The Moor's Last Sigh

By Salman Rushdie, 1995 

It’s always interesting to read a book by Salman Rushdie because he so playfully ties so many distinct ideas together, and puts them in a novel light. And I like the fact that the light he chooses is not a conventional Euro-centric one. Using the expulsion of the Moors from Spain as a lens for viewing India’s post-colonial history may be an eccentric model, but it works at many levels.

I knew only the fact of the expulsion of the Moors, but Rushdie adds to that the poetry of loss from the last Moorish ruler’s point of view. Instead of the righteous victory of Christianity over Islam that we typically hear, it becomes a sad story of an artistic culture destroyed by violence. This turns the expulsion of the British from India upside down, and I wonder if that’s what Rushdie intended. But it’s also a metaphor for personal loss when the artistic side of the narrator’s family is destroyed by crime, violence and corruption. The family’s history is closely tied to the history of India – from its wealth as an exporter of exotic spices to its corrupt power in independent India. The family ultimately collapses in sectarian violence and expulsion back to a phony Alhambra in Spain. In this, Rushdie goes beyond the poetic to comic irony, and there’s plenty of that throughout the book, too.

Another key metaphor through the novel is the palimpsest – the underpainting that shows through when a canvas is re-used. Rushdie uses several literal palimpsests as the artists in the story paint over embarrassing or rejected earlier works. And other characters similarly cover up parts of their lives, which continue to show through in their work and which ultimately lead to their downfall. This comes back in another form in Rushdie’s repeated references to the invisible people who work behind the scenes in Bombay and make the show of wealth possible. And the novel itself is a kind of palimpsest, too, as the story of the Last Moor of Grenada keeps coming to the surface from beneath the lives of the characters. In this way, the story is a reflection of the way that contemporary life is always built on the past, and however modern we may wish to be, the past keeps coming through. This makes the bizarre story of passion and corruption in India relevant for us in Canada and elsewhere as we grapple with the present effects of our own colonial and racist history.

The story offers many parallels with modern life worldwide, and with Rushdie’s life, too. It was written while his life was under threat from the fundamentalist fatwa, and some of the extremes in the plot are driven by political and religious extremists. His one love turns out to be a death-seeking Christian, and his release from horrifying prison conditions comes at the hands of fundamentalist Hindus. It is an obsessive fundamentalist who destroys modern Bombay and the Moor’s family by blowing it all up.

The complexities of the storyline are reflected in Rushdie’s characteristically rich language of allusions, metaphors and playfulness. I’d need to know a lot more Indian history and world literature to know even half of his references, but it’s still a pleasure to read a creative writer who seems to be having such fun with his craft.

I found both the beginning and the end of the book to be less engaging than the main body that takes readers through the Moor’s life. The introduction lays out his prehistory and forebearers in colourful, but sketchy portraits. Then the final pages wrap up the story in a dash of events that undercuts their own drama and the richness of the earlier parts of the Moor’s life. This is not to say that the beginning and the end are less extravagantly written than the middle – in fact, looking at the first pages again, I love the way that the story starts at the end and then circles around to reconnect. It introduces the key themes and characters and links the narrator with both Luther and Christ at the crucifixion to let us know that we are in for a bold storyline. In spite of the extremes of the Moor’s life, however, in the end all he wants is to rest and find a peaceful end to the divisions in the world. This is a nice ending, and likely true to Rushdie’s feelings at the time, but I’m not sure it lives up to the richness of the rest of the story.

Moonglow

 By Michael Chabon, 2017 (June 2021)

Michael Chabon writes with such engaging originality and imagination that I’d read anything he puts out. This novel combines a look at the complex relationships in his own family with some of the historical events of the 20th century. In writing about the people in his own family, he shows how world history affects generations in very personal ways, or how the personal often reflects profound social issues.

There’s a lot of beautiful writing here, with the moon and rocketry a symbol for the escape from the difficulties and horrors of life on earth. Similarly, a lot of Chabon’s images are so stark or unusual that they stick in the mind – the hermaphrodite in the trailer, for example, the conversations with the German priest, the dream of the horse, the snake hunt. These seem a lot of disparate images, but Chabon uses them to highlight the memorable story of his grandfather’s life.

