The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd--the finale

 I am wondering about whether this book is really this disappointing, or if it has to do with my expectations of it. Because what I had heard definitely set my expectations, and then the book profoundly failed to meet them.

Let's pick up the story after the first quarter previously reviewed. When last we left Ana, she was being stoned in the marketplace for being an unmarried widow--her betrothed died before the actual marriage ceremony. Jesus stands between her and the mob, and promises to marry her, which takes the wind out of the sails of the mob and they leave. 

There is some plot I left out here--Ana was being groomed for seduction by Herod Antipas. That's the King Herod you know from the Bible. Is this the one who ordered the Slaughter of the Innocents? Kidd doesn't accuse him of that particular atrocity, but everything else? Yup, that's the one.

For some reason, Herod sees her, decides to use her as the model for a new mosaic he is having installed. This is how you know that the Romans are bad--because their love of interior decor has led Herod astray from the commandment against graven images. Herod is also a creepy dude, so since he's in service (and inspired by) the Romans, they must be terrible. Thus Judas is entirely justified in his terroristic/guerilla warfare. Which is less "war" and more "random violence and property destruction."

There is some mishegas where because Ana is this unmarried widow/spoiled goods situation, it's not clear that she can have any kind of respectable marriage. So her father brokers a deal with Herod where Ana will be taken in at the royal palace as a concubine. But she is Too! Good! For! This! and she rebels, insults Herod, steals some valuable hammered ivory to write on, and runs away from the palace. This is the accusation that nearly gets her stoned to death before Jesus appears in her life again. (Somehow in all of this she meets Herod's first wife, and they become soul sisters or something, which becomes important later.)

So having ruined this politically and economically advantageous match--Herod isn't interested any more--there is nothing left but for Ana and Jesus to marry off-screen, and she goes to Nazareth to start her new life.

Nazareth turns out to be a pretty impoverished village. Joseph has died, Jesus is pretty much considered to be illegitimate, so he has to go find work in other places. Ana is left alone (with Yaltha still) with Jesus's family--two brothers, a bitchy shit-stirring woman married to one of the brothers, a widowed sister, and his mother Mary. Mary is--of course--wonderful and loving. The sister is named Salome, but not THAT one. 

As rushed and this section is, it does contain some bits of realism that seem to be missing in the rest of the book. Ana turns out to be terrible at domestic chores expected of her--because she has literally never done any of that before. Jesus is gone a lot, picking up odd jobs where he can, and his absences create tension between Ana and this family she doesn't actually know. 

The book fast forwards through about seven years of impoverished domesticity. There is the whole "Ana doesn't want to have children, but 1st century contraception isn't fool proof, Ana gets pregnant, baby is born prematurely while Jesus is away, baby is born dead, Ana has an abbreviated crisis of identity--does she want to have more children or not? And will she ever have time again to write?

This is where you get the sense that Kidd has set herself a task she is just not up to executing. Seven years of close quarters domesticity would be where the book could really dig into Jesus as a man, as a Jew, as a 1st century Galilean, as seen through the eyes of the woman closest to him. This is where I was hoping   learn about how traditional Jewish practices informed his ministry, and how it differed from them. There are enticing nuggets--how in his search for work, Jesus met other gig economy types, and forged relationships with the men who would eventually become his disciples.

But so much of what happens with Jesus happens off-screen. We get some cute antics--Jesus and Ana go to the temple and release the sacrificial animals and run away, clearly foretelling the incident with the moneychangers. But for the most part, Jesus is absent from the narrative during this time. There is very little sense of how Judaism is practiced, how Jesus struggles with his understanding of God and his role. I strongly suspect that Kidd ships him off to look for work so she can avoid doing precisely this work. 

After about seven years of this, the Big Events happen. Ana introduces Jesus to her brother Judas, who has shown up to tell her that their mother has died. And Jesus and Ana meet "John the Immerser," and both get baptized. This sets up Jesus to confront his own destiny and launch his own ministry.

But Kidd is also not really equipped to handle this either. So Ana is left at home while Jesus follows John into the wilderness. "It's not that I think women shouldn't come along, Ana, but it's John's followers who are going to hate it...." Sure Jan.

So--more plot to the rescue! When Judas comes to Nazareth, he has political gossip! Herod wants to be elevated to "King of the Jews" by the Romans, and Ana's father recommends that Herod needs a well-connected Roman wife. So he's got to get rid of that inconvenient first wife, possibly by murdering her. So Ana writes a letter to her BFF warning her to flee, signs her name to it (!), and sends it off. 

First wife flees the palace and returns to her home country. Since the marriage was designed to stave off a war with that country, her returning touches off renewed hostilities, in addition to being a big humiliation for Herod. Servants get tortured, and Ana's part in this gets revealed. So Ana has to go run off to Egypt to avoid arrest just as Jesus starts his own ministry.

So everything that I thought a book about "Jesus's wife" might do--doesn't happen. Ana has faffed off to Alexandria, engages in challenging the patriarchy, puts other people at risk for her own sense of rightness, finds Yaltha's long lost daughter, and ends up hiding out in a spiritual retreat center, where she is immediately recognized as a Towering Talent and has all the time and materials she needs to write. She hangs out there until she gets word that Jesus has been arrested. 

So now it is Back To Jerusalem with all deliberate speed. People are put at risk of arrest and death to get Ana to Jesus, (it never occurs to her that this is maybe too high a price to pay to see a husband she has basically abandoned for 3 years) and she arrives in time to watch him on his walk to Golgotha. She reconnects with the Nazareth crew, sees Jesus die, and then hightails it back to Egypt before Kidd has to deal with any inconveniences around resurrection.

There is an epilogue where all the women join this spiritual retreat community and spend decades being at peace and Ana eventually makes copies of everything she has been writing (not clear what all that was, but I'm pretty sure I will be disappointed in that too, so I'm not really complaining) and seals them in jars and buries them. Maybe they will turn up, like the Dead Sea Scrolls did!

So did I hate it? I started there, but by the time I got through the first 25%, it was just a mild dislike. Is it because the book is not good, it is because my expectations were mis-set, or am I just impossible to please? Here are some questions I am asking to address that.

What does having Ana married to Jesus actually do for the book? Having the story framed as "the wife of Jesus" certainly affected how I came to this book. And a lot of my disappointment comes from the squandering of that premise. If it had instead been a book about a a first century Galilean woman, whose life brushes occasionally across Jesus's but is only incidentally connected--I might have had more patience with it. If Ana had met him as she did in the first quarter, but NOT married him, then it would have been more clearly HER story, not her perspective on him. 

I think the "married to Jesus" aspect threw the book out of balance for me. For example, I had zero patience or interest in what was happening in that retreat center, because it felt like a dodge to get the protagonist away from having to witness, interpret, and recount the life of Jesus. 

If the book had not been about their marriage, then I might have been interested in the account of a non-Jewish, non-Christian tradition that was in existence at that time. As it was, it felt like a plot contrivance rather than anything meaningful.

What does having Ana be Judas's sister do for the book? Again, this is a potentially explosive relationship that the book just does not address. Judas spends most of the book somewhere else--there is very little relationship between him and Ana. Nor do we see much of the interaction between Judas and Jesus--they are constantly walking away so they can talk without Ana overhearing. So why make the relationship so close? Why not make the meeting between them accidental? If Ana doesn't actually provide any insights into the relationship, there isn't any reason to make this relationship exist at all.

