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Learning to See: Swimming Between Worlds

08 Monday Aug 2022

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Review: Swimming Between Worlds, by Elaine Neil Orr
Berkley, 2018. 382 pp. $16

Tacker Hart, former high school football star and would-be architect, has gone to Nigeria on a plum assignment for a private company, only to be summarily dismissed, practically kidnapped, and sent home to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The year is 1959, and momentous change is in the wind, though Tacker doesn’t sense it.

He senses little of anything, feeling adrift and angry and missing Nigeria, a place whose ways and atmosphere swallowed him whole. He’s barely put together that the Black society he admired in Africa would be forced to the back of the bus in his hometown. Moody and distraught, Tacker moves out of his parents’ house, persuades his father to let him manage one of two grocery stores Dad owns, and doesn’t know where he’s going, or why.

Two encounters give him purpose. First, he runs into Kate Morton, whom he remembers vaguely from high school, and picks up signals of common ground:

Still it seemed he was on vacation from the real point of living, a point he could only vaguely have described, though it had something to do with putting oneself at the edge of the world and staying there long enough to imagine something absolutely new. Outside, wind herded a curve of clouds at the far edge of sky and the air smelled of tobacco. The sidewalk was dark from the night’s rain and fall leaves lay sleeping on the pavement. Here and there morning light fell in dazzling sprees. Tacker felt the key in his pocket, cool and solid against his knuckles. He’d be happy to see Kate Monroe drop by again. She’d seemed as dazed by her present life as he felt about his.

Second, Tacker defends a Black customer, Gaines Townson, from a beating by several toughs in front of his store — Gaines has crossed an invisible line by shopping there. Subsequently, Tacker hires Gaines to work in the store, not realizing that his new employee has become active in the Civil Rights movement, participating in sit-ins at lunch counters. Nor does Tacker know that Kate, to whom he’s attracted more and more, distrusts the movement and Blacks in general.

Three protesters sit in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, Durham, North Carolina, February 1960 (courtesy North Carolina state archives, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Swimming Between Worlds stands out in several significant ways. Orr does a terrific job capturing how adulthood confuses the two prospective romantic partners. They’re both difficult, oversensitive, wary, aching from loneliness, and expert at driving people away. Kate, at least, has a more conventional excuse: Her mother, her sole surviving parent, has died, and Kate lives in her house, with its memories and societal burdens (her parents possessed status and therefore a code to live up to). As part of that legacy, the place contains letters her mother wanted her to burn. Big hint: Kate disobeys and is knocked for a loop.

Kate also has a suitor who’s doing his medical residency, and whom she’s not sure she wants to marry, yet doesn’t see what other choice in life she has. Marrying the doctor would give her social position and security but pigeonhole her as her husband’s reflection. I like how Orr portrays this dilemma while introducing Kate’s growing interest in photography, the pursuit that gives her something of her own, without overplaying it.

As you might surmise, the author shows you her characters’ flaws straight out. You lose patience with Tacker and Kate regularly, and nothing between them goes neatly. For instance, there’s a great scene when the medical resident shows up unexpectedly at a birthday party to which his rival has also been invited. Nor does the author protect her characters in other ways, for they suffer deep losses.

From a moral point of view, essential in a story like this, the sit-ins narrative doesn’t try too hard, just the right touch. Tacker’s no better than he should be, no liberal in hiding. It’s not immediately apparent to him how Blacks endure bigotry as second-class citizens, and how, if they seek ordinary pleasures he takes for granted — sitting down to eat at a lunch counter, for instance — they take their lives in their hands. Kate, too frightened even to contemplate what segregation means, argues with Tacker about it, though she comes around, eventually.

I’m less taken with Gaines’s portrayal. He seems one-dimensional, passionate about the cause and little else, as though he were merely a plot device. Indeed, he brings Tacker messages from the front lines and articles from Black newspapers, all of which prompt action. It’s also curious how easily Tacker, who has a quick temper that often gets him in trouble, tolerates Gaines’s jibes and lets him act as his conscience, his goad.

Then again, Tacker’s characterization in general sometimes feels stilted, particularly toward the beginning. The text often “explains” him, which strikes me as odd, given the care Orr takes with emotional resonance, as with her artful descriptions. Regarding the storytelling, though I like the Nigerian narrative in itself (and am reminded of my years in Africa), both the unnecessary prologue set there and one later section feel shoehorned in.

Still, Swimming Between Worlds is a thought-provoking novel, a human story full of feeling with an unexpected twist or two. It’s well worth your time.

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

“Lag”: Shepherd

04 Monday Jul 2022

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Review: Shepherd, by Catherine Jinks
Text Publishing, 2019. 226 pp. $30 AU

New South Wales, 1840. Tom Clay, transported to Australia at age twelve for poaching in Suffolk, has always loved animals and been good with them. It’s people he has trouble with, especially the murderous types British courts have inflicted on their infant colony in the name of justice. But as long as Tom can stick to tending sheep at the outpost station, he’s got a loyal dog, Gyp, and life’s not so bad.

