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What a Tangled Web We Weave: The Poison Bed

10 Monday Jun 2019

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Review: The Poison Bed, by Elizabeth Fremantle
Pegasus, 2019. 403 pp. $26

In 1615, England’s golden couple, Robert and Frances Carr, face trial for murder, and the only question is whether both will swing or only one. At first glance, their predicament sounds highly improbable, given how far they have fallen and how quickly. Why, it seems only yesterday that Frances was a star at the court of King James I, celebrated for her charismatic beauty, wit, and sharp intelligence. Further, as a member of the powerful Howard family, she’s a force one does well not to dismiss. Her husband, who rose from obscurity as the orphan of a minor nobleman to become the king’s lover, trusted advisor, and a rich man, cuts an equally brilliant figure. (To read what Winston Churchill had to say about that as a historian, click here.) Not only that, he rescued Frances from an abusive marriage — not without help, of course, and therein hangs a tale.

As Robert observes, “If people know what you love most, it is a fault line they can exploit to break you.” And success breeds enemies who’d like nothing better than to bring down the blessed and seize their substance. So as the novel begins, and guards sweep the Carrs away to prison, the narrative gradually leads you to wonder who’s behind the arrests, and why. But nothing’s as it seems. Robert and Frances both love wealth and power, and her family — well, they’re venal and vicious as they come — and maybe the golden couple cut corners (or throats) on their way to the top. So who’s guilty, and what did he — or she, or they — do, exactly? You won’t find out until the very end.

Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, as William Larkin painted her in 1615 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

What a brilliant thriller this is, with enough thrust, counterthrust, and deception to make a Jacobean revenge tragedy. (John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi even makes a cameo appearance as a theatrical offering.) Fremantle tells her story in two directions, like halves of a sliding door that roll from opposite sides until they meet. This is exceptionally hard to bring off, and many such narratives feel forced or shoehorned simply to fulfill a literary conceit. Not here. Told in alternating chapters, titled Her and Him, with rare exceptions — all early on — the storytelling feels coherent, almost seamless, despite shifting verb tenses, from present to past, and back.

The Poison Bed succeeds, in large part, because of the prose, which puts the two main characters so vividly on the page, they’re practically sitting next to you. Take, for example, this passage from before their marriage, when Robert sees Frances for the first time in years:

In the intervening years, she’d become a woman. I watched her with [Prince] Henry, laughing about something, their heads flung back, mouths open, but she stopped suddenly, turning away from him, her gaze locking on me, as if she were a hawk and I a hare. I like to imagine it was the force of my desire that drew her attention. I had never seen such eyes, dark glossy ovals. Just a square of white in each, a reflection of the window behind me, and my own tiny form etched there. She said nothing, just smiled, displaying teeth as neat as a string of pearls.

Rest assured that Frances’s view of Robert in the same scene is equally feral. But Fremantle’s approach goes deeper. She extends such metaphors throughout the book, always taking pains to imbue emotional transitions with physical parallels, often concerning animals. During one conversation with the king, while hunting with falcons, Robert’s keenly aware that James’s bird, much larger than his kestrel, could destroy her if it wished, and there’d be nothing Robert could do. That’s the same position he’s in with his monarch. Similarly, when Frances wonders what to do regarding her husband’s anxieties, she watches a groom calming a skittish horse and gets her answer. I like that approach much more than rhetorical questions, such as, What do I do now?

But if The Poison Bed has a flaw, it’s an unfair shift in which it comes out that not all the narration may be trusted. Having called out Samantha Harvey for that in The Western Wind, I’m bound to mention it here, while trying not to reveal too much. When the change first happens, if you’re like me, you’ll resent it and feel manipulated. But if there’s a saving grace, it’s that the revelation can’t be a complete surprise, given the court atmosphere, the power games the characters have played, and the lies they tell themselves in justification — assuming they even bother. In all that falseness, some readers may be put off; after all, for whom is the reader meant to feel empathy?

Still, maybe that’s what Jacobean court life was like — and even if it wasn’t, The Poison Bed has created that world in fine, plausible detail. Despite the rude surprise, it’s one of the most gripping novels I’ve read in a long time.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Breaking Free: November Road

07 Monday Jan 2019

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Review: November Road, by Lou Berney
HarperCollins, 2018. 299 pp. $27

Toward the end of this ingenious, heart-stopping thriller, one character says, “With every decision we create a new future,” and destroy all others. It’s the perfect motto for November Road, whose protagonist finds the future narrowing hour by hour, like the short end of a funnel, no matter what decisions he makes.

It’s November 1963. Frank Guidry is a midlevel New Orleans mafioso, fortunate to have the ear of big boss Carlos Marcello and the charm and horse sense to do the right favors for the right people. But when Frank hears that President John F. Kennedy has been assassinated in Dallas, he wastes no time getting out of New Orleans, hoping to outrun Marcello’s long arm.

How Frank intuits this is a simple, elegant proof, worthy of Euclid — and Berney, like his protagonist, wastes no words explaining. Frank has just ferried a car to Dallas and back; on the return trip, the trunk contained a duffel bag in which he found a high-powered rifle, broken into parts, and shell casings. From the news reports, Frank supposes that nobody but a professional could have hit a moving target so accurately at that range. Conclusion: Marcello masterminded the assassination, and as an accessory, Frank Guidry must be next on the hit list, because of what he knows.

