Dick Francis, “Odds Against”

Three cheers for “category fiction,” is what I say. Sometimes people in the book business look down on novels that fall into the categories of romance, mystery, thriller — I guess “chick-lit” may be one of the categories now. But we all need diversions, and when you want a seamless (and cheap!) airlift out of your own reality, there’s nothing like an efficient novel.

So I spent a couple of hours last night in 1960s England with Sid Halley, one of Dick Francis’s best heroes, a depressed former steeplechase jockey with a mangled hand. Odds Against is one of those thrillers where the bad guy and his nefarious project are identified early on. It’s interesting, then, to see how Francis creates suspense out of the information he doesn’t give us. There’s an unidentified henchman — who could he be? There’s the question of how the villain will strike. There’s also an asymmetrical response: Sid has squirreled away copies of the villain’s records and in retaliation the villain firebombs Sid’s apartment and office. What was in the purloined information that  warranted such extreme measures?

All of this is very competently handled and I’ve always been a pushover for Francis’s horsey settings. But what really set him apart as a thriller-writer was his economical, literal writing style, and the modest, wry toughness of his heroes. You know things will come out right in the end and you won’t feel like a dope for admiring Sid or Jonathan or Alan, Matt or Steven or Gerald. Or Dick Francis himself, for that matter.

Annabel Goldsmith, “No Invitation Required”

Annabel Goldsmith’s No Invitation Required: The Pelham Cottage Years is the perfect corrective to Julian Fellowes’ Past Imperfect. Annabel — Lady Annabel to you and to me — is one of the truly grand and fascinating figures in English society. The daughter of the Marquess of Londonderry, she grew up at Wynyard in County Durham, a stately pile equipped with three ballrooms. Her mother died of cancer when Annabel was in her teens, her father (who turned to drink) a few years later. At nineteen Annabel married Mark Birley who later named his nightclub “Annabel’s” after her.

So there’s grandeur and glamor and tragedy all woven in together here — and this is before our author gets involved with the financier James Goldsmith. Her love affair with Goldsmith runs for several years before she and Birley split up, then she eventually marries Goldsmith and has three children with him. (That’s in addition to her three Birley children.) No Invitation Required is nominally a memoir of the early years of the Birley marriage but might more properly be called pen-portraits of some of the people she knew in those years. (One of them is her eldest son Rupert, who drowned in the 1980s.)

What’s really striking about it is the sang-froid with which Goldsmith narrates the most hair-raising events. After the birth of her third child in 1961, she comes home from the hospital. “We had lost our au pair at Christmas after she had gone mad and tried to knife me — a very distressing day at Pelham Cottage — and had just employed Irene…” The au pair with the knife is gone, whisked away, no more details forthcoming.  Goldsmith is similarly casual about her first husband’s reluctant attitude toward fatherhood, a result of his own mother’s chilliness. “Gradually, however, through our marriage, the arrival of his own children and a sequence of much loved dogs, he began to learn how to show the affection he had been denied as a child.”  (The dogs in this book are treated magnificently.)

This off-handedness extends to Goldsmith’s view of marital fidelity. She is very casual about her affair with Goldsmith and other characters’ marital wanderings. Her friend Lord Lambton was a terrible rake whose political career foundered in the 1970s following a sex scandal. “When the photographs of him appeared in the newspaper, I was distressed for him and felt dreadfully sorry for Bindy [his wife], his children and Claire Ward, who had been his close companion for many years.” Gosh, that’s complicated.

Is there something deeply aristocratic about this high-handedness? Perhaps what’s so deeply appealing about Goldsmith’s book is the very fact that she tells you so little. She takes so much for granted about her life that in a way you feel drawn into it. Paradoxically, Fellowes‘ needle-sharp observation, while informative, keeps you forever on the other side of the glass.

