Mount TBR #32

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

I first read this in 1979, when I was in Japan. We foreign students passed this novel around, hand to hand. Maybe it attracted us because it was a best seller; in 1977, it won the Gold Dagger award for the best crime novel of the year and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. With the 2018 holidays on the attack, I thought to re-read it, for old time’s sake, for stress beating.

The Honorable Schoolboy – John le Carré

After the unmasking of a 'mole', a Soviet agent in the London intelligence agency, George Smiley has taken over the leadership of the Circus. He is tasked to lead the department back to its old clout as it closes residencies and gets its spies out of harm’s way – or out to pasture because their covert lives aren’t covert anymore.

To do this, Smiley has to find 'Karla', the Soviet spymaster in charge of the relentless campaign against the Circus and all reasonable guardrails of western civilization. A money trail leads to what we called in the 1970s Indochina. Smiley sends an Old Asia Hand, Jerry Westerby, camouflaged as a journalist, to Hong Kong, where he investigates secret bank accounts - apparently set up by 'Karla' for Moscow to pay an agent of tremendous value in Red China.

Westerby travels from Hong Kong to every hot spot Indochina has to offer in the mid-1970s. In a painful set piece, in Saigon days before the withdrawal of the American forces, a bitter American military officer wants to shake Westerby’s hand, since they are now both members of “second-rate nations.” Westerby also delves into the heart of darkness with trips to Vientiane in Laos and Phnom Pen and Battambang in Cambodia.

Without a little knowledge of Southeast Asia and without reading the prequel Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, a reader might feel rather lost in this big novel. But given these prerequisites are fulfilled, the many details do come together for an alert reader. The local color is amazing and persuasive; the reader can tell LeCarre visited the region to research this novel.

Both the male and female leads are lost souls, seeking a sense of stability they never got from loose educations or their broken families with unreliable fathers (see The Perfect Spy and Single & Single). I am always fascinated by how John le Carré manages to examine betrayal, disloyalty, ruthlessness and pure utilitarian thinking without becoming sentimental. This is also a profoundly humane novel that shows how people are forced by unusual, desperate circumstances to act in ways that they could not have prepared for or even contemplated.

I think le Carré challenges his readers to trust him. That is, there are stretches in his long books where literally nothing happens. Even the characters start to get antsy in periods of inertia punctuated by periods of frenzy. On the other hand, he makes unpromising scenarios – interviews, in particular – brilliant character studies and primers on interrogation methods. So the story may be thin, but the suspense is compelling. In le Carré novels, the last 100 pages or so are always un-put-downable.

A Classic with a Single-word Title: Emma

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

JERRY: Just talking? Well, what's the show about?

GEORGE: It's about nothing.

JERRY: No story?

GEORGE: No - forget the story.

JERRY: You've got to have a story.

GEORGE: Who says you gotta have a story?

Emma – Jane Austen

We pick up Emma and after giving it a good shot we start to fret, like the dismayed Goodreads reviewer who said, “Having loved Pride and Prejudice, I can only say that I'm most disappointed by this book. I couldn't even finish it. I read about 100 pages and not once did I find something about it that's intriguing and what's more the story is not only bland but also empty...”

Here’s the story, thin as it is: A clever, handsome, rich woman dotes on her comically hypochondriac father and makes cruel funny blunders of omission and commission in the areas of love and romance for herself and others. The characters, both rational and irrational, are motivated by avarice or generosity, pure love or comfortable settlement, selfishness or devotion, aristocratic vanity or bourgeois vulgarity. Nothing extraordinary happens, though nine-day wonders do. The vicissitudes, it must be admitted, are neither numerous nor varied though a sore throat (by no means trivial in the early 19^th century) takes a character conveniently off stage, and reliable old Death moves the plot along too. Austen contents herself, in general, with everything – especially marital ties - wrapped up tidily in the end.

Or does she?

Austen as writer and artist does not really care about the story in Emma. Austen knows life is this, life is that, life is a pat on the back, life is a kick in the pants, setbacks open up doors, good fortune imposes burdens. Austen knows cause and effect can be traced back to the Garden of Eden. Decrease and increase, ripening and rotting are the constant accompaniments of life and death. Decline, fall and surge, growth alternate in continuous succession, and we are not aware – much less mindful - of any interval. Emma engrossed by her friend Harriet and a dinner party just lives, alert and attentive in the in-betweens:

She was so busy in admiring those soft blue eyes, in talking and listening, and forming all these schemes in the in-betweens, that the evening flew away at a very unusual rate; and the supper-table, which always closed such parties, and for which she had been used to sit and watch the due time, was all set out and ready, and moved forwards to the fire, before she was aware. With an alacrity beyond the common impulse of a spirit which yet was never indifferent to the credit of doing every thing well and attentively, with the real good-will of a mind delighted with its own ideas, did she then do all the honours of the meal, and help and recommend the minced chicken and scalloped oysters, with an urgency which she knew would be acceptable to the early hours and civil scruples of their guests.