John Oxley’s chart of part of the New South Wales interior, 1822, from Moreton Bay to Port Philip (courtesy State Library of New South Wales Z/Cc 82/1-3, via Wikimedia Commons)

Trouble is, Dan Carver, a fellow employee of the same rancher, has killed a couple of their coworkers and seems to be just getting started on the others. Consequently, young Tom, who, by rights, should be learning his letters in an English school, has to move fast to save his skin and that of Rowdy Cavanaugh, a glib jokester whose crime in England was passing counterfeit coin. His garrulousness, which he either can’t control or doesn’t care to, makes stealthy movement difficult if not impossible, and may cost Tom and him their lives.

I should add that the phrase by rights doesn’t exist for criminals like Tom, or for anyone else sent to Australia for punishment — “lagged,” it’s called. Therefore, even if Tom somehow manages to evade Carver and alert the rancher, he’s likely as not to hang for Carver’s murders. Nobody believes a “lag,” and when it’s one lag’s word against another, the stronger, older man will likely prevail.

As you may have guessed, this excellent thriller — I defy you to start it and put it down — has more to offer than unending sequences of “no — and furthermore,” gripping though they are. Shepherd tells the grisly, heart-breaking story of how lags come to Australia, or how Tom does, and the various stratagems he must employ to stay alive, let alone avoid flogging or any other casual brutality his masters may devise.

In beautifully crafted, brief flashbacks that seamlessly flow with the main narrative, you learn about the boy’s harrowing sea journey from England, the filthy so-called majesty of the law, and his dreadful childhood in a family of poachers: “I don’t think I’ve slept easy since I was in my mother’s womb.” Shepherd spares nothing, yet I never find the violence gratuitous or sense it’s included for shock value.

I wish the novel didn’t start with a prologue, and Jinks doesn’t need to tell the reader what’s coming, because her first chapter pulls you in right away. However, I like the writing in the prologue, which shows you much about young Tom in few words:

When I first came here, I thought it a cruel affliction to walk through a wood and not know what bird was singing, or which plants were safe to eat. Now I understand it’s more than an affliction; it’s certain death.
I see nothing around me that I can properly name. Ferns. Vines. Bushes. Trees that shed their bark instead of their leaves. Flowers with spikes instead of petals.
I’m going to die wordless, in a lonely hollow in a strange land. I’m going to die among beasts that I don’t understand and plants that have killed me.

The passage suggests both the author’s gift for spare, direct prose and characterization: “I’m going to die among beasts I don’t understand and plants that kill me.” For Tom’s a born tracker, the one advantage he possesses in his attempt to escape Carver or get the drop on him — plans and circumstances change rapidly. How the boy copes with the natural world would make a novel in itself, for his knowledge and ingenuity constantly surprise; yet, as the prologue says, he’s conscious of what he doesn’t know.

His skill and humility set him apart from the other colonists. He’s also alone in his admiration for the Black indigenous people and their understanding of the land, flora, and fauna. He fears them too, because of what they might do, though Carver’s and their boss’s treatment of them troubles Tom. There’s muted social commentary in that as well, and though the indigenous folk linger on the fringes of the narrative, you sense them watching the whites act like maniacs.

This slim volume has a lot going for it — a lightning-paced story, a landscape physically rendered in emotionally resonant detail, and a teenager fighting not only for his life, but to live decently, in a place where no one understands the concept. Few Australian novels reach our shores, unfortunately, unless a major house picks them up. I wish more Americans knew about this small press in Melbourne, Text, which has given us Shepherd and also A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville.

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

Tragic Destiny: Four Treasures of the Sky

02 Monday May 2022

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Review: Four Treasures of the Sky, by Jenny Tinghui Zhang
Flatiron, 2022. 336 pp. $28

The first, arresting sentence of this utterly compelling novel refers to a kidnapping, but the story’s much larger than a single person. It’s a tale of good versus evil, mostly the latter.

Despite being named for a tragic heroine of legend, Daiyu has a happy childhood in 1880s China. Growing up in a fishing village six days from the port of Zhifu, she has firm but doting parents who teach her to love nature and respect others, and to expect such respect in return. With that nurturance to guide Daiyu, life holds great promise:

Our village sat next to a river that fed the ocean and in those early years, I walked along the riverbank often, following the black-tailed gulls until I reached the ocean’s mouth. I hugged the water’s edge, counting the riches that it held: life, memory, even doom. My mother spoke of the sea with romance, my father with reverence, my grandmother with caution. I felt none of those things. Standing beneath the gulls and swifts and terns, I only felt myself, one who held nothing, carried nothing, and offered nothing. I was simply beginning.

Unbeknownst to Daiyu, these are dangerous times, and one day, her parents flee without warning, leaving her in her grandmother’s care. Soldiers come looking for the fugitives, which bewilders Daiyu; what could her parents have done wrong? And soon, it’s too dangerous for Daiyu to live in the village, whereupon she’s sent to fend for herself in Zhifu.

Perhaps that seems improbable, but what follows is all too nightmarishly real. For a while, she finds comfort and stimulation as a servant at a calligraphy school, and in learning that art, she learns about life. In that way, you might call Four Treasures of the Sky a coming-of-age novel, though it’s different in tone from any I can think of.

