Ten Thousand Saints

Eleanor Henderson
Ecco Press 2011, Hardcover, 388 pages, £17.24

Shortly before his death Teddy lost his virginity to Eliza, who was visiting for the night from New York, where her mother is dating Jude’s father. Eliza also gave Teddy cocaine, which may have been the key ingredient in the mixture of substances that killed him. All of this happens in the opening of Henderson’s novel, which deals with the fall-out from Teddy’s death.

Jude travels to New York to tell Teddy’s brother, Johnny, the news. He moves in with his estranged father and gradually becomes involved in the ’straight edge’ punk scene, which rejects stimulants of any kind. Meanwhile Johnny, who is exploring Buddhism, decides that the right thing to do would be to marry Eliza and raise his brother’s child.

It is this chaotic situation that Henderson gradually brings to order. The punks form a kind of family, their own families having disintegrated at the hands of their hippy parents. Jude’s father deals drugs and his mother makes a living blowing glass bongs. Johnny’s mother skipped town shortly before Teddy’s death, fearing that her lies about Teddy’s father’s identity were about to be exposed. Nobody in the book seems grown up but at least the children have an excuse.

Without parental guidance, all kinds of values take their place. Buddhism, straight edge punk ideals and the camaraderie of life in a touring band are all explored as potential codes for living. In the end, the kids will grow into their identities, regardless of what they choose.

Henderson has an eye for detail and creates an authentic mid-1980s New York that is grubby and crime ridden but also filled with an unusual sense of community. A key scene in the novel takes place at the Tompkins Square Park riot in August 1988, in which heavy-handed policing turned a rally into a battle.

She’s equally able to draw the contrast between New York and sleepy Lintonberg, Vermont. The characters shuttle between the two – usually from one of Jude’s parents to the other – seeking to escape one and find refuge in the other. The city represents hope for excitement but also danger; the small town means boredom but sometimes safety. Conversely, the city means anonymity, while the small town can be a place where mistakes are hard to live down.

These aren’t pleasant characters – at least I didn’t find them that way – and that can make this book a difficult read. Like real people, the cast of this book are rough-edged and can be inconsistent, selfish, confused and irrational. Spending a lot of time inside their heads can be an uncomfortable experience.

That’s not a criticism. If anything, it’s to Henderson’s credit that she has resisted sentiment and stuck to the story. Ten Thousand Saints is a very good novel but not necessarily an enjoyable one.

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A Venetian Reckoning

Donna Leon
Pan Books 1996, Mass Market Paperback, 240 pages, £6.99

Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti is the most human detective I’ve come across, a sort of Venetian Maigret with a lower clear-up rate.

The story is a gruesome one. It starts with a lorry smuggling prostitutes across the border from eastern Europe, crashing and scattering bodies across a snowy landscape, and ends with abductions and executions.Brunetti rarely knows what’s going on and is powerless to stop anything. Even his final leap of logic and judgment ends badly.

Throughout, he’s an intelligent man with excellent instincts and policing skills, but there’s something huge going on that he isn’t able to get his arms around. The case does come in to his family home in a quite horrific way but the horror isn’t the only reason his wife and children are shown. They’re a big part of his life and character, as much as his work, and we couldn’t see him without them.

The story itself, gory as it is, contrasts with Brunetti’s happy home life and idyllic Venetian setting, but Italy is a malevolent character full of corruption, violence and venality. Leon lives in Italy but hasn’t wanted her work translated into Italian. Considering the current state of Italian detective drama, which has begun to function as a carpet-unsweeping exercise for the country’s organised crime failings, that’s a little surprising. Perhaps she has hoity-toity venetian friends who don’t want to be told.

A Venetian Reckoning is unsettling and beautiful at the same time. I liked it very much.

Related posts:

1. Naples ‘44 by Norman Lewis (James’s book 5, 2011)
2. Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia (Shane’s book 6, 2011)
3. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith (Shane’s book 8, 2011)

All That I Am

Anna Funder
Viking 2011, Hardcover, 370 pages, £16.99

All That I Am tells the story a group of German activists during the 1930s as they try to warn the world of the threat from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.Ruth Becker is living in Australia and coming to the end of her life. She receives a parcel containing a notebook that belonged to the left-wing playwright Ernst Toller. Funder’s narrative switches between Becker, remembering in the present, and Toller, in his hotel room in 1939 working on his autobiography.