Is this just the weaknesses of historical fiction?  So many historical fictions are saddled with the protagonist having to meet every single famous historical person in the time period, and this felt like an egregious example of that. It's also more loaded because this isn't like Johnny Tremaine working for Paul Revere and being at Valley Forge during the American Revolution. This is taking two of the most seminal figures of a major world religion, and inventing the closest of relationship ties.

The problem pervades the book. It's Ana's father who sets up the marriage between Herod and Herodias, which leads to the beheading of John the Baptist. It's Ana who precipitates the conflict between Jesus's peaceful ministry and Judas's preference for armed insurrection--because without her, they wouldn't have met and Jesus would not have been betrayed. 

While I am hugely skeptical of this sort of Narrativium overdosing, I am willing to allow it if it illuminates something. If we got to see how Jesus's domestic life informed his ministry. If we saw how Jesus and Judas disputed over time, and how Judas came to betray his friend. What remorse did Judas have--or maybe he didn't? Did he hang himself, or was he lynched? Really digging into how these people might have interacted as humans, rather than as the mythic figures they are in the Bible--well, that's what I was hoping for.

Instead, almost all of these big moments are just reported. Ana has no more insight into them than we do.

The Verdict

I would not recommend this book as a story of the wife of Jesus and the sister of Judas. I might recommend it (with some significant reservations) if it had been about a young woman's search for spiritual meaning in the context of first century Galilee. I would not recommend it if you have already read The Red Tent--it felt very much the same.

Nor is "Jesus was married" all that interesting in this context. More minds were blown by the possibility that Jesus was married by The Da Vinci Code, which came out about 17 years earlier. 

Ultimately, by using major religious figures, Kidd is playing with explosive material she is not equipped to handle. If she had stripped down the story to minimize the representation of Jesus, it would have been a novel that was slightly better than average mildest fiction designed to appeal to women.

The Book of Longings, by Sue Monk Kidd (The first quarter)

 I liked The Secret Life of Bees when I read it ages ago. I liked the formal structure, where the facts about bees and their social structure and the science of beekeeping served as a framework for the story being told about a girl growing up in a largely female society. It resonated. It felt like Kidd was taking metaphors and examining them for the wisdom they could offer, but was also aware of the limitations of strictly equating bee and human behavior.

So I was willing to consider that she could do the same with her most recent book. The Book of Longings is described as a book about a first century Jewish woman who is married to Jesus and is sister to Judas. Based on the promotional materials, it promises to show Jesus as a fully human man, viewed through the filter of domestic life in turbulent times.

As of this writing, I have finished the first section of the book, and so far, I am not encouraged.

The first quarter of this book covers about a year, in which our protagonist Ana approaches the transition from a child in her parents' home to marriage. Structurally I expect this part of the book to show us the status quo--what is the social/economic/religious foundation that Jesus arises from, and which his teachings challenge. What are the attitudes and experiences that form the basis of daily life, as well as the exceptional experiences? What are the benefits--tradition, stability, power, wealth--and the draw backs--oppression, poverty, fear, violence? Who is our protagonist, how is she situated in this culture, and how does that affect what we will see about the value of the change Jesus and Judas are fighting for?

So far, the picture painted is not encouraging. I do not feel that I am in the hands of an insightful guide. (A quick search of the internet shows me that Sue Monk Kidd was raised Baptist in Georgia, but has moved to mystic Christianity over her life. Not necessarily the background of someone who can explain the soil from which the figure of Jesus was grown.)

In the first quarter of the book, Ana is 15. Her father is highly placed in society, a scribe to Herod Antipas, the tetrarch (ruler of a quarter) we know from the Bible as King Herod. Ana is not like other girls (have you read this book before, because I have) because she doesn't care for jewelry and shopping, she doesn't want to get married, she holds her traditional mother in contempt. Unlike other girls, her father has allowed her to learn to read and write, and that is all she wants to do. Which seems fine to me--it's not like we see that she has anything else to do in this book. She doesn't participate in any running of the household, seems to have no chores, no social life...honestly, no wonder she is bored.

But now she is 15, so it's time to get married I guess. Not clear why this is such a surprise to her, or why she doesn't seem to have any interest in getting away from the parents she obviously despises. I guess since she doesn't seem to know any other people, or have any siblings, she doesn't have any ideas about it.

Oh, there is this aunt who lives with them in the compound, who is herself a disgrace and is supposed to not be around Ana or give her dangerous ideas. Yaltha is a widow (which is a Bad Thing to be) whose husband beat her regularly until he died suddenly and she was suspected of poisoning him. Her brother has taken her in out of family obligation, but Ana's mother hates Yaltha and forbids Ana from spending time with her.

Not clear what Yaltha does all day either, but the two of them sneak out at night and sit on the roof and talk about how unfair the world is to women. Which--it is. No question. But they are the only ones who see it I guess. Because they are special and everybody around them are just sheep. Or evil. Or evil sheep (Ana's mother, I guess.)

Because Ana's big crisis is in this part of the book is that she is betrothed to an old man who has some kind of quid pro quo with her father and she is collateral damage. (Dad wants to own property, Husband-to Be wants to leverage Dad's proximity to Herod. HtB doesn't actually want to get married to Ana, and it's not clear why Dad threw her into the mix. What does he get out of it?) The day she first sees her betrothed is also the day she meets Jesus in the marketplace, and it is chemical attraction and love at first sight for her with Jesus. 

Look--these stories happen! They get told over and over because they can be powerful. But because of that, it is important HOW they are told. Pride & Prejudice, Shakespeare in Love, Tristan and Isolde, Monsoon Wedding, the entirety of Arthurian legend. Probably also many of the stories referred to in Ana's writings (she allegedly is writing out the stories of the women of the Torah.)  Many women are given few choices in life, and the conflict between who they are allowed to marry and who they love is powerful! Economic uncertainty, the struggle of the individual to find fulfillment with the strictures of their society--these are stories that surround us. But given that I have so many options to encounter this story, I don't want to waste my time with a dull and irritating version.

Which so far, this is. Ana doesn't actually do anything interesting--she is defined mostly by the awfulness of the people around her. Her mother is terrible--because her mother basically just tells Ana not to do the things that Ana wants to do. There is no explanation or understanding of WHY her mother doesn't want Ana to wander around the hills and caves with only a single servant in tow. Or why she doesn't want Ana spending her days reading the writing, or talking to Yaltha. Or why she is so anxious to get Ana married off.

But Ana manages to do all these things anyway, and then the two women just glare daggers at each other. And sure, I want everybody to get what they want--I am generally in favor of self-actualization! But Ana's condescension and reflexive opposition doesn't seem principled, or understanding of others. And this is a problem with the book, because while a 15 year old girl in first century Galilee might not understand much of anything, I want the author to! 

For example, compare this to Pride and Prejudice, where Lizzy is witty and smart, a bit rude, condescending her self, but also periodically redeemed by her love and admiration of Jane, her worry and care for Lydia, her kind ness to her father, and Austen herself makes fun of Mrs. Bennett, but you understand why she is so fixated on getting her daughters well-married. The economic anxiety is real. Mr. Bennet is not rising to the occasion, and Mrs. Bennet is ill-equipped for the job that has been dumped on her.

