That Old Cape Magic - Wendy's Review

“Good heavens, no, it wasn’t you. What kept us together was ‘That Old Cape Magic.’ Remember how we used to sing it every year on the Sagamore?” She then turned to Bartleby. “One glorious month, each summer,” she explained. “Sun. Sand. Water. Gin. Followed by eleven months of misery.” Then back to Griffin. “But that’s about par for most marriages, I think you’ll find.” The I think you’ll find, he understood, was of course meant to suggest that in her view, his own marital arithmetic was likely to be much the same. - from That Old Cape Magic, page 7 -

Jack Griffin is middle-aged, married for thirty-four years to Joy, and driving around the Cape with his father’s ashes in his car’s wheel well as he contemplates his childhood, his unruly (and often emotionally absent) parents, and his own marriage. By the end of the weekend, everything will have changed – suddenly and unexpectedly. A year later, he finds himself on the coast of Maine at his daughter’s wedding, separated from his wife, now carrying two urns in the trunk of his car, and unable to turn off the ironic and sarcastic voice of his dead mother which plays inside his head. Richard Russo’s iconic novel is filled with humor, bittersweet nostalgia, and wise observations of marriage and love.

Russo is a genius when it comes to developing character. Griff is a man who has finally come to rest in Connecticut, after giving up a career as a screen writer in Los Angeles. He settles into his job as a college professor, and he and his wife Joy buy their dream house and nurture their daughter, Laura. But Griff has a lot of unfinished business – especially regarding his relationship with his parents which has come to inform his life and his marriage. Russo employs a lot of irony and humor in unraveling Griff and his parents. Griffin’s mother is outrageously elitist and narcissistic. When she retires from her position as a professor at a small, Indiana university, she stuns everyone with her farewell speech.

“Unlike my colleagues,” she said directly into the microphone, the only speaker of the evening to recognize that fundamental necessity, “I’ll be brief and honest. I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is a distinctly second-rate institution, as are the vast majority of our students, as are we.” Then she returned to her seat and patted Griffin’s hand, as if to say, There, now; that wasn’t so bad, was it? - from That Old Cape Magic, page 20 -

On the other hand, Griff’s father is a bit bumbling and prone to having a wandering eye when it comes to other women. He also has a propensity for automobile accidents. His car is perpetually damaged, the trunk secured with a bungee cord.

Griffin, raised as an only child, seems dwarfed by his bigger-than-life parents. His struggle to find his own place in the world, secure his own marriage, and come to terms with the ambivalent love he has for his difficult parents is what drives the narrative in That Old Cape Magic.

Russo’s writing in That Old Cape Magic is, well, magical. I found myself completely absorbed in the lives of the characters, wanting them to find redemption, hoping that all the many strands of their lives would weave together again. Russo does what so many writers struggle to do – namely, make you care about what happens to the characters which people the story. Russo’s strength lies in his razor sharp observations of life with all its subtle quirks and twists, especially middle-aged life when individuals begin to look back on the paths they’ve chosen and wonder whether they have made the right decisions; to contemplate the plans they have mapped out and question the outcomes.

Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming. – from That Old Cape Magic, page 248 -

Readers who love literary fiction and who appreciate irony, humor and deftly developed characters, will love this novel.

Highly recommended.

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Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers - Tim's Review

I recently read an an interesting comparison between two dominant strands of how we approach reading a book, particularly for reviewing -- the journalistic approach and the literary criticism approach. While I don't necessarily agree with all the observations, it does fairly define those approaches and, as this review demonstrates, I find myself largely in the journalistic view.

Why is that? Because the journalistic approach is based on the individual reader's response to a book. And that directly influences my view of Richard Powers' most recent novel, Generosity: An Enhancement. Put simply, I don't care for metafiction. So, it's not surprising that the fact it appears in the first paragraph affects my view of the book, although I can't honestly say to what extent.

Granted, the book is not full of passages telling you this is, in part, a story about someone writing a story. Yet the device is used enough to distract me and, more importantly, undercut the more interesting social issues the book presents. But for the metafictional elements, I have fairly high praise for Generosity, which made a number of "best of" lists when initially released last year and is now out in a trade paper edition.

