Killed at the Whim of a Hat, Colin Cotterill

I lost count of the times I rolled over, laughing out loud, reading this book, a murder mystery set in modern day Thailand, and the first of Cotterill's "Jimm Juree" series. There are brilliant secondary characters, like Lieutenant Chompu, but the real star is Jimm as a narrator, who brings wit and irony to her backwater surroundings.

I'm in the middle of reading my way through Cotterill's earlier "Dr. Siri" series, set in the 1970s in Laos. The characters are equally engaging, although the tone is more serious. Cotterill has an appreciation for the unusual, the eccentric, the elderly. the non-conformists, which gives all his books sweetness and depth.

Dominion, C.J. Sansom

Barnes & Noble link

I'm not a huge fan of alternative history. For me, the highlight of the novel was how thoroughly the details of its world had been researched and re-imagined. I was interested in descriptions not only of 1950s Britain as a police state, but the impact of a 1940 surrender on the Empire. There is a Historical Note at the end of my edition in which Sansom lays out his case for his alternate history, and for me that "straight-up" section was the most fascinating part of the book.

There is a spy/thriller plot holding the narrative together, which didn't work for me, and more characters than I could care about. Or perhaps it was simply that I didn't care for the characters that were introduced. I'm not sure why this is, but I struggled to connect. The closest I came was the beleaguered Frank Muncaster, who reminded me of Turing in "Imitation Game," and at least seemed very kind. Mostly I did not like David and Sarah, which I think Sansom expected me to.

I found the multiplicity of perspectives burdensome, which surprised me. I think it weakened the story by interruption, defused emotional identification, and resulted in retreading ground. The example that comes to mind is of Gunther and Syme searching an apartment which has already been searched by David & co. and turned up nothing. I particularly thought the world through the principle antagonist's eyes was extraneous. There were many humanizing touches (Gunther misses his son, etc.), but then he thinks and behaves in such bigoted, merciless ways that he loses humanity. Perhaps if the entire novel had been told from his point of view--? Then the focus would have been something other than the alternate history, I suppose.

The strength of the novel--it's research and historical grounding--is also it's flaw, in my mind. Every character, major, minor, had a fleshed out backstory, and a compelling need to share it, even though part of the plot involves undercover secrecy and falsified identities. Friendly characters pitched each other softball open-ended lines: Where are you from? Are your parents still living? What made you join the Resistance? etc., which, after I noticed it, felt increasingly artificial. Reviews on Goodreads cite Sansom's earlier Tudor-era "Shardlake," mysteries as being superior in style and construction.

In the Woods, Tana French



"What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception"

-- Chapter 1

Barnes and Noble link



This was not only a good murder mystery, but also a surprisingly thoughtful and beautifully-written one. The "Whodunnit" didn't work out as I expected, but I enjoyed it immensely. The setting in modern-day, un-romanticized, Ireland, was fascinating to me. If you like BBC Crime Dramas, this is almost certain sure to please.

 

In the Woods is the first in the "Dublin Murder Squad" series. I'm definitely looking forward to reading more by Tana French.

Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford

DVD on Amazon

I stumbled across the TV miniseries adaptation of “Parade’s End” while on a “Sherlock” kick (thank you, Benedict Cumberbatch) and was enthralled. I stopped watching in order to read the original books straight through, I think in a matter of days (we ate a lot of take-out), and then went back to finish the TV adaptation.

I should explain what “Parade’s End” is, at least in my mind: Ford Madox Ford wrote three books, all with horrible titles, Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up--, which tell one extended story, so I’ll call it “the book” and refer to it collectively as “Parade’s End.” Ford also wrote a belated sequel called The Last Post. The novelist Graham Greene omitted The Last Post from the 1963 edition, arguing that it was a mistake and did not belong—I was appalled by this until I read The Last Post, (and really, at the end of A Man Could Stand Up--, it’s almost impossible not to), but it really is awful, and I hate to admit I think Greene was right.

