Tana French, “Broken Harbor”

OK. We know that Tana French is a goddess, yeah? So all I really have to do here is tell you that Broken Harbor keeps up her usual high standard and that you should read it right away. But just in case you don’t know her work, or want details — or because I can’t help myself — here’s more.

Ghost estate: photo from Galway Planning Blog on WordPress

French‘s last outing was Faithful Place, which took a searing look at a certain kind of Irish family dysfunction, while also, naturally, solving a mystery. In Broken Harbor, though, she takes on the more recent phenomenon of the wreckage of the Celtic Tiger. Her narrator detective is Michael Kennedy, whom we knew (and disliked) in Faithful Place as “Scorcher.” In an interview in the Barnes & Noble Review French talks about how she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand living in Scorcher’s head for the two years it took her to write the book. Well, it can’t be a fun place — Kennedy’s a seriously hurting puppy. But so, it turns out, are all of the characters in Broken Harbor. And, as in French‘s debut novel In the Woods, the detective has strong emotional ties to the location that should probably prevent him from taking the case.

Are the themes hit a little hard here? I’d say so. “Broken Harbor” is the old name of the seaside resort where our narrator used to vacation with his fragile family; two happy weeks a year in a caravan parked on the seashore. Broken (get it? broken?) Harbor has been renamed “Brianstown” as part of one of those sketchy real estate developments that were abandoned in the Irish crash and are now called “ghost estates.” Kennedy catches the case when a young family is discovered dead in their house. Pat and Jenny Spain were living the good life, working hard, spending hard, raising two adorable kids and getting on the “property ladder” with a 110% mortgage, when it all went haywire. Our first clue: the walls of the pristine Spain house — one of the few occupied among the rows of half-built abandoned shells — are full of holes punched through the drywall.

So what we basically have here is a tale in which the slick surfaces are peeled away and we witness the desperation beneath. Is the plot a surprise? Not especially. Is the handling magisterial? Absolutely. As Tana French’s readers know, she is the master of the unreliable narrator and Kennedy is a tour de force. This is a guy who’s spent his entire adult life attempting to hold back the forces of darkness: “In every way there is, murder is chaos. Our job is simple, when you get down to it: we stand against that, for order.”

Here’s another bit of Scorcher’s wisdom, which explains the perennial popularity of the mystery novel. “One of the many ways that murder is the unique crime: it’s the only one that makes us ask why. Robbery, rape, fraud, drug dealing, all the filthy litany, they come with their filthy explanations built in; all you have to do is slot the perp into the perp-shaped hole. Murder needs an answer.”

By the way, French usually chooses as narrator a secondary character from her previous book. This suggests two possibilities for Novel Number 5: the young eager Richie Curran or the odious department hack Quigley. Any bets?

Margaret Mitchell, “Gone with the Wind”

Yes. It is still fabulous.

You’ll notice I’m assuming that you have read Gone with the Wind at some point, which may be a generational thing, but everyone has seen the movie, right? Sure, both book and movie are long, but with Hilary Mantel tearing up the best seller lists, I don’t see that length is a big objection. And, yes, Margaret Mitchell takes a patronizing view of blacks and her perspective on some aspects of post-Civil War Georgia politics is repugnant. But the plus side is that Gone with the Wind is a thrilling read, for all 1025 pages. You could look far and wide to find a better summer beach book, even if you think it’s old hat. From “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, though men seldom realized it…”  to “‘After all, tomorrow is another day,’” I was captivated.

Just in case you need a refresher: Scarlett is a headstrong Georgia belle whom we meet in April of 1861, as tiresome male war-mongering begins to interfere with her incessant flirtations. She is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes, a classic Southern gentleman of the bookish variety, fond of poetry and music, but the best horseman in the County. As war bears down on the South, Scarlett sees only her own tragedy when Ashley announces his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. In a private moment she declares her love for Ashley, who admits that he “cares” for her, but will marry Melanie nonetheless. This tender scene is unwillingly overheard by Rhett Butler, the bounder from Charleston, who is amused. In the first ten percent of the book, Mitchell has set up the conflicts that keep us turning the next 900 pages.

Of course Scarlett is the key to the whole thing. My goodness, what a piece of work she is — a monster-character along the lines of Angelica Deverell in Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. Mitchell is very clear about Scarlett’s selfishness, obstinacy, limited intellectual gifts and poor judgment, but we remain fascinated. And not in a train-wreck way; somehow at the end of the book, when she meets a real defeat, we’re still rooting for her. I don’t remember where I read this but some writer recently pointed out that the great power of fiction is to make readers identify with the characters’ desires. We just can’t help it. So with a character like Scarlett who is all desire, we’re completely hooked.