Walt Cisco’s photograph for the Dallas Morning News, November 22, 1963 (public domain in the U.S.; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

But Marcello didn’t get where he is by sitting still, so he sends Paul Barone, a cold, tireless killer, to track Frank down. Frank doesn’t know who’s after him, only that whoever it is seems unshakable. And as the net draws closer, the fox devises a way to throw the hounds off the scent: In New Mexico, he eases himself into the path of Charlotte, a woman who’s just left her drunken husband and has two young daughters in tow. Now Frank looks like a family man, much less remarkable to gas station attendants, lunch-counter waitresses, or motel clerks, the people whom anyone following him will interrogate.

But the reader knows what Frank doesn’t — that he’ll fall for Charlotte and the girls, which will add a complication, for he’s never thought of anyone except himself before. Further, to keep up appearances, he’ll have to humor their whims, when speed is of the essence, and though the little girls are extraordinarily well behaved, Charlotte must keep them entertained on the long drive. She thinks she’s going to Los Angeles, where her aunt lives, but Frank is bound for Las Vegas, where he hopes one of Marcello’s rivals will help him. How Frank balances all this makes for a spellbinding story; his secrets, though hidden temporarily, won’t stay that way forever, and Paul Barone is a more than worthy opponent. Sooner or later, all elements must meet.

Berney’s prose, vivid without calling attention to itself, colors in the gangland world and all it touches:

The west bank of the Mississippi, just across the river from New Orleans, was a dirty strip of scrapyards, body shops, and lopsided tenement buildings, the wood rotting off them. The Wank, people called it. Barone understood why. The smell was something else. A couple of refineries fired night and day, a burning funk that stuck to your clothes and skin. Ships dumped their garbage on the New Orleans side, and it washed up here. Dead fish, too, the ones even the gulls wouldn’t touch.

The only place where Berney loses me is Charlotte’s decision to leave her husband for who knows where; the Los Angeles aunt is an afterthought, and a weak one, given that the two haven’t spoken in years. Charlotte has spent her life making circumstances work for other people, and though she’s tired of doing so for her deadbeat husband — and equally tired of being spoken to as a second-class citizen because she’s female — running out is too great a leap for her. No one in her Oklahoma town, where everyone knows everyone else, gets divorced, and nobody just ups and leaves anything or anyone. To hit the road with two vulnerable children and an epileptic dog (a nice touch) makes no sense to me.

I’m also not sure that Frank, despite his apparently exceptional powers of seduction, would find her such an easy conquest. To his credit, Berney gives her intelligence and humor, and those qualities are what draw Frank, not her prettiness. But I could have more easily seen her succumb once, only to pull back, which would have added more sexual tension while complicating the choreography of the later chapters.

Even so, November Road is still a superb thriller. Charlotte has the journey of her life; many readers will enjoy going along for the ride.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Bad Penny: Friends and Traitors

17 Monday Sep 2018

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Review: Friends and Traitors, by John Lawton
Atlantic, 2017. 341 pp. $26

If I were to describe a thriller whose central incident doesn’t happen until around page 200, and whose back-story-laden narrative revolves around an essentially harmless, flamboyantly foolish turncoat spy, you would likely decide that the book was a plodding, pointless tale, not worth your time.

In this case, though, you’d be wrong. The back story reveals England of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties with remarkable vividness, brio, and wit, focusing on, among other issues, laws and prejudice against homosexual behavior, and the equally prejudiced mindset about national security and how to act in its name. You see these come alive through a compelling protagonist, Frederick Troy, not your ordinary copper. Born to Russian émigrés under the name Troitsky, Troy, as even his girlfriends call him, walked away from a scholarship to Oxford to join the London police force and serve in the East End, a tough patch. Recruited to Scotland Yard above more experienced candidates in the late 1930s, he has been solving murders ever since, up until 1958, when the forward action of Friends and Traitors begins. Like many fictional detectives, he sails very close to the wind, and unscrupulous, vicious characters have a way of disappearing when he’s around, whether they belong to the police force or the criminals. So far, he has covered his tracks, but not without attracting suspicion.

Henry_Labouchère, the British parliamentarian whose amendment to an 1885 law intended to combat prostitution made “gross indecency” between males a criminal act. During the 1940s and 1950s especially, the police went out of their way to enforce it.

What threatens to undo Troy at this juncture is his friendship with Guy Burgess, later known as a member of the infamous Cambridge Five spy ring; but, as this portrayal would have it, Burgess is very much a junior partner in that game. Still, when he defects with Donald Maclean in 1951, their flight embarrasses and surprises the British intelligence community and causes a rift with its American counterparts. Troy, who has known Burgess for decades, first through family connections, and later because the man keeps crossing his path like a bad penny, has always been suspect for this association. But Troy thinks that what MI5 and Special Branch really object to, aside from shame at their own lapse, is Burgess’s unapologetic, open homosexuality, which to Troy shouldn’t be considered a crime.

