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Tag Archives: two-dimensional characters

Bad Mother: This Lovely City

06 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1950s, book review, historical fiction, injustice, Jamaica, jazz, London, Louise Hare, passive protagonists, police, racism, rationing, romance, strong story, two-dimensional characters, violence, World War II

Review: This Lovely City, by Louise Hare
Anansi, 2020. 384 pp. $18

Lawrence (Lawrie) Mathews, a young Jamaican whose brother died fighting with the RAF in World War II, has emigrated to London, believing the blandishments from the British government that he can make his fortune in the mother country. But he hasn’t reckoned on the racism, expressed in the most vicious, direct terms; or that most desirable material goods are still rationed in 1948; or that housing is in short supply, thanks largely to German bombs.

Nevertheless, by 1950, when the story begins, things are looking up. He plays clarinet with a jazz band, which he loves, and which brings in a little cash. As a day job, he delivers mail for the Post Office. And he’s found lodging with a kind, motherly woman who treats him with fond respect. Not just that: Lawrie digs the girl next door, who likes him back. What could go wrong?

Plenty. One day, while making a drop of black-market merchandise to help a friend (and make ends meet), he happens on a dead infant by a pond. Since the child is “coloured,” as the kindest word in common use puts it, an accusation against Lawrie fits all too neatly, especially since he can’t explain his presence at the pond without revealing he’s an accessory to illegal activity. But even a more legitimate excuse probably wouldn’t have helped Lawrie, for Detective Sergeant Rathbone hates Black people, immigrants, and most anyone else on two legs.

Worse, the case creates a sensation in the press, arousing white Londoners itching to blame outsiders for the hardships that haven’t eased much since V-E Day. Lawrie and his Jamaican friends must now watch themselves carefully on the street, while patronizing stores and—most especially—when the jazz band plays dance music for a hard-drinking crowd.

Nelson’s column, London, seen through the Great Smog, December 1952. The climatic disaster lasted five days and caused many thousands of deaths. (Courtesy N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite aspect of This Lovely City is the plot, which twists in unexpected ways, particularly in the final third. Both Lawrie and his girlfriend, Evie Coleridge, have secrets from the other. Evie also has a hard-hearted mother, an apt parallel to England. Mrs. Coleridge has suffered its whips and scorns herself, though that’s why—at least in part—she’s as tough as she is.

I also like how Hare re-creates postwar London, pinched and yearning to let loose, but also violently racist, in which what we would call micro-aggressions quickly flame into just plain aggression. The prose, though simple, occasionally rises to illumine emotional moments particular to that environment, as with this passage about Lawrie playing jazz before an audience:

The nerves would pass soon enough, but the moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think of was how sad they looked, those magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

I wish the characterizations worked with any consistency. Lawrie and Evie seem too good by half, and the terrible secrets they possess never credibly threaten their happiness. At times, quick resolutions—much like Lawrie merely lifting the clarinet to his lips, in the above passage—make me wonder whether Hare’s trying too hard to rescue her characters.

She also portrays Lawrie as a sexual innocent in ways I find hard to believe, particularly when a young woman invites him to take a bath at her house (in the days before he moves next door to Evie), and he has no idea she has plans other than cleanliness. At times too he seems generally clueless about his surroundings, as with his surprise that so much of London was bombed. Not much of a secret, that. What did he think his brother was doing in the RAF?

The two principals often have trouble locating their spines, to the extent that I lost patience with them and wondered what they saw in each other. Wouldn’t each lover seek out someone more forceful than themselves? They’re trying to be pleasant, sure, perhaps hiding behind that to avoid confrontations. Or maybe they confuse asking for what they want with meanness; it’s hard to tell. But whatever the explanation, I wanted more push from each of them, the lack of which might just be convenient to the plot.

As for the villains, the cops are faceless and horrid, without a single redeeming feature, including intelligence, so it’s a surprise to discover they actually know a thing or two. The most complex character in the book—perhaps the only one with sharp edges and kind impulses, both—is Mrs. Coleridge. She’s a piece of work, yet I understand her.

For all that, though, This Lovely City provides a glimpse of London as I’ve never read of it. Despite its flaws, the novel depicts the struggle to get by and dreams of a fuller life in real, day-to-day terms. That’s worth something.

