2010/73: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- Stieg Larsson

"Which is worse -- the fact that [he] raped her out in the cabin, or that you're going to do it in print? You have a fine dilemma. Maybe the ethics committee of the Journalists Association can give you some guidance." (p. 461)

An ageing Swedish industrialist engages a disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomqvist, to investigate the 1966 disappearance of his great-niece Harriet. He'd also like to know which of his relatives has been trying to drive him mad these last forty years by sending him birthday reminders of Harriet. In exchange, he promises information that will redeem Blomqvist, who was jailed for libel after an exposé that proved to be a set-up.

In the process of investigating Harriet's disappearance, Blomqvist (who is apparently irresistable to women) encounters various family members, uncovers evidence of a series of violent crimes, and meets Lisbeth Salander, a young female security specialist with a murky past, 'a rather trying attitude' and a photographic memory.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is tremendously evocative of Sweden. (Or so it seems to me: but I've never visited the country.) There's a marvellous sense of place, lakeside cabins and desolate flatlands: but Larsson pulls no punches about the dark underside of society, endemic misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazism. Each section of the novel is preceded by a statistic relating to sexual crime: "92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police" (p. 399).

Lisbeth Salander is one of these women, though she has no trust in the system -- which has failed her comprehensively, from the unexplored 'All the Evil' in her childhood to the fact she's still classified as 'legally incompetent' -- and resorts to an alternative solution. Salander is the reason I was so engaged with this novel: she's a fascinating character, neither sentimental nor self-pitying. She is competent, and she may be the character who displays most integrity: she does not compromise.

Read for book club: I've actually owned a copy for some time ... and have now acquired the other two in the trilogy. (£7 for both at Sainsburys).

When we discussed this at book club someone raised the point that it wasn't an especially novel crime novel, in terms of the crime: but I don't read a lot of contemporary crime/thrillers, so the crime element worked for me. Yes, the violence in the novel is unpleasant, distressing: but it's not sensationalised, and Larsson doesn't focus on suffering.

I did work out what happened to Harriet, and the identity of the primary criminal: but that wasn't because the plot is simplistic, it's because the novel does present all the necessary evidence for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. There are quite a few red herrings and a couple of useful coincidences to keep things uncertain.

The translation seems good to me, though some of the dialogue is slightly clunky: there are also points where the difference between Swedish and English terminology ("In English they call it 'new evidence', which has a very different sound from the Swedish 'new proof material'" (p.268)) are highlighted. I like this evidence of the translator's presence.

2010/72: Margarettown -- Gabrielle Zevin

She was born Margaret. As a girl, she was May; as a teenager, Mia; as an adult, Marge. When she dies, dhe was Margaret once again. There were other iterations along the way: Old Margaret with the grey hair, the sexy and impossible Maggie whom I adored, the manic depressive Greta, and others, so many others. There were so many Margaret Townes. Sometimes I ask myself, how could Margaret have been so many women at once? And the answer is, Jane, that your mother was either a most extraordinary woman or a most ordinary one. (p. 32)

Margarettown is the story of the love affair of Maggie and the narrator, named only as N___. Maggie isn’t like the other girls: when she says so, N___ writes it off as a typical early-twenties statement. Then, visiting the family home (Margaron), he meets Maggie’s family and realises that she’s really not like other women.

Or is she? Or is N___ lying? (His uncle tells him he’s ‘’sexually unethical’ like my mother and ‘a pathological liar’ like my father. (p. 105)).

There are plenty of fairytale elements in this novel. When N___ first meets Maggie, he finds her lying on a heap of mattresses, beneath which is, not a pea, but a pen. The child May draws a picture of the frog prince, and tells N___ that the original story has the princess throwing the frog against a wall, ‘beating the prince out of him’. And there’s another story, of a girl bewitched: the enchantment would split her into multiple ages until she found true love. When the daughter found true love, the spell would be broken and she would become one again ... I just made all that up, of course. (p. 85)

Most of the novel is N__’s narration, but part is a third-person account of the first years of Maggie’s marriage, and part is told from the perspective of prenatal twins. Maggie’s secrets, and her past, are explored by allusion: little is explained, but explanations are unnecessary. Maggie’s multiplicity fascinates.

This is a quietly impressive novel. It reminded me at times of Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife -- for the romance, for the unsentimentality, for the unquestioned mundane magic of it.

