Book Review - Bereft by Chris Womersley

Every novel, if it’s a novel at all, has its “inciting incident,” a phrase I think was coined by screenwriting guru Syd Field. The inciting incident of Bereft, the luminous new novel from Australian writer, Chris Womersley, takes place in 1909 on a stormy day near the former gold rush town of Flint in New South Wales. That’s the day the book’s protagonist, then sixteen-year-old Quinn Walker, was found by his father and his uncle standing over the body of his twelve-year-old sister, Sarah, a bloody knife clutched in his hand. Quinn does what many sixteen-year-olds would do in that situation – he runs. He’s not heard from again until his mother receives a telegram informing her that Quinn is missing and is presumed dead in the trenches France, one of the multitude of victims of the Great War.

One would think that Quinn, now twenty-six in 1919 when the main action of the book takes place, and still alive, would make it a point to stay as far away from Flint as humanly possible, but this isn’t the case. Spurred on by a mysterious note given to him during a séance in Marylebone in London, Quinn returns to Flint, a town that’s lost its reason to live, determined to avenge the murdered Sarah. He’s not the same Quinn who left ten years previously, however. Part of his face has been mangled by shrapnel. His hearing has been dulled by repeated shell blasts. A gas attack left his throat “a violin with a frayed string that fluttered useless and annoying, tangling in those strings still tuned tight and in working order.” And Quinn, of course, has been affected emotionally as well as physically. He’s shell shocked and haunted by ghastly memories and hallucinations: the crack of gassed birds underfoot; stricken men calling for their comrades; the sight of a soldier sodomizing a corpse; and the “claustrophobic” presence of the dead, “as if their silence were an impossible demand.”

Though he’s far from France, the horrors awaiting Quinn in Flint are, in some respects, much like the horrors of war. It’s 1919 and the Spanish flu pandemic is in full force. The dead and the dying are everywhere, some of them beckoning to Quinn like the ghostly apparitions that haunt his sleep. One of the dying is Quinn’s own mother. She lies in bed, feverish and alone, awaiting the end. It’s Quinn’s mother who explains the meaning of the book’s title:

Widows, widower. Orphan – and you know I was already one of those. Do you know, Quinn, there isn’t even a word for a parent who has lost a child? Strange, isn’t it? You would think, after all these centuries of war and disease and trouble, but no, there is a hole in the English language. It is unspeakable. Bereft.

And Quinn tells her that there is no word for a brother who’s lost his sister, either, for he, too, has been left bereft.

Even with the alterations in his physical appearance, Quinn doesn’t dare to stay in Flint. Instead, he hides in the hills above town, and it’s in those hills that he meets Sadie Fox, a twelve-year-old orphan whose parents fell victim to the Spanish flu. Despite Quinn’s murderous reputation, Sadie seems unafraid of him and befriends him as she awaits her own brother’s return from war. Pursuing her is Quinn’s uncle, Robert Dalton, the sheriff of Flint, a man Sadie swears is himself a murderer several times over, and, along with Quinn’s father, the man who vowed to hang Quinn for Sarah’s murder.

From their very first meeting, it’s clear that Sadie is the savvier of the two, the one more attuned to living in the wild, and it’s also clear that she knows far more about Quinn and Sarah than any twelve-year-old should, including the details of Sarah’s murder and even the name of her murderer.

It’s not a spoiler to let you know that Quinn didn’t murder his sister. Womersley makes that clear very early in the book. Suspense will flow, not from wondering whether Quinn did or did not kill Sarah, but from wondering if he’ll be able to hold himself together long enough to avenge her death and prove his innocence, and whether he has the physical and emotional strength to prevail against those who have dark secrets to keep, those whose lives are now fated to collide with his.

Though initially cautious of each other, Quinn and Sadie form an unshakable bond. A strange combination of ageless spirit and childish sprite, it’s Sadie who protects Quinn from danger and even brings him the oranges he’s craved for years. It’s Sadie who pushes him to fulfill his vow of avenging his sister’s death. This seems natural. Quinn is, after all, the big brother who lost his little sister, the big brother who returned from war; Sadie’s the little sister still waiting on her big brother to return.

I spent a good deal of time while reading this book wondering if Sadie was real or a figment of Quinn’s broken mental state. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you whether she was or was not real. That would be too much of a spoiler, but I will say that there’s much about this novel, which is written in the gothic tradition, that borrows from magical realism as well. It’s filled with signs, portents, and superstition, and though young Sadie feels she must hide from Sheriff Dalton, she can, at times, simply dissolve into her surroundings “like smoke or water.”

This is a book filled to overflowing with remembrances of a better past, a desire for what’s been lost, for what’s been ripped away. In Bereft, the past, or what the past had been, be that good or bad, is always threatening to overwhelm the present. Even the town of Flint is but a shadow of what it once was. It has been left bereft:

Fifty years earlier these hills were full of gold and the town of Flint had swarmed with hungry men . . . but the boom was fleeting and had left in its wake a landscape riven and tortured, littered with the ruins of rock stampers and wooden scaffolds that had been erected over shafts.

The characters, especially the pivotal characters of Quinn and Sadie, are extremely well drawn and believable. Even Sadie’s magical like attributes were believable to me. I felt what these characters felt, at least as far as it was possible for me to do so, and I sympathized with both of them. I wanted them to have what they needed and wanted. Where Bereft really shines, however, is in the high quality of its writing and its evocation of place. The beauty and the harshness of the Australian landscape add so much to this book and the telling of this story that I can’t imagine it taking place anywhere else. The very first sentence sets the novel’s tone:

“On the day twelve-year-old Sarah Walker was murdered in 1909, a storm bullied its way across the western plains of New South Wales.” This left the landscape of Flint “riven and tortured,” and the town, which had not seen such drama for years felt “a guilty air of ill-gotten excitement.” The images are lush; the writing is spare, but poetic, and Womersley always chooses just the right word. When a writer describes men in the trenches of France as “so muddied and grey about the gills they might have been fashioned from the earth itself,” I get excited about that author’s work, and Womersley did not let me down.

