I anticipate a lot more escapist books to come as I continue to reel from the Democratic Party's mind-boggling Will To Fail, and their eagerness to kick their most loyal supporters AND destroy America's economy rather than stand up with overwhelming popular support against the Republicans.
Mind boggling.
Eisenhower once said that a political party that openly urged the repeal of Social Security and acted against unions would almost immediately cease to exist as a political entity. He never mentioned what might happen if the other party, which stood to gain from such folly, decided to join them at it. I don't think Eisenhower ever imagined that any party would be that stupid. He never met Harry Reid and Barack Obama.
But I digress. Here's what I read last month. May it distract you from the Hell that is America under Supreme Dictator by default John Bohner....
Into the Woods: The Bloody Chamber, and other stories, by Angela Carter
Children do not stay young for long in this savage country. There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise but this one, so pretty and the youngest of her family, a little late-comer, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother who’d knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like the lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her woman’s bleeding, the clock inside her that will strike, henceforward, once a month.
She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.
Her father might forbid her, if he were home, but he is away in the forest, gathering wood, and her mother cannot deny her.
The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws.
This amazing little collection of ten fairy tales in 125 pages takes some favorites from Perrault and the Grimms and makes them sexual (oh all right, makes them more overtly sexual). Such gruesome fates as being eaten up by a wolf or compelled by a vampire have never had such erotic overtones as they do here.
In these pages, Bluebeard is a standard for the Marquis de Sade and his forbidden room is a torture dungeon with All The Nasties; Beauty and Beast act out their drama in two variations with opposite endings, and Puss-in-Boots (my favorite in the collection) is a Rabelaisian tom with a rakinsh swagger (I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats, one leg stuck in the air like a hambone). I'm the type who visualises most stories pretty vividly as I read, and since they began as familiar fairytales, I tended to experience them in my mind as animated Warner Bros. or Disney cartoons, only to find the subject matter turn increasingly R-rated. The effect was disconcerting, but I liked it enough to smile when I stopped shuddering.
If James Tiptree had written fantasy instead of sci-fi, the result might have been a lot like this. I'm specifically thinking of such tales as "Love is the plan the plan is death". Very high recommendations.
Curse you, Red Baron! Thou Shell of Death, by Nicholas Blake
The trail of footsteps stretched out before them from opposite the French windows to the hut door, a distance of about fifty yards. Nigel hurried out, unconsciously keeping well away from this trail, Cavendish a little ahead of him. He knocked on the door of the hut. There was no answer. Nigel looked in at the window, and what he saw made him leap for the door, thrust it open and stumble inside. The enormous kitchen table was still there, strewn with books and papers; the oil stove and the easy chairs were as he had seen them last. One of the carpet slippers was there on the floor, too; but the other was on the foot of O'Brien, who lay in a heap beside the desk.
It’s nice to know you’re never likely to run out of good mysteries. Even as I lament the finite output of Sarah Caudwell, I’m discovering for the first time Nicholas Blake, one of the classic golden age whodunnit writers. And he apparently has a lot. If Thou Shell of Death is any indication, I’m in for some fun.
You’ve met Blake’s detective, Nigel Strangeways, before, if you have any familiarity with Holmes or Poirot or Ellery Queen or Philo Vance or Mr. Fortune or The Thinking Machine or any of the other perpetually bemused gentlemen of leisure who loves to hear himself talk and who therefore offers his services as a consulting detective to the astonished constabulary. He looks at clues and smiles a Mona Lisa smile as he points them out to others without saying what they mean, because it’s only chapter four. He winds up the book with the usual long, proud explanation of what happened and why and how only he was able to correctly observe what was under everyone’s nose all along. I seriously get off on this stuff; your mileage may vary.
In this case, Strangeways is invited to the country home of a famous World War I Flying Ace (really, that’s how they describe him) who has been receiving threatening letters. Revenge for someone he killed in the war? Fallout from an old love affair? Wait and see, Watson! The pilot-adventurer naturally refuses police presence and other elementary protective precautions in favor of his own contrived plan, and of course is found dead in a hut surrounded by snow, with only one set of footprints—the victim’s—leading in. I solved it pretty easily and had some campy fun along the way.