2010/71: Cards of Grief -- Jane Yolen

The specification is that you, Aaron Spenser, did wilfully and unlawfully violate the Cultural Contamination Act in regards to your relationship with an inhabitant or inhabitants of the newly opened planet Henderson's IV in such a way that you have influenced -- to the good or to the bad -- all culture within their closed system forever. How say you to the specification, guilty or not guilty?
I have been more changed than they by the contact, Lieutenant Malkin.
Guilty or not guilty to the specification?
Guilty -- and not guilty, Lieutenant. (p.93)

2132 A.D.: humankind is exploring the galaxy and encountering a variety of alien races, including the might-as-well-be-human inhabitants of Henderson's IV, 'known in the common tongue as L'Lal'lor, the Planet of the Grievers'. L'Lal'lor is a matriarchal society [it was a nice change, after Xinran's Miss Chopsticks, to read a novel where mothers are pitied for bearing sons] where there is no word for love, but where the act of formal grieving has been raised to an art.

The inhabitants are suspicious of the strangers from the sky, 'the men without tears': but the arrival of the exploration party coincides with the discovery of a new Griever, Linni / the Gray Wanderer, who is assumed to be the subject of a prophecy indicating great change.

Aaron Spenser's initial investigations indicate some important differences. The males are only fertile for five years; the population comprises six 'worker' tribes and a aristocracy of Royals (tall, slim, fair of face, golden-eyed), whose byblows are brought back to the capital whenever they are found; the Royals in particular display some unsettling biological idiosyncrasies, such as increased body temperature when bonding with somebody.

Spenser, being an anthropologist, has a good working knowledge of folklore and fairy tales: he realises very quickly that singing 'Tam Lin' -- the tale of a thwarted Queen -- to the assembled nobles isn't going to go down well. He slips up anyway, with a chance remark about having nobody to grieve that leads to an impromptu re-enactment of a well-known fairytale.

But Aaron Spenser is (literally) the blue-eyed boy who can do no wrong, so he's befriended by B'oremos, the young prince who brought Linni to the capital. Cue more fairytale tropes: distortion of time (which runs faster on the ship in orbit than on the planet, due to the Hulanlocke Rotational Device), a lost child, doomed love. And yes, there is great change.

This is a short novel (remember when novels were under 200 pages long?), told from several viewpoints -- Linni, B'oremos, Aaron Spenser -- and interspersed with transcripts of traditional tales which supply context for the Grievers' social structure and traditions. The different viewpoints add dimension: it's possible to triangulate them to arrive at a more objective perception of plot and setting. (And sometimes the differences in interpretation are hilarious.)

At first I thought this was Linni's story, and it is Linni who is the pivot for events: but it's as much Spenser's story, and B'oremos who is the first of his people to understand what 'love' means. Cards of Grief isn't a cheerful tale, but it has the structure of a fairytale if not the unequivocal 'happily ever after'.

2010/70: Miss Chopsticks -- Xinran

Imagine coming to a city like Nanjing when you have never seen a television or a car... Her heart is like a blank sheet of paper, ready to absorb whatever lands there. (p. 183)

Miss Chopsticks, which tells the stories of three country sisters who go to Nanjing to find work, is based on the true stories of three young women -- not actually sisters, but Xinran (a successful journalist in China and now in Britain) felt that their stories ‘seem to speak for so many others’. (p.2) Set in the early years of the 21st century, Miss Chopsticks vividly illustrates the rise of commerce and the massive social changes that have resulted from economic reforms.

“.... girls are called chopsticks and boys are called roof-beams. They all say that girls are no good because chopsticks can’t support a roof ...” (p. 12)

The girls come from a family of six children, all female. “Their father had been so disappointed by his lack of sons that he had never given his children real names, and so they became known by the order in which they had been born.” (p. 6). Three, the first to flee the village due to the imminence of an arranged marriage, goes to work in the ‘Happy Fool’ restaurant, where her skill in arranging and displaying fresh produce makes the place very popular. Five, who is illiterate and naive, finds work in the Water Dragon’s Palace, a therapeutic spa which uses traditional Chinese medicine and state-of-the-art plumbing to attract a wealthy clientele. Six, who was the only girl in the village to finish middle school, ends up working in the Book Taster’s Teahouse, where she is surrounded by books and has the opportunity to meet foreigners and improve her English.

Each of the girls experiences considerable culture shock. City life is utterly unlike anything they could have imagined, and each must change her way of thinking, her behaviour and her dreams to fit with what she finds. ‘Stone-hearted’ Three falls in love; ‘stupid’ Five reveals a talent for engineering; ‘too-clever’ Six learns a great deal about the world, and about China’s place in it, and becomes rather cynical.