Guy de Maupassant, “Strong as Death”

Keen as I am on electronic reading, I do have faint reservations about this latest iteration. I downloaded the Eucalyptus app to my iPhone, then downloaded a couple of short Conrad novels that a friend had recommended. From there I realized that I could probably find work by his contemporary Guy de Maupassant, so I downloaded Strong as Death. (Free, all free!)  And much as the Conrad titles appealed to me, I couldn’t pass on this. After all, Conrad wasn’t writing about a Parisian society portraitist who falls in love with the daughter of his mistress.

The reservation is this: even though I’ve read happily on my phone from the Kindle app, it feels peculiar to have a novel stored only on my phone. It’s just too… wee. Not the type: the gizmo in my hand. At least when you read on the Kindle app, you know that there’s a bigger device somewhere, a more book-sized object. And even though Eucalyptus has a nifty “page-turning” effect (as opposed to the Kindle app’s page-slide) I had a little trouble feeling that, to use academic-speak, the delivery method was transparent to the narrative. It was unsettling. Especially reading in bed. On my phone.

What Bertin's art looked like?

All that being said, Strong as Death is great fun. Olivier Bertin is the society painter, the Comtesse de Guilleroy is his mistress. They have been together for years, and their relationship is still strong, though nostalgia plays a part in it. Bertin is beginning to feel his age and to feel the loneliness of the elderly bachelor. Then young Annette de Guilleroy is brought to Paris from the country where she has largely been raised. It is time for her to marry and a match has been cooked up with a handsome boneheaded Marquis. Annette is virtually the double of her mother, and Olivier falls hard for her.

There is some subtlety here: Maupassant understands the mixed emotions of his protagonists. Not much subtlety in the writing, though: for instance, near the end we get a scene where Bertin walks through Paris on a carpet of, gosh, yes, fallen leaves. And the long set-piece at the opera includes a performance of, naturally, Faust. However, I’d back Maupassant against anybody — Balzac, Edith Wharton, even Henry James — on the minutiae of social behavior. How does he signal that we’re supposed to hate the Marquis de Farandal? By telling us that when Farandal enters a ballroom he screws his monocle into his eye the better to see the crowd, then with an imperceptible motion of the muscles of his cheek, lets it drop.  I’ve always wanted to see someone do that!

Peter Robinson, “Final Account”

Peter Robinson writes straight-up procedural murder mysteries set, from what I can tell, largely in Yorkshire. His detective, Alan Banks, veers in the direction of the hard-drinking, disillusioned cop with a romantic longing for justice and the occasional attractive female. But I never got the sense that Banks was much more than a set of qualifications for the job of “murder mystery detective,” and the galaxy of surrounding characters — the pert female DCI, the annoying cloddish sergeant — rotate mechanically through the narrative, delivering bits of information as needed but otherwise forgettable.

In Final Account the plotting’s fine:  accountant has his head blown off in his garage; turns out he had another fun-loving identity; furthermore he was laundering money for a corrupt Caribbean strong man; bang. (And I still haven’t given everything away.) Pacing OK, local color only average. I think the big problem is that Robinson’s writing is workmanlike, nothing more. He goes through the motions with the landscape and the colorful Yorkshire characters and the sinister emotional dynamics of the victim’s family, but it all failed to move me.

If I remember correctly, the New York Times restaurant reviewers used to be able to rate a restaurant “Acceptable,” or possibly “Adequate,” which seemed more damning than the current lowest rating of “Fair.” That’s pretty much where I leave Robinson. I finished the book — if I were in the corresponding restaurant and hungry, I would have finished the meal — but I won’t be going back for more.

