Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life by George Eliot is one of those classics of English Literature that show up on most "you must read these novels before you die" lists.  Published in installments in 1871-72, it was historical fiction even in its own day.  The story is set fifty years earlier during what was apparently a time leading up to great changes in English political life.  

Full disclosure:  I started reading this novel last summer on a very long daytime flight to London.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  On my previous trip to London I had read an Anthony Trollope novel and enjoyed it.  But this time I found Eliot a bit of a slog and I got about 300 pages in when circumstances outside my control made me stop.  I wasn't enjoying it enough to pick it up again later. But then I saw there was to be on-line read-along on BlueSky and thought it would be a good way to finish it.  So I read the first 300 pages twice, once last year and then again last month. 

The novel follows the stories of a multitude of characters living in and around the fictional town of Middlemarch.  However, at its center are two characters: Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate.  Theirs are essentially stories of self-deception and coming to terms with reality.  They each enter into marriage (not with each other) believing that the person they are marrying is different than they actually are, with unhappy results.  I am told that Eliot was the first novelist to take the story of marriage past the wedding day . I don't know if that's true but it is certainly what she does in this novel.   (And she certainly wasn't the first story teller to do it as the play Medea takes the mythological story past the fairy tale wedding to tragic results.)

In addition to these four characters there is the story of Fred Vincy, who is in love with a local girl named Mary Garth.  There is also a small plot involving the local banker, Mr. Bulstrode.  Along the way we meet many other folk including the entire Vincy family and the entire Garth family as well as the local vicar and a variety of medical men.  Eliot intertwines all of the stories but she always comes back to the main stories involving Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, but especially Dorothea.  

While I know that this is a novel that is loved by many people, I have to honestly say it was not for me. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out why it didn't work for me and I think it has to do almost completely with how I take in novels that I enjoy. 

First, let me say that I think Eliot's prose is sublime.  She created a narrator character that leads us through the stories and comments on the other characters and forces the reader to consider things about the other characters that they may not have otherwise taken into account.  Sometimes the narrator mocks the other characters; sometimes the narrator has empathy for characters who don't seem to deserve empathy (and Eliot's use of the adjective "poor" is used both ways). Sometimes the narrator simply opines upon the world the characters live in.  The narrator is often very funny. The voice of the narrator is clear and distinct and is a joy to read.  

Those who have read my blog for a long time will recall that when I read novels I don't see a "movie in my mind".  The visual images I see are indistinct.  If there is a forest, I have a general impression of trees but could not give you any specifics.  I generally don't play the movie-casting game with novels because I never see the characters clearly enough to care what actors look like.  But in novels that work for me, I can specifically "hear" each character's voice, including any narrator. 

I have never heard a narrator's voice as clearly as I did with this novel. The voice of Eliot's narrator  is so clear to me that I think of it as a character in the novel separate and apart from Eliot herself.   But the narrator, in addition to having a distinct point of view and commenting upon the action, is also omniscient and tells us what the other characters are thinking. 

And therein, I think, lay the problem for me.  I don't have a problem with third person omniscient, in fact I like third person more than first person almost all of the time.  But I consistently felt with this novel that I  could not clearly "hear" the main characters.  They didn't seem to have their own voices. It was like I was hearing them, especially Dorothea, from a great distance where I could occasionally directly hear what they said but more often it was the narrator telling me what they said and what they thought.  I felt as if all of Dorothea's thoughts were filtered through the viewpoint of the narrator and the narrator was such a distinct character for me and was so opinionated that it was as if a separate opinionated person was telling me what Dorothea was thinking rather than me feeling that I was eavesdropping on Dorothea's thoughts. And I think that meant that Dorothea was never "real" to me. I felt the same way, but to a lesser extent, with Lydgate .  To a lesser extent because Eliot gave Lydgate dialog more often than Dorothea.  I could judge Lydgate a little more on his actions and words rather than solely on the perception of the narrator.  But Dorothea spends a lot of time with interior thoughts; she spends a lot of time holding her tongue, especially in the middle of the novel, because she's trying to be "good". 

I would say that, of all the characters, I never heard Dorothea's voice clearly at all - which was a big problem for me because so much time is spent on Dorothea.  I grew tired of the narrator telling me about Dorothea - I never had to figure anything out about Dorothea because the narrator always told me what I was supposed to know about Dorothea at any given time.  I never related to Dorothea possibly because she is so young and naive and I am no longer young and was never naive. I never felt like I saw life directly through Dorothea's eyes, only as mediated through the narrator's eyes. I found Dorothea tiresome and I found the parts of the novel that dealt with Dorothea boring and usually I couldn't wait until they were finished and we could move on to other characters. It's a real problem for a reader when they are bored by the plot concerning the main character. I remember being on the plane to London and wondering how Eliot was going to sustain an 800+ page novel about such an uninteresting character and being so relieved when the attention shifted to Lydgate, who ended up being only mildly more interesting but was surrounded by other characters that I found interesting. My re-read of the first 300 pages didn't change my mind. 

Interestingly, I did not have that problem with the minor characters.  They seemed very real to me and I could hear their voices clearly.  I think this was because the narrator spent less time telling me about these characters and more time describing what they did and what they said. Their character was revealed by a combination of their actions, their words and the narrator's commentary.  The best part of the novel for me was the story of Mr. Bulstrode which ended up being gripping.  But, alas, it is only a very small part of the novel. 

So rather than have empathy (something the narrator kept preaching) for the main characters, I mostly thought they got what they deserved based simply on the setup of the story.  When you marry someone under a delusion, you are going to be disappointed. Your life is going to be unhappy.  That's just the way it is.  And much of modern literature is about this, which may have also been part of the problem for me. 