And the book isn’t overwritten. Quite the contrary; it’s filled with graceful restraint. Despite its poetic qualities, the prose in Bereft is spare and almost formal, something I found very fitting as it reflects the formality of the time period. Even if you’ve not yet experienced the all-consuming loss described by the word, “bereft,” you’ll understand what others who have experienced it are feeling. Womersley brings that much depth and nuance to his writing.

Like the great Toni Morrison, Womersley leaves many holes and spaces in his narrative for the reader to fill in. He trusts his readers to “get it.” His details are often scant, as when he describes the town of Flint. I liked this sketchiness, though. For me, it only added to the ghostliness of the story.

The details may, at times, be scant, but the images this book paints are beautiful, horrifying, and terrible, but always vivid. I remember in particular the images evoked when Quinn and Sadie take refuge in the “Cave of Hands,” a cave that seems to have been conjured by magic and one that plunges the book’s protagonists into “a galaxy of painted hands.”

Some readers I know found Bereft too unremittingly bleak for their taste, but I liked the darkness of the book. And, have no doubt, Bereft does take the reader into some very dark, and very uncomfortable, places. Murder, post traumatic stress, guilt, these are all difficult to read about when they’re presented as authentically as Womersley presents them. For me, however, the book was authentic enough to warrant spending time in the dark.

If I have any complaint at all, it would have to do with the book’s ending. I like ambiguous endings as opposed to endings in which everything is wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow, but I don’t like to have to guess too much. After investing so much of myself with the characters, I want to be able to make sense out of what I read, and I’m not sure I can. At least not completely. Perhaps the fault is mine and not the book’s. And I did say I liked the fact that Womersley left all those holes and spaces for the reader to fill in. So, who am I to complain? At any rate, I thought this book was so superior I couldn’t even deduct one-half star for an ending I felt could have been a little stronger.

Some readers have compared this book to the work of Cormac McCarthy. I’m not one of those readers. Though I do like the early novels of McCarthy, e.g., Child of God, The Orchard Keeper, and Suttree, I found this book, on the whole, to be very different. There is a bloody and spine chilling climax here that is reminiscent of McCarthy, but overall, I’m reminded more of Sonya Hartnett than of Cormac McCarthy.

This extraordinary novel works on so many levels. It’s a story of revenge. It’s a story of redemption. It’s a story of devastation. It’s a story of the trauma experienced by the returning soldier. It’s the story of a man who is broken in both body and spirit, yet who remains determined to make sense out of one of life’s most tragic acts. Bereft is a beautiful and a powerful book and one no reader will soon forget. Read it.

5/5

Recommended: The book is bleak, but it is so beautifully written and contains so much depth that the bleakness becomes almost beautiful. This is one of the best books I’ve read in the last decade. I look forward to more from Chris Womersley, and I look forward to more books like Bereft.

Book Review - Mysteries - Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George

Believing the Lie is Elizabeth George’s seventeenth “Inspector Lynley” novel, and in this book, Tommy Lynley is back to form and back on the job fulltime.

When Ian Cresswell, nephew of the very wealthy industrialist, Bernard Fairclough dies in Cumbria’s Lake Windermere, the victim of an apparent accidental drowning, Fairclough takes advantage of his friendship with New Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier in order to have the death looked into unofficially. Fairclough wants to make sure no one in his family had anything to do with Ian’s demise and that there’s nothing more sinister than a boating accident is going on.

Hillier, of course, can think of no better detective to send to the Lake District than Tommy Lynley. And, since Lynley feels he’ll need a little help in dealing with Fairclough’s considerable family, forensic expert, Simon St. James and his photographer wife, Deborah, both depressed over Deborah’s inability to carry a child to term and at odds over adoption, go along for the ride. Along with Lynley, Simon and Deborah will help the Scotland Yard DCI determine if anyone in the Fairclough family had the motive, means, and opportunity to murder Ian Cresswell, for if it was murder, it had to be someone in the family who committed it.

And what a family Bernard Fairclough has. His wife of forty-three years, Valerie, seems “normal” enough, though Lynley will learn that like her husband, Valerie has her own unique foibles. Of their three children, son, Nicholas, and twin daughters, Mignon and Manette, only Manette seems fairly well adjusted. Nicholas, who seems fine at present, is a reformed drug addict and “wild child,” now happily married to Alatea, a gorgeous Argentine woman who has plenty of secrets of her own. And Mignon, well, maybe the less said about Mignon, the better.

The deceased, Ian Cresswell, left behind a very bitter ex-wife, Niamh, who is doing her best to rid herself of Ian’s two children, the very troubled Tim and the very scared Gracie, even though these are her own children as well, and really, quite lovable. And lest I forget, there’s Kaveh Mehran, the handsome, young, Iranian man who persuaded Ian to leave his family and introduce Kaveh to them as his lover on Tim’s fourteenth birthday. All of these people profited, or could profit, from Ian Cresswell’s death, but did any of them actually murder him?

Meanwhile, both Lynley’s boss, Isabelle Ardery, with whom he’s carrying on a grief-inspired torrid affair (begun in the previous book This Body of Death), and Lynley’s former partner, DS Barbara Havers are busy back in London. Isabelle’s upset because she can’t get Lynley to tell her where he is or what he’s doing, and Barbara is deeply involved with her neighbor, Taymullah Azhar, his lady love, Angelina Upman, and their daughter, Hadiyyah. But why, for goodness sake, will Azhar never allow his older children to meet the intelligent and adorable Hadiyyah? I think we’re going to learn more about Azhar and family in future books, and I hope we do. At any rate, eventually even Barbara is pressed into service by Lynley.

Complicating matters is tabloid reporter, Zed Benjamin. He’s sniffing around the Fairclough clan as a “last resort.” He either brings his boss a big story or he loses his job. Meanwhile, Zed’s mother, who is really more caricature than character, is trying to marry her son off to a “nice Jewish girl” named Yaffa Shaw, but Yaffa insists she’s engaged to Micah, a long suffering medical student in Tel Aviv.