The main story concerns Christopher Tietjens, a statistician for the Civil Service, a younger son of a very wealthy family of a Yorkshire estate. He is married to a beautiful, cruel, socialite, Sylvia, and he has the misfortune (or fortune, depending on how you look at it), to fall in love, despite his common sense, with a spunky, young woman, Valentine. There is a brilliant passage in which Ford writes:

“If you wanted something killed you’d go to Sylvia Tietjens in the sure faith that she would kill it; emotion: hope: ideal: kill it quick and sure. If you wanted something kept alive you’d go to Valentine: she’d find something to do for it…”

Christopher himself is a sort of bottled-up relic of aristocracy in an increasingly mercantile society: generous, chivalrous, despises affectation, very private and proud. He is a principled idealist in a world that has less and less use for his kind. The books implicitly contrast Christopher with best friend, Vincent MacMaster, who is a Scot, and not well-born, and who is much more attune to what it takes to “get ahead” in the world—a little fudging, a little flattery, knowing and making an impression on the right people. As MacMaster’s fortunes rise, Christopher’s fall, largely because he is too proud to defend himself against lies or compromise his ethics.

I have seen Christopher referred to as “cold” and even “unlikeable,” but I bonded to this character. In his interactions with other people he is dry, often a touch arrogant, and yes, cold. Christopher tends to employ his intellect in avoiding unpleasant emotions—there is a brilliant scene in which he sets himself the task of composing a difficult sonnet, simply to take his mind off the war and his situation with his wife. He is a paradox: Stoic outside, horribly sensitive within. Ford describes his reaction to receiving a letter from his estranged wife:

“He seemed to have no feelings about the matter. Certain insolent phrases in Sylvia’s letter hung in his mind. He preferred a letter like that. The brandy made no different to his mentality, but it seemed to keep him from shivering.”

He is often surprised by his own feelings and galled that his self-control is insufficient to govern them.

Valentine, of course, turns out to be one of the disruptive forces that overrides his common sense. They are in an impossible situation: he has reconciled himself to an honorable but loveless marriage, only to discover love too late. Very little happens between these two characters, but Ford has an amazing way of describing their relationship through the physical effect they have on each other:

“It sufficed for Tietjens to approach her to make her feel as if her whole body was drawn towards him as, being near a terrible height, you are drawn to it. Great waves of blood rushed across her being as if physical forces as yet undiscovered or invented attracted the very fluid itself. The moon so draws at tides.”

“He had never realized that he had a passion for the girl till that morning; that he had a passion deep and boundless like the sea, shaking like a tremor of the whole world, an unquenchable thirst, a thing the thought of which made your bowels turn over…”

His reaction to discovering in a moment of giddiness that he wanted to kiss her is to feel physically sick. I think that describes the power of love quite well.

There is very little talk of love (Valentine recalls “as, just occasionally, using the word ‘we’—and perhaps without intention—he had let her know he loved her”), but the reader develops a cumulative impression that these two characters belong together in some very deep, inexpressible way.

So I love the characters, but more than that, I fell head-over-heels for the style of the book, which is written like an almost seamless flow of flashbacks and reminiscence from multiple points of view. Ford starts everything in medias res. Everything. The events of Book 1, for instance, actually cover between 3-4 days, but there are all of these dislocations, time-shifts, that mean the reader is always off-balance, trying to catch up and put the pieces together. I understand this is called “delayed decoding,” in which details are presented, but the connections only revealed over time, or have to be surmised by the reader retrospectively. I adore this. It is a magnificent feat, simply from a technical standpoint, and utterly fascinating.

I wish I could “unread” Book 4. By the end of Book 3, Christopher & Valentine have endured so much that a just God (or at least a just author) would want them to be happy—because that is “the deal,” at least implied, that if you turn your back on external rewards in order to be true to yourself and what you love, presumably you will be happy. I suppose Ford is too much of a realist (or a cynic) to let Christopher & Valentine be content, but it is disheartening to watch Valentine’s growing preoccupation with the strain of continual poverty. The story is told from Christopher’s brother’s perspective, who has never been the most interesting of characters, and contains the cartoonish figure of an American lady who exists simply for Ford to mock. It is part of the genius of the earlier books that Ford gives Sylvia her own story and point of view, and that we see Christopher and her marriage through her eyes. For a well-reasoned blog post that sees value in the fourth book, please check out Shelf Love.