Moreover, Burgess’s inability to keep a secret, and the relatively short time he was working for the Foreign Office, suggest he’s not much of a threat. Self-absorbed, boorish, insulting, and vain, yes; but since when are those qualities treasonous? Nevertheless, when Burgess lets it be known in 1958 that he wishes to return to England, several people whom both he and Troy know wind up dead, and others are running scared, including at least one former lover of Troy’s.

From there, the pieces that Lawton has laid in place with seeming casualness turn out to matter in ingenious, unexpected ways, so cleverly that not even Troy understands the depth of his troubles before they arrive. The sentence, “Someone was following Troy,” recurs constantly. For a man of his experience, that’s almost an insult. And since he never takes his medicine quietly, he leads his watchdogs in Special Branch up hill and down dale, at one point leaving a Lewis Carroll poem in a tree for them to puzzle over. Very snarky. But what else would you expect from the youngest child with two twin sisters named Sasha and Masha, each of whom has a particular brand of acting badly, and an oh-so-righteous older brother, Battle of Britain hero, member of Parliament, and all that, who may be prime minister one day? It’s always been Troy’s job to be different in a family of individualists, and he does so with a sharp sense of humor.

Then there’s the prose, which evokes myriad times and places, as with this description of the London Blitz:

It seemed to Troy that the night sky was short on sky’s own colour — blue. Reds it had aplenty, from the bright, post-office-van scarlet of the flames that leapt heavenward from burning buildings to the colouring-book-and-wax-crayon carmine of tracers and the paintbox burnt orange of ack-ack shells popping uselessly among the beaten-metal pewter hue of the barrage balloons. Incendiaries burnt white to silver, and the searchlights sliced up the night with long fingers of pure, clear light. Rarely had he seen a plane hit, either ours or theirs, but when it happened every colour in the rainbow might burst forth.

My only quibble is Burgess himself, who’s so unappealing that if I were Troy, I’d run in the other direction. At times Troy does, yet he also seems fascinated, and I’m not sure why. Burgess’s willingness to say what no one else will? Troy’s stubborn refusal to shun a man whom his conventional older brother has warned him about? Hard to know, but I still recommend Friends and Traitors.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Spy Family: Paris Spring

16 Monday Apr 2018

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Review: Paris Spring, by James Naughtie
Overlook, 2016. 320 pp. $27

Will Flemyng, who works undercover for the British Embassy in Paris, is accosted on the métro by an East German agent named Kristof. At first, Will wonders whether Kristof is willing to trade information or change sides, and since it’s April 1968, and talk of democracy in Prague has the Soviet bloc on edge, Kristof’s sudden appearance offers possibilities.

Or does it? A subsequent rendezvous turns testy when Kristof threatens to expose Will’s brother, Abel, who spies for the United States, as a traitor. Will refuses to believe him or be bullied. But he also keeps his own counsel, because this is family, and the Flemyngs are close, matter of state or no. So Will doesn’t tell his boss, Freddy Craven, all he should, and there too lie emotional ties. Freddy’s like a father to Will, an older man in ill health who’s shown him the ropes of tradecraft, and for whom Will would risk anything.

Meanwhile, the student population has fomented rebellion, and the streets are boiling. The embassy is expected to watch these events carefully, and in return, with so much focus on Paris, any diplomatic mistake will quickly become public knowledge. Freddy, like any sensitive soul, realizes something’s up with Will, but he doesn’t know what. A love affair that ended a few months before? The tensions of the job? But before that question can be resolved, Grace Quincy, a world-famous journalist who could pry secrets from a clam without having to open it, blows into Paris. Will, knowing that Grace is trouble and that her flirtatious attentions mean she’s digging for information, nevertheless invites her over. But before that happens, she’s murdered at Père-Lachaise cemetery, of all places, and the police quickly learn that Will’s name is on her dance card. It’s obvious that one side or other had her killed, for reasons of espionage, but who, and why?

Pierre_Mendès_France, the Socialist politician who had helped extricate France from Vietnam, was willing to form a coalition government in May 1968 and listen to the student demands. But the Gaullists increased their power in the next election (courtesy Dutch National Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

Naughtie excels at portraying Paris under siege and the student protests:

. . .the canteen in the student building was filled with a rolling crowd and had the air of a cavernous bar in the early hours, a dance hall with the lights down. There was a group in one corner listening to a guitar, some of them flat out on the floor, and across the room an argument was threatening to turn into a struggle. Somebody ran shouting from the room. At least five people were handing out newspapers and campaign sheets at the door, one of them wearing a Mao cap, the others in black.…Someone was cooking oil. A few on the floor looked as if they’d slept there for days and the place looked like a school gymnasium on a wet afternoon. They’d rigged up an urn to boil water for coffee, and people were pulling stale bread rolls from a cardboard box. Someone had brought in a cat, which sat on top of the jukebox with its tail rigid in the air and its eyes wide.

But good as that is, it’s just the vivid background. The real story involves two families. First, it’s the Flemyngs, and how the brothers balance their feelings and ties against the secrecy demanded by their work, which affects a third, older brother, Mungo. Until reading Paris Spring, I didn’t know I wanted an older brother named Mungo, but it helps that this one is supportive, caring, and paternal, without being pushy or controlling, the family mediator. Mungo comes to know Freddy as well, so there’s plenty of warmth to go around in this coldest of cold-blooded professions.

