A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Most of what I knew about A Separate Peace before reading it was that it was one of those 20th century curriculum books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies that schools like to assign, and that Lisa and Grandma Simpson hate it. I also struggled to see how it fit in with Knowles’ other work until I realized I was mixing him up with John Fowles. That’s what they get for having names that rhyme.

The story takes place at a New England boarding school called Devon during the middle years of World War II. The narrator, Gene Forrester, is a top student who is enamoured with his roommate Phineas, a preternaturally gifted athlete whose breezy way of life and effortless charm make him Gene’s perfect foil. Despite their difference, the two are close friends, though Gene harbours a one-sided resentment of Phineas that festers into a paranoid assumption that his pranks and amusements are intended to undercut Gene’s academic success.

Gene eventually realizes his mistake, but rather than clean the infection, understanding merely drives it deeper, ultimately causing him to knock Phineas out of a tree and cause him a life-altering injury. The rest of the book deal with the consequences of this action. Like the bone in his leg, Phineas’ friendship with Gene reforms in the following, lumpy and misshapen yet in some ways stronger than before. Much is left ambiguous regarding why Gene did what he did, how conscious of an act it was, and to what extent Phineas realizes what happened. He rebuffs Gene’s initial confession and the whole things gets papered over, though later revelations make you question how Phineas really feels.

The book is interesting and well-told, convincingly narrated by an educated man looking back on his life. Perhaps not truly the ninth-grade level for a precocious student, but hardly pre-school.

Elevation - Stephen King

He may be the preeminent horror author of the 20th century, but Stephen King’s greatest skill as an author isn’t blood, gore, or terror, but his depictions of community. It’s easy to forget that The Stand includes an extended sequence about rebuilding Boulder from the ruins of the superflu-fueled apocalypse, and that these scenes are among the strongest in the book. I was reminded of this while rereading Hearts in Atlantis, in which the first two stories contain long passages of the characters simply existing, passages that in the hands of lesser authors would feel like padding or wheel-spinning. There is a coziness to King’s writing that you might not expect, but is essential to his stories’ power. He writes people you care about, and seeing their lives in such intimate detail is key to making you care about them.

I thought about this a lot while reading Elevation, which is essentially nothing but coziness. There’s some interpersonal conflict and a supernatural phenomenon affecting the main character, but none of it feels primed to draw blood. Even the character’s mysterious condition that renders him constantly lighter without appearing to lose weight feels to him more like a curiosity than an impending doom. If anything, it inspires him to be a better man, and to conjure better angels from the small circle of friends his condition draws around him.

Elevation is a warm cup of tea of a book, a momentary pause to be enjoyed in one reflective sitting. Some of the political elements flirted with the corny, but King has enough skill and experience to flesh out his characters beyond caricature, and to temper didacticism with honest depictions of human behaviour. The ending retains the courage of its convictions, and reminded me of the Baron in the Trees.

The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Che Guevara is, to put it lightly, a polarizing figure. Though his deification on some parts of the left makes me a bit queasy given the repressions he oversaw—and to some extent directly imposed—on Cuba’s citizens, the countervailing vilification he receives from the right has always felt a little forced, as the exigencies of revolution and war seem to them acceptable, even laudable, when done by their side, and repugnant when done by others. Basically, Che is the ultimate optical illusion for political partisans: some see two faces chatting, others see a vase, but the pattern of light and shadow is in both cases identical.

But I’m not here to talk about Che Guevara the revolutionary, but Ernesto Guevara, author of a poignant memoir about his travels around South and Central America. It’s called The Motorcycle Diaries, but the eponymous motorcycle dies less than halfway through the book, and anyway it isn’t even really a motorcycle, but a regular bicycle with a jury-rigged motor attached (though come to think of it, putting a motor on a bicycle does make it a motorcycle in the most literal sense, so point to Che there, I guess).

Published nearly 30 years after his death, The Motorcycle Diaries was obviously released without Che’s knowledge, and it’s unclear to me whether he wrote his diary with the intention that anyone would ever read it. There is indeed no overwhelming impulse to apply narrative structure to the text, with passages recounting experiences episodically and often without the connective tissue of segues. A few of his letters to his parents are interspersed between entries. Yet there is undeniably a literary flourish to the work that suggests he hoped it to be read. I am always reluctant to judge the prose style of works read in translation, but I can at least say that Che utilized a surprising degree of lyricism, irony, and humour, giving depth to his more prosaic observations of life among the lower classes of South America. The humour especially surprised me, particularly its sly self-deprecation. I will remember the anecdote about the peaches for the rest of my life.