Believing the Lie is one of Elizabeth George’s longest books (my hardcover copy is 608 pages), and it’s also one of the most intricate and complex. There are multiple plot strands that radiate from a central occurrence, in this case, the drowning of Ian Cresswell, before all converging near the book’s end. The characters are, for the most part, well developed. And, like most of George’s books, the problems involved revolve around relevant social issues. Personally, I loved the book’s complexity and it’s length. I love finding a big, hefty book that’s going to allow me to bury myself in the story for days to come, which I did. While there were two storylines I didn’t particularly like – the one involving Zed Benjamin, and to a lesser extent, the one involving Tim Cresswell, I have to say that there’s no “fat” in this book, nothing truly extraneous. (Okay, the one involving Tim could have been cut, but it was nicely woven in, and I really liked Tim.) I’ve never been terribly interested in “relevant social issues,” but a person has to take some interest in order to get along in the world and pay his dues. This book seems to revolve around the broad theme of parents and children and the relationship of one to the other, and I don’t think anyone can deny that that’s an important subject.

Bernard Fairclough is interested in getting along with his grown son, Nicholas, and his twin daughters – also grown – play important roles in the novel. There’s the relationship Ian Cresswell had with his aunt and uncle, and the relationship he had with his own young children, Tim and Gracie. There’s Kaveh Mehran’s relationship with Ian’s children, which is far better than their mother Niamh’s relationship with them. And two couples, Alatea and Nicholas Fairclough and Deborah and Simon St. James, are despondent over not being pregnant and are considering surrogacy. Down in London, Barbara Havers is concerned with the only child in her life – Azhar’s daughter, Haddiyah, while Isabelle Ardery receives a surprise visit from her two sons.

I’d never been a fan of Deborah St. James until this book, when I really began to like her and warm toward her. That was odd, I thought, because Deborah wasn’t at her best or nicest in this book. Maybe that’s what drew me to her. Maybe I saw her more as a “real” human being with her vulnerabilities and flaws exposed. She was, however, at her most introspective and that almost always endears me to a character. Still grieving over the loss of Helen, Lynley, too, is vulnerable and flawed in this book, though he remains very good at doing the job he does. Both characters, at least, understand their weakness, making them more attractive to readers than if they did not.

Lynley and Company expose a wealth of Fairclough family secrets and lies, including one really big twist near the book’s end, and the twists and turns in this book can rival those on an Alpine road, you can be sure of that. Some readers didn’t like the fact that this book seems to be short on actual crime and long on melodrama. That didn’t bother me. Lynley, Havers, and the St. Jameses were front and center in this book, and I really loved that. I applaud George for trying something a little different once in a while. There’s not a thing wrong with this book. Unlike the foolish Fairclough clan, this book makes no missteps.

George is particularly skillful at integrating setting into her story, and this book is no exception. In Believing the Lie, George takes us to Cumbria’s beautiful Lake District. By the time I finished the book, I was ready to pack my bags. I felt the same way after reading the “Inspector Lynley” books set in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Scotland, Cornwall, the New Forest, etc.

I loved reading this book. I found it extremely well written and complex. And, it’s not quite as dark as some of the previous “Inspector Lynley” books. Personally, I love the darkness in George’s books, but things can’t be all dark all the time.

There’s a lot of story here. I don’t doubt that it’s going to be “too much” story for a lot of readers. In my opinion, though, it’s quite worthy. Although some of Elizabeth George’s fans say the books are “suffering” lately, they still climb to the top of the bestseller list, and I expect all future books to do so as well. Even those readers who were dismayed at Helen’s death, who dislike Tommy’s affair, who want to see more (or less) of Simon and Deborah, etc. will pre-order the books, as I do, and read them the day they are published. Such is George’s hold on her readers. I hope it never changes, and I hope the “Inspector Lynley” series goes on for at least twenty more years.

5/5

Recommended: Elizabeth George fans won’t want to miss this one even though some of them will say it’s not her best. For those who are new to the “Inspector Lynley” series, I recommend starting at the beginning and working your way through to this book. Hopefully, by the time you do, a new “Inspector Lynley” book will have been published.

Note: Elizabeth George did not kill Lady Helen because of pressure from her publishers or because she wanted to introduce new characters. She planned on it for quite some time, for reasons I’m not quite sure of. George said she knew for a long time before Helen was killed that she was going to die. She simply had to find the proper time and place and means for it to happen. I liked Lady Helen, though I think I prefer Tommy Lynley unmarried, and I applaud George for having the courage to shake up the status quo of her books with a decision that wasn’t too popular with many of her readers.

From first to most current, the “Inspector Lynley” books are:

A Great Deliverance
Payment In Blood
Well-Schooled In Murder
A Suitable Vengeance
For the Sake of Elena
Missing Joseph
Playing for the Ashes
In the Presence of the Enemy
Deception on His Mind (Lynley on honeymoon)
In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner
A Traitor to Memory
A Place of Hiding
With No One As Witness
What Came Before He Shot Her
Careless In Red
This Body of Death
Believing the Lie

Book Review - Booker Nominees - On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

I know a lot of people who weren’t familiar with Sebastian Barry’s work until the publication of the Booker shortlisted The Secret Scripture. Barry, however, has been around for quite some time. He’s written five novels now, a host of plays, and three poetry collections, and he’s collected several awards for his writing including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Independent Bookseller’s Prize, and the Irish Book Awards Prize for “Best Novel.” Those of us who’re familiar with his work know that Barry writes primarily about two families – the McNultys and the Dunnes. The Secret Scripture, the book that immediately preceded this one, revolved around Roseanne McNulty Clear as she neared her one hundredth birthday. On Canaan’s Side, however, which was longlisted for the Booker, revolves around a member of the Dunne family. The Dunnes, first heard from in what is probably Barry’s most loved play and the cornerstone of his work, “The Steward of Christendom” are a family of Irish loyalists whose only sin is being on the losing side of the Troubles of 1916-22. “The Steward of Christendom” explores the life of Thomas Dunne, a “Castle Catholic,” and the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police under the British. A widower, Thomas raised one son, Willie, whose story is told in Barry’s first Booker shortlisted novel, A Long, Long Way, and three daughters, Annie, Maud, and Lilly. Annie’s story is told in the beautiful Annie Dunne, and it’s Lilly whose story is told in On Canaan’s Side.

