The Dark Star - Robert W Chambers

Robert Chambers wrote a lot of novels. His wikipedia page lists 82, nearly all of which are mostly forgotten today, though they were apparently quite popular at the time of their writing. These days, what remains of Chambers’ popular legacy is a book of short stories called the King in Yellow, which forms an early example of what would eventually be called Weird Fiction.

Chambers wrote other fiction of a similarly paranormal bent, though he was not exclusively a “genre” writer (all writers write in genres, whcih is why I think that term is elitist and dumb, but that’s another post). Even in The King in Yellow, Chambers demonstrated a transition from the macabre to the Romantic (more in the sense of WIlliam Wordsworth than Hallmark cards, though there’s a bit of the latter in there, too).

Given how many books he wrot,e and how little is written about them now, it can be hard to tell at a glance what sort of book you’ll be getting when you reach in the back catalogue, and I’ll admit that I chose The Dark Star in large part because it sounded suitably ominous and Lovecraftian. In reality, there’s nothign remotely supernatural about the book, but it is an unusual beast, and one I enjoyed.

The story begins with an impressionistic overview of lives entagnled with the malign forces of a Dark Star, an astrological phenomenon signalling tragedy and doom. A chance encounter united the two main characters, though even this isn’t known for a while. One disappears, while the other takes center stage: her name is Ruhannah Carew, a gifted but untrained artist whose father was badly injured on missionary work in Turkey. Her family scrape by on land holdings, until a chance encounter results in Ruhannah getting married to an unscrupulous businessman. The marriage falls apart before it begins, where another chance encounter brings the second hero to the fore: his name is Jay Neeland, a foppish commerical artist who grew up in Ruhannah’s village and now lives in New York. Through Jay’s connections, Ruhannah hops a steamer to Paris and is taken under the wing of a Russian “Princess.”

Here the story, unusual but thematically consistent, takes a daring and pulpy lurch into espionage, as Neeland is asked to obtain important documents that Ruhannah’s father smuggled from turkey, only to fall afoul of a conflicted spy. He lumbers through adventures t oreach Paris, where the tone shifts again, leading towards a bloody but strangely muted climax.

The whole thign is somethign of a mess, but it works remarkably well. I admired the complexity and unconventionality of the chacters. Even Ruhannah’s jilting husband is more than a simple boor, but a deeply flawed man who tried to reform too late, and gave up too easily when things didn’t go right.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider - Katherine Anne Porter

I checked out Pale Horse, Pale Rider because someone in a newspaper comments section said it was the only significant work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Flu epidemic. I have no idea if that’s true, but the titular story is excellent and does seem to nicely encapsulate the convergence of tragedies that struck the world in 1918, as a horrific war ended just as an equally horrific—in terms of body count, at least— plague raged along its murderous crescendo. I say titular story because Pale Horse, Pale Rider is not one novel but rather three short ones, two of which may or may not be connected (the protagonist of Old Mortality has the same name as the woman in Pale Horse, Miranda, so I assume they could be the same person, though I didn’t pore back over the first novel to find clues to confirm or deny this.)

Of the three novels, the middle one, Noon Wine, may actually be the strongest. It concerns a farmer swimming exhausted against a riptide of insolvency until a stoic Swedish immigrant arrives from seemingly nowhere and drags him from the depths and into quiet prosperity. All seems well, despite an undercurrent of unease, until a stranger arrives in the third act and forces the farmer to make a snap and costly decision. I can see why Pale Horse got the title, as it’s a great story and carries the most symbolic heft, but I would say I enjoyed Noon Wine most of the three. Old Mortality was good as well, though it was one of those family history stories, in which young characters glean the failings of their elders, and while the details were smart and well-rendered, it didn’t pull me along as strongly as Noon Wine did.

Porter’s prose is exeptional, rich and lyrical, with a tendency to roam that I admire when it goes right, as it does in all three novels. I’m surprised I’d never heard of her before, considering she was apparently a prominent short story writer from an era I often read. I’ll be certain to pick up more from her in the future.

The Guns of August - Barbara Tuchman

I checked out The Guns of August expecting a history of World War I, but the book actually views the ocnflict throug ha much narrower lens. First, it provides a brief outline of the geopolitical history of Europe leading up to the war. Next, it gives a detailed accounting of the political maneuvering of the variosu combatants, as a cavalcade of treaties and alliances nudged them—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—into armed conflict. Lastly, it provided a detailed military history of the war’s first thirty days or so—the titual Guns of August, so obvious in retrospect—leading up to the Battle of the Marne, where the Allies denied Germany a desicive victory over France, and the war descended into the four stagnant years of trench warfare for which it is most notorious.

In its focus on negotiations, planning, and other minutae of governanc,e it reminded of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book far large and scope but with a similar emphasis on the tiny, almost clerical decisions on which nations turn and tumble. This wash of detail can get a little overwhelming at times, but is carried along smoothly enough by Tuchman’s deft prose. Likewise, the battles are described using the common convention of military history, in which the movement of each formation is discussed. There is an audience for this sort of thing, and while I’m not exactly part of it, I’m interested enough in the subject matter to play along and enjoy it for what it is (though I’ll never truly be able to read those maps of battle maneuvers with anything like fluency).

The book was good overall, though its strongest passage was probably its first, where Tuchman uses the event of King Edward’s funeral as a fitting prelude to the carnage that would follow a few short years in his wake. She makes no claim to greater causality, but rather seizes on the event as a rich symbol for what was lost in those final years of European peace, and a meditation on how long and bloody the road to regaining it would ultimately be.

