Penelope Lively, “The Photograph”

What a great premise for a novel: a character comes across an old photograph of his wife. She is surreptitiously holding hands with another man — her brother-in-law, actually. Our protagonist realizes, for the first time, that the two were having an affair. Now what?

A few years ago I heard Tom Stoppard, in a radio interview, say that doling out information in the right order and at the right pace is a major element of drama. Well, he would know — and so does Penelope Lively. I often think that sheer curiosity is what keeps most of us flicking over the pages of most books. Lively has structured The Photograph so that each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character. Glyn, the husband who finds the photo of his wife Kath, is a driven academic. Kath is obviously no longer in his life. Why not? Elaine, Kath’s equally driven sister, feels slightly guilty about Kath. Why? Nick, Elaine’s husband, the one who had the affair with Kath, remembers his sudden, feverish need to possess Kath who, we learn, was beautiful. Was. Hmmm.

Photo Dr. Tom Moore, Durham University

But Penelope Lively is too good a writer to occupy herself merely with a tale of a marriage that wasn’t all it seemed to be. She is also concerned with time. Glyn is a landscape historian: his subject is the way time operates on the land over thousands of years. Elaine, a landscape architect, works in the same field but on a shorter framework: again and again, Lively has Elaine assess a garden in terms of how it will look a few years hence. The other characters are preoccupied with time, too. They think about how they use it, where it goes, how you track it. Nick, Elaine’s husband, a feckless perpetual boy, is unconcerned at the passage of time until he suddenly perceives himself looking older. These characters have known each other for years, and as Glyn tries to find out more about Kath’s infidelity, chronology matters, too. When was this trip, what year did we go to the Roman villa?

Memory, of course, is time’s lodging in our minds. It’s were we keep our perceptions and our private narratives. But Lively shows us how erratic memory is. As Elaine examines the telltale photograph, she thinks, “It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis. A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside, everything appears different. The reflections are quite other; everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.”

Eventually we put together a portrait of Kath, the girl in the photograph. Glyn’s view of her changes. Elaine’s, too. Perception and reality are measured against each other. Self-absorption is somewhat shaken. A new equilibrium emerges. Life goes on, as “something else.”

Ariana Franklin, “Mistress of the Art of Death”

Here they come. From down the road we can hear harnesses jingling and see dust rising into the warm spring sky.

Pilgrims returning after Easter in Canterbury. Tokens of the mitered, martyred Saint Thomas are pinned to cloaks and hats — the Canterbury monks must be raking it in.

I won’t quote any more of the opening of Mistress of the Art of Death, but you get the idea: exuberant, irreverent, clever. (I loved “mitered, martyred Saint Thomas.”) It’s a catchy economical form of exposition and if the handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer pokes out here and there, I didn’t have a problem with that. Ariana Franklin can hold her own.

Yet I had reservations. The bone I have to pick with Franklin is not really the issue of anachronism. As she points out in the Author’s Note, you can’t write a novel about the 12th century without it. For one thing, the narrative voice as we know it didn’t exist at the time, nor did most of our storytelling techniques. I do wonder a lot about imposing contemporary understandings of character and motivation on people who lived 1000 years ago but Hilary Mantel’s handling of Thomas Cromwell didn’t bother me. So I should at least be consistent about this.

Multiple anachronism: JWWaterhouse 1916, illustration for Boccaccio's "Decameron." But you'll admit it's vivid.

And there is a lot to enjoy in Mistress of the Art of Death. Franklin’s mastery of landscape, atmosphere, and pacing absolutely gripped my attention. However, this is basically a murder mystery dressed in historical costume and it’s not a formula that normally works for me. The basic structure of solving a murder is often incompatible with the historical framework. Here, for instance, we have Adelia, a proto-pathologist from Salerno. Proto-feminist, too: abrupt, efficient, outspoken, ultimately earning respect. She is in Cambridge to find out who has been killing small children, and the way she does so is by examining their bodies. Her sidekick is Mansur, the tall Muslim castrato. (I believe Franklin made him a castrato to explain the absence of sexual tension between him and Adelia; there’s no other reason for that quirk.) Finally, working with them, is Simon of Naples. Yes, a Jew. Three outcasts functioning on the outskirts of English society to solve a problem, exposing prejudice and ignorance along the way.

