Fionavar

Re-reading The Summer Tree, the first book in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Trilogy is both a delight and a puzzle.  The delight I’ll explore shortly, but the puzzle?  The puzzle is why I am drawn to books like this, stories about elves and magicians, other worlds and fantasy kingdoms, books that are often in several volumes, books that require a preface giving the names and relationships of the thirty or more key characters about to appear.  It isn’t the complexity, which at times can be a might frustrating:  who was Na-Brendel again?  Yes, I’m fudging here.  The answer is clear.  These books are the stuff of dreams, the tantalising if foolish and momentary belief that all this could happen to me, pulled out of a humdrum earthly life into an amazing adventure, thrilling, risky, and yet fulfilling.

How many pages did it take for Kay to grab my attention?  Precisely one!  Chapter 1 of The Summer tree begins like this:

In the spaces of calm almost lost in what followed, the question of why tended to surface.  Why them?  There was an easy answer that had to do with Ysanne beside her lake, that didn’t really address the deepest question.  Kimberley, white-haired, would say when asked that she could sense a glimmered pattern when she looked back, but one need not be a seer to use hindsight on the warp and weft of the Tapestry, and Kim, in any event, was a special case.

White-haired Kimberly, a seer;  the Tapestry; and she was a special case.  Phrases like that tend to ensure I’ll read on, and just a few pages later we are at the University of Toronto and people are going in to a lecture theatre to hear a paper being presented at the Second International Celtic Conference.  Dave Martyniuk is there, feeling uncomfortable, (his brother is a speaker, but the topic’s not his thing), and then he sees Kevin Laine, Paul Schafer (both of whom he might prefer to avoid), and meets Kim Ford and Jennifer Lowell.  Whoa, it’s complicated already.

A couple of pages later, we learn that high up in the hall, effectively invisible, there are two observers, a dwarf and an older man.  They watch the five – they are the five, whatever that means, and the older man looks carefully at each one.  When he is studying Paul Schafer, Paul finds himself pulled away from the inside of the hall, and finds himself in a forest, confronting the ‘haunted eyes of a dog or a wolf’.  As he looks round, he sees a tall man, with great antlers of a stag on his head.  You might not be lost in this story at this stage, but I was, and was again when I reread it.  I don’t mean lost in the sense of confused, but rather entranced, and I have to know what is going on.  Once again, I won’t be satisfied until I reach the end of The Darkest Road, the final book in the trilogy.

Some books when you read them again are familiar, comfortable even.  When I reread The Hobbit recently, it was like an old friend.  I knew the shape of the book, and felt comfortable with the knowledge that I could already see the journey we were about to make.  There would be details that I hadn’t remembered, but it was as if I knew the underlying shape of what was to come.  Kay manages to make that harder, in part because he keeps throwing in details, presentiments, warnings and irrelevancies at every stage.

It is rather like trying to follow a magician’s tricks.  You know what you are seeing has been carefully constructed, and you know what you want to see is being hidden.  This trilogy is worse in the early stages because what you want to see is there, to be picked apart from all the other information, but everything in front of you has its place.  It is far too tricky to follow it all.  It is as if Kay wants to keep you reading, and then, every so often, go ’Ah, now I see what that meant.’  Isn’t that a literary jigsaw puzzle of the best kind, bits and pieces embedded in the narrative, waiting to be pulled out and used later on?  Perhaps it reflects the structure of the books:  there’s much to be covered in the early sections, often as background, only to make sense when you have it all available to you, once the story has progressed.

There is a wonderful section early on when one of the five who has crossed into the world of Fionavar, Paul, plays chess with the King.  It’s a game that is fascinating in itself – youthful aggression played against older wisdom and patience.  But it is also a preliminary to a long and important discussion, as Paul learns about some of the complexities of the world he has entered.  We also pick up hints and understand that the two women are to play key roles in the future: Kim has some kind of connection to Ysanne, a seer; and Jennifer’s beauty will draw to her a key figure.  We learn about the Summer Tree, where a king must go and die.

It is as if we are getting some outlines of a complicated three-dimensional sketch.  As each tentative line is added to the picture, it becomes more complex, not less.  As we get deeper into the story, we begin to worry some of the things we thought were clear are not.  And, to pursue that sketch analogy, it is now apparent that some of the lines are green, some are red, some are indistinct and uncertain.  This is an intellectual game.  What is really going on?  What is true? Dangerous games, for sure, and just as intoxicating as the events you read about.  Guy Gavriel Kay can write:  if Tolkien swept you up with adventures, Kay has the same ability to construct compelling events, but also has the same skill to entrance you.  Even now, as I’m writing, I want to keep reading.

Let me ask again:  why are stories of this kind so compelling?  I wonder if they represent some kind of progress in our thirst for fiction.  When we are young, the stories that entrance us are only gently complex.  In The Wind in the Willows, much of the story is an account of friendship, leisure and small adventures.  Toad is foolish, but not excessively so.  Rat is heroic, but manageably so.  Mole is loyal, but not blindly so.  And Badger is wise, but not oppressively so.  There are dramas and excitements, but they are at an easily appreciated pace.  Even the battle at Toad Hall is easily won, and without much bloodshed.  Similarly Alice, in Wonderland’, goes through amazing changes, and confronts difficult people, but there is a sense it will all be resolved and nothing really frightening will take place.

The next step up, for boys when I was that age, are adventures with more of an edge.  Treasure Island is my best example.  There are real fights, real dissensions, and the risk of being marooned, of death, of disaster.  At the same time we meet people who are more than just nasty:  some of the characters are frightening, some are evil, and some are paradoxical.  Long John Silver is sufficiently complex to make him a memorable character, a mixture of good, caring, manipulative and downright dangerous.  From there it is only a short step to Bilbo Baggins and the dramas of Lord of the Rings.  Now our heroes are complex, and they face very real dangers.  People die, and these include characters that you had come to love.

I think the Fionavar trilogy takes us to the next stage.  It isn’t just that the story is complex, just as it was with Tolkien. It’s not just that we are meeting varieties of evil, and horrible challenges.  Now we face another development, where even the heroes are themselves complex, their actions often foolish or self-serving.  More to the point, you realise they have some critical flaws, and that they won’t always be ‘heroic’.  We’ve reached the point where, as adults, we are reading about individuals who are closer to ourselves, flawed, confused, driven by unsettling passions, tempted in various ways, and weak enough to lead them on to places and relationships they should have avoided.

As I reread the Fionavar trilogy, I felt Guy Gavriel Kay was offering me two books.  One is a marvellous, complicated, twisting story, concerned with overcome evil and risks to the world.  As in all stories of this kind that get us involved, things go wrong, mistakes are made, and for a lot of the time it seems like evil will triumph.  If not sitting on the edge of our chair, we are certainly thrilled, worried, occasionally flattened, and sometimes delighted.  Like many of the excellent fantasy books I’ve read, it is a compelling adventure.

However, the ‘other book’ is about the key people.  Dave Martyniuk, Kevin Laine, Kim Ford, Paul Schafer and Jennifer Lowell are very real.  They are driven by muddled emotions as much as by logic.  They have their personal flaws ad predilections.  You want them to triumph, but every so often you groan.  How could he have done that?  Is she really that oblivious to how she’s seen?  Like friends over the years, they become both close and yet frustrating.  These people might be in a book, but there are moments when you feel like giving them a serious talking to, and other times when all you can do is despair.

As older adults, we want story and person:  we like a complex twisting set of events.  We like the unexpected, the challenging, and the sense that everything might go really bad before – almost by the thinnest of threads – everything is pulled back from the brink.  But without those people, those very real characters, that wouldn’t be enough.  Is Dave really that blind to what is happening?  Is Kim aware of what will happen to her?  With a really good author, we are, as we are reading, partly inhabiting the people of the story.  Well, I am, as I groan at a choice that’s been made, or smile at a moment when love or understanding breaks through.

Compelling fantasies offer a subtle way to think about ourselves and those around us.  Novels set in our world, exploring complex relationships also do that.  But fantasies give us a freedom to step out of the self and enjoy experiences that are no longer ‘typical’.  They can invite us to ask questions about our motivations and expectations, about what we value and what we assume.  They have the advantage that is all at a distance, but, for me, they are no less personal.  In the case of some excellent fantasies I am reduced to tears at various moments.  How could that have happened?  I often feel I should shake myself at moments like that and remind myself ‘it’s just a story’.  But literature isn’t just a story, it’s a window, a window into humanity and a window into ourselves.

