All the Light We Cannot See

 By Anthony Doerr, 2014

Although this novel is well grounded in a detailed realism, it’s a bit too metaphysical for me.

Many things about it are very good. The pictures of the lives of two young people, one growing up under Nazi government in Germany and the other living under Nazi occupation of France, are real and illuminating. I get a picture of the paranoia and privation, and the compromises that people make to survive under terrible conditions. In this way, it reminds me of the conditions shown in Suite Française, and gives an idea of what conditions might be like in Ukraine under Russian attack. Werner’s impoverished life in the mining village, at the authoritarian and cruel Nazi youth school and then in the army is vivid, and I can understand the choices he makes. The scenes of the Russian soldiers when they occupy Berlin and threaten Werner’s sister are horrific – although they fall into a common stereotype of Russia with no attempt to get beyond it, unlike the picture of the German occupiers in Suite Française.

Marie-Laure’s more protected middle-class life is less harrowing, but still difficult. Even without being rich, she is protected in a way that Werner is not, as class has its privileges even in wartimes. The challenges of her blindness don’t compare with his poverty, and in some ways they seems to make life easier for her as people go out of their way to help her. Her blindness seems to me to parallel more with Werner’s indoctrination, which allows him only a limited view of the reality around him. The novel gives a picture of war that is empathetic and lyrical, even within the horrors of the situation.

In spite of the detail and realism, there are many details that I didn’t buy into, which made it difficult for me to completely accept the narrative. Marie-Laure, for example, is often shown seeing details that she can’t see. Even accepting that blind people can be highly aware of their environment, how can she know that a spider spins a new web over the stove every night? Or be aware of a reaction in someone’s face? She is a highly intelligent and capable blind person, which is great, but she can’t know some things that she cannot see. And Werner’s philosophical ruminations about the excesses of the Vienna Opera seem equally out of place for someone with his background. As these details accumulate, they start to seem contrived and make the story feel artificial.

So the metaphysical elements to me feel just as contrived and artificial. Werner and Marie-Laure are initially linked through the almost miraculous connections of the radio broadcasts. When they ultimately come together, I could perhaps see a link through Werner’s fascination with radio and Marie-Laure’s connection with her uncle, if it were not for the artificiality that I felt earlier. All the metaphysical language that Doerr uses to describe the scenes just draws attention to the contrived nature of the story. I can’t help comparing this with the metaphysical links that connect the lead characters in Doctor Zhivago, which are so understated, but real, that they make the novel a compelling classic that I look forward to re-reading.

The fateful story of the Sea of Flames gem foreshadows the mysterious connections across time and space. The electromagnetic radio waves connect everyone through modern technologies (magnified these days with internet communications), in a contemporary science-like way that is too metaphysical to be actual science. The theme of connectedness helps to make the characters feel better in tragic circumstances. They overcome the absence of those they love, and perhaps believe in something that isn’t war. This is something, but it doesn’t offer meaning or respite from the brutality of war.

Fifteen Dogs: An Apologue

By André Alexis, 2015

What a fun way to think about humanity – by stepping outside of human consciousness and seeing what it might look like from outside. It’s also an interesting speculation about what dog consciousness might be if dogs had a human sort of consciousness (raising right there the question of what consciousness is, what part of it is based on intelligence and what is innate and if it’s innate what part might be universal, or at least cross-species — and then there are the hints of god-consciousness). This sounds like a heavy philosophical debate, which it is, but not in the sense of a dry treatise debated among specialists. Instead, André Alexis tackles it with humour and fun.

The combination of humour, empathy, art and deep thought make this book quite unique. It’s comic and entertaining in many ways, especially in how the dogs and the gods perceive the foibles of humanity. When Apollo says to Hermes, don’t insult me by arguing like a human, it’s a comic reflection that flips over human arrogance and puts it in its place. The humour lightens up a story that might be too sad without it, as does the artfulness of Alexis’ prose. When he describes how the dogs perceive the world through scents and doggy enthusiasms (“the excitement of biting on a new stick”), he offers a genuine insight into different ways of seeing and appreciating the world. And the dogs’ verbal jokes and poems are both fun and poetic. They get at a kind of consciousness that humans don’t appreciate, but can find some empathy with.

The story is, of course, sad, as it deals with life and death. Life is a struggle for the dogs, as it is even without consciousness, but it becomes quite poignant as they are able to contemplate what they want in their lives and the hardships they face. The deaths of the dogs, often occurring quite quickly but sometimes after a full life, is poignant because readers come to know them as sympathetic characters. Even the unsympathetic characters seem to deserve more than they get, and that too is a reflection on human life.