Well, I have a hard time with anachronistically plucky and capable females. Especially ones with white-blonde hair who unwittingly enchant the one highly-evolved male in the story. Sarah Dunant’s books walk this line sometimes, and I am usually ready to overlook the problem. Franklin exacerbated it, though, by giving Adelia advanced ideas about capital punishment: “She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it… because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused.”

And yet the writing is so good, the dialogue so lively, the secondary characters such fun, that I suspect I’ll find myself back in Adelia’s company before long; Mistress of the Art of Death is the first in a series. One down, three to go.

Fred Vargas, “Debout les morts”/”The Three Evangelists”

I don’t have the temperament of a completist. Not for me the obscure early works, the unfinished manuscripts, the lesser-known short stories of the eminent novelist. But I find myself making an exception for Fred Vargas because she is just so much fun. Debout les morts/The Three Evangelists, published in 1995, is one of Vargas‘ earlier mysteries, though it comes after L’homme aux cercles bleus/The Chalk Circle Man, in which police commissioner Jean-Pierre Adamsberg makes his first appearance. It’s clear that Vargas had not yet figured out who her chief protagonist is going to be, since The Three Evangelists ignores Adamsberg in favor of the three out-of-work academics who study, respectively, prehistory (Mathias/Matthew, the “hunter-gatherer”) the Middle Ages (Marc/Mark, the “broke aristocrat”) and World War I (Lucien/Luke, with a tin soldier on his keyring). They occupy a wreck of a house in a quiet neighborhood, each taking an entire floor, layered chronologically in what might have been fatal whimsy in other hands. The top floor is occupied by Marc’s uncle and godfather, an ex-cop with a tarnished reputation.

As one might expect, three reasonably attractive (well, except for Lucien) young men make friends of their female neighbors and thus become involved when former opera star Sophia Siméonidis is deeply disturbed by the appearance in her garden of a young beech tree. When Sophia disappears, the tale takes off. As in The Chalk Circle Man, Vargas concerns herself with research methods. (After all, she has a PhD. in history and published academically as recently as 2007.) Direct observation, archival research, excavation, discussion, even that tricky process, thought, are all brought to bear on the problem. In a wonderful passage near the end of the novel, Marc goes on a walkabout through Paris, coming to grips with ahorrifying conclusion, then returns home: “He had accepted the idea. He had understood. Everything was in order. He knew where Sophia was. He had put the time in.” Other crucial clues that only Vargas could have invented: the quality of the disturbed earth when a trench has been closed up. A spelling error. The rust-mark left by a paper clip on an old newspaper.

It’s true that The Three Evangelists is not the full-blown Vargas I’ve come to adore. She’s still playing with archetypes rather than real characters — Mathias, for instance, the prehistorian, prefers not to wear clothes and speaks very little while Lucien, the only post-industrial historian, feels naked without his tie. But somehow she makes even these slightly schematic figures sympathetic. And if the murderer’s motive seems a little thin, there’s enough action at the end to more or less veil that shortcoming. The truly good news, though, is that a new Vargas is appearing in France on May 18. Mark your calendar!

Carol Wallace, “Leaving Van Gogh”

Dear readers, I really am trying not to use Book Group of One to promote Leaving Van Gogh, which went on sale yesterday. (Small, discreet cheer.)

Lovely cover design by Greg Mollica of Random House

But I’m getting a lot of traffic here from web searches. So, very briefly. It’s an historical novel about the last two months of Van Gogh’s life. It’s on sale at all the usual places: IndieBound, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, even your local book store where you could conspicuously fondle the gorgeous cover while you waited in line to pay, drawing interested gazes of your fellow book buyers who would then get out of line and go find themselves copies of that beautiful object that appears to be making someone so happy…  OK. Maybe not. E-book versions also available, and a London friend says she has found it on Amazon.co.uk – I’m pretty sure that’s an import of the US version. I don’t have a UK publisher. (Yet?) Canadian Amazon is also carrying it.

Leaving Van Gogh has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, by the Associated Press, and I was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

I’m doing a little bit of traveling: check the “Tour” tab on Carolwallacebooks.com to see where. There’s also a Facebook fan page for the book, and I’ve got events posted there.

And if I post here a little less often in the next few weeks, you will know that it’s because I’m out in the physical and digital worlds trying to introduce readers to my own new novel!

