Tag Archives: conrad

What I Read, December 2023

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review

A great semester in the classroom; an even more irritating than usual semester for committee work. I am lucky to have a long winter break. Over the last years I’ve found that I either thrive in these short, dark weeks or succumb to bad anxiety. Happily, this was one of the good years. El Niño means colder weather in Arkansas, which makes me happy, not least because it’s so good for running. And for sitting on the couch reading.

Laurits Andersen Ring, Foggy Winter Day. To the Left a Yellow House. Deep Snow., 1910

Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008)

An extraordinary book, maybe my favourite of the five or so by Morrison I’ve read. (Beloved is titanic, of course, but it’s been so long since I’ve read it that my memory of it has dimmed. Maybe I’ll redress that in 2024.) I chose A Mercy for One Bright Book; I thought we had a lot of interesting things to say. Fifteen years after its publication, the book only seems more pertinent to the task of understanding America. Which makes this review by Wyatt Mason, a critic I usually admire, feel badly dated.

Katherena Vermette, The Circle (2023)

Longtime readers will know of my love for Vermette. The Break is fast becoming canonical; I extolled its sequel, The Strangers, not long ago. And now we have a third volume featuring the same characters, with the addition of a few new ones, especially in the younger generation. My wife noted how much faster this book reads than the others. Partly that’s because of the knowledge we bring to the book (if you haven’t read Vermette yet, don’t start here): we’re mostly catching up, not getting to know. And partly it’s because of the short chapters that shift the point of view. But mostly, that sense of speed is a function of how much happens. Whereas The Break considered the repercussions of a single event (ripples from a stone sunk into a lake), and The Strangers thought about the pull of family (oceanic, seemingly inescapable, full of ebbs and flows), The Circle focuses on the pull to change, to get away, to break from the past (this book is a river, and one full of rapids at that.)

That compulsion sometimes—maybe even often—fails. But not always. Trauma never lets go, but change is possible. But always from collective bonds, not individual willpower. Yes, individuals make choices that affect their fate. But grit isn’t enough in the face of systemic inequalities and generations of abuse. Maybe that explains why Vermette has replaced the family trees of the earlier volumes with a diagram of overlapping circles, each with a character’s name. The closer the circles to each other, the closer the relationship. The bigger the circle, the more people that individual affects.

If Vermette decides she’s finished with these characters, she has ended her now-trilogy on a satisfying ambiguous, tentatively hopeful note. But I thought the endings of the previous volumes were just right, too. Who knows, maybe more is in store. I kind of feel like Vermette is as caught up by these characters as readers like me are.

Abdulrazek Gurnah, By the Sea (2001)

My third Gurnah: not a misfire yet. I’m a fan.

In his 60s, Omer Saleh leaves his world behind him and claims begrudgingly granted asylum in the UK. A harried lawyer assigned to his case tracks down the only person she can find who knows anything about Zanzibar, Saleh’s homeland. That man, now an academic who has himself made the journey to England, turns out to have known Saleh: he was a boy when the older man became entwined with his family, to complicated and in some ways ruinous ends.

Gurnah reminds me of Conrad not just because his novels also consider the relationship of England to parts of the world where people have “different complexion[s] and slightly flatter noses” but more so because they are similarly constructed through nested stories told at length in the quiet of evening between a teller and a silent audience. These stories concern all manner of things: the age-old trade routes between the Persian Gulf and the East African coast; the furniture business as practiced in a culture that prizes barter; the experience of African students during the Cold War in East Germany, where it turns out that not all communists were equal brothers; and the pain of incarceration at the whims of despotic regimes.

Of the latter, Saleh says:

I have taught myself not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not a language I can speak with words. Sometimes I see photographs of people in distress, and the image of their misery and pain echoes in my body and makes me ache with them. And the same image teaches me to suppress the memory of my oppression, because, after all, I am here and well while only God knows where some of them are.

The last line is the characteristic Gurnah touch: a passage that had been moving, even stately, if perhaps a little pat, turns more complex. We are so attuned to the suggestion that testimony is an unalloyed good, a force, even, for change, that we might be surprised to think of quiescence and repression as responses to past injustice and trauma.

By the Sea was longlisted for the Booker Prize. I’ve no beef with Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (haven’t read it), but it would have been nice to see Gurnah on the shortlist at least. No matter, he won another big prize and the novels are back in print and I still have five or six ahead of me, so it’s all good.

Roy Jacobsen, Eyes of the Rigel (2017) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2020)

Third in Jacobsen’s Barrøy series, which since the last part of the first has focused on Ingrid Barrøy, now the chatelaine of the Norwegian island that has given the family its name. Eyes of the Rigel follows hard on the events of its predecessor, The White Shadow, which I read in the spring but never wrote about. I like this summary from The Guardian:

The second installment, White Shadow, is set during the last year of the second world war: refugees from the northern province of Finnmark arrive, collaborators abuse their power, and Russian prisoner of war Alexander, having survived the sinking of the MS Rigel, lands on Barrøy. Ingrid falls in love with the young man and hides him from Nazis and collaborators until he is strong enough to embark on a trek to neutral Sweden. In Eyes of the Rigel Ingrid sets out across a postwar country in search of the father of her 10-month-old daughter. Ingrid’s only mementos of her lover are her daughter’s eyes, as black as Alexander’s, and a note in Russian, which a neighbour helps her decipher: it says, “I love you” nine times.

Ingrid’s epic quest—after hitching a boat ride up the coast, she makes the rest of the journey on foot with the world’s most saintly baby—is preposterous. Everyone she meets feels that way too. But with the determination and implacable work ethic that characterizes her family she follows a trail made fainter by the reluctance of many in the immediate postwar era to remember or cop to the events of the recent past.