Mitchell also does a great job managing the various levels of conflict in the novel. The Scarlett/Ashley/Rhett triangle separates and re-forms repeatedly as Scarlett marries, first out of pique, and second out of practicality. The war, of course, keeps the tension high, especially as Union troops approach Atlanta. But there’s also consistent confrontation between the Old South and the New, which Mitchell sees in rueful, elegiac terms. The cultivation and aesthetic charms of the old South, along with its essential values of hospitality, loyalty and gentility, are embodied in Ashley’s wife Melanie, who shows courage under pressure and kindness to all. She dies, of course, leaving the world to Scarlett, with her relentless energy and drive. Rhett has just delivered his deathless line — “‘My dear, I don’t give a damn” — but Scarlett is indomitable, and maybe that’s why we follow her through the book with fascination and a tinge of envy.

Alan Furst, “Mission to Paris”

We know what we’re going to get when we read Alan Furst: moody, well-written thrillers set somewhere in Europe during the years leading up to World War II. As I’ve commented here before, these books are almost interchangeable. Take a principled hero, subject him to pressures from the growing power of the Nazi regime, and watch him squirm. Add quirky female characters to provide sexual spice and go on for 200 pages.

Hey, I’m not complaining. Mission to Paris  is a perfectly pleasant read. The hero is Fredric Stahl, an American movie star of Viennese birth. He has been sent to Paris by Warner Brothers in 1938 to make a film called “Après la Guerre,” in which he plays a French Foreign Legionnaire. He comes under pressure from certain mysterious Germans to help the Nazi cause. I think you can imagine the rest. I’ll merely add that he’s in Berlin for one night which just happens to be Kristallnacht.

The real star of the novel is Paris, from the posh hotels near the Champs-Elysées to the recessive grandeur of the Faubourg St.Germain and the down-market charms of Montmartre. Furst writes about this city with such knowledge and sensory pleasure that he transports you. The plot of Mission to Paris is a little bit flabby — though it does contain a gun battle it lacks a definitive climax — but as a brief, inexpensive mental vacation the novel is very good value.

Elly Griffiths, “A Room Full of Bones”

Ruth Galloway is a great character for a detective series:  overweight, cranky, insecure in every area but her profession, which happens to be forensic archaeology. Which is to say, Ruth studies old bones. What a terrific premise! Teamed with the hyper-prickly police detective Harry Nelson, to handle the technical stuff like actually cuffing the perpetrators, Ruth has now solved four mysteries on England’s Norfolk coast. Unfortunately, A Room Full of Bones doesn’t rise to the level of the three previous books.

Ruth’s new neighbor on the Saltmarsh also plays the digeridoo.

Some of the difficulty arises from the perennial challenges of a mystery series. Elly Griffiths has to keep referring back to previous episodes and juggling familiar secondary characters while keeping everyone moving forward. Fortunately, there’s a lot of tension and a certain amount of humor in this group. Nelson’s relationship with his wife Michelle provides the former and Ruth’s ditsy friend Shona provides the latter. What’s more Michelle now knows that Ruth’s baby Kate is, yikes! Nelson’s. Great touch.

And, yes, there are dead bodies. All over the place, actually. The usual breakdown is that Nelson attends to the recently dead while Ruth solves the older puzzles, but Griffiths engages in some misdirection here by bringing in Aboriginal folklore and a subplot about repatriation of some native Australian remains, along with an animal-rights movement red herring and the possibility of a curse. Druid Cathbad reappears, enigmatically as always. Long dream sequences à la Craig Johnson occur. The ultimate solution of the contemporary murders can be attributed to magic or not (in the style of Fred Vargas)– the drug ring, though, gets sorted. It all seemed slightly perfunctory and even Griffiths‘ usual sharp narrative voice seemed a little bit muffled. I’m hoping she returns to form for the next book, which I’m sure is already under way.

Anouk Markovits, “I Am Forbidden”

Many years ago The New Yorker ran a long story by Lis Harris  called “Holy Days,” about the Lubavitcher Jews of Crown Heights. (She later turned it into a book.) I was amazed and fascinated by the lives she described, and that fascination has stayed with me. It’s not just very devout Jewish observance that I find compelling: I’ve written enough here about nun books here to make that clear. What gets my attention is the details of these lives, whether Catholic or Jewish for that matter LDS. I love ritual, and I love reading about communities where rituals of faith permeate everyday life. There is also something attractive about the close-knit quality of these communities, and what I imagine to be the comfort of knowing where you belong. Yes, I realize I am romanticizing.