Powers uses a two-track approach to the main story. (Or is it? Is metafiction about the story you think you're reading or the statements and suggestions of the fictional (?) author writing the fictional story?) One track is built around Russell Stone, a writer who basically quit writing when he learned how his first published articles affected the people who were the subjects. He now lives in a small Chicago apartment, editing the stories submitted for the entirely subscriber-generated content of a self-improvement magazine and, as the novel opens, is beginning a job teaching a creative nonfiction night class at a small nondescript college in downtown Chicago. Among his students is Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian Berber refugee from the county's civil wars and political unrest. Despite the strife that marked her life, Amzwar seems immeasurably happy, ebullient to the point she even has a positive effect on her fellow students and people she encounters on the street. Enthralled by her disposition, Stone becomes concerned whether she has hypomania, one aspect of bipolar disorder, or if she is the rare hyperthermic, a person who is always happy and positive. He even consults a clinical psychologist with the school's counseling center, Candace Weld, who bears a striking resemblance to the lost love of Stone's life and also becomes drawn in by Amzwar's ubiquitous euphoria.

The other track centers on Tonia Schiff, the host of a cable television science show, who is preparing a episode about the potential benefits and ramifications of genomics and genetic engineering. The main subject of the program is Thomas Kurton, whose biotech companies are seeking ways to improve life through genetic engineering. When the two tracks cross, testing done on Amzwar by Kurton's company gives rise to a belief that the potential exists to create a "happiness gene" based on her genetic structure. Once Amzwar's identity leaks out after the publication of the journal article on the testing, her life changes dramatically.

Akin to how Powers' National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker examined aspects of neuropsychology, Generosity considers the implications of programming the genes of fetuses, creating drugs tailor-made for an individual's genetic code or extending life far beyond today's life expectancies -- and the profits to be made from patenting genetic information. Kurton see this as creating a wonderful new world. Stone and Schiff are more leery, In fact, after trying to grasp the journal article, Stone concludes:

Homo sapiens has already divided itself, if not into the Eloi and the Morlocks, then into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products. A tiny elite is assembling knowledge more magical than anything in Futopia, ... learning how a million proteins interact to assemble body and soul. Meanwhile, Stone and his 99.9 percent of the race can only sit by, helplessly illiterate, simply praying that the story will spare them.

Powers also takes Generosity beyond the ethical and social issues of the concept that happiness is simply a function of genetics. The characters also confront the more basic questions of how we define happiness or contentment, how we achieve -- or lose -- it, and how each of us views our lives and our world. As a result, it is not as deep an exploration into the science and tends to be more character driven than The Echo Maker.

Powers does have the ability to quickly capture characters. For example, saying one of the students in Stone's class is "a small, hard woman who must run with both wolves and scissors" does as much to establish that character as a couple paragraphs of description. At the same time, the main characters don't seem to be plumbed too much. Weld, for example, never really feels fully fleshed out and rarely comes across as much more than a convenient bridge between Stone's world and Kurton's. Moreover, every time the omniscient author interjects himself and reminds us the characters are his creation, their development and our ability to invest in them is undermined.

Setting aside my admitted distaste for metafiction, Generosity is more engaging than The Echo Maker. Particularly with its flaws, that doesn't make it a national award winning book. But if all we read were books that won awards, we would miss a lot of interesting works. Even for readers who may have my predilection toward metafiction, the flaws in Generosity are offset by the book's ideas and the way Powers approaches them. As such, it not only is worth reading, it may be a more accessible introduction to his style and approach for newcomers to his work.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Tim's Review

If someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it's the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war.

South American writers, though, recognize that even if their nations were not combatants, they were not immune from the effects of Nazism and World War II. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, in fact, created a fictional encyclopedia of ultra right-wing writers in North, Central and South America with his Nazi Literature in the Americas. More directly addressing the topic is The Informers, the first novel of Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez translated into English.