Spoiler alert: her quest ends in frustration and heartbreak. She doesn’t find Alexander, and, maybe worse, she learns things about him she doesn’t want to. (In a brief passage, readers learn his tragic fate.) I wouldn’t say she’s happy to return home, but she does so with few regrets and no complaints. (Barrøyers don’t complain.) There’s that baby to raise, after all. And another fishing season to prepare for. And heaven knows what’s happened to the sheep over the summer.

I sensed Jacobsen enjoyed the wider canvas of this story (it’s not really any longer than the others, but it has much more narrative drive), but not as much as he enjoyed returning to the island in the final pages. That’s how I felt as a reader, anyway. As is characteristic of these books, we encounter much that is unhappy (a former Nazi concentration turned POW camp, for example). But much that is joyful, too, though always in a bittersweet way. I especially loved an idyll on a farm where Ingrid thinks about taking up with the owner, a member of the resistance, who had hidden Alexander for several months.

Ronán Hession thinks it’s the weakest of the series, but even though he wrote Leonard and Hungry Paul so definitely knows what’s what I can’t agree. Loved this one just as much as the others.

Roy Jacobsen, Just a Mother (2020) Trans. Don Bartlett and Don Shaw (2022)

I picked Jacobsen’s fourth Barrøy novel up the minute I finished the third. It feels as though the writer did the same: Ingrid’s story picks up where she left off, with her return home to the island. The novel covers the 1950s, and, as Tony puts it in his excellent post, it reworks some of the preoccupations and themes of The Unseen, the first book in the series. But Jacobsen isn’t treading the same ground. Yes, his characters continue to wrestle with the competing claims of isolation and community, but now they do so in the context of new technologies and ideologies. What happens when it’s not profitable to run the mail boat to the island? Would it be best to give up this almost laughably hand-to-mouth existence for life on the mainland? (Friends and family report on the pleasures and tribulations of life in centrally planned communities. It’s nice to have a machine to wash the linens, but of course you can only use it in your allocated hours.)

For Ingrid, Jacobsen’s main character, the matriarch of the island, the question of whether it will still be possible to live on Barrøy is practical, not abstract. Who will do all the work? Her great-aunt is aging. The girl she has brought up as her own daughter has grown up and moved away. The few menfolk who are left have bought a bigger boat so that their annual fishing expeditions take them away from the island longer than before. But new life arrives, in the form of a boy, the child of the skipper of the mail boat. The man asks Ingrid to watch his son while he goes on his weekly run, because his wife, the boy’s mother, has up and left. With foreboding in her heart, Ingrid accepts the charge; weeks pass, the skipper fails to return. Eventually his boat is found drifting aimlessly and unmanned. This trauma is met with resourcefulness and care, and the boy flourishes under the auspices of Ingrid and the other islanders, not least her daughter Kaja, the infant in the previous book, who is now five or six. The pair grow up as something more than siblings. Perhaps their relationship will be at the center of another book, should we be lucky enough to get one.

As always, Jacobsen pushes our emotional buttons, in the most satisfying way. One scene in particular hits like a blow. As Tony puts it, “One thing I can promise you is that anyone who has read the rest of the series will at some point feel the pain almost physically…”

Jim Thompson, A Hell of a Woman (1954)

Hadn’t read one of Thompson’s sordid, riveting noirs in a while. I’ll need to wait awhile before trying another, so dark was this one. Although it can’t top The Killer Inside Me (what can?), A Hell of a Woman also turns on the author’s masterly use of first-person narration. If you liked In a Lonely Place but found it a little decorous, this is the book for you.

Stephen Spotswood, Murder Crossed Her Mind (2023)

The latest Pentecost & Parker mystery ends on a dramatic note. (Cliffhanger alert!) Despite a solid enough mystery, the point of the book is to set up a longer narrative arc. I look forward to volume 5, and encourage you to read these books, but whatever you do, don’t start here.

Walter Kempowski, An Ordinary Youth (1971) Trans. Michael Lipkin (2023)

I once heard Parul Sehgal describe Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War as having “big first book energy,” which, she explained, is what happens when writers feel the need to stuff everything that matters to them into that first book, because who knows if there will ever be another. The result is undisciplined, maybe, but also exuberant and true.

I thought of Sehgal when reading An Ordinary Youth, the first book by Walter Kempowski, a phenomenon of (mostly West) German literature. (My friend Till Raether tells me he had something like a Warholian factory going to help him compose an epic series of collage texts, perhaps in the Dos Passos mode, I’m not sure, of German 20th century history; that’s in addition to his many novels.) The debut is patently autobiographical—its hero, Walter Kempowski, is nine years old when his family moves to a new apartment in the old Hanseatic port of Rostock in 1938. As the title suggests, he’s an ordinary kid who like movies and jazz music and this one girl in particular and school not so much. He gets used to bombing raids; he doesn’t mind that his father has been deployed (away from the front, luckily); he misses his older brother, Robert, who brought home all the good new records. As he becomes a teenager, Walter distinguishes himself mostly for being a bit of a badass: rowdy, impious, a petty troublemaker. He could seem to incarnate some of the worst attributes of his country at that time, but interestingly his natural nonconformity puts him at odds with the Party and all it stands for. He has little interest in the Hitler Youth, for example, ready to shirk its obligations as often as he can. (He forges a lot of sick notes.) But he’s no resister, no young version of that postwar chimera, “the good German.”

The genius of the book is the way it lets us read against Walter’s vision of the world, and indeed that of German society writ large. Here’s an example, which I chose by opening the book to one of the pages I’d dog-eared. The man Walter’s sister has married, a Dane, takes Walter’s side in an argument between the boy and his sister. Walter has said that in England people never open their windows and they drive on the left—something his friend has told him—which is all basically true and presented only as the mildest criticism. (An earlier conversation in which Walter’s mother has told her son-in-law to stop using English words feels much more freighted.) But Anna, Walter’s sister, takes offense at her younger sibling. Her husband, Sörenson, mildly objects. Germans, he says, forget that everyone should be able to express their own opinion:

And as an example of tolerance he mentioned modern music, the kind where the notes were all in a jumble, the kind we didn’t have any more in Germany. In Denmark, people did often laugh when they heard that kind of modern music, but they also clapped. He’d seen it happen many, many times.

