This book, aimed at younger readers, comprises two short stories set in Roman Britain. 'A Circlet of Oak Leaves', written in 1965, is set in Isca Silurium (Caerleon) and tells a story of friendship, lies, cowardice and bravery on the northern frontier. 'Eagle's Egg' (1981) is set in Eburacum (York) and is the tale of a young standard-bearer in the Ninth Legion, in the days of Agricola.
There's a great deal of difference between the two stories. I much prefer 'A Circlet of Oak Leaves', and I think it's also a better story, though the second has a humour and warmth that's lacking from the rather melancholy 'Circlet of Oak Leaves'. I'm not sure if this is because the expected audience changed between 1965 and 1981, or whether the author herself mellowed -- I don't want to say 'declined', but 'Eagle's Egg' is not vintage Sutcliff.
Both protagonists are unusual heroes; Aracos the Thracian because his heroism's been, perforce, hidden from his peers, Quintus because he knows how to defuse a dangerous situation. And Sutcliff's evocation of Roman Britain, from the advantages of Dacian cavalry against the Picts to the craft of the mosaic-layer to the rules and regulations of the Roman Army, is vivid in both tales. But there's a sharp stained edge, a complexity of story, in 'A Circlet of Oak Leaves' that isn't apparent in the later story.
A pleasant evening's read, though.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
#34: Britain BC -- Francis Pryor
This has been my bedtime reading for months now: there's only so much detailed analysis of hut-circles and ditches that I can imbibe at a time. And I didn't even know that Francis Pryor was famous (or perhaps notorious) for his work on Time Team and other pop archaeology projects.
I bought Britain BC for the first few chapters, really: Britain during and after the last Ice Age, the excavations at Boxgrove, life before metal. Pryor's enthusiasm for his subject, and his anthropological perspectives -- he returns again and again to the spiritual, magical implications of various sites -- kept me hooked. And I learnt a lot, though some of it is inevitably closer to speculation than to fact.
Pryor's explanations are accessible, colloquial, couched in layman's terms. He compares Neanderthal thought processes (deduced from brain capacity, probable maturation period and relatively static technology) to "the overfocussed approach of obsessive trainspotters or stamp collectors". His digressions -- mostly in footnotes rather than endnotes, a distinction I appreciate -- are wonderfully entertaining:
Timber, a word unique to English, defines a form of wood which has been trimmed up and sometimes split, sawn or further subdivided, with the intention of being used in a structure of some sort. A felled tree is not timber (despite what lumberjacks shout as warning) but its trimmed-up trunk is.
He's pretty rude about some of the 'restorations': Newgrange is a 'grotesque hatband', Neolithic tombs defaced by 'Ministry mortar'. He's a little more tolerant of those who have gone before. His passage on Dean Buckland, the 19th-century clergyman who excavated a Paleolithic burial under the impression that he was digging up a Roman prostitute surrounded by the bones of beasts who'd drowned in the Flood, is almost affectionate. (That burial is like something from a Robert Holdstock novel: it took place during the last great glacial maximum -- 26,000 years ago -- right on the edge of the habitable part of Britain, in a cave that now overlooks the sea but would have been high in the mountains. The cave had been used for thousands of years before that burial, and would be used again. A liminal zone.)
There's a recurrent theme of Place, here: of sacred -- or at least somehow 'special' -- sites being used again and again, often hundreds or thousands of years after they first became significant, and sometimes after a long period of disuse. It's not so much continuity of purpose, as perhaps a new set of people happening upon the remains of an older set, not understanding them but recognising that they held some importance. In the early modern age, antiquarians attributed Neolithic monuments to folk heroes or devils; how did earlier ages interpret the relics of their ancestors?
Pryor draws upon recent anthropological work to suggest simple equations that, whether or not they are true, are credible. Stone for the dead, wood for the living; buildings erected so that the use of them mirrors the diurnal and seasonal cycles; ritual landscapes with definite boundaries; the spiritual dimension of even the most mundane tasks. He really gets into his stride in the Bronze Age, writing about lake villages -- in particular Flag Fen (near Peterborough), a site he's spent years excavating. His enthusiasm is infectious.