As the book opens, eighty-nine-year-old Lilly Dunne Bere is mourning the suicide of her grandson, Bill, who she raised from the age of two, and, as she now finds herself unable to face life without him, she’s writing her memoirs in preparation for her own suicide. She lets us know immediately that she’s come undone with grief:

Grief: The feeling of it is like a landscape engulfed in floodwater in the pitch darkness, and everything, hearth and byre, animal and human, terrified and threatened. It is as if someone, some great agency, some CIA of the heavens, knew well the little mechanism that I am, and how it is wrapped and fixed, and has the booklet or manual to undo me, and cog by cog and wire by wire is doing so, with no intention ever to put me back together again....

On Canaan’s Side is going to be compared with Barry’s previous book, The Secret Scripture simply because both books feature an elderly protagonist who’s intent on setting down the story of her life. In actuality, other than the above, I didn’t find the books at all alike. Reading On Canaan’s Side was a very different experience for me than reading The Secret Scripture, though I loved both books. And Roseanne McNulty Clear, the protagonist of The Secret Scripture is a very different woman than Lilly Dunne Bere. I’m not usually a fan of the memoirist who’s setting everything down for posterity, but Sebastian Barry is one of the few authors writing today – or any time, really – who can make anything work, and make it work beautifully.

The structure of the book is a simple one. It’s divided into seventeen chapters, each chapter narrated by Lilly in more or less linear fashion, and each one marking one more day since Lilly buried her grandson, Bill. The chapters are simply titled – “First Day Without Bill,’ “Second Day Without Bill,” etc., until we reach “Seventeenth Day Without Bill.”

Like Roseanne in The Secret Scripture, Lilly is an intelligent, articulate, sensitive, and poetic narrator, who has a fascinating story to tell, though she seems a bit more emotional than Roseanne Clear. A woman who came of age in Wicklow, Ireland during the Troubles that began with the Easter Rising in 1916, Lilly’s fiancé was Tadg Bere, a man who’d known Willie Dunne in Belgium, and who served in the “Black and Tans” after his return home. When Lilly’s father learns there’s a price on Tadg’s head – and by extension, Lilly’s – he arranges for the pair to flee Ireland forever and hopefully, make a new life in the relative safety of the United States, on Canaan’s side.

Although Tadg and Lilly have plans in the US, life, as most of us know, rarely conforms to the decisions we’ve made for it. As Lilly and her story move from Chicago to Cleveland to Long Island, Barry makes it clear that Lilly – that none of us, really – can flee from the consequences and repercussions of our history, or from our memories.

Although Lilly comes from a background steeped in Irish history, it’s American history (both World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the civil rights movement, the political assassinations of the 60s) that forms the backdrop of this book, though the book, itself, is intimate and personal and Barry’s touch is light when writing about politics.

Having lost almost every man she ever cared about to war, Lilly becomes a symbol of the devastating effects of war on those who are left behind. To Barry’s credit, his strong anti-war message doesn’t feel like a message at all. There’s nothing didactic about this book. Barry is far too empathetic for that. So skillful is Barry in the creation of his characters, and so honest and heartfelt is Lilly’s raw grief that the reader is immediately pulled into her story. And Lilly grieves not only for those she’s lost, but for all those who have been lost, and all those who have suffered losses:

Greece, America, Arabia, Ireland. Home places. Nowhere on earth is not a home place. The calf returns to where it got the milk. Nowhere is a foreign place. It is home for someone, and therefore us all.

Sebastian Barry, of course, began his career as a poet, and part of this wondrous book’s power lies in the power of Barry’s language. His lyrical prose is filled with hypnotic rhythms, perfect details, and vivid images. He knows exactly what to write to evoke the emotional reaction in the reader he wants:

But there was something tugging, tugging at me now, Lilly says at one point, some intimation, like a drop of lemon in a jug of milk, to sour it for the soda bread.

This concentration on just the right detail ensures that On Canaan’s Side will be an intense and immersive read, and one in which the most brutal events of the book will be diffused somewhat by a dreadful and beautiful strangeness. Barry, himself, has defended his intense poeticism: "If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it."

This is, without a doubt, the most beautifully written novel I’ve ever read, and for all its poetry and lyricism, to its enormous credit, I never found it overwritten. In attempting to convey the depth of her grief at her grandson’s death, Lilly writes:

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound.

Lilly’s voice, in Barry’s sure hand, is a radiant Irish voice. This is Lilly as she begins to describe her small house in Cleveland, Ohio, where she lived in the 1930s:

Our little house had a view of the lake, just. You had to crane your neck, and all you saw were factories and jetties, but it was there, the water. The lake had its own aroma, from a hundred ingredients, mixed by the god of that lake. There was great soothing in that smell.

And, when remembering the heathery white hills of her Irish girlhood, Lilly, herself, becomes caught up in Barry’s intense lyricism, his poetic cadences:

I am writing it, I am writing it, and I spill it all out on my lap like very money, like riches, beyond the dreams of avarice.

At one point, Lilly says her heart …lifted like a pheasant from scrub…its wings utterly opened in fright and exulting. And, when describing the whole of her life, she writes: My years have no width or length, have no dimension at all, just the downturn of a bird’s wings. So quick.

Lilly’s story is, primarily, a story of exile, suffering, and horror, though it’s shot through with glittering strands of beauty, wonder, and tenderness that tug at the reader’s heart. Sometimes, there are even brief glimmers of happiness. I’m thinking, in particular, of a five-hundred-word sentence that recreates the uphill climb and the downhill rush of a rollercoaster at Luna Park on which Lilly rides with her friend, Cassie Blake and a Cleveland police officer, Joe Kinderman, and also describes how Lilly feels about her friends. I heard Sebastian Barry, himself, read this section, and the power of his words is nothing short of tremendous, making it impossible for any reader with an open heart to come away from this book dry-eyed.