We see conversation between adults presented through the view of the child protagonist, without judgment or comment or perhaps even full understanding of the stakes. But we learn more about the adults than the child here. For what kind of an example is this? Certainly not a full-throated defense of the art the Nazis deemed degenerate (those notes “all in a jumble”). His description of audiences laughing suggests his opinion is shared among his countrymen. But maybe laughing and clapping is the best kind of tolerance: amused, bemused, generous. Yet that last sentence, with its repeated, unnecessary, special pleading “many,” makes me question his attitude still further. Is he making it up? On every page, Kempowski plays tricks like this with tone.

An Ordinary Youth was a huge bestseller at the time. What were those first audiences responding to? It’s hard to imagine. Maybe it’s that Kempowski so straddles the line between nostalgia for and critique of the Nazi era that readers can take whatever they want from the book. My hunch is that many German readers responded to its depiction of the Volksgemeinschaft, that community “we” all shared and where we had some good old times, no matter what they want us to say now, a response that of course ignores the book’s challenge to that community, structured as it is around absences like the burned-out synagogue Walter passes on the way to school or that store old Herr so-and-so (I can’t find the reference) left behind when he disappeared. (It makes me wonder who lived in that new apartment before them.) The characters are basically uninterested in these absences—in this sense the novel accurately represents its time.

Kempowski’s debut has long been taken to be untranslatable. Its original title, Tadellöser & Wolff, refers to a Kempowski family saying, one of those weird family things, the kind of thing you repeat because everyone in the family says it and sometimes no one even knows why. In this case, Löser & Wolff is a cigar manufacturer (Aryanized by the regime in 1937, incidentally), a brand beloved of the father, who plays with the name. If something is tadellos it is perfect, without flaws, or blameless. (I’m reminded of an indelible moment in Vasily Grossman’s “The Hell of Treblinka” where he quotes an SS man who called the “grilling” system of the layering and burning of bodies in mass graves tadellos.) Walter takes up the phrase: on a visit to the country he trots it out to some country-bumpkin kids, blithely telling them that’s how everyone talks in the city.

The nonsensical phrase (which takes on a life of its own: Walter adapts other words so that they are also “löser & Wolff”ed) exists alongside dozens, even hundreds of lyrics interpolated into the text, almost all of them from popular songs or Lieder in the Schubert sense, and a few from poems. Translator Michael Lipkin has done something amazing in bringing the book into English. (I’m not sure I needed him to cite the source of every song lyric, though.) The publisher refers to this collage as the novel’s “echo chamber of voices,” without which Kempowski could not investigate the meaning of subjectivity in a mass popular society. I bet some smart folks have written about how An Ordinary Youth at once instantiates and challenges the very idea of the Bildungsroman.

Hats off to NYRB for making this translation happen. I hope more Kempowski is in their plans. (See below for more on the one they released first. They have a third title, which I have since read, too.)

Jenny Offill, Weather (2020)

Fragments from the life of an overeducated, underemployed New Yorker with the requisite terrific child and corresponding fears of climate change. A lot of it rang true—even the precious bits—but if I want to mourn the loss of the world as we know it in the company of a neurotic, bien pensant book lover, I’ll just have a little me time, you know?

Walter Kempowski, All for Nothing (2006) Trans. Anthea Bell (2015)

Some of my most memorable reading experiences have taken place in winter. Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, devoured over an unusually cold Arkansas Christmas just before our daughter was born. The never-to-be-matched-in-impact double-whammy of Absalom, Absalom and Barthes’s S/Z, in the snowiest Halifax January I can remember. And now, in another colder than average Arkansas winter (yes, it’s still climate change), Walter Kempowski’s magisterial late work, All for Nothing. Which is a bitterly cold book, in setting and to some extent tone. It’s late January 1945 in East Prussia and everyone knows the Russians are coming. But in a once-grand, now mostly shut-up manor house, life continues in a semblance of cultured normality. It’s like that scene with the French family in Indochina from the long cut of Apocalypse Now.

There’s the dreamy, beautiful woman of the house, who shuts herself in her quarters with tea and cigarettes and desultory reading, like a heroine from Turgenev; the absent husband, an officer in charge of requisitioning foodstuffs for the Reich, currently stationed in Italy; his aunt, who wishes she were still in the Silesia of her childhood but who keeps the place going and has no interest in taking down the portrait of Hitler in her room, despite suggestions from others that this might be wise; three Ostarbeiter, a Pole who tends the horses and does the heavy work, and two Ukrainian girls who cook and clean; and Peter, a mild, quiet, inquisitive boy whose regular illnesses keep him from Hitler Youth roughhousing, and who loves nothing more than examining bits of the world (a snowflake, a drop of blood, a crumb) under his new microscope, and who sometimes goes into the room that belonged to his younger sister, left as it was on the day she died of scarlet fever. Across from the manor is a working-class settlement built by the Party in the late 30s: its most officious inhabitant stares in grim resentment over at the manor house while he tends to his wife, lost in depression after their son was killed at the front.

To these wonderfully drawn characters come a series of visitors, all of them only too happy to share the warmth and food on offer in the manor house: a one-legged opportunist convinced that by buying up rare stamps on the cheap he is ensuring his future security; a young violinist, fanatically devoted to the Party; a Jew the woman of the house agrees to hide for an evening, seemingly for no other reason than her desire to have something happen.

The tone is quiet and anxious. How much can this episodic aimlessness last? (The question asked by characters and readers alike.) A convoy of refugees has been streaming west for days now. The carriage is packed, the horses fed and watered. But where are all those people going, this is their home, is there any need to leave now, just how close are those weapons booming now day and night? The family delays and then, abruptly, leaves. And the book becomes more eventful: the roving point of view centers on Peter, the tone becomes more muted, almost shell-shocked, a little naïve even as its events become extravagant and terrifying.