As his sweeping overview of history draws to a close, it's clear he also has an agenda: an argument that pre-Roman Britain was by no means a land of heavy-browed savages, but rather a surprisingly sophisticated collection of tribal kingdoms with legal and civil systems firmly in place. "It would be tempting to suggest that the British love of democracy and instinctive mistrust of all politicians is rooted in prehistory, but I shall try to resist it."
Fortunately for the entertainment of the reader, he doesn't try too hard.
I bought Britain BC for the first few chapters, really: Britain during and after the last Ice Age, the excavations at Boxgrove, life before metal. Pryor's enthusiasm for his subject, and his anthropological perspectives -- he returns again and again to the spiritual, magical implications of various sites -- kept me hooked. And I learnt a lot, though some of it is inevitably closer to speculation than to fact.
Pryor's explanations are accessible, colloquial, couched in layman's terms. He compares Neanderthal thought processes (deduced from brain capacity, probable maturation period and relatively static technology) to "the overfocussed approach of obsessive trainspotters or stamp collectors". His digressions -- mostly in footnotes rather than endnotes, a distinction I appreciate -- are wonderfully entertaining:
Timber, a word unique to English, defines a form of wood which has been trimmed up and sometimes split, sawn or further subdivided, with the intention of being used in a structure of some sort. A felled tree is not timber (despite what lumberjacks shout as warning) but its trimmed-up trunk is.
He's pretty rude about some of the 'restorations': Newgrange is a 'grotesque hatband', Neolithic tombs defaced by 'Ministry mortar'. He's a little more tolerant of those who have gone before. His passage on Dean Buckland, the 19th-century clergyman who excavated a Paleolithic burial under the impression that he was digging up a Roman prostitute surrounded by the bones of beasts who'd drowned in the Flood, is almost affectionate. (That burial is like something from a Robert Holdstock novel: it took place during the last great glacial maximum -- 26,000 years ago -- right on the edge of the habitable part of Britain, in a cave that now overlooks the sea but would have been high in the mountains. The cave had been used for thousands of years before that burial, and would be used again. A liminal zone.)
There's a recurrent theme of Place, here: of sacred -- or at least somehow 'special' -- sites being used again and again, often hundreds or thousands of years after they first became significant, and sometimes after a long period of disuse. It's not so much continuity of purpose, as perhaps a new set of people happening upon the remains of an older set, not understanding them but recognising that they held some importance. In the early modern age, antiquarians attributed Neolithic monuments to folk heroes or devils; how did earlier ages interpret the relics of their ancestors?
Pryor draws upon recent anthropological work to suggest simple equations that, whether or not they are true, are credible. Stone for the dead, wood for the living; buildings erected so that the use of them mirrors the diurnal and seasonal cycles; ritual landscapes with definite boundaries; the spiritual dimension of even the most mundane tasks. He really gets into his stride in the Bronze Age, writing about lake villages -- in particular Flag Fen (near Peterborough), a site he's spent years excavating. His enthusiasm is infectious.
As his sweeping overview of history draws to a close, it's clear he also has an agenda: an argument that pre-Roman Britain was by no means a land of heavy-browed savages, but rather a surprisingly sophisticated collection of tribal kingdoms with legal and civil systems firmly in place. "It would be tempting to suggest that the British love of democracy and instinctive mistrust of all politicians is rooted in prehistory, but I shall try to resist it."
Fortunately for the entertainment of the reader, he doesn't try too hard.
Monday, April 10, 2006
#33: 9Tail Fox -- Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Apart from the central concept -- the 9tail fox, if you like -- which could be either supernatural or scientific, there's little overtly science-fictional about this novel. It's a crime novel allegedly set in the near future, in a San Francisco where the police departments are slightly different to those of our own world, but it's a future that is, for all intents and purposes, the present.