Becker is based on Ruth Blatt, who Funder met in Australia, and her story includes many real people, such as Ruth’s husband Hans Wesemann, her cousin Dora Fabian and Toller.

Fabian is the centre of the novel. She’s a strange character and a slightly unrealistic one, though it’s worth remembering that our two narrators adored her and we see her through their eyes. She seems a little too perfect to me but it’s believable that Becker and Toller saw her that way.

At first the group are in Germany working in opposition to Hitler but it soon becomes too dangerous and they flee to London. As refugees, they attempt to continue their work but discover that the British establishment is reluctant to help and that Hitler’s forces are not afraid to operate abroad.

It’s a horrifying story and one that illuminates a period about which I knew little. Funder has been criticised for taking liberties with the truth but it’s important to remember that this is a novel. The background is real as are many of the characters but the precise events here should not assumed to be true. From the little I’ve read, Funder’s version of Dora’s fate, for example, differs considerably from what the available evidence suggests.

I don’t think it’s worth paying too much attention to that criticism. Funder has written a moving story about an immensely courageous people whose voices were ignored at the time and have largely been lost in history. She has brought them vividly to life.

Related posts:

1. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Shane’s book 26, 2011)
2. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 12, 2011)
3. The Information by James Gleick (Shane’s book 11, 2011)

PopCo

Scarlett Thomas
Canongate Books Ltd 2008, Paperback, 464 pages, £8.99

That shows once you start to read it. PopCo is less sophisticated than Mr Y and Thomas either has trouble marshalling her material or has simply not yet developed a sense of how to balance a novel.

The End of Mr Y was essentially a fantasy novel, albeit one that took place in a world that is recognisably our own. PopCo, which dabbles in cryptography, mathematics and virtual worlds, is a novel about science.

Its heroine, Alice Butler, works for an international toy company, PopCo. She develops spy kits for children. Butler’s grandmother was a mathematician who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and her grandfather solved a centuries-old code pointing to hidden treasure but refused to tell anyone where the treasure was.

After a team-building weekend at a remote country house, Butler and a few of her colleagues are asked to stay behind to work on a special project. The team is expected to develop the ultimate product for teenage girls. As Butler works she becomes disillusioned with her job and grows increasingly uncomfortable with the ways that her company markets its products to children.

Though it shares some themes with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, PopCo is not in the same class. It reminded me more of Harry Potter. Like Harry, Butler has no parents. Her mother died when she was a child and her father disappeared. The country house in which Butler finds herself is not exactly Hogwarts but there she meets a gang of quirky friends, they take lessons together with a range of teachers and a kind of mystery develops.

Butler’s ‘classes’ are the weakest sections of the book. Her teachers explain the concepts that Thomas wants us to understand. The vast information dumps drag and unfortunately they aren’t limited to Butler’s teachers. Her grandparents, in flashback, offer long explanations of codes and maths and her friends explain virtual worlds and vegetarianism.

The most cringe-inducing moments come when the narrator explains homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. That these bonkers ideas are given the same weight as the other concepts in the book when neither one has ever been proved scientifically is disappointing and serves to undermine the reader’s faith in everything else. If Butler believes in homeopathy then I’m inclined to think she’s a gullible fool. Why would I trust her judgment on anything else?

That point becomes significant when, towards the end of the book, Butler discovers anti-capitalism. It seems to be a fairly naive, shallow version of anti-capitalism. It might be possible to believe that Butler has come to see a way out of her corporate existence but Thomas doesn’t really convince me that that is the case. Given Butler’s belief in homeopathy, I’m more inclined to see her anti-capitalist ideas as another placebo.

It’s quite a messy book. Thomas packs in lots of threads and ideas that she fails to do anything with. The homeopathy and vegetarianism stuff, for example, has no real relevance to the story. It just seems like Thomas wants to preach a little. The disappearance of Butler’s father is left unresolved too, despite being referred to so many times that I was convinced it had some significance to the outcome.

Part of the problem here is that there is no great tension at the heart of the plot. Butler is a woman who realises she doesn’t like her job very much. That’s it. Everything else is just smoke and noise that Thomas deploys to create the impression that there is something more going on here. Unfortunately, there isn’t.

PopCo is a straightforward read and though it has its moments, it’s a waste of time.