The Informers is inspired by a woman of German-Jewish origin Vásquez met in late 1999 who emigrated to Colombia with her family as a teenager in 1938. In Vásquez's hands, she becomes Sara Guterman, the subject of a book written by Gabriel Santoro, a young Bogotá writer whose father of the same name is a nationally recognized and honored professor of rhetoric. Like her real life counterpart, Guterman's family moves to Colombia in the 1930s as her German Jewish parents fled Nazism. She becomes a lifelong friend of the senior Santoro.

In telling Guterman's story, Santoro fils also examines the impact of the "Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals," a list announced by the U.S. Government of some 1,800 individuals and entities in Latin American "deemed to be acting for the benefit of Germany and Italy." That list became the basis of blacklists in Colombia, with people informing on others, usually with German or Jewish backgrounds, for real or unfounded suspicion or out of self-interest. Many end up in internment camps in Colombia and, in fact, a number of Latin Americans were sent to the United States for internment. The senior Santoro tells his students there were "thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed." He teaches that "the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are a majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment[.]"

Despite those comments and the fact he also teaches lawyers and judges, Santoro père disparages his son's book in a published review. Not only does he downplay its discussion of the blacklist years, he calls the book a "failure" and says listing its shortcomings "would be as futile as it would be exhausting." Father and son do not speak for three years after that.

The senior Santoro breaks the silence when he contacts his son to tell him he is facing a life-threatening health condition. The two begin to reconcile and when father survives the health scare, he views it as a new chance at life. While he at some point apologizes for the review, he never truly explains his reasons for it. After several months, though, the senior Santoro dies in a car accident. Before and after his father's death, with information provided by Guterman and his father's girlfriend (his own informers), Santoro begins to peel away layers of silence, misdirection and falsity to reveal a secret his father hid for decades and that explain his hostility to the book.

Anne McLean translates Vásquez's generally artful prose, with the latter being an author who doesn't indulge in trite metaphor. To the contrary, Santoro senior's "breathing whistled like a paper kite" and "the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth." While the younger Santoro narrates the book, Vásquez is not tied to a single traditional narrative style. One part of The Informers is the first chapter of Sanotoro's book about Guterman. Other parts are almost transcript-like versions of interviews and yet another is basically a recording of a conversation between the younger Santoro and Guterman, consisting of lengthy passages of Guterman's recollection of events before and during the blacklist era. Some readers may see the changing formats format extending a slowly unfolding structure that is already intricate but it does not become a major distraction. Perhaps more noticeable is that the younger Santoro seems strangely aloof, as if viewing himself as a journalist requires him to approach the events and revelations that impact his life in that role.

The Informers, first published in translation in the U.S. in 2009 and now in a trade paper edition, doesn't limit itself to Colombia's World War II history. Electoral politics, internal armed conflict and terrorism, and the power of the drug cartels also come into play as Vásquez takes his story through some half century of Colombian history. Those items play a role in the author's own life, as the violence and unrest caused by guerrilla movements and the drug lords led him to Europe, where he now lives and writes in Barcelona. (Interestingly, Bolaño lived on the Mediterranean coast in Spain less than 50 miles from Barcelona when he wrote most of his novels.)

With The Informers, Vásquez provides another example of how literary fiction and many of its most common themes can illuminate seemingly forgotten history and its consequences. Not only do these themes help animate the story, they help engage the reader. The fact the themes explored in The Informers, such as the relationship of father and son, family secrets and betrayal, are age-old doesn't keep it from helping unfold 20th Century history.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

Let the Great World Spin - Wendy's Review

Tacked inside his cabin door was a sign: NOBODY FALLS HALFWAY.

He believed in walking beautifully, elegantly. It had to work as a kind of faith that he would get to the other side. He had fallen only once while training – once exactly, so he felt it couldn’t happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging. - from Let the Great World Spin, page 160 -

On August 7, 1974 Philippe Petit – a 24 year old daredevil - walked a tightrope wire strung between the twin towers 1350 feet above New York City. His feat stunned New Yorkers who marveled at the ease at which he traversed the wire – not once, but seven or eight times – before handing himself over to police. It is this event which opens Colum McCann’s novel Let the Great World Spin – a novel less about New York City and more about the connections between people and how life continues forward despite unfathomable loss.