It's Emo's World: The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
Emily passed on with faltering steps, and having paused a moment at the door, before she attempted to open it, she then hastily entered the chamber, and went toward the picture, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall--perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture, and, before she could leave the chamber, she dropped senseless on the floor.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh! Castle Sinister in the Mountains of Doom! Scheming evil men who assert their churlish dominance over helpless victims! Gossamer-clad damsels whose hearts go pit-a-pat! Thunderclaps that punctuate dramatic pronouncements! Spooky noises and forbidden rooms and legends of....Unspeakable Horror!!!
Ann Radcliffe pretty much invented the gothic horror genre in the 18th century, and Mysteries of Udolpho is her best known thriller. It rambles. The first quarter of the book is a long prologue about the heroine’s life with her father, while the last quarter is a long epilogue about straightening out loose ends and arranging to live happily ever after. In between, we have endless coincidences, digressions into side-plots that only become important later on, and repetitive “You MUST pay the rent!”-style standoffs between the heroines and villains. And yet, it is gripping, and fast-paced, and does what it’s supposed to do. Just be aware that it’s brain candy, not great literature. Apparently, a good number of young people in Radcliffe’s day forgot that. Which leads us to...
How Mr. Noodle Is A Gothic Heroine...... Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence, besides two good livings—and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself.
I read Udolpho as a prequel to Northanger Abbey, having been told that Austen’s work was a satire on Radcliffe, the story of misadventures of a young woman who reads Radcliffe’s books and goes on to see evil counts and dark castles behind every bush. And in fact, I do recommend anyone reading Northanger Abbey for the first time to read Udolpho first; the passages about Moreland’s Radcliffe-induced expectations are funny enough on their own, but with an understanding of the original, they’re downright hilarious. (NOOOOOOOOO, not like that, Mr. Noodle!)
But then, the “Life isn’t a Gothic Romance” part is only a small part of a short novel—aside from a few preparatory discussions of how much Catherine loves Udolpho, the comic expectations and consequences only come to a head for the middle of Part Two. The real novel is the typical Austenian comedy of manners between the Moreland, Tilney and Thorpe families, and about clearing up the minor misunderstandings that stand in the way of getting the proper couples paired off.
The implications of Austen’s ‘moral of the story’ are seen when Moreland’s love interest discovers that she has been suspecting melodramatic intrigue in his family where none exists, and says to her, “Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbor voluntary spies and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”
I couldn’t help but feel wistful at that, the sentiment that England is so much better than the continent, that those dark bandit-laden forests and even darker count-laden castles belong only in Italy and France, while early 19th century England was a civilized, Christian country, with nothing nastier than Sweeney Todd and Dickensian labor conditions to be encountered. And because Christianity, education, laws and social and literary intercourse exist to prevent the rise of powerful evil people there as in America today.
Dresden Gets Bombed: Grave Peril, by Jim Butcher
”Look around you!” he shouted. “Good God, wizard—the past two weeks, the border’s been waggling back and forth like a hooker at a dockworkers’ convention. Why the hell do you think all of these ghosts have been rising?”
I didn’t let the sudden volume of his tone make me blink. “You’re saying that this instability has been making it easier for ghosts to cross over from the Never-never?”
“And easier to form bigger, stronger ghosts when people die,” he said. You think you’ve got some pissed-off ghosts now? Wait until some honor student on her way out of the south side with a college scholarship gets popped by accident in a gang shoot-out. Wait until some poor sap who got AIDS from a blood transfusion breathes his last.”
This is the third in Butcher’s Dresden Files series, and the point at which it becomes clear there is an arc to the story. It begins in the middle of an adventure (I had to go back and check to make sure I hadn’t picked up a later volume by mistake, due to the references to events that apparently happened after Fool Moon but before Grave Peril. I also initially confused Dresden’s upright sword-wielding friend Michael, who is introduced in this book, with the upright sword-wielding adversary Morgan, who wants to Kill Dresden in book one. They’re different people), and never lets up, not even on the proverbial “final thrilling page”. Ghosts are causing problems all over Chicago. Dresden’s enemies, old and new, are around every corner. Dresden, as usual, is too brave and stupid and honor code-driven to leave well enough alone when putting himself in mortal peril several times over might rescue an innocent child. At one point, an enemy taunts Dresden by showing him a ready-made tombstone with Dresden’s name on it, and the epitaph “He died doing the right thing”. I just about took it for granted during that moment that Dresden had in fact died and was one of the ghosts by then.