To use the word ‘window’ seems to suggest that this is all about looking at ourselves, using a story to make us reflect:  is this something I would have done?  Have I made mistakes like that?  However, fantasy does far more than tell ‘good stories’ and sometimes make us look back at our own mistakes and misunderstandings.  That makes the role of fantasy sound like a reflecting board, but it offers far more.  It is also a means to stretch us, to pull us out of the happy reflective times sitting in a comfortable chair with a novel on our lap.

No, really good fantasy doesn’t just entertain, it makes demands of us.  Like all really good fiction, we are being invited to learn, to reflect, but also to change, to see more possibilities in what we might do.  I don’t mean that it suggests we should start looking in the back of cupboards in the vague hope our wardrobe will offer a doorway to a fantasy world.  CS Lewis was helping his younger readers understand more about the adult world they were entering.  Others provoke more than simple understanding (and even Lewis managed to sneak in some Christian thinking, and a place for God in his readers’ eyes).

Good novels do more than offer escapism, and a sense that our world is acceptable by suggesting all the nasty, exciting and alarming stuff taking place somewhere else.  No, they keep reframing and rethinking what we think we know.  Lewis did an excellent job in helping his characters, and hence his readers, appreciate some of the complexities of the adult world, and, most important that what was happening in Narnia was also happening in Hull, or Bermondsey or Adelaide. Situations change as you grow older, and you have to take on roles and responsibilities that once seemed irrelevant (the stuff your stuff parents did) as you move through adolescence.

Kay takes that further.  As in any novel, he presents the reader with real interpersonal dilemmas and misunderstandings.  The twist of his fantasy in that it does something more, in that it allows us to imagine our way past present and future relationships in the world we ‘understand’ on to worlds, and therefore ways of understanding and behaving, which sit outside our experience.  That’s why magic matters:  it creates something new.  In Fionavar, magic is uncertain, dangerous, and yet it also holds out the promise that we can do more, be more than are today.

Fionavar offers another important perspective, as excellent novels often do, it allows us to imagine who we might do mor than out current lives suggest, to get us ‘breathe out’ as it were, expanding our world to offer space to what isn’t really or possible, and yet which is important if we are going to grow past the prosaic.  It isn’t surprising that children, as they grow up, delight in the possibilities of these other worlds.  Rather, the problem is that as children grow up, they – what’s the phrase – set aside childish things.  I would like to catch up with Paul one day and explain to him how his vision in Corinthians is essentially conservative.  What did he suggest?  “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11).  The idea of becoming grown up in Corinthians is limiting, entering and succumbing to the confines of adult world.

I’d much rather adults read books like to Fionavar Trilogy, and so many of the other excellent storis like them.  I want adults to retain their fascination with fantasy, not as mere stories, but as explorations of what could be, how our visions are compromised by our careless ‘sensible thinking’, and how our ability to remain interested in what might be is actually keeping us alert to possibilities and the benefits of escaping from sensible thinking – well, I concede, at least some of the time!

As far as I am concerned, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar trilogy is one invitation alongside many others to keep on seeking something more.  It is a reminder that our aspirations and hopes are often wrong or at least confused.  However, it is also a series that reminds us there are alternative paths to explore.  I might be getting older (just a little!), but I never want to lose that aspiration to seek another way, to step past increasingly out-of-date conventions and restrictions, and try something new to help us do better than we have in the past – both individually and in society as a whole.  Right now we are witnessing political parties and national leaders who are dragging us back to familiar and traditional ways of behaving.  I can’t think of a mor important time to toss all that stuff aside and find ways to take new steps forward, to want to create better ways of living for our friends and families, and to want to keep improving society.  Kay has it right:  it’s often messy, sometimes riddled with failure, but the desire to change and grow must be supported.  Read the Fionavar Trilogy and allow fantasy to help you keep the radical mid-set alive.

Pooh

This is an 'unpublished book review' from late 1964??  It would have been something to submit it to the Carleton Miscellany that year, but …  Isn't my imagination a wonderful thing!

We are about to confront a student text.  Let me quote from the Preface:

"Winnie-the-Pooh is, as practically everyone knows, one of the greatest books ever written, but it is also one of the most controversial.  Nobody can quite agree as to what it means.  This is why it will be an ideal book around which to organize all your work in Freshman English this semester.  Like the other casebooks, such as those on Harper's Ferry, Edith Wharton, and the personality adjustment difficulties of Poe and Ezra Pound, this one is frankly designed to keep you in confusion.  Try as you may, you will find it impossible to decide which of the critics represented has 'the word' about Pooh …"

Fortunately, we have Frederick C Crews, from the University of California, Berkeley, to guide us, with his insightful collection of papers written by such major critics as Harvey C Window (University of Pennsylvania, author of Paradoxical Persona), Martin Tempralis (Publisher and editor of the Jackson White Democrat), Woodbine Meadowlark (perpetual student at Harvard), Benjamin Thumb (Assistant Professor Emeritus at Oregon State), and Karl Anschauung (ex-Freud's circle of followers), among others.  Enough by way of introduction:  it is time to get serious, and review some of the critical insights set out in The Pooh Perplex.

Harvey Window's analysis of Paradoxical Persona is the first essay, and a most important one.  As he observes "The heart of the matter is revealed in the opening chapter, 'We Are Introduced' – the 'We, I take it, referring to four personages, the Milnean voice, the Christophoric ear, Christopher Robin and Pooh.  I guess that is obvious, but Window soon gets into the critical details:  "The Milnean voice, however, in its didactic-paternal role, is unprepared simply to feed the self-love of the Christophoric ear; it (the voice) must also see that it (the ear) is properly edified in a moral sense" (emphasis in the original).  Most helpful is his later rejection of Wart's theory; Wart was writing in Mandala I, on 'Myth, Symbol, Ritual and Archetype, where he mistakenly (obviously mistakenly) suggested that Pooh is an "Orphic deity with seasonal-sacrificial-redemptive crop-growing characteristics.  I mean, really!!  However, it was disappointing to see Window gave little space to analysing Alexander Beetle's role in the story.

It is followed by Martin Tempralis on A Bourgeois Writer's Proletarian Fables, an essay which addresses the hidden socio-political implications of Milne's work.  As Tempralis notes, Milne was 'thoroughly bourgeois'.  Brilliantly, Tempralis examines all the characters, and I think his view of Owl (the 'pedantic plutocrat who resides at The Chestnuts) is especially insightful:

"A spelling champion and a master of flowery, empty rhetoric, Owl is the necessary handservant to the raw acquisitive  passion of Rabbit, which badly needs to be cloaked in grandiosities.  The friendship of these two intellectual thugs is a perfect representation of the true role of 'scholarship' in bourgeois-industrial society:  the end purpose of Owl's obscure learning is to spread a veil of confusion over the doings of the fat cats, to cow the humble into submission before the graven idols of 'objective truth' and 'the Western Tradition', and to rob the proletariat of its power to protest.  What could be more meaningful than the fact Owl has stolen the very tail from the back of Eeyore, the most downcast and bounced-upon member of society, and converted it into his doorbell."

Martin has hit his head on the nail, and we are all the better for it.  [Editor:  please check this remark – I think I have it right.]

Myron Masterton provides an extremely insightful analysis of the salacious underside to Pooh [Editor:  please check this sentence, as it may not be the best expression of my thoughts].   Masterton reminds us that concern was already evident when When We Were Very Young was published, observing

"my youngest son, Charlie, stopped me and asked to hear these lines from 'The Mirror' again: 

And there I saw a white swan make

 Another white swan in the lake

'God, how did they let that one through', lisped Trudy.  And little Stephen said 'That's nothing.  Read that real wild couple from 'Vespers''.  With mingled misgivings and interest I allowed Billy and Jane to fumble their tiny fingers through the pages until they came upon these lines, which they recited in gleeful unison:

God bless Mummy.  I know that's right.

Wasn't it fun in the bath tonight?

Oh, my!  As Masterton adds, it is clear from the text that Christopher Robin had recently suffered from the destruction and repression of his Oedipus Complex, a process that "provides a key" to the whole of Winnie-the-Pooh.  Later, you'll member, Pooh is found by a river looking for 'Poles', clearly a phallic reference since Pooh admits he wants to avoid mentioning the East Pole for a while, since "people don't like talking about them".