Reading Miss Chopsticks felt like opening a window onto a society with very different rules, mores, goals. Xinran’s Nanjing is more alien than many SF settings I’ve read. This impression is heightened by the girls’ culture shock as they encounter city ways. “‘In many ways,’” Six’s employer tells her, “‘people in the countryside are living in a different century from those in the city, and it will take them many years to catch up.’ She did not feel able to tell Six that in her view the Chinese countryside was as much as five hundred years behind the city.” (p. 86)

The translator, Esther Tyldesley, explains in a foreword some of the difficulties of translating Chinese to English: the prevalence of puns and classical references in Chinese prose, the huge variation of dialects, the densely-layered sense of history and culture. There’s often a sense that a line of dialogue is funnier in the original Chinese: there are also passages which expand upon idiosyncrasies of language and dialect. (Five is bemused by a northern girl who uses different words for ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘her’.)

Xinran provides an afterword in which she recounts her attempts to track down the girls whose stories she’d borrowed. Contacting anyone in modern China (where cellphones and email are only for the rich, the Westernised, the politically adept) isn’t easy. Eventually Xinran discovered that the ‘Happy Fool’ restaurant had closed, and that the Book Taster’s Teahouse had been shut down for distributing ‘banned books’. The girl whose story inspired Three ended up in an arranged marriage after all. ‘Six’ could not be traced. The girl encoded as ‘Five’, though, had had more success: she’d been sent on an advanced training course, despite her illiteracy.

I’m sobered by the girls’ acceptance of their feminine inconsequentiality: I’m heartened by their sheer determination and refusal to give up hope. And I’m appalled that millions of women are still enduring the layers of oppression and discrimination described here.

2010/69: The Mislaid Magician -- Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer

I can find no observations on the effect of running a steam locomotive in the vicinity of a ley line. The stationary steam engines used in mines have, to date, not been located near enough to ley lines for any difficulties to become apparent. I found, however, any number of papers regarding the tapping of ley energies. Most of them warn of inadvisable methods of attempting it, or deal with the catastrophic results of applying such techniques. (p.73)

The subtitle of this, the third in the sequence that began with Sorcery and Cecelia, is Being the Private Correspondence Between Two Prominent Families Regarding a Scandal Touching the Highest Levels of Government and the Security of the Realm. There is, indeed, a great deal of political discussion and speculation in the letters of Kate, Cecelia, James and Thomas: there is also a lot of family gossip and commentary. The younger generation are variously afflicted with colds, kidnapping and a excess of curiosity regarding their parents’ magical enterprises; Cecelia’s feckless sister Georgy turns up at Kate’s house, having apparently fled her husband.

The Mislaid Magician is set in 1828, eleven years after Sorcery and Cecelia. The main plot concerns the disappearance of Herr Scheller, a Prussian railway surveyor-magician, while assessing the route of the Stockton-Darlington railway. James, still a favourite of Wellington (who is now Prime Minister), is sent north to investigate, in company with Cecelia: Thomas and Kate find themselves embroiled in a different aspect of the intrigue. There are ley lines, stone circles (though actually, no, these are not found ‘all over England’), steam engines, echoes of fairytale villains, knitted cryptography, and a kidnapped heiress who refuses to speak. (I should have spotted who this was, but hadn’t realised she used her middle name in later life.)

I loved Sorcery and Cecelia, and though the later books haven’t had quite the same impact I very much enjoy the combination of frothy frivolity, well-thought-out magical practices, and alternate history. There’s a nice set-up for further books at the end of The Mislaid Magician, and I look forward to them.

2010/68: London Bridges -- Jane Stevenson

She stopped and gestured at the pub they were passing, very ordinary-looking apart from its bright blue paintwork, with a flat, tiled frontage. “Look at this notice beside the door. It says it’s been here since 1462. Shakespeare probably drank here. See what I mean? Even the bars turn out to be historic.”
“I never noticed that. But why shouldn’t it still be here?” objected Dil. “Getting thirsty’s one of those things that just goes on happening. ‘S not really worth noticing. If we come back at opening time, we won’t find a bunch of Elizabethan actors quaffing sack, it’d be the guys from the wholesalers tipping down lager.”(p. 206)

London Bridges is a thriller set in contemporary London, though the plot ranges from seventeenth-century Greece to the wilds of Somerset. Jeanene is an Australian graduate student, studying classical Greek: while working in a Mayfair pharmacy she encounters Dr Sebastian Raphael, an ebullient academic specialising in the history and culture of Byzantium. Sebastian, it turns out, is off to Mount Athos in Greece, to visit the abbot of St Michael’s, in search of the sole surviving copy of the Alexiad, a sixth-century Greek poem which might make Sebastian’s name in the cut-throat world of the Institute. He traces the manuscript to London, to the church of St Michael which was destroyed in the Blitz: and then to the sole surviving representative of a small Greek merchant bank, Mr Eugenides, who lives a reclusive life in the heart of the City and is only too glad to help Sebastian.

