Rob Roy

Walter Scott, 1817 (September 2014)

I was a little surprised in reading this novel at the perspectives reflected in the narrator’s story. Scott, writing in the early 18^th century, takes the voice of an English businessman writing a reminiscing letter to a friend about his adventures as a youth early in the 17^th century. Occasionally, the narrator reflects on his romanticism as a youth and his current settled life, so we are reminded that the perspective is that of a mature, successful and cultivated English gentleman.

  As the narrator, he portrays the Scots as foolish and bumbling thieves, canny but crass business men, or wild violent savages. The only exception is the title character, Rob Roy, or Red Rob, or Robert Campbell MacGregor, a wise but just outlaw, a Scottish Robin Hood, beloved by the country people, scourge of the wealthy city dwellers and especially of the English, fearless fighter and brilliant campaigner. For a Scots nationalist, this seems a peculiar way to portray the people he wants to inspire. While MacGregor is a heroic and mythic figure, the rest of the Scots come off as crude, backward and vicious, although good fighters as described by his English narrator. (And for balance, the English in relation to the Scots seem to come across as arbitrary oppressors and often not a lot brighter than the Scottish Highlanders.) Is Scott suggesting that Scots need to move ahead from their heroic but backward past and join the modern, if grubby, world of business?

  Perhaps so, but the life of business is not very appealing either. The businessmen here may be wealthy, but they seem to have a very limited perspective, whether Scottish or English. The narrator initially rebels against his father’s insistence on joining his business. But Scott, a successful businessman himself (until his publishing business went bankrupt later in his life), makes it clear that the narrator’s romantic youth is a diversion and that his later success came from the family business. So is Scott here telling us that Scots (and we readers) need to put aside romantic notions and do the hard work of creating wealth, after which we can perhaps enjoy a quiet, cultured life? Or, since the narrator does in the end get the woman he loved in his romantic youth, perhaps we can take some of that romance with us in to our more business-like life.

  Also interesting is the detached position of the narrator. Although the narrator tells the story in the first person, he is only an observer. But for the first 200 pages, Rob Roy has only a brief appearance using a pseudonym, and thereafter appears only in short passages (although always to save the day). The narrator’s only active role, to recover his father’s papers, ends when they are presented to him without a struggle. Someone else always intervenes before he has to act himself. In between are scenes that could pass for social satire and comic relief, often given in broad dialect. Is this Scott’s message – that the English are lucky to be saved always by someone else while they acquire wealth and power?

  Perhaps it’s not fair to put these post-modern questions in relation to an author who was creating the genre of the historical novel 200 years ago. Scott apparently wrote at great length with little editing, so maybe this is just where the story took him, and he didn’t concern himself with how the story might reflect on his nationalistic ideals. Perhaps he thought he was just writing a realistic description of the past. His descriptive language, for example, suggests that. He does not romanticize the bleakness of the lowland moors or the primitive Scottish inn where his narrator stays, but he does describe the beauty of the Scottish lakes and mountains. His descriptions of rural life and the role of women (highly prescribed, if not entirely passive) also reflect a realist point of view.

  So the points of view and the narrative style are peculiar to a modern reader, although in the end they make an interesting and picturesque read. The mix of social observation and tame adventure explain why Scott was such a popular writer in his time.

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration. New Philip Marlowe Stories by Some of the World’s Leading Mystery Writers

Edited by Byron Preiss. 1988 (July 2014)

  This is an enjoyable collection of short stories involving Philip Marlowe. All the stories are quite readable and build on the atmosphere and character that Raymond Chandler created. One is by Chandler himself, previously unpublished. (I half suspect that this is a publisher’s project to create a new book on the basis of the rights to one story. But never mind that.) The stories suffer a little from the compressed format and the need to introduce and wrap up a crime in 15 to 20 pages, although I believe that was Chandler’s format in many cases.

  I like the chance to see so many contemporary writers interpreting Marlowe’s character in their own way. Some are a bit heavy-handed with the famous hard-boiled writing style, but some (such as Simon Brett) are quite clever and witty. A few downplay it entirely to focus on Marlowe’s character and situation. What they all do effectively is work with Marlowe’s character, placing him in different settings and times to see how he would resolve a problem. These Marlowes, like Chandler’s Marlowe, often make intuitive jumps without much real detective work, but that’s because they are not so much about working out a mystery, as working out a situation with toughness and honour.

  Also quite interesting are the comments in the author’s notes after their contribution. They describe how they see Chandler’s influence (or lack of influence) on them as writers of detective stories and what they think Chandler achieved. The diversity of their impressions builds a portrait of Chandler’s influence on writing that is quite revealing and diverse, from Sara Paretsky whose reaction was to try to find a more rounded role for a woman character to Paco Ignacio Taibo who adopted a gritty neorealism as an appropriate alternative to Latin magic realism.

