Divine Misdemeanors, by Laurell K. Hamilton

Meredith Gentry is back in LA working as a private detective, living with an unspecified number of exiles from the Unseelie court, and pregnant with twins. Someone is killing demi-fey--the small winged creatures humans think of when they think of "fairies"--and arranging the corpses to copy children's book illustrations.

Much of this book is perfunctory--less a novel and more a short story padded out with recaps of previous books in the series and re-introductions of the many different characters. Some new supernatural characters are introduced, including a "Jack-in-Irons" named Uther. A couple of characters gain new powers from Meredith, and a new sithen is produced magically, disguised as an apartment building, although that development happens entirely off-stage.

The only development of interest to the larger arc of the novels is that Meredith faces off against Barinthus, a former sea god who is regaining some of his former strength by living next to the ocean, and who wants to return to Faerie to rule with Meredith through power and fear. Meredith refuses and makes clear that he has obligations to contribute to the upkeep of the LA exiles. By the end of the book, Barinthus has eaten some of the humble pie he's been served.

As a measure of how thinly plotted this book is, there are three murder scenes, but no suspects until after the third one, and the novel is "solved" by the voluntary appearance of someone who rats on an acquaintance. So, basically, no mystery solving, no complexity to the crime. There are two perps, one of whom literally appears only at the end of the book after the informant has passed on what he knows. Meredith and her people go confront the bad guys, who are quickly killed after a short confrontation. The End.

Not worth the purchase price--if you have to read everything by Hamilton, get this from the library, read it at the bookstore, or wait until the inevitable clearance sale lowers the price on this one to under five bucks. Safe to skip--all the developments will be recapped in future novels. Read it with very low expectations to avoid inevitable disappontment. Less original than the widely reviled Micah.

Fans can hope that Hamilton is working on something meatier and that this is a contractual obligation; ex-fans can feel justified in their opinion that Hamilton has run out of ideas.

Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater

I read this one for our mother-daughter book club; one of the 13 year olds picked it. It's Twilight for werewolf lovers, and there are no vampires at all. But there is the whole "I love my boy/girl friend and nothing else matters as much as being together" and "we can't be together because my boyfriend is a freak and I can't let anybody know about it" thing that is the distilled essence of Twilight. And that's how I know I am old: because I've had enough of that.

The main characters are Sam, the werewolf, and Grace, the girl he has loved ever since she was 11 and attacked by werewolves, and he saved her. Since then, she has loved the wolves and he has obsessed about her, and they finally meet when she's 17 and he's 18. And in Stiefvater's conception, transformation happens when it gets cold, so as Minnesota winter approaches, Sam is vulnerable. It also looks like this will be his last chance to be human—at some point, usually much later in life, werewolves just don't change back into humans and they live a shortened wolf life-span. This is Sam's last chance to be human.

Of course, like so many YA tropes, the existence of werewolves has to be kept secret, because adults wouldn't be able to handle the truth and would (obviously! God!) just hunt down and slaughter the pack. So Grace has to figure out how to keep Sam warm enough to stay human, while solving the mystery of a classmate's disappearance and has to fight off a she-wolf who wants Sam to take over the pack. So Grace is gifted with two of the most absent and incompetent parents in the history of literature. Dad is never home, Mom is a spacy artist who grabs cereal to eat in front of the TV on the few occasions she's outside her studio. Grace cooks all the meals, which her parents are never home to eat, and occasionally gets calls on her cell when her parents decide to stay away for a weekend.

Which is mostly just fine, because that means Sam can move into Grace's bedroom and her parents never notice. Early in the plot, a classmate (Jack) is reported killed by wolves, but there is no body because he's actually been turned into a werewolf. Jack's a bit of an ass, and school is actually more pleasant with his absence, but he doesn't stay away. He also has an inconveniently nosy sister, Isabelle, who thinks Grace knows something about the wolves and her brother. Between all these students, they figure out that Grace was bitten and should have turned, but apparently a fortuitously timed fever killed the toxin. So now Sam is about to go permanently wolf-shaped, Jack is losing what little mind and patience he had by turning back and forth, and Jack has bitten Grace's friend Olivia who is about to turn wolf for the first time.

Isabelle manages to get three vials of blood from a meningitis patient, and she and Grace inject Jack. Jack suffers for three days and then dies. Olivia choses to turn wolf, so she leaves a note for her parents to say she is running away and they shouldn't look for her. Sam gets half an injection before he turns animal. Logic dictates that a meningitis fever can't burn away the wolf while the patient is in wolf shape, so he's probably not going to get better. There's no way to tell for certain, because he runs out the open door and into the woods, as sick animals will. After a couple of pages where Grace finally gives up looking for Sam in wolf form, he shows up human Happily Ever After The End.

And I am tired of this. I'm tired of YA characters having to keep all these Big Secrets and fight these life and death battles with Absolutely No Adults they can trust or ask for help or advise or ANYTHING. The kind of message 13 year olds NEED to get from their literature is that adults are Big Stupid Dummies who Can't Be Trusted and who will only Interfere and Make Things Worse. Make no mistake, because the biggest market for these books are 11-13 year olds. Maybe we need to blame Shakespeare, because the template was set by Romeo and Juliet, and of course they shouldn't trust either the Montagues or the Capulets.

Sure, there's the developmentally appropriate process of a seventeen year old to separate from her parents, but does so much YA literature have to throw these kids so completely on their own resources? There are no positive adult relationships—no teachers they could turn to, no advice seeking from other adults or even older college kids. Every adult in this book is absent (Grace's dad), vapid and disconnected (Grace's mom) or dangerously violent (Sam's biological parents, Sam's werewolf mentor, Jack and Isabelle's dad). The world of this novel is entirely limited to teen agers. I'd have felt less annoyed if they had turned to a science teacher to ask about the meningitis, for example, or even gone to a library and spoken to the librarian. Instead we get a parade of horrible parenting.

• Sam's parents saw him turning into a wolf when he was 11, so they held him down in the bathtub and slit his wrists trying to bleed the disease out of him.
  
• Sam's werewolf mentor decided he needed werewolves who would still be human in the spring to support the pack, so he went out and bit some teens, tied them up in the back of his van and brought them to his house.
  
• Jack's dad organized the hunt to kill the pack that he thought killed his son, and also keeps stuffed hunting trophies in the house.
  
• Grace's mother makes a single attempt to counsel her daughter, but when rebuffed she gives up and leaves the scene.
  
• Grace's dad is a workaholic who only comes home in order to go away for the weekend with Grace's mom.
  

So Grace and Sam live for weeks together in her empty house and nobody knows about it. It just annoys me because it overtly sends the message that whenever any important life (and death!) issues come along, teens should just handle them on their own.

I'd rather see these kind of things be handled with a sense of a larger community. Some writers have started to explore what happens when these groups—vampires, werewolves, etc.—come out of the shadows and have to be absorbed into society. True Blood is all about what happens when vampires are no longer myth, for example. I'm not naïve enough to think that YA novels are going to all start promoting healthy parent-child relationships, but what good does it do to show the kids so completely alone? Even Harry Potter had Dumbledore and McGonagall to help him out sometimes.

Can we also maybe can the "destined for each other for eternity" meme as well? It's rather unhealthy, I think, in this day and age to portray seventeen year olds as fated to be mated. We are even told that Grace has never even had a boyfriend—so we're even treated to the old "virgin's first lover" trope. (Has Sam had a girlfriend, or even a wolf mate? We don't know, but it's not ruled out in clear way Grace is overtly signaled to be a virgin.) I can't help but think that Grace is going to want to have a life—to go to college, to travel with her friend Rachel, to not just move from being her parents' caretaker to taking care of her boyfriend and his wolf pack. Maybe he would like to do some of that himself as well. Sure, he's grateful she saved his live and all, but do they really have all that much in common?

I know, I know—this is just a tween/teen friendly romance novel, and asking for realism is like asking for Cinderella's shoe size—it misses the point. Still, I'm bothered by the insidious messages that lie just beneath the romantic story, and I dislike what those messages say about the proper behavior for heroes and heroines.

Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde

Another oddly charming read by the wizard of the Socialist Republic of Wales. Jasper Fforde won my reader's heart with his first book, The Eyre Affair, in which his heroine Thursday Next reads herself into fiction. I was totally won over when he introduced the door-to-door Baconian proselytizer--a Jehovah's Witness-like pamphleteer who tried to convert those who believed Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. From then on, I was in his capable hands as he re-wrote the ending of Jane Eyre, held a Rocky Horror re-enactment of Richard III, and seized forged Samuel Johnsons with a street value of millions of pounds.

Fforde has produced four Thursday Next novels, mixing literature with his own fictional version of 1980s England. Less successful for me are the Nursery Crimes novels, featuring Detective Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary. But there are still moments of inspired lunacy that make him worth reading even at less than top of his game. Did Humpty Dumpty fall, or was he pushed?