Also evident (and here the right wingers will roll their eyes and gag) was an undeniable empathy for the people he met. For nearly everyone he writes about, he does so with compassion and kindness, and there seems to be a sincere sorrow at the plight of the poorer folks he encounters. particularly the patients at one of the several leper colonies he visits. Whether this compassion was a genuine fuel for his revolutionary zeal or merely a pretense for later violence is something I’ll leave to others to debate, because frankly I don’t really care. Che was who he was and did what he did, and regardless of these things his writings show insight and talent.

Le pont de la rivière Kwaï - Pierre Boulle

I had no idea that The Bridge Over the River Kwai was a novel before it got made into a movie, let alone a French novel. I don’t recall where I stumbled upon this information, but it encouraged me to get a copy from the library.

It’s a quick read (though in my case it would’ve been quicker in English), brief in focus, without a lot of narrative expansion. The story begins with a group of English POWs led by Lt. Colonel Nicholson, a man of profound resolve and and unbending yet warped sense of duty. He and his men are made to build a bridge over the eponymous River Kwai, and his resolve is tested early when his overseer, Colonel Saito, tries to force the officers to conduct manual labour. He refuses, and the resulting battle of wills ends when he is allowed supervisory duty. It is a duty he takes seriously, and the construction of the bridge becomes a symbol of his pride and sense of superiority over his captors.

The narrative shifts halfway through to a group of three English special operatives, who are tasked to destroy the very bridge Colonel Nicholson is building. The story climaxes with a scene where Nicholson must choose his allegiance between his country and his bridge.

The pacing was tight, with interesting descriptions of the process of construction and sabotage that provide a clear view without getting bogged down in detail. I find it difficult to gauge the quality of French prose, but the style seemed good, with moments of introspection offered in between the more clinical description of the action. A good book overall.

Shogun - James Clavell

I was slow to warm up to Shogun, owing mostly to having read Lonesome Dove immediately before. It suffered a bit by comparison, especially given their parallels as sweeping historical epics with broad ensemble casts. This isn’t a slight on Shogun, but rather a testament to Lonesome Dove’s singular narrative power. Shogun felt like commercial fiction; Lonesome Dove felt like literature.

This is not to denigrate commercial fiction (I’d describe my own work the same way), and as I got deeper into Shogun I became absorbed in the rich world it created, full of evocative period details and exploration of feudal Japanese culture. The book’s hero, pilot John Blackthorne, is an accomplished sailor seeking to be the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. He becomes shipwrecked on the insular island of Japan, and is quickly pulled into their politics, where an uneasy peace following the death of the Taiko has left the feuding kingdoms teetering on the brink of war. He becomes a vassal to Lord Toranaga, one of the five regents ruling the fractious empire and the man the others see as the greatest threat. Toranaga is a shrewd strategist, and much of the story concerns his machinations to become shogun, or undisputed military ruler of Japan.

It reminded me a bit of the works of Ken Follett, only without the clear dichotomy between heroes and villains. This might be because the characters were largely based on real historical figures, or simply because Clavell felt that the difference in cultures made clear moral judgement difficult. Even a detestable character like Yabu can be at times admirable, and demonstrates honour in line with his values as a samurai.

Clavell’s style is clear and unadorned, and his characters are engaging, though the broad cast can make it easy to confuse people, and I often forgot who people were or mistook one character for another until context proved me wrong (this is a challenge for me with any story where the characters have non-European names; even Russian novels give me no end of trouble). Though I was slow to warm to it, I enjoyed the book and by the end was open to picking up the next in the series.

Lonesome Dove - Larry McMurtry

I picked up Lonesome Dove after learning that Holly Flax had read it three times, and I can see why she did. What a wonderful, gorgeous, melancholic book. Historical in scope but without the rigid exposition common to historical fiction. Effortlessly paced. Crackling with characters hewn from archetypes and imbued with a richness of spirit that makes them feel real. Told with unshowy lyricism, flitting between perspectives without feeling disjointed. Easily the best novel I’ve read in a long time.

The story follows two retired Texas Rangers, Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae, who together run the Hat Creek cattle company, an outfit that wrangles cows and horses from Mexico and sells them to ranchers.