Henry Green, “Party Going”

Oh, Henry Green! Such a trickster! Since Party Going is the third short novel included in the volume I received last month, I was not actually expecting party coverage in the style of M. Proust. Oh, no. But I was a little bit startled that the tale began with a dead pigeon. Yes, dear reader, here are the opening lines:

Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.

There it lay and Miss Fellowes looked up to where that pall of fog was twenty foot above and out of which it had fallen, turning over once. She bent down and took a wing then entered a tunnel in front of her, and this had DEPARTURES lit up over it, carrying her dead pigeon.

Trains to the Continent leave from Victoria Station, as they did in the 1930s.

And if you think you are going to find out why Miss Fellowes gets so attached to that pigeon, let me set you straight. She does take it into the ladies’ room at the train station and wash it in the sink, observed by two retired nannies whom she knows slightly. Then she has it packaged in paper and twine and keeps it with her until …. OK. I don’t know where Miss Fellowes loses her pigeon. All is confusion.

But you see, that’s the story. All is confusion. Fog has entered a vast train station, so thick that trains are no longer departing. A group of rich and fashionable Young People assembles there for a trip to the South of France (the “party” of the title). They are all the guests of Mr. Max Adey, a young man so wealthy, so handsome, and so free of personality that he could easily turn up on the cover of a current issue of Vanity Fair. As the station becomes ever more crowded, the “party” retreats to the station hotel where they look down from their windows to “the people” below — depersonalized, of course, and somewhat menacing. Green descends from time to time into the crowd to visit with the servants who stand watch over the luggage, and to expose the network of dependence, resentment, and respect that connects these two classes.

Action? No, not really. Amabel takes a bath. Julia flirts with Max. Claire is unpleasant to her husband. They all chew over an inconsequential piece of gossip about a man known as “Embassy Richard.” Green manages to recreate the disorienting feeling of such travel glitches (think O’Hare Airport in a snowstorm) while commenting on the ever-fascinating class issues. Yes, the traditions of linear narrative fiction do fall by the wayside and yes, this does make Party Going a faintly tedious read. Yet of the three novellas in this volume, it may turn out to be the most memorable.

Sarah Dunant, “Birth Marks”

I wonder why so many writers choose to begin with murder mysteries. Could it be that so many of us read them so faithfully? Another possibility is that there are simply so many murder mysteries published that the odds of selling one to a publisher aren’t bad. Or it may be that the strict form offers writers training wheels. And them maybe I’m looking at the whole question backwards and the issue is really why so many terrific writers abandon writing mysteries and move on to something more ambitious. Even Julian Barnes wrote four mysteries (as Dan Kavanagh) in the 1980s, while also writing novels like Metroland and Flaubert’s Parrot.

Maybe I am reading into Birth Marks, Sarah Dunant’s first Hannah Wolfe mystery of three. But it seemed to be an exploration of a genre that wouldn’t hold this writer for very long. Hannah Wolfe herself is not an especially original creation, though a very appealing one. A wisecracking sometime employee in a small-time security firm, she is obviously both too posh and too well-educated for her job. (In Birth Marks she turns out to speak perfect French, for instance.) Some ill-defined restlessness and man trouble are Dunant’s only explanation for what otherwise seems like Hannah’s slumming.

That’s a minor quibble, though. Birth Marks is completely enjoyable. The plot concerns a young woman who has vanished, and Hannah pretty expeditously finds out that Carolyn has gotten herself mixed up with a French industrialist for nefarious reasons. I thought I had this figured out and about two-thirds of the way through the book, my guess was revealed to be correct…. but! There was more! Further layers of deception! No one, it turns out, has any principles, possibly including the victim Carolyn. As Hannah puts it: “Funny. When you think about it the only really glamorous thing about Marlowe is Chandler’s style. Strip that away and what have you got but sleaze?” No wonder Dunant bailed after three mysteries!

 

 

Paula McLain, “The Paris Wife”

I’ve never been a big fan of Ernest Hemingway the author. All that swagger is bad enough, but I’m not even a fan of the prose. I have this notion that, just as there are cat people and dog people, there are Fitzgerald people and Hemingway people. If you like that cut-to-the-bone style, then the latter’s the man, but if you like things a little more decorative, then it’s the blue light on the end of the pier that will beckon.

Atget photo of Luxembourg gardens, ca. 1925, from the Chrysler Museum. The Hemingways lived nearby.