I kept waiting for the violence of the Red Army to erupt and overwhelm the characters. And, yes, this does happen. But so stealthily it’s hard to know how we got from the warmth of the manor house to overturned carts, dead animals, and bombed out refugees on the side of an icy road. Fascinatingly, the Soviets almost never appear in the book. (I was reminded of how seldom Germans factor in depictions of the camps, etc.) For me, All for Nothing is most brilliant in his suggestion that the apocalypse arrives gradually, almost banally.

I encourage you to read R. Nicht’s brilliant take on the book. (Just one clarification: although Kempowski often returns in his writing to the history of East Prussian, he did not grow up there (he was born in Hamburg and grew up in Rostock); All for Nothing is not strictly speaking autobiographical.)

The consensus seems to be that All for Nothing is Kempowski’s greatest work. (He wrote a ton, though, hardly any of it yet in English, so who knows.) Anthea Bell’s translation is gorgeous, somber and elegiac; I wonder how much of that is Kempowski’s “late style” and how much is Bell’s predilection. (I’m thinking of the way some of Sebald is more melancholy in English than in German.) It’s true though that the quotes in this book come mostly from Goethe and Schiller, unlike the pop music of An Ordinary Youth. It feels wise and resonant the way the classics do at their best. I once heard Edwin Frank, NYRB’s publisher, say he always read the last line of a novel first. (Insane!) I bet he nodded in satisfaction when he paged to the end of this book.

Tremendous stuff.

Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (2023)

Before Sister Holiday ran away to New Orleans and became a nun she played in an all-girl punk band, carried on a torrid, doomed affair with her married best friend (and bandmate), and made a bunch of other bad decisions. Now she’s teaching music to mostly disaffected kids in the Catholic school attached to her convent, covering her ink with gloves and a scarf, sparring with a sister who can’t stand her, and taking succor from the Mother Superior, the only woman in the country who would accept her when she came calling. But when a maintenance worker dies in a suspicious fire that also injures two of the students—and other fires follow thick on the first—Sister Holliday turns detective, (implausibly) tagging along with a painkiller-addicted fire investigator. Can you believe it—she solves the crime!!!

I heard about Scorched Grace from several UK readers, and I can see why the novel, heavy on atmospherics, might be popular with non-Americans. (As far as I can tell, the author isn’t from NOLA; to me it feels like she tries too hard to set the scene just so.) Just wait until it’s translated into German. They’re gonna eat this shit up. The subtitle (“A Sister Holiday Mystery”) implies Douaihy has plans for a series. More power to her, but I think this would have been better as a standalone.

Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960

A find end to my reading year. Morrison, Vermette, Jacobsen, and, above all, Kempowski. See anything here to strike your fancy?

Two Superior Spy Thrillers

Posted on by under book review, Uncategorized

Does anyone remember the movie Crank from 2006? Jason Stratham plays a hit man injected with a poison that will kill him if his heart rate drops. What follows is 90 minutes of preposterous enjoyment, and a master class in narrative efficiency. There is no goal; there is only go. The movie barely has a beginning, and who knows what the end is (it’s telling that I can’t remember, because even more than most narratives this ending must undo all that’s come before). Instead it’s all middle, just one set piece after another of ingenious contrivances designed to keep the character’s—and the viewer’s—heart pounding.

I thought of Crank when reading Lionel Davidson’s terrific thriller Kolymsky Heights (1994). Davidson’s novel is more sophisticated, but like the now mostly forgotten movie it reducing narrative to its essentials. What’s really amazing is that Kolymsky does so over almost 500 pages, not a single one of which is wasted. The book gets its hooks into you from the beginning and doesn’t let go. That’s true even when it does something unorthodox, like taking until page 60 to introduce us to the hero.

And what an interesting hero he is. Jean-Baptiste Porteur is known as Johnny Porter. He is a Gitskan Indian from the Skeena River area of Northern British Columbia. (How timely and exciting to have an Indigenous protagonist., one whose indigeneity is central to his success—and not because he’s “in tune with the land” or some such nonsense but because he can speak so many languages.) Porter is a linguistic genius, having as a child already mastered several Native languages from the region, including Tsimshean, “a language so unique that linguists had been unable to relate it to any other on earth.” Later he is sent to a mission school (the horrors of which are glossed over—I’d like to think a book written today wouldn’t do so), where he learns English and French. Porter begins studying at two prestigious Canadian universities—studies interrupted by a sojourn in Russia—before completing his degree and winning a Rhodes scholarship.

Porter is back in Canada pursuing legal claims against the Canadian government when he is approached by an Englishman named Lazenby, who has received a coded message from a research station in Siberia that no one in the West knows the purpose of. Lazenby, who is the character we follow for the first 60 pages, reaches out to a former student now working for British secret services and the CIA; agents from these institutions are the ones who tap Porter as the only person able to get into Siberia, penetrate the defenses of the research station, and return. Lazenby flies to Northern British Columbia, makes his case to Porter, and exits the novel. Porter, phlegmatic, bemused, and interested despite himself, meets with the CIA and takes the case.

What follows is a gloriously ingenious journey via Japan and a Korean ship through the Northwest Passage into the heart of Siberia. Porter disguises himself as a member of the Chukchee people (he speaks the language, as well as related ones such as Evenk), going by the name of Kolya Khodyan. He gets a job at a transport company in the Green Cape along the Kolyma River (where earlier in the century many of the Gulags had been located) and patiently waits for his chance to sneak into the top-secret research facility. (This involves befriending the local Medical Officer, with whom he enters a relationship much more touching, plausible, and non-exploitative than the ones you usually find in spy novels.) The best parts of the novel detail the winter transportation routes across Siberia, mostly along frozen rivers in jeep-like vehicles called bobiks. (Kolymsky Heights has good maps and if you’re anything like me you will refer to them over and over.)