For the most part, I’ve avoided a plot summary. It would only be fair to let Lilly – and Barry – tell you the details of Lilly’s life. On Canaan’s Side is not a comforting read, and it’s not sentimental. In fact, Barry eschews sentimentality. There are, he says, some Irish, and even more Irish Americans, who cherish a sentimental view of Ireland, one that really has little to do with Ireland’s history, especially the bloodshed of the twentieth century.

If you’ve read many reviews of this book, you’ve no doubt read about a plot twist near the book’s end. It’s surprising – not shocking, but surprising – and I think it’s entirely credible. I felt the book was enhanced by its inclusion, and I’m glad Barry decided to make use of it.

Most wrongs are never righted. The so-called “sins of the father” continue to reverberate down the ages and visit tragedies on the sons. Sebastian Barry’s vision, as I’ve interpreted it, is to expose those unrighted wrongs, and with the healing balm of language begin to bring light into the darkness. He searches out memories, memories in which “a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything if you follow the thread long through.” And don’t we all have threads of that sort woven into the fabric of our lives?

I don’t believe anyone who reads this book will soon forget Lilly Dunne Bere or the events that made up her extraordinary life. This book affected me like no other ever has. If you love literature, and if you love what literature can do, you need to read this book.

5/5

Recommended: Without reservation. This is undoubtedly the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. However, lest I’ve dwelt on the book’s language too long, let me assure you that the story of Lilly Dunne Bere is a compelling one. Barry does not, in any of his books, sacrifice story for poetry.

Book Review - Contemporary Classics - A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth’s gigantic (it’s close to 1,500 pages) novel, A Suitable Boy is set in Brahmpur, a fictionalized Northern Indian city on the banks of the Ganges River. The action takes place from about 1950 to 1952, four to five years after India gained independence from Great Britain in 1947. As such, there’s been a lot of political turmoil in India, with Partition, etc., but even though politics plays a big role in the lives of the characters, Seth never lets politics dominate his story. A Suitable Boy is, first and foremost, a book about people.

The book opens with the wedding of Savita Mehra and Pran Kapoor, two people who are entering into an “arranged” marriage and have barely laid eyes on each other prior to their wedding day, something that doesn’t seem to bother either bride or groom. The mother of the bride, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, who might be said to be the character around whom the book revolves, informs her younger daughter, Lata, that she, too, will someday marry “a suitable boy” her mother chooses. Lata, however, has ideas of her own.

The wedding of Savita and Pran, like the wedding of Arun Mehra and Meenakshi Chatterji, which took place prior to the book’s opening, helps in uniting the novel’s four main families: the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, and the Khans. Seth has provided a family tree in the front of the book, but readers soon learn “who belongs to whom” and there’s no confusion when reading the novel. As the reader follows the triumphs and tribulations of the four main families, India during transition impacts their lives, and a richly textured portrait of life among the upper middle classes on the subcontinent emerges.

Although a part of the book, of course, follows Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s quest to find “a suitable boy” for Lata, and Lata’s quest to choose a husband for herself, this story thread is by no means the only one in the novel. Maan Kapoor, the younger brother of Pran, might be said to play as large a role in the novel as do Mrs. Rupa Mehra and Lata. And it’s Maan, primarily, through his friendship with the lawyer Firoz Khan, who unites the Hindus and the Muslims in A Suitable Boy.

Everything these characters do impacts the lives of the other characters. All the lives seem intertwined, and the reader gets to know everyone just about equally. For example, when Pran falls ill, it’s not only the Mehras and the Kapoors who are involved. The Chatterjis have reason to visit the patient as well, and Pran’s physician is none other than Imtiaz Khan, the twin brother of Firoz, Maan Kapoor’s best friend. I loved the way Seth intertwined the lives of his characters. It drew me more fully into the book.

The themes in A Suitable Boy are family themes, of course, but the book also abounds in political themes given the fact that it’s set in India only a few years after independence and partition. I admit to being least interested in the political sections, but still, I did find them somewhat interesting, and there’s no doubt they were well written. We see, though the eyes of the book’s characters, the struggles between Hindus and Muslims, between governmental parties, between the city and the countryside. India is in the process of defining itself, without the British and without the northern states that were partitioned to Pakistan. Most of the time, when reading the political sections of the book, I just wanted to hurry and get back to reading about the characters I’d grown to love, though I didn’t skip any sections, and really never wanted to, long as the book is.

The caste system in India might be confusing to some readers, though Seth doesn’t make it overly so. I knew the upper classes wanted their sons and daughters to marry within the same class, but I didn’t know the difference between brahmins and khatris, for example, and really, I still don’t know completely. I just know they usually don’t intermarry, though one couple in the book, the already mentioned Arun Mehra and Meenakshi Chatterji, are a khatri and a brahmin. I learned that “Mehra” is a khatri name.

While Seth lets us know that “caste matters” in 1950s India, he doesn’t over-burden the Western reader with details. What came as an even bigger surprise to me was that lighter-skinned Indians were very strongly opposed to the darker-skinned Indians, and I was even more shocked when a friend from Sri Lanka assured me this is still true today. I was a little shocked when Mrs. Rupa Mehra told Lata in no uncertain terms, “I will not have a black grandchild.” However Meenakshi Chatterji is described as being quite a bit darker skinned than the Mehras, and Mrs. Rupa Mehra dearly loves Meenakshi’s daughter, Aparna, so I guess complexion wasn’t always a factor in the choice of marriage partner.

Some people have criticized A Suitable Boy as being “too sentimental” and “not gritty enough.” It’s true that Seth only glossed over the gritty underworld and the petty criminal element that form a part of any large city in any country, but I think he can be forgiven for that. This book isn’t meant to be a police procedural or a detective novel. It’s not, for instance, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, which does take a close look at a police detective in modern day Mumbai. And, Seth was writing about the upper middle classes and the upper classes. The characters in this book aren’t the kind of people who are going to become involved with the criminal element. That said, there was some glossing and sugar-coating in this book. The women, for example, were too free to do as they pleased, even the Hindu women. Lata Mehra, for example, an unmarried, nineteen-year-old girl, at one point, accompanies Amit Chatterji to his bedroom in the Chatterji mansion. Granted, it was entirely innocent, and they were only going to look at some of Amit’s books, but really, in 1951 India, I don’t think any nineteen-year-old girls would be accompanying thirty-year-old men to their bedroom for any reason. This didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the book in any way, though.