Shades of Grey creates a different universe for Fforde to play with, and is apparently the first of a trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic England some 700 years after "Something Which Happened." The world we know is buried under centuries of leaf mold and ivy, although pieces of our time (and even our future) obtrude occasionally. What does exist is a society organized entirely by what colors people can see: almost no one can see full spectrum any more. The hierarchy is the reverse of ROY G BIV, with the "Purples" at the apex, Reds at the bottom except for the dreary Greys, who are the servant class and do all the unpleasant work.

The book starts with the transfer of Eddie Russett and his father from their cosmopolitan home to the Outer Fringe village of East Carmine. During a stop-over in the town of Vermillion, a Purple appears to be dying on the floor of a National Color store, and since Eddie's father is a swatchman, the equivalent of a doctor, he is called to aid. Things are not what they seem, however, as the recommended treatments have nearly killed the patient. Eddie notices that the Purple seems to be mis-identified: his hands are work roughened. It's a Grey, passing himself off as a Purple!

Things get more complicated as the Russetts reach East Carmine. Eddie finds himself on the bad side of the village prefects, a nasty Yellow family called the Gamboges, while he is simultaneously falling in love with a sarcastic and aggressive Grey with a retrousse nose. Eddie seems unable to keep his head down, and his inconvenient curiosity opens his eyes to secrets that challenge his ability to live according to his society's rules.

A great deal of the charm of this book is the way Fforde has mapped out the class system with colors. According to an interview on his website, Fforde set the Purples as dukes, and the rest of the spectrum fell into place. In many ways, Shades of Grey is a social satire like Jane Austen's novels--so much depends upon securing a good marriage, and the consequences of marriage negotiations illuminate the nature of social relationships.

Much of Eddie's time is spent trying to secure his engagement to one Constance Oxblood, whose family has a higher percentage of red perception than the Russetts do, and there is hope that their children might rise to sit on city Councils, or serve as Red Prefects if they have enough color perception. Eddie himself seems to be a strong Red, but he has not yet been officially tested at the annual Ishihara and so his status is mere potential. There is a rival for Constance's affections, as well as some advantageous (if unattractive) marriagable women in East Carmine. There is also the un-advantageous and dangerously attractive Jane Grey.

There is also the continuing mystery of the dead man from Vermilion, who seems to have had some connections with East Carmine's previous swatchman--a Robin Ochre, who was selling swatches illegally, and whose own death is questionable. What happened to the missing swatches and the money that came from their sale? Who else was in on the beigemarket scam? Why is it illegal to manufacture spoons and why does no one ever come back from High Saffron?

I'm not certain I can explain why I enjoyed this book so much; it's something about Fforde's ability to take something ridiculous, treat it as serious, while at the same time writing with such deft lightness that the entire book becomes a sort of confection. He's also put so much thought into how his color-based society would work that there are none of the floating loose ends and nagging inconsistencies of--just to pick an example at random--James Cameron's Avatar. Plus Fforde did it for less than half a billion dollars.

Shades of Grey isn't the literary romp that the Thursday Next novels are, because he's planted himself in a non-literary world. However he has created a world as internally consistent and as intriguing as Thursday's world, and it's worth a read.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I would say this book is "very French." There is such fixation on class differences, and while very little happens in terms of plot, the book is stuffed to the gills with meditations on what makes art beautiful, the role of literature in society, the nature of cultural displacement on violence in society, the fundamental error of Husserl's phenomenology, and on and on.

The two alternating narrators are Renee Michelle, the widowed concierge of a glamorous apartment building in Paris, and Paloma Joss, the 12 year old daughter of one of the families living in the building. Both have untempered disdain for everyone else in the building, but they don't actually know each other until late in the book.

What little plot there is concerns the arrival of a new resident, a 60-ish Japanese man named Kakuro Ozu, who sees the intelligence hiding behind Mme. Michelle's facade, as well as Paloma's loneliness. The concierge begins to bloom under M. Ozu's attentions and as a narrator begins to lose her defensive prickliness -- which is the metaphor expressed in the title.

I am admittedly surprised that this has become such a successful book here in the US, as so many of the issues of class and privilege don't resonate here in quite the way they do in France. Mme. Michelle puts out a great deal of effort to appear to be a "real concierge;" she leaves the TV on all day, she buys horrible food which she actually feeds to her cat, she behaves as though she is both stupid and stubborn. Actually she doesn't watch the TV, she hides her real food underneath the horrible stuff, and she reads and thinks with ferocious avidity. She is authentic, however, in her dislike of everyone in her building and their privilege, although it's not clear for most of the book if there is any reason for her fury. Most of the people are thoughtless or unpleasant, but I found them to be predominantly lost themselves and mostly pathetic.

After all, none of them treats her badly; the worst thing that any one of them does is Paloma's older sister who rings the bell of the loge at 7 a.m. instead of waiting until 8 when the loge is officially open. Mme. Michelle had been out late the night before, drinking sake with M. Ozu, so she was particularly irritated by it, but in the universe of bad behavior it's pretty negligible.

No, most of Mme. Michelle's hatred of her employers seems to be projection--her own assumption of what they think about her. Frankly, if this spiky woman worked in my building, I'd be desperate to respect the privacy she so obviously wants! Not because I think I'm "better" than she is, or because I didn't think she could understand my deep thoughts, but because I was afraid I might leave her with less than all ten fingers I started with.

This got to me toward the end of the book especially hard. She is going out to dinner with M. Ozu, dressed up and made up like she doesn't ordinarily do. She's even gone to a hair dressers for the first time in her life, when they meet two of the women of the building. To her amazement, the women don't recognize her. M. Ozu claims it is because they have never actually looked at her to see her properly. But, honestly, how empathetic has Mme. Michelle ever been to them either? Has she ever tried to see them for who they really are, to see what their joys and sorrows have been? Of course not.

The second narrator is Paloma Joss the younger daughter of one of the families in the building. Her father is in the government, her mother is apparently deeply bored and passes much time in psychotherapy, and her older sister is a student in one of the best schools in Paris. Paloma hates them all and has decided that being an adult is so horrible that she will kill herself on her 13th birthday, just after setting fire to the apartment building. In the interim, she will keep journals and see if she can find any reason not to carry out her plan.

Paloma as a character is hard to swallow. I am not certain if her "Journal of Profound Thoughts" is supposed to actually be profound, or just the kind of "profound" that one would expect from a twelve year old. Nor did I ever believe she was going to kill herself or set fire to the building. If this were anything more than a plot device imposed by Barbery, said twelve year old would have spent some time planning. Exactly how was she going to do this thing? Sure, she swiped some of her mother's pills, but was she going to take them the night before her birthday so she would be found the next morning, or was she going to take them in front of everybody, or hide them in the birthday cake, or what? Surely a girl planning to commit a statement suicide would plot what she was going to where, how she would be found, as well as imagine the satisfaction of the family's reaction to her death.

Even less believable was the idea of burning down the apartment building. There was really no plan at all. Was she going to take a kitchen match to some carpeting maybe? Before of after she took the pills? No, the whole "die before I get old" was just never going to happen. Sure, she found her family to be annoying and intrusive; it's practically a developmental stage.

I will not attempt to distinguish myself by weighing in on the philosophical musings of the two women, as honestly, I just trudged through those parts of the book. Not that they were worthless; it's just that I don't enjoy philosophy. I'm kind of tone deaf to it, I think, or something, because I didn't particularly care one way or another about Mme. Michelle's views on Husserl or Marx, and her disquisition on the subject of Dutch still life went in one ear and out the other.

I did object to her dismissal of Paloma's sister's paper on William of Ockham, though. After all, I, the reader, have just spent valuable hours of my life hearing your thoughts on all sorts of things that were hardly personally useful--the habits of your bladder, for one. I'm sorry you don't care for Ockham's thought, but is it really completely without any worth whatsoever? Surely there are plenty of "thinkers" who are more obscure and less worthy of study--she could have been a student of romance novels or something even more disposable. At least she is trying--just like you are. Show a little compassion for people; you certainly demand it for yourself.

And the end. The end! Fortunately I had Googled the book and knew to expect it, although I might have figured it out anyway. I kept thinking about Virigina Woolf's comment (as delivered by Nicole Kidman in "The Hours") that someone has to die so the rest of us can see how precious life is. And it was never going to be Paloma.

Yes, Renee Michelle dies, hit by a dry cleaning truck, just as she has started to soften up and behave like a human being. Maybe she and M. Ozu would have married. Maybe not, but maybe she would have learned how to be her true self and be a happier person. But no.

Although I have to give Barbery some credit, as Mme. Michelle's last thoughts are quite interesting and the whole idea of narrating what happens while a person dies was an intriguing and daring risk to take. And, of course, it is Mme. Michelle's death which convinces Paloma not to kill herself, so there is that silver lining as well.

While looking up other reviews of this book--to see if I could figure out why this has been such a successful phenomenon, I came across a delightful and persuasive critique here.

In the end, did I like this? No, not much, but then it's not really the type of book I enjoy. I'm not someone who reads philosophy for fun, just as I don't do well with non-fiction. Mostly it's because there are so many other types of books I enjoy more, and I'd rather be reading those. It's a classic line, because it works: "It's not you, it's me." It's probably more a failure on my part than on the book's part, for whatever that is worth.

