The West Indian

By Valerie Browne Lester, 2019 

An exotic locale, a superficial sham of English culture, ruthless egotism and acquisitive colonial commerce are the backdrop to this story of one woman’s survival and the launch of her son into another form of English culture.

I first heard of this novel as an imagined pre-history of Heathcliff, the romantic hero of Wuthering Heights. It does not touch at all on the events of Wuthering Heights, as it ends with the arrival of an uncouth youngster in Liverpool harbour, and the barest hint that he is the orphan Heathcliff, adopted into the Earnshaw home in Yorkshire. But The West Indian does recreate the impassioned emotions and extravagant behaviours that Emily Bronte conceived.

Wikipedia says Wuthering Heights “was controversial because of its unusually stark depiction of mental and physical cruelty, and it challenged strict Victorian ideals regarding religious hypocrisy, morality, social classes and gender inequality. The novel also explores the effects of envy, nostalgia, pessimism and resentment.” All of these are themes in The West Indian. Here, however, instead of heroic romantic passion, Valerie Browne Lester presents a kind of inverse – the male protagonist makes his fortune in colonial trade (and keeps slaves on his plantation and in his home), is obsessively possessive and self-centred but without a reciprocating love. Like Heathcliff, he ignores or abuses his actual wife, Martha, but also demands that she allow his lovers to dominate her home. Initially, this arrangement works because his lover is a charming and generous domestic slave and Martha makes a deep friendship with her. A later lover, Antonietta, is lazy and self-centred, and antagonizes Martha. Meanwhile, Martha has formed her own relationship with the local pastor, in an enlightened and idealized model. There is even a passionate story of a horse-back struggle through a storm to find help and save the life of a loved one.

Browne Lester also makes a lot of the contrast between the cultured Martha, from a destitute middle class family in England, and the pretense of high culture among the English Jamaican colonials, again echoing the contrast between the Earnshaw and Linton households in Wuthering Heights, though drawn with greater extremes. While the violence and uncouth behaviour in Wuthering Heights seems confined to Heathcliff’s household, it is at the centre of the Jamaican colonial culture, reflected even in the behaviour of the women and men at the top of its European society.

The landscape similarly contrasts in the two novels, with the Yorkshire moors being bleak and threatening, while Jamaica features the exotic beauty of colourful flowers, lush vegetation and gorgeous birds. The Yorkshire setting represents the bleak world of Heathcliff versus the cultured charm of Thrushcroft, while the beauty of Jamaica contrasts with the venality of its white residents.

Browne Lester shows some incidents from the perspective of young Peter, a wild child raised with few boundaries who wonders at the foolishness of civilized society. Through his eyes, we can see what life might be in a tropical paradise outside of colonialism. Again, this both parallels and contrasts with young Heathcliff, who finds himself banished from the established culture and is fiercely resentful as a result.

One frequent theme in The West Indian that is not represented in Wuthering Heights is literature. Martha and her friends enjoy literature and find comfort and inspiration in making up songs, sharing books, translating the classics, even reading Tristram Shandy. Perhaps for Browne Lester, this is a beacon of hope that an elevated culture will eventually transcend the violence of colonialism and slavery. Her Jamaican character does live on through his appearance in Wuthering Heights.

No doubt because the author is a scholar of 19^th century lives, this novel has the details of life, language and character that are illuminating and interesting. It’s an enjoyable, provocative read.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

by Salman Rushdie, 2015

In this artful and amusing book, Salman Rushie combines a clever riff on the Arabic 1001 Nights tales with a harsh critical look at both Islamic and Euro-American ideological narrowmindedness.

  The story is first of all an amusing literary recreation of the 1001 Nights in modern times. Here the jinn are sometimes evil and sometimes benevolent, but mostly uninterested in the pathetic low-lifes that inhabit Earth. That changes when their vanity drives some of them to undertake a cataclysmic battle for the attention of humans. Rushdie has fun with his readers in creating a satire that draws parallels through a wide range of literary allusions and human foolishness. I particularly liked the mystery Baby Storm who destroys careers by causing the flesh of the lying and corrupt to decay hideously.