Her kidnapping interrupts her education and self-discovery, and much else. Kept for a year in captivity, where she’s taught English, she’s sent overseas to a brothel in San Francisco. The author may pull a punch once her protagonist arrives in America, but rest assured, Zhang doesn’t protect her characters. Daiyu also has further misadventures in Idaho, where she tries to pass as a man. Throughout, she experiences or observes the brutalities women suffer at the hands of men, or each other.

Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper ran this cartoon in April 1882, commenting on the Chinese Exclusion Act of that year (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But dressing and acting as a man offers only a veneer of protection; as a Chinese person, she’s subject to constant harassment, insult, degradation, and violence. “No — and furthermore” thrives here in full force, so that whenever a hint of kindness, generosity, or warmth reveals itself, you have to wonder how long it’ll last.

To survive, Daiyu, now called by other, invented names, retreats within her tragic alter ego, or, to be precise, literally and figuratively swallows her and holds her inside. What a remarkable metaphor, an attempted antidote to the bitterness that life forces down her throat. But the alter ego also represents the self that Daiyu may never show anyone, for fear of exposure and punishment. As a result, she won’t let herself trust or love, so that dreadful as her physical sufferings are, the emotional deprivation is that much worse.

Zhang’s prose, as quoted above, penetrates surfaces to illuminate the shadows or currents beneath, one pleasure of Four Treasures of the Sky. Besides the passages on calligraphy, I enjoyed one describing the differences between Chinese and English; the latter, soft-pedaling unimportant words while emphasizing others with vigor, “is a matter of timing and chaos.” Another passage precisely links male power to physicality, reflected in how men move and carry themselves. Like so many parts of the novel, it’s beautifully observed without a hint of self-consciousness.

Mostly, though, Zhang wants to redeem the largely forgotten history of American bigotry and violence against Chinese. In that, she performs a great service, in general and particular. In her afterword, she says that Trump’s lies blaming China for COVID energized her, in part, to write her story.

I warn you, however, that if you read this brilliant, disturbing book, be prepared to see humans at their worst. All the white characters are racist, and few of the Chinese have much to recommend them, either. Yet Daiyu’s constant struggle over whether to live fully, and how, prevents Four Treasures of the Sky from becoming a polemic or a tract. To me, the social and political observations feel integral and crucial to the narrative.

This is an important book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Class Warfare in Spokane: The Cold Millions

14 Monday Jun 2021

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Review: The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter
Harper, 2020. 337 pp. $29

Spokane, Washington, in 1909 makes a volatile mixture. Some townspeople get by, a few live in luxury, while a vast army of loggers, miners, prostitutes, and hobos struggles to exist. Into that cauldron leaps the I.W.W., the International Workers of the World, known as Wobblies, whose stated goal is to organize workers into a union that capital must recognize, and to do so without violence. For that, they are called anarchists, revolutionaries, subversives, and agitators, chiefly at the behest of Spokane’s wealthiest citizens, who own the mines, logging companies, real estate, flophouses, saloons, and brothels. But the Wobblies won’t back down and have planned a Free Speech demonstration; the local constabulary, corrupt to the core, will be ready.

Before that happens, however, a policeman is killed, and suspicion immediately falls on the migrant workers, tramps, and other “undesirables” who’ve floated into town. But the newcomers, among whom are sixteen-year-old Ryan (Rye) Dolan and his older brother Gregory (Gig), don’t know this yet. In fact, they know very little of what’s in store:

They woke on a ball field — bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and blankets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds’ tongues over the Spokane River. Seasonal work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps, filled every flop and boardinghouse, slept in parks and alleys in the pavilions of traveling preachers and, on the night just past, this abandoned ball field, its infield littered with itinerants, vagrants, floaters, Americans.

Gig’s a Wobbly (and a drunk), while Rye devotes himself to one cause, trying to keep his older brother out of trouble. Pigs will fly before he succeeds. And even after a violent confrontation with vigilantes who offer them the choice between getting flung in the river or a broken head, the brothers have seen nothing yet. After all, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn will come to lead the Free Speech demonstration.

Joe Hill wrote this song about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1915 (courtesy NYU Library via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Perhaps the most famous labor organizer in America at that time, Flynn, as Walter portrays her, is about the best stump speaker this side of Teddy Roosevelt and more than a match for any man foolish enough to debate her. But even the Wobblies’ labor allies wonder what a pretty, pregnant, nineteen-year-old “girl” is doing (a) away from her husband, and (b) speaking to workingmen, often in terms no modest wife would ever utter, even in private. The Dolan boys are smitten, especially Rye. I don’t blame him one bit.

With exceptional economy, prose, and storytelling punch, Walter justifies his considerable reputation with The Cold Millions. The narrative reads like a thriller about labor strife, with “no — and furthermore” thriving everywhere. Life’s a fight to the finish, and so much wrong blankets the landscape, you seldom know where right is hiding itself, let alone how to act accordingly. In other words, the novel captures the divisions and desperation of a bygone era that seem remarkably like the present.

