Lee Child, “The Affair”

There’s always been something especially satisfying about Lee Child’s thrillers. Child writes good, clean prose and he’s a master with the pacing. He understands how much we love inside information (my favorite is still Without Fail, the one set in the Secret Service) but his sympathy is with the ordinary. He abides by the bargain of the thriller — bad deeds are punished, order restored — but his inspired creation of hero Jack Reacher gives his novels extra appeal. And I have to take this chance to say that, no I have never imagined Reacher looking anything like Tom Cruise. (My impossible casting choice is Ciarán Hinds circa 1995, when he was in Persuasion. Anybody else?)

So of course I was excited about The Affair and I did gulp it down pretty swiftly. But… sigh. It’s melancholy. These books have been set mostly in the present or the recent past but The Affair dates back to 1997. Reacher is narrating at some distance in time:

‘Talking to a man with a gun is a risk. Asking questions isn’t.’

I believed that then, back in 1997.

As you’ve realized if you’re a fan, this is the story of how Reacher became “separated” from the Army — the only community he’s ever known. And the tale has to do with corruption in high places, compromised values, cover-ups. Reacher has always explained his leaving the Army as a pragmatic matter but here we find out that there was a lot of pain involved.

The Pentagon: keep this image in mind for the opening chapter

When you think about it, that makes sense. What besides pain creates a loner? What else makes a man take off across the country with nothing but a toothbrush in his breast pocket?  (Watch for the original disposable toothbrush here.) And what else makes a big strong fella who can kill people with his bare hands so sensitive to the plights of the helpless? But there was something almost arch about the ex-military Robin Hood on a perpetual road trip that made Child’s earlier books more obviously artificial, and thus possibly more fun.

Nor, I have to say, is The Affair quite as polished as I expected. The opening is one of those annoying frames that are trendy right now, a tense moment lifted from the center of the novel that’s supposed to keep us on the hook while we loop back and pick up the essential exposition. But the frame itself requires so much exposition — why is Reacher in uniform at the Pentagon, with scruffy hair and a 5-day beard, evidently walking into a trap, and what the heck does Kosovo have to do with it? — that the technique backfires. In fact the setup is generally slow. I like it better when Reacher just stumbles over trouble.

All in all, The Affair is perfectly competent and exciting. It’s just kind of… well, sad.

P. G. Wodehouse, “My Man Jeeves”

I’ll admit I was a little desperate after finishing Emile Zola’s La Débâcle. I needed entertainment — no, I needed jollity! Hence, Wodehouse. Now, I’m pretty new to his work and gosh, there’s a lot of it. Worse, I was reduced to the freebies on offer via Eucalyptus so I ended up with My Man Jeeves, a volume of stories rather than a full-length novel. And half of them didn’t even feature Bertie Wooster. (Like millions of other readers, I became rather fond of Jeeves rather quickly. I especially like the way he “seeps” in and out of rooms.) They’re narrated instead by a proto-Bertie named Reggie Pepper, who is about 15% less imbecilic and thus 15% less funny. Clearly I need to be more careful next time and I’ve learned my lesson: my phone always needs to be stocked with the right kind of beautiful silliness because it may be required at any moment.

Are You There, Jeff Bezos? It’s Me, Carol…

… with a teeny suggestion. We hear that Amazon is going to release a new tablet reader called “Fire” before Christmas. (No so sure about that name, but “Kindle” has worked pretty well, huh? And I didn’t like that either…) Of course you’ll be sending them out to tech blogs for review but, hey, how about letting the real power users test-drive these devices? Don’t you think you should ship a bunch to book bloggers? Who are pretty adept at reviewing, too… You’ll find  a handy list to the right and below. Okay, just an idea. Thanks for your time.

Emile Zola, “La Debacle/The Downfall”

Another long silence, but I’ve been helping Emile Zola fight the Franco-Prussian war, and it’s taken a long time. Didn’t turn out too well, either: after all, Zola called his book La Débâcle for a reason. Just to get you up to speed: in July of 1870, Prussia more or less manoeuvered France into declaring war. The French, banking on a tradition of military triumph, marched eastward in confidence, carrying only maps of Germany because it was assumed they would invade the neighboring country. But the Prussian army was better organized, better provisioned, and better commanded. Defeat followed defeat, and on September 4,  a large segment of the French army surrendered after a crushing battle in a village called Sedan. Nearly 90,000 men — including the Emperor of France — were taken prisoner. The Prussians swept west to surround Paris, besieging it for more than four months. In the political instability that followed its surrender (you still with me?) the city itself seceded from France and was governed briefly by the Commune. Civil war ensued, with street-to-street fighting and the torching of many familiar monuments. You’ve heard the phrase, “Paris is burning?” In May of 1871, it really was.