Austen shows empathy even while being quite cutting to people and their weaknesses. You don't actually like all her characters, but they have appealing moments, they have nuance. Wickham is appealing until his true colors are revealed. Lydia is obnoxious, but also pitiable. Mr. Collins is a subject of mockery and distain, until Charlotte marries him and then even Lizzie has to find something good in him.

But The Book of Longings so far doesn't trade in any such nuance. Ana is the smartest, richest, most educated and most beautiful girl in all of Sapphoris and so she is obviously the victim here. Oppression is fine for all the sheeple around her, but she is too good for this. Sure, she goes out to the hills with a single servant, and breaks all the social rules by meeting Jesus alone and eating with him. So--her mother was right then?

And when her repulsive betrothed actually dies of a plague, Ana is now "damaged goods." Betrothal is nearly the same as being married, and so now she is a widow, but also a harlot and a whore. So Jesus has to step in and prevent her from being stoned to death by a mob, by promising to marry her. "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

(So we get Jesus's Greatest Hits too.)

Let's not forget Judas. Judas is fighting to get the Romans out of Galilee. He's part of a guerrilla/terrorist organization that has forced him into hiding. But he's a Good Guy, as he shows up and promises to get his sister (half-sister?) out of her betrothal to the old man Nathaniel. Judas burns down Nathaniel's date farm, while being very obvious and declaring who he is. 

Of course, this is dangerous--it threatens the entire family's income if Herod feels he can't use a scribe whose son goes around committing terrorist acts. But Dad disavows Judas and Dad is cast as the Bad Guy here, rather than Judas.  Mostly because the book is entirely filtered through whether Ana gets what she wants or not. Judas is against Ana marrying Nathaniel, Dad is in favor, and so that's the moral calculus. 

I know that everything is much more complicated than that, and I want this book to acknowledge it and explain just how complicated everything is. I fear I am going to continue to be disappointed.

Judas is fighting to get rid of the Romans. So far, the evil presented by "the Romans" has been limited to inciting Herod to install figurative decorations inside his palace in contravention of the Second Law of Moses (no graven images). I can't keep this scene out of my head. From Monty Python's Life of Brian.

REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers. 

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers. 

REG: Yeah. 

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers. 

REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?! 

XERXES: The aqueduct? 

REG: What? 

XERXES: The aqueduct. 

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah. 

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation. 

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like? 

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done. 

MATTHIAS: And the roads. 

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads-- 

COMMANDO: Irrigation. 

XERXES: Medicine. 

COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh... 

COMMANDO #2: Education. 

COMMANDOS: Ohh... 

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough. 

COMMANDO #1: And the wine. 

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah... 

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh. 

COMMANDO: Public baths. 

LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg. 

FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this. 

COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh. 

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? 

XERXES: Brought peace. 

REG: Oh. Peace? Shut up!

http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Life_of_Brian/10.htm

Will this get better? Will I even read it? As of now, there is no way to tell!

A Murder Is Announced, by Agatha Christie

 What a classic, escape-room-y set up! In the tiny fictional English village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local Gazette publishes a personal ad. "A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED... Friends are advised to accept this, their only intimation."

Date (doesn't matter), time is 6:30, location is "Little Paddocks" because Agatha Christie houses all have names!

A group of about 12 people end up gathering out of curiosity, thinking it might be a "murder game." At the appointed time, as the clock finishes chiming the half hour, the lights go out and the front door opens. A man's voice yells "Hands up!" as a dazzling flashlight plays around the room. Two shots ring out, chaos erupts, the man spins and a third shot is heard.

When the lights are restored, the owner of the house is bleeding copiously from her ear, while two bullet holes are visible in the wall behind her head. The robber is dead in the doorway.

Who would have wanted to murder Miss Letitiia Blacklock? Did the robber die by accident or suicide?

In order to remember this plot, a cast of characters is recommended.

The Suspects:

Living at Little Paddocks:

• Letitia Blacklock, lady of the house, in her 60s (also the main character)
• Dora Bunner, her elderly fluttery childhood friend, usually known by her nickname, "Bunny"

• Patrick and Julia Simmons, Miss Blacklock's spoiled and foolish young cousins (who call her "Aunt" due to the difference in ages)
• Mitzi, Miss Blacklock's foreign housekeeper and cook, a young refugee
• Phillipa Haymes, a young widowed paying guest/gardener with a young son at boarding school

Neighbors:

• Colonel Archie Easterbrook, blustery old colonel just returned from India
• Laura Easterbrook, his considerably younger, glamorous wife
• Mrs Swettenham, elderly lady who dotes on her son, Edmund
• Edmund Swettenham, cynical young writer
• Miss Hinchcliffe, physically fit, tough lady farmer
• Miss Amy Murgatroyd, Miss Hinchcliffe's sweet-dispositioned, giggly companion
• Belle Goedler, dying widow of Letitia's former wealthy employer
• Julian Harmon, the vicar
• Diana "Bunch" Harmon, the vicar's wife
• Tiglath Pileser, the vicarage cat
• Rudi Scherz, a young man of Swiss extraction, the receptionist at a local spa
• Myrna Harris, girlfriend of the latter, waitress at local spa

The Detectives:

• Miss Jane Marple
• Inspector Dermot Eric Craddock
• Chief Constable George Rydesdale, Craddock's superior
• Detective Sergeant Fletcher, assisting Craddock
• Constable Legg

(Cast of characters copy pasted from Wikipedia)

Published in 1950, the book has that timeless Christie quality. There are some references to "the War" probably, but was that WWI or WWII? There is Colonel Easterbrook, just returned from India--3 years AFTER partition? No mention of that horror having any effect. No, the colonel could have been posted at anytime, back at any time, Britain could still be the raj for all this book acknowledges the actual time period. This book could be set at any time from 1924-1976--basically the scope of Christie's career.

THIS IS HER 50TH NOVEL!

So, what happens?

Classic Christie format: We begin with vignettes of the various households, reading the newspaper. We get a sense of who the assembled parties will be--what we don't know is who will be a victim, and who will be the perpetrator. It's rather the fun of a book like this to try to spot the plot before the plot is actually set into motion.

The murder is announced via newspaper personals advertisement. Various characters intrigued. Letty Blacklock, the owner of Little Paddocks, is particularly surprised, but certain that the neighbors will turn up, she puts together a little party set up, and indeed, people arrive. At 6:30, the clock chimes, the lights go out, a door swings open, someone yells "Stick 'em up!" and a flashlight swings around the room. Two shots are fired, the flashlight is dropped, a third shot is fired, then all goes quiet. Very exciting!

When the lights are back on (somebody had to find the fuse box), the burglar is dead, and 2 bullet holes are in the wall behind Letty Blacklock's head!  She is bleeding from the ear--she was the target, but why?

Bunny recognizes the "burglar" as a receptionist from the nearby hotel--a man named Rudi Scherz, who had approached Letty for money recently. She turned him down--was that the motive for the burglary? And how did he die? Did he accidentally fall on his gun?