I look at it as the Citizen Kane problem.  Citizen Kane was a groundbreaking film in which Orson Welles used innovative cinematography techniques.  But those techniques have been copied so many times that we, the viewers, are used to seeing them.  So Citizen Kane viewed outside of a film class may seem dated to the viewer.  Perhaps in a seminar on Victorian literature, reading my way up to Middlemarch, I would appreciate it more as a groundbreaking novel.  But I'm long past the days of seminars. 

So, in the end, it just wasn't for me.  It never engaged me and I didn't greatly care what happened to the characters.  But I am not sorry I read it because I very much did enjoy Eliot's use of language when observing life through the character of the narrator.  

Who might like this novel?   If you are looking to be transported to another time and place, this isn't for you. Eliot doesn't spend much time on world-building so "setting" is not a big part of this novel. Middlemarch is set in a fictional town and fictional county in England that could have been anywhere in the midlands. If you are someone who wants a page turner, this probably isn't for you either. In terms of story, there is a plot but it meanders over the 800 plus pages.  It seems to me that most people who enjoy Middlemarch relate to the brilliant writing and identify in some way with the main characters and don't need to hear their voices directly as I do.  I also think they like the psychology of the novel - Eliot's take on life in general as exemplified by the characters and (probably mostly) by the narrator's commentary.  Others in the read-along were consistently raving about how Eliot captured the essence of life in perfect language (and she did, in the narrator's voice using the characters, in my opinion, mostly as examples.)

Be warned that if you aren't engaged in the first few hundred pages your reaction probably won't change much.  Mine didn't.  But, in fairness, know that for many people this is their favorite novel of all time. 

My March Reading

The following are the books I finished in March. In the beginning of the month I was reading literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.  I also was reading a couple of classics that I've not yet finished. By the end of the month I needed a few mysteries. 

In the Upper Country by Kai Thomas

This amazing novel begins in 1859, on the brink of the American Civil War, but the location is Dunsmore, a Canadian town near Detroit that was settled by people fleeing enslavement.  A relative newcomer to the town is Lensinda Martin, a mixed-race woman who, unlike the other settlers, came from the north and was born in Canada.  Now she works as a journalist for a black newspaper.  Dunsmore is a stop on the Underground Railroad. One night a slave hunter from Kentucky shows up and is shot dead by an old woman who recently arrived.  As the old woman awaits trial Lensinda visits her in jail to learn her story. But the old woman will only "trade" stories.  And so each woman, young and old, tells the other woman a far ranging set of stories that reveal an interwoven story of Black and Indigenous peoples going back to the beginning of the century and encompassing the War of 1812.   In his Author's Note Kai Thomas says: "I was steeped in stories of various colonial formulations:  I knew and had seen many stories that were concerned with the relationships between  black and white people, and similarly, between Indigenous and white people.  And of course, between whites and any other people of color.  But I couldn't think of a single story I knew that meaningfully explored black and Indigenous relationships."   This is a first novel for Kai Thomas and what an excellent beginning for him.  It is not perfect; sometimes I had trouble keeping track of  the various characters.  But on the whole I really enjoyed and heartily recommend this novel. 

The Ride of Her Life by Elizabeth Letts 

This is the true story of Annie Wilkins who, at age sixty-three and after being told she only had a few years to live, sold her debt ridden farm in Maine, bought a horse named Tarzan and set out for California with only a few belongings, almost no money, and her dog Depeche Toi.  The year she set out was 1954 and Letts spends a great part of the book outlining how America was a changing country.  On the one hand, Annie could still find stables along the way to house Tarzan; on the other hand the automobile was taking over the country. Annie believed that people were basically kind and all the people she met along the way who helped her affirmed her faith in mankind (it probably helped that she was a white person when she knocked on people's doors asking if she could use their fields that night.)  Annie caught the fancy of the media and local and national newspapers, and sometimes even television, covered her story and Letts obviously spent time reading those stories along with the memoir that Annie eventually wrote  This book was lent to me by a friend who thought I might enjoy it. He was right. I think most people would enjoy this story. 

The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck.

This collection of poems, published in 1992, won the Pulitzer Prize.  I like Louise Gluck's poetry but I had never read this collection.  The One Bright Book podcast chose this as their March book so I thought I would read it along with them and I'm glad I did.  The poems in the collection are a conversation between the plants in a garden, the human gardener and God (or some higher being).  The collection begins in the spring when plants that seemed dead come back to life and ends in the fall as the garden goes dormant again.  In between, the gardener has conversations with God in the form of poems called Matins and Vespers - which are the morning and evening prayers in the canonical hours of the Catholic church.  Like the plants that are coming back to life the gardener is also coming back from ... grief?  depression?  It is never made completely clear. The conversations with God are frustrating for the gardener because God does not seem to answer; and yet for the reader God does answer in other poems.  In one of the Matins she says "I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever ..."  and finishes "was the point always to continue without a sign?"  

Beowulf, tr. by Maria Dahvana Headley

I did not intend to read another classic epic poem so soon after finishing The Iliad, but I listen to the Poetry Unbound podcast and in February the host had an excerpt from the Maria Dahvana Headley translation of Beowulf and I was intrigued. I had read excerpts of Beowulf back in school and later I read Seamus Heaney's translation.  But this was different.  Imagine a Lin Manuel Miranda production of Beowulf but with fewer internal rhymes and more alliteration.  For example, Seamus Heaney's translation begins "So.  The spear Danes in days gone by ..."  Headley's translation begins "Bro. Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!" If you are interested in Beowulf this is very readable.  Recommended.  I wrote more about it here. 