This is the part I’d been waiting for in the series, where the exposition-adventures are done and the real adventures start in earnest. Dresden levels up in ability considerably; one can only hope he does so in character and wisdom as well. In this episode, he spends so much of the book fighting or fleeing one big bad monster after another that it’s hard to tell for sure. It was nice, though, to see him teamed up with a palladin, and a family man to boot, to help him see how counterproductive his lone wolf schtick is being for him and for those he wants to protect.
The Virgin, The Vicar and the Vulture: The Sybil in Her Grave, by Sarah Caudwell
The first thing I noticed was the smell—it was the first thing anyone would have noticed. A perfectly disgusting smell, acrid and sweet at the same time, mainly, I suppose, of bird droppings, but as if someone had tried to sweeten it with something else—incense or camphor or something like that. The second thing I noticed was the vulture, perched on the back of one of the chaises longues. The third was Isabella, lolling on another of them, dressed in the caftan she’d worn on my first visit, with her little black eyes staring at me without blinking, out of her white pudding face. I alomost apologized for my intrusion.
“She’s been sitting there like that since I came down this morning,” said Daphne. “She doesn’t seem to hear what I say to her. There’s something wrong with her.”
I knew straightaway what was wrong with her, and I could hardly believe that Daphne still hadn’t realised. I tried taking her pulse, and the other things they tell one to do in first-aid classes, but I already knew she was dead. The vulture knew it too, and was looking at Isabella in a way I didn’t much care for.
Here I bid a sad but very satisfied farewell to Sarah Caudwell; this fourth novel in the 62 New Square series (see April and May 2011 bookposts for the first three) is the last one she wrote. In my head, I hear her consoling me and telling me We Will Always Have Sark. And Venice, Greece and now Parsons Haver. These are much more than your standard mysteries.
Reading The Sybil in Her Grave is like following up a gourmet three-course meal at table by retiring to the living room for high quality brandy and chocolates; it's still excellent, but different. The chief joy I got out of these books has been the conversation between Julia, Desmond, Michael and Selene, the four witty, cultured, intelligent barristers who have a close enough bond to say anything freely to one another and who frequently do so with the outrageous light-hearted irony in the face of tragedy that can only work among the closest of friends. Trust me; I just read some Jane Austen, the known queen of comedy-of-manners, and Caudwell matches and even surpasses her.
Except that the final volume is short on this kind of conversation. More than half the book consists of letters from Julia's aunt Reg, a cozy English woman in a cozy English village with a vicar, a retired colonel, a lady who gardens and has cats, and some less conventional inhabitants. The aunt and her village friends are witty and charming, but they're not 62 New Square. Eventually, when mysterious deaths, thefts, blackmail and (shudder!) breaches of fiduciary duty occur, Julia goes to Parsons Haver and her correspondence with Desmond (this comes close to being entirely a mystery by mail) provides that dose of conversation I'd come to love.
Like I said, brandy and chocolates in the cozy living room to end a gourmet meal. But you might want to examine them for telltale bitter almond odors; it's been that kind of a series.
Devil Take the Bluetailed Gadfly: The Lesser Dialogues, by Plato
If you kill me, you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore I would advise you to spare me. I dare say that you may feel out of temper (like a person who is suddenly awakened from sleep), and you think that you might easily strike me dead as Anytus advises, and then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless God in his care of you sent another gadfly.
Here are a dozen of Plato's earliest, shortest dialogues, each of which is nicely readable, can be read in under an hour, and showcases Socrates at his annoying best. The typical formula is that Socrates approaches some learned figure and asks, "What is truth?" (or whatever), and then bats away the other guy's attempts to define the term until the other guy gives up, and the dialogue ends with them failing to agree on anything except maybe how yummy that young man over there looks. You think I'm exaggerating? Pick up the dialogues and see for yourself!