Let the Great World Spin introduces nearly a dozen characters to the reader who at first seem unconnected. But as McCann allows them to tell their stories in alternating chapters, the synchronicity of their lives begins to unfold. At first it seems they are only related to each other through the feat of the tightrope walker – it is only by reading through to the end of the novel that the reader recognizes their connections on a deeper level.

It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected. – from Let the Great World Spin, page 306 -

John Corrigan is a spiritual man who immigrates to America. He finds himself living in the Bronx among the prostitutes and pimps, the crime and the poverty. He is a gentle man who is searching for a greater meaning. His character represents the quest for the simple things in our lives which bring comfort and beauty – the yearning for light in the darkness.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth – the filth, the war, the poverty – was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. – from Let the Great World Spin, page 20 -

Throughout the novel, the reader is reminded of the darkness in the world – the wars, addiction, crime. A judge finds himself cynical and overwhelmed despite his desire to make a positive difference in the world. A group of women meet each week to share the stories of their sons who have died in the Vietnam War. A prostitute examines her life from behind the bars of a prison cell.

Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief. - from Let the Great World Spin, page 247 -

My big tall boy, shaving. Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward. – from Let the Great World Spin, page 81 -

Yet, McCann does not leave his readers in the darkness. The novel is also full of hope and that little bit of light which Corrigan seeks. At its heart, Let the Great World Spin is about moving forward despite the flaws in our world, overcoming our losses, and leaning on each other.

It was America, after all. The sort of place where you should be allowed to walk as high as you wanted. – from Let the Great World Spin, page 262 -

When the twin towers fell on September 11, 2001 New York gasped, mourned, hugged each other closer, and then kept on going. That resoluteness in the face of unspeakable tragedy is mirrored in McCann’s book. The prose is rich, the characters infused with grace and courage, and I found myself drinking in the story, letting it wash over me.

McCann’s novel also takes a look at a pivotal point in American history – the final year of the Vietnam War, a war which took a huge toll on young lives, and forced us to look deeply at what brings us into conflict and the cost of such decisions. Decades later, it seems we are still learning the same lessons, and so it seems fitting that the final pages of Let the Great World Spin take place in 2002, as America totters on the cusp of yet another controversial war.

Colum McCann won the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin – and it is easy to see why. This is a complex novel peopled with unforgettable characters.

Highly recommended.

Visit my blog tour for this book.

Little Bee - Wendy's Review

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalization. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilization, my good man, and make it snappy. – from Little Bee, page 2 -

Sarah and Andrew, a British couple, travel to Nigeria where they hope to heal the wounds in their marriage. They check into a beachfront hotel, blissfully ignorant of a war which is raging in the area – a war for oil, where the native people are being murdered to gain access to the black gold which lies beneath their villages. A young girl (who has taken the name Little Bee) and her sister have fled from one of these villages and soldiers are tracking them down. It is on the beach that the African girls cross paths with Sarah and Andrew…and horror unfolds.

Chris Cleave’s novel doesn’t start on the beach, but everything that happens there has a lasting impact on the characters. The novel actually begins two years after the beach incident – Little Bee managed to get to England where she sought asylum and where, within minutes of her arrival, the immigration authorities locked her up in an Immigration Removal Center. Now she has managed to get free of the Center and has traveled on foot to Sarah and Andrew’s home. It is there where the real story unfolds.

That summer – the summer my husband died – we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves. – from Little Bee, page 22 -

Little Bee is a book about two women who unexpectedly find each other through tragedy. It is their stories, told in alternating points of view, which drive the narrative of the novel and reveal the underlying inhumanity of the refugee and asylum system in England.

Cleave’s prose is ironic, at times humorous (although the themes of the novel are anything but funny), and original. When Sarah compares the recent unfolding of the war to that of her child, Charlie (who dresses as Batman throughout the novel), the resultant analogy is a brilliant look at how wars (and children) need our constant attention lest they grow out of control.

The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of them – my son, or the war – with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, Gosh, haven’t you grown? – from Little Bee, page 33 -

Thematically the novel explores fate and how in an instant our lives can be changed by things not in our control. It also takes a hard look immigration laws, specifically those impacting individuals seeking asylum from brutal governments (which are often militarized). A third theme looks at the choices we make and how those choices impact our futures and the futures of those closest to us. Cleave examines these themes through the unlikely friendship of the two protagonists – Little Bee and Sarah.