  The overwhelming sense, of course, is one of futility in conflict with a deep personal honour. Coming out of the Depression, the world war and the Cold War, it’s easy to see how American (and other) readers would recognize the sense of darkness and futility. But against that is the belief in the individual standing up to whatever comes, even at the risk of great personal cost. As one writer, Robert Campbell, suggests, it’s the American frontier cowboy reset in the gritty urban scene.

The Hungry Ghosts

Shyam Selvadurai, 2013 (July 2014)

As a metaphor for the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka, this story is tragic in many aspects, although ultimately resolved. As a reflection on the immigrant experience in Canada, or queer relationships in the 1980s, it is not uplifting. It all turns out painfully bad, in spite of the narrator Shivan’s somewhat passive attempts to make a life for himself. He is overwhelmed by the circumstances of his early life in Sri Lanka, having to choose between poverty for his family and affluence with a selfish, controlling grandmother. He escapes by immigrating to Canada, but finds that life as a gay student offers him only limited options, in part because of the damage he carries from his early life in Sri Lanka. He tries to make things better by returning to Sri Lanka to accommodate his past, but things get worse. Returning to Canada, he tries a new start which seems to succeed, but he finds his attempt to bury his past fails, and his only recourse is to give up what he has achieved and return to face his nemesis with unconditional compassion. The simplified message seems to be that for Sri Lanka to overcome its murderous civil war past, everyone has to be prepared to give up what they have won and face each other with forgiveness and compassion. Simplified though this is (and I don’t see much in the story that offers a more nuanced reading), it’s pretty inadequate as a political solution for Sri Lanka’s past.
  What is really good about this book (and what I loved in his earlier books) is the beautiful writing, and Selvadurai’s ability to create a rich visual sense of the lush environment of Sri Lanka, and in this case its contrast with the dirty, grey, dusty, cold, barren Toronto suburbs (softened a bit by the scenes of UBC and the West End of Vancouver). And Selvadurai writes very effectively about their mental anguish. I can empathize with Shivan’s mother’s horror of life as an immigrant woman, and with Shivan’s wretchedness as a South Asian exotic object in the gay scene or his rage at his grandmother and everything she destroys for him. But this writing is undercut when Selvadurai repeatedly describes a character’s complicated reactions to words or events as if unable to make the characters understood without explanation. While it’s probably true that I would not get the complex interactions on a first reading, I found the repeated explanations intrusive.
  More problematic is the unrealistic nature of many of the relationships – I often did not buy into the decisions that many of the characters made, Shivan in particular with his back and forth changes from hating his grandmother and Sri Lanka to adopting them, then hating them again and finally adopting them again. Yes, his character is drawn in many directions by powerful feelings of home, family, love, greed. But Shivan seems to barely think about his sudden changes of direction, he just feels he has to do it. Similarly, other characters, his family and his partners, jump to extremes of feeling without any intrinsic change. It seems that they are driven more by the needs of the plot and the need to fully illustrate the theme of compassion than by any internal sense. They act as if they are puppets more than people (and to an extent they are, driven by the forces in their lives).
  So this raises a question of style and authorial intent. In places, I found the style clunky, awkward and repetitive, and I found myself wondering what happened to Selvadurai’s editor. But I know Selvadurai to be a careful and thoughtful stylist and I don’t remember these issues in his previous books. So are the intrusive explanations and repetitive style deliberate, an attempt to recreate in an English novel the ritualistic story telling of more traditional literatures? Selvadurai recounts a variety of Buddhist stories and aphorisms to illustrate the message of compassion. He shifts from Shivan’s present hostility to his emotive narration of the past and then his final resolution. And he frequently shows how books and stories are a key elements in Sivan’s youth and adult life. (Thank you buriedinprint for pointing that out.) I found the writing irritating in places, but if this is really supposed to work as a metaphor for something else, than perhaps it serves a purpose that the writing should call attention to itself, forcing the reader to step back and ask what’s going on here. I cannot say that it made me appreciate the story more, although perhaps it brought out its meaning. As someone else noted, readers care about the characters, not about a metaphor, so it’s the characters who have to work, not the metaphor.

My Ántonia

Willa Cather, 1918/1926 (June 2014)

  An interesting reflection on the lives of women settling in the American Midwest in the late 1800’s, this is not exactly what I had been expecting. Much like Angle of Repose, this novel gives a detailed look at the hard life of pioneer women trying to establish their lives in a context of frequently ineffectual men. Curiously, both are narrated by men at the periphery of the central woman’s life.