So I couldn’t be fair about Hemingway as a character, right from the start. It’s a testament to Paula McLain that I read The Paris Wife in a couple of sittings and that, having finished it, find it hard to shake. The poignant quality almost overwhelms the annoyances, not the least of which is Papa himself. For instance, his verdict on an acquaintance: “‘I do like Greg, but he doesn’t box and he doesn’t know anything about horse racing. I’ve also never seen him drunk.’” Well, there you go, what use could Greg be? Or his approval of narrator Hadley when she enjoys her first bullfight: “‘You weren’t brought up to know how to watch something like this. I guessed you’d go weak. I’m sorry, but I did.’” McLain isn’t easy on Hemingway, showing us how he could be vindictive, rude, arrogant, competitive. But she also peels away the brashness to expose the demons that made him that way.

Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife of four, narrates and you know from the start their marriage is doomed. What McLain does really well is create a woman whose poor choices make sense to her. Hadley, 28, meets Hemingway as a handsome 21-year old, crackling with charisma and ambition. In the earliest scenes, he does a lot of talking and she does a lot of listening, a dynamic that didn’t change much in their five years of marriage. McLain resists the temptation to make this a feminist fable, keeping the focus close on the couple and their impossible emotional equation.

Of course along the way we get … Paris. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, the cafés in Montparnasse. We get Pamplona and Austria, skiing before ski lifts, and the South of France with Gerald and Sara Murphy. Absinthe. Chanel (whom Hadley does not wear: the Hemingways are dirt-poor). The Closerie des Lilas. McLain moves through the arc of Hadley and Ernest’s relationship at a fairly even pace, plucking out telling scenes, building the tension, exposing Ernest’s weaknesses as well as his gifts. I did find that the style grated on me.  McLain seems to be reaching for a neo-Hemingway rhythm in places: “‘I love you,’ I said, and kissed his hands and his eyelids and tried to forget what he’d said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget anything he’d ever said to me. That’s how it was.”

A moment of pedantry: the cover is gorgeous, no question, but the woman’s clothes are from the 1950s while the novel is set in the 20s. Strange choice.

Pierre Assouline, “Le dernier des Camondo”

Visitors to the wonderful Parisian house museum, Musée Nissim de Camondo, tend to get hung up by the photographs. There you are, gazing your fill at the stupendous decorative arts ensemble — paneling, tapestries, porcelain, mind-blowing 18th century furniture. And then sitting on the marble top of a marquetry table, you see a framed picture of a mournful-looking young man, or of a girl on horseback, or of a portly fellow in natty tailoring. Shortly you understand: they are no more. The family that assembled this museum, and the money that created it, has vanished. The last of them died at Auschwitz. 

But what Pierre Assouline wants us to understand in Le dernier des Camondo is the context of this disappearance. The last of the Camondos is actually Moïse, father of Nissim for whom the museum is named. He outlived his only son by 18 years, aware that his family line would end with him. The museum thus becomes their monument, and the terms of its gift to the Paris Musée des Arts Decoratifs insists that everything in the museum remain as it was at his death. No loans, no acquisitions, no moving so much as a snuff box.

The Camondo family were Sephardic Jews who settled in Istanbul and in more recent history had become Italian citizens and bore Italian titles. They did not come to Paris until 1869 when they joined other high-flying Jewish financiers in the Parc Monceau area. Moïse’s cousin was the collector Isaac de Camondo whose death in 1911 added a splendid collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings to the collection of the Louvre (rather before the Louvre was ready for them, but that’s another story). Eventually Moïse lived at 63, rue de Monceau, just down the street from the Ephrussi family. Assouline has done a great deal of research on the earlier history of the Camondo family and conscientiously links the various generations to the social movements and personalities of their eras. Proust appears here, of course, as do the Rothschilds, and notably Charles Ephrussi. But for all his research Assouline doesn’t manage to bring his characters to life the way Edmund de Waal does his Ephrussi ancestors in The Hare with Amber Eyes. Le dernier des Camondo is a fairly conventional social history.