Golden Kupol

I pretty much loved everything about Kolymsky Heights. Particularly intriguing is the absence of any references that would allow us to date the events. The events of 1991 are never mentioned, though I suppose they are indirectly alluded to in the increasing national/ethnic self-consciousness of the indigenous peoples of the north (though this is always accompanied by contempt/casual racism by whites, a fact Porter uses to his benefit, in that people are always underestimating him because they think he is “just” a Chukchee or an Evenk). I take the book to be set around the time of its writing, that is, in an interim period in which the Cold War is taken by many to be over but Russia remains an enemy, though of what kind it isn’t quite clear.

That uncertainty might explain why the mystery at the ostensible heart of the book—what is the going on at that underground research station?—isn’t the usual Cold War fare. The Russians don’t have a terrible new weapon that threatens humanity, for example. This mystery is much more intellectual, even ontological, concerning what it means to be a human being. (A question which, frankly, was answered in a more profound manner in the labour camps strewn across the whole area in which this book is set and which were just being closed at the time of its publication.) All mysteries have an easier time building up suspense than resolving it, and if there is any weakness to this novel it’s with the scenario Porter uncovers at the research station. I had a hard time really caring about the Big Reveal. But I cared a lot about how Porter was going to break into that place and then get out again. Porter’s escape through the blizzards of the Siberian winter is one of the most exciting things I’ve ever read.

A vivid evocation of a particular time and place is one of the things that links Kolymsky Heights to a thriller I read a few weeks later: Joseph Hone’s The Private Sector (1971). But that’s about the only thing these books have in common. If Kolymsky Heights reminded me of Crank, The Private Sector is, oh, I don’t know, Antonioni maybe. The Private Sector is not particularly suspenseful (though the last thirty pages or so really pick up the pace; it turns out this is the first in a four-book series and you can tell Hone is playing the long game). Nor is its presentation of events always clear. Hone is fond of shifts in perspective and time that are at times so oblique that I had read a few pages before I noticed what had happened. And the story itself is much more complicated than in Kolymsky Heights. In Davidson’s book, we know what the hero is trying to do; the suspense lies in seeing whether he will be able to, and how, exactly he will accomplish it. In Hone’s, not even the protagonist (no heroes here) is sure what he’s meant to do. This is the world of triple agents and double crossings familiar to me from the little amount of John le Carré I’ve read.

But whereas most spy fiction takes the transience of its characters for granted—having nothing to say about it beyond fetishizing the freedom of its invariably male protagonists from the clutter of bourgeois life—Hone makes this situation into an existential dilemma for his characters, all of whom have hybrid identities that complicate their work for British intelligence. Marlow, the central figure, is born in Ireland but grows up in England. He meets Henry Edwards—who first recruits him into intelligence work and whom he is now, many years later, assigned to track down—at a private school in post-Suez Cairo, where both are teachers. Edwards has grown up in Egypt, as has Bridget, the woman whom by the time of the narrative present he has become involved with and who happens to be Marlow’s ex-wife. It’s all very complicated and it doesn’t make it easier that all the male characters have first-name surnames. (Their control back in London is named Williams.)

What Kolymsky Heights does for the cold, The Private Sector does for heat and humidity in pre-air conditioning Cairo. Hone vividly describes how the heat sends everyone underground, holing up by day and timidly venturing forth at night. I was reminded of Olivia Manning’s descriptions of Egypt in the first volume of the Levant Trilogy, which I read a few years back and unaccountably didn’t finish. (If you haven’t read The Balkan Trilogy yet, stop reading this post and do so immediately. These two books are fantastic, but they’re no Balkan Trilogy.)

Egypt+Cairo+La+Place+Tahrir

All of which is to say that Nassar’s Egypt in May 1967, rushing into a war with Israel that, in Hone’s telling at least, it has no real interest in, is more than just an exotic locale. It is home to most of the characters even though almost none of them think of it that way. They think of themselves as from England, a place most of them have spent very little time in. Though less overtly uninterested in the locals than many novels set in expatriate or colonial/Pieds-Noir communities—an Egyptian colonel, in particular, is an important and appealing character—The Private Sector is still almost entirely about Westerners. That’s certainly a limitation, but I found its depiction of colonials living on in the wake of decolonization fascinating.

Here, for example, is Marlow describing Henry Edwards’s particular tribe, those Englishmen who had grown up in Egypt, would never be Egyptian, yet are highly attuned to it:

[T]hey were natural seismographs alive to its [Cairo’s] smallest tremors. They had not always been happy there; so much the more were they bound to it: they had lived a real life in the city, had given nothing false to it, in every minute passed there. Their dreams of elsewhere, of rain, of ploughed fields, sloes in the hedgerow or London Transport, were as unreal as mine would have been for sun and coral, and clear blue water. The known years spent in a landscape never tie us to it, the marked calendar from which we can stand back and reflect or think of change; we are bound to a place by the unconscious minutes and seconds lost there, which is not measurable time or experience, and from which there is no release.

You can see what I mean when I say Hone isn’t exactly easy going. His narrator is always stepping back from the action to offer these sorts of reflections. With its sophisticated syntax and complex ideas, this passage is typical. Our dreams, Hone suggests, are always of elsewhere. For him dreams are conscious things, meditations that fill our days even as we ignore our surroundings. But it turns out we’re not really ignoring them. We might think we know where we’re from—after all, we do live “real” lives, we do give ourselves over to the place where we live, it’s not that we are living in bad faith all the time—but we’re tied to the place of our history by something deeper than what we can know. We can’t even measure these experiences, but nor can we get rid of them. Most of time, this passage tells us, we live in clichés (sloes in the hedgerow or coral in a clear sea) when what really matters is happening to us unannounced.