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood 

Set in the 1940's this reads like an updated hardboiled classic detective novel except the detectives are women:  Willowjean (Will) Parker, a former circus performer, and Lillian Pentecost, an experienced private detective suffering from multiple sclerosis.  It's an interesting premise and I found it very readable. We learn how Will and Lillian teamed up and then the story jumps ahead three years. They are by now a well-oiled team and they are hired to investigate a high profile murder.  I thought all the characters were interesting, both the main characters and the suspects. I thought the plot was good enough.  There was a good sense of time and place.  On the whole, recommended.  This is the first in a series and I'm sure I'll read more. 

A Mansion for Murder by Frances Brody  

This is the latest in the Kate Shackleton mystery series. It came out last year but somehow I missed it.  This is not my favorite mystery series but I like it enough that I always read each new installment. Kate is a WWI war widow who lives in Yorkshire.  I'm always a sucker for post-WWI stories and I love stores set in Yorkshire; I think that's why I keep reading these.  Kate's father is a  high ranking police officer and Kate becomes a private detective when her husband goes missing, presumed dead.  She is assisted by her intrepid housekeeper, Mrs. Sugden, and by Jim Sykes, a former policeman.  This story takes place in Saltaire, a company Mill town that actually existed and is now a national historic site, in a mansion that did actually exist at the site.  One of the things I like about this series is that Kate ALWAYS tells the people she talks to that they should go to the police with their information.  In most detective novels the detectives act like the police should never be involved. 

The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude

Another of the British Library Crime Classics I inherited from my mom, I really liked this one.  Superintendent Meredith is perplexed when a crime scene is discovered with blood but no body. Two brothers, John and William Rother share Chalklands Farm but now John is missing, presumed dead.  I actually guessed the end of this one about 1/2 way through but it didn't really matter.  This was published in 1936 and for once I think this is a crime novel that deserved to be republished. 

Three-Inch Teeth by C.J. Box

The latest in the Joe Pickett series set in Wyoming, this one involves a rogue grizzly bear that is killing people in the area.  I found the grizzly bear story very interesting and would actually have liked more of it.  But of course there is always more in a Joe Pickett story than the wildlife story and usually the "more" involves a fairly unbelievable plot.  This one is no different.  Over the years Joe has amassed many people who hate him and want revenge for something.  This time two of them have teamed up to seek revenge on all the people who have wronged them, including Joe and his friend Nate.  The method they choose is almost completely unbelievable.  But somehow that never really matters in a Joe Pickett story.  I think I read this series mostly for the descriptions of the mountains and the wildlife, which Box does beautifully.  The plot is always a page turner (albeit an eye-rolling page turner).  As usual his characterizations are thin, but at this point we've known most of the characters for a long while so it doesn't matter much.  My verdict is that it isn't the best Joe Pickett book but if you like Joe Pickett you'll enjoy it. 

Beowulf, translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

I never intended to read yet another epic poem immediately after finishing The Iliad.  But I subscribe to the Poetry Unbound podcast and in February one of the episodes featured a few verses from the Maria Dahvana Headley translation of Beowulf.  I had read excerpts of Beowulf way back when I was in school.  I also read the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf.  I didn't think I needed anymore Beowulf in my life.  But this transaction intrigued me. 

This one begins:

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of Kings!
  In the old
  days,
everyone knew what men were:  brave, bold, glory-
  bound. Only
stories now, but I'll sound the Spear-Danes' song
  hoarded for
  hungry times.

As Headley explains in her forward:  early English verse is distinguished by both alliteration and stress patterns over a caesura (a pause, a gap between the two halves of a line).  Rhyming isn't as important. 

Headley's alliteration is wonderful and modern. 

They stacked shields, wood-weathered, against the walls, then sat down on benches, their metal making music. Their spears, they stood like sleeping soldiers, tall but tilting, gray ash, a death-grove.

Beowulf boasts:  I put that monster down, I made it a sleeper as it leapt, severed its spine, spiked its skull, and split it into smithereens. 

And later he says:  At down, I surfaced in a slurry of scales, floating flotsam where formerly there'd been fangs. 

This was almost as if Lin Manuel Miranda decided to do Beowulf, ignoring internal rhymes and just focusing on alliteration.  I loved it. 

This translation came out in 2020 and somehow I missed it despite it being picked as a Book of the Year by NPR (go figure, there was just a worldwide pandemic to distract me).  But I'm glad I eventually heard of it and read it. 

My February Reading

In January I decided that the coldest part of winter was a good time to do some slow reading in addition to my regular reading.  And so February saw me finish two books that I started in January: the first was a very long biography of Ulysses S. Grant; the second was Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad. I assumed that the other books I would chose to read would be shorter but it turned out that in January and February quite a few of the other books I read ended up being longer than I expected.  By the end of February I needed a break and finished the month with a few shorter murder mysteries.  

These are the books I finished in February.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

Octogenarian detectives Arthur Bryant and John May have worked in the London Police Department's Peculiar Crimes Unit since they were both in their 20's. On a night that Bryant is working late at the office, a bomb explodes destroying the office. John May is determined to discover who killed his partner. At the time of the explosion Bryant seemed to have reopened the very first case the two ever worked on together, a case that began when a dancer was found dead without her feet. It was the beginning of a string of murders at London's Palace Theatre all taking place during the Blitz and its related blackout. John May is forced to remember that original case for clues in this case. This is apparently the first in a series about the two detectives. I'm not sure I will go on with it, at least not yet. Fowler does a great job of giving a sense of place - his descriptions of the Blitz, the blackout and the theater made me feel like I was there, I could picture it. (The Palace is where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is currently playing and I've walked past it many times on my trips to London.) I appreciated the references to 84 Charing Cross Road (the place, not the book) and the blue police boxes (the real ones, not the TARDIS). But the story was very convoluted and I felt it could have used some cutting because he did tend to go on and on. (On a side note, this is the second mystery set during the London blackouts that I've read in two months.  This was not intentional.)