So much for the opening essays.  Once we get to Woodbine Meadowlark, we are into even more compelling territory.  A la recherche du Pooh perdu is amazing, eye-opening stuff.  Woodbine asks a key question early in her analysis (I think Woodbine is a 'she'): in her opinion, the core issue the Pooh address is "a debate over wisdom, and an attempt to arrest the clock at the wisdom of childhood".  Just so,

Do you recall that key passage when Pooh and Piglet are debating issues underpinning maturity and wisdom:

'Rabbit's clever,' said Pooh thoughtfully.

'Yes,' said Piglet, 'Rabbit's clever.'

'And he has a brain.'

'Yes,' said Piglet, Rabbit has a brain.'

There was a long silence.

'I suppose,' said Pooh, 'that's why he never understands anything.'

As Woodbine Meadowlark alerts us, this is a key moment in alternative philosophies, the world of innocence and indolence contrasted with the assault of time, sweeping everything and everyone towards atrophy and death.  She also reminds us of "the heart rending close" of The House at Pooh Corner, where Christopher Robin is still able to assert his belief in doing "Nothing".  What is this 'Nothing'?  it is "just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

This isn't about nostalgia, returning to past delights.  This is what Woodbine warns us is the "inexorable pull of temporality … dashing Christopher Robin away from us forever".  It is something unbearable in Woodbine Meadowlark's' appreciation, a view which reminds her, forcibly, of the last lines of Now We Are Six:

"But now I am six, I'm as clever as clever,

So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."

Words to make anyone except the most callous weep.  We are being asked to confront the end of access to true wisdom as the horrors of formal education sweep down to seize the innocents, taking them into the sterile world of formal learning.  Weep, weep indeed.

There's more, of course.  For example we have the insightful analysis of plot in Winnie-the-Pooh, a detailed study by Professor Duns C Penwiper.  He introduces us to a typical plot situation in Winnie the Pooh:

"If we let A stand for one of the characters, B for a second, and C (following out the established pattern of consecutive form) for a third [As an aside it is obvious why Penwiper was offered a chair] we see that there are various situations in Winnie-the-Pooh employing some of the most complicated devices of plot known to criticism.  A's relationship to B is often such that C, who had hoped to establish a certain contact with B, finds himself constrained instead to deal with A.  Or again, C may initiate an action against A; A replies by appealing to B; B thinks the matter over to himself, decides not to act, and departs; C and A are thus left on the scene to resolve their differences, either by C reconciling himself to A, A's reconciling himself to C, of A's (or C's) undertaking a decisive finishing action against the other. [Italic emphasis is in the original].  Still more intricate are the plot situations in which A, B, and C have nothing to say to each other, but are obliged to remain together on barest amicable terms  until the end of the episode.  This we call the 'Jamesian' situation, which draws its complexity from the subtleties of appeal, criticism, muted disrespect, and barbed repartee among the characters involved."

Astonishingly complex, and Penwiper goes on to examine some almost unbelievably complex situation where other characters intervene, including D, E and F, later G, H, and I, and unbelievably J, K, and L and more.  Penwiper's structural analysis, which he modestly describes as having "some small degree of success" is masterly.

Is that all?  Of course not.  Emeritus Professor Benjamin Thumb, at the end of forty years of service at Oregon State, and prior to his retirement to " pass his remaining days visiting with his grandchildren and caring for his garden", gave a most important analysis of The Style of Pooh.  An assiduous scholar, he has uncovered much that others have missed.

For example, he has alerted us to the fact that Winnie-the-Pooh was written, in 1926, just at the time there was an (unfortunate – his word) revolution against Victorian poetry.  He suggests that his would have made it likely that Milne would have shown some 'metaphysical' elements in his style, and cites one pertinent example:

"'One upon a time, a very long time ago, about last Friday …' says Milne in an opening chapter.  This is suspiciously close to Donne's

Now thou hast lov'd me one whole day

Tomorrow when thous leavest, what wilt thou say?"

Moreover, Thumb has noticed many references to Shakespeare's style, as in this passage from the chapter introducing Kanga and Roo:

"'You ought to look at that tree right over there,' said Rabbit …

'I can see a bird in it from here,' said Pooh.  'Or is it a fish?'

'You ought to see that bird from here,' said Rabbit.  'Unless it's a fish.'

'It isn't a fish, it's a bird, ' said Piglet

'So it is, ' said Rabbit.

'Is it a starling or a blackbird?', said Pooh

'That's the whole question,' said Rabbit.  'Is it a blackbird or a starling?'

I feel sorry for any reader who might be so ignorant as t fail to recognise this exchange as a replica of Hamlet's 'Yes, very like a whale' conversation with Polonius."

[In the interests of full disclosure, I had forgotten that important Shakespearean exchange.]

Thum's essay is packed with more examples.  However, of them all, the most important might be his analysis of that extraordinary point when Happy Birthday comes out as "HIPY PAPYBTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY".  How astute of Thumb to discern this must have come from Milne's appreciation of James Joyce.  It's tricky territory.  As he remarks:

"I cannot, in good conscience, seriously propose to myself that Milne may have read Joyce; surely his imagination was ever too pure to take nourishment from the compost heap.  But since deep similarities exist in word play, I think a reasonable compromise would be to say that Pooh is analogous to Ulysses and is an influence on Finnegan's Wake.  This, I trust, settles the matter …"

Much as I would like to avoid it, there is an essay by Karl Anschauung, on A A Milne's Honey-Balloon-Pit-Tail-Bathtubcompex that must be referenced.  His Freudian analysis is persuasive, especially on such topics a bear phobia.  As Anschauung notes, the bear phobia is interesting, but more to the point is the sequence of events in his early childhood that led to this phobia.  There are several key clues.  We are reminded that in Milne's Introduction to Winnie-the-Pooh there is a note explaining how Christopher Robin goes to the Zoo, where doors are unlocked, dark passages and stairs traversed, a cage unlocked and from which Winnie emerges.

This Anschauung makes clear is an "understanding of the underlying Pooh's meaning .  Freud's Interpretation of Dreams shows us unequivocally that 'To wander through dark passages and up steep stairs' can only a coitus equivalent signify … The friendly male bear Pooh is meant, the unfriendly female organ to represent."  I would like to quote more on this key moment in understanding Pooh and Christopher Robin, especially its overtones of "fear of abandonment … various simulation of racial memory traces, and, of course, total repression and  'forgetting' of the entire scene."  Anschauung's analysis is complex, deep and satisfying, and requires reading the original rather than relying on my superficial summary.

Finally, I feel obliged to briefly mention Simon Lacerous and his disappointing essay Another Book to Cross Off You List.  Lacerous seems to view the whole collection of essays as an attack on himself, and adds to his rather puerile commentary the observation that "Not one character is from the Midlands; not one is of working-class origin; and there is not even a coal mine on the ideal landscape where they play."  At the end of the book, Lacerous imagines Christopher Robin is being "spruced up, fitted for his revolting little public school uniform, and drilled in all the 'graces' of the would-be aristocracy".  It was bold of Crews to allow this intemperate essay to be included.

Fortunately the last essay, by Smedley Force, reflecting on the various critical essays, ends with the words "biographically and scientifically speaking, we are on the threshold of the Golden Age of POOH".  Even Smedley could not have foreseen that this  'Goden Age' would continue into the 21^st Century.  There is good reason that it did, and I am confident that will remain the case for decades to come.  Almost all these essays make it clear why this was inevitable.  Let us join together and say: long live Winnie-the-Pooh!!

Lincoln Rhyme

Twenty-five years ago, I saw a film advertised, a thriller with actors Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie.  I might not have paid a lot of attention, but this was just a few years after The Pelican Brief, a 1993 film that also starred Denzel Washington, along with Julia Roberts.  Now, since it is best to be truthful, I really liked Julia Roberts, and hoped to watch as many of the films she appeared in that I could.  In The Pelican Brief she was a law student, developing a theory about the murder of two Supreme Court justices.  With a trail of murders following her, she meets up with Denzel Washington, who is a Washington Post reporter.  There are lots of pulse raising adventures, plot twists and drama, but they manage to survive and eventually solve the murders – at which point (spoiler alert!) Julia Roberts is sent off to a safe location, as part of the US Witness protection program, leaving audiences to wonder if she ever caught up with Denzel Washington again.  It was a brilliant film.

With that as background, I decided to watch this 1997 film, The Bone Collector.  I didn’t know so much about Angelina Jolie (she was to appear in Mr and Mrs Smith six years later), but as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t Julia Roberts.  However, Denzel Washington was clearly an outstanding actor, enough to draw me in.  I had no idea as to what The Bone Collector might be about, not even that it was a kind of thriller, but also a murder mystery.  Off I went to the cinema, and immediately found myself glued to the screen.