Waiting for Harriet in a store, Emma gets into the moment:

Harriet, tempted by every thing and swayed by half a word, was always very long at a purchase; and while she was still hanging over muslins and changing her mind, Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole's carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

This is life flowing by. Austen knew this is what life does. It flows. Heaven grant me a mind lively and at ease, able to see the flow, of life doing what it does, the ordinary, the not-much, the neglected, for the gifts - or the white elephants - they are. 

Okay, back on the planet earth, I think that she wants to focus on the characterization of Emma and see if she can pull off something difficult. Her intention is to describe how Emma grows from a complacent busy-body to a more humble discerning fiancé. It was daring of Austen to focus on her clueless title character instead of disadvantaged Jane Fairfax with the outré hairstyle, the Fannie Price figure. Austen must have known the difficulty of changing a reader’s first impression of a character. However, in my case anyway, I was pulling for Emma by the end. Know thyself, Emma, inspire us all.

This is also worth reading for two comic figures. Emma’s father Mr. Woodhouse uses his valetudinarianism to manipulate and subtly tyrannize the people around him. He keeps up a stream of  feeble petulant whining about the risks to health posed by everything in nature. He is also so dismissive and fearful of the institution of marriage – probably because of the unhygienic conjugal duties involved – that we wonder how Emma got conceived. He’s as monstrously funny as the conceited vulgarian Mrs. Elton.

The other comic masterpiece is Miss Bates, the gabby aunt of Jane Fairfax. Her monologues are amazing.

Very true, very true, indeed. The very thing that we have always been rather afraid of; for we should not have liked to have her at such a distance from us, for months together—not able to come if any thing was to happen. But you see, every thing turns out for the best. They want her (Mr. and Mrs. Dixon) excessively to come over with Colonel and Mrs. Campbell; quite depend upon it; nothing can be more kind or pressing than their joint invitation, Jane says, as you will hear presently; Mr. Dixon does not seem in the least backward in any attention. He is a most charming young man. Ever since the service he rendered Jane at Weymouth, when they were out in that party on the water, and she, by the sudden whirling round of something or other among the sails, would have been dashed into the sea at once, and actually was all but gone, if he had not, with the greatest presence of mind, caught hold of her habit— (I can never think of it without trembling!)—But ever since we had the history of that day, I have been so fond of Mr. Dixon!

I think Austen is un-ironic about Miss Bates being, like Joe Ben in Sometimes a Great Notion, something of a holy fool:

And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself. She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited Mr. Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.

Keep it simple: respect others, do no harm, be grateful, be fair. Not easy for a guy like me, though the rules seem simple enough.

For those of us stiff-necked readers who need a moral to the story, Austen is saying that Emma develops the emotional intelligence to view others more generously and accept people as they are. With the help of the admirable Mr. Knightley, she learns to assess her own rationality and discernment in order to exercise keener judgment. Austen hints that maybe the reader too can apply lessons learned by reading literary fiction to everyday life, where we - I mean, me, actually - get too distracted to follow the golden rule for more than three minutes at a time.

Or does she?

Mount TBR #31

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Tales of Terror and the Supernatural - Wilkie Collins

Collins (1824 - 1889) was a contemporary and associate of Charles Dickens and the author of novels such as No Name and The Moonstone. He also wrote stories for the magazine market, often for Christmas annuals. The title of this collection is misleading since only a couple feature ghosts; Tales of Mystery and Suspense would have been more informative,

The Dream Woman (1854): A cognitively disabled ostler has a horrific vision of being murdered by a demon woman. Like all good sons would, he tells his mother about his experience, describing the ghoulie carefully. Imagine mom’s perturbation when one fine day he brings home his fiancé, the very spit and image of the spooky woman in the vision. Collins goes the extra mile with bleak description of a troubled marriage – he was always persuasive with spouses not getting along.

A Terribly Strange Bed (1852): In a dodgy Parisian casino, a carefree young gentleman doesn’t know when to quit while he’s ahead and thus finds himself in trouble deep. Collins’ examination of the denizens of a gambling hell brought to my mind a casino I once visited in Macau. It’s worth quoting because it gives a feeling for the sensational tone of these stories.