The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson. 

England in the 1700's.   A story of orphans, murder, an inheritance, family litigation and fortune telling.  The character at the center of the plot is Red, a girl with a mysterious background raised as a lady by a kindly old gentleman  and given the name Rachel. But who is she really?  Who was her mother?  And why was she told by her father that there were people out there who would want to kill her?  Some of the chapters are told from the point of view of a man called Lazarus Darke (a Dickensian name!).  Will he find Red and harm her?  Is he a good man or a bad man? Is everyone an unreliable narrator (of course, all narrators are unreliable to a certain extent). When I put this on my TBR list I noted that some people said it was Dickensian.  I suppose so in the sense that it is long, has a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce type legal suit that has been ongoing for years, and does deal with the differences between the "haves" and the "have nots".  But although Dickens could create long, complicated plots with many twists, I always felt he played fair with the reader.  When I put this novel down I had a vague feeling that the author hadn't played fair with me.  But I can't put my finger on why except that the ending was unexpected. I even went back and re-read a couple of the scenes - and I saw what she did.  It was clever.  But I still felt she hadn't played fair in the end.  This novel is very plot driven and since I devoured it over a weekend I suppose it could be called a page turner (but only for people who like complicated plots).  The author does create a real sense of time and place.  The characters are mostly well drawn but hard to warm to. As Red said at one point " If you'd wanted a saint, then you should have read a different book."  It is well written, cleverly written.  But I am somewhat ambivalent about it due to how she wound up the story.  (And again on a side note, this is the second book in two months that I've read that had an experiment with static electricity shocking a person trying to kiss another person as a minor plot point. Again, this was unintentional on my part.)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. 

Full disclosure - I tried to read this (very short) novel more than 5 years ago and never finished it.  I think it just wasn't the right time for me.  The dialect defeated me.  When I read, I don't see specific pictures in my head but I usually hear specific voices.  In this case, however, there was so much dialect that I couldn't hear the characters properly in my head. But I always intended to eventually finish it.  That day finally came when I heard that the audiobook was the way to go because it was read by the great Ruby Dee.  And, oh my.  It really made all the difference.  I don't usually go the audiobook route but in this case I wholeheartedly tell you to listen to this audiobook if you are at all interested in this novel.  That being said, I am somewhat ambivalent about the novel itself.  Hurston paints a vivid picture of the life of her character in the various locations she lived.  But a great deal of this novel would not pass the Bechdel test (two women with names who talk about something other than a man). The relationship of Janie (the main character) to the men in her life is the entirety of the book and truthfully I got tired of it (especially when the last one, who was the best of the bunch, beat her and she "understood"). On the other hand, the last twenty percent of this novel was not at all what I expected and is very, very powerful.  Janie does have a character arc and does come into her own, in a very sad way.  I am glad I read it but it took me a long time to get to the point of being glad I was reading it. 

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford creates an alternate reality in which Native Americans did not lose all power and the ancient city of Cahokia did not disappear. But a brutal murder in the 1920's could be used as an excuse by the white community to destroy that power.  On the whole I liked this novel even though alternate history novels and hard boiled detective novels aren't usually what I like.  His world building is exceptional although it sometimes interferes with the pacing of the murder mystery.  But, on the whole, recommended.  I set out my more extensive complete thoughts on this novel in a separate blog post here. 

Grant by Ron Chernow

This 1074 page behemoth had been sitting on my shelf since I purchased it shortly after it was published.  Finally, this January I picked it up to read it.  I paced myself, allowing myself one chapter a day.  It was the perfect way to read it and it was a perfect slow read through the winter months of January and February. I actually knew a fair amount about Grant before reading this book.  I live in St. Louis where Grant spent his early adult years and my childhood summers always involved a trip to "Grant's Farm" (the Busch estate that encompassed the log cabin Grant lived in).  My uncle also lived on land that formerly belonged to Whitehaven, the Dent property where Grant met his wife Julia Dent. Still, it was interesting to read about Grant's early years in and out of St. Louis.  I also know a bit about the Civil War so most of the chapters dealing with the war did not surprise me - except how staunchly Grant insisted on allowing "contraband" former slaves to fight for the North.  It was the sections after the war that were the most enlightening to me.  I realize I know next to nothing about Reconstruction; I should remedy that.  I was surprised to learn that Grant was a champion of public education.  He was prescient:  "in the near future the dividing line will not be the Mason & Dixons but between patriotism, & intelligence on one side & superstition, ambition & ignorance on the other." Chernow clearly liked his subject and I suspect always attempted to put him in the best light possible. But it is also very detailed.  This is a very readable biography despite its length. 

A Royal Affair by Alison Montclair

After so many long and/or heavy books I felt the need to kick back with a reliable mystery.  This is the second in the Sparks and Bainbridge mystery series. Set in London after WWII, Iris Sparks (former intelligence operative) and Gwendolyn Bainbridge (widow and former debutante) run The Right Sort of Marriage Bureau to assist persons looking for spouses.  Along the way they get caught up in murder mysteries. This mystery involved the Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Philip's mother Princess Alice in the lead up to the royal engagement.  It was delightful and completely unbelievable.  But just what I needed.  And it probably helped that I had watched the episode of The Crown that involved Princess Alice. 