Flynn is pure electricity, and you can see the sparks; the novel crackles whenever she appears. The Dolan brothers represent Everyman, men who’ve had hard luck and want only a fair chance to improve it. But as Ryan observes, “Hell, it took only your first day in a Montana flop or standing over your mother’s unmarked grave to know that equal was the one thing all men were not. A few lived like kings, and the rest hugged the dirt until it cracked open and took them home.”

What powerful stuff, and Walter deals it straight. There’s no sugarcoating, only an occasional kindness or flash of decency. Sometimes, you can tell the good guys and bad guys apart too easily, yet in the author’s defense, the stakes are such that there’s no straddling allowed. I do wish that Rye had more flaws; he makes mistakes, but usually out of naïveté, which he does his best to address. You pull for him, but I want to do so not just because he’s a trusting innocent. I want him to struggle more with evil instead of skirting it by instinct. I also get impatient with digressions into the backgrounds of minor characters, a few of whom wind up dead shortly thereafter, which feels unfair to the reader. Yet I’ll give Walter credit for insisting on fleshing everybody out, even if the back story becomes intrusive.

There’s also no arguing with the overall effect, which is breathtaking. Walter captures a time, place, and mindset with such brilliance, he makes it look easy. And as a fellow Washingtonian, I salute his effort to portray the Wobblies, who left their mark on the Pacific Northwest a century ago and more.

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

What Will It Take?: The Last Thing You Surrender

14 Monday Dec 2020

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Review: The Last Thing You Surrender, by Leonard Pitts, Jr.
Bolden, 2019. 500 pp. $17

When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, George Simon, a nineteen-year-old marine badly injured from a fall in a wounded warship, survives only because a Black messman, Eric Gordy, makes a superhuman effort to save his life. Though they’ve probably seen each other daily, George doesn’t know Eric’s name or anything else about the “messboy.” Growing up in a well-to-do Mobile, Alabama, home, George recognizes only two Black faces, both household servants. All others are invisible to him. Moreover, in the hours before a rescue team saves the small group of survivors in the sinking warship, Eric slips, falls, hits his head, and drops into the oily water, drowning before anyone can reach him.

Wracked by survivor’s guilt and determined to honor Eric Gordy’s heroism, George tells everyone who will listen about his savior’s courage and strength. But no good deed goes unpunished, for when George recovers enough from his injuries to walk on crutches, he’s sent home to Mobile with a mission. He’s to ask Eric’s widow, Thelma, who also lives there, to travel around the country, telling their story to raise war spirit among “the colored.”

To his credit, George balks. (The narrative never quite explains how he gets away with disobeying a direct order.) More importantly, when he visits Thelma, he sees at once the depth and intelligence missing in his fiancée, Sylvia, a beautiful airhead who uses racial slurs as casually as “hello” or “goodbye.” George’s attraction for Thelma remains largely unconscious. But her moral authority prompts him to entertain an idea he’s never encountered, that his race prejudice makes him less than the man he wants to be. And when he learns that Thelma’s parents were lynched and burned alive, which explains the unveiled hostility George meets in her older brother, Luther, the young marine begins to see how little he knows of life.

Dutifully, he tries to explain his confusion to Sylvia, who laughs in his face. Her reaction makes him think of how Alice and Benjamin, the two Black servants, must feel in the Simon home:

How many times, in the nearly 30 years that Benjy had been part of their household, had he been passing in a hallway or lingering invisibly in a corner and heard one of them—Sylvia, Mother, Father, even George himself—say that word? Say it laughingly. Say it matter-of-factly. Say it with less thought than you’d give to waving at a fly.

A more potent, timely premise would be hard to find, and, for the most part, the various narratives retain power until the end. The reader follows George as he returns to combat, first on Guadalcanal; Thelma, as she goes to work in a Navy yard, spray-painting warships; and Luther, after a draft notice requires him to fight for a country he detests.

A tank from Company D, 761st Tank Battalion, in Coburg, Germany, late April 1945. The 761st, among the finest armored units in the U.S. Army, was almost entirely Black (courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

In this novel depicting wartime, I like the Stateside narratives the best. The racial conflicts at the shipyard and at Luther’s army camp call out on every page, Just what the hell is wrong with our country? Pitts takes no prisoners, nor should he, and though many plot points seem predictable, what he does with them lends a dash of the unexpected. In the main, the story works.

The battlefield sequences ring true, yet the military narratives surrounding them feel truncated, as though the author doesn’t want to linger. He’s got places to go and people to see. You can understand, considering that at five hundred pages, The Last Thing You Surrender is plenty long as it is. Nevertheless, about halfway through, the novel loses some immediacy. It’s as though the story must pick up pace, or . . . . Or what?

I suspect that the search for redemption is at fault here, and the book has to get going so that it can happen. You can tell which characters will see the light, though I’m not sure they all earn their epiphanies, which come about through witnessing or experiencing degradation so powerful it shakes them to their roots. Maybe Pitts is saying that’s what it takes to change; you have to see just how vicious people can be before you can give up hatred.

Not everyone here does, and the violent racists in this novel are duly unrepentant. But Pitts immerses those willing to open their eyes in events that are so well known they’re practically tropes, sort of like ticking boxes off a list of meaningful historical incidents that everyone has heard of.