Bobby Zha is an SFPD detective who ends up investigating his own murder. He discovers almost as much about himself and his, often dysfunctional, relationships with others as he does about the crime, and the convoluted motives behind it. It's a novel about identity, its loss, its persistence, its nature. Besides Zha, there's a homeless black man who claims he served in Vietnam -- clearly a delusion, except that the numbers scratched on his dog-tags open some surprising avenues -- and a mad scientist (er, probably not mad) who's taken his name from a character in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. There's a missing Russian oligarch and the assassins sent to track him. Oh, and a crack-addicted kitten.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is the portrayal of Zha's relationships -- pre- and post-mortem -- with colleagues and other SFPD officers. (I do wish the author would write a sex scene that wasn't hasty, rough and slightly sordid: it got old around NeoAddix and he hasn't stopped yet.)
The ending feels hasty, though I think it ties up the plot-essential threads: there are quite a few loose ends, but I think they're there to add Atmosphere. Or perhaps I missed their resolution.
Badly proofed / edited: I gave up counting errors after the first hundred pages ('... such a group included one of their member'; '"I've head of it"; any number of stray apostrophes) and I'd run out of fingers before that. Grimwood has some neat ideas, but he is not above cliche and lazy prose. Quite an entertaining read, but I'm getting pickier about prose quality, and this doesn't compare well with the literary fiction I've been devouring lately. No reason that it should, of course, but to me it felt like a lack.
And Another Thing: The author's descriptions of Bobby's teenaged daughter -- Goth makeup (hey, this is the Future, isn't it?), ecological concerns etc -- sound terribly middle-aged at times, almost to the point of cliche ...
Bobby Zha is an SFPD detective who ends up investigating his own murder. He discovers almost as much about himself and his, often dysfunctional, relationships with others as he does about the crime, and the convoluted motives behind it. It's a novel about identity, its loss, its persistence, its nature. Besides Zha, there's a homeless black man who claims he served in Vietnam -- clearly a delusion, except that the numbers scratched on his dog-tags open some surprising avenues -- and a mad scientist (er, probably not mad) who's taken his name from a character in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. There's a missing Russian oligarch and the assassins sent to track him. Oh, and a crack-addicted kitten.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the novel is the portrayal of Zha's relationships -- pre- and post-mortem -- with colleagues and other SFPD officers. (I do wish the author would write a sex scene that wasn't hasty, rough and slightly sordid: it got old around NeoAddix and he hasn't stopped yet.)
The ending feels hasty, though I think it ties up the plot-essential threads: there are quite a few loose ends, but I think they're there to add Atmosphere. Or perhaps I missed their resolution.
Badly proofed / edited: I gave up counting errors after the first hundred pages ('... such a group included one of their member'; '"I've head of it"; any number of stray apostrophes) and I'd run out of fingers before that. Grimwood has some neat ideas, but he is not above cliche and lazy prose. Quite an entertaining read, but I'm getting pickier about prose quality, and this doesn't compare well with the literary fiction I've been devouring lately. No reason that it should, of course, but to me it felt like a lack.
And Another Thing: The author's descriptions of Bobby's teenaged daughter -- Goth makeup (hey, this is the Future, isn't it?), ecological concerns etc -- sound terribly middle-aged at times, almost to the point of cliche ...
#32: True History of the Kelly Gang -- Peter Carey
I didn't have much of an interest in Australian history until quite recently: Carey's Jack Maggs resonated with vague memories of Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (which I mean to reread) and impressed me with Carey's craft. Jack Maggs was a distinctive voice, and Ned Kelly is another. I was much more aware, reading this novel, of the post-colonial themes -- the wild colonial boys (first-generation Australians rather than transported Irish), their intimate relation with the land, the alienation from Empire, etc.
It's also a cracking story, and I'm almost certain that it glorifies crime, if not terrorism. The story is told entirely from Ned Kelly's point of view, in an idiosyncratic style that's recognisably based on the Jerilderie Letter: allegedly written by Kelly himself, with or without the assistance of his mate Joe Byrne, this 58-page document was published decades after Kelly's execution. It's referred to in True History of the Kelly Gang, but not included there because, unlike the conceit of the parcel of papers spirited away just before the Kelly Gang's last stand at Glenrowan, it's declared to have been lost.