I don’t cite this passage in order to say that Hone transcends the thriller genre, because I don’t think genres need to be transcended. They exert a hold on us for a reason. (If we’re going to wish them away we should do so in the spirit of true freedom and gleeful destruction, as Tom does, rather than as a covert way to uphold literary fiction as the standard for all writing.) Better to say that Hone’s book is both a very good spy story—though for pure excitement it’s got nothing on Davidson’s—and a thoughtful meditation on belonging. Although Marlow is thinking in this passage about belonging to nations or cities—about England and Egypt, London and Cairo—in the end the book pursues the idea most intensely in terms of the intelligence community. What allegiances do we owe to institutions that pursue their work by breaking allegiances—that is, by spying? Given its—to me, completely unexpected—ending, it’s clear Hone will have more to say about this question in the rest of the series.

*

Maybe the best thing about these wonderful books is the serendipitous way I came across them. I found Kolymsky Heights the old-fashioned way: browsing in a good bookstore, in this case Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C. I’d never heard of Davidson, but I knew I was on to a good thing when, a day or two later, I had the good fortune to finally meet face to face with Eric Passaglia at an evening with several bloggers and book lovers organized by the inimitable Frances. (Eric has no blog, sadly, but you should follow him on Twitter.) Eric sang Davidson’s in a way that made me wonder yet again how it was I had never run across him before. The book Eric had with him that night was by Joseph Hone (I can’t remember if it was The Private Sector or one of the later ones) and he described him so appealingly that I tracked the book down at the library as soon as I returned home. Serendipity, then, and the reassurance that comes from a trusted source’s recommendation (which is what independent bookstores at their best can do): that’s how I came across these two books. I’m here to pass on the love. If you have even the least interest in spy thrillers, you should read Davidson and Hone without delay.

The Paying Guests–Sarah Waters (2014)

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Just so you know, I reveal details of the plot here, so maybe bookmark this for later if you’re planning to read the book anytime soon.

Near the beginning of The Paying Guests, Frances Wray, the novel’s protagonist, looks in on her mother before going to bed. Mrs. Wray is sitting up in bed with “a book in her lap, a little railway thing called Puzzles and Conundrums: she had been trying out answers to an acrostic.” Near the end of the book, after dramatic events that Frances has kept secret, she feverishly speculates that her mother has guessed part of what has happened: “But how long before she worked out more? How long before the whole thing knitted itself together, like one of her wretched acrostics?”

These references are quite disparaging (“a little railway thing,” “wretched”), which is surprising, since, on the face of it at least, The Paying Guests is greatly interested in puzzles, mysteries, enigmas, and the like. In the great tradition of Golden Age British crime fiction, these mysteries concern unlikely protagonists. The Paying Guests’s Wrays live in a respectable London suburb. The Great War has been over for four years but its effects persist, not least in their household. Frances’s two brothers died in the fighting, and her father of ill health and grief soon after, leaving behind an unpleasant surprise: his investments turn out to be nearly worthless. Mother and daughter live on in the family home, a home that is too big for them, and too expensive. They have long since let the servants go; now the only solution to their financial straits is to let part of the house to strangers.

The novel begins with the arrival of the lodgers, the Barbers. (Mrs. Wray calls them “paying guests,” in keeping with her willingness to delude herself about anything she doesn’t want to face.) Leonard and Lilian are a young lower-middle class couple: he works as an insurance agent, she looks after their home and dreams of art school. They are the novel’s first puzzle: we share in the Wrays’ half-horrified, half-fascinated efforts to figure them out. Their manner of speaking, their gramophone, their rooms decorated in garish bohemianism: all set them apart from the fastidious, self-regarding, and yet increasingly threadbare world of their landladies (a term Frances uses to shock her mother).

Frances is a character we’ve come to know from some of Waters’s other books, especially The Night Watch (2006): the melancholic lesbian. Much of the great sadness of the Wray household arises from her thwarted hopes. We learn of her pacifist and suffragist activism during the war years (she was briefly arrested for throwing a shoe at an MP), and the woman, Christina, she met and fell in love with during that time. Later we learn of the crisis when Christina asks her to live with her and Frances bows to her sense of family obligation and breaks the relationship off. Frances cares for her mother and the household, she manages the finances as best she can. The book is a study in the exhaustion that comes from making small economies at a time when the daily business of keeping up a household was much more labour intensive than it is now. Waters describes the housework in detail: the fires to be made and kept up, the dusting and sweeping, the scrubbing by hand of the tiles, twice, first with vinegar to remove the dirt, then again with water to get a shine (which of course soon fades). Bathwater must be heated; the WC is across the yard. Even going to bed is “a round of chores—the gatherings, the turnings-down, the cushion-plumpings and the lockings-up.”

Frances, though a puzzle to her family (her mother in particular effects not to know about her daughter’s sexual orientation, holding out hope that she will find a man, and therefore a purpose to her life), isn’t one to herself. She knows the solution to her ennui (meaningful work, recognition, a room of her own, love, life) but can’t imagine where it might come from. To her surprise—but not to ours, at least not to those of us who have read Waters before—the solution turns out to be right in front of her, right under her roof in fact.

Frances and Lilian, who are often alone in the house together, slowly become friendly, their relationship characterized, on Frances’s part at least, by a muted gallantry that is part of the way she keeps all the important things about herself in check, hidden from everyone, even, almost, herself. Eventually Frances outs herself to Lilian, telling her about Christina. Lilian’s responds with wary reserve; Frances curses herself for saying too much; the intimacy dies as quickly as it had flared. But one night everything suddenly changes, Lilian’s reserve is revealed to have been fear of her feelings, and the two fall headlong into a charged relationship that consists, like the experience of being closeted, of hiding in plain sight: they steal moments together whenever they can, even under the very noses of Leonard and Mrs. Wray.