Of course, it's much more complicated than that. There is a legacy--Letty had worked as secretary to a very successful financier, himself dead for quite some time. But his widow Belle. is still alive--but once she dies, the money comes to Letty.

Or, if Letty pre-deceases Belle, the money goes to "Pip and Emma" a pair of twins who are the niece and nephew of the financier. So there is motive to kill Letty?

Much is discovered--Patrick and Julia are pulling a scam--"Julia" is actually Emma, one of the missing twins who stands to inherit if Letty predeceases Belle. Philippa turns out to be "Pip"--the other twin. 

Other people die--Bunny takes an aspirin from Letty's bottle, is found dead the next morning. Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd (coded lesbians!) try to reenact the drama of the night, Murgatroyd realizes "She wasn't there" and is soon found strangled.

Miss Marple happens to be staying at the hotel where Rudi Scherz was working, and she. comes in and figures it all out. Letty is not the intended victim, she is the perpetrator! 

Because Letty is NOT Letty, she is actually Letty's sister, Charlotte. Letty and Lottie went to Switzerland during the war, where Lottie had goiter surgery, and met Rudi Scherz there. After the war ended, "Letty" returned to England, saying that "Lottie" had died. The inheritance, you see. 

But Rudi recognized her, and he had to be silenced. Letty set up the situation, exited the room and shot twice at where she had been standing, then killed Rudi with the third shot. She nicked her own ear and returned to her spot by the time the lights came back on.

In acting out the scene, Murgatroyd realized that Letty wasn't in the spot she was supposed to be, so Letty killed her.

Bunny--dear, dotty, Bunny--wasn't able to remember to always call her friend "Letty." A few times she slipped, calling her "Lottie," so Letty gave her one last wonderful birthday day, and killed her with a narcotic in the aspirin bottle.

Letty is finally caught in a trap set by Miss Marple and Inpsector Craddock, where they accuse Edmund of being Pip, and trying to kill Letty for the inheritance. (Here, Philippa reveals that she is Pip, so they have to quickly pivot to claiming Edmund did it to marry a rich wife.) Mitzi claims to know a secret, and Letty is caught trying to drown her in the kitchen. She breaks down when Miss Marple imitates Bunny's voice.

As someone who has binged on quite a few of Christie's works in the past few months, it is amazing how she managed to ring so many changes on this cozy format. The trick of this one is that the bulk of the book is spent tricking the reader into seeing Letty as the intended victim, when she is the perpetrator. At some point, you have to realize you have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Christie has quite a number of variations on the cozy scheme. There is one where the first person narrator turns out to be unreliable--is the perpetrator. There is one where ALL of the suspects committed the crime, and they are all covering for each other. There is one where all the suspects end up dead--so who was the murderer? There is one where the murder to be solved happened a decade before--and Miss Marple has to even figure out what she is investigating. 

Much of the novel is written as dialogue--characters are sketched briefly, with only a few characteristics to distinguish them from each other. They aren't exactly memorable, but you can usually tell them apart. There are 15 suspects, after all, in addition to the detectives, the victim, and a couple of witnesses. For a book of about 100 pages, that requires deftness!

Do you really care about any of them? I submit that you don't. There is pleasure in the unraveling of the puzzle, but it's not really wrenching to deal with all these deaths. They aren't real enough to be affecting.

But they are entertaining, and it's rather comforting to read these during the covid upheaval. There is order, and it can be restored after a major social disruption--murder and war can be overcome, so why not a pandemic?

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

Just listened to this from Audible.com, and Tom Hanks is a delightful reader. He has certain cadences that feel very true to him, idiosyncratic even. Not that I can recall any at the moment, of course. But even when I can predict how the sentence he is reading will end, I was frequently surprised by how he said it.

Of course, I don’t just listen to any book from Audible—I listen to the 5 minute sample, which is plenty long enough to decide if the voice is going to be irritating. In that case, I usually get an ebook instead.

So Hanks’ reading is why I listened to The Dutch House, and as a first person narrative, Hanks gives the main character the best chance of being likeable. I mean, who doesn’t like Tom Hanks? (Other than QAnon I guess?) I have liked Tom Hanks since back in his “The Man With One Red Shoe” days. I remember a profile article (VF maybe?) that celebrated his Hasty Pudding award, and his infectious joy with everything.

So I don’t hate this book, and I don’t hate Danny Conroy.

I feel the need to put that out there as soon as possible, because apparently I hate everything.

I have also followed Ann Patchett since before she published Bel Canto. I really enjoyed The Patron Saint of Liars, and The Magician’s Assistant, although I read those decades ago now. I was less in love with Bel Canto, but thought Commonwealth was better.

In fact, somehow, Patchett managed to capture the exact quality of late afternoon light, slanting into a child’s bedroom at nap time, while adults outside were getting genially day drunk—-the first part of Commonwealth was an amazing evocation of a specific time and place and the book deserves to be read for that alone.

So, I also don’t hate Ann Patchett.

But I don’t like The Dutch House. And I can’t tell if it’s just that I don’t get it, or that I want more from Patchett than she gives.

The Dutch House is a story of a broken family, and the maturation of the narrator, one Danny Conroy, as he describes his life from the age of 5 until his 50s. It is a character description of his fierce and powerful older sister Maeve, and I guess also an exploration of unresolved grief?

Plot Summary

Although the plot spans decades, the focus is the singular trauma of the broken family, represented by The Dutch House—the extravagant mansion the Conroy family acquired before Danny was even born. It is called that because the family that built the house in the 1920s were Dutch—the Van Hoebeeks—rather than because of the architectural style. As central as the house is, Patchett is sparse with description, allowing the reader to imagine their own version of a magnificent house. There are at least 6 bedrooms, a ballroom on the 3rd floor, large “windows” (French doors) that open front and back, allowing one to see straight through from the front walk to the pool in the back. There is an observatory (really? I don’t think they mean a place with a telescope, since it’s on the first floor), a small kitchen, an embarrassingly ostentatious dining room, and two enormous full length portraits of the Van Hoebeeks.

Danny’s father, Cyril Conroy, purchased the entire house and furnishings at an auction in 1946, after the last of the Van Hoebeeks died. He bought it as a surprise for his wife Elna, transferring the family from a tiny house on a military base, to the ridiculous grandeur of this showplace.

Elna was overwhelmed by the house, by the new lifestyle, by her husband’s sudden and surprising excess. Elna had intended to be a nun, and was retrieved from the convent by Cyril who had decided that life was “not for her.” Elna believed they were poor, and spent her time frugally rationing even the light that illuminated the tiny house. She and Maeve would read inside a closet, with towels stuffed under the door to keep the light from leaking out and being wasted. She soaked pinto beans in water—cheap ingredients, but filling, until the day Cyril said “I’ve borrowed a car, let’s go for a ride” and presented her with the house.

He had apparently been saving money, perhaps already launched on his career of real estate management? The book is not terribly clear. The family moves in, Danny is born, and they acquire a staff—Sandy as housekeeper, Jocelyn as cook, and Fiona (“Fluffy”) as nanny. Cyril imports a famous painter from Chicago to paint Elna’s portrait with the intention of replacing the Van Hoebeeks with the Conroys.

Elna refuses.