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

Mississippi Mayhem: Any Where You Run

13 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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"no--and furthmore", 1964, bad choices, Black struggles, book review, compelling plot, historical fiction, melodrama, Mississippi, murder, racism, rape, thriller, two-dimensional characters, Wanda M. Morris

Review: Any Where You Run, by Wanda M. Morris
Morrow, 2022. 382 pp. $29

Neshoba County, Mississippi, is in upheaval in summer 1964. Three civil-rights activists have been murdered, and pressure on the federal government gets the FBI involved, because local law enforcement takes no interest. But the infamous case concerning James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman is merely background story here, a gauge by which to measure Neshoba County at that time.

Violet and Marigold Richards don’t need to read the newspapers to know what it means to be Black. Each sister runs afoul of a man, the law, or both. A white man sexually assaults Violet, who shoots him dead. That sends her fleeing from Jackson to Chillicothe, Georgia, a small town where she has kin, worrying that any second, the local police will trace her to the shooting. (Why they haven’t already is never explained.)

Meanwhile, Marigold, the supposedly smarter sister, the one good in school—there’s much sibling rival over family perceptions—makes the mistake of her life. Working for the Mississippi Summer Project, trying to help Blacks register to vote, she has an affair with a handsome lawyer from Harlem. When Marigold tells him she’s pregnant, he splits. And when Violet splits too, without having told her where she’s gone, Marigold wonders what to do next.

FBI missing-persons poster showing Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, June 1964 (courtesy Federal Bureau of Investigation via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Any Where You Run offers a compelling story that will keep you turning the pages. It’s not just that each Richards sister has reasons to run; they have persistent pursuers with varied motives for catching up to them. Bad choices multiply, and circumstances conspire against them, usually because bigotry has narrowed the number of possible solutions down to zero. “No—and furthermore” lives here, in other words, and Morris has no qualms about punishing her characters.

I also like the sense of time and place. The author excels at portraying everyday situations in which a white person can expect help, respect, or just simple acknowledgment, whereas a Black person knows she can only hope to escape punishment for an imaginary offense. A Black woman may not try on a wedding dress; it’s take it or leave it, and be quick. A Black person mustn’t look a white person in the eye. And so on. As Violet recalls of her childhood:

We weren’t blind. We knew that the books we used in school didn’t look like the ones the white kids used. We knew we couldn’t use the local libraries or swimming pools like the white kids. How do you tell a child that life will be better for them, when everything in the world told them something different? I had to force my mind to stop thinking on those things because they always took me to a bad place.

However, those bad places, and how the characters react to them (or don’t) hold this novel back, I think. The sisters’ plight and sufferings make you want to find out what happens to them, but the next “no—and furthermore” seldom evokes deep reflection or emotional reckoning. Instead, Violet and Marigold react in set, predictable, logical ways, bouncing between two unpleasant alternatives, too often expressed in rhetorical questions (“How could I . . . .?), which feels like lip service rather than grappling.

For instance, I kept wanting Violet to wrestle with the sexual assault and the murder she commits in revenge. But the small extent to which she dwells on them seems to suggest a plot point—why she’s on the run—not traumatic events.

Rather, it’s on to the next crisis, until the end, when violence erupts everywhere, much of it in melodrama, yet the survivors appear to dig themselves out from under—no, not by snapping their fingers, but still without the turmoil you might expect.

Too many characters here are all good or all bad, especially the men, who are either saints or devils. With one male character, Morris presents a slightly more nuanced picture, trying to show how the racist culture and power structure put poor whites at a disadvantage. But even he tips over the edge, partly because the triple murder of the activists influences the narrative.

Consequently, Any Where You Run stands or falls on the plot and setting alone. The writing, simple and direct, as with the passage quoted above, seldom gets in the way but never takes flight, either. Often reading like nonfiction with occasional, pithy folk sayings, the prose plays toward the action, and when it must take center stage, as with the emotional transitions, I wanted words I could hold onto.

To be fair, the tension never flags, and the story is often gut-wrenching. But the emotional impact could have gone much deeper. This might be one novel in which less—as in fewer twists, especially violent ones—might have counted for more.