Meissonier's "Allegory of the Siege of Paris"

You think that’s a lot of explanation? I’ve just saved you 582 pages. But when Zola wrote La Débâcle in 1892, this was recent history, fresh in everyone’s mind. His goal in reiterating the horrors was to demonstrate how France had been humbled, and why.

There’s way too much here to sort through so I’m taking the lazy way out with bullet points. Truth to tell, I’m still somewhat stunned. As I’ve said elsewhere, Zola’s not a subtle writer and when you get him on, say inadequate wound care, he’s relentless. This is hardly an enjoyable book but it packs a punch.

–Unlike La Curée, this is a polemic rather than a novel. Sure, there are characters and it’s through them that that we perceive what Zola’s so het up about (corruption, laziness, disorganization, mistrust, neurosis, selfishness, cowardice, etc.) But the characters are pretty schematic. Types rather than individuals.

–The research is prodigious. Zola began as a newspaperman, and he reported the heck out of this book. My copy had some scholarly apparatus that tracked our intrepid author’s sources and they were very impressive.

–Back in 1870, when you wanted to make a case — or beat an audience over the head, perhaps? — the way to do it was with a big, heavy piece of fiction. No longer true. I don’t know much about Zola’s role in the Dreyfus affair but I wonder if his famous “J’accuse” letter  of 1898 isn’t a precursor of modern journalistic rhetoric. Which would have Zola using both old and new tools within his career.

–Seems to me there are two fictional things to do with a battle. One is Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme technique in which your protagonist gets mighty confused about all the noise and people running around, and loses track of Waterloo. The other is Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels method, where you provide maps and let the reader follow the action hour by hour. Zola switches back and forth between them.

–One forgets how much the basics matter in wartime, both before and after the battle. The French fought hungry and tired — we’re talking days of fasting because of disorganized supply lines, and sleepless nights because of wet tents and dawn marches. What’s more, once the gunfire stops, the problems really begin, not only for the soldiers but also for the civilian population.

–This book is too long. There’s a lot of repetition and the pacing is slow. But the length forces the reader to feel a tiny bit of the tedium and, imaginatively, a measure of the discomfort, dislocation, terror, pain, humiliation and grief endured by the soldiers and victims of the Franco-Prussian war. And by that measure, it’s a success.

How I Influenced “Downton Abbey”

Maybe you could think of this post not as outright bragging, but as giddiness, OK? Because my brilliant friend and co-author Gail MacColl sent me an article from the UK Daily Telegraph’s Sunday magazine, in which Julian Fellowes, … well, just let me quote it. When he was originally approached about writing the script for this as-yet-unnamed TV series

Fellowes was reading a book called To Marry an English Lord, about American girls who had come over to England in the late 19th century and had married into the English aristocracy.

“It occurred to me that while it must have been wonderful for these girls to begin with,” he says, “what happened 25 years later when they were freezing in a house in Cheshire, aching for Long Island? That was where it all started — with the idea of a woman bringing up her children in a culture different to hers.’”

This is, as Gail put it, deeply satisfying.

Joanna Trollope, “Daughters-in-Law”

Engraving by Thomas Bewick, founder of British bird art

Did I dream this? Wasn’t there a moment when Joanna Trollope’s books were best-sellers in the U.S.? I’ve certainly bought most of them, loaned them to friends, re-read them, enjoyed them mightily. So I was startled to find that Daughters-in-Law more or less sneaked into print in the U.S. with only a paperback edition, now remaindered. I can’t figure this out. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps Trollope’s genteel English fiction feels retro and irrelevant to a mainstream audience? If that’s the case, the books should be repackaged, because they have a great deal of the charm that enchants us in some of the between-the-wars fiction that Persephone or Virago publish so persuasively.

I need to make plain that I’m perfectly happy with gentility. Trollope’s characters almost always know where the next meal is coming from. They have jobs and cars and futures. Actually Trollope is one of those writers — like Maeve Binchy or Rosamunde Pilcher — who make domestic arrangements sound immensely appealing, and that, for me, is part of the pleasure of her books. But it would be nothing without her characters. Here, the couple at the core of the novel are Anthony and Rachel Brinkley, parents of three grown sons. The tale opens at the wedding of the youngest, Luke. It’s a testament to Trollope’s professionalism that this scene introduces all of the players without confusing or boring us. Luke is marrying the spoiled beauty Charlotte. The other couples are banker Edward and his Swedish wife Sigrid, and brilliant but difficult Ralph, with his Bohemian wife Petra. I’ve had to reduce them to fit them in, but these are complicated, believable, attractive characters that I was happy to spend time with.