They're entertaining in exactly the way that Aristotle isn't, but philosophically not much use. For one thing, they never do get around to defining the various virtues, and the people Socrates questions tend to put up straw men who are barely worth refuting (asserting that temperance means being quiet, for example) and to not follow up with much more than obliging nods to Socrates's pronouncements. For another thing, it seems that Socrates's main point throughout is that no one can be really said to have these virtues who cannot define them--the just man must understand justice the way a cobbler understands leather, for example--and this point is absurd. In one dialogue, Socrates makes a famous general with a proven victory record admit that he must not have courage because he cannot define it; in another, he implies that an actor with a reputation for greatness must nevertheless not understand Homer's poetry unless he also has mastered ship-handling, military tactics, and other skills that are poetically referenced in The Iliad.
The dialogues that don't fit the formula are a mixed bag. "Euthydemus" is about sophistical nonsense along the lines of the "Do you still beat your spouse?" trap. Sometimes it seems as if ALL of the dialogues are on this subject. "Cratylus" might as well be a verbal argument between two deaf people, with one philosopher arguing that words have no intrinsic meaning, and that what I call red might look green to you, even though you call it "red" too, and that it is no more right to call those things at the end of your arms "hands" than "manos", and Socrates contending that it is stupid to call a horse a man. The truly delicious part of "Cratylus" is that those words that Socrates refers to in proving that everything has a 'correct' name are printed in Greek, so that if you don't know Greek, you have no idea what Socrates is saying--he's using the wrong name!
The most worthwhile dialogues in this set are the "Meno" and "Protagoras", on the question of whether virtue can be taught; the "Phaedo", in which Socrates discourses on death right after drinking the hemlock; and, of course, the "Apology", Socrates's speech to the Athenians as he is being tried for his life. I reread the "Apology" about once a decade, and it always seems to say something new depending on my frame of mind. Sometimes I'm shocked at the very idea of putting a man to death for what he thinks; other times I don't blame Athens in the slightest for wanting the old windbag to just shut up already with his philosophical equivalent of "I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves...", or any of several points of view in between. Definitely needs to be read at least once.
Let Me Hear Your Body Talk: Let's Get Physical, by Aristotle
In general, the view that there is an infinite body is plainly incompatible with the doctrine that there is necessarily a proper place for each kind of body, if every sensible body has either weight or lightness, and if a body has a natural locomotion towards the center if it is heavy, and upwards if it is light. This would need to be true of the infinite also. But neither character can belong to it: it cannot be either as a whole, nor can it be half the one and half the other. For how should you divide it? Or how can the infinite have the one part up and the other down, or an extremity and a centre?
It is plain from these arguments that there is no body which is actually infinite.
Considering that Aristotle has an entirely different tract devoted to Metaphysics, his tract on Physics is surprisingly short on actual science and heavy on the kind of navel gazing I normally associate with Metaphysics. Here, and not in the Metaphysics, is the attempt to prove the existence of God as an "unmoved mover"; the four causes of change; and a whole lot of discussions about infinity, whether change is possible, whether there is such a thing as time or place, and what movement is. Things that haven't been at the forefront of my concerns since that time I ate the funny mushrooms.
After a couple of chapters, I mostly skimmed the rest, and after saying a mouthful about Plato, I have almost nothing to say about Aristotle’s Physics. You have to be an academic or really into this kind of philosophy to like it. It's as dense as Aristotle gets, and unlike the Ethics or Organon, it's hard to see how it has anything useful to teach any more, even to a student of philosophy.
It’s All Greek To Me: The Life of Greece, by Will Durant
As Giotto rough-hewed the early path of Italian painting, and Raphael subdued the art with a quiet spirit into technical perfection, and Michelangelo completed the development in works of tortured genius; as Bach with incredible energy forced open a broad road to modern music, and Mozart perfected its form in melodious simplicity, and Beethoven completed the development in works of unbalanced grandeur; so Aeschylus cleared the way and set the forms for Greek drama with his harsh verse and stern philosophy, Sophocles fashioned the art with measured music and placid wisdom, and Euripides completed the development in works of passionate feeling and turbulent doubt. Aeschylus was a preacher of almost Hebraic intensity; Sophocles was a "classic" artist clinging to a broken faith; Euripides was a romantic poet who could never write a perfect play because he was distracted by philosophy. They were the Isaiah, Job and Ecclesiastes of Greece.