The other family consists of Will’s allies, foremost among them Freddy, of course, but also others encountered during his travails over Kristof. Rivalries exist, to be sure, but even as temporary friends, they stick together. They know better than anyone else what the power of secrets can do, especially those that may or may not exist, except in rumor. As Freddy tells Mungo, who’s a historian, “You warn your students of the fog of war. Well, I know it to be real. I breathe the fumes.”

Naughtie’s grasp of spydom as a brethren echoes John le Carré, and the same could be said of his focus on characterization. Paris Spring fails to emulate the master in that it resolves with a couple turns that may be too neat; another neatness is how indulgent Freddy is with Will, which strains credulity at times. Nevertheless, Paris Spring is an excellent thriller, elegant in the way le Carré’s are — as few moving narrative parts as possible, a focus on motive instead, and characters who believe in what they’re doing. Bravo.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Blog Is Three Years Old: Or, Why I Read

23 Monday Oct 2017

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“I couldn’t connect with the characters.” As readers, we’ve all said that, at one time or other, and if you’ve written for publication, I guarantee you’ve heard it from agents or editors who turned down your work. But what does it imply? Is that connection entirely subjective, a matter of taste, and therefore meaningless except for that audience of one? After all, what kind of connection can you expect when there are so many books written about so many different characters?

I thought about these questions as I compiled my annual list of favorite books I’ve reviewed in the past year. They include three mysteries, a thriller, two picaresques, a Holocaust novel, a snapshot of youth, another of old age, and a tale of an infamous miscarriage of justice. I call just about all of them literary. But the one common thread? The characters compelled me. I wanted to know more about how they felt, because I could feel along with them. I expected to learn something about human nature from them, and I did.

Contrast that with two much-heralded novels I put aside recently, one about a woman who explores the Arctic, and the other, about a lynching. Compelling premises? Sure. Beautiful sentences? You got ’em. But these novels didn’t grab me. I didn’t know how the characters felt, even though the authors tried to tell me–and the problem wasn’t just that the narratives told rather than showed. The authors must have thought they created an emotional connection, but I felt none. I thought I was reading about events or actions or attitudes, and however unusual or significant they were, attention-grabbing by their content, they remained abstract.

Not that it’s easy to write that emotional connection. Last month, I attended a workshop given by the literary agent Donald Maas about his book, The Emotional Craft of Fiction, which I’ve mentioned before. I’d gone to the workshop with a half-completed novel–half a house completed, if you will–and hoped to find out what could help me pull it together and finish it. By the third day, I realized that all I had was a big hole in the ground and a lot of building materials scattered around it.

So I’m very impressed with the following books and authors, who, no matter what their story or premise, have created that elusive emotional connection. In no particular order:

The Ballroom, by Anna Hope, tells of a man and woman trapped in a paupers’ institution in Yorkshire in 1911, and how he courts her through smuggled letters, unaware that she can’t read. Another desperate institutional romance, The Golden Age, by Joan London, takes place in an Australian sanitarium for juvenile polio victims in 1946. The kids, though stricken with a life-changing and potentially fatal disease, are much healthier than their parents and have bigger hearts.

By contrast, Sabina Murray’s Valiant Gentlemen takes place on a very large stage, starting with the Congo in the 1880s. Murray dazzles you without being self-conscious and sifts through the most serious subjects without taking herself too seriously–only two of the many pleasures of this novel re-creating actual historical figures. Steven Price’s By Gaslight, equally evocative, takes you into London’s underworld of 1885. It’s a long book, 731 pages, and Price builds his enthralling tale atom by atom.

Darktown, Thomas Mullen’s terrific mystery about two African-American cops in late 1940s Atlanta, is so tense, you think the novel might combust at any moment. Its deeply explored theme, racial politics within law enforcement, couldn’t be more timely. Gods of Gold, Chris Nickson’s mystery set in late Victorian Leeds, depicts the bare-knuckles life of a dreary industrial English city as well as the uphill struggle to uphold the law. Nickson conveys a depth of feeling and atmosphere in remarkably few words.

When the judges are the criminals, as they are in Crane Pond, Richard Francis’s retelling of the Salem witch trials, there’s no end to deviltry. But if you think you know the story, think again, for this judge was the only one to repent his actions, and the man’s internal struggles are compelling indeed. Crane Pond may be the most memorable book I read this year. And speaking of struggle, Mary Doria Russell’s, Doc, as in John Henry Holliday, wants to live life to the fullest in frontier Dodge City. A brilliant dentist, virtuoso pianist, and card shark, he inspires almost universal respect–but he’s dying of tuberculosis at age twenty-two.

Paulette Giles offers a very different view of the West in News of the World, about an itinerant town crier who reads newspapers to audiences starved for stories of other places. His outlook, demeanor, and personal code make him an irresistible character; I wish I knew someone like him. Better yet, I wish he were running the country. Amor Towles tells an inverse story to that in A Gentleman in Moscow, about an enemy of the Soviet state who’s sentenced to lifetime imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. From this circumscribed life springs a tense, richly emotional and intellectual journey on a Tolstoyan scale.