Seth’s prose is plain and unadorned, and that’s as it should be. In a book this size, anything else would stand out and become difficult. The author even employs a third person, fully omniscient narrator, and it works. Perfectly. I can’t imagine the story being told any other way.

Although this book is one of the longest I’ve ever read, it’s not a difficult read, and the pages fly by. I found myself fully engaged with the characters by the end of page 1, and I hated to put the book aside every night to go to sleep. The book, and the characters, became my constant companion, and I was truly sorry to see the novel end.

A Suitable Boy is a beautiful book. It’s Dickensian in scope, and it will pull you in and keep you there for the duration. It’s become one of my all time favorites. I really can’t praise it highly enough.

5/5

Recommended: Readers who love big, old-fashioned books that really tell a whopping good story will no doubt love this one. Don’t let its length scare you away. The pages fly by, and you'll love spending time with these characters.

Note: Seth is publishing A Suitable Girl in 2013, which will tell the story of eighty-year-old Lata’s search for “a suitable girl” for her grandson. I can’t wait to meet a Lata who will be old enough, in the new book, to me the mother/grandmother of Mrs. Rupa Mehra (Lata’s mother) in A Suitable Boy. It will be interesting to see how Lata has evolved.

Edit: It's been several weeks since I've finished this book, and I really miss both the story and the characters. It's that kind of book.

Book Review - Literary Memoirs - A Haunted Love Story by Mark Spencer

Mark Spencer is well known as the popular Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Monticello in Monticello, Arkansas and as the talented writer of several wonderful, prize-winning books of fiction, both novels and short stories. A Haunted Love Story, however, will introduce readers to a new side of Mr. Spencer, that of writer of creative non-fiction and memoirist.

When Mark Spencer and his wife Rebecca traveled with their three children from Oklahoma to Arkansas they all fell in love with a stately “convoluted, but also elegant” Victorian home located right on the town’s Main Street. Determined to buy it, though it wasn’t even for sale, Mark and Rebecca had no idea – at first – that the home they’d fallen in love with had quite a history. It had been, the Spencer family would soon learn, voted the “most haunted house in America” in an online survey conducted a full three years prior to the writing of Mark’s book.

The first half of A Haunted Love Story details Mark and Rebecca’s attempts to buy the house – known far and wide as the “Allen House” – from its previous owner, an eccentric “Dallas kind of gal” Mark dubbed “Marilyn,” a buxom blonde who could often look twenty-five or thirty years younger than her chronological age, and one who, it would appear, really didn’t want to sell the house at all. How many people wait two years to take possession of a house they love simply because the owner can’t bring herself to let it go? I would bet not many, yet that’s exactly what Mark and Rebecca did, sometimes with comic effect. As for the long wait to make the house their own, Mark and Rebecca must have known then what I came to know several years later – the Allen House needed and wanted them there, and it was determined it would have them. It had a purpose for the Spencers, and part of that purpose has been fulfilled by the writing of this book.

Even though the entire town of Monticello had warned them, Mark and Rebecca really had no idea what they were getting into when they and their children finally moved into the house of their dreams. They thought they were getting a beautiful Victorian mansion to love and to restore and to call their home, and so they were. Not much time passed by, however, until Mark and Rebecca realized they’d gotten so much more. The people who told this unsuspecting couple that the Allen House was haunted weren’t joking or simply repeating town superstitions and fears. The Allen House, the Spencer family came to realize, really was haunted.

In the first part of the book, Mark gives his readers an interesting and intriguing history of the Allen House that encompasses more than one hundred years and will surely fascinate any reader who’s ever wondered about the spirit world, no matter what his or her beliefs. The family even calls in credible paranormal investigators, the “Louisiana Spirits,” to conduct a thorough examination of the house and confirm or deny the presence of the spirits who made themselves known to the Spencers. I, myself, once lived in a house with excessive poltergeist activity, as did my own mother, yet I tended to be a non-believer where the spirit world was concerned. After all, I could only “hear” my poltergeist; I couldn’t see him or her. But even though I’m a non-believer, I was totally engrossed, and sometimes downright scared, by Mark’s detailed descriptions of the spirits he and his family encountered in their home, and I must say, I’m not quite the skeptic I once was. Mark and Rebecca eventually became convinced that no less than six spirits are haunting their beautiful new home, and one of the most active is Ladell Allen Bonner, one of the daughters of the home’s first owner.

As Mark details in the book, the first owner of the Allen House was wealthy businessman, Joe Lee Allen, who had the house built for his beloved wife, Caddye and their three daughters, Lonnie, Ladell, and Lew. The girls grew up in the Allen House, and when Ladell and her husband Boyd divorced, Caddye and Joe’s middle daughter came home to live with her mother.

Ladell was a real “southern belle,” born to wealth and privilege. Everyone in Monticello knew her, and she knew everyone else. The townspeople were curious about Ladell’s life, and when she swallowed mercury cyanide on Christmas 1948, the townspeople were, understandably, curious about that as well. That curiosity persisted for sixty years, until the Spencer family bought the Allen House.

One day, when Mark was alone in his home, he felt an irresistible urge to explore the attic. There, hidden under a loose floorboard, he discovered eighty-one love letters written to Ladell, the bulk of them from a man known as Prentiss Hemingway Savage, that at long last shed some light on the overwhelming sadness in Ladell’s life and pointed to a reason for her suicide.