Related posts:

1. Take Your Eye Off The Ball by Pat Kirwan (Shane’s book four, 2011)
2. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Shane’s book 27, 2011)
3. The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey (Shane’s book 13, 2011)

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan
Corsair 2011, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

Most of the chapters are connected to Bennie, a record producer, or his assistant, Sasha, but there are some that centre on characters whose connection to the ongoing story is unclear, at least at first.

One chapter focuses on a young woman struggling with kleptomania, another is about a man hunting for his niece in Naples, while in a third a young girl goes on safari with her dad and his young girlfriend.

The chapters do not tell the story in chronological order but hop backwards and forwards in time, with the whole slowly coming into focus. Egan experiments with form, too, presenting one story as a slideshow, another as a magazine interview.

It’s not always successful – the interview goes on too long, for example, and the final chapter is set in a dystopian future that is somewhat clumsily realised. However, most of the chapters hit their targets perfectly. The slideshow chapter, for example, about a young girl trying to make sense of her family, is genuinely – and unexpectedly – moving.

This is unusual because it’s the first book I’ve read that is an app. I’ve read plenty of ebooks by now so I’m used to the idea of a whole section of my library being virtual. A book that is a stand-alone app is a little different. It means, for one thing, the addition of features that aren’t possible in another format, such as the ability to switch between the audiobook and the text version with one tap and added ‘liner notes’ that provide background notes and video clips related to each chapter.

The slideshow chapter, incidentally, works better in app form than on paper.

In whatever format, this is a very good book. Egan balances humour and pathos and has a sharp eye for pop cultural references too. There’s a lot to enjoy here.

Related posts:

1. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)
2. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (Shane’s book 20, 2011)
3. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Shane’s book 12, 2011)

The Franchise Affair

Josephine Tey
Arrow 2009, Paperback, 288 pages, £7.99

I find golden age crime novels comforting in a funny sort of way. They are more like puzzles than novels and, as with any genre fiction, the adherence to a template offers a reassuring familiarity. The Franchise Affair is considered one of the classics of its kind so everything should have been in place for an enjoyable read.The ‘affair’ in question concerns Betty Kane, a young woman who, after several days missing, goes to the police and says she was held hostage and beaten by the owners of The Franchise, a remote country house. Kane describes several features of the house in remarkable detail and the case against the owners, Marion Sharpe and her mother, looks iron-clad but they protest their innocence. Marion turns to a local solicitor, Robert Blair, for help.

The solution to the mystery is arrived at fairly early on and Blair spends the rest of the book trying to find the proof he needs. The story plods along without ever being either dull or absorbing. There are no real twists, just a few gentle curves. It’s all perfectly pleasant but little more.

Tey’s writing serves her purpose well. She’s concise, witty and her characters have a degree of individuality about them, while all feeling slightly familiar. She builds up a charming picture of sedate country life that is slowly beginning to face modernity and a busier, noisier existence.

The most interesting thing for me was the class snobbery running through the book. Tey’s characters are divided into decent and not so decent types, with the more upper class ones falling into the former category. Aside from a couple of ’salt of the earth’ common types, the lower class characters are generally brash or dishonest.

Marion goes to Robert, who is a family solicitor, rather than the local criminal lawyer because the latter is “not my sort”. There are also suggestions that Kane’s background explains her behaviour. It’s all very subtle and probably subconscious onand, from this vantage point, it seems silly rather than offensive.

This is a pleasant enough book but I’m not sure that its status as a classic is merited. If you want to read a golden age classic, I’d recommend Trent’s Last Case or The Moving Toyshop ahead of this.

Related posts:

1. Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia (Shane’s book 6, 2011)
2. Stamboul Train (aka Orient Express) by Graham Greene (Shane’s book 10, 2011)
3. Reading list: five books by Philip Roth

Going Ashore

Alberto Manguel (Introduction)
Mcclelland & Stewart Ltd 2009, Hardcover, 357 pages, £21.07

James recommended Mavis Gallant’s work to me last year knowing I love short stories and clean, concise writing – and I do appreciate her for that – but it’s her own story, not those she has written, that so warms me to Ms. Gallant. Born in Montréal in 1922, she moved to Paris in 1950 to write short stories for a living. Can you imagine? A 28 year-old divorcée skipping continent on a solo mission when the rest of the world was coupling up and settling down behind picket fences. And the most inspiring bit? She succeeded. In 1978 she referred to her “life project” and said, “I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It’s what I like doing.” (Source: Wikipedia)

The self-awareness and autonomy I find so admirable in Ms. Gallant’s character surface in her writing as a sharpness of vision. Writing is what she does, and she turns her whole focus to it. There’s no sentimentality here, no reason to soften rough edges or manufacture closure. Characters are almost uniformly flawed, and stories just end where they end. Some, like the title story Going Ashore, wrap round and sort of close off that chapter in anticipation of a new one, but the majority end where the pieces fall. I liked that about this collection.