Carey magnifies the sense of character in that document. In this novel, Ned Kelly's voice is vivid and honest: he's not exactly arrogant, but certainly never humble, though there is a simplicity (and even sentimentality) to his prose that makes the tale all the more poignant.
The novel is built around the true history of the gang, all right, but it expands that history -- the story of a poor boy driven to the bad by poverty and by the bias and corruption of the authorities -- with credible details and wild speculation. There's a strong Oedipal thread in here, and some allusions to especially savage or perverse aspects of Irish history that I'm not qualified to judge as truth or invention. There's more than a tinge of the supernatural (changelings, curses, banshees) that fits with the traditional superstition of uneducated Irish. There's a compelling explanation for the infamous Kelly armour: based, according to Carey, on yellowing newspaper reports of the Monitor, the Civil War's iron-clad submarine. And there is a very real sense of a man living in, and on, the land. No evocative descriptions here, apart from the odd phrase -- 'the vast ancient stars', the sound of a tree about to fall 'at the hinge of life' -- because this is not a novel about people coming to a magnificent new landscape but about people inhabiting that land and making it their own.
All of it's told in a style which at first seems wilfully perverse. The newspapers describe the Jerilderie letter as the work of a 'clever illiterate person', but though Kelly (by which I mean Kelly's voice transcribed by Carey) disdains punctuation, there's a clarity and simplicity to his prose that has the rhythm of speech without the need to enforce that rhythm:
All my life I had stood by her when I were 10 I killed Murray's heifer so she would have meat when our poor da died I worked beside her I were the eldest son I left school at 12 yr. of age so she might farm I went with Harry Power that she might have gold when there were no food I laboured when there were no money I stole and when the worthless Frost and King closed round her like yellow dingoes on a chained up bitch I sought to protect her.
Kelly and his gang are not immigrant Irish, or transported convicts: they are first-generation Australians, rattling around in a country at once too large for them and too constricted by land-ownership and by the geographical borders imposed by great rivers and the Great Divide. They all have a shared Irish identity, built from anti-Irish bigotry and gilded by the legends of Cuchulain and Maeve that Ellen Kelly weans her children upon. It takes Mary Hearn (entirely fictional, as far as I can tell) to tell them what Ireland is 'really' like, to puncture their romantic fantasies about the old country and the old ways.
That is the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what came before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned on the moon.
The novel does not rose-tint the undoubted benevolence of the bushrangers, and of the Kelly Gang themselves -- payers of overdue rent, workers in the fields of men who've gone to prison -- but rather focusses on the injustices perpetrated by the police (the 'traps') and the respectable settlers of Victoria. There's a strong sense of unfairness, a clear chain of cause and effect that links Ned Kelly's first encounters with authority to the last desperate days before his death. Yet for all the grudges and the occasionally petty attention to detail, there is also a strong sense of personality, of humour and charisma. Carey makes this horse-thief and murderer into a hero: but more, into a likeable and potentially gentle man who's prisoner of his own fate. It's a grand and epic tale and I fear that when I finally get around to watching the recent movie version, I'll find it a pale shadow of this book.
It's also a cracking story, and I'm almost certain that it glorifies crime, if not terrorism. The story is told entirely from Ned Kelly's point of view, in an idiosyncratic style that's recognisably based on the Jerilderie Letter: allegedly written by Kelly himself, with or without the assistance of his mate Joe Byrne, this 58-page document was published decades after Kelly's execution. It's referred to in True History of the Kelly Gang, but not included there because, unlike the conceit of the parcel of papers spirited away just before the Kelly Gang's last stand at Glenrowan, it's declared to have been lost.
Carey magnifies the sense of character in that document. In this novel, Ned Kelly's voice is vivid and honest: he's not exactly arrogant, but certainly never humble, though there is a simplicity (and even sentimentality) to his prose that makes the tale all the more poignant.