On balance, I wouldn't recommend it because I didn't enjoy it. If I had a friend who adored philosophy, I'd mention it. It's not an easy read, although the philosophy is deliberately accessible, but you have to want to read philosophy to really enjoy this book.

Finally, a note on the audio book. Yes, I listened rather than read this one, and so I devoted more hours to it than I would have if I had simply read it. On the other hand, I listened while doing other things, so I didn't lose as much time to it than I would have if I had to sit and concentrate on it alone. The readers were very good, especially Barbara Rosenblatt as Mme. Michelle--but then something about Barbara Rosenblatt's voice holds a secret smile, as though she is about to tell you a really good joke, which lightened the tone of the bitterness.

What will probably live on for me, however, is the beauty of French. Sure, the author's name is "Muriel Barbery," but when pronounced in the French way, it's a beautiful name. Muh-ree-EL Bahr-buhr-REE. Much more elegant, and worth the price of the download itself.

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Now this was a good book.

I know I bitch a lot about the books I read, and even I wonder sometimes if there are ever any books that I do like. I liked this one. I liked this one a lot, and I'd recommend it to anyone with any taste at all for historical fiction.

The hero is Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith who improbably rose to be Henry VIII's closest counselor. He was the epitome of the "new man," the non-noble who rose to prominence by his skill and talent--something that hadn't happened before Henry VIII.

A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on Thomas Cromwell gives the substance of his life and does nothing to diminish the joy of this novel. Mantel has taken the bones of Cromwell's life and fashioned a character, one who moves through history in relation to other characters. Mantel sets up Cromwell against Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More and Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and shows off each individual character. Whether or not they are actually accurate, they are engaging.

The book starts with what may have been the lowest point in Thomas Cromwell's life: at approximately age 14 he was beaten within an inch of his life by his father. The book literally starts with Cromwell's thoughts that he might not survive. The book ends at a high point in his career, where he has achieved a great deal in royal government and seems to be contemplating the possibility of marrying again. Along the way we are treated to seeing turbulent Tudor life through the eyes of a man we can respect for his wisdom and his kindness.

It is through the accumulation of almost domestic details that Mantel tells this story, leaving the reader with a sense of having truly seen into the past. Cardinal Wolsey is not terribly pious, and is always at the king's side, despite being the Archbishop of York. He is a tireless worker, fond of luxuries, surprisingly kind and witty. When he is presented with a sun dial he remarks "Nine faces! That's two more than the Duke of Norfolk!" Which is a rather witty way to vent his frustration over his opponent.

Wolsey amused himself by inventing stories of Cromwell's origins. At one point in the book, after Wolsey's death, someone demands to know if Cromwell had been baptized, since the cardinal had said that Cromwell had been kidnapped by pirate while an infant. Cromwell's response captured the spirit of his former master: "Who will I have to invent me now?"

T here is a touching scene between Cromwell and King Henry. Wolsey has been stripped of his position as Lord Chancellor and has been turned out of his London house, after failing to get a divorce for Henry. Cromwell has come to beg for some leniency or assistance, to get Wolsey up to York. In front of his counsel and Anne Boleyn, Henry remains firm, but he demands a private consultation with Cromwell and asks "Would a thousand pounds help?"

I adored these human touches to people who are often just names in history books. Thomas More is portrayed as a self-righteous prig. Mark Smeaton, the musician who would ultimately be swept up in Anne Boleyn's fall, is a vain gossip. Henry Norris is a thoughtless and casually cruel man. Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, and Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, compete with each other to hire Cromwell after Wolsey's death, but do not appreciate his appointment to the king's council. Anne Boleyn is wary, tense, and fiercely intelligent; her sister Mary is kind hearted and genuinely likable. Jane Seymour is a ghostly presence, yet attractive, somehow remaining loyal to Queen Katherine yet welcomed in Anne Boleyn's rooms.

The book ends before Anne Boleyn's fall, but the signs are there: the first baby only a girl, a miscarriage, and the stress of the relationship between her and the king. The dominoes are lined up to be pushed over. Yet, again, Thomas Cromwell will survive this fall, as he survived Wolsey's only to lose his position and his head over the debacle of the marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1640.

But the book ends before any of this happens. Could Mantel be planning a sequel?

And why the heck is it called "Wolf Hall?" Wolf Hall was the seat of the Seymour family, where (eventually) Henry VIII would go to court his third wife, Jane Seymour. The first we hear of Wolf Hallin the novel is as the site of a scandal. Wolf Hall's lord, Sir John Seymour, was discovered carrying on an affair with his oldest son's wife. Later, Jane Seymour makes a remark about staying at court until things settle down at home. At the end of the book, Cromwell is contemplating a call at Wolf Hall, presumably to court Jane Seymour. Other than these references, nothing happens at Wolf Hall--all the main action happens at Cromwell's home or the royal palaces.

Even writing this review, I find myself wondering what I missed the first time through. This book gets an A from me.

The Passion of Artemisia, Part II

Despite not liking this book much, I did finish it. At some point I dumped the audio book and picked up the actual book from the library--and the good news is that I can read much faster than I can listen.

I do have to lay some of my dislike for the book at the feet of the audio production. The narrator was competent and her pronunciation of the Italian was fluent, but her affect lent a permanent air of bewilderment to the first person narration, creating an Artemisia Gentileschi who just couldn't be very bright, as she was constantly surprised by everything.

Also, the book is written as a series of vignettes, and the audio production would have benefited from leaving longer silences between each scene to replicate aurally the visual use of spaces to represent the passage of time.

Leaving the audio aside--how was the book? Again, not very good. The group pretty much agreed that the subject was very interesting, but the book didn't do it justice. We rated it a C+.

Looking at the task of pulling together such a book, you'd think you'd have a slam dunk. Artemisia Gentileschi lived at a high point of Italian history, painting for Medicis, corresponding with Galileo, working in Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples and England. We have many of her paintings with a rough chronological order. Some of her letters have survived, as has the legal records of the rape trial. The author's task was to pull this patchy data together and create a character who could also speak to modern readers. Vreeland was only intermittently successful.

I think perhaps my dissatisfaction came from the uneasy mix of modern sensibility with period detail. It just seemed that Vreeland pointed out things that the real Artemisia would not have. For example, when attending a ball at a noble's house, she writes of the "too sweet perfume that failed to mask the musky scent of their unwashed bodies." That's a detail that translates the Renaissance for modern readers, but wouldn't Artemisia be used to that and not notice it? After all, she didn't bathe more often than the rest of them did.

The real strength of this book should have been Vreeland's ability to describe the paintings--how she made them, what choices she made as a woman that were different from other artists' depictions of the same subjects. And we do get some of that. Artemisia's Judith slaying Holofernes is described as requiring more realistic work on Judith's part.



Vreeland especially takes time with Artemisia's choices in painting Lucretzia. Traditionally, it is a blood-and-sex subject, in which the victim of a rape kills herself. Vreeland's Artemisia is unwilling to perpetuate the belief that death is the only proper response. After all, she didn't kill herself, why should Lucretzia? We get a lovely set piece with Artemisia holding a dagger and testing poses herself, while looking in a mirror. Should she hold the dagger pointing in, or out? Wrist up, or down? Blade touching skin, or in the air? Artemisia muses on what moment she wants to capture in her painting, rejecting the more extreme emotions in favor of painting a woman who is still undecided about her fate.



I think I would have enjoyed this book more if we had gotten more about the art and less about the melodrama: Artemisia seems to have had bad luck in picking her family. She spends much of the book blaming her father for making her rape public by starting the trial, for the use of the sibille on her, for marrying her off to a man who cheats on her. She spends most of the novel with a major chip on her shoulder, and refuses to have anything to do with him until the end, when Vreeland cobbles up a sort of reconciliation. Perhaps it was necessary to have some sort of arc to the story, but the result was a deeply immature and petulant main character who failed repeatedly to appreciate what he had done for her and dwelled only on what he had done to her.

It came as a relief toward the end when Artemisia's mentor (a nun) gives her a bit of a tongue lashing. Grow up! Get over it! You've had a fabulous life, living in wonderful cities, making your living by what you love, surrounded by art and beauty. You have a healthy child. You have a life that most women can't even dream of, while I've been shut up in this convent for thirty years. Quit whining.

It would have been good advice for Vreeland to have taken earlier with her character.

A word about the title: "The Passion of Artemisia" is most likely intended to play on the many paintings of saints called "The Passion of X." These pictures often (usually? always?) show the saint in a moment of religious ecstasy, sometimes indistinguishable from sexual orgasm. Vreeland doesn't give us a passionate Artemisia--even her love of art doesn't really register as a "higher calling" or something that gives her transcendent bliss. Rather, she is a very practical woman--as she would have had to be--juggling painting with child care, commissions with household management. She tells us she loves to paint, but that love is shown not by ecstasy and an O face, but by the determination with which she manages to keep painting even when that requires major upheaval in her life.