Ms. Gallant has an exceptional eye for detail, and though some of her stories now feel too dated, their subtleties too subtle for a modern reader – what was risqué then reads a little less so now – the best stories in this collection still feel real and relevant. Human dramas – unwanted pregnancies, mental illness, loneliness, cultural isolation – don’t change that much from one generation to the next.

The Rejection, a short piece about an inept father’s attempt to reach his daughter even as she casts him aside for another guardian reveals much about the intellectual and practical challenges of being a parent. Changing oneself into an adult isn’t easy:

“He was dealing with a child, he suddenly recalled; it was not a father’s business to please for justice but to dispense it. Pride, yes, pride was important, but he was not to give up his role.”

As much as a I found it difficult to read, The Cost of Living was another of my favourite pieces in the collection. An examination of loneliness and unbelonging, it had me wringing my hands as spinster Louise, moral compass spinning after a doomed affair, spends and spends her limited inheritance on a lost cause. Ms. Gallant isn’t the first writer to tell of people who try to salve guilt and hurt with spending and reinvention, but she does it exceptionally well.

One thing that struck me about this collection is that it focuses mainly on suburban and rural life, while the author is very much urban, having lived in Paris most of her working life. I suppose, though, that our storytelling tools are gathered early, as we are still taking the world in, and Ms. Gallant’s were gathered on the suburban streets of Montréal. She built on them in later life, but they were shaped early, as most of ours are.

Final comment: if you’re looking for an introduction to Ms. Gallant’s work, start here and be sure to read the Editor’s Note by Douglas Gibson, the author’s longtime friend and colleague. Gibson tracked down each of the stories in this collection and brought them together before the author when ill health prevented her from doing so herself – a touching backstory to a very impressive selection of work.

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Edwardian Entertaining

Christine Smeeth
FCA Cooperative Resources Centre Ltd 1989, Paperback, 112 pages, £3.99

To achieve her aim, she wrote down all the recipes she could persuade the house’s cook to tell her, making a record of Edwardian home cuisine for the wealthy. Her granddaughter, Smeeth, converted these notes into recipes that a modern cook might understand, drew some illustrations and published.

There are some fantastic recipes here, and a lot of good information on courses and table etiquette. Edwardian food as presented here is spiced, herby, glossy, formal and substantial.

Unfortunately glossy and substantial aren’t words that describe the book itself. Self-published in the late eighties the illustrations are no substitute for some decent photographs and the text is in monospaced courier, incredibly difficult to read for long and arranged in an odd-looking grid, so all of the letters appear in a series of columns. I found myself trying to make words out of the vertical letters. Very distracting.

If I didn’t have a few other historical cookbooks lined up this year I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this up. The recipe for potted game does look very tempting, as does the lobster bisque but offal is almost entirely missing, as are cocktails. Not bad, but a bit disappointing.

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Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)

Hannah Arendt
Penguin Classics 2006, Paperback, 336 pages, £10.99

Perhaps it still is. One of the complaints levelled at Bruno Ganz’s astonishing portrayal of Hitler the film Downfall (Der Untergang) was that it ‘humanised’ the Führer. What ought to be the film’s triumphant achievement, to help us to understand that the monstrosity of Nazism was a human monstrosity, was seen as its greatest weakness. There has been, and continues to be, a romantic view of history that atrocities are carried out by monsters. If Nazism has taught us anything, it should be that its very much more complicated than that.

Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the transportation of Jews to the east. He was present at the Wannsee Conference at which the various arms of the chaotic yet bureaucratic Nazi government met to thrash out the practical aspects of murdering all of the Jews in Europe in mealy-mouthed double talk. This double talk, the language of the office applied to mechanised death, is one of the most shocking yet human things to emerge from a study of Eichmann and other Nazi bureaucrats. Shocking because it is so thinly veiled as to be almost transparent but still enough to provide a moral comfort blanket to those involved, human because it is our natural inclination to put the best spin we can on what we do, to tell stories about our actions.