Then a lot of things happen at once. Lilian reveals she is pregnant and asks Frances to administer some pills she has purchased illegally from a shady chemist’s. The night she induces a miscarriage is the same night Leonard comes home early from a business meeting. He assumes the child is a sign that Lilian has been involved with another man. When he threatens Lilian, Frances tells him the truth. Leonard attacks her in a rage; a desperate Lilian beats him off with an ashtray, the first thing that comes to hand; the blow to the back of the head kills him.

The women subside in relief that quickly turns to shock. Lilian convinces Frances not to call a doctor or the police. Instead they manage to remove the body—Waters is great on the physicality of bodies, especially as revealed through sex, work, and death: the scene in which they desperately drag the corpse downstairs, out through the garden, and into the lane behind the house, before Frances’s mother comes home from her bridge night is a marvel of suspense and horror—and erase the signs of the struggle. Here the descriptions of cleaning that earlier seemed only to remind us of the emptiness of Frances’s life take on new urgency; so too do the earlier meditations on its futility (everything fades, everything decays: the porcelain collection always collects new dust, the freshly scrubbed floor always attracts someone’s muddy boots) take on new irony: some traces of the crime (bloodstains on the carpet, for example) simply can’t be expunged.

Murder, it seems, will out. The police become increasingly suspicious about the crime. It seems inevitable that the women will be found out. Their actions drive a wedge between them: they are physically separated, Lilian’s family takes her to stay with them, and emotionally separated, caught in a series of emotional upheavals ranging between fear of getting caught, elation at how everything seems to be breaking their way, paranoia that the authorities know more than they’re letting on, shame at having their comfortable lives mixed up in murder, and guilt at the idea that someone else might be held accountable for their actions.

Yet whenever the book seems to become conventional, it shrugs its shoulders, reveals conventionality to have been a red herring. Take for example its decision to limit its narration closely to Frances. We only really know how Frances is feeling. Lilian remains much more shadowy. Thus we too become suspicious of her motivations, her loyalties, her responses. We share in Frances’s suspicions. Did Lilian know, for example, about the large life insurance policy Leonard had taken out on himself only a few months before his death? Does Lilian love her—she’s never been with a woman before, after all—or is she taking advantage of her?

Lilian is the novel’s greatest enigma. We always have to read her through others’ perceptions. Even her most direct utterance—a love letter she sends Frances when away on holiday with Leonard—turns out to be open to more sinister interpretations. Added to this inscrutability are the facts that come to light about Leonard after his death. He turns out to have been having a long-standing affair with another woman, Billie, whose sometime boyfriend/fiancée, Spencer, had beaten him savagely several months earlier. Leonard’s best friend Charlie, meanwhile, was involved with Billie’s sister, which explains why he maintained to the police that he and Leonard were together on the night of his death: he was with that girl and didn’t want his fiancée to know about it. (Are you keeping up with all this? It gets a bit complicated, though Waters is admirably lucid with her details.)

The book’s most interesting surprises have to do with the ease with which the women get away with their crime. No one notices those bloodstains on the carpets, especially after Lilian’s family and the police trample over the Barbers’ rooms. It rains heavily the night of the murder, washing away evidence and ensuring that the only possible witnesses (a spooning couple) couldn’t see anything. Suspicion, which had first fallen on Charlie, comes, after the revelations about Leonard’s affair, to rest on Spencer, a young tough with a record of assault. He admits to the earlier attack on Leonard and relishes, at least at first, being accused of a crime he insists he didn’t commit but which he is glad about. Even when the boy goes on trial for murder, prompting the women to agonize over their responsibility in letting an innocent man be accused, this problem too goes away: a new witness, a fellow lodger of Spencer and his mother—they let rooms in a house much shabbier than the Wrays’—comes forward at the trial to confirm that Spencer had been at home the night of the murder. This man—a war veteran who loses his sales job by testifying (he was meant to have been in Leeds on business)—is the most admirable character, the only one we can unreservedly sympathize with.

Significantly, the man is never named, and so stands, not as a British Everyman, but as a symbol of the possible integrity that might remain in a society that has been thoroughly transformed by war, no matter how people like Mrs. Wray try to pretend it hasn’t. Like so many other veterans, various examples of which flit through the novel, the man is scraping to make ends meet, trying out all sorts of odd jobs. To lose this one is a hardship: doing so reinforces his bitterness at the society that fails to acknowledge the things he went through on its behalf.

Unacknowledged sacrifices are everywhere in the book. These losses are as much of people as of ideals, most obviously of sons and brothers, but also of lovers, especially same-sex ones. They are losses of expectation and hope. Is this, various characters ask, what we fought the war for? In this regard, the paying guests of the title might be everyone in England, or almost everyone. Certain no one seems at home in the new order, and everyone has had to pay.

Everyone except, suddenly, Frances & Lilian. The jury is convinced by the ex-serviceman’s testimony and finds Spenser not guilty. Leonard’s death is destined to remain unsolved. The women are free, their consciousnesses mostly assuaged. And just when it seems as though none of those things are enough to overcome the harm that’s come to their relationship, just when Frances has contemplated suicide from the Battersea bridge (but, in her sensible way, quickly rejected it), at that very moment Lilian breathlessly arrives and the novel concludes by intimating a new beginning for the two of them.

In this way, The Paying Guests uses its crime story framework to ask the question, what would happen if you got what you wanted, if all the obstacles to your desire melted away? One answer is that there’s no such thing: there are always obstacles, we never get what we want. That’s the lesson of most crime stories, from Macbeth to Patricia Highsmith.