Chabon’s grandfather wants to escape from the anti-Semitism and poverty of the USA in the 1920s and ’30s, and from the isolation that he seems to experience even within his own community. He joins the army, but is sent to join an intelligence unit. What he finds in searching for the U2 rocket construction sites leaves him unable to separate the aeronautical dream from the slave labour death camps overseen by rocketeer Wernher von Braun. This becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with a French refugee who is dealing with mental health issues that were compounded by – or maybe rose out of – her experiences in the war. Finally, he comes face to face with von Braun at an astronautics conference, and feels nothing for him but pity. In the end, Chabon concludes, his grandfather found love and outlived von Braun.

The role of storytelling is one of the themes in this novel, as it was in other books by Chabon. Storytelling offers a way to make sense of one’s life, as Chabon’s grandfather seems to be trying to do. It’s also a way to create a new life, as both his grandmother and von Braun have chosen to do. Chabon sees this as a house of cards: the stories his grandfather tells are pieces of some kind of building, although the building is unstable and prone to falling apart. Nevertheless, putting them together allows Chabon to find a kind of order in the bizarre series of events that he discovers make up his own family.

The links between fiction and reality is another theme in Chabon’s writing that comes out here. The book’s subtitle says that this is a novel, although it reads as a fairly straightforward retelling of his grandfather’s last days. Chabon’s gift as a writer is to make even the bizarre seem realistic. But perhaps the subtitle is merely meant to explain imagined lines of dialogue that Chabon wasn’t present for, or to provide a cover for the criminal events that he describes. (Family meetings might be difficult if he has to justify all the stories in the book.) But it made me wonder how much of this story is made up, as I did in Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay book. It also leads to the question of how much conventional history is a story. The whitewashed story of Werner von Braun and the American rocket program, for example, was clearly embellished to suit the needs and political objectives of the time.

Not long ago, I read The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald, which has surprising parallels to this novel. Both seem to use elements of the authors’ family lives to explore the compromised history of the rocket programs of Germany and the United States, within a complex social context that includes family lies, racism, sexual abuse and criminality. Both are powerful reflections on the ideals of the space race coming into conflict with personal and political ends, and by extension with the idealistic stories we tell ourselves and the reality they hide.

Washington Black

 by Esi Edugyan (2019)

This book explores the complications of freedom in a hostile world. Freedom from slavery and oppression are obviously highly desirable, and Edugyan shows how destructive plantation slavery was. The everyday fear of brutal punishment for not working well enough or for talking back undermines the slaves’ consciousness and sense of identity. They are treated as objects and don’t even know their parents. When Washington is brought into the owner’s house, he spends his first days fearful because he doesn’t know what is expected of  him or how to avoid punishment.

But Edugyan’s characters find that escaping from slavery brings complications of a different kind. First is the fear of being re-taken. The escaped slave, Washington, and his white liberator, Titch, imaginatively escape to Virginia, a slave-owning state where they have to pretend to be master and servant to avoid bounty hunters. They find a very sketchy escape route to Canada, but Washington chooses to sail north with Titch to find Titch’s eccentric father in the Arctic. He prefers the risk of staying with his friend over the potential of an unknown freedom in Canada. Eventually he ends up in Nova Scotia, where he finds the Black community surviving in poverty almost as marginal as on the slave farm. When he is able to return to his interest in art and science, he comes to realize that Titch and his patron in science don’t really appreciate him for himself, but more as an instrument who can advance their own projects. He even comes to question his relationship to the woman he loves when she allows her father to take credit for his work. Finally, he finds, he has to go out into a stormy world entirely on his own in order to be free of the limitations of friendship and emotion.

This is a difficult path, and Edugyan does not intend to say that the challenges of freedom are in any way parallel to the horrific conditions of slavery that she depicts. Only when Washington is free is he able to express himself and his own interests. But freedom does not rid the world of racism, poverty and exploitation. In fact, when the slaves are freed on the British island of Barbados, they don’t have any economic options except to continue working on the plantations in near-starvation conditions.

In a kind of reversal, Edugyan shows the complications of slave ownership as well. Titch and his brother hate managing a slave plantation. They don’t seem to be brutal in themselves, but they think that brutality is the only tool they have to manage their slaves. Titch says that he would abandon the plantation, but his brother says that they have no choice because without the plantation their family would be reduced to poverty. And they are right – without fear, the slaves would revolt or simply walk away, and the family would lose its wealth and privilege. As Hegel wrote, the slaveowner becomes a slave to the institution, and without revolution neither slave nor owner can be free.

It’s interesting that Washington’s interest is in the science of marine biology. The scene describing his experience with an early diving suit is amazing, especially when he has a kind of underwater dance with an octopus. The octopus is able to change colour to match its environment, but Washington has to go to extraordinary and dangerous lengths to survive in a foreign environment. It’s a memorable image, and an apt metaphor for Washington’s survival in the world. Washington has to create a new state of being, a world of creativity and freedom, but this will be a difficult and painful task.