Given that the dogs are granted human intelligence, and in many ways think like humans, it’s disturbing how quickly the pack falls into something like fascism. Some are disturbed by the dogs who think for themselves, and especially by the artist in the pack, because it threatens the hierarchy and the established structure of their society. In this telling, all the dogs accept the hierarchical nature of pack society, but even so free thinkers are seen as a threat that has to be eliminated. If the dogs are an analogue for human society, the story illustrates the rise and the strength of fascism. It’s only through luck or divine intervention that the artists escape fascistic repression.

The real interest, of course, is in the lives of the artists and thinkers. Their conflict with the pack leads the philosophical Majnoun to life with a human who uses her intelligence to communicate. But it leads the poetic Prince to life as an outsider, who interacts with some sympathetic humans but can’t share his vision either with them or with other dogs. What the storyline suggests is that life is brutish and short for the unthinking, but it can have beauty, connection, even happiness, in spite of many challenges, for those who use their intelligence. This is the message we get from other stories set among humans, but setting it in a doggy consciousness simplifies it and gives it a satisfying conclusion. The storyline would probably seem trite if the characters were humans, but that’s the benefit of a fable – the author can take fundamental truths and give them a novel quality.

Some people compare this novel to dystopian stories like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, but I think it has little in common with them. It’s more about communication, like stories about first contact with alien species. Here, the dogs and the gods make contact with humans in a doomed struggle to connect that nevertheless is worth the effort.

Never Forget

By Martin Michaud, 2014, trans. 2020

Martin Michaud tries too hard and accomplishes too little in this police thriller. It’s disappointing because I wanted to enjoy it. It’s set in Montreal and evokes many details of the city in a realistic way. It touches on contemporary issues, such as the corrosive effects of the repression of the Quebec independentist movement, political corruption and continuing interference by the RCMP. It even has an insider’s view of realistic police work. I would have been happy if it had handled any of these with reasonably plausible characters.

Instead, Michaud tries to hook readers with tortuous murders depicted from the victim’s point of view, and bizarre plot points like the bow and arrow shooting in a Montreal cemetery or the CIA’s brainwashing experiments carried out in Montreal in order to avoid legal scrutiny. This is catchy plotting that draws the action from high point to high point, as if following the advice in a manual for successful detective thrillers, but it feels artificial and manipulative.

Worse, Michaud creates thinly drawn characters who over-react to everything in their lives. With characters of greater depth, I might have been drawn into the rest of the story, which has its intrigue. But it seems that each of the central characters has one quirk that becomes a defining feature. The lead detective is dealing (badly) with a fatal error from his past and its repercussions in his personal and professional life. His partner is a junk food junkie. Another detective is gnomic while the chief is supportive as he struggles with his wife’s cancer. These could be colourful details if there were more to the characters, but there isn’t. The characters are uniformly flat cartoons.

Apparently, Michaud is a popular writer in Quebec and perhaps his characters have more depth in their original language. I can imagine that they may well have lost something in translation, particularly as a lot of the characterization comes from the dialogue. The plot conforms to the genre conventions, and Michaud has won fiction awards in both French and English. So perhaps I’d concede that personal taste is a factor here – except that those characters (in translation) just don’t have the substance of, say, a well-crafted English police drama. (Is it fair to compare a translated novel to a well written English drama? Perhaps not.)

Maybe I just don’t appreciate the modern detective genre, but it seems to me that the mid-century novels of Phillip Marlow or Dashiell Hammett are just better written, even with their exaggerated language and convoluted plots. And the genre fiction of John Le Carré never leaves me thinking that the characters are flat cartoons, even when they are predictable types from his repertoire. Ultimately, I’m just not drawn to spend any more time with Michaud’s characters, even if there are aspects of his novels that are intriguing.

Judith and Hamnet

By Maggie O’Farrell, 2020

Maggie O’Farrell is a poetic and empathetic writer, and yet there are a few things that hold me back from fully appreciating this book.

First the good stuff. O’Farrell writes such rich, descriptive prose that, as a reader, I could sense the scene and the characters in a very concrete way. When she describes the herbs or the birds or the room, in a few words she brings an image to mind that places the story in a setting that simply seems very real. I kept thinking that she must have been there to catch those details. Although in the credits at the end of the book she lists a lot of printed references and she describes visiting the sites in Stratford, she writes with such detail that it’s hard to imagine that she’s not writing from a lot of close personal experience.

Even with that skill, though, I sometimes felt that a few words from an editor would have helped. When she makes metaphors, they sometimes seem overdrawn, like “the dark maw of the ground, ripped open to accept the white wrapped body in the grave.” Does this have an emotional resonance for readers? Perhaps, but graves in my mind are very neatly dug and describing them as ripped open seems to stretch reality for the sake of an artistic expression. It’s jarring and distracting, not illuminating. Several times through the book, I found myself thinking that the artful language is getting in the way of the response that I imagine O’Farrell wanted.