Elna ultimately refuses everything, but she starts with refusing to be painted, so the painter (who had already been paid) paints 10 year old Maeve instead. Elna eventually refuses the entirety of the nouveau riche fantasy concocted by Cyril, and leaves the family entirely to go work with the poor in India. Danny is about 5 years old, and Maeve steps up and parents him as she is all of 12 at this point.

Before too long, in swoops Andrea and her two young daughters, and over time she displaces both Maeve and Danny from the house. Andrea marries Cyril during Maeve’s first year of college, and moves her older daughter (Norma ?) into Maeve’s room. Maeve is displaced up to a 3rd floor bedroom, and basically never comes home again. Cyril dies when Danny is 16, and Andrea evicts him from the Dutch House. Neither Danny nor Andrea goes back into the house for another 40 years, more or less.

They do go haunt the house, however. Whenever Danny comes home from school (Choate, Columbia for undergrad and medical school, all courtesy of an educational trust, which is all they inherit from their father, so they attempt to bleed it dry so it doesn’t go to Andrea’s daughters along with everything else), they go sit across the street and look at the house and reconstruct their lives, and nurse their grudges.

When Maeve hits her 50s, she has a stroke, and Elma Conroy returns. Danny has married, has a couple of kids, has never practiced medicine in favor of a real estate development career—the same one Cyril had. Elma moves in with Maeve, and for a year they both bask in a mother-daughter relationship that Danny resents. Then...Andrea again.

Elna suggests that they actually go and ring the doorbell at the Dutch House, make a visit. It turns out Andrea has some sort of brain degradation—dementia, or Alzheimer’s, something where she doesn’t know where she is. She sees the now middle-aged Danny, and believes it’s Cyril back. Elma volunteers to help care for Andrea, who is running through home health aides, and Norma had to give up her career in California to come back to talk care of her mother.

In an abbreviated coda, Elna moves back into the Dutch House, this time as a form of service. Maeve dies of a heart attack in her mid-50s, Danny and Celeste divorce, May becomes a successful movie actress. Andrea eventually dies, and neither of Andrea’s girls want the house. Danny’s daughter May buys it and reinstates the Gatsby-style parties that the Van Hoebeeks used to hold in the actual 1920s.

Analysis

What is this book about? Danny is not self-reflective enough to see his own arc, so it’s not really about the growth of the narrator.

• He describes the moment he realized that Sandy and Jocelyn were sisters, and he comments a couple of times about how it never occurred to him to wonder about their lives outside caring for him. He does reach this understanding when he is about 11, which seems developmentally appropriate, so I was anticipating that this might be a book about how he grew in empathy and understanding about his place in a larger social system.
• But when he gets divorced several decades later, he is surprised that his wife never liked the house he bought “for her.” Just as Cyril never understood that Elna didn’t like the Dutch House either.
• So he repeats the pattern, to a slightly better outcome? In that Celeste stays around until the kids are mostly grown? 

This is kind of a character study of Maeve, the indominable and constant family presence in Danny’s life. But we don’t get any sense of her internal life. Patchett gives her a house, a job, a degree, and sets her to caring for Danny. Which is not really enough. What she primarily does is lurk outside the Dutch House in the car.l
****

I started to re-listen to this book, as I finished it so long ago, and I am starting to see the shape of the book. Patchett is a thorough novelist, but I'm still wondering if I like this book.

The book is divided into three parts, and each of the parts really centers a different woman. Part 1 is the story of Danny and Maeve's stepmother Andrea. Her insinuation into their lives, capped by the death of Cyril and Andrea's insistence that Maeve take Danny out or the house.

Part 2 is Danny's beginning adulthood, meeting and marrying Celeste, learning about his parents from  Fluffy. Part 3 is the return of Elna. Maeve binds these stories together, because Danny never really sees what is going on around him, what roles the women have in shaping his life. He never sees them clearly. He doesn't spot that Sandy and Jocelyn are sisters, he is totally blind-sided by Andrea's dislike of him, he doesn't understand why Maeve responds to Elna's return.

The book starts with "The first time Andrea came into the house"--an excellent starting sentence. Textbook even. There are other wonderful lines. Danny describes sitting in the car with Maeve, outside the Dutch House as "We pretended what we lost was the house. Not our father and mother." (Roughly.)

But I'm still bothered by this book. There doesn't really seem to be any reason for it to exist. Why read it? Why write it? Why is Danny the narrator? Why does the book end the way it does, compressed time jump, to the unlikely result of May being a famous and rich movie actress? What happens to Norma and Bright, and why? Do things just happen, one after the other? Why does Danny tell this story? Why does Patchett?

Five Quarters of an Orange, by Joanne Harris

I would never have found this book if not for book club, and I really rather liked it. Let's dig into the nuances of that assessment, shall we?

Joanne Harris hit the jackpot with her book Chocolat, a bit of magical realism with a decidedly hedonistic bent. Made into a movie starring the luminous Juliette Binoche and a delicious Johnny Depp, it was a delightful fairy tale that was completely grounded in the petty feuds and the judgmental religiosity of a small French town. The time period is left charmingly vague--it looked vaguely mid-20th century, but could have been set in almost any decade.

Chocolat dealt with women's roles in a male dominated village, issues of racism, domestic violence, and moral rigidity enforced by religious intolerance, but a happy ending was engineered by the protagonist's magical chocolate shop. As I said--a fairy tale grounded in reality.

Five Quarters of an Orange revisits that format, although less successfully over all. We are back in a rural French village, but in two specific time periods--the Occupation by the Germans in WWII, and the present day. The narrator is Framboise Dartigan, who was a nine year old during the events of the war, and who returned as a widow to reclaim her childhood home, while hiding her identity from the villagers who are largely the same people as when she was a child.

There are hints of a terrible secret from the past, and family conflict in the present day that threatens to unmask her true identity. There is a fairy tale element--the existence of a giant pike that lurks in the depths of the Loire. Local legend says that whoever catches Old Mother will be granted one wish. Framboise is determined to catch that fish.

The Dartigan family are named after fruits, and there is a lot of space devoted to Framboise's mother's recipes and Framboise's cooking--food is again a major element of the book.

Parts of this work very well, parts are frustratingly underwritten.

Once untangled from the bouncing around in time, the plot is rather straightforward. Framboise and her brother and sister fall under the sway of a charismatic young German officer named Tomas Leibniz. They pass all the village gossip to him, in return for luxuries that he can procure for them. Framboise doesn't care for the movie magazines and cigarettes--she imagines that she is bonding with Tomas on a more authentic basis. They are both fishers, after all.

Here is where I have to call for a time-out, because this seems like a major miscalculation. Framboise is nine years old. NINE YEARS OLD. It is 1942, in rural France. This is NOT a case where children are immersed in hyper-sexuality and I just don't accept that a nine year old has sexual feelings for an adult male.

I WOULD accept that she was love-starved, was looking for a father figure, or validation, or something. I am not okay with her being presented as romantically interested in a Nazi.

Back to the plot--there is a brief moment of concern that maybe the gossip they are feeding to Tomas is getting people sent to concentration camps, but that tension lasts about a half a page before being dissipated. Tomas is using the dirt the kids give him to blackmail the residents and he is skimming from the requisitions to pad his own accounts.

