Michael Connelly, “The Reversal”

Michael Connelly sells a lot of books, and since I’m always on the lookout for escape reading, I bought a used copy of The Reversal in an airport last week. I will say that it got me through the 5 hours from Burbank to New York. But I have to add that the ladies chatting rather loudly in front of me broke through the storytelling more than once, which meant that the book was not completely doing its job.

The Reversal is a recent entry in a series of books by Connelly that follow a network of characters solving crimes in Los Angeles. Detective  Harry Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller are working together here with what is evidently a familiar cast of ex-wives and former colleagues. There’s a lot of criminal court procedure that reminded me of jury duty only, of course, much more colorful. The criminal in this case is Jason Jessup, who has spent 24 years in jail for murdering a little girl. The case has been reopened and Mickey — normally a defense lawyer — is named prosecutor. It’s perfectly competent but lacked the quirkiness of Thomas Perry’s books, which cover much the same ground. So I guess Perry remains my airborne choice.

Anita Brookner, “Hotel du Lac”

The 1984 winner of the Booker Prize — back when we in the U.S. were just starting to pay attention to the Booker Prize — was a short quiet novel about an English spinster, called Hotel du Lac. The author, Anita Brookner, was an art historian who had suddenly broken into the fiction big time, and several of her previous novels were published in the U.S. around that time. Brookner’s popularity followed on the rediscovery of English novelist Barbara Pym (more spinsters) and the English movie Stevie, about the poet Stevie Smith. Also a spinster.

Wrong mood -- a baggage tag for the fictional Hotel du Lac would be shades of gray.

All this concern about unmarried women: was that a cultural phenomenon, or did I just perceive it as such? I think it must have been real, springing from an anxiety about women’s roles that was in turn the offspring of second-wave feminism. The protagonist of Hotel du Lac is Edith Hope, a 39-year-old writer of women’s romances who has been  packed off to a Swiss resort hotel to recover from some disaster she’s brought on herself. Brookner piques our curiosity by declining to explain just what happened. Instead she focuses on the characters at the hotel, most of whom are women. As Edith gets to know them, they resolve into examples of different approaches to femininity. There are the Pusey women, mother and daughter: voracious consumers and manipulators of masculinity. There is Monica, anorectic, sent to Switzerland to fatten up so she can conceive an heir for her husband. Then lame, deaf Madame de Bonneuil has been exiled to the hotel by her unloving son. The hotel, we understand, is a microcosm of the world, in which the flashy, dramatic, overtly sexy Pusey women are the successes. The sole male guest at the Hotel du Lac is handsome sardonic Philip Neville who tells Edith a few unpleasant truths:

‘You are a lady, Edith. They are rather out of fashion these days, as you may have noticed. As my wife you will do very well. Unmarried, I’m afraid you will soon look a bit of a fool.’

It turns out that Hotel du Lac is a mild little retelling of the Faust tale, with Philip Neville standing in for the devil (catch the name rhyming?) who offers Edith the great bargain of marriage. But she would certainly have to give him her soul.

This is most of the plot, and I’m sorry to have given it away, but Hotel du Lac isn’t the kind of book you read for the plot. Rather you read it for the sharp observations and Brookner’s insights, as well as her deft, economical characterizations. It does feel like a period piece, though; a snapshot of a surprisingly recent moment when women still defined themselves through their relationships to men.

Elizabeth Bowen, “The Last September”

With books as with people, sometimes it’s hard to assess incompatibility: is it me, or is it him? I had respectful (if not exactly fond) memories of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September. I know her work is highly prized in literary circles and maybe in another mood I would have been more appreciative. But this time around I found myself impatient with Bowen’s quirks of style. Normally I’m perfectly happy with books in which nothing obvious happens, but I found myself tapping my foot at Bowen’s start/stop approach to narrative. In fact, my error may have been in expecting story telling in the first place.

Where the book is heading all along.