The Durants’ eleven volume survey history of Western civilization has too broad a scope to treat three millennia of human achievements in great detail, but it makes up for lack of depth inwidth, in readability, in tying together various aspects of culture so that they seem to follow from one another, and in gentle wit during the frequent passages when the author inserts his own commentary. I pretty much got my introduction to world history from this set, and would love to see it made into the standard high school European History text (which is unfortunately impossible in the American format where European History tends to be taught as one year a four-year all-encompassing “Social Studies” program. You’d have to read more than one thick book per month, and even then you’d only get as far as Waterloo What I mean is, these texts would be ideal for students in a format where history included a year of Greece and Rome, a year of Medieval through Renaissance, etc.).
This is actually the second volume in the set (the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, is a jumble that includes both the ancient Near/Middle East through Alexander and Asia through the early 1930s, and I’m sort of skipping around in that one) bringing Greece not only from the Homeric times through the war with Sparta, not only through Alexander, but all the way to Greece’s absorption by Rome, including the Ptolemies, the Seleucid empire, and about 150 years of events I’d mostly forgotten.
Where most standard history texts focus on rulers, wars and important individuals, Durant carefully includes all of the aspects of civilization—economics, science, philosophy, music, art, morals and manners, books written and the lives and lifestyles of the ordinary populace. Hence The Life of Greece devotes as much space to the Greek sculptors, philosophers, tragedians, mathematicians, slaves and citizens as it does to Themistocles, Pericles and Alexander. Highly recommended as a foundation for understanding the past, and as a refresher for the eras you may not have thought about lately.
The Only True Religion: The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton
I don't know how anybody who pretends to know anything about history can be so naive as to suppose that after all these centuries of corrupt and imperfect social systems, there is eventually to evolve something perfect and pure out of them--the good out of the evil, the unchanging and stable and eternal out of the variable and mutable, the just out of the unjust. But perhaps revolution is a contradiction of evolution, and therefore means the replacement of the unjust by the just, of the evil by the good. And yet it is still just as naive to suppose that members of the same human species, without having changed anything but their minds, should suddenly turn around and produce a perfect society, when they have never been able, in the past, to produce anything but imperfection and, at best, the barest shadow of justice.
However, as I say, perhaps the hopefulness that suddenly began to swell in my breast as I stood on the deck of this ten-day liner going to New York via Halifax, was largely subjective and imaginary. The chance association, in my mind, with fresh air and the sea and a healthy feeling and a lot of good resolutions, coinciding with a few superficial notions of Marxism, had made me--like so many others--a Communist in my own fancy, and I would become one of the hundreds of thousands of people in America who are willing to buy an occasional Communist pamphlet and listen without rancor to a Communist orator, and to express open dislike of those who attack Communism, just because they are aware that there is a lot of injustice and suffering in the world, and somewhere got the idea that the Communists were the ones who were most sincerely trying to do something about it.
I was disappointed. I was also a little bit stupid. I didn’t know what a Trappist monk was. From the picture of Merton, with his head shaved and the robes pictured in black and white, I had hoped it was related to buddhism and the kind of monasteries associated with Shangri-La. No such luck. The full name of the Trappists is “The Cistercians of the Strict Order”, and they are the most rigid kind of Catholics, given to vows of silence and mortification of the flesh. Still, I had been told that Merton’s spiritual odyssey was a great and affecting story, something that could help me understand the appeal of this whole Christianity thing, as it had done for thousands of Americans before me.
It didn’t work. Chesterton and CS Lewis remain the only theological writers who have made me feel some love for that kind of God.