Coincidentally, the last three on the list are the last three I reviewed–or maybe it’s no coincidence, since I finish few books these days unless they truly draw me in. Golden Hill, Francis Spufford’s version of an eighteenth-century picaresque about a man arriving New-York in 1746 bearing a draft worth a thousand pounds, is a marvelous, page-turning moral tale. Is Richard Smith a bounder, a swindler, or an honest man worthy of immediate inclusion in high society? Everyone who’s anyone in New-York takes sides. A Single Spy, William Christie’s heart-stopping World War II thriller about an NKVD agent who doubles for the Abwehr, portrays a man who’s feral and disturbed, yet sympathetic. Impossible, you say? Read it and decide.

Finally, A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert, is simply one of the best Holocaust novels I’ve ever read. Set in Ukraine in 1941, her narrative has no heroes, speeches, nor forced redemptive moments, offering her characters only the chance of mercy.

As always, thanks for reading.

Between Two Fires: A Single Spy

09 Monday Oct 2017

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Review: A Single Spy, by William Christie
Minotaur/St. Martin’s, 2017. 388 pp. $26

Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, the orphan-thief protagonist of this superb, hair-raising thriller, is both feral and sympathetic. I wouldn’t have thought that possible, but, then again, if you read A Single Spy — and if you like this genre at all, I suggest you do — you’ll discover that many things are possible.

The first is that Alexsi, as a mere teenager, is more than a match for the smugglers he’s taken up with in Azerbaijan. This would be a dangerous occupation anytime, but in 1936, there are Russian soldiers on one side and rival gangs on the other, and no one can afford scruples. Still, Alexsi trusts his instincts. As a practiced thief, he has a sixth sense for when others intend to rob or sell him, and whoever tries winds up with his throat cut. However, the NKVD catches him where he shouldn’t be, and just when he thinks he’s about to get a bullet in the skull, they startle him by offering him a job. If he passes their tests — and the penalty for failure is that bullet — he’ll work for them, doing the killing, robbing and prowling he’s always done, except for the state. The rewards can be enormous, as he learns immediately:

The first thing Alexsi noticed was that, unlike every other Soviet apartment, there wasn’t anyone else living there. Which was unprecedented in his experience. There were freshly painted walls and thick blue curtains. A sofa, chairs, a table. Spare and severe furniture, in the Soviet style, but to his eyes unbelievably luxurious. A gas stove and a refrigerator instead of an ice box. He opened it up and was greeted by a gust of cool air and shelves filled with food. Milk, sour cream, butter, cheese. If they were trying to impress him, it was working.

But everything’s a test. No question his handlers ask is ever innocent, no matter how it sounds, so he must think one step ahead, always. His greatest asset is his poker face, which conceals more than they know, in particular a detestation for bullies and a soft spot for a friend’s family, his only childhood respite from a violent, abusive father.

In the abstract, it seems improbable that an NKVD agent, hired and trained to be a ruthless operative for Comrade Stalin, would possess both a human core and a healthy skepticism of the Soviet regime. Yet Alexsi, despite his savage instincts for survival, has a code that tells him not to hurt anyone who hasn’t tried to harm him. Naturally, his instructions and that code will conflict. And the complications multiply, because he can only escape the fearful, terrifying Soviet Union by accepting an assignment to Berlin. There, he eventually joins the Abwehr and becomes a double agent, reporting everything back to Moscow at the risk of his life. Caught between two fires, Alexsi must be slippery indeed to avoid the flames. “No — and furthermore” governs every moment. Not only must he please his two masters while avoiding detection, once more, no conversation is innocent, no matter with whom. He takes to heart his NKVD mentor’s advice never to reveal his true identity to anyone, for any reason — and if they guess, he must find a way to dismiss it convincingly. The tension fairly ripples off the page.

Alexsi’s vantage point allows him to make private observations, comparing the two totalitarian regimes he knows. For instance, the night of Kristallnacht, he’s studying in a university library, when he overhears someone ask nervously whether the rioting in the streets has been authorized. If it is, that means they can go see what’s happening; if not, they must stay put. Alexsi thinks, This could only happen here.

Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

While reading A Single Spy, I thought often of Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, another excellent thriller about the training and adventures of an NKVD agent. Christie takes a different approach, making Alexsi’s education a tutorial affair rather than at a school among inquisitive classmates, probably essential to the scheme, because it allows the spy-in-training to keep his inner self private. But the novels are similar in at least two respects. Both rely on atmosphere, and both introduce plenty of sex. Christie even has Alexsi’s training include it, in a chilling scene that I find hard to believe and suspect was included for its titillation. The only other false note is how Aleksi, as a junior agent in Berlin, manages to be told certain monumental secrets from none other than Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr.

But these are quibbles. Overall, A Single Spy satisfies in many ways.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Venetian Theatrics: Ascension

04 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: Ascension, by Gregory Dowling
St. Martin’s, 2015. 298 pp. $26

Alvise Marangon doesn’t know it yet, but he’s a perfect spy. He thinks he’s the perfect cicerone, who guides English tourists through his native mideighteenth-century Venice, showing them the architecture and history or the gaming tables and brothels, depending on their taste. Alvise even speaks fluent English, having spent many of his formative years in London, and he has a prodigious memory for useless facts guaranteed to fascinate the occasional British clergyman come to sneer at (and be secretly thrilled by) the popish decadence they think is Venice.