  A more profound theme underlying the book is the conflict between reason and unreason, or religion as Rushdie identifies it. Cleverly, Rushie identifies the rational thinkers with the descendants of the Islamic scientist and philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rushd in Arabic. Thus, his descendants are Rushdis and, like Rushdie, targets of repression by religious fundamentalists who gain their power by convincing their followers to believe their pronouncements, however irrational. The book is in part an attack on the Islamic fundamentalists who tried to have Rushdie killed for ridiculing Islam. In one section, parasitic jinni of the irrational forces occupy human bodies and turn them into airline attackers and suicide bombers. And while it seems nightmarish, Rushie makes it a comedy, with his cutting satire and imaginative storyline. Ibn Rushd and his rival, the mystic Al-Ghazali, for example, dispute philosophy in life, and then centuries after their death, the conflict becomes so intense that their dust is driven to resurrect their debates. So while a philosophical debate underlies the novel, Rushie’s skill as a storyteller makes it an amusing and moving tale.

  He also allows love, perhaps the most irrational of all human activities, to lead the fight against the irrational, so he’s not a simple rationalist. And while Rushie shows clearly which side he wants to win, he ends the novel by saying that in the new world of peaceful freedom, reason has left God out, but now we don't dream. Life is good, but we sometimes yearn for nightmares, he says.

  It’s also interesting to identify the varied links that Rushdie drops to world cultures, ranging from the Muslim cultures to the touchpoints of Western culture, including Greeks, Candide and contemporary television and movies. These references not only tie Rushdie’s thinking to world cultures, but they make the novel more than a fantasy. They show that it is a serious novel relevant to contemporary readers.

  Rushdie’s writing style is as entertaining as his story. Often I stopped either to laugh at an ironic or ridiculous image or to credit an eloquent phrase or social observation. Some critics have objected that the characters are not fully developed, they are cartoons, and the storyline is too simple. This is true, but it didn’t reduce my enjoyment of the novel. It is, after all, a fable, and fables are not written for complexity. They are written to make a point in a direct way. In this, I expect that the novel is a parallel to the 1001 Nights – a series of fairly simple stories that make a point. (But I don’t want to be definitive on that, as I’ve only read the 1001 Nights in a simple version years ago.)

  Rushdie makes his point, and entertains at the same time. All in all, this is a thoughtful and amusing read, and it encourages me to watch for more novels by Rushdie.

Heartlands: A Gay Man's Odyssey Across America

by Darrell Yates Rist, 1992

I initially thought that this would be a light and entertaining travelogue with pictures of gay life in various American communities. It is a travelogue, but much more. It becomes a gay man’s search for the meaning of life in the early years of the AIDS crisis.
  I don’t usually read personal memoires, but this book shows how memoire can combine personal experience and reflection in a compelling and illuminating story. The author Darrell Rist slowly reveals more of  himself as he explores gay life in many varied American communities. Initially, perhaps, he does not even know why he has begun his journey, suggesting that it is a journalistic attempt to portray his community in a time of crisis. He visits the gay mecca of San Francisco and finds a community divided along lines of class and race, suggesting a sociological perspective that interested me. In the mountain states, he finds loners with a self-serving critique of gay urban life, as well as military members willing to make compromises for their careers. In the desert, he finds visionaries living outside of society and rodeo cowboys and girls who are bitter that the regular rodeo circuit won’t tolerate them. In one experience after another, Rist shows that if one can even speak of a gay community in America, it is a community with so many different issues and perspectives that even when everyone seems to recognize that they live in a homophobic society, they don’t share a sense of a common oppression.
  It’s interesting that one of the most touching incidents occurs when Rist helps some illegal Latin migrants in the desert and observes that their fear has shut down their capacity for empathy and intimacy. It becomes clear that Rist is talking about himself and his own fears.
  Gradually, Rist tells his own stories of loss, the ways that his friends deal with AIDS, some rising above their medical complications, and some falling into despair. The loss of an intimate friend who was a spark of energy and life seems to lead to Rist’s own sense of despair, and his acknowledgement that he cannot find meaning in other people’s life stories, but he has to find his own sense of meaning. The fact that he shares an alienation from mainstream life with many, perhaps most, gay men does not allow him to accept their answers or accommodations. He continues to search, he finds something like a queer paradise in Hawaii and some individuals living in strange solitary networks in the hostile extremes of Alaska. Toward the end of the book, he fails to connect with a black gay New Yorker, who doesn’t want to live in white gay society because he can never be comfortable there.
  Rist describes the specific details of the lives of a wide number of men, and a few women, but he places it in a broad social and naturalistic context. His poetic descriptions of the physical landscapes that he passes through are I think an attempt to link himself and his readers to a more universal world. They sometimes strike me as overdone, but the language does take his personal stories into a place beyond their specific settings.
  Rist does find resolution of a kind in the last chapters, although not a resolution that can be simply stated. He calls it redemption and the experience of universal love, but the experience he describes is appropriately complicated. Meaningful life and death in a time of AIDS cannot be simple, but his experience does seem to give Rist some resolution.
  As a reader, I felt that this book offered a satisfying insight, not only into the time and place it describes, but also into the larger themes of life and meaning that Rist wants to address. It’s worth taking the time to read it slowly over a period of time, reflecting on the range of experiences and ways of living that Rist finds in America.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky

by Karen X. Tulchinsky, 2003 

It takes a fairly audacious author to name a contemporary Canadian novel after the foundational literature of Judaism, but while Karen Tulchinsky’s book may not achieve the significance of the original five books of Moses, there’s a good basis for the reference. For Tulchinsky at least, the times and incidents that are the basis of the novel are a part of the foundation of the Jewish experience in Canada.

  The novel describes in concrete detail the pogroms that drove Jewish immigrants out of their Russian homeland and to a new promised land, and then of the struggles they faced in their new homes. It deals with tradition and family as sources of strength as well as limits to personal adaptation.

  Tulchinsky brings together some key historical facts from the period and ties them into the Lapinsky family history. They face poverty in the 1930s, the oppressive antisemitism and almost equally oppressive heat and humidity. I had known a little of the history of antisemitism in Canada, but Tulchinksy makes it real with stories like blatant bypassing of a job application from the literary son of the family and the antisemitic riot at the Christie Pits baseball park. These incidents effect the family in dramatic ways, causing family splits that everyone regrets but can’t seem to change. They drive the central story of Sonny, who takes out his fury both in the army and in the boxing ring.

  Through their telling and retelling of the family stories, the Lapinskys make their history and their connection to their culture a strong part of their life. But the private recriminations and reliving of their mistakes also lets it eat away at their mental health. And the guilt that family members feel comes back over and over and it works on them even after they have achieved successes in Canada. It continues to affect the contemporary narrator who is putting together notes for a family history.

  The details of everyday life keep the story personal, a specific family story set against larger histories. Tulchinsky has clearly done a lot of research and uses it to create a particular time and place. Her description of the light in a shop in the stetl or the sound of horses hooves on a Toronto bring me as a reader right into the scene. For me, these details are one of the strengths of Tulchinsky’s writing.

  Happily, Tulchinsky uses a light touch and humour as well as her historical research. In one comic spin on the stereotype of Jewish guilt, she works her way around five members of the family, each agonizing over how he or she is guilty for the debilitating injury of the youngest son. And the local lovable crime boss is almost comic in his characterization.

  I would not have thought that I’d be very interested in a story that spends a lot of time on the inner life and the physical experience of a boxer, but Tulchinnsky makes the details and the life fascinating. She gets into Sonny’s life so closely that I often wondered if Tulchinsky had not taken up boxing herself.

  If I have a criticism (beyond the occasional excess of details from the Toronto newspapers), it’s in the stories of the sons as young boys. It seemed to me sometimes that their thinking was too advanced for their ages – Sonny at 10, for example, is more focused and driven than anyone I’ve known at that age. Lenny is drawn into a literary world at 12, which is a little hard for me to imagine. I can agree that they live in times different from those I’m familiar with, but I think I’d have accepted more of their thinking if they had all been a few years older.

  Nevertheless, I’m happy to have found the book and read it. It gives me a sense of Jewish and Canadian lives and how they are linked to the past, and how the past continues to relate to the present.