While joint venture on paper, the ranch is truly run by Captain Call alone, a man of such unbending, unsmiling industrious that he’d likely keep working several days after he was dead. Gus, by contrast, lolls on his porch all day drinking whiskey and chatting to anyone in earshot, speaking with sly humor and a sarcasm that betrays a certain sensitivity about his education, which, while robust by the standards of the range, falls short when held against big city standards. The odd couple pairing feels unforced, as both men are highly intelligent, competent Rangers honed by the frontier to deadly precision. You believe these two men respect and care deeply for one another, however fractious their relationship on a surface level.

A panoply of characters fill out the cast, all of whom feel well-realized and whole, even if they appear for only a few pages. The biggest among these are Lorie, a prostitute with a tough past who longs for a softer life in colder climes; Deets, a long-time partner of the Captains and a tracker of unparalleled skill; Newt, a young cattle hand adopted by the outfit on the death of his mother, raised with cold confidence by Call and avuncular warmth by Gus; and Jake Spoon, a former comrade whose sudden arrival spurs the story onward, and whose weakness provides an element of Greek tragedy.

Jake tells Call and Gus about the pristine fields of Montana, as of yet unpeople by ranchers and sure to make rich men of whoever first drives a herd of cattle there. The promise spurs Call to pack up shop and head north, a move made not from greed but for an unspoken desire that is never fully articulated. The plot keeps a loose hold on the story, which flows at a languid pace punctuated with moments of high tension, which are told in a detached and understated way that increases their effectiveness. The scene where Gus rescues another character from a band of Indians is particularly well-wrought, the action evoked without excessive details of staging or melodrama.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’d hate to spoil anything for a new reader. I adored this book.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

I feel like I’m always forgetting where I hear about books. This is another one of those cases. I put a hold on Say Nothing at he library at some point, and by the time it came in, the specific impetus for doing so had vanished. In such cases, I tend to trust my past self’s judgement—we tend to have similar tastes—and I did so again here.

Say Nothing is a history of a large event and a mystery about a small event (small in global terms; to those involved it was devastating). The history concerns the Troubles, which roiled Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties. The mystery is what happened to a woman named Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten who, on a night in 1972, was abducted form her home and never seen again. That she was murdered was never seriously in question, but the absence of a body was an abscess in the minds of her children, a puckered wound in their hearts that refused to close and thereby seal the certainty of their mother’s demise.

The two stories intertwine, with McConville’s disappearance a thread singled out from the broader tapestry of the Troubles. Keefe does a good job juggling both subjects, giving a brisk but thorough summary of the causes that led to the troubles, the struggles of the paramilitaries with the authorities and each other, and the eventual peace process that brought the bloodshed to a halt while undermining its meaning, a decision that caused no shortage of resentment among the IRA faithful.

Keefe’s interest is clearly with people over events, and he frames much of the history though specific stories, including those of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters whose violent exploits made them IRA darlings and media fodder; Brendan Hughes, an IRA footsoldier and gifted tactician with an uncompromising view of Irish nationalism; and Gerry Adams, one of the heads of the Provisional IRA (though never admitting as much) whose pivot to politics with Sinn Fein brought peace to Northern Ireland while leaving those who fought feeling abandoned and bitter.

The focus of the book is clearly with the nationalists, as unionist voices are relegated to villainous bit parts, but this is more due to focus than polemics. Keefe paints the IRA neither as purely cold-blooded killers or revolutionary heroes, but as normal men and women whose convictions and circumstances led them to commit unlawful and occasionally violent acts. His final weighing of the fat of Jean McConville is not a stone cold certainty, but he presents a credible argument as to who killed her and why, and helps refute the claim that her “touting (or informing) was the cause. A good book.

The Tin Drum - Günter Grass

I feel a little defeated that I didn’t read The Tin Drum in the original German, but I think that would have been a pretty painful experience. The book is dense enough in translation, rife with euphemisms, call-backs, extended metaphors, and narrative cul-de-sacs.

The story is narrated by Oskar Matzerath, a man born in Danzig between the World Wars whose growth was stunted (by his own telling, deliberately) at the age of three and whose abiding love for his tin drum is such that attempts to take it from him evoked the power to destroy glass with his screams. The story bounces between Oskar’s present, where he resides in an insane asylum, and his past--or indeed that of his family; he goes back several generations to give familial context.