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

Heavy Trip: A Thousand Steps

07 Monday Feb 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1968, book review, drug abuse, historical fiction, kidnapping, Laguna Beach, LSD, no and furthermore, physical detail, Sixties vibe, social markers, T. Jefferson Parker, thriller, Timothy Leary, two-dimensional characters, Vietnam War

Review: A Thousand Steps, by T. Jefferson Parker
Forge, 2022. 368 pp. $28

If you’re into the peace-love-tie-dye scene, with or without the accompanying sex and drugs, Laguna Beach, California, is the place to be in summer 1968. Timothy Leary preaches the beauty of LSD to adoring crowds, and every other person, it seems, has a different mantra of self-enlightenment.

However, sixteen-year-old Matt Anthony watches most of this from the sidelines. He’s too busy trying to put food on the table, because his mother, hooked on opium-laced hashish, can’t. His older brother, Kyle, fighting in Vietnam, worries he won’t make it out alive, and Matt worries too. Their father? He’s a deadbeat, a former cop who mouths off about discipline and keeps promising to visit one day from whatever state he’s just fled to, a lie Matt has heard for seven years.

A Pageant of the Masters tableau vivant of a chess game evoking the battle of Waterloo, 2012. Laguna Beach holds the pageant every summer, and the 1968 edition figures in the novel (courtesy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2F4cZ0Lsao, via Wikimedia Commons)

But just when life could not get worse, Matt’s older sister, Jasmine, has disappeared. At first, he thinks Jazz has merely let loose after graduating high school, but he comes to believe she’s been kidnapped. And since the police assume that Jazz is simply another drug-addled hippie on a bender, it’s up to Matt to rescue her.

How he goes about it makes for a tense, plot-driven thriller, where the ambience feels pitch-perfect. Parker captures Matt’s hand-to-mouth existence, in which he delivers newspapers practically for pennies, fishes off the rocks to get protein, and cadges meals of leftovers from friends who work in restaurant kitchens. He tries to avoid the war between cops and hippies, views anyone over thirty as “old,” and sympathizes with the antiwar protesters who chant, “Hell, no, we won’t go!”

Parker’s careful about social and cultural markers, and Matt immediately sizes up everyone he sees according to the pecking order that places him at or near the bottom, a clever touch. The only glaring false note in this otherwise exacting portrayal is how brother Kyle enlists despite drawing a safe draft lottery number, when the first lottery actually took place in late 1969. To me, overlooking that easily researchable fact suggests a characterization overreach, which I’ll get to in a moment. Otherwise, this novel has a recognizable Sixties vibe:

The store is crowded with shoppers, most young and well-haired, wearing loose clothes and smothered in bags — bags with straps over their backs or shoulders or around their waists, bags in their hands, bags on their arms and at their elbows — sewn bags, knit bags, woven bags, bags featuring feathers and seashells, wooden amulets, ceramic zodiacal symbols, and beads, beads, beads. Matt’s young instincts tell him that this world of mystic arts is funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous. He feels an undertow of arousal every time he walks in.

Parker throws obstacles in Matt’s path every step of the way. The boy has his mother’s drug habit and fecklessness to contend with, a cop who wants to break him, bad guys of all stripes (including those masquerading as good guys), and vicious types all too willing to prey on a young, defenseless kid down on his luck. “No — and furthermore” thrives here.

Where A Thousand Steps falters is the characterization, often two-dimensional, as with Kyle’s allegedly superfluous self-sacrifice. I believe the portrayals of Matt’s mother and a cop — not the one who wants to take Matt down — and a few other “oldsters,” but not those of the kids. Matt’s about the most upstanding person in Laguna Beach, and though you want him to carry a certain moral weight, he’s too upright, respectful, and open. Given such a selfish, neglectful, dishonest parents, I don’t understand why he isn’t more like them, or at least struggling not to be. It’s as though, in this coming-of-age novel, the protagonist has already figured out this youth thing and gotten good at it.

Most obviously, he’s got no adolescent anger or rebelliousness, though he has more right to them than many people making noise in Laguna Beach. He’s also much too trusting, to the point that when his father (an over-the-top superpatriot) interrogates him about his sex life, he answers, without a qualm. No qualms, either, about opposing the Vietnam War, though Kyle’s in it; the narrative pays lip service to that moral complexity and zips onward. As for the two girls attracted to Matt, they’re types, with good looks and social and cultural markers, but little in the way of inner life.