In some ways, the book is diminished by events--at the time the book was published in 2002, it didn't have to compete with Wikipedia, which summarized the factual events of Artemisia's life. When Vreeland wrote it, she didn't have any reason to expect that her readers might Google "Artemisia Gentileschi" and readily access her history. In the world where the internet so dominates, the role of historical fiction may have changed. It's no longer enough to bring forth the facts of a somewhat obscure character from history--authors have to do something more.

The White Queen, by Philippa Gregory

Having novelized all the Tudors she could get her hands on, Philippa Gregory moved back in time for her new trilogy, starting with Elizabeth Woodville in "The White Queen." So now she can do for the War of the Roses what she did for Henry VIII's marital troubles.

Elizabeth Woodville was the wife of Edward IV, and is perhaps best known as the mother of the "Princes in the Tower"--the young Edward V and his brother the Duke of York who disappeared while living at the Tower of London and who Shakespeare claims were killed by the hunchback Richard III. So I was curious to see what Gregory's take on the story would be.

First off, the book suffers from Gregory's adherence to her formula: take a woman from a significant historical period and tell the story from her point of view. Because most of what happens historically during Elizabeth Woodville's life happens while she was not there. Edward fought the Wars of the Roses without bringing his wife along to the battlefields, so all the military strategy and political intrigue can't be reported first hand. Gregory "solves" this problem by giving her protagonist magical powers, so she can "see" what happens hundreds of miles away.

And I have a problem with this. Admittedly, I don't expect a historical novel to be rigorously accurate to every last detail--it is fiction after all, and if I want accurate history I shouldn't be reading fiction. And goodness knows that Edward's marriage to Elizabeth was strange enough that contemporaries probably did consider that she had bewitched him. But having the author introduce sorcery and mythical ancestry (the Woodvilles are descended from Melusina?) as if it were fact crosses a line for me.

Secondly, Gregory has gotten sloppy with her writing. Maybe she was always a master of cringe-inducing prose and I just missed it before, but it really intrudes here. Perhaps it's the essential lack of story that throws the writing into stark relief, but whatever it is, it is painful. The novel opens with the meeting of Elizabeth Woodville and the future king. He is on his way to meet his army and another battle, she is standing with her two sons (she is a widow, and still quite young) intent on stopping him to ask for her sons' lands back--lands that were given to someone else when her husband died in the wars.

This is a famous meeting, at least as much romance as history, and there are people in England today who can point out the exact tree she stood beneath. The king-to-be was stopped by her beauty, and was so taken with her that he actually married her secretly before he won the crown. He then insisted on the validity of the marriage, even in the face of arrangements to consolidate his throne by marrying a French princess. Warwick, his former mentor (called the "Kingmaker") turned against him, and the wars continued.



Gregory is not up to the task of dramatizing this meeting and the relationship between these two people. She may have been beautiful, but how beautiful would she have to be that Edward would sneak away from his war and risk the crown to marry a widow with two sons? Gregory's Edward can only speak in modern cliches: "God, I must have you." Perhaps that is why she resorted to treating the allegations of witchcraft as truth--because as a writer, she simply couldn't make this marriage believable.

Third: Elizabeth Woodville's life is most historically interesting after her husband dies in 1483, and Gregory has committed to covering the twenty or so boringly domestic years before that. So not much happens in cursory form for hundreds of pages. Somehow, the first half of the book suffers both from too much and not enough happening. The book only comes alive once Edward is dead and Elizabeth has to protect herself and her children and weather the political changes that threaten them.

Before he died, Edward IV named his youngest brother Richard (Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III) as Lord Protector, to run the kingdom until the Prince of Wales reached his majority and could rule for himself. Once Edward IV died, the young prince was brought to London from Wales, where he had his own household as Prince of Wales. He was there under the protection of one of Elizabeth's many brothers, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, as well as one of the sons of her first marriage, Thomas Grey. Richard intercepted the procession, and Rivers and Grey ended up imprisoned and dead.

Elizabeth fled with her remaining children to sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, and from there watched the preparations for her son to be crowned. Historically, she was persuaded to send her second son, the Duke of York, to join his brother at the Tower. Gregory posits that she sent an anonymous urchin in disguise, while she spirited her son to Flanders, where he was raised as "Perkin Warbeck." Gregory also shows Elizabeth as suspicious of Richard's every action, and trying to raise military forces through her brothers and Grey relations, while remaining in sanctuary herself.

Gregory plays with the historical mystery: the generally accepted story is that Richard killed the two princes in order to get the crown for himself. Gregory doesn't accept this version--by the time the boys disappeared, Richard already had been declared king by Parliament, the boys had been legally declared illegitimate, and they were no real threat to his position. Their disappearance, however, was a problem. In an nicely imagined meeting, Richard III comes to Westminster Abbey to ask if Elizabeth knows what happened to the boys. If they are alive, he can show them to be so and the rumors of their murders will stop. If they are dead, he can show their bodies and blame their deaths on one of his current enemies--the Duke of Buckingham. As it is, there is only damaging speculation and rumor, and he recognizes that his name will always be blackened by their deaths.

So, by the end, the book gains the historical ballast it needed all along. Richard is a hard man, but no worse than others. The young man who shows up in England years later calling himself "Perkin Warbeck" and claiming to be boy who was assumed to have been murdered in the Tower is the son of Edward IV. No one knows what actually happened to the boys in the Tower, but Gregory leaves open the suspicion that they were murdered by Henry Tudor, later Henry VII. She also gives some understandable human flesh to the bones of Elizabeth Woodville's later actions--why she allows her daughter Elizabeth to leave sanctuary and go to Richard III's court, and what happens to Elizabeth there. How Elizabeth falls in love with her uncle, and her betrothal to Henry Tudor.

It is in the latter half of the book that Gregory finally shows some of her talent in a more subtle use of sorcery--while in sanctuary, Elizabeth curses whoever killed her boys by cursing him with the death of his own sons. "That is how we shall know who it was--by the death of his own heir." This threatens to rebound to her own injury, as history shows us that Elizabeth's grandson Arthur dies before becoming King of England, and that Henry VIII spends decades in a quest for his own heir.

The next two books in the projected trilogy are "The Red Queen," to focus on Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, and "The White Princess," focusing on Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Elizabeth Woodville, sister to the Princes in the Tower, wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII.

Will I read them? Probably. Will I bitch about it as I do. Undoubtedly. But I think I can't live with not knowing what position Gregory takes on the historical mysteries of those times.

The Passion of Artemisia, by Susan Vreeland

"Reading" this one on audio, as I'm in a serious case of Reader's Block. My book club chose this one, and I voted for it, based on my affection for Vreeland's earlier book, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue.

Bad choice.

I'm about five chapters in, and the relentless self-pity and melodrama reduce this book from the level of art Vreeland showed in Hyacinth Blue to mere genre "historical" fiction. Do I really have to finish this book?

As a matter of background, Artemisia Gentilischi was an actual historical person, who lived in 17th century Italy. Her father was a painter, and as he had no son, taught her to paint. He also hired painting tutors for her, one of whom raped her. The trial took place in Rome, and the documents are apparently available. After the trial, the true, historical Artemisia entered an arranged marriage and continued to paint, becoming one of very few women artists of her age who achieved prominence both in her lifetime and afterwards. An exceptional woman in an intriguing profession at a time when the Renaissance was sweeping Europe.

Chapter One is called "Sibille" and with it the promise of richness and metaphor. Artemisia and her father are plaintiff/witnesses in the trial of Artemisia's rapist. A device called the "sibille" is used on Artemisia to test the truth of her testimony. Narrow cords are woven between her fingers and tightened -- torture, in short. A "sybil" is a mythological prophetess, and Michelangelo painted a Sybill on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. The sibille is used to test the truth of an artist's testimony, an artist who is herself a woman, with the down side that the sibille appears to risk the use Artemisia's fingers.

But since the book is written solely from Artemisia's perspective, we already "know" that she is telling the truth. The use of the sibille is never justified or presented as anything other than gratuitous torture with a side order of permanent maiming and the destruction of her painting career. Nobody else cares about the effect of this torture on her--and there is not even any indication that the evidence she is bringing is all that important anyway.

The trial continues--the "defense" seems to be that the accused is innocent and that Artemisia has slept with many men. So the sibille is used to test her denial of sleeping with a laundry list of other men. Are those men ever called in to testify? Are they ever even questioned? We don't know, because that is outside what Vreeland is doing, which is creating a melodramatic scene of a woman oppressed by the men who control the society.

Other than making the reader angry at this sexism, does this make any legal sense? Especially since AFTER this, when Artemisia denies the other sexual partners, THEN then bring in midwives to check if she is still a virgin. WHAT? I mean, everybody agrees she isn't a virgin: I don't think that even defendant denied sleeping with her. So, what is this for?

Then, it appears that Artemisia's father and the defendant worked out a betrothal, and that she was going to marry him, and so after that point, she didn't fight him. So, what's the point here? Is this actually a breach of promise suit--did the defendant refuse to marry her after all? Is there such a thing as marital rape in 17th century Rome--I mean, if she was going to marry him, why is there even a trial?