Merton is preachy, convinced that his is the only way to practice spirituality, and that all others are not only wrong but in danger of eternal Hell. His autobiography, through the moment when he suddenly becomes a believer, is a fairly ordinary life, not particularly wild, for which he feels an inordinate amount of guilt later on. His most compelling descriptions of “the contemplative life” amount to the kind of thing I do from time to time when I go out into the forest, by the river, and practice self-renewal via nature. I see more of God in a sunset or a shaft of light among the moss than I have ever seen from reading scripture. And I find that, like too much of any good thing, excess of contemplation can be counterproductive, and lead to pointless navel-gazing. And when you start trying to righteously insist that your path is right for everyone else, the salt tends to lose its savour, as it were. Merton is evidence on that point, it seems to me.
But maybe he’s just right for you. If St. Augustine and the like impresses you, check Merton out for yourself, by all means.
CalvinMining: Pigeon Post, by Arthur Ransome
Titty, Dorothea, and Roger went back to the camp together, where Homer, alone in the big cage, was waiting his turn to fly. Titty caught him and held him gently while Roger slipped the message under the rubber ring on his leg. They put him in one of the small travelling baskets and carried him out on the Topps so that he should get a clear start. Roger took him in both hands.
“It’s the best news you’ve ever carried,” said Dorothea.
“Now then,” said Titty, and Roger flung him up into the air.
The pigeon flew far across the Topps before beginning to rise. Then, making a wide circle in the air, he came back high over their heads, higher, higher.
“Hullo,” said Roger, “there’s another pigeon...higher still.”
“Rogie,” cried Titty, “It’s a hawk!”
Back to the next in Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons stories, which I enjoy because they remind me of my childhood by the lake. This time, however, the adventures of the Walker, Blackett and Campbell kids take them far from the lake during a summer of drought, to the mountain nearby, with three homing pigeons and a clue to the location of a possible gold mine.
As usual, the story is marked with wholesome innocence, explicit descriptions of outdoor skills that kids can actually practice, and adventures more true to life than fantastic. Also as usual, the thing that makes it delightful rather than just good is the boundless energy and enthusiasm of the protagonists, who approach the caves and mines as though they are grizzled prospectors, alert for claim jumpers around every corner. Swallows and Amazons Forever!
Glass Churches: Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey
Elizabeth would never know why she did what she did. It was excitement. It was getting ready for Easter in such warm sunshine. It was wishing Miss Ahearn, the Sunday School teacher, to know that Elizabeth knew all about Palm Sunday.
When the cart drew away she picked up a palm leaf and waved it. She was not boisterous, rather tentative in fact. She waved reverently, as if she were in Jerusalem on that day.
There was a man--she could see him, would always see him--with a broad black beard and small jug ears, riding a little fat-bellied horse down Church Street.
All she meant to do was lay the palm beneath the horse's feet.
"Hosanna," she cried--afterwards her voice would sound shrill and silly in her memory--"Hosanna in the highest."
All her life she saw what happened: the horse rearing, the man's mouth open, the dreadful trajectory. The noise his head made was as definite as a walnut cracking.
According to the blurb on the back, Peter Carey is supposed to be comparable to Borges and Pynchon, surreal writers who leave me scratching my head and wondering what just happened more often than not. I disagree. The events in Oscar and Lucinda are fantastic but all too clear. The writers it reminded me of are Vonnegut, for the sudden jarring ways in which light whimsical events transition directly into earth-shaking tragedy (see the quote above; this book is packed with moments like that), and Thomas Hardy for the air of inevitable doom that hangs brooding over the main characters like a cruel god.
There are comic moments, mostly stemming from the eccentricities of the major and minor characters, who are portrayed with an emphasis on quirks, but those moments serve to make the tragedy more horrifying, like if most of Napoleon Dynamite consisted of watching the protagonists get beaten to a pulp by Idaho football players, expelled from school for “fighting”, and then shot by rednecks on their way to low-paying jobs at the sheep insemination plant. Oscar Hopkins is a scrawny nerd, and Lucinda Lepastrier is an intelligent woman, in a Victorian England and Australia that actively despises and punishes scrawny nerds and intelligent women. Their chances at happiness, together and apart, are kicked away, partly by themselves out of the sense of duty and self-loathing, and partly because of their immersion in churches and church towns full of gossipy, puritan busybodies who love nothing so much as to perform evil with the sanctimonious smirk of self-righteousness. Rarely have I seen such a glaring example of lives utterly ruined from within and without due to the poison of religion.