The Z Murders by J. Jefferson Farjeon

A British Library Crime Classic I chose from the ones unread on my shelves, this is a serial killer thriller published in 1932.  The main character, Richard Temperley, arrives in London Euston Station on a very early morning train and on the advice of a porter heads to a nearby hotel where he can bathe and wait until businesses and shops open.  Also at the hotel is an elderly man who was also on the train with Temperley.  The elderly man is shot dead while sleeping in an armchair and at the scene of the crime is  a token with the letter "Z" on it.   Also at the hotel Temperley encounters a beautiful but mysterious young woman who he is sure had nothing to do with the murder although she rushes from the scene of the crime.  He pursues her while the police pursue him.  The police know these two are not the murderers because other murders begin to happen in other parts of the country, all involving the letter "Z". The introduction tells us that Dorothy L. Sayers was a fan of Farjeon's writing ( he apparently wrote loads of books).  I didn't really see the appeal of this one.  Temperley is a very annoying main character, the police are surprisingly lenient with him and the mysterious woman didn't seem worth the trouble to me.  It was, I'll grant you, a page turner but the characters had all the depth of 1930's film noir characters.  

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

One of my goals this year was to re-read some old favorites.  I used to re-read books all the time but then I got out of the habit.  This year I have been reading through the pile of British Library Crime Classics I was left by my mom, many of which were written in the 1930's.  I also discovered the As My Wimsey Takes Me podcast, in which the hosts are slowly reading and analyzing the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.  It seemed the right time to re-read Dorothy L. Sayers and I decided to start with Whose Body? which is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, published in 1923.  I truly did not remember much about it.  I did remember that I originally thought it was the weakest of the series, but then the first book of a series often is.  I found that it held up very well, especially compared to the BLCC books I've been reading.  It is easy to understand why the series has never gone out of print.  Lord Peter is one of my favorite characters in literature, although he starts out the series as a somewhat silly (at least on the outside) young man. I had forgotten that he had an episode of PTSD in this novel (he was a Major in WWI and his man Bunter was his Sergeant) which gave him more depth than I remembered.  I also forgot that she introduced detective Parker in the first novel.  I first began to read this series in 1991 and I remember that was the year I took my first trip to London.  I was so excited to be able to see Piccadilly and Green Park for the first time and thinking this is where Sayers set her mysteries. The whole series is a delight and I can't recommend it enough.  I don't know if I will re-read anymore this year but I may.  

The Iliad by Homer tr. by Emily Wilson

This is the third Iliad I have read and it is, in my opinion, the most readable.  I read it very slowly because I knew the story going in and I knew there was only so much blood and guts per day that I could take.  (What I didn't reckon with was combining the Iliad with the biography of Grant which is filled with the blood and guts of the Civil War.  I also at one point was reading Menewood which is filled with medieval blood and guts.  Some days it was a little overwhelming.)  Homer seems intent on giving every single man killed in the war his due by describing his death in detail.  In graphic detail. Then you realize that this story takes place only over a few days and these are only a small portion of the actual deaths that must have occurred over the ten year period of the Trojan War.  So I read 10 pages a day more or less until (finally) Patroclus got himself killed (spoiler, but this IS a very old story).  From that point I could read a chapter (book) at a time. Wilson translated the poem into iambic pentameter which is very readable in English.  Although I knew there was a lot of death in the Iliad, this translation really brought it home and yet ... the poem was still beautiful.  In her introduction Wilson says:   "You know the story.  You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry.  You will weep.  You will bargain.  You will make demands. You will beg.  You will pray. It will make no difference.  Nothing you will do will bring them back. You know this.  Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the first time."  As I said, this was the most readable version of the Iliad I've yet encountered.  I don't think I will need to ever read The Iliad again. 

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

The ancient city of Cahokia was located in the present state of Illinois directly across the river from what is now the City of St. Louis. At one time it was the largest city in North America. In 1250 it had a larger population than London, consisting of Native Americans whom we now call the Mississippian Culture but who are known colloquially as "the Mound Builders" because they built hundreds of very tall mounds on both sides of the Mississippi River (and indeed throughout the Midwest). The city of Cahokia was believed to be a religious center and the hub of a large trading network that reached all the way to the American southwest. The Mississippian Culture pre-dates European contact and it is believed that the population had dispersed and the city was abandoned by the early 1400's. No one knows exactly why but theories abound, many to do with climate change and scarce resources. All that was left were the mounds. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site maintains the few remaining mounds, which have eroded over the years. I would urge you to visit its very good Interpretive Center but it has been closed for over a year for renovations. 

When the French explored the area in the late 1600's they did, of course, discover Native American peoples living in the area whom they called the Illini. Anthropologists believe that the Illini people were not descended from the Mississippian Culture. One of the Illini tribes called themselves the Cahokia (or at least that is how the French heard it). The Seminary of Foreign Missions in Quebec sent missionaries to the area and they established the Church of the Holy Family and the little village of Cahokia (competing with the Jesuit missions at Peoria, and later Kaskaskia). That town and the log church still exist across the river from St. Louis, south of the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. 

Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford's new novel, is, on one level, a hard boiled detective story set in the 1920's involving the investigation of a brutal murder on the roof of a municipal building. But on another, and more important level, it is the exploration of an alternate American timeline in which the ancient city of Cahokia was never abandoned. He also imagines a world in which the strain of smallpox that was brought across the Atlantic was a less virulant strain  that also conferred immunity. Thus the native populations of the Americas were not decimated by disease.  In his world the Jesuits have converted much of the native population, although they have done this by allowing the incorporation of native beliefs into the rituals of the church. And, although he doesn't explain exactly how, the native populations managed to escape the inexorable drive westward by the greedy Anglo population and were able to maintain their own "kingdom" in the Midwest.   By the 1920's, when this novel takes place, the City of Cahokia is in many ways a typical midwestern American city with good parts and bad parts and the Cahokia "kingdom" has been made a state in the Union.  

Spufford's Cahokia differs from the average American city in that the majority of its citizens are native American, here called the takouma.  There is a significant population of persons of African descent (called taklousa) and of course there are white citizens (called takata).  You would do well to force those definitions into your head right at the beginning of the novel so that you can keep the racial dynamics in focus. Spufford provides some handy maps at the beginning of the novel that sets out the boundaries of the Cahokia state and the street plan of the heart of the city (which includes one large mound at the center). 