That’s my major objection to The Last Thing You Surrender, how the narrative grunts and strains to give characters famous external circumstances by which they can reach internal change. Is that how it happens? And if it does, why rely on such events, when everyday observation, if written vividly, might work as well—and, because it’s unexpected, carry more tension?

That said, the novel asks that all-important question—what will it take before we treat each other respectfully, righteously?—and Pitts offers a thought-provoking answer. Read it.

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

Insight: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

06 Monday Apr 2020

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Review: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller
Europa, 2019. 410 pp. $19

One rainy night in 1809, a coach pulls up to a vacant country house in Somerset, discharging a badly injured man. Nell, the housekeeper, can’t tell whether it’s John Lacroix, master of the house, for he possesses few recognizable clothes or belongings, and facial hair and wounds obscure his features. However, Nell tends him; and yes, it’s John, an officer of hussars returned from a disastrous campaign in Corunna, Spain, against Napoleon. John slowly recovers from his physical wounds, pleasing Nell and his beloved sister, Lucy, but he’s emotionally out of sorts and refuses to speak of his war. And when a comrade visits to urge him to heal quickly and return to his regiment, John decides to travel instead and settles on Scotland as a destination. He’ll look for an island where he may find solitude and solace, though how he envisions those qualities remains vague, even to himself.

Meanwhile, two men have been sent, unofficially yet on high authority, to hunt him. Why they’ve targeted John is unclear, at first. All you know is that one of his seekers, Calley, is as vicious a brute as any who’s ever drawn breath. On sighting a man he’s never met, for example, he measures up the newcomer to guess whether he’d be his equal in a brawl. It’s Calley against the world, and he’ll come out swinging.

This brilliant, delicately written thriller has to do with a manhunt, obviously, but offers a significant twist. John’s hunting himself too, though he doesn’t know that yet, trying to figure out who he is. His entire life, he’s accepted a given version of himself and can’t see its constraints. Instinctively, he turns away from questions, especially the existential kind. But on his travels, he meets Emily, a freethinking woman who’s going blind, yet sees what he can’t (a lovely touch). As he learns to trust her, he opens himself up to insight and reflection — which is all very well, but two men are trailing him.

Death of Sir John Moore, British commander at Corunna, Spain, from an 1815 aquatint by William Heath, engraved by Thomas Sutherland (courtesy The Martial Achievements of Great Britain and her Allies from 1799-1815, by James Jenkins, via Wikimedia Commons)

To call a thriller “delicate” may sound strange, especially considering that this one, like many, portrays its share of violence. Yet the adjective fits. Miller’s is a subtle hand; he shows just about everything, letting you infer from his beautiful, lucid prose all you need to know while keeping John and Emily less open to themselves than to the reader. That’s extraordinary storytelling. Like a house assembled by artisans who take pride in details that few visitors or even residents would ever notice, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free reflects the author’s dedication to moments small and large, characters major or minor. Nell, the housekeeper, has an inner life, as does John’s sister, Lucy, though neither plays a lengthy role. Such loving attention extends even to characters with whom our protagonist never even interacts:

He would stroll while he was still free to do so, and he set off, walking away from the water and turning into a narrow street of gabled buildings, part of the city’s medieval guts. Through cellar windows he saw backs bent over benches, cutting, sewing. He saw through two windows — the whole body of a house — a garden where men were twisting rope. At the gates of a yard he saw three giants stripped to the waist, their skin blushed blue from some process they were resting from. They watched him as he passed. They looked like men made almost mad by what they did.

Note that this prose, which carries you through what might otherwise seem like a digression, puts you — and John — in the scene actively, conveys a notion of his character and an image of early nineteenth-century English life.

Also impressive, and what few authors succeed at, the villain has his due. Calley’s thoroughly repugnant, yet you glimpse the kind of life he’s had, and why he might have surrendered to his crueler instincts — all of it suggested, never announced.

Andrew Miller has written a splendid story that’s at once a page-turning novel of suspense and an inquiry into what defines freedom. I highly recommend Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, one of the finest novels I’ve read in several years.

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

Revenge Tragedy: After the War

06 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: After the War, by Hervé Le Corre
Translated from the French by Sam Taylor
Europa, 2019. 533 pp. $19

A man sits, tied up, being tortured to divulge who killed a certain figure from the Bordeaux crime world. This figure, like most of his brethren during the late 1950s — like the police beating him up — collaborated with the Germans during the recent world war and profited from it. In fact, few profited as handsomely as Albert Darlac, the commissaire de police, and the man leading the interrogation. Jewels, art, and furniture taken from dispossessed Jews made him rich, and without a trace of compunction or remorse, he can say that his department would cease to exist if such activities disqualified a man from serving the law.