The novel was written in 1929. My grasp of Irish history is pretty vague but we’re in the midst of “the Troubles” and the action centers on a big Anglo-Irish house called Danielstown. The central character is the young Lois Farquar, niece of Danielstown’s owner. Lois is nineteen, just out of school, and seriously underemployed. One of the enduring impressions I took away from the book — and this is certainly intentional — is one of time passing very, very slowly. Light shifts; furniture settles; people change their minds about each other. Visitors arrive at the house, meals are consumed, letters written, flowers arranged, oh! the tedium! Lois is utterly at loose ends and the only intrigue is supplied by the English soldiers stationed nearby. One — handsome, opaque — is in love with Lois, or at least with the idea of Lois. There’s a great deal of dialogue that shows the two at cross-purposes. Meanwhile genuine drama, like military raids, all takes place off-stage, and the climactic action of the book is summed up in a dry little epilogue and we never find out what happens to our characters.

But “happening” is hardly Bowen’s concern. The Last September is barely serial, if I can put it that way. It’s more like a panoramic photograph stitched together to portray different angles of a place. Incidents like a dance in the British camp or a long walk into the mountains exist to illustrate the different angles of the fraying of British rule in southern Ireland. It’s almost like the painted backdrop to a Mollie Keane novel. Only I was in the mood for a little bit more action, so I found the novel beautiful but achingly  slow.

Tana French, “The Likeness”

Let’s start by thinking about glamor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (with the magnifying glass, yes), the word doesn’t enter English until late in the 18th century, when it basically means a spell. The contemporary definition offered by the OED is “A magical or fictitious beauty… a delusive or alluring charm.”

So glamor is by definition deceptive. And The Likeness dives right into that pool, insisting on both charm and delusion, which are naturally sides of the same mirror. The basic premise of the book involves doubling: Dublin detective Cassie Maddox, whom we met in In the Woods, is summoned to the ruins of a cottage outside of Dublin one morning to find her former Undercover boss Frank Mackey and her current boyfriend Sam O’Neill (of the Murder squad) hovering over a body. Sam is especially undone, because the body is a physical double for Cassie.

If you’re willing to buy that premise — and why wouldn’t you be, with Tana French in charge? — the rest of the plot is plausible. Frank wants to use the likeness to send Cassie back to the life of the murdered girl, Lexie Madison. Cassie’s got a reckless streak, and unresolved issues about loyalty, so she agrees. And what a menage she falls into! Here’s the opening line of The Likeness: “Some nights, if I’m sleeping on my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House.” Do you remember the opening line of Daphne duMaurier’s Rebecca? “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Tana French is absolutely setting you up here: you are supposed to be thinking for all 466 pages of this book about appearance and reality. Whitethorn House is as much a fantasy as Manderley was, and Cassie Maddox falls for it and all who dwell there. There’s Daniel March, the brilliant rakish owner of the crumbling 18th century mansion in the Irish countryside. Rafe, “the resident eye candy,” is English, trying to escape his boorish rich father. Justin, nervous and gay, Abby, plucky and practical, with a drug-addict mother — the five of them (with the late Lexie), all graduate students, have forged a new family. Cassie, orphaned young and never quite over it, falls deliriously into her deception. She becomes Lexie, and comes perilously close to losing herself in the spell these people cast.

Oh, there’s a lot going on here. You’ve got the Cinderella thing, as Cassie turns herself into the dead girl. You’ve got various sexual undercurrents: Lexie was pregnant when she died. You’ve got the glamor component: these five attractive young people living together in a grand house, creating their own witty, elegant civilization. Only one of them must have killed Lexie. And Cassie is wearing a wire, and none of it will end well.

I read The Likeness when it came out in 2008 and I’ve been hoarding it for a re-read ever since. The glamor thing gets me every time (see Rules of Civility), and French has given Cassie a literate, eloquent, sensual voice with a redeeming edge of irreverence. I loved every page of it, and as of today I’m counting down to the next go-round.

Nathaniel Philbrick, “Why Read Moby-Dick?”

“There are no tricks — there is only enthusiasm.” That, according to my admittedly flawed memory, is legendary femme fatale Pamela Harriman’s explanation of how she managed to ensnare so many powerful men in her lifetime. My husband takes this to mean that men are pathetically easy to please, but I think the message is broader: eagerness to share your pleasure has powerful appeal. You could, if you wanted to be snarky, say that Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? is just a high-brow fan magazine. But you’d have to have a pretty hard heart to resist Philbrick’s ardor for what he calls “the greatest American novel ever written.”