Flood of Fire

by Amitav Ghosh, 2015 (November 2019) 

Flood of Fire completes Amitav Ghosh’s colourful trilogy of the linked histories of China, India and the colonizing forces, particularly Britain. I enjoyed it more than the last book, which got bogged down in ideological argument, but perhaps not quite as much as the first, which revealed a detailed story of people and places in the opium trade. This novel takes us into the early phases of the British invasion of China now known as the Opium Wars.
  Looking at the history from a South Asian perspective, Ghosh brings in the Indian traders who hoped to profit from the opium sales and Indian soldiers who had to fight the wars, as well as an educated noble class that found itself disposessed from its former privilege in India. The character of the mystic gomusta, Baboo Nob Kissin, adds a slightly comic viewpoint as he helps bring all the forces together for what he hopes will be a destructive cataclysm that will launch a new spiritual world. The British, the Chinese and the Americans all have characters representing their viewpoints, but the main focus is the characters from the Indian subcontinent.
  I found the clash of these varying national and personal interests brought a lot of interest to events that I knew of only as a  historical note. Ghosh describes home life, ship life and warfare in concrete detail that gives a real sense of what’s involved and what’s at stake for the characters that he chooses for his story. (Except for a few soldiers, he chooses only relatively wealthy middle and upper class characters.) The Indian soldier Kesri, for example, lives the farce of military bureaucracy as well as 19th century cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat in conditions where food, water and ammunition had to be carried to soldiers by hand. The advantage of modern weapons over traditional ones is violently clear.
  Each character’s personal motivations also develops and plays into the broader historical forces. Zachery becomes a key character as he develops from a naïve and generous American sailor with mixed-heritage into a self-interested businessman who wants status and wealth. He finds his way to prove his merit by making vast profits in the drug trade. In this, he follows the model and the moral justification of the British. They regard him as a useful tool in facilitating their own acquisition, and his anger at the emotional and social costs he has to pay is key to his motivation. However, it is Zachery that Baboo Nob Kissin is thinking of when he envisions the destruction of the world through greed. Pointedly, Zachery sees the bombardnent of Canton as the high point of rational civilization, where technology and science come together to project modern comercial values on a recalcitrant country.
  There are some things in the novel that, for me, don’t entirely fit. The characters are all drawn to travel together on the Hind in their passage from ancient India to modern Hong Kong, but somehow they are all connected through the Ibis, the schooner that was at the centre of the first novel in the trilogy. The Ibis was carrying its characters to a range of new lives in Mauritius when it was hit by a storm. The ghost of a key Indian trader appears on the Ibis before another storm sinks the ship in Hong Kong harbour. This is all a bit mystical and I’m not sure what it adds to the story. Modern transport and communications are the instrument that links new and old and brings about their destruction? It is obviously a factor, but it’s not the only one or the most powerful one, and it doesn’t act in a mystical way.
  Nevertheless, the narrative is a gripping way of looking at the history of southeast Asia. It shows not only the economic and political forces at work, but also their impacts on individuals of many classes. The narrative and the characters are interesting and keep the story moving along through its considerable length.

A People’s History of England

by A. L. Morton, 1938 (October 2019)

This review of the history of England was unexpectedly rich and insightful. Morton in his epilogue says that the book is not so much history as an exercise in historical interpretation. It is complex and ambitious and for me was a facinating overview of the economic and political forces that created Britain up to modern times. In a little over 500 pages, this book provides a densely packed summary from the pre-Roman tribes to the early 20^th century.

  I was initially looking for an overview of British history from a common person’s point of view, like Colin James’ excellent Cambridge Illustrated History of France. Although Morton’t book touches on the lives of common people, it’s focus is more to create an understanding for readers who are common people so that they can understand the forces that shape their lives. It does not dwell on detail much but focuses on the broad social, political, economic and technological forces as they were understood by a left-leaning historian writing in the 1930s. Morton sees history as a continuous process  of change and class struggle, not as an abstract movement but as people struggling to gain class interests that are important in their everyday lives. When talking about the shift from agricultural and craft production to the early phases of the industrial revolution, for example, he shows how trading and transportation technology created markets for factory products, but also how working people resisted through organized rebellions over centuries as well as through their individual attempts to protect their livelihoods.