The novel is built around the true history of the gang, all right, but it expands that history -- the story of a poor boy driven to the bad by poverty and by the bias and corruption of the authorities -- with credible details and wild speculation. There's a strong Oedipal thread in here, and some allusions to especially savage or perverse aspects of Irish history that I'm not qualified to judge as truth or invention. There's more than a tinge of the supernatural (changelings, curses, banshees) that fits with the traditional superstition of uneducated Irish. There's a compelling explanation for the infamous Kelly armour: based, according to Carey, on yellowing newspaper reports of the Monitor, the Civil War's iron-clad submarine. And there is a very real sense of a man living in, and on, the land. No evocative descriptions here, apart from the odd phrase -- 'the vast ancient stars', the sound of a tree about to fall 'at the hinge of life' -- because this is not a novel about people coming to a magnificent new landscape but about people inhabiting that land and making it their own.
All of it's told in a style which at first seems wilfully perverse. The newspapers describe the Jerilderie letter as the work of a 'clever illiterate person', but though Kelly (by which I mean Kelly's voice transcribed by Carey) disdains punctuation, there's a clarity and simplicity to his prose that has the rhythm of speech without the need to enforce that rhythm:
All my life I had stood by her when I were 10 I killed Murray's heifer so she would have meat when our poor da died I worked beside her I were the eldest son I left school at 12 yr. of age so she might farm I went with Harry Power that she might have gold when there were no food I laboured when there were no money I stole and when the worthless Frost and King closed round her like yellow dingoes on a chained up bitch I sought to protect her.
Kelly and his gang are not immigrant Irish, or transported convicts: they are first-generation Australians, rattling around in a country at once too large for them and too constricted by land-ownership and by the geographical borders imposed by great rivers and the Great Divide. They all have a shared Irish identity, built from anti-Irish bigotry and gilded by the legends of Cuchulain and Maeve that Ellen Kelly weans her children upon. It takes Mary Hearn (entirely fictional, as far as I can tell) to tell them what Ireland is 'really' like, to puncture their romantic fantasies about the old country and the old ways.
That is the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what came before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned on the moon.
The novel does not rose-tint the undoubted benevolence of the bushrangers, and of the Kelly Gang themselves -- payers of overdue rent, workers in the fields of men who've gone to prison -- but rather focusses on the injustices perpetrated by the police (the 'traps') and the respectable settlers of Victoria. There's a strong sense of unfairness, a clear chain of cause and effect that links Ned Kelly's first encounters with authority to the last desperate days before his death. Yet for all the grudges and the occasionally petty attention to detail, there is also a strong sense of personality, of humour and charisma. Carey makes this horse-thief and murderer into a hero: but more, into a likeable and potentially gentle man who's prisoner of his own fate. It's a grand and epic tale and I fear that when I finally get around to watching the recent movie version, I'll find it a pale shadow of this book.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
#31: The Ship Thieves: The True Tale of James Porter, Colonial Pirate -- Sian Rees
I seem to have read quite a few books, lately, about 19th-century penal Australia. (Just embarquing on The True History of the Kelly Gang ...) This one could have been more interesting than it was, and I don't think the problem is in the subject matter -- recidivist James Porter and the most audacious of his plans to escape from penal servitude in Van Diemen's Land -- as the format. I think I prefer Giles Milton's approach to popular history: in White Gold, for example, chapters focussing on an individual are alternated with overviews of the historical context.
Which is not to say that Rees can't write or that this is a dull book. Her depiction of convict life (though not as vivid as Richard Flanagan's fictionalised version in Gould's Book of Fish) is stark and forbidding, drawing on contemporary accounts and dry bureaucratic reports and fleshing them out with credible imagined detail.
James Porter seems the sort of criminal who can't bear to be deprived of his freedom. He batters against the walls of his cell (metaphorically, most of the time) in a sort of dumb panic, though he's not stupid: he always has an escape plan on the boil. This book focuses on a well-planned escape in 1834, when -- in the company of nine other convicts, most with some nautical experience, and the ship's cat -- he stole a newly-built brig from the officers in charge of it and sailed over 6000 miles to Chile. The cat wandered off into the jungle (I was most impressed that they left some seal-meat for it, having failed to lure it back!) and the escapees passed themselves off as ship-wrecked sailors.