Maurice Poupon, member of the Legion of Honor and illustrious politician in the Gaullist government, 1967. As a Bordeaux police official during World War II, he had arranged for the deportation of more than 1600 Jews; during the Algerian War for independence, he allegedly tortured rebel prisoners (courtesy Archives municipales de Toulouse via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Meanwhile, Daniel, a twenty-year-old garage mechanic who lost his parents at Auschwitz, has terrible trouble understanding the ache inside him. His adoptive parents, former Resistance members who rescued him from a rooftop the day his biological parents were arrested, have protected him and given him a warm home. Their daughter, Irène, also adopted, is the only person to whom Daniel can show any vulnerability. But Daniel fears that this happy life — happy, considering his circumstances — will soon end. He’s due to receive his draft notice and fight in Algeria, in a colonial war his friends and family staunchly oppose.

Darlac and Daniel, victim and perpetrator, don’t meet for quite a while. The contrasts between them provide the context and the moral theme of this extraordinary, exceedingly violent narrative. Darlac scorns everything remotely resembling compassion or kindness as weakness that deserves to be crushed. As one old-time acquaintance says, “Other people die and you’re the one that smells like a rotting carcass.” Daniel, however, wishes he could make himself more accessible emotionally — not that he entirely realizes this, a superb stroke of characterization — and often hides inside movie images, which he’s constantly imagining in his daily life. But you know that once he reaches Algeria, his struggles to become fully human will only get more desperate.

Connecting the two, a figure from their pasts has come to Bordeaux to settle old scores. How Darlac reacts in particular provides much of the story, and a searing one it is. Any author can follow Raymond Chandler’s advice and have a man with a gun enter the scene to prevent tension from flagging. Le Corre has plenty of men with guns, but he doesn’t have to worry about the tension. It’s not just that stuff happens, because if it were only that, a hyperactive plot would do as well. No; he grounds every scene so thoroughly in the physical that you can’t help feeling that his narrative is happening all around you, and that you’re involved by turning the pages. Whether it’s the Bordeaux docks or the Algerian desert, Le Corre knows every inch of his territory, and how it feels to be there, so you do too.

But even that wouldn’t work if he didn’t also put you firmly in his narrators’ heads, as with this introduction to Daniel, which also happens to portray the port of Bordeaux:

He stops suddenly in front of the gates of the port, his bicycle between his legs, and remains there, stunned. With his balaclava and his sheepskin coat with the collar turned up and the mittens on his hands gripping the handle bars, only his eyes are visible. He observes the blaring traffic of cars and trucks, intoxicated by the din they make, grinding his teeth as axles groan and bodies shake over the large cobblestones… He feels the dull rumble in his legs as a train trundles slowly past endless rows of warehouses, accompanied on foot by a man swinging a lantern in his hand. The city buzzes and trembles in his flesh.

Many people will find After the War a bloody business — and so it is, because the title’s ironic. Wars merge, so that there’s no apparent space between one and the next, no aftermath, because even if the calendar says that a few years have passed, in men’s minds, they haven’t. Darlac is also a complete monster, so he’s hard to take. But it was that kind of monster who made the French portion of the Holocaust possible, a fact conveniently ignored in France. Rather, I’m more troubled by the way female characters seem to exist largely in a man’s perception, not necessarily as sex objects, though in Darlac’s case, that’s all they are, but without readily definable aspirations of their own. They’re invariably the kindest characters, but they’re not fully rendered, not like the men.

Nevertheless, if you like noir, After the War is as noir as it gets, a first-rate thriller by an author who understands how to put it all together.

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

Finnish Saga: Deep River

16 Monday Sep 2019

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Review: Deep River, by Karl Marlantes
Grove Atlantic, 2019. 717 pp. $30

During the early 1900s, Russia’s hard-fisted rule over Finland prompts violent uprising, met with even harder fists. Aino Koski, a young woman committed to the radical nationalist movement, endures imprisonment before she flees to America, to live with her two brothers in the Pacific Northwest. Aino never forgets her losses, familial or personal — deaths, eviction, destitution, torture — and ascribes them all to capitalism. She’s got an argument, but of course it’s a little neat, as is her solution. Her blind faith in revolution, no matter where or when, and rigid reduction of all situations to the same self-righteous formula, wears on those who love her. To give her credit, as an activist with the infant International Workers of the World, or Wobblies, Aino accomplishes minor miracles organizing the loggers in various camps around the Northwest. But her victories and single-mindedness come at great cost, to herself and others.

Wobbly organizer Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, also called Joseph Hillström, became famous as Joe Hill, thanks in part to the song written after his execution in 1915 (courtesy Utah Division of Archives and Records Service, via Wikimedia Commons)

Deep River lovingly portrays Finnish immigrant society, and you don’t need to read the author’s comment at the end to guess that Marlantes has written about his forebears. You see the men quick to violence if they believe their honor in question, and their stoic, maddening, sometimes hilarious refusal to express anything verbally. The women pick up the pieces, guiding their menfolk through difficult moments like loggers breaking up a jam at a narrow point in the river, offering coffee and cake, subtle redirection, or unexpected steel. They hold their own, but boys will be boys.

Whether these characters’ struggles will catch you completely and take hold depends, I think, on your taste for Marlantes’s narrative style. He does an excellent job weaving labor history into his story, and he shows how management’s hired thugs, captive law enforcement, and recruitment of citizen vigilantes crushes the Wobblies and paints them as the instigators. (Management did such a thorough job at public relations that I had admired the Wobblies for their efforts but deplored their methods, only to read here that they preached nonviolence.) Figures; the victors write the history.