Now I know The Bone Collector may not be considered a ‘great’ film, but it remains one of my favourites.  I can still remember the opening scenes.  First rookie policewoman Amelia Donaghy (played by Jolie who was only then on the way up to become a ‘superstar’) is seen ferreting around on the rail tracks for evidence related to a murder, just as a train is approaching.  That was more than enough to get my adrenaline going.  No sooner had I recovered from that bit of drama that I was confronted with Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective living in an elegant New York townhouse, stuck in a specially designed bed throughout the film.  This movie was going to be ‘different’!!

From there it was only a short step to Amelia walking a crime scene, while on a two-radio to Lincoln, down in a dark cellar with the remains of a body hanging off a steam pipe.  The Director, Phillip Noyce, knew how to ratchet up (my) tension.  It was the perfect combination for me:  frightening moments combined with live detective analysis, Lincoln Rhyme in his hospital bed staring at scraps of paper and trying to make sense of what had happened.  As it turns out, those scraps of paper eventually lead to Rhyme realising the first and subsequent murders are repeating stories from a crime novel, The Bone Collector.  A very clever plot idea.  Hey, if I’d become a detective (one of the many careers I’ve imagined at various points in my life), I might be working on scenes like these with Angelina there to assist me.  Well, if I’m honest I think I might have hoped that it could be Julia Roberts as my assistant.

Looking back, my response to this film was an unusual one.  My more typical approach to novels has been to read the book first, and maybe watch a film or television series later.  There’s a good reason for this.  Books are always rich, complicated and detailed.  Film versions are necessarily simpler, even those that spread the story over a few episodes.  It’s not just complexity, of course.  Once you’ve seen the characters on screen, your imagination is replaced by knowledge, and one result of seeing the Bone Collector is that Lincoln Rhyme is Denzel Washington, even though I know he was just playing a role.  The Bone Collector has given me an image of Rhyme (as well as that of Amelia Sachs as she is called in the books) which I can never abandon.

When I watch Dalgleish or Wimsey, it is easy to write off those playing them off as merely actors, because I read those books first, but I am stuck with very specific images for Deaver’s main characters.  Lincoln Rhyme has been in sixteen novels to date, and as I read each one, there is Denzel Washington again.  That makes it sound like a problem, but it is more of a fact that intrigues me.  As it happens, none of the other books have made their way into a second movie, not yet anyway, and I wonder if that is because a film version of any of the other stories will have to include Denzel Washington in the key role.  It’s hard to live with changes.  It might have happened with Dalgleish, but the first actor was only replaced for the last two stories.  Annoying.  Ah, and now we have a new series again, and yet another Dalgleish!

Jeffrey Deaver had written nine murder mysteries before The Bone Collector.  Some were standalone, and some were in short series.  However, the appearance of Lincoln Rhyme marked a turning point.  His unusual character, (not many detectives are quadriplegics!) seemed spark an interest in Deaver as much as in his readers.  Since that first book, there have been fifteen others in the series, together with four others with Kathryn Dance as the central character, a spin off from the Rhyme series following her appearance when assisting Rhyme in The Cold Moon in 2006, and yet another couple of books with Parker Kincaid, also connected to Rhyme (he appeared in two Rhyme stories in 2003 and 2005.).  Well, spin-offs are spin-offs, and the serious stuff with Lincoln Rhyme keeps appearing:  the latest book in the series was published in 2023.  I doubt that’s the end of him.

The style of the Lincoln Rhyme books is clever, seductive even.  In order to solve each mystery, Rhyme is forced to summarise what Amelia Sachs and the other characters learn.  This means material is written up on whiteboards, and other pieces of data projected on a screen.  These images are then reproduced as tables of evidence in the book as you read along, and they get updated on later pages from time to time.  It’s as if you’re in the room as he mulls over what has been discovered, and, almost without thinking, you find you are working with him, trying to make sense of what’s in front of you.

I guess this is the logical step from an Agatha Christie novel.  In her books, the key information is there, to be picked out of conversations and discoveries.  With Jeffrey Deaver, we have all the data summarised in front of us.  You want to be a detective?  Feel free to see if you can get there first!  Christies’ approach is the conventional one.  Can you identify in the course of the unfolding story that events and evidence that matter.  She would often allow Poirot to make a remark which offers a hint at what is critical but done in such a way you would have to be very astute – or lucky – to put it together with what else you’d read.

Deaver’s technique is quite different.  Those pages of summarised information mean we have the evidence, as it gets collated, but, like real evidence, it is complex, often contradictory, and it feels like you are in a game, trying to sort it out using logic and sound analysis.  If this was the case (item on whiteboard #3, half-way down), then how could that have occurred (that piece of paper currently on the screen)?  It’s a challenge that draws you in:  can you go through what’s there with a logical mind, can you see what is more important?  The good news is that there’s nothing hidden in an earlier part of the story.  It’s all there, so you can solve it – but only if you can separate the red herrings from the real stuff!

This style, which many other writers have used since, is both enjoyable and frustrating.  Enjoyable, because you have the chance to play detective, without the author having hidden key information away.  It’s all in plain sight.  Frustrating, because it is easy to miss the relevance of scattered bits of data, with the result it can be difficult to find a way to put it all together into a compelling story, especially as there seem to be a number of stories that could be woven out of what has been collected!

Perhaps I should add I am almost always hopeless:  I can’t work out who’d done what!  As it happens, the very few times I have identified a killer in a novel before the final denouement has been using another kind of logic:  this is when I decide to choose the one who is ‘the person who seems least likely or least able to commit the murder’!

It also makes the nature of the murder mystery rather different.  Perhaps this is closer to real life detective work.  There is always evidence, often heaps of evidence.  Most fictional detectives seem to have an unerring eye to spot the one key fact.  In television series, that clue if often hinted at if you’re watching carefully.  Why did he focus on that cup on the sink, that cushion beside the chair?  However, Deaver is unrelentingly ‘fair’.  Here is all the stuff for you to look at, and now you just have to do what Lincoln Rhyme does:  look, think, analyse, and construct possible scenarios until you find the one that makes sense of what happened (bearing in mind that a lot of the evidence is evidence from the crime scene, but not necessarily evidence relevant to the issue of how and why the actual crime was committed).

Do you get the impression I like Deaver’s approach!  Let me contrast it with just one other writer whose books I enjoy (one of many, as it happens).  Fiona MacIntosh is another prolific writer, with children’s as well as adult titles, including a series of detective stories with Superintendent Jack Hawsworth as the key character.  Jack Hawsworth is another Lincoln Rhyme (but no, he’s not a quadriplegic).  He’s a thinker, and he has a team of detectives who go out to seek for evidence, interview suspects, and study crime scenes.  He doesn’t have a series of white boards we can study, although he does have regular briefing sessions where summaries are given and task allocated.  There are other writers like this, of course.  I could have used Cara Hunter as another example, centred around DI Fawley.

What the reader of books like those of Hunter and MacIntosh have to do is to follow the teams as they go out, note what they discover and then, like Hawksworth or Fawley, try to put it all together.  However, the chapters of these novels don’t include a comprehensive whiteboard summary from time to time.  You are expected to ignore the extraneous stuff (of which, naturally, there is plenty), and focus on identifying what has been found, then sort it out, work out the priorities, abandon misleading data, while remaining alert to the possibility that something that didn’t seem to fit or make sense might turn out to be critical later.

Both writers pull off another trick, which is to make you feel you really understand what each person is doing.  It is all about attention to specifics.  You don’t just see the crime scene, but you observe each member of the team at work.  In Fiona MacIntosh’s case, she is willing to shift the reader’s perspective as the story moves from one detective’s activities to another’s.  You know that Jack Hawksworth is at the centre, but you are allowed to enjoy the details of the investigation, observations and interviews being undertaken by others, their moments of triumph in tracking something down, their occasional frustrations when another member of the team has worked out something just before you got to the same conclusion.

They have a further key attribute.  Both Fawley and Hawksworth follow a purposeful process, each finding adding to a better understanding of what has happened, each stage moving us closer to a conclusion.  Fiona MacIntosh and Cara Hunter both have a good sense of how real cases work, incremental but effective progress, a step-by-step advance.  Morning or evening team briefings give the reader the sense of how the case is going, and you begin to feel, maybe two-thirds of the way through a book, you can see this is going to be resolved.