Things start to fall apart--Framboise's older sister is (almost-but-not-quite) raped by the Germans, an old man ends up dead. The nascent village Resistance is revealed. Mother Dartigan's migraines require morphine that she gets from Tomas--possibly as a payment for her silence about the assault. Tomas makes plans to leave the village, Framboise is determined he should stay (or run away with her) so she catches the Old Mother pike, wishes that Tomas would stay forever, and the wish backfires. Tomas drowns while helping Framboise pull in her trap--the one that Old Mother is actually caught in. So technically she gets her wish--Tomas does not leave.

The three kids panic about the body being linked to them, so they shot Tomas in the head so it looks like an execution. The Germans believe this story, round up the Resistance members and shoot them all in the village square. The locals blame Mother Dartigan, accuse her of being Tomas's mistress, and storm the farm and torch it. The family escapes and flees.

This is the climax of the book, which is as it should be dramatically, which means that all the contemporary family drama is incredibly mundane in comparison. Framboise's older brother sold the family farm to her and then died, leaving a son and daughter-in-law who offer a kind of existential threat to her anonymity. This second generation wants the recipes, wants a career, wants to publish the "true story" of what happened in 1942, none of which Framboise wants. At best, this is a tool for creating tension and mystery--what happened that was so terrible that Framboise is hiding?

Unfortunately, the larger question is: Why does Framboise even want to live in this stupid small village? Once she is there, she is misanthropic in the extreme, operating a tiny restaurant where she refuses to talk to the patrons even. The mechanics of the story are too visible. It's like Harris needed her narrator to be in the village in order to tell the story, but never created a character-based reason for that decision.

This is an ongoing problem with the book--it just needs to bake longer or something? The elements are good, the story is worth telling, the structure is sound, but the whole does not even equal the sum of the parts.

Part of the problem is that the characters are underdeveloped, so it is hard to care--or even remember them. The various townspeople are generically "rural" and "petty" with no real reason to care about them one way or another. Ten people are shot by firing squad due to the blundering of Framboise and her siblings, but they never really came to life so it is hard to care.

I have already expressed my problems with Tomas and Framboise's passion for him. Her siblings are not served by the time jump. Cassis is casually cruel but also dangerously exciting when Framboise is nine, but in the contemporary sections, he is just feeble. None of the characteristics of his youth survive the transition, and there is no explanation of why. Reinette is even more poorly served--she exists to be young and sexy, to be interested in movie glamour magazines, and then to be assaulted. Once that plot obligation is fulfilled, she disappears. In the contemporary sections, she is in a nursing home, apparently completely senile.

There are hints that Harris had more in mind for these characters. She details conflict among the there of them due to the inequality of their mother's bequests. Reinette inherited a cellar of wine that is worth a great deal of money, that Framboise won't touch, that might be the object of Cassis's grasping son. . .a plot element that goes nowhere.

It's frustrating, because this book should be better than it is. It has all the ingredients, but the execution is poor--which is a fitting metaphor for a book that spends a lot of time talking about food.

I wish I liked this better than I do.

The Confession, by Charles Todd

I read this on the recommendation of my mother, who has excellent taste in reading material. However--and this is an important caveat--she consumes her Inspector Rutledge books in audio format, where they are read by the excellent actor Simon Prebble, and his mellifluous tones soothe her to sleep. I can imagine how delightful that is, and has given her many hours of enjoyment of this series.

Which is to say that this is not a book for reading, this is a book for sleeping through.

It's not actually terrible, and it has the bones of a much better novel. There are dangerous secrets worth killing for, there is emotional anguish and class resentment and the terrible beauty of the English marshlands.  Sadly, the writing manages to rob the action sequences of any excitement, flattens the characters to the point of them being fundamentally indistinguishable, which makes it hard to keep track of the suspects or the victims. Which makes the plot nearly impossible to keep track of--I think the mystery might be clever, or interesting, but since I could never quite tell who was dead and who was under suspicion, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Spoilers below--as I try to figure out what happened.

First off, I recognize that this is the fourteenth book in a series, and I have not read any of the others. It is unfair of me to complain that things that happened in other books aren't explained in this one, and I will try to avoid doing that. The central character is Inspector Ian Rutledge, of Scotland Yard, who has returned to the force after a traumatic experience in The Great War (WWI). It is now 1919, and he continues to wake from his nightmares screaming on a regular basis. He is a broken man who pushes himself to hide the PTSD so he can continue working. Work is the only thing he has to live for now.

A seminal event of his wartime was the death of a soldier under his command. Hamish MacLeod had been Rutledge's closest confidante, but when he refused a direct order, Rutledge was obliged to have him shot. Rutledge himself had to administer the final shot. Now he hears Hamish in the back of his mind, as real as if Hamish still lived. There are other recurring characters, but they don't play much of a role in this particular mystery--Rutledge's sister Frances, various members of Scotland Yard, and an official at the War Office who can be used to gather background information. None of them were really called on to do much, so I'll just assume they are old friends from earlier installments.

Rutledge himself is fine. He's not terribly interesting as a character, but that's fine as he's the glass through which we watch the murder investigation unfold. He's competent, he's got a back story with emotional resonance, he's fine.

Hamish is--a problem. At least in this book he is. I could accept him as the disembodied manifestation of Rutledge's guilty conscience, as a way to illuminate Rutledge's struggle to re-integrate into civilian society. But he's used in a strange way to advance the plot, commenting on the motivations of the suspects, warning Rutledge of things that  Rutledge himself can't see. Hamish is basically Rutledge's ride-along partner, being Watson to his Holmes. Which means he is more than just the symptom of PTSD--he is a character separate from Rutledge. In my opinion, he needs to be either explicitly supernatural, an actual ghost who is literally haunting his killer, or Rutledge just needs a constable to ride around with him that he can talk to.

It's the nature of the mystery genre. Clues have to be revealed slowly, and the reader has to be shown the detective's thought process without showing the solution too early. Questions like "Do you believe this suspect's story?" and "Do you think this person is guilty?" have to be asked and answered. For practical reasons, a mystery novel needs that character to keep the plot on track. In theory, it could all be done with internal dialogue, and Hamish is apparently an attempt to do that. As written, however, his comments are just too different, too independent to be the product of Rutledge's own thought processes.

Basically--Hamish needs to pick a lane. Either be a straight-up supernatural presence, and acknowledge that. Or, be a manifestation of Rutledge's trauma, but then you have to be less substantial ( and also--the attempts to render the Scottish accent is decidedly off-putting). Or just give Rutledge somebody to talk to--his Boswell, his Watson, or have him bring different people along. "Hamish" is just weird.

PLOT SYNOPSIS

(Or, In which I try to tell several 2 dimensional silhouettes apart.)

The book begins with a "sensational" inciting incident--a dying man comes to Scotland Yard to confess to a murder. He quickly becomes evasive when pressed for details, then decides that this was a mistake. Rutledge is skeptical, but can't really do much in the absence of a body or a case. This man turns up dead a few days later, shot in the back of the head. Hurrah! Now there is a case!

In a surprise that shocks no one who has read a mystery novel before, the man isn't who he said he was. WHAAAAAT? You mean, men with fatal cancer diagnoses who decide to confess to vague crimes might not be totally truthful in all aspects?