That being said, there are fascinating questions here and Assouline is more than willing to explore them. How much, for instance, can or should a Jewish family assimilate into its host society? The Camondos left Istanbul because they were Westernized, liberal, cosmopolitan. But once in Catholic France, they stayed true to their religion. The children studied Hebrew, the family supported Jewish causes generously, they married within the faith. Assouline does an especially good job tracing the fitful rise of anti-Semitism in France, and the always ambiguous social position of families like the Ephrussis, the Camondos, and even the Rothschilds. The last survivor of the family, Beatrice Reinach, assumed that she would be safe from the Germans because as an excellent equestrian she had many German friends in the world of the horse. Wrong guess. She, her husband, and her children died in Auschwitz.

Memorial to Nissim de Camondo in eastern France. photo Eric Mansuy

But somehow the saddest part of the tale is the death of young Nissim, the gifted, courageous son who was a much-decorated flyer in World War I. He was killed after an air battle on the German front and the Germans so admired his bravery that they paid him the honor of burying him in one of their cemeteries. After the war Moïse had to move heaven and earth to bring Nissim’s body home. He is buried in the family tomb in Montmartre and the golden stone palace, modeled after the Petit Trianon, is his memorial.

Louise Penny, “Still Life”

Is there anything more tricky than choosing the right escape reading? Satisfaction depends so much on your mood and on fine shades of difference in narrators, in action, in setting. I read Tana French but not the Swedes, Patricia Wentworth but not Agatha Christie. At first try, Still Life seemed to be too cute. The body of an elderly woman is found in a beautiful patch of Quebecois woods. Flash back a few days: an appealing woman artist is waiting for an older woman to show up to have coffee with her in their idyllic Canadian village and they discuss the village art show. My heart sank, and I read no further. Still Life seemed awfully cutesy, or “twee” as our English friends might put it.

Fortunately Chief Inspector Gamache of Montreal put some backbone into the proceedings and once it was discovered that the murder weapon was a hunting arrow, I relaxed. Odd, really. Why should cuteness bother me in a genre that is so artificial? Why does the arrival of a nasty steel-pointed arrow, which makes the novel more sinister, also make it more appealing?

For his part, Gamache is tall, handsome, Cambridge-educated, intuitive, occasionally at odds with his bosses in the Sûreté of Quebec. Pretty much the recipe for an attractive detective in a Canadian series. It was the suggestion of several friends that put me onto Louise Penny in the first place although I don’t feel she’s a treasure (hello, Julia Spencer-Fleming!) five more perfectly fine novels about mayhem in Canada are good news.

Michael Gilbert, “Smallbone Deceased”

I recently recommended Michael Gilbert to (I think) Annie because I thought she would like his dry wit. Then, between helpings of Henry Green, I revisited my first-ever and possibly favorite Gilbert, Smallbone Deceased. This is one of those mid-20th-century English mysteries set in a solicitor’s office and I’m not giving away much plot by telling you that the body of Marcus Smallbone is found in a deed box.

Lurid cover from 1954. It doesn't read like this at all.

What I am doing is announcing the slightly arch tone of the novel. We all know where we are, right? Not a “locked-room” novel but a locked box novel, with a diagram at the beginning and a methodical Scotland Yard detective and many, many cups of tea. Reading Smallbone Deceased was sort of like doing the cha-cha with an expert; heeding the conventions is part of the fun.

But so is mocking them. About halfway through the book the genuine detective, Hazlerigg, complains to his appealing amateur helper Henry Bohun:

The trouble with you… is that you read too many detective stories… you expect me to spend my time sitting here asking a million questions. Occasionally moving round the office in a catlike manner, popping up unexpectedly when people are talking to each other, stooping to pick up minute scraps of paper and invisible threads of wool; all the time smoking a foul pipe or playing on a mouth organ or quoting Thucidydes in order to establish a character for originality with the book reviewers…

Bohun is a particular favorite of mine, sucker that I am for the casual polymath. His peculiarity is that he suffers from “para-insomnia” which means he only sleeps two hours a night and suffers no ill effects. He has thus been able to train as an actuary, endure two years of medical school, and qualify as a solicitor in a very short time. He is a lawyer by day, a watchman by night. He cracks the case with a little piece of math.

Here is my favorite throwaway line in the whole book. Gilbert is summing up investigation into the secretaries of the law firm in whose office the deceased man was found. All are questioned, including “Cissie Chittering who lived in Dulwich and spent her evenings in country dancing and decorative poker-work, and Florence Belbas who lived in Golder’s Green but apparently had no other hobbies.”

If that’s the kind of thing you like, Smallbone Deceased is delicious.