But the novel’s more interesting answer is that this crime does pay, because of the desire that motivates it. The most ingenious thing Waters has done here is to use the conventions of crime fiction to make her point about the invisibleness of same-sex, especially lesbian desire. Although Waters creates a lot of suspense as to whether suspicion will fall on Frances and Lilian, ultimately, she suggests, that suspense is beside the point. The law—exclusively, even obstreperously male here—simply cannot imagine Frances and Lilian as co-perpetrators, as co- anything. The police are no different from Leonard, who assumes his wife must have been with another man. We can imagine that, had the women confessed, the police would have been as unforgiving as Leonard was. But they’ll never get there on their own. Only other women—Lilian’s sisters in particular—can even begin to imagine the truth—not about the murder, but about the nature of Frances and Lilian’s relationship. But that “knowledge” can’t extend beyond an inarticulate suspicion of something queer.

Waters is too attuned to historical reality to paint too optimistic a picture of the possibilities enabled by the invisibility of lesbian desire. After all, the relationship between Frances’s former lover, Christa, and her artist friend Stevie appears only at the margins of the story: their life together seems precarious. And Waters doesn’t show us what Frances and Lilian’s life together looks like. But the absence of robust, open, healthy lesbian relationships isn’t just an acknowledgement of history. It’s also, more interestingly, a function of the book’s narrative form.

Waters hasn’t always handled similar material in the same way. The Night Watch, for example, is another story of war and homosexuality. There too, forms of life, expressions of desire, that are possible in wartime (in this case, WWII) become much more difficult afterwards. But that novel qualified its narrative of the rise of peacetime conventionality by telling its events in reverse (that was the source of much of its power), so that the narrative of the book countered the narrative of history.

By contrast, the conventional structure of The Paying Guests left me unsatisfied. Although suspenseful, it more often feels inert, as if it were leading to something it chooses not to develop. It’s not just my naïve desire to know whether things turn out happily ever after that was disappointed by the ending. I wanted the book to take on the challenge of imagining what Frances and Lilian’s life would look like, as two women living together, let alone two women who bore the burden of the secret of their responsibility in a crime.

I think the book is aware of this failure, if not in terms of its characters then in terms of its form. Remember those references to acrostics I started with. Although it’s helpful of Waters to use the second reference to remind us of the first, there’s an obviousness here—aren’t we supposed to make the connection between the daughter’s situation and the mother’s puzzles?—that makes me think about what kind of book The Paying Guests wants to be. For not all books are supposed to be puzzles. In this regard, the part of these passages that seems the most important is nothing to do with puzzles per se but rather with the kind of book the puzzles are in: “a little railway thing.” The dismissal is Frances’s, though it might equally be her echo of Mrs. Wray’s sensibility: its snobbishness disguised as self-deprecation suits her to a tee. It doesn’t really matter, since, at the beginning of the book, mother and daughter quite agree, at least on matters of social class.

But does Waters agree? I don’t think so. I think she wants to write “a little railway thing”—though, to be sure, and this is a significant difference, a queer one. Waters has always loved popular late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literary forms (sensation fiction, detective fiction, gothic fiction, suffragette memoirs). But her desire to re-write them from a queer perspective means she can never inhabit them fully. In her past work, this has felt like an enlivening tension. But here the ambivalence comes across as more uncertain. One way to take the measure of that uncertainty is to consider the novel’s allusions to canonical literary modernism, a movement that prided itself on being puzzling.

The opening line—“The Barbers had said they would arrive by three”—feels like a flat echo of the one that famously begins Mrs. Dalloway: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Frances’s meditation on her neighbourhood’s seclusion—“you’d never guess that a mile or two further north lay London, life, glamour, all that”—sounds like a drier, less rhapsodic version of Clarissa’s hymn to “what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.” (Waters’s book, by contrast, begins on “a wet April evening.”) But when Frances does slip into the city, she sounds like the much-wealthier Clarissa:

She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged… It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that on was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it!

The rush of metaphors, the sensual attunement to the world, the exclamatory free indirect discourse: why, Frances here almost makes herself into the peals of Big Ben that boom and dissolve across Woolf’s novel.

As I read on, I kept finding other modernist references: the flower-seller Frances dashes over to as she accompanies Christina reminded me of the destination of Clarissa’s initial errand. Other references seemed more overt. The description of a sudden, pregnant silence—“She was aware of rain, in a sudden shower”—echoes the line from “The Waste Land” about the summer that surprises “in a shower of rain.” Frances’s hysterical vision, as she waits for Lilia not return from the chemist’s with the abortifacients, of a London overrun with infants—“Everywhere she looked she saw prams, she saw babies with pink, alive faces”—echoes Vivienne Eliot’s similar yet much more horrified vision in a letter to her husband. And Lilian’s exclamation about a poor world reminded me of Stevie’s heartfelt cry in The Secret Agent, “Bad world for poor people!”

At times I thought Waters might be thinking of her own novel as a kind of dialogue with that earlier novel, Conrad’s own remarkable exploration of the uses that genre fiction (spy stories, detective fiction) might be put to. I haven’t the energy to check if I’ve remembered this correctly, but Leonard stays in my mind as fleshly, rather like Conrad’s Verloc, and there is, of course, the similarity between the novels of a murder committed from outraged despair at the thought that the person one most loves might be threatened. Conrad subordinates genre convention to modernist imperative much more than Waters; and his book is much more pessimistic, even deterministic. So I don’t want to suggest they’re in any way the same book. I’m similarly willing to admit that I may be finding these allusions where they don’t really exist. (Did anyone else notice them?) But they struck me as signs of Waters’s own uncertainty about what kind of a book she’d written: a conventionally, if carefully structured crime story that might while away a railway journey that sometimes willfully disdains the more experimental literature of the period in which it is set yet which sometimes yearns for, even needs that very experimentalism as a way to be able to tell what, in the actual genre fiction of the period, would have been an untellable story. (Again, maybe I’m wrong. There might be a ton of Golden Age lesbian crime fiction that I don’t know about. If so, please enlighten me!)

I certainly don’t regret reading The Paying Guests (it’s long, probably too long, but a quick read). I’ll read anything Waters writes. But I don’t think this one quite came off. Perhaps we might think of it as a bit of a paying guest amongst the more established instances of her impressive body of work.