In contrast, Jeffrey Deaver follows a more complex approach, perhaps a reflection of the fact that he’s a key detective stuck inside, seeing almost everything second or even third hand, trying to tie bits of data back to the sources he uses.  Lincoln Rhyme can’t get out much (he is occasionally put into a specially designed van and driven to key locations), so he has to relies on history books about an area, geological surveys, builders’ reports and an astonishing variety of other secondary sources to complement his teams observations:  “Show me that soil sample again, please” (I don’t think he often says ‘please’).  As he studies a photograph, or even a physical sample in a plastic evidence case, his mind is sifting through dozens, even hundreds of items he’s seen before, hoping to link the evidence back to a source that will be helpful (as long as he can remember the details of the source on which he’s drawing).

In the film version of The Bone Collector, in that early scene where Amelia ‘walks the crime scene’, we see the way in which she observes the squares of ground she covers, and at the same time how Rhyme hears and visualises her account, checking on what she has described as if he is rebuilding her experience in his mind.  It is a compelling cinematic episode, all the more so because Rhyme is unrelentingly objective, and ignores Amelia’s natural revulsion as he asks her to describe, in detail, the remains of the body hanging off the steam pipe.  As it happens, this is a pivotal moment in their relationship, which we don’t see in the film, but which is subtly addressed in the book.  He has ‘used’ her, but she doesn’t want to walk away.  She has become his crime scene partner, and you sense that bond will grow (as it does in the next few books, even if this outcome was only possibly likely in this first story).

There have been very few films based on Deaver’s books.  There might be a number of reasons for this.  The Lincoln Rhyme books on film would be hard to continue as a series without Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and I doubt it would be easy to get them back together in the years after The Bone Collector to take part in a series, given the ways their careers have continued to develop.  Perhaps more to the point, the series would face two obstacles.  First of all, this wouldn’t be like a Batman series, with spectacular effects and universal appeal.  Deaver’s stories are always likely to attract a smaller audience, albeit a dedicated group.  More important, the books aren’t especially cinematic.

Deaver’s books are for readers.  The pages summarising data collected on a case are there for the reader to consider, allowing time to check out what’s there and what it might mean.  This is a technique for thinkers, for crime solvers, and the entertainment is in the brain work, not in dramatic moments.  As it happens The Bone Collector does open with a vivid scene as the express bears down on the policewoman, and it ends with another dramatic denouement.  However, they are merely the ‘top and tail’ of the story, and the real substance is in the processes of detective work.  Sadly, a lot of detective work is boring, an illustration of diligence rather than drama.

Having said that, I hope I am wrong.  If excellent television can be made using the Commander Dalgleish stories, so the same must be true of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme books.  Are they likely to be made into films that bring in hundreds of millions of dollars?  I rather doubt it.  If the future of television and cinema is largely concerned with blockbusters, they don’t stand much of a chance.  However, I cling on to the hope that there is still room for television series and movies that have more limited appeal, addressed to an audience that wants to enjoy battling with mind stretching puzzles.

Malabar Hill

In the past I have confessed my love of detective novels, both classic and contemporary.  I’ve probably admitted they account for more than two-thirds of the books I borrow from my local library.  That’s probably not good!  Some of my blogs have explored some of the better-known authors and their novels.  All that is background to say that it is about time I gave some space to writers less familiar to many readers.  As usual, serendipity plays a part in this, and I have just finished murder mystery by Sujata Massey.

How did I come across Sujata Massey?  Wikipedia reveals she is an American writer, born in the UK, her father Indian and her mother German.  Her family left for the USA when she was five years old, and when she was eighteen years old, she moved to Baltimore, graduating from Johns Hopkins with a bachelor’s degree, taking courses in the Writing Seminars.  Her writing career began with preparing features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before becoming a novelist.  What else have I learnt?  Her debut novel, The Salaryman’s Wife, won the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1997, and since then she has won other Agatha and Macavity awards.

All of that tells me she has a track record as a writer, but it was a background about which I knew nothing when I picked up The Widows of Malabar Hill, back in 2021.  It was in my local library, and, on the back, I read it had won “the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Left Coast Crime Convention’s Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, the Macavity’s  Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery, and the Agatha Award  for Best Historical Novel. It was selected for Publishers Weekly Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2018.”  Perhaps not so important but it was also an Amazon Best Book of 2018.  That all sounded great, and then I read it was set in Bombay in the 1920s.  I almost returned it to the shelf, but I took it out.

Massey’s ‘legal mystery series’ began with The Widows of Malabar Hill, and, as I quickly discovered, it is focussed on the activities of Perveen Mistry, a Parsi woman.  I think we’d better take a detour here.  A Parsi? A Parsi, also spelled Parsee, is a member of an Indian religious group, the followers of Zoroaster.  Their  name means ‘Persians’, and they are descended from Persian Zoroastrians who emigrated to India to avoid religious persecution by the Muslims back in the seventh century.  Today most live in Mumbai and surrounding areas, but there are a few groups in Karachi and Chennai, a sizeable population in Bangalore and a few families in Kolkata and Hyderabad.  Since they sit outside the Hindu world, they are not a caste, but they form a well-defined community.

It’s possible, like me, you’ve heard of Zoroastrians.  As Zoroastrianism is practiced by the Parsi community, there are a number of distinctive practices, resting on the concepts of purity and pollution (nasu), initiation (navjot), daily prayers, worship at Fire Temples, marriage, funerals, and general worship.  Some of their beliefs seem ripe for a ‘Levi-Straussian’ analysis.  For example (quoting from Wikipedia), “The balance between good and evil is correlated to the idea of purity and pollution. Purity is held to be of the very essence of godliness. Pollution’s very point is to destroy purity through the death of a human. In order to adhere to purity it is the duty of Parsis to continue to preserve purity within their body as God created them.”

A child doesn’t become a Zoroastrian by some form of baptism.  Rather a youngster will recite a selection of required prayers at the time of the Navjote  ceremony, which comprises a cleansing prayer and ritual bath, prayers, and being given the sacred items that define adherents.  These include a sacred shirt and cord, the ‘sudre’, a special undergarment worn together with the sacred thread known as the ‘kushti’.  The kushti is highly symbolic.  It is worn wound three times around the waist, tied twice in a double knot in the front and back, the ends hanging on the back. It is made of 72 fine, white and woollen threads, representing the 72 chapters of the Yasna, one their key texts, with 3 tassels, each with 24 threads, at each end, again representing another sacred text,

Perhaps most relevant to Massey’s books and Perveen Mistry, marriage is very important in the Parsi community, with its traditional belief that the expansion of God’s kingdom must come from having (preferably significant numbers of) children.  Incidentally I read that up until the mid-19th century child marriages were common even though child marriage was not and is not part of their religious doctrine.   Today, marriage practices are facing a new problem as more and more women in the Parsi community are becoming well educated and are either delaying marriage or remaining single.  This trend was just beginning to emerge back in the 1920s, the time of Massey’s novels.

The Parsi community is very small.  At the time of the 2011 Indian Census there were 57,264 Parsis in India.  The Indian Government has observed. there are a “variety of causes that are responsible for this steady decline in the population of the community”, of which the most significant they mentioned were childlessness and migration.   Demographic projections estimated that by 2020 the community would number only 23,000.  Part of the decrease is the result of Parsis going overseas, and there are small communities in the UK, Australia, Canada and the US.  However, the major factor is a declining birth rate: as of 2001, Parsis over the age of 60 make up for 31% of the community, and only 4.7% are under 6 years of age.  I was unable to track down more recent figures.

For a tiny group, they have made a considerable contribution.  Well-known Parsis include the Tata brothers, and especially the son Rata Tata, often described as the “Father of Indian Industry”.  Many are connected to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.  Indira Ghandi’s husband was a Parsi.  However, the most well-known might be in the arts community, including Freddie Mercury, the pop singer, Zubin Mehta, the conductor, along with several writers and some Bollywood stars!

However, I discovered that another Parsi, Mithan Jamshed Lam was a suffragist, the first female barrister admitted to practice law at the Bombay High Court, and who served as a Sheriff of Bombay, together with Soli Sorabjee, a former Attorney General of India.  All that takes us back to Perveen Mistry, a character Sujata Massey tells us was partially inspired these two trailblazing women who had been Parsi lawyers, as a one-time solicitor in the case of  Cornelia Soli Sorabjee and as a former barrister for Mithan Jamshed Lam, both on their way to key roles in the Indian legal hierarchy, as mentioned above.