The 2012 TV miniseries was adapted by Tom Stoppard, who did a tremendous job with it. One of the things that Stoppard did was to put everything back, chronologically, in its right place, and condense, of course, multiple viewpoints into one third person omniscient perspective, which makes the story a lot easier to follow. He also, brilliantly, salvages what he can from the disastrous Book 4, and makes a better ending. If you are a reader who finds the time-shifts off-putting, I would suggest watching the TV series first, which will give you a roadmap to the main events. I do think one of the costs of Ford’s method is that it can at times engage the intellect at the expense of emotions – a scene witnessed in real-time is almost always more powerful than events or dialogue remembered. I found I feel the story more deeply when watching it, but then the books have so much richer, interior nuance, and this wonderful “unfolding” effect.

Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare

Kenneth Branagh's 2015 Winter's Tale:
Proof that if you're a good enough actor,
you can get away with a lot.

I was lucky enough to see a film of Branagh’s 2015 production at the Garrick Theatre in London. I am hugely grateful that there are starting to be world-wide showings of plays I would have an infinitesimal chance of seeing live—please check out FathomEvents.com for additional listings.

Winter’s Tale is an odd play, to say the least. For me it basically breaks down into two unequal halves: Leontes’ jealous rage, and then, whoops-a-daisy, 16 years later, Pastoral sheep-shearing and tidy resolution (“Exit pursued by bear” in the middle, which I think I’ve seen done well once). I think jealousy must have preyed very heavily on the mind of Let-us-call-him-Shakespeare: not only Othello and Winter’s Tale, but also Cymbeline. In each case there is a wronged, innocent wife, and a husband whose poisoned mind turns in on itself, and I think particularly in Othello and Winter’s Tale there is a clear understanding on the part of the jealous husband that his mind is playing tricks on him, even as he acts on his suspicions, which is remarkable.

Jealousy is not something that particularly resonates with me, luckily (I have many other faults), but what did ring for me this time was Leontes’ grief over the death of his son, especially his lines:

Prithee, no more; cease; thou know'st
He dies to me again when talk'd of…

I suspect it might very well be like that, that one would literally relive the memory each time it comes up.

So what Branagh did extraordinarily well here—and, in the interests of full disclosure, I should probably admit the first time I fell in love it was with his 1989 Henry V—was play a man being slowly poisoned by jealousy. He does it SO well, that one almost doesn’t notice he’s throwing away the details and particularities of the language: there are odd gaps, muttered phrases, rushed passages, which work beautifully, but in the meantime, you’ve lost the lines themselves. The production includes a score, composed by Patrick Doyle (also of Henry V), which does much the same thing: it is both highly effective, and creates a generalized “wash,” like “this scene is sad.”

Where the score really did work was in the sheep-shearing festival of Act IV. I have to admit I dislike the Pastoral part of this play intensely. There is a long (LONG) passage where Perdita talks about flowers, and I think this is important, and each one met something very important to Shakespeare, but since I am a city child and can’t tell the difference between a oxlip and a gillyvor, it goes over my head. This Branagh production was hand’s down the best treatment of the Pastoral scenes I’ve witnessed, because the whole thing had a kind of magical, golden glow. The Guardian theater critic Michael Billington writes that it has the flavor of an “east European fertility rite.” The music worked very effectively here in the dances to rev the energy up in a compressed time. I’ve seen this before, brilliantly, with the scene in Othello where Iago began a drinking song which took Cassio from sober to credibly drunk in less than five minutes. It works somehow to change mood, or shift energy.