The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke; the flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly, to register how often black won, and how often red--never spoke; the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and the darned great-coat, who had lost his last sou, and still looked on desperately, after he could play no longer--never spoke. Even the voice of the croupier sounded as if it were strangely dulled and thickened in the atmosphere of the room. I had entered the place to laugh, but the spectacle before me was something to weep over. 

The Dead Hand (1857): Another carefree young gentleman, hard up for lodgings during a race weekend, is tricked into sharing a room with a corpse.

Arthur looked closer at the man. The bedclothes were drawn up to his chin, and they lay perfectly still over the region of his chest. Surprised and vaguely startled, as he noticed this, Arthur stooped down closer over the stranger; looked at his ashy, parted lips; listened breathlessly for an instant; looked again at the still face, and the motionless lips and chest; and turned round suddenly on the landlord, with his own cheeks as pale, for the moment, as the hollow cheeks of the man on the bed.

Four – ly adverbs no less. The corpse, however, doesn’t seem to be down with being dead.

Blow Up with the Brig! (1859): I don’t what a sailor’s yarn is doing in a collection of eerie tales, but as a suspense it works well enough as a change of pace and indicator of the kind of rousing sea story periodicals printed back then. See The Frozen Deep. As a story of trussed-up would-be victim watching a fuse burn down to a bomb, it’s okay, but pales compared to Woolrich’s Three O’Clock.

Mr. Lepel and the Housekeeper (1884): A pair of college buds attend an opera with a plot of an over-the-top love triangle. Later they find themselves living out the exaggerated story with one angle being the 17-year-old daughter of a lodge keeper’s widow. Besides the nutty premise (and the Victorian complacency about the middle aged male and the not or barely legal maid that makes us postmoderns wince rather), this is worth reading because in this late-career story, Collins experiments with the unreliable narrator.  Mr. Lepel’s cluelessness about his housekeeper is a hoot.

Miss Bertha and the Yankee (1877): Unexpectedly becoming an heiress, a very young woman from the colonies finds herself in a love triangle with an intense English Army officer and a gentle Yankee. At first the two men are friends but love for the unintentionally indiscreet beauty comes between them to the point where they fight a duel. An overheated story that should appeal to fans of melodrama.

Mr. Policeman and the Cook (1881): A young homicide detective finds himself in a moral quandary. This is a serious, almost gloomy story, of what the conflict between love and duty will drive people to.

Fauntleroy (1858): One of those “life is complicated” stories that remind us not to judge harshly since we don’t know all the facts. For Collins, unlike his friend Dickens, people were seldom all good or all bad.

A Stolen Letter (1854): A story told in the voice of a sharp lawyer hired by a distraught rich guy to recover a letter that will wreak havoc on the reputation of his fiancé. The lawyer is a city rascal with few illusions and a keen eye for appearances.

Ah! but she was one of my sort, was that governess. Stood, to the best of my recollection, five feet four. Good lissome figure, that looked as if it had never been boxed up in a pair of stays. Eyes that made me feel as if I was under a pretty stiff cross-examination the moment she looked at me. Fine, red, fresh, kiss-and-come-again sort of lips.

I imagine a lot of Victorian papas would have torn this kind of thing from their daughter's fair hands.

The Lady of Glenwith Grange (1856): A sad story of a selfless older sister taking care of her ungrateful younger sister. The Victorians liked stories with imposters. Though impersonations were easier in days before modern communications and bureaucracy, they still seem unlikely to me. As he sometimes did in his novels, Collins puts in a brief appearance of a person with a disability, a rare thing for writers of that era.

Mad Monkton (1855): Dickens turned this story down, thinking that it wasn’t suitable for the family-friendly magazine Household Words. We heartily agree when we read this unflinching account of a guy with monomania looking for his reprobate uncle’s unburied corpse in Italy, egged on by the uncle's spirit that won't go away.

The Biter Bit (1858): A comic detective story that gives Collins a chance to smack two things he liked to smack: overweening self-confidence and middle-class pretensions. Probably the best story of the collection.

Many other stories of Collins can be found at Westminster Detective Library.

Classic By a New-To-You Author: Jonathan Wild

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Jonathan Wild – Henry Fielding

Published in 1743, this short novel came between the massive texts of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Loosely based on a historical mob kingpin, it tells the story of the title character whose family name is apt. He is wild in the sense of being unrestrained in the pursuit of his ends. He cheats, robs, commits fraud, sexually assaults, kills, and denounces henchmen so that they are executed. He is uncontrolled in that he in incapable of conceiving ways to his ends except by criminal means. He then jeers at people who have been weak enough to trust him and thus be taken to the cleaners. Critics says that Thackeray was inspired by this novel to write Barry Lyndon. But Barry is a schoolboy, a lovable rogue compared to the rapacious, disturbing Jonathan Wild.