The return of the Bucentaur to the Molo on Ascension Day by Canaletto, 1730 (courtesy the Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Trouble is, cicerones don’t earn much, and though Alvise has developed a working partnership with Bepi, the gondolier with whom he splits his fees, he’s perennially short of cash. But he has two qualities in play from the first sentences of this beguiling, atmospheric thriller, and so long as he gives them free reign, adventure will never be far behind. To wit: Alvise shoots his mouth off and indulges his impetuous curiosity. And in Venice, where half the populace is watching the other half, those habits will get you in a heap of trouble, pronto, for the secret service is everywhere.

The story begins as Alvise and Bepi accompany two Englishmen to their hotel. The younger visitor is the proverbial wastrel, bent on losing his money at the gaming tables and in the fleshpots, whereas his companion, a tutor entrusted with his scholarly and moral education, is supposed to apply restraint. To Alvise, the pair seem typical of other visitors:

The young man looked amiable enough; he was gazing around at the scene with frank interest. Presumably all very different from the decorous orderliness of his home, where his mother would have bidden him farewell with a stately bow of the head and his father with a manly handshake. Here at Fusina, a family of Venetians were exchanging raucous shouts, hand-slaps, kisses and lively embraces with relatives who had crossed the lagoon to meet them. Gondoliers and servants in bright liveries were transferring parcels and trunks to waiting boats and yelling at one another for no apparent reason, and across the lagoon the towers and domes of Venice shimmered in the golden haze of spring sunlight. The scene appeared to fluster the tutor. . . .

And yet, appearances deceive. Rather quickly, Alvise senses that Shackleford, the tutor, has less than a passing familiarity with his profession, and that the visitors have come to Venice for a singular purpose other than sightseeing. Naturally, Alvise does his best to learn what they’re after, but when unknown intruders ransack the Englishmen’s baggage, and Shackleford disappears only to be found dead, the cicerone winds up in jail for his troubles. Since no Venetian sparrow falls without the knowledge (if not consent) of the secret service, they take a keen interest in the young tourist guide.

From then on, Alvise’s in for the ride of his life–and so is the reader. Dowling knows Venice intimately–he’s lived and taught there more than thirty years–so you can hear, see, smell, and taste the city in all its finery and decay. But there’s atmosphere, and then there’s atmosphere. The second-most important character in Ascension, after Alvise, is Venice, in its love of spectacle and gossip; intrigue around every corner; the delight in masks and concealment; the squalor, magnificence, and corruption. Dowling casts his Venice as a place where performers who know their role are the ones to succeed. Sure enough, Alvise has his theatrical gifts, which is why the secret service wants to talk to him.

But nothing comes easily, and “no; and furthermores” spring up like mushrooms. (Risotto con funghi, anyone?) From a forbidden, seditious book to a Rosicrucian cult to an eccentric nobleman nursing a grudge to a theater to the state shipbuilding apparatus, Alvise must bluff his way into and out of danger–and of course, getting in sometimes proves all too easy. But what he discovers is nothing less than a threat to the Serene Republic itself, timed to take place on the celebrations surrounding the Feast of the Ascension.

My only quibble about the novel is the nifty, not to say incredible, way in which Alvise escapes certain physical constraints. But I don’t think anyone will mind; I didn’t. Ascension is not only good fun, I note an undercurrent of political commentary that seems topical–the desire, in certain right-wing quarters, for strongman rule to create fear and respect among the “rabble.”

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Jewish Brother Against Brother: All Other Nights

21 Monday Aug 2017

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Review: All Other Nights, by Dara Horn
Norton, 2009. 363 pp. $15

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” So goes the first of the Four Questions asked at the Passover seder by the youngest person there.

And that youngest person, in many ways, is nineteen-year-old Jacob Rappaport, who flees his New York mercantile family in 1861 to join the army. He’s escaping an arranged marriage in which he’s a financial pawn–traded like human chattel, if you will–and the army seems the best alternative. It never occurs to him that he could simply decline the marriage, nor does he anticipate the Civil War, which breaks out a few months later.

The following year, 1862, the word no eludes Private Rappaport once more when his superiors in the Eighteenth New York press him to undertake a mission behind enemy lines in New Orleans. They want him to poison his Uncle Harry, who, their intelligence tells them, leads a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Vulnerable to their shaming, anti-Semitic blandishments, Jacob agrees, which of course only confirms them in their prejudices. And when he returns from this mission, they’ve got another assignment–inveigle his way into the home of a Jewish Virginia merchant he’s met through his father’s business and marry one of the daughters. They’re Confederate spies, apparently.

This sounds absolutely preposterous, but the genius of All Other Nights is that when you read it, your disbelief drops away. It’s not just that Horn has thoroughly researched daily life during the Civil War, Jewish communities of the 1860s, espionage, manners, or a dozen other things, though she has. It’s that I believe how lost Jacob is, how he longs for the same things as the people he’s working to betray, those human qualities so precious in wartime–kindness, a ready ear, acceptance, love. He’s enchanted to find that those qualities still exist, and he’s not being two-faced when he offers them in return, which makes him sympathetic.