The deception lasted for over a year, during which a series of increasingly undiplomatic despatches shuttled between the governments of Britain and Chile. Much of the argument hinged on whether the escaped convicts had committed an act of piracy (a capital crime) or not. Was the river where they'd stolen the brig really the 'high seas'? Didn't the fact that there had been no bloodshed, and that they'd made considerable efforts to leave the marooned officers provisions and supplies, count in their favour? Had any of them been thinking of 'profitable plunder'? Were they not escaping from an intolerable regime? (Various reform and anti-slavery Acts were underway at the time.)
Meanwhile, oblivious to all this paperwork, the men found work, wives (or, at any rate, women) and a kind of respectability. Then it all went wrong.
Rees occasionally sounds rather exasperated by her subject. "Porter himself was doubtless an irritating little so-and-so," she says at one point, "with his boasting and swaggering and always knowing best." She worked from Porter's original writings, and notes dryly at one point that "the prominence he accords himself in retrospect does not quite square with other accounts."
Porter fell on his feet at last. Returned to Norfolk Island, he came under the purview of Captain Maconochie, a philanthropic and well-intentioned commandant whose letters and reports would do a great deal to improve conditions for the transported convicts. Porter, perhaps tiring of the constant battle for freedom, did well; was treated well; was, finally, given his liberty. His happy ending is oblivion.
Which is not to say that Rees can't write or that this is a dull book. Her depiction of convict life (though not as vivid as Richard Flanagan's fictionalised version in Gould's Book of Fish) is stark and forbidding, drawing on contemporary accounts and dry bureaucratic reports and fleshing them out with credible imagined detail.
James Porter seems the sort of criminal who can't bear to be deprived of his freedom. He batters against the walls of his cell (metaphorically, most of the time) in a sort of dumb panic, though he's not stupid: he always has an escape plan on the boil. This book focuses on a well-planned escape in 1834, when -- in the company of nine other convicts, most with some nautical experience, and the ship's cat -- he stole a newly-built brig from the officers in charge of it and sailed over 6000 miles to Chile. The cat wandered off into the jungle (I was most impressed that they left some seal-meat for it, having failed to lure it back!) and the escapees passed themselves off as ship-wrecked sailors.
The deception lasted for over a year, during which a series of increasingly undiplomatic despatches shuttled between the governments of Britain and Chile. Much of the argument hinged on whether the escaped convicts had committed an act of piracy (a capital crime) or not. Was the river where they'd stolen the brig really the 'high seas'? Didn't the fact that there had been no bloodshed, and that they'd made considerable efforts to leave the marooned officers provisions and supplies, count in their favour? Had any of them been thinking of 'profitable plunder'? Were they not escaping from an intolerable regime? (Various reform and anti-slavery Acts were underway at the time.)
Meanwhile, oblivious to all this paperwork, the men found work, wives (or, at any rate, women) and a kind of respectability. Then it all went wrong.
Rees occasionally sounds rather exasperated by her subject. "Porter himself was doubtless an irritating little so-and-so," she says at one point, "with his boasting and swaggering and always knowing best." She worked from Porter's original writings, and notes dryly at one point that "the prominence he accords himself in retrospect does not quite square with other accounts."
Porter fell on his feet at last. Returned to Norfolk Island, he came under the purview of Captain Maconochie, a philanthropic and well-intentioned commandant whose letters and reports would do a great deal to improve conditions for the transported convicts. Porter, perhaps tiring of the constant battle for freedom, did well; was treated well; was, finally, given his liberty. His happy ending is oblivion.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
#30: Prime -- Poppy Z Brite
I've probably overdosed on this series, but there isn't another one until July ... Prime was the ideal read for a sunny afternoon spent on the sofa, dazed with lack of sleep and the lingering after-effects of travel sickness. (I look forward to reading it again when I'm more awake!)