To be clear, Perveen Mistry’s Parsi character is largely kept in the background.  We notice there are rules about who might be a boyfriend, and we see there are times when being a Parsi is mentioned as a relevant factor, or even turns out to be an obstacle.  However, there are many more problems that arise as the result of being a policewoman, and these play a much larger role in her activities.  Women in India in the 1920s were clearly subordinated, except for ‘white’ women from overseas, and we know these issues are still present in contemporary times.  If Parveen battles against discrimination, it is sex discrimination that is most often the issue.  Her father is a leading barrister and runs his business with Parveen as part of the practice, but he, like she, has to battle against various rules and prejudices that assume women play no part in the judicial process.

Sujata Massey’s Indian novels are set in Bombay.  In the Widows of Malabar Hill, Perveen Mistry has returned from the UK, where she studied law at university (but was unable to proceed to a degree).  In her first case (at least as far as we know), she finds herself investigating a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in full purdah.  As she examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity.  What will they live on?

Perveen is suspicious, especially since one of the widows has signed her form with an X—meaning she probably couldn’t even read the document.  given they are living in strict seclusion, never leaving the women’s quarters or speaking to any men, she begins to consider the likelihood that an unscrupulous guardian might have tricked them.  Perveen soon realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder.  Now she feels it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.

Enough of the book summary.  There are many, many murder mysteries sitting on my local library shelves, so the obvious question is as to why this one deserved my attention – and had me intrigued.  Unusual settings help, and a mystery involving women in purdah is certainly distinctive.  However, both having a Parsi detective and with Purdah as a complicating offer promise, but enough?  No, what makes this, and the following three books (so far) work is the character of Parveen Mistry herself.  Rather like Lacey Flint, about whom I wrote recently, Parveen sometimes acts precipitously, doesn’t always follow the rules, jumps to conclusions, and does an excellent job of upsetting other people, especially men!

Parveen joins that group of detectives who are uncertain about themselves, as able as anyone else to misunderstand, and with a stubborn streak that makes them likeable.  There is no doubt that the setting and her background conspire to make this even more satisfying.  Bombay in 1920 sounds like Bombay today, big and confusing, with massive poverty, suffering from prejudice and misogyny.  However, it has the advantage of distance in time, so we can accept some of the terrible features of society at the time as being ‘the way it was back then’.

Based on reading the news, I think I also like to tell myself that religious tensions have worsened in more recent decades, even if women are more able to take their place in society.  What do I know?  I know that Bombay in 1920 was nicely complex, and there plenty of deep prejudices and prohibitions, all of which make for an idea setting.

However much Bombay helps the story, it is Parveen Mistry herself who makes Massey’s novels so engrossing.  She wants the world to be different, and pushes against some restrictions, even if the accepts the authority of her father and the expectations of her mother, well, at least most of the time.  Rather like so many of the best police investigators in fiction, she breaks the rules some of the time, makes mistakes, gets herself into tricky situations, some of which have nothing to do with her investigations.  She is delightfully likeable and attractively uncomfortable.  Perhaps what I am trying to say is that she is ‘real’.

All of this fascinating character becomes even more absorbing when Parveen is sent out from Bombay, under the auspices of the British Raj, to deal with a dispute over a maharaja’s estate.  In Sujata Massey’s second book in this series, The Satapur Moonstone, she’s sent because she is a woman and therefore able to meet and talk to the two maharanis in purdah.  Such were the rules at the time, she shouldn’t have travelled in the country alone, but once there it becomes clear that she is in a trap:  she is to be used as a pawn in the complex palace politics.  Oh, and just to add to the fun, the kingdom of Satapur is being administered by an agent of the British raj, ‘on behalf of’ the two maharanis.

There’s a welcome surprise – for the reader if not for Parveen Mistry – in the third book, The Bombay Prince, when the Parsi group takes centre stage.  It’s November 1921, and Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four-month tour. The Indian subcontinent is already antagonistic to British rule, and there’s no surprise when local unrest over the Prince’s arrival spirals into riots. But when Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, falls from a second-floor gallery and dies just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college, Parveen is on the case.

Freny had seen her for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she told Perveen raises suspicion that this wasn’t an accident.  Perhaps partly feeling guilty that she hadn’t helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist in dealing with the coroner’s inquest.  It’s not a good time to be challenging authority figures:  Bombay is erupting.  As armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence.  Great setting for a murder mystery, and it gets more involved and more compelling as events unfold.

I’ve already admitted I read murder mysteries and detective stories on a regular basis.  Much of the time, they are simply enjoyable, making me exercise those little ‘grey cells’ as Hercule Poirot fondly refers to them.  Last year I read novels by Stig Abell, Mark Billingham, Michel Bussi, Anne Cleeves, Candice Fox, Elly Griffiths, Mick Herron, Cara Hunter, Donna Leon, Fiona McIntosh, Håkan Nesser, Nita Prose, Stephen Spotswood, and several others.  It’s a long list, and it is a passion.

However, in addition I have read three novels by Vaseem Khan, the first of which, Midnight at Malabar House, he introduced by saying: “my new book is a historical crime novel set in 1950 in India. It’s called Midnight At Malabar House and introduces Inspector Persis Wadia of the Bombay Police, India’s first female police detective. The period is incredibly intriguing. It’s just after Indian Independence, the horrors of Partition and the assassination of Gandhi. Social and political turmoil is rife in the country. Yet Bombay remains cosmopolitan, with thousands of foreigners still in the city.”  It’s as if Parveen Mistry lives on thirty years later, mysterious changed into Persis Wadia!

It turns out Vaseem Khan is another expatriate Indian, but this time living in the UK.  From his website I discovered “he is the author of two award-winning crime series set in India, the Baby Ganesh Agency series set in modern Mumbai, and the Malabar House historical crime novels set in 1950s Bombay. …In 2021, Midnight at Malabar House won the Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger, the world’s premier award for historical crime fiction.  When he isn’t writing, he works at the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. Vaseem was born in England but spent a decade working in India.  He also co-hosts the popular crime fiction podcast, The Red Hot Chilli Writers”. Does this all mean that my future murder mystery books will all be about Bombay?  What happened to events close to 221B Baker Street, London?

 Lacey Flint

For much of my life, I have read, and read and read, detective stories.  I’m quite unable to understand why this is the case, other than the fact that I love them!  I started with John Creasy and Agatha Christie, books borrowed from the local library when I was far too young to be reading such stuff, and the habit has never left me.  Some of the mystery writers of my childhood are long gone from the popular domain.  In his time John Creasy wrote some 600 novels, using no less than 28 pseudonyms:  today, I doubt many would know about the series of books featuring Superintendent George ‘Gee Gee’ Gideon (authored by Creasy as J J Maric) or the Chief Inspector Roger West series (under his own name).  However, Agatha Christie is still well-known, as much because of the various films and television series made with Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple as their lead characters (and in England because The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in the West End, on since November 1952, except for a fifteen month break during the COVID epidemic).

As I grew older, so it became clear some writers and their detectives had become favourites.  Some are from a time long gone.  Among these, pride of place has to go to Dorothy L Sayers and her Peter Wimsey.  However, there are many other more recent authors, including, as one example, Charles Finch, a modern Sayers, writing about another amateur detective, Charles Lenox, living in Victorian times.  Another series I return to is the rather more contemporary set of thirteen books about the cases confronting Commander Adam Dalgleish, written by P D James, who is, for me, the successor to Dorothy Sayers.  Well, I could continue to comment on the great writers of the past, but now we seem to have entered another time of prolific and outstanding writing.  Many excellent contemporary detective novelists are Australian, and there is a genre of outback mysteries that seems likely to continue for many more years.  Indeed, writing about murders and their solution has flourished all over the world.  Despite this, I am pleased to report there are several new and brilliant British novelists in the mix.

What makes one writer stand out from the others?  The stories themselves?  The principal characters?  Or is it just a matter of chance, and I read a book, like it, and get hooked into a new series while ignoring others just as good?  Perhaps that is the case with Sharon Bolton, and her five books centred on Lacey Flint, a London detective constable.  I know that I picked up the first in the series, Now You See Me, when I was living in the US.  Seeing an English detective novel on the shelf of my local library, I picked it up on a whim.  I hadn’t heard of the author, nor had I read about the book, which had appeared a year or so before I checked it out it.  Well, by page 7, I was hooked.

Part One of Now You See Me begins on Friday 31 August:

A dead woman was leaning against my car.