In order to even begin to understand the convoluted story, we now leave the summary of the book and reconstruct the events in chronological time. All the the suspects and victims and most of what passes for investigation happen in and around a country manor house in Essex known as River's Edge. Owned by the Russell family, the patriarch (who is mostly skimmed over and ignored in the book) had a disastrous first marriage to an apparent gold digger who had a child after the divorce. Was that child Russell's son? Probably not, but also not definitively established.

He eventually became wealthy, married another woman-- mostly known as "Mrs. Russell," occasionally as Elizabeth--and they had a single son, Wyatt. They also acquired two wards/surrogate children/extended relation/cousins that they took in and raised as their own. Justin Fowler is a tragic boy whose parents were brutally murdered and was himself attacked and left for dead. After months in hospital recovering from multiple knife wounds (all three Fowlers were attacked in their beds while asleep), Elizabeth Russell brings him to River's Edge, and no one ever speaks of his trauma.

The second ward is Cynthia Faraday, who lost her parents to an accident while they were traveling. Despite this, she is well adjusted, a bit of a "spitfire" (which basically translates to rude, impulsive, but pretty enough to get away with it). You know what? Don't bother with Cynthia Faraday. She's mostly pointless. Everybody was in love with her, she didn't love anybody, she's the damsel in distress in the final boss battle. Other than that, no point to her.

There are two other boys, roughly the same age as Wyatt and Justin. There is a village boy, named Ben Willet, born to be a fisherman, but with aspirations to be a writer. He left the village to become a footman before the war. There is also a Mrs. Russell's driver named Harold Finley.

The plot begins with the disappearance of Elizabeth Russell in the summer of 1914. She was seen headed to the marshes, and never returned. Search parties failed to turn up any sign of her. The assumption was that she died due to depression caused by Wyatt and Justin going to WWI.

Justin Fowler and Harold Finley go missing in 1915, presumed deserters.

In 1919 (the book's present day), we get a shell game of identity swapping. "Wyatt Russell" turns up at Scotland Yard, and confesses to killing his cousin, Justin Fowler, in 1915. "Wyatt Russell" turns out to actually Harold Findlay? Can I keep these characters separate? No, because so far they are indistinguishable; just names.

So Ben Willett is the cancer riddled former footman who wrote a couple of books after the war. He confessed accused Wyatt of killing Justin in 1915. His body turns up shot in the head. Who did that? Why is he wearing Elizabeth Russell's locket around his neck? (Mostly in order to give Rutledge some clues to follow up, basically.) Did he engineer her disappearance in 1914?

Let's just skip to the resolution, rather than try to tease out all the clues and the red herrings. Everybody was killed by a madman. The anonymous child of that first disastrous Russell marriage? Grew up a resentful sociopath, convinced that he should have been the Russell heir. (Again--not clear he was even related, but whatever.) His life is literally devoted to destroying the Russell family. He becomes the rector at the local village church (????) where he hides in plain sight for the duration of the war I guess?

He killed Elizabeth Russell in 1914, tied her body to some rocks and sank her in the marshes. He also killed the Fowlers, failed to kill Justin as a lad, but managed to do it in 1915 when Justin was at River's Edge (along with Harold Finlay), recuperating from war wounds.

Finlay finds Justin's body, swaps clothes with the corpse, and dumps the body into the river to confuse identification. (He is apparently afraid that Cynthia will be blamed for the murder. No clear reason why.) He then fails to go back to the war in either identity, thus becoming a deserter, and sets up a new life for himself in Northern England or Scotland or somewhere.

Wyatt is in a nursing home somewhere, his mental stage swinging from clear to befuddled, mostly depending on what clues have to stay hidden. Rutledge plants a story that Wyatt had died, to lure the killer.

Who is the rector, going by the name of Morrison. But why does the rector want to kill all these people? To the extent there is any "reason" given, it's that he's SO resentful of Wyatt having the life he thinks he should have had, that he plans to kill everybody, leaving Wyatt for last so Wyatt is as miserable as possible.

Okay. This is not a theme or a trope or a leitmotif or an atmosphere or anything that has been running through the book. In fact, to the extent that there is a thematic emotion running through the book, it's that WWI sucked, and everybody's life is worse because of it. In fact, the sheer scale of the WWI carnage is such that it's hard to get worked up about a few hand crafted murders, really.

BUT--from a mystery perspective--this is a lot of carnage for not much payoff for Morrison, don't you think? I mean, these are all the people he has killed:

Mom and Pop Fowler
Justin Fowler (attempted)
Elizabeth Russell
Justin Fowler (successful)
Ben Willett
Wyatt Russell (he thinks, but not really)
Cynthia Faraday (attempted)
Ian Rutledge (attempted)

What did any of this do for him? He's still a rector in a tiny little village, where everybody hates him because he is an outsider, he doesn't get any of the Russell family money, nobody acknowledges him as family, he doesn't seem to get any satisfaction out of revenge. . .

There is no meat to this character at all. There is no reason for him to have been the murderer, except that in Mystery Writing 101, they tell you that the perpetrator has to be the most unlikely character. And he is, because this whole story of the "first marriage to a gold digger who dumped you when you were poor but then raised her child to be resentful of the eventual wealth" is only barely covered in this book. Because why tell that story when instead you can spend pages and pages talking about the emptiness of the marshes, and have people just looking out on the landscape.

THE MOST ANNOYING PART

The most irritating thing about this book is that there are scenes and secrets and dramatic occurrences that are basically shoved into the cracks of the plot like so much binding agent--everything is flattened into a sort of formless mess.

Let's talk about the single most dramatic thing in the book--the tragic story of the village.

This river village is overtly hostile to strangers--obnoxious to the point of caricature. Rutledge shows up in the tea room, and the operator would rather kick out the regulars and close up than let an outsider eat there. NOT THAT THIS IS SUSPICIOUS IN ANY WAY?

There is dialogue that amounts basically to this:
"Why are you so hostile to visitors"
"Because we are hiding a Deep Secret and we don't want people to hear about it!"

What is that Deep Secret? It's actually the most compelling story of the book--far more upsetting and emotionally scarring than the Mad Rector. Back a generation or so ago, river smuggling was a pretty big part of the economy. (Still is, although the presence of British soldiers nearby patrolling the coast has caused some fluctuation in the market.) A rich ship came up-river, got stuck on a sandbar, and the locals rowed out to investigate (loot) it. There was nobody aboard!

(Cue spooky music! OooooooooOOOOOOoooOOOooo!)

It was a plague ship, and there was a diary by the last survivor explaining what happened. One of the greedy villagers just tossed the diary overboard so as not to interfere with the looting. BUT THE PLAGUE CAME ALONG WITH THE LOOT! Some of the villagers became ill, and the then-rector started caring for them in the church, turning it into a makeshift hospital. The healthy villagers panicked, nailed the doors shut and burned down the church, killing everybody inside.

This is incendiary stuff. The toxic stew of emotions--the fear, the cruelty, the horror, hearing your family members dying inside the church, the long tail of guilt and misery. Why did the son of one of the arsonists went and named his pub after the plague boat? That is a story worth telling! The emotions! The visuals! The charred bodies and the destroyed church! The dancing flames and the rifts that grew up among the survivors!