It’s a heartbreaking tale, one well worth learning about, but be warned: There’s plenty of violence, even when the Wobblies don’t appear. Marlantes, ex-Marine captain and author of Matterhorn, a superb Vietnam War novel, excels here, as you’d expect. His action scenes carry an electric charge, and the knowledge that these people can and will do anything just about anytime keeps you riveted. He loves his characters, but he doesn’t protect them.

He also keeps you connected through intense physical detail, especially the mud, danger, and squalor of logging camps; and the landscape, whether before the axes fall or, in the following case afterward:

It looked as if a giant had had a temper tantrum, smashing the gigantic trees into slowly bleaching jackstraw piles of splinters, stumps, and snags, and the occasional lengths of abandoned steel cable, some as thick as a man’s wrist, and broken blocks, heavy, grooved wheels called sheaves encased between two steel cheeks through which the cable was threaded. The stumps took [Aino’s] breath away. Her whole family could stand on top of one of them with room for twenty more people, maybe thirty if some of them sat on the edge and dangled their legs over it.

As a Northwest resident (and a tree hugger and hiker), I find these descriptions moving, portraits of what the region looked like before greed and demand for wood got the upper hand.

But Deep River disappoints in a couple significant respects. Aino comes across fully, though I expected more psychological scarring from the torture she received in prison, particularly regarding physical affection from men. Her two brothers and their friends Aksel and Jouka also earn complete portrayals, but the others seem more like figures known for a trait or two. All the women besides Aino are strong, which I appreciate, and they have their moments. Yet I’m not always sure what makes them tick.

More importantly, Marlantes’s way of telling emotions gets in my way. Often, he creates a marvelously tense confrontation, building the drama, only to let the air out with a sentence like: “They stood, looking at each other, love pouring from their eyes.” Deep River’s length and breadth may beg for economy in places — the narration essentially goes until the early 1930s — but these moments deserve their weight, and Marlantes’s descriptive prowess clearly measures up to the task. I just wish he had exercised it.

So take Deep River for what you will, a wonderful story shortened at crucial points, or an involving saga of blood and heroism in rough country.

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

St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me… : The Widows

01 Monday Apr 2019

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Review: The Widows, by Jess Montgomery
Minotaur, 2018. 317 pp. $27

When Lily Ross’s husband, Daniel, sheriff of Bronwyn County, Ohio, is shot to death in March 1925 under circumstances that beg for investigation, the widow undertakes to learn the truth. Though the bereaved spouse/lover detective is by now a trope, you couldn’t ask for a more compelling premise than Montgomery provides. Not only does Lily quickly learn that Daniel led a secret life with another woman — again, something we’ve heard before — but that woman, Marvena, is recently widowed herself and a union organizer. Bronwyn County is coal country, and the mine owners’ exploitative practices loom large — wages paid in scrip instead of cash, the company store, yellow-dog contracts, Pinkerton thugs; the whole nine yards.

“Keeping Warm,” a cartoon appearing in the Los Angeles Times in November 1919, reveals a common attitude of that time about mine labor disputes (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The miners’ cause lends potent substance and background to Daniel’s death and Lily’s investigation, not least because Daniel’s half-brother, Luther, owns the mines. Accordingly, the story involves many more deaths, beatings, and threats of violence, whether from mobs or individuals, authentic to labor history in the coalfields. Montgomery makes Daniel a violent man too, an erstwhile prizefighter capable of great rages. Lily’s least pleasant discoveries concern aspects of his past that show how he hid his violent side from her.

Much of this she learns from Marvena, who shares the narrative point of view. Though the story wouldn’t work without her, Marvena’s a weak link. She’s an admirable person who has suffered for her beliefs, but maybe that’s the problem — either she’s too earnest, or Montgomery was in creating her. Marvena plays two notes, over and over — whom can I trust? how can I keep the miners together when the union-busters have all the power? — and you can’t argue, but she needs more. Marvena’s emotional world feels too narrow, despite a passage or two about what her two daughters mean to her. What the miners endure is absolutely heartbreaking, and the way management maintains power at all costs reads like a combination of serfdom and three-card Monte. Nevertheless, to me, Marvena remains a symbol, an icon of resistance, rather than a complete person, and if she had a flaw other than the suspicious nature she has honestly earned, I’d believe her more readily.

Lily needs flaws as well. Men call her stubborn and foolhardy, but they would. Though she suffers from Daniel’s silences when he’s alive, she never regrets having married him, and though she briefly resents him for having died, that doesn’t stick. Why the whitewash? Even so, she comes across more fully than Marvena, particularly in passages like the following, a flashback to her courtship of Daniel — in a delightful switch, she’s the aggressor — when she spies on him training for a fight:

She took in every bit of him with her gaze — the bow of his head as if he worshiped at the swing of the bag, the pull and stretch of his muscles with each wrathful thrum, thrum, thrum of his fists against the bag. She felt in that beating rhythm his intention to keep going until mind and memory and muscle all melted to mere spoonfuls of sopping grayness.