In this alternate history of the United States, things are the same and yet some things happened slightly differently than in our real history, from Civil War battles to movies like The Birth of a Nation. Spufford peppers these changes through the story, like surprise caramels in a box of chocolates.  In general I didn't think it was too heavy handed. And much of the world is exactly as it really was.  Just as in the real 1920's, the Ku Klux Klan is on the rise. I found that the best way to read the story was just to accept the historical changes and not think too hard about them.  

As far as the murder mystery goes, I'm not at all an expert on classic detective fiction written by the likes of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett but the flyleaf describes this novel as a "noir detective story" so I assume that is what Spufford was attempting. In these types of stories the detective is usually battling some kind of shadowy figure while working within a corrupt system.  There is usually a femme fatale to lead the detective astray.  In the end, order of some kind is restored.  

In general Spufford succeeds although he probably won't be acclaimed as the next Hammett or Chandler.  His novel doesn't have "the voice" (you know ... a voice you can imagine as Humphrey Bogart in a voice-over).  The lead character, Detective Joe Barrow, a half takouma and half takousa man who is always described as very large, is the "muscle" side of the partnership with Detective Phineas Drummond.  Barrow, an orphan raised in a boys home who plays a mean jazz piano, forged a bond with Drummond during WWI. Drummond, a cop who pays no attention to the rules, has gotten Joe his job on the police force although neither of them is native to Cahokia, and so far Joe has been willing to go along with Drummond's unorthodox ways.  But now Drummond doesn't seem very interested in finding the perpetrator of the murder and Joe doesn't understand why. 

The detective story has prohibition bootleggers, corrupt cops, corrupt politicians, jazz musicians, the Ku Klux Klan, an "unofficial" king of the city and two characters who you suspect could possibly be the femme fatale of the story.  As a detective story, the pieces fit together and, while the broad strokes of the story are predictable (as these often are), the actual details are sometimes surprising.  But the true tension in the story is whether the takata whites  (of the City and/or the United States) will use the gruesome murder as an excuse to destroy the takouma culture and power.  

In his earlier novel, Golden Hill, Spufford explored the racial dynamics of old New York but interestingly left out any Native Americans.  Here, although he includes African Americans, the clash is mainly between the Native American takoumas who run the City and the minority population of white takatas.   It is an interesting thought experiment.  Spufford is not American so I find it interesting that two out of his three novels are set in historical America and that he explores themes that many American authors shy away from. 

I thought the murder plot was perfectly fine but was more impressed by his world-building both in terms of the physical location descriptions and the characters.  He is interested in the power of myth, in many forms.  For instance, although the takouma were long ago converted to Catholicism by the Jesuits, many of the white community of takata believe that they are descendants of renegade Aztecs who practice human sacrifice.  Spufford is also interested in how power is exerted. The most powerful man in the City holds no office but is the hereditary king of a territory that no longer has a king.  And then there is the mysterious Red Council.  As things build to the climax, the question is whether Cahokia can attempt to be a utopian community where people of all types can live together in peace or is it a powder keg about to explode?  Spufford waivers between a sense of hope and a sense that it will be an everlasting battle against white racism. 

It was interesting to compare his version of Cahokia with what I know of ancient Cahokia and what I know of the geography of the area.  In general I think he did a good job - although like most people who didn't grow up in the Mississippi River Valley he ignored the destructive nature of the Mississippi River.  There are no mentions of flood levees and he has warehouses and businesses apparently built right under the ramps to the bridge.  One of the reasons St. Louis grew on the WEST side of the river is that it sits on top of a bluff with a natural access down to the river.  The towns on the eastern side of the river were small and had to sit far back from the river because of flooding - which hampered commerce and, hence, growth.  Also, he gave his takouma a super power to be able to figure out how to build a bridge over the Mississippi before Chicago built the railroad bridge up in Iowa.  In this alternate history the majority of western train traffic goes through Cahokia instead of north through Chicago as it did in real life. (The river is narrower and shallower up north before the Missouri River joins it so bridge building is easier.)  But none of this is important to the story and, as I said, he did a good job with his world building. 

I'm not one who normally chooses to read alternate history books.  I'm not sure I would have even wanted to read this one except that I live across the Mississippi River from Cahokia and I very much liked his earlier book, Golden Hill.  I enjoyed this novel but I liked Golden Hill much better, probably because I'm not into alternate histories or hard boiled detective fiction but I love colonial history. 

On the whole, I recommend this novel but I don't think it is for everyone. The detective story may move a little too slow for some people due to his world building but on the whole he keeps things moving and there are some decent twists in his story. This novel would appeal to persons who want to see the thought provoking world he creates and the parallels to modern society and the continuing racial problems in America.  

My January Reading

It's the start of a new reading year.  January was cold, damp and blustery, the perfect kind of weather to curl up under a blanket and read books.  And that's what I did.  Here's what I read in January. 

• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.  It's always nice to start off the new year with a book you like. This book was so hyped last year that I was sure I was going to think it did not live up to that hype.  But I found it just as good as everyone else said it was.  This is the story of Sam and Sadie, childhood friends, who grow up to develop games and form a successful company. Their relationship is full of ups and downs to say the least.  One thing that was SO refreshing about this novel was that it was not a story of romantic, sexual love.  As Sadie says, lovers are common, true collaborators are rare.  So many novels fall into the trope of romantic love even in work environments when, in real non-novel life, most people have lots of work relationships that aren't romantic or sexual.  In fact MOST, if not all, of our relationships aren't romantic or sexual.  But to find a true collaborator and meeting of the minds, isn't that what we all want in our work environments?  I know I always did. This a beautifully written book, the only part that I would have edited was the penultimate section which went into great detail about the storyline of a game.  I understood what the author was doing but I found it a little tedious but that may be because I'm not a gamer and had a hard time picturing what was being described.  This novel has a plot but it meanders, it is mostly a study of characters over time but it also evokes the time period so well.  I found both characters endearing and annoying, as I think I was supposed to. Highly recommended.  You can read my full thoughts here. 