Somehow managing to stand upright, arms outstretched, fingers grasping the rim of the passenger door, a dead woman was spewing blood over the car’s paintwork, each spatter overlaying the last as the pattern began to resemble a spider’s web.

A second later she turned and her eyes met mine.  Dead eyes.  A savage wound across her throat gaped open; her abdomen was a mass of scarlet.  She reached out; I couldn’t move.  She was clutching me strongly, strong for a dead woman.

I know, I know, she was on her feet, still moving, but it was impossible to look into those eyes and think of her as anything other than dead.  Technically, the body might be clinging on, the weakening heart still beating, she had a little control over her muscles.  Technicalities, all of them.  Those eyes knew the game was up.

It’s a vivid, unrelenting description, and there’s no looking away until an ambulance has come, a protective tent has been erected around the body, DC Lacey Flint has been given a cup of tea, and a detective inspector interviews her on site.

I re-read Now You See Me recently, and asked myself what it was about that book, that author’s style, and the Lacey Flint series that snagged me.  There was a two-page Prologue, prior to the section I’ve just quoted, but the book really started with that dead woman leaning against Lacey Flint’s car.  So, was it the realistic violence?  Or was it Lacey Flint, with her momentarily stunned response, only to be set aside as she almost immediately tried to help a woman she knew was dying, and couldn’t be saved.  We will learn that she had a possibly unrealistic aspiration to get involved with a key detective team in the Metropolitan Police, hoping for a transfer to work with them.  She had been ‘moonlighting’ on a case, while waiting to get into the work she was determined to do.

I suppose you could say that Lacey Flint had been in the right place at the right time – if being where a murder has taken place can ever be the ‘right place’!  With some hesitation by the leadership, she is brought into the detective team, and begins to take a key role in the investigation.  However, as time goes on, it becomes apparent that the initial murder, and others that follow, seem to be tangled up with events concerning Lacey Flint herself, especially some tantalisingly unclear stuff from the past.  As in any good murder mystery, by about half way through the novel, the complications are becoming close to baffling.  Lacey is guided by a senior officer, Detective Inspector Dana Tulloch, while also being closely watched by another DI, Mark Joesbury.  She is smart, sharp, and attractive.  Life is going to get complicated, and it does.

Sharon Bolton writes from Lacey Flint’s viewpoint, and she does so brilliantly.  In no time at all, we are inside Lacey’s mind, her hesitations, her concerns and her insights.   We feel what it is like to be an outsider in a group, working with others because of serendipity, and we yearn, with Lacey, that she’ll make some key contribution to the case.  We know she is determinedly avoiding seeing DI Joesbury as anyone other than a member of the murder team, but we sense her fascination with him.  It is equally clear that, against his wishes, Joesbury finds Flint compellingly attractive.  As to how we get from investigating one murder to chasing a serial killer, and finally ending up searching in the underground caverns of London … you’ll have to read Now You See me for yourself.

Sharon Bolton uses one technique which pops up in several detective novels, which is that there are occasional chapters that deal with a character who is not part of the detective team, sometimes referring back to past events that must be related, in some way, to the series of murders.  I can never finally decide whether this is a technique I like or dislike, but in the case of the Lacey Flint books, it works.  It is as if the reader’s task is to pay to attention to the juggling of data and characters in relation to a series of murders, and then, with a spare hand as it were, also juggle this other story which you know is going to be important in some way.

I reread Now You See Me while I was writing this blog.  It was more than that.  I started to read, and then I had to keep going, and read right to the end in the afternoons (while I was reading my library books in the evening!).  I was stunned.  What I had recalled about Lacey Flint wasn’t that first story.  It was as if I had never read it before.  No sooner had I finished, than I decided I’d better read the second book, Dead Scared.  Lacey Flint was a London policewoman, but this book was set in a Cambridge college, St John’s, and I didn’t remember that one too.  Sharon Bolton was eating into any ideas I had about having some time for myself … except, of course, that reading is about time for myself!

There aren’t many writers who have the ability to make me almost obsessive.  I finished Dead Scared, and then checked if I had the third in the series on my iPad.  No, I didn’t have Like This For Ever.  Easily fixed.  I downloaded the book, while relieved to see I did have A Dark and Twisted Tide (book 4).  Oops, years later a fifth book had been published, and I didn’t have that one either.  Better get The Dark, just in case.  Now I have all five books, and now I can get back to reading the third book.  Oh no, there are two shorter books also about Lacey Flint and her escapades, If Snow Hadn’t Fallen, and Here Be Dragons.   Let’s add those, just to be on the safe side.

I don’t want you to conclude that I am obsessional, not clinically so, but I do like to have copies of the books I really like.  Upstairs I have all the Dalgelish books, all the Wimsey books, and it’s possible I might have all the books so far written by Philip Pullman following Lyra Belacqua’s adventures (just waiting for book six – for how much longer?).  On my iPad there are several series, ranging from many of Elizabeth George’s novels about investigations undertaken by DI Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers, to lots of Daniel Silva, Karin Slaughter – and on my old iPad, unable to transfer across, even more .  Surely all this is just proof I like good writing, and in no way evidence of some kind of personality disorder.  The fact that many of these authors are British (but certainly not all) is a reflection of habits formed when I was younger, and I could add a whole number of other authors whose works litter my computer, iPad and my shrinking physical library.

The question remains: why do I find books with Lacey Flint as the key character compulsive?  It isn’t that they are well-written:  they are, but so are many others I read.  The plots are clever, and the stories weave together, so that each separate book, which can be read stand-alone, is also part of a larger story.   As I complete one book, I know the next will continue threads from that one, and I have the uncomfortable feeling (in a good sense) that the book after that will still be pulling at threads from the very beginning of the series.  However, even that characteristic is not all there is to my delight in Sharon Boltons detective novels.

What makes them work so well is that Lacey Flint is so ‘involving’ a person.  It doesn’t take long before you are looking inside her head, and trying to make sense of what is going on.  In part it is a matter of sympathy.  As you learn more, so her moods and behaviour become more understandable, and your desire to see some of the complexities in her life sorted out becomes more obvious.  However, that sounds rather detached.  The fact of the matter is that she is real in a way that is quite compelling:  not just real in the sense of a well-portrayed character, but real in the sense that you begin to take on some of her hesitations, join her in battling some of her uncertainties, and even share her fears.

Some outstanding characters in fiction, like Lyra in Pullman’s books, leap off the page as fascinating people, and you become invested in their journey.  Lacey is more than that, she is flawed, troubled, and yet insightful and persistent.  The more I read of this series, the more I want to stop, call Lacey Flint on her mobile, and invite her over for a chat.  It’s not that she needs a therapist:  indeed, we learn that she is good at managing therapists and their questions and suggestions. Not, I think it is more than that.  It is the desire to offer friendship, not to achieve some particular outcome, but to create a space in which you can just chat, agenda free, letting the conversations go where serendipity takes them, while knowing Lacey will add in matters she’d like to explore or question, as and when she is ready to do so.

In case I haven’t made it clear, I consider Sharon Bolton to be a great example of British detective writing at its best. However, I have omitted one key fact, which is what she has had to say about herself and her books.  When Now You See Me was first published, the author was identified as S J Bolton.  Two years after, in November 2013, S J Bolton’s website announced, “I’m Coming Out!”  What followed was a very English explanation!

My name is Sharon Bolton and I am a woman. Yeah, yeah, you knew that already. Anyone who’s visited my blog, read my Tweets or befriended me on Facebook over the last five years will be in no doubt about my gender or my Christian name. Significantly, though, when Like This, For Ever comes out as a mass-market paperback this week I will be published for the first time as Sharon, rather than SJ, Bolton. Of course, relatively few people will notice. The vast reading public has largely not heard of either SJ or Sharon Bolton and if the (rather exciting) marketing campaign persuades them to pick up a copy, it will be the cover and the story summary that attracts them. The name of the author is likely to be immaterial.  On the other hand, I do have a modest following who know me as SJ, and I guess I owe them an explanation. So here it is:

Back in 2006, when Sacrifice first sold, Transworld, my UK publishers, suggested I publish under my initials, in the manner of PD James and JK Rowling, rather than my full name. The argument being that, whilst my books would appeal to and be enjoyed by men, a lot of men (in the UK at least) are reluctant to buy a book with a woman’s name on the cover. (Men are such simpletons, bless ‘em, stick initials on a book and they’ll never guess it was written by a girl.).  I went along with their advice. Of course I did. I was a first-time author, desperate for a publishing contract. I’d have published as Daffy Duck if they’d asked me. … I don’t have a middle name … [N]o author publishes with just one initial, so I had to invent one. I tried every combination with S but nothing quite had the ring of J, so that’s what I went with.  But then, a couple of things happened. First, a rather alarming number of other SJs have sprung up. SJ Rozan, SJ Parrish, SJ Watson. Then there’s CJ Sansom, RJ Ellory, NJ Cooper. All writing crime. I was starting to feel lost in the crowd. And, given that the author as a brand is becoming increasingly important, lost in the crowd is not where I wanted to be.  Also, back in 2006, social media wasn’t what it is now … Over the last seven years, authors have become personalities who interact with their readers and the wider public on an almost hourly basis. I Tweet, I blog, I’m on Facebook. My online personality (far more interesting and glamorous than my real one, I might add) has become part and parcel of who I am as a writer. It simply isn’t possible anymore to hide behind an amorphous, sexless silhouette.