One of the problems I had with the book was not so much the story or Cleave’s writing – but the marketing of the book which sets the reader up with certain very high expectations. The book flap reads:

We don’t want to tell you what happens in this book. It is truly a special story and we don’t want to spoil it.

And they don’t tell us. So as a reader, we purchase the book with certain expectations. I expected not just a good book, but a book which was going to blow me away; perhaps provide a twist in the plot which would surprise me. That didn’t happen (I actually anticipated how the book HAD to end) and I could not help but feel a little manipulated. I think the publisher did a bit of a disservice to the author by marketing the book the way they did…so I won’t hold it against Cleave.

In fact, this is a good book. It is a meaningful book which is heartbreaking in many ways. Despite revealing the dark side of humanity in his story, Cleave also shows that there are good people in the world. There is light even when there is darkness. The world may have evil, but it also has hope and goodness. My favorite character in the book was not either of the women, but Charlie – the little boy who poses as a superhero. Not only does Charlie represent the innocence in the world, but he is also symbolic of future hope. His child’s voice was endearing and honest…a refreshing glimmer of goodness in a novel which looks at betrayal.

Little Bee is not an easy read, but it is a book I am glad I read.

Recommended for book groups, and for readers who enjoy literary fiction.

The Little Stranger - Wendy's Review

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden away: things like envy, and malice, and frustration… - from The Little Stranger, pages 353-354 -

In a small English village in Warwickshire sits a Georgian home called Hundreds Hall. It was once an elegant mansion with beautiful grounds and many servants to keep its rooms flawless. But the war has taken its toll on the people and economy of England, and Hundreds Hall is now in decline with crumbling masonry, weed-choked gardens and leaky ceilings. Dr. Faraday, the local physician, had visited the mansion as a child and his mother was once a maid there, so he is shocked at what the once beautiful home has become when he is called out to see an ailing servant girl. He quickly befriends those still living at Hundreds Hall: the elderly Mrs. Ayres and her two adult children… Roderick (who is crippled from the war), and Caroline. Within a short period of time, strange things begin to happen – scorch marks appear on the walls, the telephone rings in the middle of the night and then goes dead, and the family dog acts out of character. Are these events caused by a ghost, as Betty the young servant girl believes, or something far more sinister?

Sarah Waters’ newest novel is Gothic in style. Set in post-war England sometime in the the late 1940s and narrated by a questionable narrator (Dr. Faraday), the story unfolds slowly at first but then picks up about mid-way through the book. Waters takes her time to carefully develop her characters and introduces the theme of class differences early on when it becomes evident that Dr. Faraday has never relinquished his dismay at being the son of a maid, and the Ayreses (despite their current bleak economic situation) will always consider themselves a family of means.

As in all good Gothic novels, Hundreds Hall becomes a character in the book. The descriptions of the house’s decline, its dark and gloomy halls and closed off rooms with peeling or mildewed wallpaper, seems to be a metaphor for the economic decline of the times. Beneath its crumbling exterior, the house also holds family secrets and tragedy.

Waters gives clues as to the malevolent presence in the house, but it is not until the end that I was certain of its origins…and then I was thrilled by Waters’ deft manipulation of her story. As with all of her work, Waters’ writing is sophisticated and satisfying, and filled with descriptions which capture the historical time of the story.

My only complaint, and it is a small one, was the slow pace at the beginning of the book. Waters takes her time to set the stage and introduce her characters, and at times I grew impatient for some action. Once events start to happen, however, the pace picks up. I found myself reading straight through the last 150 pages with barely a break.

Readers who have liked Waters’ previous books and who like a good Gothic mystery, will most likely find The Little Stranger an enjoyable, albeit disturbing, read.