  Although well grounded in historical fact, Morton does not hold back his opinions and he can be quite witty in his descriptions, which makes the density of the text easier to work through.

  I suspect Morton’s interpretation is open to some dispute and updating, but he provides an understanding of why British society was shaped the way it was, such as why the Romans entered Britain (to prevent their suporting the Gauls) and eventually left; how feudalism worked in the middle ages, but gave way to centralized political structures; how Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army changed contemporary warfare and politics; and how privatization of the commons led to both the exploitation and the growth of the industrial working class. I can imagine this book being a text for a working class discussion group, easily providing enough points in each chapter to stimulate an evening’s education sessions for a year. In fact, this is not a quick read – it took me months to read it because there is so much in each chapter that I wanted to absorb each section before moving on to the next. There’s too much in each brief section to quickly read and move on. It’s well worth the time, though.

  As a Canadian, we learn some highlights of English history, such as the Magna Carta and the Reformation. We get little detail, however, and less understanding. (We don’t learn that the Magna Carta was ignored and largely irrelevant until it suited bourgeious ideology in the struggle against the Stuarts, when it was brought out of storage and revered.) Although this book doesn’t cover the last half of the last century, it does give a basis for an understanding that goes far beyond historical facts. It added a great deal to my recent vacation in Britain, notwithstanding that it ends in the period leading up to the cataclysm of the Second World War.

Sweet Tooth

by Ian McEwan, 2012 

This is a book with a flaw. It purports to be about propaganda and literature: both literature as a form of propaganda and propaganda in other forms. Our protagonist, Serena (!) is first educated about ruling class propaganda in The Times of London and elsewhere by her left-leaning tutor, who turns out to be a Russian agent. Characters spin their stories in their own way and have their favoured versions of the truth. Serena gradually learns to doubt the surface messages. She is brought into MI5, and becomes part of a low-level propaganda campaign, providing a disguised income to Tom, a promising novelist who writes about freedom and creativity. Part of Serena’s indoctrination is a review of the efforts of the Comintern and CIA propaganda branches to support their own literary favourites. In the end, the whole scheme comes apart, and as readers we have to re-evaluate the story of Serena.

  Serena is more than a bit naïve, a shallow but voluminous reader who slowly learns to appreciate more literary writing. She is taken with Tom’s creative stories, sometimes quite moved by them, although the summaries she recounts seem rather bizarre, more like academic writing exercises than actually convincing stories. Serena falls for Tom and they have an affair, although she worries about how to tell him that she is a fraud who has been undermining his professional credibility. When Serena’s ex-lover brings Tom a different story that undermines her credibility, Tom turns the tables on her and makes up his own story. In the end, we see how creative story-telling is more successful than bureaucratically inspired propaganda, even in the hands of a literary writer.

  All this is very post-modern, questioning the meaning of storytelling and point-of-view, which could be an interesting twist, although hardly a new idea.

  The flaw, which I felt before reaching the various plot turns, is that it’s just not that interesting. The characters are sketched with little detail or depth, and their crises are not engaging. The plot seems to have so little at stake that it’s not interesting. The occasional background details of the social unrest of Britain in the early 1970s actually sparked more interest for me than the central story line. So it undermines the message that creative fiction is better than government propaganda when the creative fiction that I’m reading feels flat and boring.

  On a side note, the story line seems to challenge the notion of artificial limitations on writers and that writers can’t appropriate someone else’s voice. McEwan writes in the voice of a woman as if to show that it can be done successfully. In fact, the voice of Serena seems convincing enough as a young woman in 1970s London, but the fact that the story she is describing isn’t very successful actually seems to support the notion that writing in the voice of another is inherently limiting and incomplete.

  My reaction to the book is totally subjective, and perhaps others would react more deeply to the intensity of the love affair and the inherent conflict and loss that threaten it. But in the end, it seems to me to be another thought experiment that doesn’t really work rather than a successful novel. (For a thought experiment that does work even though much wilder than this one, I both enjoyed and bought into Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)