There is something in there about a stolen painting--presumably the defendant stole it from Artemisia's home, and so this trial is about her father's claims for the painting and a virgin daughter, both of which were taken by the defendant? What is going on here?

Vreeland doesn't tell us, presumably because she doesn't care. The point is not to illustrate the culture or the social structure of the time--it's just that men humiliate and destroy women simply because they can. Sure, that's bound to happen in a city where the legal and the religious structures are hopelessly intertwined, but it would be a better book if we saw the scope of entrenched sexism inherent in a rape trial of this time. I mean, if a rape trial -- by the laws of the city -- required the testimony of midwives that the victim was not a virgin, then we could understand why those women were called. Did the laws require that the examination be conducted in the courtroom? Did they require that the notary (presumably the Renaissance equivalent of a court reporter) be present? Then tell us--because that sort of institutional disregard for a woman's experience tells us so much about Artemisia's situation.

Instead, this stuff just happens, and Vreeland only gives us Artemisia's embarrassment and the take away is that all these men are pigs. But "men are pigs" simply is too modern a sentiment to fit comfortably in this 17th century milieu. Ditto a subsequent scene where Artemisia watches her father count out the coin for her dowry. She is entering an arranged marriage, presumably so she can get out of Rome and the gossip about her and her trial. "I felt like a bartered goat," she says, but I can't get the outrage. Aren't arranged marriages pretty standard in Rome at this time? Don't most girls get married off by their parents and sent off with a dowry as well? If this is usual, then there is no reason she should feel so insulted by the process. It's what she's been expecting her whole life. It's as if a modern woman complained about walking down the aisle--if there is something unusual about doing this, or unusual about your feelings about it, you have to make that clear.

But Vreeland merely gives us Artemisia's outrage and disgust, and then moves on. There is so little detail to anchor this story into the time and place of its setting, that it almost feels like a costume drama, where modern people don old fashioned clothing.

Life is too short to slog through bad books.

Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger

This is the second novel from the author of Time Traveller's Wife and has been getting excellent reviews. It's not quite the emotionally engaging success that TTW is, but it is creepily compelling.

Set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London, it is the story of two sets of twins: Edie and Elspeth, and Edie's daughters Julia and Valentina. Something happened between Edie and Elspeth, and for over 20 years they haven't been in contact. Edie and her family live in Chicago, while Elspeth lives in London overlooking the cemetery. At the start of the novel, Elspeth is dying and arranges for her nieces to inherit her estate, with the condition they live in the flat for a year before they can sell it.

The other residents of the apartment building are Robert, Elspeth's lover, who lives in the flat below and works at the cemetery while writing his history thesis on it. Upstairs are Martin and Marijke: Martin has OCD, and his obsessions have finally driven Marijke away after 25 years.

The book is a meditation on identity, the meaning of "home" and the role of relationships to identity. Once Elspeth dies, she becomes a ghost and ends up haunting her flat. What does it mean to be "Elspeth" without her body? Robert is devastated by her death, but what does it mean to him to have her back in ghost form? They are, as he says, "betwixt and between." He wants to come to her, but she doesn't want him to die. Even if he did, they might end up haunting their own flats and never be able to reach each other.

Martin has identity issues--he has a rational brain that understands the pointlessness of his OCD compulsions, yet he can't overcome them with logic. He can take medications, but the side effects rob him of different parts of his identity and so he chooses not to take them. Marijke cannot bear to be robbed of her identity by Martin's compulsions, and she ends up leaving him to return home to Amsterdam, even while remaining in love with him. For Martin, is the flat still "home" without his wife?

Julia and Valentina have their own struggle with identity. Valentina is the weaker and more compliant of the two, but she wants to have her own life and identity separate from her sister. Julia can't imagine ever being apart. Valentina has also fallen in love with Robert, and Julia resents the time she spends with him, resenting the way Robert comes between them. Robert has started to heal from his grief, and starts to consider the possibility of a life with Valentina, when Elspeth makes her presence known.

Niffenegger posits that a ghost starts out as weak as a newborn, and Elspeth has had to train to have any effect in the physical world. The revelation comes as she discovers she can write in the dust on a piano. Robert and the twins develop a home-made Ouija board, and Robert spends hours "talking" to Elspeth through automatic writing as well. As time passes, Valentina begins to be able to see Elspeth and the two of them spend hours together as well.

Matters come to a climax after Elspeth accidentally catches the soul of a kitten while playing with it, but manages to put it back into the cat's body, literally resurrecting it. Valentina sees this as a way to escape her sister--apparently she's completely incapable of simply enrolling in design school without Julia's permission so she creates an elaborate scheme to free herself from her sister. She convinces Elspeth to pull her soul out of her body, and then has Robert steal the corpse from the mausoleum so Elspeth can put her soul back in. Julia will be convinced Valentina is dead, so V can go off and live a non-twin life.

It is a stupid plan, of course, but Elspeth is convinced that Valentina is desperate enough to kill herself to escape Julia, and this way there is a chance that V won't die. This is how she forces Robert to participate--because either way, he will be guilty of V's death.

HERE BE SPOILERS--YE ARE WARN-ED!

Of course, it works, sort of, but in all the wrong ways. Elspeth is able to grasp V's soul and pull it out of the girl's body. Robert is able to pull strings with people he knows so Valentina's body is not embalmed, so that it is kept cold, and she is buried in the family mausoleum in Highgate. Robert is able to bring the corpse back to the flat and Elspeth tries to put the soul back in, but V is far too weak, and her soul doesn't go back inside, so Elspeth takes the body instead. Robert is again trapped between the two women--the soul of the woman he first loved, the body of the second one. Elspeth has come back to him, because he could not come to her. Valentina is trapped in the flat as a ghost, now more dependent on Julia than ever before. Julia is heartbroken, but is aware of V's presence in a way she never felt Elspeth's.

In the end, Robert and Elspeth leave London to avoid Julia seeing them. They have a son, although Robert has become distracted, and soon after his son's birth he finishes the enormous thesis and escapes. Elspeth eventually comes to realize he will never return.

Julia learns to see Valentina, and helps her to escape as well. Valentina climbs into Julia's mouth, and Julia carries her to the cemetary, where Valentina meets other ghosts, learns to fly on crows, and finds to her surprise that she is happy.

Martin takes small steps in overcoming his OCD, and at the end of the book is able to travel to Amsterdam, back to Marijke. He escapes his condition, his apartment, his old life in favor of a new one with his wife. Their son Theo comes to the flat, and Julia is probably going to fall in love with him.

There are some interesting parallels--Elspeth must wait for Robert, but she gets impatient and comes to him and so drives him away. Marijke waits for Martin, and by waiting they come together in what promises to be a happy way. Valentina is trapped in her life with Julia, and by dying she becomes free. Elspeth is free in life, but trapped in death. Elspeth and Edie are twins who regretted their separation, Valentina and Julia are twins who should have been more individual.

The great secret of the Noblin twins is finally revealed as well. Edie and Elspeth switched names over Edie's determination to test her fiance's love. (Like "The Marriage of Figaro" or "Two Gentlemen of Verona" perhaps.) Edie was engaged to James, but insisted she and her sister switch identities to see if James could tell. He could, but went along with the scheme. He fell in love with the "other" sister and broke his engagement to one and married the "other." So they remained switched their entire lives. The woman who lived in London and died of leukemia was actually named "Edwina" but for her sister's sake took "Elspeth" as her name. However, the London woman had slept with James once, possibly to spite her sister, and ended up pregnant. Thus the twins Julia and Valentina were actually the daughters of the London Elspeth, not the Chicago Edie. More playing with identity--which only created misery and loneliness.

The specter of death infuses the book--the main characters all live adjacent to the cemetary, Robert works there and writes about it, Elspeth is buried there, Julia and Valentina are grave owners. Various characters muse on the difference between historical graves and the burial of people they know.

The title refers to William Blake's famous poem "The Tyger."

There is some wonderful writing, and some eerie ghost-story-ness to this book, but it feels to me that Niffenegger hadn't quite gotten enough time with it to fully finish what it was meant to be. The scenes around Valentina's death and funeral feel out of touch--the grief is not fully rendered, but only sketched. Robert's abandonment of reincarnated Elspeth and his son is tossed in and seen at a remove. We have spend a great deal of the book inside Robert's head: it's just odd to have no insight into his thoughts about Elspeth's return or why he had to leave.

Julia is rather sketchy as well--she is bossy and orders Valentina around, and yet she is the one afraid to live life without her twin. Julia is the one who abandons college, but we never know why. Julia is the one who expects V to sleep in the same bed, wear the same clothing, do everything together--what is she afraid of if V goes to school without her?

Why are Elspeth and Robert so certain Valentina will kill herself if she doesn't escape Julia immediately? Why do they think participating in V's death and possible resurrection is the right thing to do? Was Elspeth as selfless as she claimed to be, or did she suspect that she would be able to inhabit V's body because V would be too weak?

The bones of a great novel are all there, but the body is a bit gaunt. Still, it's a fascinating read and worth the time.