Lloyd Jones, “Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance”; Carlos Ruiz Zafon, “The Shadow of the Wind”

Sometimes you don’t give a book a fair reading — that is to say, the conditions under which you read it interfere with your absorption of the tale. When you think about it, reading is one of the few forms of cultural consumption that we assume will be interrupted. You never expect to get through a book in one sitting — and indeed many of the landmarks of 19th century fiction were constructed with that in mind. Hence the chapter-ending cliff-hanger. But some books you abuse more than others, and reading Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance interleaved with the first 80 pages of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind was a lousy idea. (It had to do with the relative weight of each book and my need to tote it around for a couple of days with a laptop). Part of the problem was they were just a little bit too similar: fragmented time frames, exotic settings, youthful male narrators. Transitions were especially bad when I had to switch between Barcelona in the 1920s and Buenos Aires ditto.

So Lloyd Jones won. Though I really enjoyed Zafón’s Captain Alatriste, The Shadow… struck me as one of those slightly ponderous near-allegories that just drive me nuts. Everything means something else, secrets are brandished in front of you, and I lose patience.

That being said, once I put down the Spanish book, I had to give the Southern Hemisphere book a little bit of time to grab me again and this is where I was possibly unfair. Jones’ Mister Pip hangs together. Here at the End of the World…. might, too, but I was untrue to the narrative thread so I can’t be sure.Certainly the challenge of stitching together story lines from multiple time frames and settings is pretty taxing. You have our bildungsroman protagonist/narrator, Lionel Howden, and his passion for exotic Argentinian Rosa, 19 years older than he. Setting: unnamed Australian city, maybe 1970s? You have Australian Louise Pohl and her passion for Paul Schmidt, the itinerant piano tuner. They meet in a tiny Australian town in 1919, but their connection continues to Buenos Aires, and into the present day.

What connects these tales is Argentinian tango. “In tango,” says Jones, “there are no wrong turns. But every dance begins with a backward step. “It sounds as if maybe Jones takes that fact as a structural cue — oh, gosh, possibly the whole novel is built like tango steps, backward, forward, sideways, entwined? I really hope not. That would be just too elaborate. Jones writes eloquently about tango as a kind of connection, a way of forging intimacy, of communication beyond words. The talent for it is arbitrary, unconnected to likability or moral worth. Jones‘ writing is informal and evocative, his ideas are quirky and generous. Here’s one to mull over: “he was in charge of music, which gave him a distinct advantage.” True when you’re trying to dance in a cave. True in other situations, too?

Edmund Crispin, “The Case of the Gilded Fly”

Stop the presses for a startling literary discovery — the first inklings of meta-fiction in a Golden Age English murder mystery! Yes indeed: in the early pages of The Case of the Gilded Fly professor/detective Gervase Fen says “In fact I’m the only literary critic turned detective in the whole of fiction.” A bit further on, Fen and the Chief Constable of Oxford spar over the details of the murder and their importance. Fen says, “That’s all very well in a detective novel, where it has to be put in to camouflage the significant things…” and Sir Richard expresses his annoyance at “the sort of detective story in which one of the characters propounds view on how detective stories should be written.”  Huh? Did writers really have this acute level of self-consciousness in 1944?

Apparently Crispin did. He was actually musician Bruce Montgomery, a composer and one-time organist at St. John’s College, Oxford, which accounts for sentences like one where he refers to “just that touch of preciosity, the lengthening, shortening, or corruption of vowels which is the prerogative of a good choir.” (A familiar concept to this choral singer.) And he wrote with a level of playful archness that makes his mysteries a cross between Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse. Crispin specialized in following the form of the classic murder mystery while embroidering madly to create a baroque and very funny hybrid. The Case of the Gilded Fly, for instance, is a classic locked-room drama but it also contains the familiar trope of the dramatic performance; the victim of the first murder is the slutty actress everyone in the company loathes. And while Christie or Sayers gave us more or less human detectives, Gervase Fen is something like Sherlock Holmes on Ritalin: variously acutely observant, wildly eccentric, and as distractible as a six-year-old.