Fielding’s message is that the same insatiable qualities that make a great thief are the same that go into making a great leader. His maxims call to mind Machiavelli. Examples are below and may be useful to those of us who work in large organizations.

2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.

4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he hath been deceived by you.

7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally, and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewel from the real.

15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.

I daresay readers will get the idea that the moral atmosphere of the novel is not what an unselfish person would describe as edifying or uplifting. But it’s not utterly lacking in positive examples. This, from a good soul abused by the title character:

Why, what can [reason’s] office be other than justly to weigh the worth of all things, and to direct us to that perfection of human wisdom which proportions our esteem of every object by its real merit, and prevents us from over or undervaluing whatever we hope for, we enjoy, or we lose. It doth not foolishly say to us, Be not glad, or, Be not sorry, which would be as vain and idle as to bid the purling river cease to run, or the raging wind to blow. It prevents us only from exulting, like children, when we receive a toy, or from lamenting when we are deprived of it. Suppose then I have lost the enjoyments of this world, and my expectation of future pleasure and profit is for ever disappointed, what relief can my reason afford? What, unless it can shew me I had fixed my affections on a toy; that what I desired was not, by a wise man, eagerly to be affected, nor its loss violently deplored?

A neat defense of reason, self-command and moderation, but Fielding’s ironic repetition of “great” to describe sleazy voracious narcissism beats the reader down, rather.

In fact, like another 18^th century writer Tobias Smollett, Fielding looks hard at our commonplace notions, such as “He may be a jerk crook and jackass, but he at least get things done.” And he poses the questions, why do so many people, otherwise smart and decent, get a kick out of rogues; is all our talk about honesty and fair-dealing merely talk;  what does a society look and feel like when a large percentage of its members could care less to distinguish right and wrong and laugh at people who fret about truth.

I like this, the first novel by Fielding I’ve ever read. I’d recommend it to readers that like unblinking surveys of this vale of tears. Whether I could handle Fieldings' dense prose for the thousand pages of Tom Jones is an open question.

Mount TBR #30

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Curtains For Three - Rex Stout

This book contains Nero Wolfe novelettes first published in The American Magazine (1905 – 1956). The Gun with Wings appeared in June 1949; Bullet for One in July 1948; and Disguise for Murder in September 1950 as The Twisted Scarf.

In The Gun with Wings, PI Nero Wolfe and his trusty sidekick Archie Goodwin are hired to show that a death ruled suicide was in fact murder and to track down the perp. In tried and true fashion, at the climax all the suspects are gathered into a room, in this case, Wolfe’s office with the red leather chair. The dialogue in this one is particularly good, setting up some very fine scenes indeed.

In Bullet for One Stout returns to the world of industrial designers, which he knew through his wife who worked in textiles. Industrial espionage of trade secrets provides the backdrop. The murder has occurred on a riding trail in the wilds of Manhattan. Three principals who can’t stand each other hire Wolfe to find the killer, but for the sake of reputation in the fishbowl of the The Big Apple they need to be cleared.

Disguise For Murder, the best of the three, starts with member of a Garden Club prowling about Wolfe’s plant rooms, looking at orchids. The killing of a young con-girl murder takes place in Wolfe’s office, which has to be a first and only in the canon. Again, the dialogue makes it well-worth reading.

Stout wrote 33 novels and 41 novelettes featuring Wolfe and Archie. You’d think reading them would get old after a half-dozen or so. But they never do: Wolfe’s agoraphobia, the unwavering schedule in the plant rooms, the gourmandizing, Archie’s brash humor, the same supporting cast like Saul and Fritz, the savvy city gals, crabby copper Kramer, and gathering the persons of interest in the office. Granted, the better stories are the fish out of water stories when Wolfe has to leave the brownstone, but the familiar touchstones are as comforting as snug in their rooms with a fire Holmes says to John, “Good old Watson.”

Real life is about flux, with the stark choice being get used to new people, places, and things, or yell at clouds. Reading stories have their appeal in their timelessness, their fixity. Readers that like this kind of genre writing – that would be me – like to go back to Manhattan after WWII or Victorian London and find the characters doing what they always do.