ETA: I just read the NYT review, and there are two things I wish I had come up with myself: 1) that when pronounced with an English accent, "symmetry" and "cemetary" sound an awful lot alike, and 2) that the novel is concerned with "obsession" as much as anything else. I totally agree--the characters are engaged in a struggle to balance obsession with love, as well as identity.

The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Steig Larsson

This is the sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which I hated. So, why did I read the sequel? I don't know. I just did. And I am glad that it was an improvement in every way over its predecessor.

This book starts off rather slowly, with a lot of daily life of the eponymous heroine, Lisbeth Salander. When last we saw her, she had used her computer hacking skills to steal several billion kroner from a corrupt financier. When this book opens, Salander has used the money to travel, island hopping through the Caribbean. She has had some elective surgery in Italy, getting breast implants to look more womanly, and less like a 12 year old boy. She has also had her most visible tattoo--a wasp on her neck--removed. She has pulled out a couple of piercings as well. Could she be maturing?

We see her studying what can only be called "Extreme Maths," and puzzling over Fermat's Theorem, while covertly tracking the man from the next hotel room, who seems to be beating his wife. Salander has Definite Views on such behavior, and tries to figure out what is going on--she is tired of being kept awake by the sounds from their room. During a hurricane, she stops the man from killing his wife, saves the woman's life, and watches without much emotion as the man is swept away by the hurricane.

But none of this has anything to do with the plot of the book. It's just the kind of thing that happens to Salander. After this episode, she decides to go home to Sweden, where she continues to live as invisible a life as she can.

Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist is still a celebrity journalist, the expose of the corrupt financier that ended the last book has made him a star, restored his reputation, and made his little issues driven magazine a Major Player in journalism. Now, two years later, he is approached by a free-lance journalist who is working with his doctoral candidate girlfriend to document the sex slave trade in Sweden. This is just up the alley of the monthly magazine Millenium, and Blomkvist and co. are planning to publish the book, as well as simultaneously release a themed issue of the magazine at the same time.

Suddenly, the free-lancer and his girlfriend are found dead in their apartment, shot execution style. Not long afterwards, Salander's guardian (a real slimebag she put in his place in the last book) is also found dead, shot slightly before the journalist. Salander's prints are found on the gun used in all three deaths, and on a broken coffee cup in the journalist's apartment. The police decide she is their suspect, and the concentrate all their efforts on finding her.

All the details of Salander's trouble life are plastered over the media. Some things are true, some are invented, most are twisted to be as salacious as possible. At one point, she is characterized as a psychotic serial killer from a Satan-worshipping lesbian sex cult. Spin can be such a nasty weapon.

Because that is not the Salander we have come to know over the course of these two books. And a few people who actually know Salander don't believe the stories they are reading. None of them--for example Blomkvist, or her former employer Dragan Armensky--knew she had been declared incompetent or was under a guardianship, but still they could not quite believe the story as told by the police. And they undertake their own investigations.

The novel then documents the search for Salander, and the differing motives of all those looking for her. The prosecuting attorney is using the salacious details of the story to build up his own newsworthiness, planning to use the trial of Lisbeth Salander to gain political power of his own. Som eof the police involvwed are corrupt, or blatantly sexist and obssessed wtih any deviancy. Armansky has two employees assisting the police, one of who bears a grudge against Salander for discovering that he stole copies of compromising photos from a celebrity client and then sold them to a magazine. She warned him that she would be watching him, and he hated her for it, so he was willing to do anything to pin these three murders on her.

Blomkvist is convined that the murders have to do with the expose on sex=trafficking Millenium was going to publish. The police seem to be unable to consider anything other than Salander's guilt. Salander herself is absent for much of the middle third of the novel ans everyone else tries to figure out what is going on. Occasionally the mysterious name "Zala" bobs up, but no one can find who this is and what connection he has to these murders.

In the end, The Girl Who Played with Fire comes down to a battle between those who respect and trust Salander, and those who hate her obsessively. Those who hate her tend to be men who have run afoul of her strict moral code and have been caught at it, and forced to bend to her will. It is a strikingly sexist villiany that provides the engine of this plot. Nearly all the Bad Guys are men who think women should do as they tell them to do, and that a woman who resists a man's orders must be broken into submission. For them, Salander is their worst nightmare.

Salander isn't the only woman proving herself in what is mostly a man's world. Salander's friend Miriam Wu is a kick-boxer and fully emancipated woman who gets mixed up in the violence because of her friendship with Salander. Sonia Modig is the only woman on the police team searching for Salander, and she outs both the men who cannot understand women except in reference to their own obsessions and hatreds. Ericka Berger is the Editor in Chief of Millenium and is poised to become the editor of one of the largest newspapers in the country. Even one of the murder victims, the woman who was writing a thesis on sex-trafficking, was the one who had done the research and thinking about the issue, which her free-lance journalist boyfriend depended on for his book and for the Millenium articles.

So unlike Dragon Tattoo, this book is much less cruel to women, presenting a much more balanced view of gender relationships. Sure, some men are still cavemen about relating to women, but not all of them are. Not all of the women are merely victims either. Salander is unusually forthright in her defense of herself and her gender, but she is no longer the only one who is able to withstand men's attempts to define her.

The book isn't entirely free of the defects of the first one. There is still a lot of awkward detail: Salander goes to Ikea to buy furniture for her new apartment, and we get what amounts to a sales receipt of everything she purchased. Does the fact that she bought "a Hemnes bed" really tell us anything that a more general description wouldn't have done better? Maybe that is a Swedish thing, where simply listing the name of the Ikea product creates instant recognition. But later we see how Miriam furnished her apartment, and in that case we get a description of what it actually looked like, not just a list of the items in the room.

One of my big quibbles with Dragon Tattoo is that some of the most obvious clues were entirely overlooked until the very end of the book--surely someone would have thought to look at who benefited financially by the victim's death, for example. Such glaring inadequacies were kept to a minimum in Played with Fire. Sure, someone should have thought to talk to Slander's previous guardian when the most recent one turned up dead, but there is a pretty good case that the police were simply too pressed by time and political exigencies to do so right away. Blomkvist does eventually, and not too unbelievably late in the proceedings either.

Okay, kind of late, but he wasn't totally wasting his time before that, and by the time he did find her old guardian, he was in possession of facts that made the guardian's story understandable.

HERE BE SPOILERS.

It turns out that the mysterious Zala was a defecting member of the GRU, the military secret police in the Soviet Union. He had a gold mine of information and was incredibly valuable to the Swedish secret police for decades. However, the cost of keeping access to his information was that the Sapo had to clean up after his boozing and whoring ways. As used here, "clean up" is a phrase that actually means to "cover up."

Of course, Zala was Salander's father. He got her mother pregnant, and returned periodically to her, frequently beating her in the process. The last time happened when Salander was 12, and Zala beat her mother so badly that he caused brain injury and she never recovered. Salander tried to protect her mother by attacking Zala in his car, pouring a milk carton of gasoline into the car and tossing in a lighted match.

Zala was seriously injured in the explosion, but because of his special status, the result was that Salander was taken away and locked up in a children's psychiatric ward for 2-3 years. There, her "treatment" consisted of being strapped to a bed in a sensory deprivation room. This was presented as "care," but Salander experienced it as torture, and she learned to hate and distrust authorities. She refused to speak to any doctors or psychiatrists, and so was labelled a "mentally ill" but with no specific diagnosis, because she refused to co-operate.

The murders all go back to Zala. Her former guardian--the one who beat and raped her in the last book--had become obsessed with her and wanted to destroy her. He was also part of the Swedish Security Police (Sapo, kind of like the Swedish CIA) who had helped Zala defect. He asked Zala for help to get out from under Salander's control--Zala hated Salander as much as he did after all. But the journalist came to interview the guardian about Zala, and that meant that Zala had to kill all three of them to keep his identity secret. All three were executed by one of Zala's henchmen. It was just bad luck that Salander's fingerprints turned up at all.

Probably the weakest part of the book is the very end, an extended chase with an appalling amount of violence that somehow doesn't actually stop anybody. Salander tracks down her father's secluded hide-out, and goes after him. He is waiting for her--having spotted her on the infra-red security cameras. She managed to evade his thug, but he shoots her three times with a Browning--once in the hip, once below her shoulder blade, and once in the back of the head. She falls to the ground, and he dumps her into a shallow grave.

Weirdly, she wakes up, and manages to scratch her way to the surface. She ends up confronting Zala again in a woodshed, where she manages to hit him in the face and the leg with an axe, which weirdly doesn't kill him either. She leaves him locked in the woodshed, and again evades the thug, this time by being so frightening that he takes her for a monster from hell and runs away. He is then spotted by Blomkvist and tied up.

Salander checks her injuries, and touches her own brain through her head wound. She tries to stay awake, but goes unconscious with a gun in her hand. Blomkvist finds her and calls for an ambulance. And the book ends.