The second half of this immensely readable book, culled from letters written by Prentiss Savage himself, details the tragic love story of Ladell and Prentiss, a handsome, wealthy, and very married oil executive, originally from Monticello, who had moved “up north,” to Minnesota. Old acquaintances who’d been reunited at a Hot Springs, Arkansas horse race, Prentiss found love with Ladell in mid-life, apparently too late, at least in Prentiss’ estimation, to leave “H.” his wife and make a home and a life with Ladell.

Even if you’re a “doubting Thomas” and don’t really believe in the ghost stories and paranormal activity recounted in the first half of the book, I don’t see how anyone could fail to be deeply touched by Mark’s sensitive and empathetic exploration of Ladell’s doomed love affair with Prentiss.

As I read, Ladell, Prentiss, Caddye, and the others who populate this book really came alive for me. I felt that I was witness to the sad – and not so sad – events that took place in Ladell’s life. I felt at least part of the great heartbreak she must have felt, and the fact that I did is testament to Mark’s perceptive writing. I can see why the spirits of some of the people who’ve lived in the Allen House still feel the need to haunt it and why they can’t let go of the life they lived on this earth and move on.

I loved the fact that Mark included excerpts from the letters. It was astonishing and riveting to hear part of this story told in the words of one who lived it. I couldn’t put the book down even though I was tired and needed to go to sleep. My need to know how things developed between Ladell and Prentiss was far greater. Ladell – a middle-aged Southern divorcee – was far from the “typical” romantic heroine, but she was real, a real human being connected to another real human being that I know and respect. Her story took on enormous importance for me.

Of course no one, not even Mark, knows all that happened between Ladell and Prentiss. Some of the details – and this book is richly detailed – had to be “filled in” by Mark. Always a sensitive writer possessed of much empathy, I think Mark really shines in this book. It’s never lost on him that he’s writing about real people, people who ate and slept and cried and laughed and just plain lived in the very house in which Mark’s living in now. As I read, I had the overwhelming feeling that if this wasn’t exactly how things played out between Ladell and Prentiss, then the difference was so minuscule as to not even matter.

A Haunted Love Story is far more than a ghost story or a story of paranormal activity. It is, in the truest sense, a love story. It details the love Ladell had for Prentiss, the love Caddye had for Ladell, the love Ladell had for her own son, Allen, the love shared among the members of the Spencer family, and the love they feel for their beautiful home. This is Mark’s “thank you” to the history of his home, and his love letter to his own wife for taking this sometimes strange and beautiful journey by his side. More than anything, though, this book was confirmation to me that love is, indeed, eternal.

I’m not a “crier.” Books and movies don’t make me shed tears. At least not generally. This one did. I can’t stop thinking about Ladell and the overwhelming sadness this lovely human being had to bear. Contrary to what some might expect, Ladell has not moved on. She’s still at the Allen House and still living with Mark and Rebecca and their family. However, with the publication of this beautifully written book, and the details of her sad history finally made known to all, I hope that Ladell Allen Bonner feels at last some measure of peace and tranquility.

5/5

Recommended: Definitely, and not just to those who enjoy books featuring ghosts. This is also a beautiful love story – two beautiful love stories – as well as the memoir of a family who finds a home they didn’t expect. It contains comedy and tragedy, but above all, it is honest, moving, and beautifully and sensitively written. It will enrich the life of all who read it.

Book Review - Mysteries - The Confession by Charles Todd

The Confession is the first of the “Inspector Rutledge” mysteries written by the mother-son team Charles Todd, that I’ve read. I liked the book very much, and I’ll be reading more from this series in the future. The characters were well developed, the mystery was intricate yet believable, and the writing was very good.

Inspector Ian Rutledge, a veteran of the Great War, is Scotland Yard’s premiere inspector. During the course of a routine workday, a man Rutledge has never seen before walks into his office and confesses to the killing of his cousin five years previously. Of course Rutledge presses for details, but the mysterious man, who is dying of abdominal cancer, will only divulge his name and the name of the small village in Essex from which he hails.

Less than two weeks later, the confessed murderer is found floating in the Thames, a murder victim himself. When Rutledge learns the victim isn’t who he claimed to be, it raises a host of questions: What was the man’s real name? Is the man he confessed to murdering even dead? And if so, did the man in the Thames kill him as he said?

A gold locket, inscribed with the letter “E” is Rutledge’s only clue, and it leads the inspector to a small village on the river Hawking, where it seems everyone has something to hide.

I really enjoyed spending time with Inspector Ian Rutledge and putting the puzzle pieces together as he did. I certainly didn’t guess what was going on until near the book’s end, though the culprit was high on my list of suspects. I especially liked the addition of “Hamish,” the Scotsman Rutledge was forced to kill in the war, who now inhabits the inspector’s consciousness almost like a watchful friend. The reverberations of war – its senselessness and its atrocities – are everywhere in this book, and for me, they helped to humanize the characters.

The Todds write excellent prose, and its no-frills transparency is perfect for a convoluted mystery such as this one as it allows the reader to concentrate on character and plot. I did find some errors in printing, however. At least once the river Hawking is called the “Hawkins,” and several times an estate known as “River’s Edge” is called “River’s End.” My only other complaint centers around the number of trips Rutledge made from London to Essex and from Essex to London. At times I felt like I was reliving the horror of reading The Da Vinci Code.

All-in-all, I thought The Confession to be just about everything a good mystery should be. No, it’s not deathless prose or on par with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch, but I don’t think it aspires to be. It is, however, an entertaining way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon.

4/5

Recommended: Yes. I think most mystery lovers will like this book. The mystery was quite well developed and the main character likable and real.

Book Review - Booker Winners - The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’ 2011 Booker prize winning novella, is his fourteenth work of fiction, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s also one of his best. The book is narrated by, and centers around, Tony Webster, a man who is now in his mid-sixties and forced by circumstance to look back on his life forty or so years ago, and to remember people and events he thought he’d left far behind.

Tony’s an uncomplicated man, or so he likes to think, who only wanted an uncomplicated life. “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” To that end, Tony’s one and only friend is his ex-wife, Margaret, a woman with “clear edges,” with whom Tony remains on excellent terms. Indeed, Margaret seems to be the only person with whom Tony has any human contact, and Tony doesn’t seem bothered by that. Even post-divorce, Tony remains a man who chooses safety over risk. “I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep its value. I’ve made my will, and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled.”