Wolf Hall - Wendy's Review

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. he is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt – ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. he can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything. - from Wolf Hall, page 25 -

Hilary Mantel’s sprawling, Booker Prize winning novel Wolf Hall is set in England during the sixteenth century. Narrated by Thomas Cromwell, it is an intimate look into the life of King Henry VIII and the cast of historical figures who surrounded him. More importantly, it is an examination of the clash between the Roman Catholic Church and the royalty – a battle of wills and politics that turned deadly for many as King Henry sought to divorce Catherine of Aragon (who could not give him a male heir) and marry Anne Boleyn.

Since Christ did not induce his followers into earthly power, how can it be maintained that the princes of today derive their power from the Pope? In fact, all priests are subjects, as Christ left them. It is for the prince to govern the bodies of his citizens, to say who is married and who can marry, who is bastard and who legitimate. – from Wolf Hall, page 435 -

This tumultuous time in history was defined by the struggle between Catholic power and Protestant will; a time when players could change sides in an instant and the charge of treason meant certain death. The Protestant Reformation, headed by Martin Luther, plays a large part in Wolf Hall and leaves one to wonder which side Cromwell was really on. It is a complex and complicated history into which Mantel drops her characters. Readers who lack adequate knowledge about English history in the 1500’s may find themselves lost in a sea of details and characters (many who share the same first name); and find themselves struggling to get through this densely written tome.

Mantel writes her novel in the present tense – an interesting choice for historical fiction, but one which I think worked to her advantage. She also picks the perfect protagonist to drive her story. Cromwell is an interesting historical character. In Mantel’s book, he is richly imagined…a man who is is able to sidle up to the King of England and play one man against another in order to ensure his place in history, while at the same time is a loving family man who grieves so much for his wife and two young children (who die from illness), that he never re-married. The stark contrast between empathetic father and manipulative, driven lawyer helps define the internal conflict of the novel.

It’s beautiful, he says, not wanting to spoil his pleasure. But next time, he thinks, take me with you. His hand skims the surface, rich and soft. The flaw in the weave hardly matters. A turkey carpet is not an oath. There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person. He would not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need not be drawn too tight. – from Wolf Hall, page 187 -

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. – from Wolf Hall, page 294 -

Another strength of Wolf Hall was Mantel’s sardonic sense of humor which comes through in pithy dialogue between the characters. Cromwell’s observations of Anne are priceless…and Mantel reveals the ridiculousness of some of the royalty, as well as the Church.

Despite this and her excellent characterization, Mantel chooses to use an ambiguous pronoun. Her use of “he” (to identify the narrator) instead of “I” consistently confused me. I often found myself going back to re-read a passage in order to understand who was now speaking or acting. Often the “he” in the sentence did not match the subject which made it all the more confusing. Mantel’s disregard for this grammatical “rule” took away from the story for me. I found myself often setting the book aside in frustration. I could not completely immerse myself in Cromwell’s complex world. I felt as though I were reading a book, rather than falling into a story.

I wanted to love this book. Passages where Mantel let her gifts as a writer shine, left me feeling that this book should have read better. I should have flown through it in record time, exclaiming at the scope of what I had read. Instead, I found myself relieved to have finally finished the book after nearly three weeks of slogging through its pages.

Many readers are raving about Wolf Hall…I suspect most of them had a good understanding of English medieval history and so could sort through the ambiguity of Mantel’s prose. Sadly, I am not one of them. Although I admire Mantel’s writing ability, I have to admit, I really did not enjoy this book. Mantel is apparently going to be publishing a sequel to Wolf Hall. I think I will skip it.

Some might like this book.

The Year of the Flood - Wendy's Review

This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach. This was the Waterless Flood the Gardeners so often had warned about. It had all the signs: it traveled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs of terror and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, and now the news was fading away; systems were failing as their keepers died. It spelled total breakdown which was why she’d needed the rifle. Rifles had been illegal for years, but laws were no longer a factor. – from The Year of the Flood, page 18 of the ARC -

The year is far in the future, a time when animals are becoming extinct at a rate faster than people can document, and the level of pollution requires individuals to don nose cones in order to go outside. The government is horribly corrupt – creating weird animals like liobams (part lamb, part lion) and embedding diseases into vitamin supplements. Criminals are either executed or sent to serve months “playing” Painball, a deadly form of today’s paintball.