As one might surmise from the summary, it’s a weird book. A bent and hyper-sexed One Hundred Years of Solitude, complete with the extended family history and magic realism. It’s also quite funny at times. Oskar’s detached and ribald commentary makes for good reading, and I genuinely enjoyed his company, even as I struggled to place names for characters that reemerged after a hundred and fifty pages.

This is not a book where plot is paramount, and there is a whiff of a shaggy dog tale about it, as instances that seem like they may explain his current predicament fizzle into nothing. When you do finally figure out why he’s in the insane asylum, it feels a bit anticlimactic. Still, I enjoyed reading it.

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain

For some reason, I always assumed The Postman Always Rings Twice was a spy novel. I don’t know why that is. It’s one of those titles I heard about through pop culture at a very young age without any additional information, and my brain made a bunch of assumptions that I assumed to be true.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is not a spy novel. It doesn’t even have a postman in it. I’m not clear why it’s called that (nor is anyone else, apparently) but it’s got a nice ring to it, and I suppose when it comes to titles, that’s the most important thing.

The story is narrated by a drifter named Frank Chambers, who comes across a Greek diner owner named Nick and his beautiful young wife Cora. Frank and Cora share an attraction galvanized, in part, by their profound lack of moral character. Quickly, almost casually, they conspire to kill Nick so that they can be together. The novel follows their attempts and the legal aftermath. I’ll refrain from spoiling the story with more detail, but in the end it becomes clear why and where Frank is telling this story, which is something I appreciate in first-person novels. Too often the perspective seems to be used simply because it feels more literary, without any logic behind the narrator’s decision to speak.

Frank is a nasty but compelling character, his casual, detached description of heinous acts revealing ugly depths beneath a blandly charming surface. This is a strong novel, daring for its time.

The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin

I’ve been a Le Guin fan for a long time, but hadn’t previously read much beyond her greatest hits (the Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Earthsea series) and some short stories. The Lathe of Heaven isn’t a book I’d heard mentioned previously. I believe I came across the title referenced in a Guardian comments section. I’ve gotten some good recommendations that way.

The Lathe of Heaven follows George Orr, a draftsman on the edge of poverty with the bizarre ability to alter reality through his dreams. He regularly wakes to find the world fundamentally different than it had been when he went to sleep the night before, with no one but him recognizing the change. His desire to stave off these “effective” dreams leads him to illegally acquire drugs from a state-run Pharmacy, a crime for which he is caught and forced into therapy. (The world, or worlds, in the book are different from—and worse than—our own in ways that are referenced obliquely through dialogue, lending the metatextual possibility that our original world was the first to be obliterated by one of Orr’s dreams)

His court-appointed psychologist is Dr. Haber, whose research into an innovative device called an Augmentor allows him to control dream states. He uses it to trigger an effective dream and, as he is present for the moment of transformation, learns that Orr’s powers are not simply a delusion but real and immense. This sets off the principal conflict of the book. Orr believes the act of reimagining the world is fundamentally immoral, regardless of whether things are superficially improved, while Haber claims it is their duty to dream away the ills of society and create a more utopian world (though it’s notable that his own station in life improves with every dream, bringing him from an obscure psychologist to head of an esteemed dream institute, while Orr remains a lowly draftsman throughout).

Hoping to extract himself from Haber’s grasp, Orr enlists the help of a human rights lawyer named Lelache, who becomes the third person to learn of his strange power. A subtle but effective love story grows between this pair, giving extra dimension ot the main story’s twists and turns. The dynamic is a good one, with Haber more self-interested and idealistic than outright villainous, and Orr and Lelache’s attempts to control his dreams doing more harm than good.

The tone of the story aligns with the major theme of dream life. It also reminds me of the works of Philip K. Dick (a classmate of Le Guin’s incidentally; funny how one high school graduating class produced wo of the most distinct and influential science fiction writers of the 20th century), with its preoccupation with the uncertain nature of reality. Her prose, as always, is excellent. Though her penchant for wordplay sometimes goes a littler overboard for me, I can’t deny her skill. Definitely a book from her canon worth reading.

Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices - Mosab Hassan Yousef

Son of Hamas tells the story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father, Hassan Yousef, is the co-founder of Hamas. Though initially a proponent of jihad and intifada, the younger Yousef recanted and became a spy for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. His position made him the most valuable mole the organization had, and by his own account he was instrumental in avoiding numerous terrorist plots.