Re-read a Favorite Classic: Sometimes a Great Notion

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

You study literature because you’re a scholar of what’s fair. It’s just a way of learning how to be what we want to be. We go to concerts to hear a piece by Bach not because we want to be intellectuals or scholars or students of Bach, but because the music is going to help us keep our moral compass needle clean. (Ken Kesey, Paris Review interview, 1992)

Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey

This is the second novel by the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, originally published in 1964. I read it for the first time in the mid-1970s at State, then again in the mid-1990s overseas. Like other great American novels such as Look Homeward Angel and All the King’s Men, it’s the kind of epic that pays re-reading.

Set on the Oregon coast, this family saga narrates the trials and tribulations of the Stamper clan. They own a small logging business. The Stampers live in a restrictive, hierarchical structure of an old-fashioned pioneer family, in which there are few emotional outlets and little intellectual stimulation. Though brother Hank is the head of the family, father Henry presents a rip-roaring presence, bringing to mind the half-mad father Gant in Look Homeward, Angel.

Logging is hard yakka, hazardous and exhausting. The family business has to hire family members to minimize trouble with the union whose members are on strike. Using gas-powered chainsaws, the Stampers can use technology to provide as many logs to lumber company Wakonda Pacific as a large number of union-organized workers. When it comes out that the family has signed contracts to provide logs to WP, their name becomes “leech” in town.

To add to the social and economic tension, an estranged brother, Lee Stamper, returns his to boyhood home to the densely populated house of his half-brother Hank and his sister-in-law, Viv. Lee is bent on revenge for his lost childhood which has made him slightly schizophrenic and highly anxious (both in a clinical sense).

Kesey skillfully mixes the pasts of the various Stampers and the streams of consciousness of different members of the town such as the native prostitute, union organizers, the family dog, and the bartender of local watering hole, to name only a few.  The narrative is like that of Moby Dick: comprehensive, full of details, a little awkward, and mercifully repetitive, which helps the reader keep her eye on the ball. There are frequent interesting changes of perspective within a paragraph and sometimes within a sentence. It can’t - and ought not to be - read quickly, as it is quite easy to slip into, “Huh? Who said that!” There are plenty of allusions to Beowulf, The Bard, Wolfe, Faulkner and doubtless others than I’m too ill-read to identify.

I didn’t grow up in a blue-collar family, but I did grow up in a blue-collar neighborhood in the Sixties. So the strutting, bantering code of masculinity I found very familiar and – heaven forgive me – nostalgic. It’s a rush to cut trees, clear land, make something and be able to say you made something without help from the outside. It’s a gas to hunt with your buds, drink beer, listen to music together. There is a code of behavior that must be followed or you will be picked on for deviant behavior. Sure, a lot of this machismo is toxic horseshit and just another way to manipulate and control people. And Kesey is not averse to exploring the dark sides of macho, from procrastinating medical attention to being unable to ever talk about shit that really matters. The heroine of this novel, for instance, finds that she has do something about letting herself down after she becomes not much more than a shuttlecock between the two half-brothers.

Kesey also wants to capture the basic unknowableness of reality – there is so much going on at the same time, right now, that we human beings have to filter it out or go bonkers. But the filtering has a cost – we focus on the essential as taught by our culture (money, agency, reputation, making a difference, being all we can be) and shrug away what doesn’t find its way through our narrow templates, never content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to those essential things. When we focus on what is beyond our control and don’t accept what we know is going to happen, we are not free. We miss a lot of magic, the miracle of creation, by being haunted by the past or anxious about the future without getting a bead on right the hell now. Like Hank and Lee’s cousin Joe Ben says, “See what there is you can get a gas out of. It’s all a matter of how you hold your head.”

In fact, Joe Ben, the wise fool, knows about the transformative power of acceptance, gratitude for being alive, and negative visualization.

I always say to him it is our lot to accept our lot and the best way to accept that lot is back off and see what a ball it is. I tell him, back off and see what a boot in the rear it is! Because it is, it is, if you just back off and look at it with your mouth held right. … Be gassed and happy and running around and loving every bit of it and even the bad stuff like this if you just hold your mouth right, Hankus. Now I don’t expect you to know the Redeemer liveth like I do, but you do know what’s coming up right here on earth, because I can always see in your eyes how you see already. So how come, when you see already what’s coming up ahead and know already what you’re gonna have to do about it, why don’t you save yourself all this fretting and cut across to what you see coming and do what you already know what has to be done …?

At about seven hundred pages that the eye had better not skim, this novel is not for the uncommitted. But it is a great American novel and deserves to be read. And re-read. I’m not letting another 20 years go by without reading this again.