Maurycy Gottlieb, 1878: “Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur”

Whether or not you share my interest, you may see the inherent drama in the clash between religious and secular life. It’s constantly in the news, and it must be a perpetual source of tension  for adherents of the strictest faith communities. The way it’s often explored in fiction is in the “stay or go” narrative. I Am Forbidden falls into this category. Anouk Markovits, according to her author bio, “was raised in France in a Satmar home, breaking from the fold when she was nineteen to avoid an arranged marriage.” The Satmar sect is one branch of Hasidic Judaism, with roots in what is now Romania and a large post-World War II presence in Brooklyn. I Am Forbidden opens in rural Transylvania on the verge of World War II.  In snapshot-short chapters, we are introduced to Zalman Stern, a young Torah scholar with “the most beautiful voice east of Vienna,” to little Josef Lichtenstein and Mila Heller, both orphaned in the war. A moving passage recounts The Days of Awe in the tiny synagogue full of “Jews who wished they could forget they were Jews and thin bent shadows who knew someone would remember: Jews who spoke no Romanian; Jews who spoke only Romanian.”  Josef, hidden during the war as a Catholic, is introduced to his true identity. “Like Zalman at the lectern, he, Josef Lichtenstein, wanted the lost world to live again.”

Markovits is very good on this lost world, giving us outsiders a glimpse of the ecstasy of worship, the confidence instilled by living in an enclave, the rewards of satisfying family life, and above all the Satmar community’s will to survive. The weak link in the novel is the structure. Markovits leans on the contrast between Zalman’s daughter Atara (restless, inquiring) and Mila Heller, adopted by Zalman’s family, who luxuriates in the structure of her world. Mila is thrilled to be married to Josef and the two set up a household in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with every expectation of producing child after child to replace the Jews lost in the war. But nothing happens. “There was not much to be, in Williamsburg, for a woman who was not pregnant.” After ten years, if a couple does not have children, they divorce. Mila and Josef love each other. Satmar practice forbids Josef being tested to see if he can conceive. This lovely little family crashes into the unyielding edicts of their faith.

The plot, of course, isn’t the point of a book like this. The “stay or go” narrative is always written by someone who left. The renegades are our only source of information. What sets Markovits apart is her rueful even-handedness. She allows herself — and the reader — to regret what she’s lost.

Laura Moriarty, “The Chaperone”

“Chaperone” is a good word, isn’t it? Conjures up a completely different world from ours, back when the appearance of sexual propriety was important. It seems both quaint and safe. I’ll admit that I was expecting madcap Prohibition escapades and maybe some characters dancing the Charleston from Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone, but that was a misjudgment. It’s true that this novel is about a woman who serves as Louise Brooks’ chaperone on a trip to New York City in 1922, and that most of the action takes place in New York during that time frame. But maybe it’s better thought of as a belated-coming-of-age novel, and an exploration of different kinds of love.

Ruth St. Denis & Denishawn Dancers, one of whom is Louise Brooks. Courtesy New York Public Library.

Let’s get Louise out of the way first. Moriarty’s portrait of the film star is completely believable and compelling: Louise is focused, driven, impossible. Cora Carlisle is accompanying her to New York to study dance with Ruth St. Denis, and Louise makes the most of that opportunity, despite also creating a certain amount of havoc. It’s Brooks on the handsome cover of the book and Brooks who serves as a foil to Cora over the arc of the book.

But Cora Carlisle is the heart of the novel. She’s first presented to us as a prosperous Wichita housewife with two college-age sons and a handsome lawyer husband. It seems surprising that she would volunteer to escort the surly Brooks on this visit to New York, especially since Louise, at fifteen, is already more than a handful. While they’re still on the train, Cora begins to grasp that safeguarding Louise’s innocence is going to be a thankless task, but she’s too naive to grasp the truth: that Louise hasn’t been an innocent for years.

Gradually we learn that Cora’s own life and marriage aren’t as predictable as they had seemed at first. She has her own reasons for traveling to New York, and some of her Midwestern complacency gets rubbed off along the way. What makes her an especially appealing character is her sensitivity and self-awareness; she’s quick to catch and reconsider her own narrow-mindedness. But her defining characteristic is generosity, and we see that quality again and again in the course of the book. Moriarty makes an interesting structural choice in The Chaperone, continuing the story once Cora returns to Wichita. She speeds up the pace and moves into a more episodic form of story-telling that remains just as compelling as the slower, more detailed earlier portion. The events of her New York trip, and their impact on her, continue to blossom. (I’m trying not to give too much away, but if you want more plot details, see this NYTimes review.) I began reading The Chaperone with some skepticism and reserve, but finished it with affection for the characters and admiration for Moriarty.