And yes, the book is perversely life-affirming by negative example. The lives of Oscar and Lucinda are precious, precious things, heart-rending in their destruction. I’m not sure why I was told this book was light reading. It is heavy, heavy stuff, and highly recommended because it does what it does very well—but you must be in the right mood, or it will flatten you.
Smash the Frickin’ Faeries: Summer Knight, by Jim Butcher
Mab was on the level about her offer. I could feel that, sense it in a way so primal, so visceral, that there was no room left for doubt. She would cut me loose if I agreed to her bargain. Of course, her price might be too high. She hadn’t gotten to that yet. And the fae have a way of making sure that further bargains only get you in deeper, instead of into the clear. Just like credit card companies, or those student loan people. Now there’s evil for you.
I could feel Mab watching me, Sylvester to my Tweetie Bird. That thought kind of cheered me up. Generally speaking, Tweetie kicks Sylvester’s ass in the end.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m listening.”
The Dresden files resemble a White Wolf campaign more and more with every book. We've had central plots involving mages, werewolves and vampires, with a wraith or two along the way, and in Summer Knight, Harry ends up among the changelings and the seelie and unseelie faerie courts (called "Summer" and "Winter" here). I half expected October Daye to show up and snarl at him.
A crime has been committed, a macguffin stolen, and the suspects are the most powerful fae of both courts, including Mab and Titania, who are about to declare Faepocolypse over it. Winter court hires/compels Dresden to prove it wasn't one of theirs. Summer court hires an ironic someone from Dresden's past to prove it wasn't one of theirs. Will they be able to work together, or be forced to fight one another?
Dresden still has the diplomatic skills of a bull in a china shop, and continues to make bad situations more dangerous by refusing help from anyone, but in fairness, these are faeries and you want to be reeeelly careful about getting in their debt. Also, for now at least, Dresden seems to have learned to stop withholding information from his friends who need it, to later wring his hands when they get killed. And the arc is getting better. We learn more about Dresden's past, why the White Council hates him, and a good bit about the White Council in general. I'm still intrigued.
Around The Bend: The Beast Must Die, by Nicholas Blake
Martin was my son. One evening, six months ago, he was crossing the road outside our house. He had gone into the village to buy some sweets. For him it could only have been a paralysing blaze of headlights round the corner, a moment's nightmare, and then the impact turning everything to darkness for ever. His body was hurled into the ditch. He was dead at once, minutes before I got to him. The bag of sweets was sprinkled over the road. I remember I began to pick them up--there didn't seem to be anything else to do--till I found his blood on one of them. After that, I was ill for quite a time: brain fever, nervous breakdown or something, they called it. The fact is, of course, that I didn't want to live. Martie was all I had--Tessa died giving birth to him.
The motorist who killed Martie did not stop. The police have failed to trace him. They say he must have been going fifty round that blind corner, for the body to have been thrown and injured like it was. He is the man I have got to find and kill.
The biggest problem with this otherwise excellent mystery is the blurb describing it as one of the greatest detective stories ever written. That right away puts one on a certain level of alertness.
There’s a reason we had a Golden Age of detective writing that began with Holmes, Poirot and Wimsey, and came to a screeching halt around WWII. By that time, the amazing, shocking situations in which the killer turned out to be the butler, the victim, the detective, the narrator, the comic sidekick, the constable, all the suspects together, or whatever improbable unlikely suspects you can imagine, had all been done once and would never be original again.
This Great Whodunnit from the Golden Age, that I had luckily never heard of until now, begins with the first person account of a grieving father whose son has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. The father resolves to track down the driver and say to him, “My name is Felix Lane. You killed my son. Prepare to die.” Or words to that effect. Immediately, I started trying to anticipate whatever stunning plot twist there would be. Would Felix find his quarry and be killed by him instead of killing? Would he kill him and find out later that someone else had actually been the hit-and-run driver? Would he think he had killed him, maybe be convicted of murder, even, and it would turn out that someone else had really killed him?
It fooled me.
It really is one of the greatest detective stories possible. Very highest recommendations.