So--weird. But what Larsson has done much better this time is to paint how difficult it is to be a person out of power. If, like Salander, you don't have any social position or power, you can be ruined at the whim of others. As the police start discussing Salander's past, she looks like someone who should not be allowed into general society. As you see the world from her perspective, however, you realize that she is doing what she can to protect herself from the abuses of those who do have power. She refuses to be a victim, and by so refusing, she gets marginalized. It is easy for the police to believe that she is a triple murderer, because her record looks so bad when read with the idea that she might be a criminal.

The "reality" is that her record looks so bad because she is a victim who refuses to lie down. Really, how many standard deviations is she from the rest of the population? She tried to protect her mother from a violent abuser, and ended up in a psychiatric ward because the abuser was a national security secret. As long as she was alive, she was a threat to national security and so she had to be neutralized. The game was rigged against her from the start--and she had no way to know it. So as a 12 year old, she was locked away, and deliberately controlled in the interest of keeping Zala happy and producing intelligence.

I still find the amount of physical damage these characters experience to be excessive--especially at the end. I don't understand why anybody finds Mikael Blomkvist attractive, although at least three women seem to find him irresistible--women I otherwise admire. But Lisbeth Salander remains a compelling character, and if the third book in the series also has her as the focus, then I will even have more tolerance for the misleading nature of the title of Dragon Tattoo.

As a final note--I read this book electronically. Both Amazon and Barnes & Nobel have free e-book apps for the iPod Touch, and I read this one on my iPod. While the screen is much smaller than a book page, the experience was quite pleasant. I took my iPod on a weekend trip to North Carolina, and except for a short time during take-off and landing when all electronics had to be turned off, it was an excellent way to take a novel on a trip. The iPod couldn't be more portable, and so my carry on bag was much lighter than it would have been if I had packed the two physical novels I had loaded onto the iPod. My next experiment with an e-book on iPod is Audrey Neufenegger's follow up to her amazing The Time Traveler's Wife. The new book, Her Fearful Symmetry has been getting excellent reviews, and is the next book up.

The Prince and the Pauper, by Mark Twain

I bet, like me, you think you already know this story, don't you?





Two boys, oddly (and conveniently!) identical, change clothes and step into each others' lives. Each learns both the good and the bad of the other's world, and in the end they go back to their original positions, having learned a Moral Lesson about appreciating their own lives.

That sells the story short. After all, it was written by Mark Twain, NOT Little Golden Books.




(Or Disney, either!)

Twain was not interested in generically moralistic pablum for youth. In fact, "The Prince and the Pauper" is set concretely in a specific period of time in a specific location--London, in late January of 1547. The prince of the title is the future Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, and Twain is setting his sights on specific matters of injustice in a fashion nearly Dickensian.

Tom Canty, the pauper, is more than simply poor. His father is a brute and a criminal, his mother and sisters are illiterate and brutalized. Tom himself escapes the meanness of his own life by reading and creating his own small kingdom among the other poor boys of the area. Thus Twain is careful to create a plausible basis for how the boys carried off the switch.

The actual switch happens quickly--Tom is spotted gazing at the Prince of Wales, and having attracted the negative attention of the guards, is being beaten. Prince Edward, a "truly noble" lad, instructs the guard to bring the boy to him. He then takes Tom to his royal rooms, and listens to the stories of a boy who is free to go where he wishes. As a joke, they switch clothes, and only then do they see their amazing similarity. As Twain is making clear, even the victims of class rigidity cannot see themselves clearly. Tom and Edward cannot even see that they look alike until they see themselves literally in each other's place.

Some further injustice causes Edward to leave his rooms at Whitehall to correct matters, and when he is seen in Tom's rags, he is treated as a pauper and thrown out of the palace grounds. What follows are his adventures, dragging him across London and back, meeting the victims of his father's harsh laws against begging, stealing, religious practice. No one believes him to be the Prince, no matter what he says, and they all take him for having lost his mind. Edward finds one champion, a dispossessed soldier who takes him in as his own son and humors him in his belief that he is the Prince.

Tom, meanwhile, is similarly determined to be mad, since no one will believe he is not the prince, despite his failure to recognize anyone or remember any of the thousand things he should. Nevertheless, he is treated kindly by Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, and he begins to enjoy himself. At first terrified that he is going to be discovered and thrown into the Tower, his most frightening moments come when he is called into his "father's" presence. Yet, despite his terrible reputation, Henry VIII is kind and loving to his son.

The situation becomes deeply serious when Henry VIII dies. Edward doesn't learn of it for several days, and is heartbroken to have lost his father. He also knows he will have to get back to his rightful place in time for the coronation. Tom manages to lull himself into a sort of denial, until he sees his mother while on procession through London. He denies her, and then suffers from great guilt and homesickness, and wants to end this charade as soon as possible.

While Edward is battling to get back to Westminster, Twain gives us a wonderful description of the arrangements for a royal coronation, including the wonderful details about just how long the nobles and peeresses have to sit in Westminster Abbey before the ceremony begins, so that they are all in place in time. I happened to have seen a show about QE II's coronation just a week ago, and then as well, people who were fortuneate enough to be inside the Abbey for the ceremony had to arrive as much as EIGHT HOURS beforehand. It was eerily similar to Twain's recounting of Edward's coronation.

Finally, finally, finally, Tom and Edward are in the same place at the same time, at the very moment before the Archbishop of Canterbury is about to place the crown on Tom's head. Edward appears in the aisle, insisting the ceremony halt, and Tom backs him up. Tests are propounded, and at the last, the boys are properly sorted out.

What makes the story so much better than my conception of it is the way that Twain uses the historic people of the time. Somehow, I was surprised to meet that old nemesis Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, in these pages. He and his son are mentioned as being imprisoned and attainted in the Tower of London, and Henry VIII orders their execution immediately. Which actually happened, and Henry Howard was beheaded on January 27, 1547, Thomas Howard was supposed to die the next day, but during the night, Henry died, and no one felt it right to start off the new king's reign with an execution. All of which Twain faithfully records.

The end of the story is also more historic than I would have guessed. Soon after Edward VI's coronation, he and the Lord Protector, his uncle Edward Seymour, repealed many of the most tyrannical of Henry's laws, including just about every form of treason enacted since the reign of Edward III (which ended in 1483). King Edward founded a school for boys, having learned from his experience that education was the best route for improving the lot of his subjects, and he gave Tom a special status of "King's Ward," allowing Tom and his family to leave poverty behind forever.

As a historical novel, it's a rollicking yarn with some real history included. There is an odd aside toward the end, where Twain compares the "blue laws" of New England with the laws of Tudor England, and points out that however hated those blue laws were, they were less rigorous than the English laws.

I mentioned before that Twain is almost "Dickensian" in his story. He places his characters in the most disturbing of social conditions, making the reader become emotionally involved and outraged by the injustices portrayed. Unlike Dickens, however, Twain has portrayed injustices some 300 years old--hard to really get irate about that. Which left me wondering what was the point of this story? It isn't to advocate social reform, like Dickens did; it isn't to develop an Educating Moral. But then, who says there has to be a point? As a swift and engaging story with a coherent theme about "clothes making the man," it doesn't need any other justification for being.





This, however, does require some 'splaining.

Revelation, by C.J. Sansom

The fourth of the Matthew Shardlake mysteries, starring the hunchback lawyer during the reign of Henry VIII. This one is set in 1543, and the king has set his sights on the recently widowed Lady Latymer, or as we know her, Catherine Parr.

The king's health is failing, and his ulcerated sores make him nearly immobile and increasingly fat. His pending mortality is obvious and may be the reason he continues to retreat from religious reform. Of course, the cat has already been released from the bag, and various forms of congregations have sprung up from the most conservative "Catholics without the Pope," to the "Hot Gospelers" who focus on pre-destination and are smug in their own perceived purity. The King is trying to return the country to old forms of worship, but it's already too late.

As a reward for his previous service, Shardlake has been appointed as counsel to the Court of Requests, a sort of civil court for poor people. Shardlake has been happily handing the cases assigned to him, and when the novel opens he has a case of a boy who has been placed in Bedlam by the privy council. Young Adam Kite has been praying for a sign he has been saved, and has made a spectacle of himself, demonstrating the new religion at a time when the old forms are ascendant. So the Privy Council has him shut up in Bedlam to keep things as quiet as possible.

Then an old friend of Shardlake's is found with his throat cut in the frountain at Lincoln's Inn and the inquest is cut short. Out of loyalty to his friend and love for the widow, Shardlake vows to find the killer. Of course, things are never simple in Tudor London--Archbishop Cranmer has ordered the inquest to be closed because there is concern that this murder might be linked to another that points to a threat to Catherine Parr. And Cranmer wants her to marry Henry because she is a reformer and the cause needs someone like that to influence the king.

Once again, Shardlake is caught up in politics against his will. Although this time the politics are really in the background. Sure, Cranmer is under attack by more conservative religious members of the Privy Council, but there is no sense that this case will have any effect on that. There is a whiff of strategic positioning: Henry is old and ill, and whoever is in a position to serve as Regent to the boy Edward is going to have a great deal of control over the religion of the country. Catherine Parr, as a Reformer herself, would be in a good position to advance the new religion after Henry's death--if she survives him. But the existence of a psychopathic murderer really doesn't affect those considerations, and so the link to the broader history of the time is much weaker here than in the earlier books.