Not white, not Moby, but a sperm whale

He starts — oh, very cleverly! — on December 16, 1850, a moment Herman Melville wrote into the novel, bringing himself to the foreground of the fiction as he composed the novel. This attention to Melville’s self-referential moment puts the struggling, sympathetic young author in front of us as he wrestles with this massive, unwieldy narrative. Then Philbrick moves back to give us some context, both for Melville and for the United States of America in 1850. This was the year the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and Philbrick sees Moby-Dick as, among other things, a rumination on the toxic existence of slavery in the supposedly democratic United States. But he points out that the book is not an allegory: while mad Captain Ahab might see the great white whale as a symbol of the evil in the world, Nathaniel Philbrick draws our attention to Moby Dick’s detailed physical presence: “In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.”

Well — yes and no. There’s a constant toggling back and forth in Philbrick’s book, between Moby-Dick and Melville, between the chronology of the fiction and the chronology of its author. But that reiterating shift in focus just mirrors Melville’s own disconcerting slipping among whales, THE whale, and “the whale” (standing in for something much larger). They are all interwoven, and Philbrick helps us appreciate how the liveliness and convincing quality of Melville’s imagined episodes function on several levels.

Philbrick comes to this material naturally: ten years ago he won a National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea, which recounted the tragic 1819 voyage of the whaler Essex. This was the incident that provided the seed for Moby-Dick. Since then Philbrick has written on other big stories in the history of nineteenth-century America (Custer; the exploration of the American interior) and he has an easy authority with the subject at hand. Combine that with his elegant style, some acute literary analysis, and, yes, his enthusiasm, and you’ve got a delightful little book.

John Le Carre, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”

Yes, I’m getting ready for the December release of the film, which stars Brit film giants like Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and (be still my heart) Ciaràn Hinds. But that was really just an excuse. I suspect John Le Carré is always going to be one of my staple authors, one of those writers I go back to again and again. Naturally I look for new rewards each time I read a book like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and this time around they were richly evident.

Gary Oldman as Smiley. Excellent!

The plot, though …. is it just me? I can never follow Le Carré’s plots. I know there is a Soviet mole at the very highest level of British intelligence. I know it’s one of five men. I know the code to identify them is the old nursery rhyme: “Tinker, tailor, soldier, chief….”  I even dimly remembered, on this third or fourth reading, (!) which of George Smiley’s colleagues was ultimately guilty. But could I follow the logic? No.

Not that it mattered. Oh, goodness, no. One of the great pleasures of re-reading a book as complex as this one is the joy with which you meet old friends. Look! There’s the dashing Peter Guillam! There’s George Smiley, of course, wearing (perhaps for the last time since, Oldman plays him in the upcoming film) Alec Guinness’s features. And my favorite, the alcoholic research expert, Connie Sachs, a fountain of florid English dialogue. Here’s how Le Carré introduces her:

‘George Smiley,’ she cried, with a shy trailing laugh as she drew him into the house. ‘Why, you lovely darling man, I thought you were selling me a Hoover, bless you, and all the time it’s George!’”

“Trailing” reminds you of some beautiful flowering vine, doesn’t it? The book is full of this kind of allusiveness. It’s fundamentally an elegy for Britain’s lost Empire (more on that), and everywhere we see downgraded shards of Imperial confidence: in a tacky curry house where Smiley has a depressing meal, in the hotel Islay where he holes up to rummage through files, in nasty trains and a tenth-rate boarding school. Too, there’s the weather. Smiley’s groping his way through a murky case and Le Carré is constantly describing mist, fog, clouds, dampness, darkness. Reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy is a forceful lesson in how every single detail can weave an emotional as well as visual atmosphere around your characters.

But what struck me most on this reading was the theme of diminishment. Tinker, Tailor… was published in 1974. The Cold War and its fever of spying was winding down. So, finally, was the Edwardian view of espionage as a reiteration of The Great Game. Even the allure of socialism to elements of the British upper class (the novel is at least loosely inspired by the Cambridge group of spies including Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, etc) was drying up by the 1970s. So there predominant mood here is a terrible melancholy. As George Smiley grapples with the motivation of the traitor, he thinks:

Connie’s lament rang in his ears: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves…’ He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed… upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.”

That sounded to me like Le Carré himself peering out from behind the authorial scrim, letting us hear his personal lament. And I do believe it’s the heart-felt quality of that sadness — in addition to all the duplicity, the trade craft, the characters, the suspense — that makes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy so much more than a spy novel.