Ruth Rendell, “The Vault”

We’re getting on in years, Ruth Rendell, Reg Wexford and I. I sort of dropped the ball on the Wexford novels, one of the most consistently satisfying police procedural series. I left Reg out there in Kingsmarkham, his Southern English town plagued by a remarkably high rate of violent crime. I must have missed three or four books in which he applied his humanity and his intuition to the puzzle at hand and solved it entirely plausibly. I missed various developments in his family: his actress daughter Sheila’s marriage, his social-worker daughter Sylvia’s third child. Then when I picked up The Vault, I found that Wexford has retired! Not only that, he’s living in London and walking everywhere has taken off his extra poundage. But he’s at loose ends, doesn’t quite know what to do with his time. So he’s happy to be called in as a “consultant” on a murder that baffles the local force. Beneath a patio behind an expensive house in St. John’s Wood, four bodies have been discovered. Not one can be identified, and while two men and a woman seem to have been interred at roughly the same time, one body is much more recent. The home-owner claims he didn’t know the bodies were there. Where do you even start?

Hence Wexford’s intervention. He has time the legitimate force doesn’t, time to noodle around and talk to the neighbors, to observe and cogitate on his long walks through North London. In some ways he’s coming to resemble my beloved Jean-Pierre Adamsberg of the Fred Vargas novels, but Rendell works in a more naturalistic vein than Vargas. While the latter always includes some supernatural element, and you’re aware at all times that you are reading a suspenseful confection of a tale, Rendell is more matter-of-fact. I think that’s what has always given her creepier books their special weird power.

Despite its title, despite its resolution, The Vault won’t inspire nightmares, or even discomfiting reflections about the dark corners of human nature. It’s just efficient, effective entertainment.

Elizabeth Taylor, “A View of the Harbour”

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the few writers whose books I will choose blindly. If she wrote a novel and I haven’t read it, I don’t even bother to see what it’s about. Or “about,” because with Taylor there’s always a great deal seething away below the surface. A View of the Harbour, for instance, is one of the more ostensibly quiet of her novels. The structure is apparently casual: the omniscient narrator rambles from one resident to another of the seaside village of Newby, examining the little community and its surroundings in a clear, dispassionate light.

Cadgwith Cove, probably more picturesque than Taylor’s Newby.

The outlander is Bertram Hemingway, a retired naval officer who fancies himself an artist and has come to Newby to paint. His function for Taylor, of course, is to be the outsider who misunderstands or the outsider who notices afresh, and provides insight. The two genteel families are the Cazabons and their next-door neighbor, Tory Foyle. Tory is an unstable element in this setting, a beautiful young divorcee with a young son and a propensity for fecklessness. Beth Cazabon, the novelist who lives next door, has always been Tory’s staid, predictable sidekick. But, this being an Elizabeth Taylor novel, Beth Cazabon has her own unruly qualities. In Angela Thirkell’s hands, she would merely be the frumpy neighbor with the peculiar daughters, but Beth, as Tory points out, has a wild and reliable source of satisfaction in her writing. “‘She is about the only happy person I know,’” Tory tells Robert Cazabon. “‘Don’t you see how she is to be envied? Nothing people do can ever break her.’”

And why is Tory discussing Robert’s wife with him, on these intimate terms? Well might you ask: this relationship is another un-Thirkell development. So is the coarse but vital Mrs. Bracey, fat, crippled and malicious, who makes life grim for her daughters Maisie and Iris. Then the widowed Lily Wilson, proprietress of a pathetic Wax Museum, seems on the verge of slipping into alcoholism or a kind of informal prostitution or possibly both. In fact A View of the Harbour resembles Stella Gibbons’ classic Cold Comfort Farm, with its relish of peculiarities. Taylor, though, avoids Gibbons‘ satiric tone, so we participate in Lily Wilson’s desperation and Mrs. Bracey’s will to dominate.

And what happens in the novel? Oh, life and death. The war is recently over, Newby is poor and shabby. Summer comes and the tourists don’t. Bertram doesn’t paint. Maisie flirts with her mother’s lodger, a fisherman, and Mrs. Bracey kicks him out of the house. The Cazabons’ daft daughter Prudence feeds disgusting messes to her two elegant Siamese cats, Yvette and Guilbert. Tory buys frivolous hats. A yacht skims the water of the bay, white sails looking irrelevant in their beauty. Hats, cats, boats, hearts, they’re all equally important.