He thought of the filthy camps where he had slept and eaten for most of the past year, the mud-coated tents and the vomit-stained blankets on ordinary nights, and then the choking smell of already rotting flesh on those howling twilit evenings when he had clawed his way off battlefields, the night air riven with the long screams of those not yet dead. It suddenly seemed impossible to him that those places and this room could exist in the same world. He looked around the table at the faces of the chattering Levy daughters and imagined that this room was a sealed compartment in time and space, with an entire world contained within it–an alternative world, independent from reality, where this house with its lights and laughter and beautiful girls had somehow, impossibly, become his home.

Film enthusiasts will notice that Jacob’s attempt to marry into this family parallels an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, Notorious (in which Ingrid Bergman marries Claude Rains and reports what happens in the house to Cary Grant). But if you’re going to borrow, take from the best, and Horn has done brilliantly, alternately thwarting and rewarding Jacob so often he doesn’t know which way is up. It’s “no–and furthermore” taken to dizzying heights. Hitchcock would be delighted.

Judah P. Benjamin, circa 1856, then U.S. senator from Louisiana (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Into this mix, Horn throws Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederacy’s secretary of state, a fascinating figure. Through him, as with Jacob, she shows how difficult it was to be Jewish, but even more, a Jewish statesman. Horn gives Benjamin an eloquent line, “All Hebrews know that there is nothing honorable about subjugation and defeat,” an epitaph for the Lost Cause that one wishes the South had embraced.

I’ve complained when authors use their characters’ Jewishness as a tool or symbol, and that it feels skin-deep at best. But here, the Jews are real, as is their complex calculus required to navigate a hostile, bigoted world. Every move Jacob makes becomes freighted with anxious meanings, except when he’s among his brethren. But since those brethren are southern, he still can’t be himself, so the tension never lets up.

Despite my admiration for All Other Nights, I think the book could have been shorter; there’s a packed feel to it. The New Orleans segment, Jacob’s first adventure, seems unnecessary and less plausible than the rest. But that part does contain a beautiful scene, a Passover seder in which slaves bring to the table the matzo and bitter herbs, reminders of biblical slavery in Egypt. How Jacob’s southern cousins manage to overlook the irony fascinates him–another way of saying that even if it’s packed too full, All Other Nights always has something to say.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

We’ll Always Have Paris: A Hero of France

26 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: A Hero of France, by Alan Furst
Random House, 2016. 234 pp. $27

If you’ve read any of Furst’s fourteen books, the time and place will be familiar: Paris, 1941, the City of Light under a blackout imposed by the German Occupation. It’s early spring, so America has yet to declare war, and Britain fights alone against German power at its high-water mark. Trying to strike back at the German hinterland, British bombers overfly French territory, and many don’t make it home. Consequently, increasing numbers of British airmen are parachuting into Occupied territory, and the nascent Resistance does its best to keep them out of German hands and send them to safety in neutral Spain.

German troops parade down the Champs Elysée, Paris, 1940 (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

One such Resistance cell operates in Paris, under a man code-named Mathieu. Like the setting, he too is typical Furst–worldly, mature, resourceful, committed, without swagger, doing what he does because he thinks someone has to, refusing to judge those of his countrymen who want no part of it. Oh, and did I say that beautiful women find him irresistible? Many things are rationed in Furst’s Europe, but sex isn’t.

Naturally, the occupiers and their French toadies do their best to crack the Resistance. But luckily for Mathieu and his operatives, the Occupation is new enough so that the German Army and the French police undertake the counterespionage; the Gestapo remains largely in the wings. As a result, the bad guys aren’t as vicious and uncompromising as they might be, especially since many of the French contingent would rather not arrest their countrymen. The real danger lies in ordinary civilians looking to make money by informing, and they can be persistent.

Mathieu . . . saw what was indeed a strange-looking man, or, rather, a strange-looking boy, barely in his twenties. Standing at the bar and drinking a glass of wine, he had dark skin and dark eyes, wore a buttoned-up overcoat that was both much too tight and much too long, a hat with a wide, flat brim and a low crown, also flat, to which he’d added a bow tie that might once have belonged to a café waiter. With a pencil line of a mustache that traced his upper lip, he struck Mathieu as a boy dressed up to play his father.

But this guy, though dangerous, isn’t the real threat. The real threat is a German police inspector imported from Hamburg to crack the Resistance cells operating out of Paris, and he’s got people working for him who are much smarter than anyone Mathieu has come up against.

Furst moves his story rapidly, and, as always, his narrative represents the definition of “no; and furthermore.” Plans backfire thanks to inattention or nerves or plain bad luck. What I like about A Hero of France is that whatever heroism you see is of the quiet variety and seemingly more genuine for it. The narrative also gives the bad guys their due; of the several minor characters who come through clearly, the German police inspector and his chief mole stand out for me.