A Matter of Malice

by Thomas King (2019)

This was an entertaining light read, with some links to a traditional detective story and some distinctions.

I enjoyed the narrator’s wry observations on small-town life and his quirky voice. It’s exactly the voice I remember from King’s CBC radio series, The Dead Dog Café. This is both good and bad. It’s familiar and comfortable. But it suggests that King has not developed much in the many years since the radio show.

The characters in the story are a broad collection of stereotypes, from the sheriff who just wants to keep things quiet in town, to the hard LA television producer who will do anything to get a show done.

King’s detective, Thumps DreadfulWater, wants to avoid getting involved in the investigation, and pushes away from it every chance he gets. He seems bemused, observing life from outside with an ironic detachment, but staying away from it as much as he can. But he doesn’t change either, in spite of a new diagnosis of diabetes and an ultimatum of sorts from his life partner. Nevertheless, he’s an intelligent observer. He not only sees connections that others have missed, partly because they have not tried to see them, but he also seems to intuit strategies for getting the criminals to confess their crimes.

His detachment, presumably, comes from his position as an Indigenous person living in white society. He clearly does not identify with the small Montana town of Chinook, although he has many friends there. He relates more deeply to the Indigenous characters, but he’s not close to them either, and he seems to want to stay away from reserve life. This may be a reflection of King’s mixed Cherokee and Greek heritage, not fully one or the other even though he identifies as Indigenous. DreadfulWater certainly seems to embody King’s voice, so I take him as some sort of stand-in for the author’s way of thinking.

While this has some elements of the western detective novel – the ironic, detached detective, the exaggerated characters, the improbable murder – it avoids the casual violence and replaces it with humour. This is a welcome turn, making the book an enjoyable read, even if lightweight.

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

 by James Baldwin (1968)

This is a dense and fascinating story, as much a reflection on racism in America as it is the story of a man’s life and illusions. The title phrase does not seem to appear in the text, and when I began I wondered what it’s meaning was. By the end, it seems to me that it’s a comment on the life of the central character, who works through his life to overcome the racist society he lives in, but finally finds that the success train has left before he ever got to the station. He was never going to be on it, no matter how much he rose in his art.

The scenes of Leo’s young life in Harlem show the impact of racism on his family, especially on his father. The threat of violence from the police and the fear of violence from white people shapes Leo’s existence. This becomes even more intense when he spends a summer at a small-town theatre camp together with a white woman friend. Nevertheless, he wants to fight against the racism and make his own future.

In some ways, Leo’s character could be a stand-in for Baldwin, a successful Black man who challenges racism and has to continually defend his choices. He has friends and allies, but being a public figure calling for justice is stressful and leads to the heart attack that makes him pause and re-examine his life. The apparent futility of his life work eventually draws him toward armed resistance. I’m not sure if that was the conclusion that Baldwin came to personally, but it is where he leaves his central character.

The story is also about Leo’s relationship with his older brother, Caleb. Leo loves and admires Caleb, a natural leader who responds with rage to the racism they grew up with in Harlem. Leo is devastated when Caleb is wrongly imprisoned for theft by racist police (and corrupted Black criminals). Caleb later becomes a preacher, swallows his rage and challenges Leo’s anger and radicalism. Is this a suggestion that Black leaders can work within the church to create a separate world? Or that the church provides a haven for defeated Black men? Leo wants to kill the white people who have damaged his brother, but he has to painfully reject his brother’s reactionary passivity and fight the racism that dominates all of their lives. By succeeding in the theatre, Leo wants to inspire other black people to overcome the racism they face. At one point, though, he sees a parallel between the church and the theatre, and by the end his success seems as limited as his brother's. In a scene near the end of the novel, he has lunch with the family of his closest friend, a white woman from Tennessee. In her family, he finds just a thin layer of politeness and liberalism covering a deep racism.

In some respects, this could be a depressing story, given the way that racism remains in contemporary society since Baldwin wrote it over 50 years ago. Somehow it isn’t depressing, at least not to me. Baldwin’s characters fight a terrible, devastating struggle, but they continue to fight, and they are ready to escalate if they have to. Baldwin suggests that they won’t stop until they succeed. The alternative is to succumb to insubstantial beliefs that are deadening. Baldwin portrays Leo’ rage and the social conditions that drive it, and makes the reader feel it too, along with the fear and despair that go along with it.