  My Ántonia is great in showing Nebraska prairie life, with the natural beauty of the grasslands in every season, and Cather’s poetic descriptions are quite evocative. Never having been there, I can see from her writing how people can find it beautiful. She also effectively contrasts the beauty with the summer heat and the harshness of the extreme winter. Her description of the first years of the immigrants’ life in a sod hut, and the neighbours’ more established wooden cabin, then the move to town life in Black Hawk, give a realistic picture of settler life. The range of characters is interesting, too, from the eccentricities of the farm hands, the prideful obstinacy of the Ántonia’s brother, the broken nostalgia of Ántonia’s father to the generosity and warmth of Jim Burden’s grandparents and neighbours. Even the bit characters, such as the spiteful town couple always fighting each other, show the range of life in a small town.

  Most interesting and memorable are the women: Lena, the free-spirited cow herder, who scandalizes the townsfolk by dancing with any men she chooses, and then becomes a stylish and successful dress maker. Tiny, who leaves the farm to make a fortune in the Klondike and settle in San Francisco. And at the centre, Ántonia, the lively and spirited young girl who captivates Jim with her energy and cheerful disposition. She lives a hard life, and it is to Cather’s credit that she does not romanticize it. She works to support her family, falls for a man who abandons her, and finally starts from scratch again to build a family with a man she loves. Her life, even when she finally makes her family farm a success, is relentless work until her children are old enough to take on some of the chores. Yet through it all, she chooses to make her own way in spite of mistakes and setbacks. She is the figure of the resilient, pragmatic, hard-working American that has become the classic type of American legend. So is it merely ironic that she is a female surrounded by flawed men, an immigrant who never loses her accent, a Catholic who becomes an unwed mother? Cather, even writing in 1918, clearly wants to up-end the stereotype and show something of a different reality.

  And what of Jim Burden in all this? As the story begins, he has lost his parents to disease and must go to live with his grandparents in Nebraska. He meets Antonia on the train, and is drawn to her, following her life on the neighbouring farm. As young friends, he falls in love with her, but does not seem to consider her a marriage partner, probably because of their different social status – he is to be a lawyer, and she is a farm girl. As a result, he ends up in a loveless marriage but affluent, while she eventually finds a man to love and turns him into a farmer. And Jim never stops thinking of her, even though he avoids contact for 20 years, and finally seems content when he rejoins her life as a sort of distant visiting uncle to her children. So in the end, he is fulfilled only by a connection to Antonia’s life force and the prairie, however tenuous that is as an eastern lawyer. And that, it seems, is to be his burden – he is privileged and civilized, but his life seems irrelevant – he describes it only in occasional references – and empty compared to the richness and beauty of Ántonia and the prairie.

Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

 Art Spiegelman, 1991 (May 2014)

 I avoided reading this book for a long time because I thought I’d heard enough stories about surviving the Holocaust. And the idea of reducing it to a story of cats and mice did not seem appealing. Probably I would not have read it had Spiegelman not been the subject of a feature show at the Vancouver Art Gallery where I was intrigued enough to pick up the book. Nevertheless, I found the story compelling at several levels.

  As a personal tale of survival, the story that Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, tells his son is extraordinary – the schemes to get through the early years of Nazi-occupied Poland, the trade-offs in the concentration camp and extermination camp, the forced march and train transport, the German death camp, these are hard enough to imagine, but Vladek’s ingenuity in finding ways to gain enough advantage to survive shows his forceful and resourceful personality. The fact that his wife, Anja (whom he portrays as more feeble), survives as well, while all of their family are killed, is even more extraordinary. Discovering the details of how an individual survives under such extreme circumstances is an interesting story in itself.

  On another level is the psychological impact of the story on the survivors. We know that Vladek’s strong personality is key to his survival (although we know little about how Anja survives). It’s not surprising that this takes a warped form when his son Art knows him as a demanding, bullying tyrant who scrimps and hoards even after building a secure and comfortable life in the USA. Anja commits suicide when Art is in his 20s, and Vladek seems to have an intolerable relationship with his new wife, Mala. (He seems paranoid and misreads Mala’s motives as venal, which leads one to wonder about his characterization of Anja, too.) Of course, Art finds him impossible to live with, or even visit, but he is drawn to his father out of a sense of loyalty or guilt, and wants to understand Vladek’s story. He presents the story and his reaction to it in an unadorned way as if he understands little beyond the surface, with little comment beyond his own editing of the story and his frustration in trying to capture it.

  While initially I felt that the drawing style was simple and crude, the imagery does add a great deal to the story line, making it both concrete and abstract at the same time. The horrors are expressed economically, showing the details without extensive description, but they still require an act of imagination on the part of the reader to make them meaningful. The animal characters are highly arbitrary and sometimes troubling (Poles as pigs? French as frogs?). If they make it easier for some readers to approach the topic, then perhaps that is sufficient justification, but it’s hard to avoid stereotypical characterizations and a fairy-tale-like story.

  And while this is an attempt to record a specific historical event, the animal story seems to take it out of any historical context. Certainly there is no attempt to describe the social and political context of Europe in the 1930s and 40s, and this is just a story of one person’s experience and how it marked him. I suppose other books have to describe the context, but in a sense this just becomes a bogey-man story of good animals and bad ones when the story is decontextualized in this way.