USA Trilogy - John Dos Passos

As you might expect from it’s title, the USA Trilogy is three books, not one, but they are sufficiently interconnected that they really operate as a single novel. If it weren’t for the separate tables of contents and title pages, I wouldn’t have suspected that the book was anything but a single sprawling novel.

And sprawling is the word, for Dos Passos’ work is nothing if not ambitious. Using a varie,d daring style, Dos Passos attempts to capture a period of American history from about 1910 to 1930, with periodic jaunts outside of this scope, both spatial and temporal. Indeed, much of the second book is set in France in the closing days of World War I, where soldiers and army volunteers struggle to transition to peacetime and capitalists seize on the abruptly shifted world order to make a killing.

There are a number of characters, but no clear protagonist, with individual players dropping in and out of the narrative. Characters who are central in one point can be relegated to small parts in other points of view later on, and some are dropped altogether—notably Mac, the young Wobbly who forms the core of the first half of book one before disappearing from the pages and never being spoke of again. If I had to select a main character, I’d pick J Ward Moorehouse, a failed songwriter whose intelligence, craftiness, and upward marriages allow him to build a successful advertising agency. But evem he is only a point of view character in the first book, shifting afterwards to appearances in the story through other eyes.

Interpresed through the main narrative are biographies of notable figures from American history during the period, as well as two more experimental sections: Newsreels, which feature snippets of headlines, news stories, and song lyrics crosscutting in a disorienting fashion, sometimes mid-sentences, and “The Camera Eye,” in which stories of unrelated and largely anonymous characters are told in a dizzy stream of conscious style.

The book isn’t an easy one to follow, and even without large breaks between readings, I often forgot who was who and what individual characters had done in prior installments. Still, the writing feels fresh even 90 years later, the characters speak with rich, developed voices, and the story carries an undeniable sense of verisimilitude. Dos Passos captures small things, and magpies them together into a towering narrative.

The Ghost Road - Pat Barker

I approached The Ghost Road assuming it was a novel about the First World War, and indeed it is commonly billed that way, but I can’t help but feel that the descriptor is inapt, or at least incomplete. Certainly the Great War features prominently, both in the action presented and in the minds of the novel’s two protagonists, who see the conflagration through very different lenses. But at its heart, The Ghost Road feels more like a book about an era than an event, a sensation reinforced by the book’s regular jaunts outside of war-torn France and Belgium to other locales entirely.

The story’s two protagonists are Billy Prior, a working-class officer who feels driven to return to the field of battle despite mutiple medical deferrals, and William Rivers, a real-life psychoanalyst and ethnographer. Barker peppers her novel with a mixture of fictional and real characters, a method of verisimilitude evidently carried over from the earlier books in the series (The Ghost Road is the final book of a trilogy, the first two of whcih I have not read). Approaching the book without any real foreknowledge, I didn’t realize this fact right away, and was suprised in retrospect that some of the characters she’d mentioend were real people (it didn’t dawn on me until the afterword that Prior’s comrade Owen was actually the poet WIlfred Owen, though in my defence I don’t think she ever calls him by his full name).

The book’s prose is elegant and ornate, with plenty of strong images. It was also surprising in its sexual frankness, which again I’m sure would have been less unexpected if I’d read the first two books, or known more of Pat Barker’s book. Barker’s depiction of a bisexual man in that time and place was interesting, though the lewdness seemed layered on a bit thick at times. However, many war novels underplay the average soldier’s preoccupation with sex, so in a sense Barker’s frankness wa refreshing.

Though Prior’s trajectory brings him to Franc,e a good chunk of his narrative oocurs while back in England, giving a glimpse of World War 1 in a place where the fighting was not actively ranging, but the violence instead filtered in through bittersweet homecomings of crippled boys or letters with black bordered envelopes. We also venture further afield during Rivers’ regular recollections of his time in the Solomon Islands. The experience of the isalanders under British hegemony, and their relatioship with death. provides interesting counterpoint to the events of the war.

All told, I enjoyed the book, and will likely go back and read the earlier installments in the trilogy. Really, I probably hsould have done this first, but the Ghost ROad was the only one I had in my collection. Oh well.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front is a story narrated by Paul Baumer, a young German man who, a long with his friends, enlists in the German army during World War 1. No jingoist, he is clearly disillusioned at the opening pages, and becomes only more so throughout. His enlistment, we learn, was largely due to social pressure, personified by an arrogant teacher who bombarded his students with stories of false glory.

The story is episodic, with the only overarching narrative e being the course of the war, which Baumer, as a lowly soldier, barely glimpses. We see through his eyes, and what he sees are generally periods of boredom and hunger punctuated with week-long stretches of terror at the front. Stints on leave and at a military hospital broaden the picture further, giving a cross-section of life as a soldier at that time and place.

The descriptions are frank and horrific without being melodramatic. Indeed, the almost casual way in which Baumer details life as a soldier serves to reinforce the horror of the war. However, the prose isn't always plain, and Remarque allows Baumer the odd poetic digression, without going beyond what a young German intellectual might reasonably say.

All told, the book deserves its reputation as a preeminent work of World War 1 fiction. It's interesting to read as a Canadian with German heritage, as I have relatives who fought on both sides of that conflict. Baumer's reflection on the war's futility, and the perversion of killing men who share more in common with you than the generals and leaders who insist you do the killing, is a simple one, but its truth is profound.