And perhaps the tone is also raised by the beautiful prose that Baldwin writes with. In every paragraph I could hear the cultured voice that he used in his public debates and talks. It’s such a pleasure to hear the language that it made me slow down to read each sentence in my head. This is not a book that I wanted to to skim through quickly.  

A Delicate Truth

 By John Le Carré, 2013

In this book, Le Carré continues his theme of updating the spy novel by focusing on its contemporary forms. In this case, his target is the private broker trading information and muscle with government operators who prefer to keep things out of the public eye.

With his usual understated style, he directs considerable anger at those who do undercover operations for money – clearly separating them from those in the official business who do necessary bad stuff on principle. In his cold war novels, there is a distinct ambivalence about doing nasty things in the service of the state. You do what you have to do to prevent a worse outcome, but you become morally compromised and that bothers you. The novels with more modern themes don’t have that ambivalence. The perpetrators are self-interested venal thieves and murderers with links into the spy world. In this story, they have enticed an ambitious, and equally venal, junior minister into a poorly judged and poorly executed scheme. The minister loses his political future, his staffers are shifted out to plumb positions where they won’t be around to raise any questions, and the private brokers carry on in apparent luxury. Interestingly, it seems to be the state security service who cleans things up to avoid embarrassing the government.

While this is the scene, the attention is really on the decent Britons who are entrapped in the scheme without being aware of it. When they get wind that things did not go as they were told, they want to put things right. Of course, this will involve significant cost to themselves, and the barriers they have to overcome make up the bulk of the novel. This part is Le Carré’s familiar storytelling, low-key spycraft slowly leading to a conclusion. His oblique style of dialogue is also familiar here, with characters carefully saying one thing in a chummy middle-class voice and meaning something other. Perhaps this is how it’s done in this world.

For Le Carré, these decent Britons are the flawed heros of the story. They are not perfect – they have second thoughts, they wonder if it’s worth it, they are distracted. For this novel, they seem a bit too decent. They choose to do the right thing, knowing that there will be consequences. In his other novels, Le Carré’s characters seem to do what they have to do because they don’t have a choice. The situations force them to make the only choice they can short of selling out. While I don’t doubt that there are decent honorable civil servants in Britain, this sort of purity makes the story line a little questionable.

And then there’s the moral dis-equivalency. State agencies, including the British security services, carry out operations to protect their interests and the interests of their political superiors. To what extent does it matter that the operations are carried out by mercenaries? Are the controls really set to a higher standard for state actors than for their hirelings? I do think that there is a potential for greater control when government oversight is involved but there’s also a potential for greater self-justification. But does that justify the level of outrage that Le Carré reflects here? Or, to go deeper, how is the combination of state and private action in this story different from the machinations against the operations of the Cold War enemies? Is it worse now because the targets are vaguely defined potential terrorists from a string of Muslim countries? Le Carré seems to think so, and perhaps he is right, but with a writer who seems to insist on a moral standard these are questions that make me question the initial premiss of the book.

In any case, at least these are questions that the story raises, unlike the action-oriented focus of many other spy stories.

The Uncommon Reader

By Alan Bennett, 2007

I thought this would be an entertaining light read when I picked it up at a library book sale. It was, and happily it was also a thoughtful look at how reading changes the reader. The Queen, out of curiosity, pops into a library van that had stopped in Windsor, and borrows a book. She discovers that reading for pleasure is quite different from reading for work, or reading the literature that she is expected to know.

I liked the fact that the Queen’s first guide to reading for pleasure chose books mainly because he thought the writer was gay. (Okay, I identify, as I expect does Alan Bennett.) As a starting point to a diversity of interesting writing, it works. And it’s entertaining to imagine how the elevated figures in the Queen’s circle of contacts might react to the thoughts and characters she finds in many books.

Reading, the Queen discovers, can create empathy by allowing you to identify with a range of different characters or at least to see into aspects of their lives that would otherwise be completely unknown. It also becomes unsatisfying and leads an empathetic reader to want to do something about what they see. Reading leads to writing and to action.

This is a nice fantasy, of course. Most people read for an escape from their reality. The ones who are drawn to empathy and action are the empathic and dynamic ones. Their own priorities are reflected in what they see when they read. I don’t know if the current resident of Windsor Castle has the empathy and dynamism that Bennett gives to his Queen, although she clearly has not taken the path that Bennett draws here. In spite of romanticising a feudal institution, though, I enjoyed reading this and imagining the power of literature as Bennett describes it.