Mr Eugenides has another new friend, a young lawyer named Edward Lupset, for whom the term ‘Yuppie Scum’ might have been invented. Edward, with the help of an unscrupulous Greek solicitor, has discovered a legal loophole concerning the bombed church, and confidently expects to make his fortune from it. Unfortunately Edward has neither respect for nor knowledge of history (morality also seems to be a closed, burnt and buried book to him) and his cunning plan goes awry.

There’s a sub-plot concerning a community garden built on the bombsite, and an interesting cast of supporting characters (including Hattie, who is introduced in a prefatory passage quoted from Margery Allingham’s The China Governess, and who is involved with a charity that derives its funds ‘from the chantry charities of the old London bridges’ (p. 86): this seems the only connection with the novel’s title, unless you take into account the frequent shuttlings between the City and Southwark). Because of a structural idiosyncrasy -- the book opens with a chapter that, chronologically, occurs about half-way through -- there’s less mystery for the reader, and more frustration as the characters thrash about in their ignorance. But London Bridges is atmospheric, very firmly rooted in modern London despite Jeanene’s constant awe at seeing Literature 101 all around her, and nicely paced. The final denouement didn’t fit with the feel of the rest of the novel (geographically or emotionally) but it did echo the occasional echoes of farce and slapstick.

I had to look up Godscall Palaeologue, the subject of a portrait that Sebastian admires, and was relieved to find that she only actually exists in Jane Stevenson’s novels: now I want to read the trilogy that culminates in The Empress of the Last Days, because I’m pretty sure it’ll have the same blend of humour, characterisation and genuine love for history that I found in London Bridges.

2010/67: Memoirs of a Muse -- Lara Vapnyar

A muse ... doesn’t simply entertain. She inspires, she influences the great man’s work. ... He, the great man, would be sitting frozen in front of a blank sheet of paper, empty canvas, silent piano, and I would walk in. Five feet five, flat-chested and skinny, but with a great fire in my eyes, or a strange remarkable gait or carriage, or speaking in an especially melodic voice, and he -- the writer, artist or composer -- would snap his fingers and say, “Yes!” and hit his piano, slab of marble or creaky typewriter, and create with great fire in his eyes an enormous, magnificent work. And then generations of people would admire that work and see the fire that would still burn behind it centuries later. And it would be I who had lit that fire! (p. 48-9)

Tatiana Rumer (Tanya) is a young historian from the collapsing Soviet Union, who emigrates to New York with the sole ambition of becoming the muse who’ll inspire some as-yet-unknown artist to magnificent works. She dreams of Dostoevsky, and is inspired by his passionate relationship with his mistress Polina (Appolinaria Suslova): who’d want to be Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky’s wife whose diaries barely mention the great novels her husband wrote while married to her?

In New York she works hard on finding a struggling artist, and settles on Mark, a middle-aged writer whose novel After the Beginning is stalled due to writer’s block. Gradually, Tanya -- who learns to read English from the romance novels supplied by a canny neighbour -- realises that from Mark’s point of view, she is not Polina but Anna: she does not inspire him. (Gradually, too, she begins to recognise that his work is banal in the extreme.) Mark and I were very much alike, if you thought about it. Two people with immense aspirations and limited abilities, except for our one great gift -- the belief that we were what we wanted to be ... (p. 201)

Memoirs of a Muse is often very funny, and Tanya’s growth from pretentious adolescent to thoughtful, cosmopolitan (and inspirational) adult is interesting. I can’t say I found her a likeable protagonist, though, and the final pages felt as though she’d given up -- although the end of the novel could also be read as another, more adult and realistic, form of success. She seems dismissive of the artist she has inspired, because that person is as different from her daydreams as is possible.

Memoirs of a Muse makes a window on modern Russian life, and on the experience of Russian immigrants in New York -- an experience shared by the author. There’s an interview here that gave me much more perspective on the novel, and made me revisit some of my impressions. There’s also more detail on the relationship between Polina and Dostoevsky, which Tanya tries so hard to emulate but which perhaps is less practical in modern America than in 19th-century Europe.