As for the plot? Well, they all stop getting along for a while. I’ll admit this is pretty standard for Trollope. She sets up her characters, subjects them to emotional strain, they adjust and move on, sometimes in new configurations. Pretty much like most of us, I’d bet. What gave Daughters-in-Law special force for me was its elegiac quality. Trollope is in her late sixties, and the Brinkleys are grandparents. There’s a distinct sense of passing the baton in this book: the center of emotional gravity shifts from the parents’ house to the homes of the sons, not always an easy transition. Rachel, in particular, suffers as a demi-tiger mother, now obsolete.

But I was especially moved by a passage toward the end when the father Anthony Brinkley is in his studio. A bird painter all his life, he is contemplating the dozens of winged skeletons that dangle from his rafters. Rachel wants them removed, saying they are gloomy, but Anthony resists:

They are interesting, every one, and valid. They represented a journey for me, my journey…. I can, with this hand and this brain, translate what I see in such a way that other people can see it too. I can make birds live on paper. And these old bird bones… were part of that process, part of the looking and looking, until you really understand how something works and can then reproduce it in a way, now, that I don’t even have to think about.”

Tell me that’s not one kind of artist, using another kind of artist to ruminate about the nature of creation.What’s retro or irrelevant about that?

…And Then It Changed My Brain

Today’s topic for Book Blogger Appreciation Week: “Reading and Blogging.” What it’s all about, right? And our clever hosts asked us to write today about a range of reading questions but the one that snagged my attention was ” Has blogging changed the way you read?”

First, a confession. I started blogging as a form of self-promotion. Back in December of 2008 I sold my historical novel Leaving Van Gogh to a publisher and it occurred to me that one way to prepare for eventual publication was to stake out an online presence. Blogging, naturally, was the logical option. And the only possible subject for a blog was books, since about all I do besides write is, yes, read. Fast. So if I wrote about each book I finished, I could count on two or three blog posts a week. More or less at random, I settled on 500 words as a length limit. Gradually I figured out about linking and adding an image to each post.

Even more gradually, I realized that self-promotion had been left far behind. I had become, in the years since college, a pretty lazy reader. I had acquired the habit of more or less filleting a book for the plot. Fine for Lee Child, less so for Herman Melville. As a blogger, I began paying closer attention as I read, dog-earing pages, following themes,comparing and contrasting. I also became more attentive to the author’s goal. I read a pretty wide range of fiction and some of it tries only to divert, while some introduces new ideas. You can only judge the merit of a book on whether it succeeds in its task, right?

But I’ve found that as a reader, even judging a book is a pretty simplistic goal. You see? A few years into the project, my intentions have shifted completely. Self-promotion is no longer the point, and I’m not really even trying to review books, per se. In fact, I’ve suffered pretty serious mission creep, because it turns out that my 500 words are an attempt to engage with each book. Maybe I highlight one aspect that strikes me. Maybe I focus on something discomfiting. Often I gush. (Those posts tend toward formlessness and run over 500 words. Sorry.)

And, yes, I do read with an awareness that I’ll be reporting to other eyes. I will be sharing my opinion, and you’ll be sharing yours back, with links and comments and suggestions. So my previously private activity has become, in the diluted but wide-ranging online world, a two-way street. I originally titled the blog “Book Group of One” because I’m too cranky to belong to an actual real-time book group. But it turns out that I now belong to a book group of multitudes.

Hugh Grant Just Sold Me a Book

OK, I’ll admit it. I really like Hugh Grant. So when I read this morning in the Hollywood Reporter  (don’t ask why) that Grant has just joined the cast of the the film version of Cloud Atlas, I had a little re-think. Yes, I loved David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.  But I was afraid of Cloud Atlas. It seemed too literary, too difficult, and somehow I find the word “dystopian” kind of a turn-off. Now, though, I just have to see what lured Hugh Grant back to work.

More on Book Blogging

So I read the instructions wrong. I wasn’t supposed to link back, but to share links to other bloggers’ work! Easy enough. How else do I find out what to read next?

For instance, I love the mix at A Work in Progress. In contrast, Amateur Reader at Wuthering Expectations does only one thing, but it’s a thing I like, too. Then there’s Nathalie Foy’s meta approach, always entertaining. And Senior Common Room attracts for Annie’s onward-and-upward attitude. (One nice thing about blogging colleagues: doesn’t matter how many thousand miles away they are or what time they post.) I like Stuck in a Book because — blush — Simon is charming. Yes, charm exists even in the Internets. And I enjoy the variety on A Striped Armchair. 

Each of those links took me 20 minutes or more to embed because I, er, got sucked in. Each time. And my TBR pile grew. Perhaps tomorrow BBAW will ask us to post about the dangers of blook blogging, which include a great deal of mutual egging-on in our collective hobby/fatal passion.

Appreciating Everyone…

It’s Book Blogger Appreciation Week, did you know? (Usually I find these things out when they are over.) Hope some of my blogging colleagues will join the fun.