The book chronicles Yousef’s life while providing a primer on the contentious history of the land that bore him. His stance with Israel is unwavering, but his sympathy for his people is evident. He faces particular anguish when discussing his father, a man he admires greatly on a personal level, but whose endorsement of actions—tacit or otherwise—that bring death and destruction to Jews and fellow Muslims alike seems contrary to his gentle nature.

There is an element of spy thriller to the story’s second half, as Yousef chronicles the spycraft he undertook to avoid detection for nearly a decade. Primarily, though, the text is plainspoken and matter of fact, though Yousef doesn’t hide his emotion when describing traumas of his past.

Yousef is a polarizing figure in current times, and his absolutism puts off some moderates, but his book is engaging and worth a read for anyone who ants to view this complex and intractable conflict from a new angle.

Brave Two Zero - Andy McNab

“[Bravo Two Zero] actually improves with every read”

— Alan Partridge

I picked up Bravo Two Zero on recommendation by Alan Partridge. I had assumed it was a novel, but it actually purports to be the non-fiction account of a British Special Forces soldier on deployment behind enemy lines in Iraq during the Gulf War. I say purports, because several subsequent books have come out disputing some of McNab’s accounts of his time in the war, and the book apparently concedes some fictionalization. This makes it one of those strange hybrids that is difficult to categorize. I choose to consider it non-fiction, simply because the author is indeed who he says he is in the book (albeit under a pseudonym), and because the events it describes are, in broad strokes, true.

The story is told in plain, conversational prose festooned with initialisms and other military jargon. Despite having to look up a few things (I had no idea what a berken was), I found it an easy and compelling read with the pacing of a Frederick Forsythe novel. McNab begins with his team’s prep for the mission, which provides a lot of details on the process without feeling bogged down. essentially, they were instructed to comrpomise a communication line that allowed Iraq to launch SCUD missiles, crippling their ability to attack nearby targets and hastening the invasion.

From there, the book spends its second section detailing their actions in Iraq, which go awry almost immediately and involve their attempt to avoid capture. The attempt fails, and the third and longest section of the book describes McNab’s captivity in graphic detail, highlighting the torture and general abuse he (allegedly) underwent while incarcerated. There is no dramatic escape, merely a stoid endurance until the closing days of the war make a prisoner exchange more prudent than execution or outright liberation.

I can’t comment on the veracity of the story since i haven’t read the other accounts and am no expert. I can only say that the book is as enjoyable as Alan said it would be, though it may be a while before I get the chance to reread it and see if it really does improve.

The Killing of Crazy Horse - Thomas Powers

Sometimes I get on a topic and I can’t remember how I got there. So it is with the conflict between the United States and the plains Indians in the latter half of the 19th century. Usually it’s Wikipedia’s fault, but this particular rabbit hole could have come from anywhere. In this case it led to The Killing of Crazy Horse, which, as the title suggests, uses one incident as a focal point to view a much longer conflict.

Crazy Horse, a fearless Sioux warrior and gifted tactician, features prominently in the book, but more as a symbol than as a man. Part of this is due to his notoriously taciturn nature. Though he commanded much respect among his people, he said little, leaving the sermonizing to more loquacious figures like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. His words are scarcely recorded, and there isn’t even a known picture of him. The most prominent characters in the book are therefore figures adjacent to Crazy Horse, those who fought with him and, to a greater extent, those who fought against him, notably General Crook and Lieutenant Clark. The marquee role goes to William Garnett, a half-Sioux man who served as an interpreter and had a foot in both worlds. Together, their shared experiences show Crazy Horse in bas relief, carving out the absences to reveal a picture of the man.

Descriptions of the battles are highly clinical, tracing movements with almost pedantic precision in a style common to civil war histories but that I often struggle to follow. Apart from this, the narrative is mostly about relationships, and Powers does a good and even-handed job of showing life on the plains during that period. A good book for those interested in the topic.

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk - Jon Doe with Tom DeSavia and Friends

X is releasing a final album and going on a farewell tour, and while final albums aren’t always final and farewell tours are almost never a farewell, I’m concerned enough they mean it to travel to Rochester on my own and see them while I still can. Buying my ticket got me in the mood to read a book I’d purchased years ago but hadn’t gotten around to until just now: Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk.