O’Farrell conveys a deep sense of the emotions of her central character. Agnes’ feelings about her family, her husband, and her situation are complex, but clear and real. Her relationship with her taciturn brother, for example, is interesting in how well they understand each other, even with few words spoken. At the centre of the story is her grief at the death of her son, and I can understand the depth of her loss and how it overpowers her. It may seem extreme, but we already know from her relationship with her stepmother and her birth stories that Agnes is a person of unusual intensity and connectedness. An extreme reaction seems right in character.

O’Farrell gives a similar emotional sense to several other characters. Hamnet’s devotion to his twin sister and his sacrifice to save her, and later Judith’s searching for the spirit of the dead Hamnet seem a natural part of their character. Their father is one of the least known characters, initially a young man of little spirit, and later a business man with a close feeling for his family. Overall, however, we get little sense of his interior thinking. This is an interesting choice, to deliberately take the attention away from the most famous historical character and focus on the unknown background players.

But this empathic acuity leads to another issue for me. In many respects, these characters seem to be modern people in a 17^th century society. The long picture of Agnes’ grief could be reset with equal impact in a contemporary family. While Agnes is an expert herbalist, she thinks and reacts in the way a 21^st century person would, essentially individualized and material. She has no real community connections and no relationship to the Christian god. Of course, this involves broad generalizations, but could a post-medieval woman go through all that Agnes experiences without reference to community or church (beyond a perfunctory funeral and burial)? Ahistorical characterization often seems to be a problem in writing historical novels, although I think Hillary Mantel avoids it in her books about Thomas Cromwell. She is deliberately exploring the development of the modern mind in the same period, and for me she is more successful in creating a historical character than O’Farrell is. This leads me to ask, why put a modern character in a 400-year-old setting and write as if the character’s psyche is not part of that setting?

Although O’Farrell’s occasional over-writing and her ahistorical characters are flaws to me, there are so many things in her writing that I really like that I’d be interested to read more of her writing to see how she handles other circumstances. 

You Went Away

 By Timothy Findley, 1996

We would now call this a book about toxic masculinity, although I don’t think that term was in vogue when Findley wrote it in 1996. Nevertheless, it explores one small story about the expectations placed on men, how some men respond and the impacts of those responses on the people around them.

The men at the centre of the story are children. Mi’s husband Graeme acts like he is still in school, afraid of his emotions, afraid of women. Ivan, a pilot trainer, plays with his toy Spitfire when Mi gives it to him and goes “Zoom” just like the boy in the story. Graeme is trying to live up to the impossible ideal of his dead hero brother, but he cannot in his office job, and he leaps at the chance to join the air force when World War II breaks out. When that doesn’t work, he falls back on alcohol. He directs his guilt at his wife, has affairs and shuts her out of his life, refusing even to talk to her. He is almost as cold to his son. The book’s title, You Went Away, describes Graeme’s emotional withdrawal from his family. While there are a few mature and caring men, they are background figures only.

The women in the story, by contrast, are empathetic and supportive. They talk to each other and look after each other when things go bad, lend each other clothes so that they can make the best impression on the men. They try to hold the family together, to make enough compromises that they, or at least their kids, can survive. At one point, Mi says to her husband, I’ve given up trying to make our marriage work, but I won’t give up on our son and I’ll make you stay for him. Reading this, I had to wonder if an angry, resentful father would be better than an absent one. But in the 1940s, divorce was not an acceptable option. Of course, the marriage does not work and the drama has a tragic end.

Matthew, the son, may be set to replicate his father’s pattern. He goes to his father’s boarding school, where he is miserable and has to see his family’s school achievements every day. He has no real friends and can’t talk to his mother. His closest male relationships are with the pilot who takes him for motorcycle rides, and a wealthy schoolmate who leaves for holidays and writes occasionally. His future is very uncertain at the end of the story as he retreats into himself. The story closes on a painting he receives of birds floating in the sky, with the label Heroes. He will have to fight to overcome the toxicity that destroyed his father, but he’s not much of a fighter.

This is a story of a family falling apart. Findley writes it with great sympathy, contrasting the outward expressions of the characters with the inner voices showing what they really want to say. This lets him look inside the minds and feelings of the characters. He conveys emotions that feel very apt – resentful, angry, jealous, and loving as well. His central characters are complex, pulled in different directions and trying to make sense of domestic circumstances that are not simple. The setting on the edge of World War II perhaps suggests that the domestic wars have their reflection in the big events of the world. Does toxic masculinity lead to military conflict, or are they both an expression of a pathological society?

Findley calls this a novella, perhaps because, with a straightforward plot in 218 pages, it doesn’t have the heft of his longer novels. Nevertheless, it’s emotional weight and substantial themes give it enough depth for a serious read.

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.