• A Scream in Soho by John G. Brandon.  This is another of the British Library Crime Classics I inherited from my mom, which I have had mixed luck with.  This one wasn't too bad.  Published in 1940, it takes place in London during the blackout.  The darkness gives criminals cover to operate and this book involves a scream heard, and blood found, one night in Soho.  But where is the body?  There are Italian gangsters, German spies, a mysterious Austrian countess and a transvestite.  It's a lot for Inspector McCarthy of New Scotland Yard to take in.  But solve the case he does.  This is a thriller, not a whodunnit and I'm more of a whodunnit fan.  But this did keep my interest and I generally liked it (although as always with books from previous times you have to ignore the casual racist, sexist and anti-semitic remarks that occasionally come out of the mouths of characters).  Not a book I'd recommend you seek out but if it is already on your shelves, as it was on mine, you may be entertained by it.  

• A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz.  This is the third in the Hawthorne and Horowitz series in which Horowitz makes himself a character, following around the mysterious detective, Hawthorne. This time he takes a page from Agatha Christie and sets the mystery on a Channel Island where everyone is in one place and can't leave. The real joy of these books for me are not the mysteries, but the satirical look at the book publishing and book marketing business.  When his editor in horror says "you won't write about me, will you" (and of course it is in the book) it is amusing.  I'm really enjoying this series because I think the writing is superb and the mysteries are perfectly fine.  He can delineate a character in a few succinct but invariably funny words:  "She was the sort of woman who would always make tea no matter the crisis. Lose your leg in a hideous industrial accident and she'd be there with a nice cup of Earl Grey." Also, although this book is published by Harper Collins, in the novel his publisher is Penguin Random House so he can make fun of them without end and without annoying his real publisher. I probably need to pick up a different, stand alone, Anthony Horowitz novel and give it a whirl. 

• Murder in Williamstown by Kerry Greenwood.  This is the latest in the Phryne Fisher mystery series. This time Phryne has a multitude of mysteries to solve including a dead body on a beach, evidence of cocaine use in the Botanical Gardens, a missing woman and financial skulduggery at a local charity. In some ways it was too much and I would have appreciated only one mystery. But I do enjoy the side characters and they were involved in the peripheral mysteries. This series has a great sense of time and place:  Melbourne Australia in the 1920s. I think that's why I enjoy it so much. That and the unabashed feminist tendencies of Phryne. 

• Menewood by Nicola Griffith.  At over 900 pages, this sequel to the 2013 novel Hild is not a novel for the fainthearted. The cast of characters is huge and you definitely need the maps at the beginning of the novel to follow along with the story.  I read this during the sub-zero weather that we had and it was the perfect long novel to read while stuck indoors.  In the end I was ambivalent about it.  This is a novel that drops you into Northumbria in the seventh century, its sense of time and place is wonderful.  Griffith writes beautifully about the location.  She also creates a compelling character in Hild but I found the secondary characters underdeveloped. And I found the first 300 pages very difficult to plow through while the second two-thirds of the novel move along quite well. I'm not sorry I read it but I can only recommend it with reservations.  My full thoughts are here. 

• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt.  I remember hearing about "the Octopus book" last year and thinking "that's not for me."  But then my book group chose it for our February meeting.  I was pleasantly surprised.  This is a delightful book.  Sure, the plot is mostly predictable but there are a few surprises along the way and Van Pelt keeps the story moving. The real joy is in the characters. This is the story of three characters:  Tova, an elderly widow who also lost her only son when he was a teenager; Cameron, a thirty year old  whose mother abandoned him at age 9 and who has never been able to hold down a job; and Marcellus a Giant Pacific octopus. Each character has a specific voice and, yes, some parts of the story are told from the point of view of Marcellus who is counting down the days of his captivity until his inevitable demise.  Each of these characters are trapped by circumstances and are basically going in circles.  But by the end they have helped each other move on. The waiting list for this book at the library was so long that I ended up taking the audiobook. I intended to listen to 1/2 hour a day but by half way through it I ended up binging it as I cleaned and puttered around the house.  People who like great plots may not like this as much but recommended if you are looking for a feel good, light read with good characters.

• The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel.  Gavin Sasaki always wanted to be a newspaperman ... or a private detective.  But the newspaper business is not what it once was and when he is fired from his job in New York he must reluctantly return to Florida where he is from.  There he decides to play private detective in his free time, tracking down his old girlfriend Anna.  This puts him back in touch with three high school friends who played with him in a jazz quartet back in the day.  All have issues, including Gavin.  Anna, especially, has issues.  And all of his former friends seem to know things about Anna that they aren't telling Gavin.  Mandel seems to be trying to make this a modern day noir story but it never really worked for me.  The characters never really made sense to me.  I get that kids in high school do dumb things, but at this point they are all adults. This story mostly left me cold, which is a shame since I loved Station Eleven and really liked The Glass Hotel. But if I were you I'd give this one a pass. 