Welcome to Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopian novel which serves as a prequel to her previous work Oryx and Crake. The Year of the Flood takes place roughly during the same time period as Oryx and Crake, but jumps back and forth from the post-pandemic months and the years leading up to the disaster. Jimmy (Snowman) makes a reappearance in The Year of the Flood, but the main characters are two women – Toby and Ren. The novel is narrated first in Toby’s voice then in Ren’s, alternating chapters to provide significant background on not only the state of the world, but each woman’s personal story as well.

The heroes of the novel are members of a (mostly) pacifist, eco-friendly group called the Gardeners. Headed up by a Christ-like man called Adam One, the Gardeners rescue people off the streets (and from morally reprehensible lives), prohibit meat eating of any kind, document the animals being lost to extinction, and work underground to gain information about the various corrupt practices of the government. Both Toby and Ren become members of the Gardeners – Toby as a healer and eventually one of the Eves (female members who take on a leadership role in the group), and Ren who joins the group as a child.

Nobody does dystopian literature better than Atwood – and in The Year of the Flood she provides complex female characters who are faced with futuristic horrors which involve women as sexual tools for men, plenty of violence, and lots of cynicism. There is also Atwood’s signature sense of humor embedded in the story which is often graphic while exploring serious subjects such as pandemics, government corruption, and loss of our natural resources.

I love Margaret Atwood’s writing. I am always astonished by the brilliance of her prose and her ability to tell an engrossing story. But The Year of the Flood is not without its faults. I could have lived without the insertion of Adam One’s sermons and song lyrics from the Gardener’s “hymn” book. I also felt the ending was rather abrupt and left the reader wondering what the future held for the characters (in this way, it was a lot like Oryx and Crake).In some ways, I felt Atwood wrote the ending to connect the novel to Oryx and Crake – it felt a bit contrived.

Despite its faults, The Year of the Flood will appeal to readers who enjoy an engaging dystopian tale and who have read and liked Atwood’s previous work. I would be interested to see if Atwood is planning a third book in the series…and if so, where she might take her characters next.

2010 Tournament of Books Long List

Each year The Morning News posts its short lists for the best books of that year - there is then a run-off to determine which book is THE BEST. This year is the first year they have released a long list. They write:

Our criteria for selecting the titles on the long list were the same as we normally adhere to. Books must be novels (for the most part), and must have been published for the first time in English in 2009 (for the most part). Considerations included: our own reading experiences; recommendations from family and friends, readers, publishing folk, and TMN staff; critics’ opinions, from internet shoppers to prestigious names; prize-winners; other media groups’ best-of lists; sales records, high and low; too much hype or too little hype; independent publisher versus big bad media; authors’ reputations; authors’ previous participation in previous Tournaments; blurb quantity and quality; etc. So yes, pretty much everything except the cover art. Of the following 50 titles, we doubt you’ll have a bad time reading any of them. Only 16, however, will we consider strong enough to withstand blood sport in March.

In January, the 16 finalists will be announced.

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker
Rage, Sergio Bizzio
The Women, T.C. Boyle
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
Trouble, Kate Christensen
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
Fever Chart, Bill Cotter
Four Freedoms, John Crowley
Everything Matters!, Ron Currie Jr.
Spooner, Pete Dexter
Homer & Langley, E.L. Doctorow
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis
The Believers, Zoe Heller
Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving
The Book of Night Women, Marlon James
Under the Dome, Stephen King
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Big Machine, Victor Lavalle
Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem
The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
Ransom, David Malouf
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
The City & The City, China Mieville
Manituana, Wu Ming
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
Miles from Nowhere, Nami Mun
Once a Runner, John Parker
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips
Generosity, Richard Powers
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
Wetlands, Charlotte Roche
My Abandonment, Peter Rock
That Old Cape Magic, Richard Russo
Burnt Shadows, Kamila Shamsie
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Far North, Marcel Theroux
The Alternative Hero, Tim Thornton
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower
This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper
My Bird, Fariba Vafi
The Book of Fathers, Miklos Vamos
The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez
A Short History of Women, Kate Walbert
Half Broke Horses, Jeannette Walls
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead
Lowboy, John Wray