None of the characters in this novel approaches three dimensions, but you don’t really mind because the writing is so diverting in that baroque style that harks back to the Dickens, piling phrase on phrase, image on image. (Note to self: at a later point, explore further the Golden Age detective novel as a 19th-century survival.) For instance, Crispin writes a long paragraph on the beginning of the Oxford term: “Notices concerning club activities, many offensively designed, began to appear in college lodges; … a week or so later, more luggage would arrive, under the system ironically described by the railway companies as luggage in advance; tutors heaved regretful sighs, freshmen arrived in a state of crescent bewilderment and anguished self-consciousness, and college cooks meditated enormities.” (Love the use of “crescent” in its archaic sense.)

I had read previous Crispin novels but not this one, which is put out by an outfit called “Felony & Mayhem.” They usefully reissue  a series of the older mysteries under their “Vintage” imprint. Notwithstanding their apparent honesty I remained skeptical about Crispin’s dates (this could have been some kind of ironic recycling, I thought) until I got to several parallel love scenes, in all of which the couples merely kissed, and agreed to get married.

Janice Y.K. Lee, “The Piano Teacher”

Not the novel by Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek that was the basis for a movie starring Isabel Huppert. That one was about an Austrian pianist/teacher who embarks on a masochistic relationship with a student. This one, perhaps more conventional but also emotionally strenuous, is set in Hong Kong in 1953 and during World War II. This piano teacher is a pretty and naive Englishwoman named Claire Pendleton who arrives in the English colony as the new bride of Martin, a dull bureaucrat with the Water Board. Claire has married Martin to escape her narrow suburban existence: she gets more than she bargained for.

Claire’s only student — she’s not a very serious piano teacher — is Locket Chen, the daughter of a very wealthy pair of Chinese. Teaching the piano is incidental to Claire’s role in the novel, since what she really does is blunder around and expose some of the nasty goings-on in Hong Kong during the Japanese invasion. Eight years after the peace, many of these have been papered over if not forgotten, but Claire’s unusual position as an English near-employee of immensely wealthy Chinese gives her a social fluidity that hastens nasty revelations.

The more vivid sections of the book, loosely alternating with the 1953 sections, are the ones narrating Will Truesdale’s love affair with Trudy Liang, the Eurasian femme fatale of the colony. Elegant, feckless, and immensely rich, Trudy captivates the handsome Will. Lee does an excellent job of describing the layers of mutual incomprehension between English and Hong Kong Chinese. Trudy (who, like Claire, occupies a liminal position) can move between both worlds, tolerated for her glamor and her wealth, but knows she fits nowhere. When the invasion arrives, she behaves pragmatically, to Will’s shock.

This is a novel of secrets, adeptly hinted at and gradually revealed. The moral landscape of Hong Kong is enormously complex, determined not only by the conditions of wartime but by the Chinese and English cultures in conflict. The Trudy/Will story line is much stronger than Claire’s — a naive protagonist allows the author to be startled by or misunderstand situations, but often that protagonist is not terribly interesting. Still, The Piano Teacher is lively and readable.  Not unlike Joseph Kanon’s The Good German, it puts terrible pressure on its characters, with interesting results. The Piano Teacher features less action, but more love affairs. And lots of food, which we’re told is the Chinese obsession. You have to love it when Trudy proclaims, “Darling, if you miss a meal, the light quite goes out of the day.” Ominously, she makes this declaration while Will is on furlough from a prison camp, and it’s clear there will be many dim days ahead for both of them.

Anya Seton, “The Turquoise”

When I was a young teenager, I wanted to be Anya Seton when I grew up. I loved her novels, all of which centered on strong-minded women in various historical periods. There were always romantic threads to the stories, of course, but Seton was more interested in the longer arc of most tales. The most familiar one to most of us is probably Dragonwyck, which was made into a rather entertaining movie.