Finally, the end disappointed me; after such careful plotting, I didn’t expect the hackneyed, predictable confrontations. The romance subplot also takes an odd twist, with little afterthought. Consequently, A Thousand Steps is a strange amalgam, a novel with an intensely strong physical presence yet flimsy characters, a highly inventive narrative that somehow loses its sure-handedness at the climax. Take that for what you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Occupation Confection: The Baker’s Secret

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, book review, cliché narrative, commercial fiction, France, German Occupation, historical fiction, Normandy, resistance, Stephen P. Kiernan, two-dimensional characters, World War II

Review: The Baker’s Secret, by Stephen P. Kiernan
Morrow, 2017. 308 pp. $27

By June 1944, the German Occupation weighs heavily on the Norman coastal village of Vergers. The Germans confiscate whatever food the villagers grow or catch, deport men of working age to their armaments factories, and delight in summary executions. One person they shoot is Ezra Kuchen, the baker; the villager who takes his death the hardest is his assistant, Emmanuelle, known as Emma.

Emma would never dream of joining the Resistance, whose activity she blames for other losses, and who believes the Allies will never invade, so what’s the point? But willy-nilly, Emma becomes the prime mover in a complicated barter arrangement whose weblike strands encompass the whole village, and which the Germans would certainly call resistance. Her treason centers around baking bread for the occupiers, which she cuts with enough straw to make extra loaves for neighbors in need. In each loaf, she carves a subtle V.

Each morning required every gram of Emma’s skills, all of her artifice, to bake loaves containing straw and have neither the Kommandant nor his officers notice. Yet this was only one of five hundred deceits, all conceived during the long strain of the occupation. She learned to sow a minefield and reap eggs. She could wander the hedgerows pulling a rickety cart, and the result would be maps. She could turn cheese into gasoline, a light bulb into tobacco, fuel into fish. She could catch, butcher, and divide among the villagers a pig that later every person who had tasted it would insist had never existed.

I like this part of the novel the best, and not only because of Emma’s ingenuity. Every fiber of her duplicity exists to satisfy someone else’s wants, which she at first resents, because they leave no room for her own. But over time, she realizes that throwing herself into feeding others gives her a reason to live despite her pessimism, and keeps her from dwelling on her repressed desires, which would drive her mad. When someone tells her to have hope, she snaps, “Can that be eaten? What does it taste like?” But since the novel opens on June 5, 1944, the reader knows what’s coming before she does.

Having written about military occupations and traveled Normandy, I was looking forward to The Baker’s Secret. (My fondest memory of the many French walking trails I’ve followed is of Calvados, where a group of local hikers pressed wine and food on me and told me how grateful they felt to Americans for having liberated them.) I gobbled up this confection of a novel in just about one sitting, which says something about its excellent pacing, but I felt hungry soon afterward. The story pleases, but, except for Emma, the characters have no depth, and the fable-like tone makes it hard to tell whether to take the narrative’s real tragedies seriously.

I took this photo in 2015, near the Norman village of Thury-Harcourt, an area that saw heavy fighting several weeks after the invasion.

One weak link is the German soldiery. Unlike the case with All the Light We Cannot See, to which this book will inevitably (and wrongly) be compared, Kiernan’s occupiers deal out plenty of brutality. But they’re stiff, utterly predictable marionettes who act like no soldiers I’ve ever read of or seen, let alone like the Wehrmacht. They are easily fooled, spout racial and political prejudices like windup toys, seem not to understand their own weaponry, and even invite Emma to a place where she can see their fortifications, which they then boast of to her. They’re not buffoons, exactly; more like a collection of bumbling neurotics with guns.

Just as the Germans are unreal enemies, the villagers are improbable, idealized good guys. They’re more like a foreigner’s idea of what French people must be like, with generic, styled modes of expression, attitudes, and descriptions. Further, I don’t believe that Vergers has a Jewish baker, that Ezra Kuchen is Jewish, or that the villagers would honor him in death so fervently. He’s a cliché, a blatant device, and, incidentally, the only villager to possess a last name, whose meaning (“cake”) is no subtler than anything else in this story. Kiernan tries hard to evoke Emma’s fear that someone in Vergers will betray her, but you know they won’t; they’re too righteous. Over time, a candidate presents himself, but he’s so roundly detested that you expect his duplicity rather than fear it.

I appreciate Kiernan’s attempt to show the cruelties perpetrated during the Occupation, and to portray the violence of the invasion as a decidedly mixed blessing for the people of Normandy. But The Baker’s Secret, though it has its poignant moments, teeters between cartoonish fable and skewed reality, and leaves me unsatisfied.

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

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