It is the very ordinariness of Eichmann’s pettiness – not a desire for advancement not at any cost like others’, but rather advancement without thinking about or understanding the cost – that comes through at every turn here. Policy was decided at a higher level, from Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann’s ultimate boss, to Göring, Himmler and Hitler himself. Eichmann helped to implement the policy, and indeed the mechanised slaughter could not have happened without his phenomenal administrative gifts, but he dealt with the actual results of the policy at a distance, only rarely venturing to the killing centres in the east.

On Arendt’s reading, it would be entirely wrong to describe Eichmann as enthusiastic or fanatical. Yet he planned and facilitated the evacuation (Nazi doublespeak for forced migration) of thousands of Jews from Hungary very late in the war, when it was clearly already lost. By that time, the sole function of Auschwitz-Birkenau was putting Jews to death (previously it had also functioned as a forced labour camp). There can have been no doubt whatsoever in his mind of what would happen to these people, and yet his workaday commitment to carrying out his orders never wavered.

Arendt’s book is – understandably – very angry. She was angry at what had happened to the Jews in Europe, and at the time new and important details were still emerging, some as a result of Eichmann’s trial. But perhaps more surprisingly, she was angry at the sham justice that was meted out to Eichmann, while up to that time other, more culpable and senior Nazis escaped unpunished.

She had no doubt that Eichmann was guilty, of course, but the trial itself fell well below the standards one expects of a fair one. The international law we now have was nonexistent at the time, and was in part developed in response to the Eichmann trial. The trial was conducted in Jerusalem after Eichmann had been kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli agents, and this of course was an embarrassing diplomatic situation, for Argentina because it became obvious that Eichmann had been living there fairly openly for years.

By far the most controversial element of Arendt’s book, though, was her criticism of the Judenräte (Jewish Councils), which were set up on Heydrich’s orders. These were groups of Jewish leaders who served as liaison between the Nazis and the Jewish people in occupied Poland and later elsewhere. Defenders of the Judenräte maintain that they had the potential to save Jews from the death camps, while detractors claim that they smoothed the path to them and helped to prevent rebellion against the Nazis, and that in order to keep a semblance of order they kept the truth of the evacuations from the Jewish people as a whole.

Arendt’s coverage of this issue caused a storm of protest which was out of all proportion to the weight she gave it in the book, but of course it is such an emotive issue that it’s not really a question of how many pages she used as the introduction suggests it might be. The introduction is otherwise very good, and provides important information about how the book was received, as well as details of how Arendt worked.

Eichmann in Jerusalem is an essential text for anyone with an interest in the Holocaust, or in the mechanics of Nazi bureaucracy, or in international law. There are more up to date and dispassionate books that deal with these questions in more detail, but Arendt’s ironic, angry, incisive writing is nevertheless something that will last long in the memory and should not be missed.

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Home

Marilynne Robinson
Virago 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Well, I didn’t. Instead, I read the thing wondering what the hell I was missing, and whether I as a reader had somehow regressed in my ability to appreciate (or even identify!) a good book.

Home is the story of the family Boughton, and the return of prodigal son Jack during the last months of his father’s life. It is a story of regret over the past, fear of the present and future, faith in God and family, and the blindness of parental love.

Home takes place around the middle of the last century and unfolds at a thoughtful pace – slow enough that, were it really speaking to me, I would have gratefully allowed it to slow everything down so I could meander along with it. But it was too slow for me, and I found the three central characters – Reverend, Jack and sister Glory – irritating and unbelievable in their unwillingness to speak of the many elephants in the room. For me, this was a story of avoidance, of talking about other things and pretending there’s nothing wrong as the last moments of life slide by and mistakes become unfixable. I found it upsetting, but not (I imagine) in the way the author intended. I didn’t identify with Glory or Jack – I wanted to grab each by the shirt front and give them a shake.

It has occurred to me that, as with most of life, reading is a timing thing. Maybe the question of whether a person will love a book has as much to do with that person and what’s going on for them, as it does with the book. Or maybe I just built it up too much: reviews like Ms. Shilling’s tend to foster significant expectations. Either way, I have to declare this reading of Home a fail. But with all the awards and love that have been heaped on the author and her body of work, I fear the failure was mine.

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