Furst’s trademark atmospheric descriptions are in full force too. You feel the blackout, the tension in the streets, a divided nation about to discover that when it comes to privation, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Furst suggests the political struggle between the Resistance and its British contacts–we won’t call them allies–and the pressures under which the French administration tries to remain intact. With equal, admirable economy, he makes a key historical point, that the British were so desperate for air crews that they sent escaped fliers back into the air. (This contrasted with subsequent American policy, which grounded escapees on the logic that they might be recognized if recaptured, compromising them and anyone who had helped them.)

All this is fine. But I still pine for Furst’s earliest works, which felt fresher, more fleshed out, and more gripping. They were also much longer. Maybe that kind of book is passé or unprofitable or un-something. But A Hero of France has tons of narrators, few of whom come alive, and, despite the “no; and furthermore,” inconvenient circumstances sometimes resolve themselves in ways they wouldn’t have in earlier books. If Furst is trying to suggest that he can do this because it’s only spring 1941, and the very, very bad guys aren’t in charge yet, I’m not buying.

Paris is Paris, and we can always have that, as Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But certain things can be too familiar and leave us wanting more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Programme Too Full: Radio Girls

29 Monday May 2017

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Review: Radio Girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford
NAL, 2016. 367 pp. $16

Maisie Musgrave, a young woman down to her last tuppence, gets a secretarial job at the BBC, a newfangled and perhaps not entirely respectable organization in 1926. After all, what is radio, how does it work, and isn’t it improper to hear a disembodied voice? But, like the protagonist in this engaging, amusing novel, the BBC is about to spread its wings and soar. The real questions involve how bumpy the ride will be, and who will learn what along the way.

Maisie, who looks, feels, and acts like a doormat, could use a lift. Growing up in Toronto, she was bullied for much of her young life, labeled “Mousie Maisie” with no kindness, yet some accuracy. Maisie has no idea who her father was, except that his name is Edwin Musgrave, and he didn’t stay long. Her stagestruck mother, Georgina, has no use for her, and her grandparents want nothing to do with her. So she has come to London, for reasons not entirely clear, feeling somehow that England offers the roots she has never known.

Consequently, getting a job at the BBC, to Maisie a posh outfit where breeding and education matter above all, is more than a godsend–it’s a lifeline. And she clings to it with all her might, which, with experience, proves stronger than she’d ever have guessed.

The first BBC aerial, atop Selfridges, the Oxford Street department store, London, 1926 (courtesy “The Dawn of the Wireless in the U.K.”)

To me, this is the best part of Radio Girls: the coming-of-age story; a young woman learning to ask questions rather than keep the silence she’s been taught; the office politics, invariably charged with sexism; and the working of a radio institution as it invents itself. Stratford excels at all this, and the narrative clips along, as Maisie learns the city, and about life:

The [tram] ride was long and she had to stand, but she didn’t mind. The car had a rhythmic sway, the bell tinkled happily, and one never knew when a sudden screech or thrust would disrupt the song, jolting them all out of their morning meditation. It was a kind of jazz, the only kind she could afford, and so she embraced the fizz of cigarette smoke, the lingering smell of coffee, and the crinkle of newspapers that added to the hum and percussion. It wasn’t stealing to read the paper over a man’s shoulder, gleaning nuggets of the world and enjoying the smell of Palmolive shaving cream. And she watched London unfold before her.

The chief conflict lies between the BBC’s director-general, Reith, and Hilda Matheson, who runs the section called Talks, and whose protegée Maisie eventually becomes. Reith is a Puritan who hates controversy or anything his nineteenth-century mind can’t wrap itself around, which is just about everything Hilda lives for. He’d fire her, if he could, but she has powerful friends, and the Talks programs–short discussions, presentations, or debates on every conceivable topic–generate tons of fan mail and expand the BBC’s audience.

I like this story, and despite my criticisms, I think Radio Girls is worth reading. Nevertheless, Stratford adds more, and that’s where she gets into trouble. The prologue, which dangles like the useless appendage it is, suggests a thriller, and yes, that subplot emerges about two-thirds of the way through, late in the game and superfluous. To be fair, the thriller part has life to it, with a couple famous figures contributing zestful dialogue and presence. But it’s too earnest by half–a screed against Fascism–and utterly improbable, whereas the rest I believe implicitly.

Besides, I’m more interested in Maisie and her struggles than in Hilda Matheson, her boss. Stratford explains in her Author’s Note that Matheson, a real historical figure, fascinates her. I agree that Matheson’s a worthy subject, perhaps for a future novel, but dragging her connection to MI5 and the clumsy thriller resolution into Radio Girls seems a stretch, at best.

I’d have also liked to see a firmer grounding in the era. Though characters talk about the Great War and the politics of the Twenties and early Thirties, you don’t see them. Stratford conveys Maisie’s poverty with great vividness, but London has no wounded veterans holding tin cups on street corners, no smog or grit to blight the air or the soul. Reith recites the mantra of a man from his time and social class, but Radio Girls doesn’t show what he’s talking about; it’s all abstract.

Reith’s a problem in himself, like the other men in this book. They have no inner lives and no contradictions, only flat surfaces, and though Stratford offers clever observations about them, the men are simply that, observed. Though I detest their sexism and what they stand for, and I cheer for Maisie and Hilda to go onward and upward, as they both like to say, I wish Radio Girls delivered more than the obvious.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.