In my experience, a book authored by musician “with” another writer is usually little more than a biography in first person, the perspective belying the obvious distance of the actual subject to what’s being written. Here, though, the “and friends” gives a better hint of what the book is about. Rather than a straight up autobiographical account of Doe’s live before, during, and after X’s heyday, Under the Big Black Sun has the patchwork feel of an oral history, with musicians, writers, and scenesters contributing their own stories and perspectives on the unique scene that emerged in late 70s LA.

Doe gets the most page time, but in a way his parts are the least narrative of the book, focusing as they do on small moments and assuming (correctly, in my case) that the reader already knows the general story of the band. Most of the other contributors take the more traditional route, charting their arrival in LA and immersion into a small but rich musical scene, though the focus is almost always on the culture rather than the specific band, furthering the anthropological sense of the book. There are a couple of missteps, but for the most part the writers feel like earnest people wistfully recollecting a difficult but formative time in their lives. Contributors namecheck bands with frequency, and I came across a few artists I’d never heard of and now adore (Nightmare City by the Alley Cats is incredible). There were also bands I knew but had never associated with the punk scene (The Go-Go’s, really?).

As befitting an anthology, the book is a grab bag of styles, and while some went more florid than others, I found the whole thing well constructed and readable, with only a couple passages that struck me as indulgent and over-written.

Overall, a solid book for those interested in a scene that, while not launching many marquee names, undoubtedly influenced American music for the rest of the century.

Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement - Marq de Villiers

“Do you respect wood?”

— Larry David

My wife signed up for a membership to the Sutherland Quarterly and as part of a promotion they let her pick a free book from their catalogue. She chose The Longbow, the Schooner and the Violin. I respect wood (much like Larry David), so I read it.

The book wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be a cohesive argument about the central place these three items held in human history, likely because of the similar structure of the title compared to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. de Villiers does lay out a rough premise to this effect in the introduction, citing these three objects as pinnacles of their genre, but in terms of influencing human history, he really only makes a convincing case for the longbow, which changed the course of warfare in the Middle Ages. The schooner had impact on trade, but was not of singular importance among similar boats. The violin, while an impressive instrument, was also not seismic in the same way.

Instead of weaving a single argument, de Villiers gives histories of these objects as pieces of cultural importance in their time, interspersing them with chapters about pretty much anything he could think of involving wood. These essays range from inspired (his taxonomy of the origin of forest was genuinely interesting) to somewhat bewildering (several pages detailing the best woods for different purposes). It feels a bit grab bag, and I wondered if these essays had been publishing previously for some sort of nature periodical (Trees Monthly?) and collected here.

de Villiers’ writing is strong, weaving eloquent description with prosaic turns of phrase to good effect. I liked the book, but it’s such an odd assortment that I’d recommend it to someone who really likes wood or else doesn’t mind taking literary detours.

VALIS - Philip K Dick

I waited way too long to write this, so my memory isn’t as clear as it could be.

I recently read The Man in the High Castle, which could by some metrics be considered Philip K Dick’s least Dickian work. By those same metrics, VALIS might be the most Dickian of his novels, at least among those I’ve read. To make this statement less meaningless, I should probably define what I mean by Dickian, which is the use of science fiction tropes to evince distinct veneer of unreality. Blurring of this sense of truth is universal in Dick’s fiction, be it the phony police station and paranoid hunt for replicants in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the uncertainty of which characters are truly dead in Ubik, or the personality-splitting Substance D in A Scanner Darkly. VALIS dials this up further by making Dick himself the narrator and protagonist of the book, despite the narrator and the protagonist being two different people(though also not).

The book ostensibly stars Horselover Fat, a recovering drug addict and amateur theologist who becomes convinced of having received information from a sentient pink light beamed into him by a satellite called VALIS. The book functions as a kind of first person pedestal story, with Dick discussing (ang tagging along on) Horselover’s quest for deeper truth and embroilment in strange conspiracies pertaining to early Christianity and time dilation. Only Horselover Fat is also Philip K Dick—his first and last name, in fact, being crude translations of Philip (from the Greek) and Dick (from the German). This is something Dick himself admits in the first few pages but then glosses over for most of the book in an elegant display of gaslighting.

The plot is light and hard for me to remember in great detail, but it is almost besides the point. Dick is somewhat like Raymond Chandler in that his fiction is more about mood than story, and that is particularly true in VALIS (perhaps that also makes it his most Dickian?). There is some stuff involving a rock star whose child is a reincarnation of Christ and subliminal messages through an arthouse film, but mostly the drive is the interaction between the characters, who (another Dickian touch) are erudite deadbeats, intelligent and eloquent but too damage to function in society.