Tony’s life becomes unsettled and rather more complicated than he’d like when he receives an unexpected bequest of £500 and a diary from the mother of an old school chum, and, one could say, Tony’s first love, Veronica Ford. Tony has no idea why Veronica’s mother, Sarah, would give him such a bequest. He only met her once, and he remembers her as “a carefree, rather dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any [guff] from her daughter.” So, Tony does what many people would do, he seeks out Veronica, after forty long years, in search of answers.

Veronica, you see has “stolen” the diary left to Tony, which belonged to yet another old chum of Tony’s, Adrian Finn, an idealistic, Camus-reading, young man who committed suicide at the very young age of twenty-two, years ago, and she’s refusing, with the exception of one enigmatic page, to give the diary to Tony. Adrian, Tony remembers, always did have romantic notions about suicide, even leaving a note that said that “life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it” and if a person decides to renounce that gift, “it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.”

Part One of The Sense of an Ending takes place forty years in the past, and we get to know the young Tony, and the young Adrian, as well as the young Veronica, the woman who was first the girlfriend of Tony, then the lover of Adrian. We also get a glimpse of Veronica’s mother, a woman who just might – or might not – have stolen Adrian away from her own daughter.

Tony’s reminiscences and remembrances of his early life seem pretty straightforward, and the reader has no reason to doubt what he reports. In school, Tony looked up to Adrian, though he did not emulate him. The two boys parted ways when Adrian went off to Cambridge and Tony went off to a far less distinguished university. Tony’s affair, such as it was, with Veronica came to a bad end, and Adrian, the gentleman, wrote to Tony and asked his permission to date Veronica himself. Then, for reasons unknown to Tony, Adrian committed suicide.

Part Two of this slim, little book concerns itself with the goings-on once Tony reconnects with Veronica, and these goings-on are far more complicated than Tony’s school days had been.

In Part Two, Veronica has grown into a spiteful, impatient, prickly woman, who hisses and bristles at Tony rather than talk. While this would make a lot of men run the other way, Tony says Veronica’s bad temper leaves him with the desire “to go back to the beginning and change things...make the blood flow backwards,” even knowing full well that it can’t be done.

“You just don’t get it,” hisses Veronica, over and over, and she shows Tony a letter he must have written long ago, though he doesn’t remember doing so, that might explain his one-time girlfriend’s seemingly misplaced hostility.

Bit-by-bit and piece-by-piece, Tony Webster reassembles his youthful past in search of the truth. In doing so, he forms a “chain of individual responsibilities” that seek to explain how his “peaceable” life resulted in “the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss.” Along the way to this reassemblage, however, Tony lets the reader know that there are times when he probably can’t be trusted. He’s not deliberately lying to himself or to the reader, but he’s learned to see things the way he wants to see them, not the way they really are, and memory, after all, is inherently unreliable. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.” And perhaps this “instinct for survival” is still the driving force in Tony Webster’s personality. “Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30,” Tony muses. “And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also — if this isn’t too grand a word — our tragedy.”

Reliable or unreliable, I found Tony Webster to be an engaging narrator. I liked him, and personally, I did trust him. I guess I just appreciated his candor. Throughout the book, I was on his side, even during those times when he seemed rather misguided. I heartily disliked the shrewish Veronica, and there were several times I just wanted to slap her (though I would never really slap) and tell her to “grow up” or something similar. If Tony didn’t “get it,” then part of the reason he didn’t was Veronica’s fault.

The Sense of an Ending is a beautifully crafted book filled with Barnes’ trademark wit and graceful writing. Some reviewers have called it a book “pervaded by the sense of death.” And yes, characters die in this novella. Adrian and Sarah, most notably, and Tony is very aware that youth is now behind him. But for me, The Sense of An Ending wasn’t so much about death as it was about the unreliability of memory, and the way we have of only remembering that which we want to remember, and perhaps “remembering to forget” the rest. It’s about the way people have of distorting their own past to become, more or less, the past they want it to be rather than the past it is.

But there’s no denying the book is chock-full of weighty subjects. One might think this would cause it to be morbid or depressing, though it isn’t at all. In fact, The Sense of an Ending is surprisingly light on its feet, though I’m not sure anyone should be surprised at that given that the author is Julian Barnes. In previous books, e.g., the novels Love, Etc. and Talking It Over, and the volume of short stories titled The Lemon Table, Barnes wrote about serious subjects, e.g., sexual jealousy and infidelity, age, time, and our eventually mortality, with a characteristically light, even jaunty, touch that made those books a joy to read.

I’ve already mentioned Barnes’ graceful writing and his trademark wit. His writing is also precise and economical. Barnes is a writer who doesn’t write one word more or one word less than he needs to write, and though graceful, his writing contains no frills. Here’s Tony after witnessing the Severn Bore surge wave:

I don't think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn't like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I'd witnessed either) — nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed and time with it. And to see this phenomenon after dark made it the more mysterious, the more other-worldly.

The Sense of an Ending may be a short book, but don’t let its brevity fool you. It’s dense and complex and filled with philosophical musings and reflections. If it’s “just a good story” you’re looking for, one heavy on plot, you won’t find that here. The plot of this book is, on its surface, a simple one, though the peeling back of layer-after-layer of Tony’s life adds a depth and a richness to this novel not ordinarily found in books three or four times its length.

I know some readers who had problems with this book’s ending. I wasn’t one. The two revelations were, at least in my estimation, natural, and they happened in the most natural of ways. I didn’t sense any contrivance about the book’s conclusion.

In summing up the events of the novel, Tony Webster says:

And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.

I felt I was in good company with Tony Webster, and I’m glad I didn’t miss the part of his life he chose to reveal to me.

5/5

Recommended: For mature (not necessarily "older") readers who like character driven books as opposed to plot driven stories. Not too much happens in this book in the way of plot, though the book’s protagonist, Tony Webster, sets about examining his entire life to date.