  This is a worthy and compelling story, but it raises questions about historical story-telling which may be as valuable as the story itself.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke

Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö (trans: Joan Tate), 1966 (May 2014)

  Combining the everyday drudgery of police detective work with the daily life of a police detective who has a hard time making the two fit together was, according to the notes, a departure for the genre in the 1960s. Certainly this novel, interesting if low key, is far from the English parlour detectives or the hardboiled American ones. By comparison with the flawed detectives of modern fiction, this is a slow, even plodding, story, although filled with detail that seems typical for the times. The procedural and psychological detail gives the story interest, in spite of its lack of action. Instead of a gruelling cross-examination, for example, the detectives sit in the suspect’s room for half an hour saying nothing, as the suspect grows increasingly nervous and finally accepts that he has to explain what he did. Since most criminals are not masterminds, I think that is a more likely outcome in the circumstances than the notion of a criminal toying with the detectives, leaving clues or holding out until the lawyer comes to save him.

  I thought the homey details were interesting – ironically, except for the place names, the Stockholm scenes could have been taking place in London or its suburbs. However, the picture of Budapest, an urbane tourist destination even under the Stalinist regime of the 1960s, with an efficient and helpful police department, was slightly surprising (possibly because of the authors’ Marxist interests). They make Budapest seem more attractive than Stockholm, which perhaps it is.

  Another reflection of the authors’ Marxist thinking lies in the crime and the perpetrators. There are no clever criminals here, just an unlikeable victim who got pretty much what he deserves, and a bunch of ordinary, competent people who get caught up in some unplanned violence. This is what the vast majority of crime involves. The attention that crime writers give to masterminds and elites reflects their own job as entertainers, and I do find it absurd and a little tiresome when improbable criminals are the main focus of crime writing. Interestingly, a theme in some modern crime fiction is not so much the elites committing crimes against each other, but the crimes perpetrated through pharmaceutical or industrial companies to generate wealth for the elites. Such stories, however, reflect a contemporary sentiment of mistrust against corporate elites rather than a mistrust of the corporate system. Sjöwall and Wahlöö seem to be more interested in exploring the circumstances of realistic crime and how decent, self-respecting police officers respond to it.

 It will be interesting to see what themes they develop in their other novels.

1Q84

Haruki Murakami, 2011 (May 2014)

  It seems that people have strongly divided opinions on this book, and I am among those who liked it. But I can see why some criticize it.

  It’s long and allusive and there is not much action –although it has suspense and a lot happening on a level below the surface of the storyline. To enjoy the book, or to get much from it at all, a reader has to surrender to it and enter into the world Murakami has created. It is a world where strange and magical things happen, some creepy, some very discomforting. But underlying the story line is a simple romance, the story of Tengo and Aomame, connected in some inexplicable way, who overcome personal challenges and physical threats to come together – reminding me at times of The Magic Flute or Dr. Zhivago. At this level, the story is a touching one as we learn about the strange turns in their lives (and the mundane details) and the slow path by which they finally come together. The sweet scene in which they re-unite is touchingly simple. It would not feel so satisfying if we readers had not gone through so much waiting and expectation.

 Of course, there’s much more than this and most of it is very mysterious, so for a reader who likes to know what’s going on (and often I am), this could be frustrating. Just what this parallel world is, why the bill collector keeps knocking so insistently at people’s doors, whether some of the characters are even real – for me as a reader, these are puzzles that keep me interested while the plot makes its slow progress. That they are mostly unresolved in the end is somehow okay, because in surrendering to the book, I know that the world is just different here.

  I think this is one of the themes of the book: how the writer creates a new world for the reader, which can come to exist in the reader’s mind for a while and allow the reader to experience something that would not be possible in the mundane world. Writerly preoccupations often come up in the story, as Tengo is an aspiring novelist who proceeds to create the world in which the story takes place (twice), a sort of Moebius strip plotline. And this is what authors do, they create a world that is more or less like the reader’s world and allow the reader to live in it for a while, accepting the realistic or illogical details as part of the story. When Murakami describes the concrete details of his characters’ lives, he makes his imagined world more real, and gives the reader a way to relate to the sometimes strange events that his story describes. And perhaps this has something to do with his frequent references to other books and authors who create rules for writers (such as Chekhov’s rule that if you introduce a gun in Act 1, you have to fire it by the end of the play, a rule that Murakami shows is not necessarily true in this world, and perhaps in others) or long meditations on life (such as Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past). And his frequent humorous notes, including the reminder that, in a story so focussed on the moon, it’s only a paper moon. 

 Also, I love the creative book design with its mirrors, shifts adn layers, imaginative, playful and entirely appropriate to the text.