But no.

This story does get told, but in a weird third-hand way that robs it off nearly all its power and majesty. Ian Rutledge reads about it--actually in Ben Willett's unpublished manuscript. But we don't get the manuscript either. We get the omniscient narrator reporting that Ian read about Ben's novelization of a scene he only heard about because it happened before he was born. I count that as something like fourth level hearsay.

Which is just so frustrating! There are the bones of a fascinating story here! The village history is still affecting the people who live there, a more traumatic experience than the entirety of WWI on the collective spirit of the village! That is a story worth telling!

Ben Willett might also have been interesting to get to know--a son of a river fisherman, who wanted something different out of life, and left to become a footman to an aristocrat, only to be mustered up and sent to France to fight WWI. He caught a glimpse of an even better life (than that of a footman!) and after the war, lived in Paris and wrote books! But his family never forgave him for getting above himself--so much so that he never came back after the war. That is a story worth telling!

Even the crazy story of Rector Morrison, maybe, if we saw the mix of the bright and the dark. I mean, the  character of the Rector is constantly being kind and helpful to Rutledge, and feeling hurt by being left out of the life of the village--well, they are keeping the secret of what they did to the LAST rector (more or less last one? The chronology is unclear here). How can this character be combined with the life-long-sociopathic-murderer that the plot requires? The book didn't do it, but that might be a story worth telling!

FINAL ANALYSIS

I should just quit farting around and write my own damn novels. I am so frustrated by the fact that a book like this gets published--actually, "Charles Todd" has written NINETEEN Ian Rutledge novels, and a further 7 with a different main character. WHAT THE HELL AM I WAITING FOR, thinking that I don't have anything to offer.

Is it too late to start NaNoWriMo this month?

Circling the Sun, by Paula McLain

Honestly, I didn't like this book, but I am going to try to be fair.

I mean, McLain scored a big hit with The Paris Wife that I didn't much care for either because it failed to do what I thought was a necessary thing. In a book about Ernest Hemingway's first wife, it failed to convince me of Hemingway's genius, and it didn't entice me into reading an either.

In conjunction with this book though, perhaps I need to rethink McLaine's objectives. In some ways, she is trying to reclaim women who have been shortchanged by history. I can certainly get behind that. I mean, Hadley Hemingway's story has mostly been cast as her husband's story, or the story of the first wife where the later wives were much more glamorous. Or she was merely a minor attendant to the glamorous figures who also populated Hemingway's life in Paris. Poor Hadley, home with the baby while Ernest and the Fitzgeralds and the other glamorous expat were drinking it up in the bars of Montparnasse.

Beryl Markham might also be a similar project. While she was an early British settler of Kenya--moved there by her parents when she was 4 years old in the very early days of the 20th century, she was a remarkably modern woman--she married three times, trained horses, learned to fly, had affairs,  was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west (harder due to prevailing winds). Her story is somewhat of an adjunct to the story of Isak Dinesen and her lover Denys Finch-Hatton, told so cinematographically in the Oscar winning Out of Africa.

Markham also has a famous memoir called West with the Night, which even Ernest Hemingway praised for it's writing (and Ernest hated praising anyone who wasn't himself). So her story was told the way she wanted to tell it, but there are presumably gaps? And to give her credit, it seems that McLain did a fair amount of research into the minutae of Markham's past and life of the British in Kenya in the 1920s.

And yet.

Maybe this book needs to be read as a companion piece to Markham's own work (which I have not read). Maybe the tedious focus on her early teen years, the dreary digging into the names and habits of many of the horses she trained, while at the same time the near failure to cover her famous fltrans-Atlantic flight or anything after that--was because all that was well covered by Markham herself.

It's just--so boring. She was a wild and obstreperous child, allowed to run wild with the local population of Gikuyu after her mother returned to England when she was about 5. Her father was a horse man, training, breeding and racing thoroughbreds in African races. At some point, when she was about 12, he brought another woman to live as his wife, and Beryl was sent to school (which she hated) and some effort was made to civilize her. She married a few days before her 17th birthday to a local landowner when her father's business went bankrupt. She remained in Kenya; her father and semi-step-mother moved to Cape Town.

Not surprisingly, the marriage didn't work out very well, but it took some seven years or so for it to fail to the point of divorce. Meanwhile, Beryl had a few affairs, got certified as a horse trainer, met Isak Dinesen and Denys Finch-Hatton, fell in love with Finch-Hatton, had an abortion, felt torn between her desire for Finch-Hatton and her loyalty to Dinesen, remarried, had a child, lost the child to wealthy in-laws, returned to Kenya and learned to fly. Denys Finch-Hatton died in a plane crash. The epilogue is the last 50 miles of her trans-Atlantic flight, where she doesn't die in the crash landing.

There might be some beautiful writing about Africa of the 1920, but she is not a very interesting character to describe it to us. She loved the farm of her childhood, and so she actively resisted learning anything new that wasn't about being on the farm. She fell in love with Finch-Hatton who's most salient characteristic seems to be that he is beautiful. Her life had incident, but ti  is hard to shape it into any kind of narrative arc. Things happened, and then I kissed Denys/my husband divorced me/my reputation got damaged and it was the end of everything except then it wasn't.

McClain seems to want to rescue Markham's reputation from the scandalmongering of nearly a century ago. There was some whispering that she had an affair with Henry, the Duke of Gloucester (fourth in line to the throne, younger brother of both David who abdicated for Wallis Simpson, and George the father of the current Queen Elizabeth). So McLain shows us scenes where they are perfectly platonic and lets Beryl rail against gossip. She is known to have had an affair with Denys Finch-Hatton, even while Denys was involved with Isak Dinesen (Baroness Karen Blixen) so McLain shows us Beryl wracked with guilt but also a better match than Dinesen was.

Beryl was linked a little bit with the "Happy Valley set"--the African version of Waugh's Bright Young Things, people with too much money and too little to do, who drank and drugged and swapped partners. Beryl is dragged along by a man, but refuses to take any of his cocaine and while she sleeps with him, won't change partners when everybody else does.

Do we know these things to be true? I don't know. Do I like her better for not having done the things she was "accused" of? Not necessarily. She comes off as priggish and reflexively anti-drug, reflexively unwilling to accept a different sex partner, not out of any particular aspect of her character. She's drawn as weirdly hedonistic and then moralistic, with no real explanation of why the lines are drawn where they were. Why is champagne acceptable, but cocaine is not? Why is it okay for her to sleep with some men but not others?

Perhaps it was the reader--I listened to the book and the distanced, mostly monotone reading leeched any nuance out of the character. Written in first person, a gifted reader would have shaded Beryl's character, made me root for her. Instead, I just got tired of her.

At several points, she discusses poetry with Finch-Hatton, or waxes lyrical about the effect of his death on her, and I just got irritated. Glittering vaguenesses, basically.

I mean, I think I respect McClain for the research she did, and it's not easy to write an book, but I wish there had been more of a point of view, more of a point at all. It was barely worth the time, and mostly I listened while doing other things anyway.

In short, I can not recommend it on it's own terms. Maybe if one has already read West with the Night, this would be a worthwhile addition. It did make me somewhat curious about reading that book, to be fair.