The Turquoise had escaped my voracious consumption, though, until the Chicago Review Press re-issued it, along with many of Seton’s other best-sellers. This one, published in 1946, sold around a million copies according to the cover copy. Thing is, it’s not very good. It opens in Santa Fe, which seemed promising, but our heroine Santa Fe Cameron (half Scottish, half Spanish and wholly magnetic) falls in with an Irish ne’er-do-well and the pair heads East to New York. Fey is abandoned, pregnant, and sets her sights on one of the nouveau-riche financiers of the day. It’s true that in 1946 Seton was probably one of the earlier writers to trace this “upward mobility in Gotham” narrative, but since I wrote a book about it myself 23 years ago, it’s pretty familiar territory.

What was a little bit startling was the strongly moralistic stance Seton took. Fey, you see, had The Sight. Or at least a mystical gift for healing — symbolized the turquoise of the title. She abandoned it in her hedonistic search for security and comfort. Bad move. She got punished. (Misery, loss of child.) She redeemed herself by heeding the call to go back to Santa Fe and become a healer. I hadn’t realized Seton was quite so puritanical. There’s lots of disapproving/titillating stuff about Fey and her sex appeal. If novelistic resolution means putting your heroine back in a hut on a New Mexican hillside, barefoot and devout…. aren’t you being kind of hard on her? Even more startling: in 1946, a million readers wanted to read this story?

Reginald Hill, “Death of a Dormouse”

Reginald Hill is an immensely prolific English writer whose best-known books are the Dalziel and Pascoe series of procedurals. Under other names, he writes other kinds of mysteries – Death of a Dormouse reminded me, oddly, of a string of mysteries written by M.M. Kaye in the years before The Far Pavilions. It’s a kind of damsel-in-distress story set partly in Sheffield, England, and partly in Vienna. The heroine — and this is a heroine, not a protagonist — has just been widowed and discovers that she had spent the previous twenty-five years of marriage in a kind of comfortable daze while her husband Trent made all decisions for her. Upon his death, she comes to life, and makes a series of startling discoveries about her husband’s double life.

Straightforward enough, but the plotting is quite intricate, full of reversals. Hill’s ambitions are not high, and he fulfills them admirably: this is a neat little diversion.

Jane Gardam, “The Man in the Wooden Hat”

I had high expectations of The Man in the Wooden Hat, having loved Jane Gardam’s earlier Old Filth. (It’s an acronym — Failed In London, Tried Hong kong — and a nick name.) In fact I loved not only the book, but the characters, Sir Edward Feathers, QC and his enigmatic wife Betty. They lingered with me. Old Filth is a novel about how an emotional cripple negotiates a long marriage, and about the multiple secrets life holds. The Man in the Wooden Hat simply turns the kaleidoscope a little bit. We knew, reading Old Filth, that Gardam wasn’t telling us everything. I doubt she has now: there’s probably a novel or two in the life of Harry Veneering (nod to Dickens, a good sign in my view), Filth’s lifelong enemy and Betty’s… sometime lover? The Man… places us primarily in Betty’s consciousness, so we understand her motivations in marrying Filth. They are largely honorable. Life is not simple.

It’s hard to write clearly about these books, in part because they are so complex. Their appeal is so complex. They are immensely charming and readable. They are colorful: Gardam is wonderful about the East and its grip on her two main characters. They are moving: Gardam seems to both understand and pardon every emotional impulse she allots to her characters. The two novels fit together like a jigsaw, or like Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. (Comparisons to Evan Connell’s Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge have also been made.) I don’t know how, as an author,  you keep track of it all: what happened, who felt what when, who knew what at which point? The mind reels.

Gardam has another Dickensian gift, the ability to give minor characters real life in just a few sentences. And she has his scope, in a way. She is not a young woman, and I have to believe that the final pages, in which Betty and Filth reach the indignities of old age, paint those predicaments clearly. And she writes with a kind of vivid economy: spends some time on description in a few situations — a house in Dorset, a museum in Delft — and lets just a few details carry the atmosphere for the rest of it. A green dress, an overgrown London garden, a rat. Just wonderful.