Set two years after the events of Liquor, Prime is the story of what happens when Rickey is recruited as a consultant chef to bail out a Dallas restaurant where Cooper Stark, a shady figure from Rickey's cookery-school past, is failing to make an impact. Meanwhile Lenny Duveteaux, the backer of Liquor, is in legal trouble; his lawyer is thinking of running for DA; dodgy deals are being struck right, left and centre. It is as corrupt as the Floridean politics in a Carl Hiaasen novel, though not as laugh-out-loud funny.
As in Liquor, the actual climax -- the Plot -- seems a little abrupt, a little more extreme than the build-up suggests. And Rickey is going to have to live with something pretty nasty. But there's still a sense of easy, comfortable fun to his relationship with G-Man: the two of them are splendidly vivid characters, and there's something very honest, very straightforward, about the way they're written. ... That sounds bland and imprecise. Do I mean 'credible', or 'pedestrian', or 'prosaic'? No. But there is no side to them, either of them, and for that matter no campness either. Two Blokes In Love.
"'I'm not interested in iconoclasm.' Rickey hoped he'd pronounced the word right. He'd actually stopped at a bookstore and looked it up in a dictionary to make sure it meant what he thought it meant, but he had never used it in conversation before." [p. 159]
Set two years after the events of Liquor, Prime is the story of what happens when Rickey is recruited as a consultant chef to bail out a Dallas restaurant where Cooper Stark, a shady figure from Rickey's cookery-school past, is failing to make an impact. Meanwhile Lenny Duveteaux, the backer of Liquor, is in legal trouble; his lawyer is thinking of running for DA; dodgy deals are being struck right, left and centre. It is as corrupt as the Floridean politics in a Carl Hiaasen novel, though not as laugh-out-loud funny.
As in Liquor, the actual climax -- the Plot -- seems a little abrupt, a little more extreme than the build-up suggests. And Rickey is going to have to live with something pretty nasty. But there's still a sense of easy, comfortable fun to his relationship with G-Man: the two of them are splendidly vivid characters, and there's something very honest, very straightforward, about the way they're written. ... That sounds bland and imprecise. Do I mean 'credible', or 'pedestrian', or 'prosaic'? No. But there is no side to them, either of them, and for that matter no campness either. Two Blokes In Love.
"'I'm not interested in iconoclasm.' Rickey hoped he'd pronounced the word right. He'd actually stopped at a bookstore and looked it up in a dictionary to make sure it meant what he thought it meant, but he had never used it in conversation before." [p. 159]
Saturday, April 01, 2006
#29: Birds Without Wings -- Louis de Bernieres
It took me a while to get into this novel, a fictionalised account of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The first few chapters seemed very dry, despite some excellent writing. If I hadn't actually been in Turkey, less than a hundred miles from Eskibahçe -- the (probably fictional) village that is the focal point of the novel -- I might not have persevered. But I did, and I'm glad of it: I understand a bit more about the bloody and violent history of Turkey, about the conflicts that have torn the region, and about the reforms instituted by Ataturk in the early 20th century.
Eskibahçe is home to Christians, Muslims and Armenians, to a Greek courtesan passing herself off as Circassian, to the stunningly beautiful Philothei and to Drousoula, her plain friend, who appears in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Drosoula is not the only connection between the two novels: deliberate comparisons are drawn between the Italian occupation in this novel and Corelli's presence in Cephalonia, and some scenes seem to mirror episodes in the earlier novel. Above all, there's that same sense of the effects of the outside world on a small, close-knit community. This, however, is a much darker novel than its predecessor (much longer, too, and not necessarily in a good way): the descriptions of Gallipoli, Smyrna, and the death-marches are savagely precise without sensationalism. De Bernieres doesn't catalogue atrocities, but he does use specific incidents to illustrate the horrors perpetrated by the Greeks upon the Turks, and vice versa.