• The Passing Bells by Phillip Rock.  This novel from the 1970's was billed as Downton Abbey before Downton Abbey became a thing.   And it is, in some ways, very similar.   Much more emphasis is placed on WWI in this novel and that was part of the appeal to me.  I'm a sucker for a good WWI novel.  This novel encompassed the entire war, jumping from high point (or low point) to the next big event with the various characters always present in some way. We had the Western Front and Gallipoli.  We had newspaper coverage of the war and the woman's nursing services.  We had people living in the Big House with not enough servants and we had the chauffeur becoming a designer of new aeroplane engines.  We had death and PTSD.  There was something for everyone.  But in the end it didn't really engage me on an emotional level.  The characters all seemed to be "types", especially the women.  This is apparently the first book in a trilogy but I think I'll give the sequels a pass. 

• The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.   It is "the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468"  and a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is sent by his bishop to a remote village in Essex to conduct the funeral of the resident priest, Father Lacy.  But did Father Lacy die of natural causes or was he murdered?  Things are not what they seem in many ways in this novel. Let's just say that Harris did not set out to write, and did not write, an historical mystery. I won't say more because I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise. The title refers to the habit of medieval people of sleeping for part of the night, then waking and doing constructive things, and then sleeping again for the rest of the night.   It is in fact a metaphor for what happens in the novel.  I truly enjoyed this novel and almost read it in one afternoon.  It began to bog down for me a little bit in the last 25% and I can see how some people might find the ending abrupt.  But the more I think about it, the more fitting I find the ending.   

Menewood by Nicola Griffith

 

She was tired of  having to guide foolish men gently, from the side, instead of  ordering them. 

Menewood is Nicola Griffith's long awaited sequel to her 2013 historical novel Hild, which told the story of the early years of St. Hilda of Whitby. Menewood picks up where Hild left off. But where Hild covered the first 18 years of Hild's life, Menewood covers only the next three years. One has to believe that Griffith will write another sequel since St. Hilda lived to be 66 years old and is mostly known for the later years of her life.

As Griffith tells us in her Author's Note, Hild was a real person but the medieval sources that speak of her are few and all that we know of her early years was that she was "living most nobly in the secular habit." This leaves Griffith free to make up her story and fit that story into what is known historically about the period and the place.

The place is Northumbria. The period is 632 to 635 A.D. (I still stick with the old way of dating.)  Hild's great uncle, Edward Yffing, is the King of Northumbria but there are forces opposing him, specifically Penda of Mercia and Cadwallon of Gwynned. Historically this is a time of  almost constant war and Griffith does an excellent job portraying the ravages of war. 

Hild wants only to live quietly with her husband in the land called Elmet that was given to them by the King. They are expecting their first child. But the King wants her with him when battle comes, because he does not trust the Roman Catholic bishop Paulinus to bring his god to help (Paulinus, in fact, flees with the Queen back to Kent). And who can deny a King? 

Hild has a reputation as a seer but in reality she is just very smart and is able to make very good predictions based on the facts at hand and good strategic thinking. Edward wants her to predict his victory but she knows that is unlikely so she must hedge.  

Cadwallon is the villain of the piece and interestingly we don't meet him in person through much of the novel. But we see his handiwork and, like Hild, I found him vile. So it was easy to be caught up in Hild's quest to, first, make her people safe from him and, second, bring him down. 

If you are looking for a novel that gives you an excellent sense of time and place, you will find it here. When Griffith is writing about the flora and fauna of Northumbria, her writing is beautiful. There is also a story that, for two-thirds of the book, moves along (more on that later). And Hild is a compelling character. One thing that I really liked about this novel was the importance of all the women characters in fighting Cadwallon. Too often medieval women are portrayed as passive while the men are out fighting. These women are not passive (although they all need Hild to tell them what to do, of course.) 

I am, however, ambivalent about this novel (as I was with the earlier novel). This is a very long novel, over 900 pages on my e-reader. I found the first three hundred pages very hard going. I had a hard time keeping the characters straight and I had a hard time keeping the locations straight. This despite a series of maps at the beginning as well as a detailed cast of characters and a glossary at the end of the novel. Possibly if I had re-read the first novel immediately before reading this one, the cast of characters would have been clearer to me. 

Griffith admits that the background history of the first three hundred or so pages of the novel is fairly clear but that the historical facts about the second two-thirds are somewhat murky. And maybe it was because Griffith was hemmed in by the more exact history of the first 300 pages that these pages plodded along with names and places being important, but not character development. The secondary characters are, in general, underdeveloped throughout the novel but especially in the first 300 pages. That made it hard to care about them. Most of the time I was thinking: who is this?  why are they so happy to see this person?  why don't they like this person?  

However, the second two-thirds of the novel moved along expeditiously. Maybe this is because Griffith could mostly make up her own story, not being as hemmed in by history? So if you can make it through the first 300 pages, you will end up in a story that, if not a total page turner, kept me very interested in what was going to happen next.

As I said, Hild is a compelling character.  However, part of the issue with the secondary characters is that, in order for Hild to be seen as almost preturnaturally smarter than everyone, everyone else has to be a little bit dumb. That didn't bother me when it came to strategy. Some people are just better than everybody else at strategy.  But it did bother me when it came to predictions about the natural world. When Hild predicts that it will soon become very cold because the birds are all flying south fast, I wondered why no other soul noticed that. She was in a farming community. These are people who live by the land - they would pay attention to almost every part of nature. 

So, in short, I am ambivalent about this novel.  I think Griffith set out to create the Northumbria of the Seventh Century as clearly as possible and to put Hild at the center of that geopolitical world.  She achieved that. As far as setting us down in a specific time and place I think it is a tour de force. Hild is a compelling character.  But the underdevelopment of the many, many secondary characters was a problem for me.  And the first 300 pages, in my opinion, could have used a very blunt editor. 

However, I remember that I was ambivalent about Hild, the first novel, too. Checking my notes I see that I thought the secondary characters were underdeveloped and I wondered if I would bother to read the sequel.  All in all, I am glad that I decided to read it. It was a good long book to curl up with in the sub-zero temperatures.