I wouldn’t recommend VALIS as an introduction to Philip K. Dick’s work, but for those who have read several of his books and enjoy his style, it’s worth reading.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I first read The Man in the High Castle in grad school. It wasn’t my first encounter’s with his fiction (that was, bizarrely, the largely forgotten We Can Build You) but I hadn’t read much of him at the time, and while I liked it, it didn’t grab me the way his other seminal works did (especially Ubik). That’s a bit surprising, as I’m a sucker for alternative history, and on rereading I found it displayed many of Dick’s usual strengths: nuanced characters understated but eloquent description, heady concepts. There is always an iceberg quality to Dick’s fiction, in that you sense you’re seeing only the small portion of the story peeking above the surface, while a mountain of detail lurks below, unexposed but supporting the visible tip.

The premise of High Castle is pretty well known: the Japanese and the Nazis won World War 2 and now fight for hegemony in a conquered America. Interestingly, the characters are all fairly unremarkable people: a Japanese bureaucrat, a store owner specializing in Americana fetishized by the Japanese, a fired metalworker, a judo instructor. As always with Dick’s work, tiny, fascinating details lurk in the corners: in this case, it’s society’s fascination with the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that guides the behavior of many of the main characters.

The titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, only appears at the very end, though he looms throughout as the author of a book called the Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which posits an alternative alternative history in which the Us and Britain (but not Russia) won WW2. The Nazis are as expected not fans (they never did like books much), and attempt to assassinate him. Such attempts originally drove him to retreat to the eponymous High Castle, but one of the characters (Juliana Frink, Judo instructor) finds him living in a regular house, having resigned himself to whatever fate may bring him.

It is here that Dick’s universal fascination with the nature of reality—a cornerstone of essentially all his fiction—peeks through, just a little. Despite being a book about an alternate reality, the nature of what is true doesn’t feature in High Castle the way it does in, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or A Scanner Darkly. That is, we presume throughout the novel that what we are reading is, in the context of the story, true. It is only at the very end, when Abendsen reveals to Juliana that he used the I Ching to compose every bit of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This leads Juliana to suggest that the I Ching actually used him, and through his words told a fundamental truth deeper than reality: that Germany and Japan actually lost the war. This is such a Dickian idea—that there exists a reality more true than the factual universe the characters are experiencing, and that such a truth mirrors (but is distinct from) the universe of the reader—and I’m embarrassed to say I missed it the first time around.

Dick truly is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth century. I’ve always bristled at the notion of some genres as more inherently “literary” than others, but if that term means anything, it is the idea of words and stories being able to convey a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. And Philip K Dick’s novels do that as well as anybody’s.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann

This is the first new read I’ve picked up in a while. I’ve been working my way back through Stephen King’s short story collections and didn’t have much to write about them (they’re good). I put The Lost City of Z on hold a while ago and forgot about it, sp when it came in I only roughly remembered what it was about. Fortunately, my interests are more consistent than my memory, and I usually end up enjoying the things my past self requests for me. So it was here.

The Lost City of Z is a journalistic account of the life of Percy Fawcett, one of the last Great White Explorers, a group seen much less kindly these days, but that loomed large in the British—and by extension, the global—imagination around the turn of the 19th century. Whatever you think of the European inclination to explore uncharted lands—or, indeed, to consider lands where people had lived for ten thousand years “uncharted” in the first place—Fawcett was a remarkable man, possessed of a keen mind, an unparalleled drive, and an almost inhuman constitution (he seemed never to get sick, even when everyone else in his party was half-dead with rot and fever). After several tresk through the Amazon, he became obsessed with the notion of a lost civilization paved in gold, a place commonly called El Dorado, which he referred to as Z. In his quest for Z, Fawcett disappeared along with his son and his son’s friend, his whereabouts and even ultiamte fate unknown.

Parallell to the story of Fawcett’s life and disappearance, the author David Grann details his own efforts to pick up the mystery that had consumed hundreds of others before him. What he finds isn’t something I want to spoil, but the book has an exciting conclusion that suggests Fawcett wasn’t as far off the mark as his detractors claim.

The writing is engaging journalistic prose, unadorned but full of keen detail. I enjoyed reading it.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.