Patrick O’Brian, “The Reverse of the Medal”

Oh wow, are you sitting down? Major Literary Discovery here. I was happily absorbed in The Reverse of the Medal when PLOT SPOILER (sorry) I got to the section when Jack is imprisoned at the Marshalsea — what we might call the white-collar prison of Georgian London. Stephen goes to visit him and there’s a description of Jack’s daily routine, Sophie’s presence as a visitor, all very pleasant…. but something’s tickling at my memory, some familiarity: Patrick O’Brian is referring to Little Dorrit! It’s plain as day. I remarked earlier on O’Brian’s borrowing from Stendhal in The Surgeon’s Mate. That was very clear — and I did feel, reading through The Far Side of the World, that Moby-Dick was present in a shadowy way. Of course as reader Antony pointed out, you can’t write about whaling without Herman Melville somewhere in the offing. And I’ll add that in the earlier books, when Jack is courting Sophie, the social machinations and the dry humor did remind me of Jane Austen. (But I tend to see her everywhere.)

Actually the first prison on the site: Jack was probably confined in the second one. But you get the idea.

I’m too lazy to do the research to substantiate these claims, but I offer them freely to O’Brian scholars who may have a field day with them. I would just add that these literary references don’t in any way spoil the fiction; even when you perceive the source, you are still firmly anchored in the Aubrey/Maturin world. Which is quite complicated, in The Reverse of the Medal. A lot happens. O’Brian goes from  gentle, generous comedy (the introduction of Jack’s black illegitimate son Sam Panda, for example; he is far more sophisticated than his father and resembles him very closely except in the matter of skin color), to the greatest tragedy that could befall Jack. This is one of the novels that takes place mostly ashore, and Jack off his ship is prone to misfortune. To add to the melancholy, Diana Villiers has bolted from London, furious at Stephen’s apparent wooing of another lady. (An intelligence stratagem, of course.) So both of our protagonists are severely distressed and it is moving to witness their different kinds of courage in the face of their trials. Stephen attempts distraction, whether with work or with laudanum. But Jack faces his pain proudly and stoically, accepting no help. After a criminal trial he is sentenced to the pillory, and Stephen brings him some laudanum to get him through it.

Stephen saw that he had no intention of taking it, and that the underlying pain was quite untouched. For to Jack Aubrey the fact of no longer belonging to the Navy counted more than a thousand pillories, the loss of fortune, loss of rank, and loss of future. It was in a way a loss of being, and to those who knew him well it gave his eyes, his whole face, the strangest look.”

I have to mention that the scene of Jack in the stocks is one of the most moving I know in fiction. A friend once told me about reading this series with her husband; she began each book as he finished it. One night they were reading side by side in bed and she became aware that her husband was awash in tears. He wouldn’t tell her why — he was crying too hard anyway — but when he got control of himself, all he could say was, “You’ll see.” Read it. You’ll see.

Amor Towles, “Rules of Civility”

I spend a lot of time thinking about story-telling, because that’s what I do for a living. My interest, retro though it increasingly seems, is pretty narrowly confined to the novel, as readers here know. As I’m reading, I’m also writing. Sometimes what I read makes me feel OK about what I write, and sometimes (as in the case of Zola’s novels) it adds depth to what I’m working on. But sometimes a book comes along that makes me feel like a total amateur — and Rules of Civility is one of those.

One of Walker Evans' subway photos, as in the novel's opening scene

I saw this book coming. People (actual humans, not just the Amazon bots) kept drawing it to my attention. But, you know, a novel about upper-crust Manhattan in 1938? How yawn-making, thought I. Well, here’s the lesson of the day for writers young and old: You can tell any story you want to and people will read it, if you get the voice right.

Because really, this isn’t new material. The central character, Tinker Grey, is a later version of  Jay Gatsby, with a more interesting sex life and a conscience. Our narrator is one of those wisecracking working-class girls who reads too much. There’s a steno pool, grand parties on Long Island, an Adirondack camp, sundry smoky night-clubs, and a grand magazine start-up called Gotham. Plus an ocean of alcohol. Once I got launched on the tale, though, I could hardly bear to put the book down. Simply put, Rules of Civility recounts one year of Katey Kontent’s interactions with a group of glamorous young men and women, and her discovery of the ever-shifting border between appearance and reality. The author, Amor Towles, brackets the tale cleverly by describing a series of Walker Evans photographs taken on the subway in the period. The frame is a flashback: Katey is older and wiser as she narrates. The frame is also a formal device warning us that artifice will follow, and Towles often tips his hat to his predecessors, quoting Edith Wharton here, Hemingway there, Dickens often. He turns them into colleagues. Katey is Pip, and so is Tinker, and that’s all the plot summary I have for you.