Montgomery writes well, if unevenly— occasionally, her dialogue dumps information — but I wish she had more confidence in her skill. I want especially to see more emotional moments like the one quoted above, in which her protagonists’ inner lives expand to take in what they love, hate, or dream of. Instead, the author focuses on action-reaction moments, in which Lily or Marvena take in what they’ve learned or experienced and wrestle with it, often posing rhetorical questions, a device that easily wears thin. They’re strong women, and they have dreams, so why are they so tightly bound to what’s in front of them?

That approach may result because of the many, many plot twists, which, though they keep the reader guessing, hurt the narrative in the long run. It’s not that Montgomery ignores her characters’ inner journeys, exactly, but she seems less sure of herself with them, which leads me to suspect that she’s more comfortable twisting the story. But that’s not where real tension lies, and the plot turns sometimes seem improbable; more than a couple ooze melodrama. Likewise, had the villains occupied fuller characters than plain villainy, they would have felt truer to life.

All the same, I like The Widows, which features two female protagonists who don’t wait for men to rescue them, a feminist perspective that remains consistent. And as the grandson of a staunch union man, I applaud this narrative, a reminder of an ugly chapter in our nation’s history.

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

Mean Streets: The Devil’s Half Mile

01 Monday Oct 2018

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Review: The Devil’s Half Mile, by Paddy Hirsch
Forge, 2018. 300 pp. $25

Justice (Justy) Flanagan, attorney at law, has returned to the Manhattan of his youth from Ireland, following his legal training and participation in the failed rebellion of 1798. He’s come to make his way in the world and to investigate his father’s suicide. But Justy, who found the body hanging from the rafters, has since learned more than most people care to hear about what violent death looks like, and the precise details he remembers from cutting his father down don’t square with his lessons in what we would call forensics. Moreover, given that his father was involved in an extremely risky financial speculation involving men far less scrupulous than himself, Justy reasonably concludes that motives for killing him abounded, as do suspects.

African Burial Ground, late 1700s, just north of Wall Street, Manhattan (courtesy preserveamerica.gov via Wikimedia Commons)

But Hirsch’s Manhattan in 1799 is a mucky, filthy place, and he’s not just talking about the condition of the streets. The language, Irish-American slang that fills a four-page glossary at the back, is pretty raw too. The title refers to Wall Street, a savage entity with no rules save caveat emptor, and where tempers are short, and memories, long. The stock exchange per se doesn’t exist yet, but trading happens in coffee houses, and a new one has risen specifically for that purpose. Hirsch wants you to read this portrayal, full of rich ruffians who detest even the thought of regulation (despite the Ponzi scheme that set off a catastrophic panic in 1792), so that you realize that little has changed.

This is where Hirsch excels. I find his portrayal of the city the most persuasive, gripping part of The Devil’s Half Mile. Whether depicting the racial tension between free blacks and Irish immigrants, the cut-and-thrust of corrupt finance, the gangs that act like private armies, the prostitution, common thievery, and violence that afflict all but the fortunate few, the squalor in which most people live, or the tiny enclaves of great wealth, the novel gives you New York in its gritty self:

Justy nodded farewell to his friend… He pushed his face into the gust of wind that carried the smell of the city down the hill to the docks. Woodsmoke from a thousand hearth fires, urine from the tanners’ shops, horse shit from the streets, sewage from the septic tanks, fresh blood from the abattoirs, rotting meat and produce from the tips. Bad breath, sour beer, raw spirits, stale sweat. It was like a pungent cloud rolling down the Broad Way to the water, a slap in the face of every newcomer who arrived in the city.
Justy smiled.
It was the smell of home.

Despite this vividness, however, the narrative of The Devil’s Half Mile has a mechanical feel that intrudes, though it’s not for want of plot points. There are plenty of twists and turns, right up to the end. Hirsch has apparently followed Raymond Chandler’s dictum that to restore flagging tension, send in a man with a gun. In this case, it’s more likely a corpse discovered or a knife fight, which gets predictable after a while. Even at that, Hirsch’s machinery might not matter, except that our hero, despite his powers of observation, remains remarkably dense about the obvious, such as the probable killers, the nature of the speculation that his father was involved in, or the mastermind behind all his troubles. Is it that he has to remain clueless until enough bodies fall? To his credit, Hirsch does the fight scenes well and is not squeamish about granting them their proper length, so if they’re a device, they’re a carefully polished one. However, like the grisly findings the sleuthing unearths, the spilling of blood requires emotional transitions from Justy — surprise, horror, the pain of treachery, or what have you — which zip past in clichéd language. His gut clenches, or his fist, a phrase announces that he has “raw feelings,” and the narrative moves on.

As such, Justy comes across as more shallow than he should, which is a shame. Hirsch tries to convey the depth to which violent fury possesses his protagonist, and how Justy’s physical skills may be useful in surviving, but not for living a satisfying life. It’s a worthy theme, especially when the author is after even bigger game; he wishes to connect the skill for violence with English prejudice against the Irish as savages fit only for doing dirty deeds or slaving at the docks. In that, The Devil’s Half Mile is a more ambitious book than it seems at first; but unfortunately, it never realizes its potential.

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