Soon, however, it becomes apparent that the killer is not political, but a religious psychopath, killing repeatedly in ways suggested by the Book of Revelations, his victims former reformers who have become backsliders. This is where the book becomes gruesome--an "Angels and Demons" for renaissance England. Corpses are found mutilated and tortured--although arguably these deaths are no more gory than the Tudor penchant for burning heretics alive, as well as drawing and quartering and other judicial tortures. The peaceful expressions on the victims' faces lead to the conclusion that they were given a sedative before they were killed, which turns the focus onto the former infirmarians at Westminster Abbbey as the only persons in London who had the knowledge to administer such drugs.

Matthew Shardlake and his strongman Jack Barak are lead this time by the Assistant Coroner of London, himself a "Gospel man" and reformer, and are assisted at times by Sir Thomas Seymour, a real historical personage who had his own interest in Catherine Parr. We are treated to death by multiple stab wounds and resultant infection (also flesh eating maggots--ewwwww); immolation; vitriol burns and tongue mutilation; a naked corpse nailed across a water gate; a corpse with tiny nails imbedded in its face to simulate a smile; as well as some garden variety stab wounds and beatings--the extras thrown in to cover the murderer's trail.

A surprising number of "clues" turn out to be false--the killer is supposed to be tremendously strong, but it turns out he has a wheelbarrow. He is preternaturally informed about people's religious and social lives, but it turns out he has paid informants and also cases his victims while in disguise. He seems to have a great deal of medical and legal knowledge, but this turns out to be exaggerated. He seems to have particular animosity toward lapsed reformers--I still don't know why that is the case, since in the end it turns out he was formerly a monk. Perhaps that was explained in a part that I missed by falling asleep while listening.

Sansom does illuminate what it must have been like to have been caught in that time of theological debate. From where we sit nearly 500 years later, we tend to see Hanry's break with Rome as being purely an expedient to get rid of his old wife and get a new trophy wife. But the "new religion" was more than a question of whether the Pope has jurisdiction over the King of England. And once the Bible was widely available in English, there were suddenly a wide variety of interpretations. Breaking with Rome was one thing, creating a new theology was another. In fact, a truly "Anglican" form of worship was not created until the reign of Edward VI. So religious uncertainty was added to the other uncertainties of Henry's reign. It was a dangerous time to live, and one of great economic disparity and harsh criminal laws and penalties.

Still, somehow the book didn't quite work for me. Maybe it was just too much of a plot to leave much room for the broader social picture. A serial killer with a literary bent and a long list of murders to complete is really quite enough--just ask Dan Brown. The religious issues felt rather distant--the murders were not really believably about the religious issues of the time, but about one crazy man's God complex, which is far from unique to Tudor England.

Add to that that some of the mechanics of the book stood out for me this time. Once again, Matthew Shardlake "has feelings" for a woman, but doesn't tell her about them because he thinks no one could love a hunchback. Then something happens so that he "dares to hope" but ultimately he gets shot down. Maybe having a real love interest, or none at all? This device is getting old.

I was also more aware of the numerous times the characters stop and reiterate what is happening in the plot, either alone or in conversation. "Could it be. . .? But what about. . .? Maybe it's another person? But how could it be someone else when. . .?" Again, a place where reading the book would have allowed me to skip over the tedious recapping, which was much harder to do with an audiobook.

I have enjoyed these books as fictionalized history, using the device of a mystery to animate a fascinating time. This time around, it seems the mystery took pride of place over the historical atmosphere, and that's what I missed the most.

Sovereign, by C.J. Sansom

This is the third book in the Matthew Shardlake series. I had seen this title promoted in a couple of places, and then we went to York. In honor of the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII's crowning, the city of York was giving away free copies of the book and holding a number of events related to it all summer.

Set in 1541, Henry VIII is "progressing" from London to York. With 3000 people in tow, including his newest wife Katherine Howard, Henry is making a show of strength to the North. Five years earlier, some 30,000 men joined a "Pilgrimage of Grace," objecting to Henry's new religion and general treatment of the North. Henry and his advisor Wolsey promised negotiations, dispersed the crowd, then ruthlessly hunted down and killed the leaders. Robert Aske, the spokesman for the Pilgrimage, was hanged in chains--which means he was left to die of thirst and starvation, and his bones are still suspended over York Castle at the start of "Sovereign."

Yes, Henry VIII has developed into a cruel and tyrannical king, and the ceremonies planned for his arrival in York include the abasement and humiliation of the city's Council for their failure to prevent the Pilgrimage of Grace. Our hero, Matthew Shardlake, is sent to York to hear petitions from the people of York, to dispense "The King's Justice." He is also charged with seeing that a suspected rebellion leader is brought safely to London to be tortured at the Tower.

Shardlake continues to suffer a crisis of conscience. Originally a fervent supporter of Henry's break with Rome and the new Reformed religion, Shardlake is seeing that the ideals of religion are being corrupted by greed and ambition, and that the king he admired has become casually cruel and unpredictible. Shardlake wants nothing more than to keep his head down and live a quiet life unnoticed by those in power. Unfortunately, his previous work for Cardinal Wolsey has been notice by Wolsey's successor, and he is pressed into joining the King's Progress.

Things get complicated quickly, even before the Progress reaches York. A glazier is found murdered, impaled on a shard of glass. Before he dies, he whispers to Shardlake "No son of Henry and Katherine can be the true heir. She knows." Shardlake can't resist puzzling over the meaning of this statement, and thus he leads himself into further trouble. Visiting the glazier's house, he discovers an old box full of strange documents. An odd royal geneology, an act of parliment called the "Titulus Regulus" and a handwritten document that appears to be a confession of someone called "Edward Blaybourne." But before he can properly examine these documents, someone coshes him over the head and steals the papers.

There is also the matter of the prisoner--a young man whose bravery in the face of the torture facing him rattles Shardlake. The prisoner points out that Shardlake's job is to deliver him to London well enough for the torture to last even longer, and Shardlake's conscience is shaken. When the prisoner is found poisoned, Shardlake figures out how it was done and again has to quettion whether he was doing something immoral in saving a life only so that it could be ended in torture.

My favorite parts of this novel take place in York--a city that I totally fell in love with while we were there. Many of the sites of the novel still exist today, most notably the York Minster, the cathedral that was already over 300 years old at the time of Henry VIII. The King's Manor still stands, the last of the buildings of St. Mary's Abbey that was dissolved and repurposed to hold the Progress. Characters enter through the Bootham Bar, the gate to the walled part of the city where we walked to get to our hotel.

The plot is quite complicated, and requires an awful lot of history to be explained in order to follow what is going on. The murderer of the glazier is discovered about half way through, but the motive is connected to the larger issue of rebellion against Henry VIII. York was the home of the Plantagenet kings Edward IV and Richard III, who was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry VIII's father. A convoluted issue of whether Henry VIII is a "true king" because he has only the smallest drops of royal blood takes a long time to explain. At issue is an old claim that Edward IV was an illegitimate son of the Duchess of York (Cecily Neville) and an archer from Kent. When Henry Tudor took the crown from Richard III, he married Elizabeth of York (daughter of Edward IV) to unite the houses of York and Lancaster and put an end to the Wars of the Roses. But if Elizabeth was not truly a "daughter of York" but only the offspring of an adulterous affair with an anonymous archer, then Henry VIII wasn't technically royal and should not be king.

This is a pretty shaky basis for an uprising, if you ask me. How much "royal blood" is enough, anyway? Just one drop? No matter how he got there, Henry VIII has everything he needs to stay on the throne--he's got armies, and money, and a navy, and fortresses, and torturers, and dungeons--all the apparatus of the state. He's also got no rivals--by 1514 he's executed the last of the Plantagenets in England. The only remaining member of that family is a cardinal in Rome. No dynasty there! Henry VIII is in no danger of being ousted from the throne.

There is a secondary plot--obvious to those who know their Tudor sex scandals. Queen Katherine's reign is perilously close to its end. In November of 1541, Henry VIII is presented with evidence of Queen Katherine's infidelity. This issue is a bit of a red herring--could this be the reason for the claim that "no child of Katherine and Henry can be the true heir?" Because it would not be Henry's child? No, this is incidental to the plot, although it is a dangerous secret to know.

About halfway through, the novel moves toward London where, in a carry over from "Dark Fire," Shardlake continues to press a suit against the powerful Sir Richard Rich, a real historical figure. After refusing to be warned off, Shardlake finds himself arrested and taken to the Tower of London to be tortured. He is actually subjected to a vise on his jaw, and the passage is quite disturbing. It makes it even harder to condone the use of torture as a method of information gathering and reinforces the sense of Tudor England as a very scary place to be.

The strength of the novel is in the evocation of Renaissance England as seen by someone who is really rather average--neither royal nor living at court, but a private citizen who struggles with his own ethical boundaries. Definitely worth the read.