But despite the frank artificiality, Rules of Civility also has a heart. Katey’s account is rueful but not cynical. She’s open to wonder, and she’s very funny. On the editors at a literary publishing house: “They were English public school professors who had misread the map in the Tube and haplessly gotten off at the World of Commerce stop.” At a restaurant: “The waitress came over like a cat to the corner of a couch. For a second, I thought she was going to arch her back and exercise her claws on his shirt.” About class distinctions: “And you can tell a rich Boston girl from a poor one. After all, that’s what accents and manners are there for.”

Besides, who can resist a book in which a character exclaims, “–Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out?”

Damn, I wish I’d written that.

Sarah Waters, “Fingersmith”

“‘If you might only hear yourself! Terrible plots? Laughing villains? Stolen fortunes and girls made out to be mad? The stuff of lurid fiction! We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.’” Excellent: another novel about lives ruined by books.

When I read Sarah Waters’ excellent The Little Stranger, several of you suggested I move on to Fingersmith. I’m not sure what took me so long; perhaps I intuited that I needed to be in the right mood for a dark Victorian thriller involving career criminals and pornographers. What I had forgotten is that Waters is a crackerjack writer. Fingersmith is inventive, vivid, perceptive, and affecting, both in the characterizations and settings. For instance, a parson walking away into darkness “seemed to snuff himself out like a light.” Or Maud, the young lady character, on her maid Susan’s illiteracy: “Not to read! It seemed to me a kind of fabulous insufficiency — like the absence, in a martyr or saint, of the capacity for pain.”

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Fingersmith is a 21st century take on the Victorian novel of sensation, in particular Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White. There is a will, there is a fortune, there are plotting relatives, there is an insane asylum with venal doctors and cruel nurses. There are two young women, who swap places once, twice, enough to make me dizzy. There are criminals of various degrees of criminality and affability (see Oliver Twist) and a country house called Briar where the sun never shines (see Bleak House). All of it is puzzling and exciting and moving, but I was particularly fascinated by the way Waters demonstrates the limited options for women of the era. This sounds dull but wait until you find yourself with Maud, wearing a purple dress with yellow ribbons, standing on a bridge over the Thames without a penny in her pocket. No skills, no relatives, no options. Or Sue, who says, “Everybody in my world knew that regular work was only another name for being robbed and dying of boredom.”

But this fabulous florid turn on Victoriana rests on a solid skeleton. Narrative turns and plot devices occur like clockwork, keeping our curiosity alive. Pickpocket (“fingersmith”) Sue Trinder (the “maid”) narrates first. Then the story is told by her mistress Maud Lilly, who sees everything differently. Who is fooling whom? What is perception, what deception? Maud has been raised precisely to read books — but has been so isolated from the world that she cannot read her circumstances or surroundings. Sue, the criminal, is paradoxically sheltered. She says, “When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.”

Waters manages simultaneously to tell a robust tale while gesturing toward the novels she emulates. “The stuff of lurid fiction?” Bring it on!

Lloyd Jones, “Mister Pip”

Very early in this book comes a piece of wisdom from Mr. Watts (also known as Pop Eye, and as “Mister Pip”): “I have no wisdom, none at all.  The truest thing I can tell you is that whatever we have between us is all we’ve got. Oh, and of course Mr. Dickens.”

For most of Jones’ readers, Dickens is going to be the familiar character here, but for the children in an unnamed village on the island of Bougainville, he is a stranger. And Mr. Watts, the only white man in the village, has come to be their teacher amid chaotic circumstances. Apparently all he can think of to do, in order to keep order and impart wisdom or even information to the village children, is to read Great Expectations aloud. The narrator, Pip, becomes lodged in the imagination of Matilda, who narrates Mister Pip.

You could say this book was an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which the hapless English aristocrat ends up in the South American jungle, perpetually reading Dickens aloud to his de factor captor. You could equally say that, like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, this is a story about the power of a story. I always like those.

A lot happens. The South Pacific island of Bougainville is torn apart by two factions known to the villagers as the “redskins” and the “rambos.” The island is being blockaded, so there is no food, and no real way for the villagers to escape. (There’s a certain Lord of the Flies feeling to it, as well.) Matilda’s mother frames Mr. Watts’ reading of Dickens as blasphemous, and goes toe to toe with him for control of the children’s souls. She cannot understand how Mr. Watts can believe in Pip but not believe in the devil.  In fact, his choice is curious, because evil is certainly abroad on this island.

Jones structures the novel ingeniously, constantly cranking up the tension and raising the stakes. He writes really well: the voice of the narrator, Matilda, is immensely appealing. And he’s not afraid of the big emotional statement. But what probably moved me most was the paragraph when Matilda explains why she is so loyal to Dickens: Great Expectations “supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own… Now, if that isn’t an act of magic, I don’t know what is.”

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.