John Barton

I have a soft spot for the Winter’s Tale, as difficult as it is—and the language is out-right more difficult than most of Shakespeare’s other plays—because of John Barton and Patrick Stewart. John Barton is an incredible Shakespearean director—one of the co-founders of The Royal Shakespeare Company—with an incredible gift for Shakespeare’s language. In 1982 he filmed a set of workshops, collectively called Playing Shakespeare (available now on DVD through Amazon, hurray!), with RSC actors of his time, and these are all the big names: Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench, David Suchet, and so on, but when they were really, really young. Each episode highlights another facet of Shakespeare’s use of language, but one of the principle lessons that comes out is that too much emotion gets in the way; it’s all about letting the words and images shine. So as an example, they do this quick bit at the end of Winter’s Tale when Pauline calls the statue of Hermione to life with Patrick Stewart as Leontes. They’re all in street clothes—I think Hermione is standing on a box--nothing fancy, but when she stretches out her hand to touch Leontes’, Stewart does this amazing intake of breath: “O, she's warm!” Like he’s been socked in the stomach. It’s extremely quiet and absolutely magical.

This is why Shakespeare is stunning: now and then, he’ll find an image that just sings, that you never forget. This is from King John, where the dying king is brought outside, and he says:

Ay, marry, now my soul hath elbow-room;
It would not out at windows nor at doors.
There is so hot a summer in my bosom,
That all my bowels crumble up to dust:
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire
Do I shrink up.

King John V.7

“I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen upon a parchment….” I think that’s incredible. And I find that at different stages of my life, different lines come alive, like Leontes mourning his son. I’d “heard” the lines before and could imaginatively identify, I suppose, but they just went by for me, and now that I have children, the lines suddenly pop.

Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Jacques Offenbach

Photo from fanfaire.com

I got to see the 2014/2015 Met Season HD Live restaging of their 2009 production directed by Bartlett Sher. Tales of Hoffmann is, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, one of my favorite operas. There's a lot of catchy music, of course - how fabulous is the Barcarolle?! - but it's also just a dark, dark intriguing story, and because Offenbach died before completing the opera, there are numerous versions in existence.

I liked that this production restored the order of the episodes - Antonia (Act III), Gulietta (Act IV) - which makes so much more sense to me as a story-telling arc. I have a soft-spot for Victorian/Edwardian, and thus Steam-Punk by extension, and I liked these elements in the production. Unfortunately, I had recently seen Steam-Punk done so much better in the National Theater production of Frankenstein (which was fabulous) and even the 2014/2015 Met production of Un Ballo in Maschera (which was fabulous).

And it didn't feel consistent throughout - I suppose it wouldn't have to be since the Olympia, Antonia, and Gulietta are virtually stand-alone - but the stylistic departures bothered me. I still don't understand why Olympia looked like she had been lifted from Candyland, or, more importantly, why there were more than one of her. Act III had a completely different feel than the zaniness of Act II, and I can only describe Act IV as Victoria Secret-meets-Louis-the-Fourteenth. Unfortunately, we had already done scantily clad women pretty thoroughly in Act II (where I don't think they belong), so by Act IV it was just scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The most intriguing part for me was the Muse/Niklausse, sung both in 2009 and 2014 by mezzo Kate Lindsey. The recording I'm used to is the 1981 Domingo, which does not include an introduction by the Muse (THAT makes a huge difference, story-wise!). The Met production goes further by adding stage-business that suggests/makes clear that the Muse as Niklausse intends to partner up with the villain of the piece in order to thwart Hoffmann's attempts at finding any happiness through love, a decidedly darker version of this already grim opera. I thought that was fascinating, but insufficiently supported, and relied mostly on the singers acting between the lines.

I also found the ending intriguing. I miss the beautiful lines I'm used to where the Muse reveals herself and says, "Hoffmann, I love you," but there was a lot of new libretto I hadn't heard before - and I so wish I could quote it, but I'm relying on my memory of the subtitles here! - where the Muse told Hoffmann he could take the ashes of his dead loves and transform them into art. I've mangled it, but that was the sense, and I've discovered through writing that sometimes I'm able to look back over my whole life and realize it's all just raw material to be transformed, the good and bad.

Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf

Amazon link

I had read “A Room of One’s Own” recently, but this was my first Woolf novel in a long time, and eye-opening. Some of the same questions that drive “A Room of One’s Own”—the assumed socially inferior relation of men to women resulting in limited access to education, the female “helpmeet” role in marriage, and reduced personal freedom—show up here. The characters discuss friendship, love, marriage, and wonder about how happy others are. There is an open question of whether it is possible for a man and a woman to understand each other, and even how far it is possible for members of the same sex to meaningfully connect. Each of the characters seems to be inarticulately searching for a way to bridge a divide, mostly without success. One of the most interesting of these is Terence Hewet’s meditation on the gap between love and marriage: he is sure that he is in love with Rachel Vinacre, but not sure he wants to marry her.

                It would take someone more familiar with Woolf to analyze her perspective on these big questions about longing for intimacy—the characters in the book seem to take running starts and present different angle each time. My sense, watching them, is that, whether in friendship or love, human beings have a strong impulse to secure and possess the companionship of this or that person—so as to be understood? To not face life alone? Simply for the pleasure of being around someone who brings out the best in us? But I think the intensity of love, to be in the other’s presence, to obtain confirmation one is loved in return, is proportional to one’s drive to capture and hold, which in turn can probably be traced back to deeper beliefs and fears about life and oneself. Once the other is “secure” however (mutual expressions of affection exchanged or a more binding engagement created), the drive lets up, and then one is left to contemplate the necessarily imperfect human being, friend or spouse, to whom one has bound oneself.

                One of the things I found most interesting about Voyage Out is what I feel sure is a silent conversation with E.M. Forrester’s Room with a View published in 1908. Both novels focus on the English abroad, where they form tiny enclaves in which their manners and rules seem arbitrary and bizarre against the native backdrop. There is also the sense in both books, I think, that travel changes people, particularly the young and receptive. There are many parallels between Woolf’s Rachel and Forrester’s Lucy Honeychurch—the impressionable ingénues whose education is unfinished until they fall in love. There are even a parallel “kiss scenes” which set both heroines spinning off on new trajectories, but in Forrester, this is positive and life-affirming, and in Woolf, the event is disconcerting, destabilizing, even disgusting. As a woman, Woolf has a much more ambiguous view of love and marriage in her society, which was both in some sense the fulfillment and the end of a woman’s individual life. There is a brilliant passage in which Woolf says of a newly engaged couple:

“From this they went on to compare their more serious tastes, or rather Susan ascertained what Arthur cared about, and professed herself very fond of the same thing.”

                I still like Forrester better—there is a sweetness about Lucy entirely lacking in the character of Rachel, who I found self-centered, jaded, and capricious. Incapable, really, of taking a genuine interest in others around her because she is so absorbed by her own impatient, intensely moody reflections. As a whole, I found Voyage Out ungainly: a set of characters is introduced on board ship, only to be replaced by a larger set of characters once they settle in South America, and the perspective hops so many times that it is difficult for me to say what or even whom the novel is about, although life is like that too. I have to give Woolf tremendous credit for mentally inhabiting so many different perspectives. She has a remarkable gift for language and description—I found myself many time thinking of the disturbing vibrancy of a Van Gogh landscape—and I appreciate the multiple perspectives and focus on subjective experience. There is a passage at the end in which Rachel is feverish which in its sensitivity to inner experience is easily comparable to Proust:

“…Rachel woke to find herself in the midst of one of those interminable nights which do not end at twelve, but go on into the double figures—thirteen, fourteen, and so on until they reach the twenties, and then the thirties, and then the forties.”

                I’m still not sure how to read the relationship between Hewet and Rachel, which must be central to the book. There are sections, particularly as they wander through the Amazonian rain forest and profess their love that reminded me of Wagner’s Tristan & Iseult: an almost choking surfeit of passion, a fantastical merging of identities. The rest of “Voyage Out” was so hard-headed about marriage and the possibility of lasting happiness in human relationships that I didn’t know if this was meant to be read from a distance by the reader, watching two characters naïvely swim about in their own projected dreams, or whether this really was Woolf’s own version of a really happy couple in love, if only they can keep hold of it. The book was published in 1915, and Woolf was married in 1912, which left me wondering about how her experience of love and marriage was worked into the novel.