As well as the horror of war, and the irrevocable changes wrought upon Eskibahçe and its inhabitants, there are moments of humour, of love, of gentleness. There's a strong sense of Eskibahçe being cocooned, isolated from the outside world: most of the people (goatherds, potters, farmers, leech-gatherers) have only a very sketchy notion of the European powers that surround them. None of it matters as much as one villager's toothache, another's infidelity, a boy's red shirt. They live in a landscape that is smooth with use. Drosoula marvels at a pair of statues she sees, near the end of the book: growing up in southern Turkey, she's used to statues being partial, ruined, fragmentary. Earlier, there's a wry reference to Allied officers digging for antiquities in shell-craters, too eager to take sensible precautions before they venture out from cover.
This novel achieves something that I'm only just consciously learning to admire: the use of individual characters to illustrate history. I suspect that a lot of my favourite historical novels do it well, but I've never really thought about it before. Perhaps de Bernieres' large cast -- not all of whom have distinct voices -- brings this to the fore. Perhaps I've noticed it here because there's one character, at least, who I don't think is brought to life: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose tale is told in the third-person present tense, in 22 chapters. His story and his accomplishments are laid out clearly, but I never had a sense of the man behind them.
Birds Without Wings isn't as bleak as, for example, Birdsong: but it doesn't have the playfulness of de Berniere's other novels, and the weight of the more factual passages -- Ataturk, the death of King Alexander, and so on -- unbalances the lighter, simpler tales of the villagers.
In lots of ways Philothei was nobody at all and she only lived in a very little world, and she was destined to be ordinary. I expect that if she had lived to old age, you could have written her biography in half a page, and I expect that if she had never been born, it would have made no difference to the world at all.
But in a way the whole of the novel is about what happens to Philothei.
Eskibahçe is home to Christians, Muslims and Armenians, to a Greek courtesan passing herself off as Circassian, to the stunningly beautiful Philothei and to Drousoula, her plain friend, who appears in Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Drosoula is not the only connection between the two novels: deliberate comparisons are drawn between the Italian occupation in this novel and Corelli's presence in Cephalonia, and some scenes seem to mirror episodes in the earlier novel. Above all, there's that same sense of the effects of the outside world on a small, close-knit community. This, however, is a much darker novel than its predecessor (much longer, too, and not necessarily in a good way): the descriptions of Gallipoli, Smyrna, and the death-marches are savagely precise without sensationalism. De Bernieres doesn't catalogue atrocities, but he does use specific incidents to illustrate the horrors perpetrated by the Greeks upon the Turks, and vice versa.
As well as the horror of war, and the irrevocable changes wrought upon Eskibahçe and its inhabitants, there are moments of humour, of love, of gentleness. There's a strong sense of Eskibahçe being cocooned, isolated from the outside world: most of the people (goatherds, potters, farmers, leech-gatherers) have only a very sketchy notion of the European powers that surround them. None of it matters as much as one villager's toothache, another's infidelity, a boy's red shirt. They live in a landscape that is smooth with use. Drosoula marvels at a pair of statues she sees, near the end of the book: growing up in southern Turkey, she's used to statues being partial, ruined, fragmentary. Earlier, there's a wry reference to Allied officers digging for antiquities in shell-craters, too eager to take sensible precautions before they venture out from cover.
This novel achieves something that I'm only just consciously learning to admire: the use of individual characters to illustrate history. I suspect that a lot of my favourite historical novels do it well, but I've never really thought about it before. Perhaps de Bernieres' large cast -- not all of whom have distinct voices -- brings this to the fore. Perhaps I've noticed it here because there's one character, at least, who I don't think is brought to life: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose tale is told in the third-person present tense, in 22 chapters. His story and his accomplishments are laid out clearly, but I never had a sense of the man behind them.
Birds Without Wings isn't as bleak as, for example, Birdsong: but it doesn't have the playfulness of de Berniere's other novels, and the weight of the more factual passages -- Ataturk, the death of King Alexander, and so on -- unbalances the lighter, simpler tales of the villagers.
In lots of ways Philothei was nobody at all and she only lived in a very little world, and she was destined to be ordinary. I expect that if she had lived to old age, you could have written her biography in half a page, and I expect that if she had never been born, it would have made no difference to the world at all.
But in a way the whole of the novel is about what happens to Philothei.
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