So there you have it. Times have moved on and what worked back in 2006 no longer holds good.  But, you know what? If I’m being a hundred per cent honest, there was a bit more to it than that. Back in 2006, I had major personal misgivings about whether Sharon was a credible (for which read: posh) enough name to appear on the cover of a semi-serious novel. Had I been writing (and I use the term after due consideration) chick-lit, I’d probably have got away with it, but in an age when authors were increasingly becoming brands, could I really expect a sensible publishing house to put its money behind a crime writer called Sharon? … I’m introduced at parties and see judgment forming. I’m tired of being asked where my mate, Tracey, is or what part of Essex I come from. People hear the name Sharon and they assume a) background, b) character and c) lifestyle. … In light of this, I could hide behind the genderless, classless persona that was SJ Bolton and let the books speak for themselves.  But, at the risk of repeating myself, times have moved on. …So here it is, my coming out. My name is Sharon and I write fiction …  If you are put off by my name then – you know what – I can do without your custom.  I am a woman. I am a reasonably decent crime writer. And, to the best of my knowledge, I am the only Sharon on the shelves!

So there you have it.  If you read a Sharon Bolton book, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

DD29 – Cover Her Face

Neither the reader nor the author could have imagined that a book that begins with an account of a slightly trying dinner party was to herald a series of what would eventually comprise fourteen astonishingly good detective novels.  The author was P D James, the series explored murders investigated by Adam Dalgleish.  They remain examples of the very best in detective story writing, and a clue to their quality is that they can be re-read more than once yet still remain deeply satisfying.

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920 in Oxford but finished her formal education at the Cambridge High School for Girls.  Her mother became ill, and was eventually placed in a mental hospital, and so James had to leave school at the age of sixteen to work, and to take care of her sister Monica, and brother Edward.  The  family didn’t have much money and anyway her father didn’t believe in higher education for girls.  Her first job was working in a tax office in Ely for three years and then was employed as an assistant stage manager at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge.  She married Connor White in 1941 and they had two daughters, Clare and Jane.

Life continued to be challenging, and Connor White returned from the Second World War mentally shattered and was he institutionalised. He died in 1964.  With her daughters mostly cared for by Connor’s parents, James studied hospital administration, and from 1949 to 1968 worked for a hospital board in London.   She began writing in the mid-1950s, using her maiden name, and her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962.  While thirteen more were to appear with Dalgleish as the key character, he also has a small role in a second series of just two books, adventures centred around Cordelia Gray, a private detective.  One piece of background trivia.  Dalgleish’s last name comes from a teacher of English at Cambridge High School and his first name is that of the woman teacher’s father.

In deciding to comment on Cover Her Face, I face an obvious problem, which is how much should I reveal?  One feature of this novel, which will be true of all the others P D James was to write, is that the murder to be investigated is quickly limited to a focus on only a small number of people:  the ‘country house murder ‘model as it is sometimes described.  In this case there is a large ‘country’ house, Martingale, a manor house in Chadfleet, a (fictional) village in Essex.  The house is the home of Eleanor Maxie and her terminally ill husband, who, at the time of the events that follow, is bed bound and under continuous medical supervision.  There are a number of others staying at the house.

Once a year, the local church, St Cedds, holds a fete, at which members of the Maxie family have traditionally taken part, including Eleanor Maxie’s son and daughter, Stephen Maxie and Deborah Riscoe.  This year there’s a dinner party before the fete, with some others staying at Martingale, including Catherine Bowers, a former romantic interest of Stephen, who still hopes to marry him; Alice Liddell, the warden of a refuge; and Dr Epps, the local GP.  They are assisted by a cook, Martha Bultitaft, and a maid, Sally Jupp, who was recently taken on and is living in the house with her baby.  Sally is an attractive young woman and was formerly one of the girls at Alice Liddell’s centre, the St Marty’s Refuge for Girls, up until taking up her position at Martingale.  The only other key character, who is absent from the dinner, is Felix Hearne, who appears to be interested in some kind of relationship with Deborah Riscoe, whose husband, Eric, had died some years before.

No one is dead, but P D James wastes no time in getting us suspicious.  Sally claims to have found some tablets hidden under the mattress of old Mr Maxie’s bed, and takes them to Stephen, who works as a doctor in London.  Are they being salted away for a suicide attempt, rather than being used on a daily basis to alleviate his symptoms?  Martha has an almost vicious hatred of Sally, especially since her growing baby is beginning to take up Sally’s time with the result of reducing her energies in assisting Martha in the kitchen.  We learn that Felix is somewhat cavalier in his attitude towards Deborah but he obviously enjoys spending time at Martingale.  Like the others he will be assisting at the fete.

At the dinner the night before the fete, Sally steps out from her serving role to announce that Stephen has asked her to marry him, leaving the room in shock, but only after making some very nasty comments to Martha.  When asked, Stephen admits that the offer of marriage was true.  In case you haven’t got the general idea, everybody goes off to bed feeling confused, angry, or merely anxious about their role in the activities they’re expected to support or manage in the fete the next day.  Just like any large family, I guess.

The next morning Martha is annoyed to find Sally is late coming down to the kitchen to help in preparing for the day.  Unable to rouse her by knocking on her bedroom door, while hearing Sally’s baby crying, Stephen and Felix eventually break into her room from the outside, using a ladder to climb up to her windows.  It is clear Sally has been strangled (so now we have a classic locked room mystery), and the police are called in.  On the basis of high-level connections and with another case already preoccupying the county detectives, it turns out that the local police will be replaced by officers from Scotland Yard, and so we meet Adam Dalgleish accompanied by D S Martin.  They arrive at Martingale in a police car, which will prove to be the last time we find Dalgleish in such a mundane vehicle.  At the beginning of the series he drives a Cooper Bristol, but later he has graduated to a Jaguar.  We are told he is tall, and in some of the later novels he is described as being ‘tall, dark and handsome’ (by women, I should add).  However, it is his mind that enthrals us.

Rereading Cover Her Face once again, I am struck by two things.  First, it is such an assured novel:  how could PD James write so well from the beginning?  Well, it’s not really the beginning.  She had been writing for at least ten years before the novel appeared, but this was her first serious book.  I am unable to find out anything more about that earlier work.  To read a first novel that shows all the signs of being written by an outstanding author is all the more impressive through the lack of any published work preceding it.  She was 42 years old when it appeared, and it’s an astonishingly assured and professional work.  It sets a standard that was James more than met in every one of her subsequent Dalgleish stories.

Second, the choice of her key character, Adam Dalgleish, is fascinating.  By the time he appears, he is already a Detective Chief Inspector.  We know little else about his previous life, except when we hear about his thoughts as he is asking one of the family about their children.  Almost out of the blue, and in just over two lines on page 94 we learn “I have no son.  My own child and his mother died three hours after he was born.  I have no son to marry anyone – suitable or unsuitable”.  We later learn this was thirteen years previously.  Adam’s private life remains private.  We do get great insight into his thinking, however, and he comes across as very cerebral in his approach.  Eventually P D James will relent a little, and in later novels we are slowly allowed into a little more of Adam Dalgleish’s world.

Well, cerebral may be a little unfair.  We know he is a poet, although we aren’t able to see what that means in terms of the poetry itself.  We also get glimpses of the man beneath the mask of cold analysis.  Indeed, in the very last paragraph, the place where P D James likes to leave a small but fascinating ‘extra’, we read that Dalgleish’s inability to say anything of consequence to Deborah Riscoe beyond police stuff might eventually be surpassed and “when that happened the right words would be found”.  James was never going to succumb to pages of insight about how Dalgleish saw the world, but, as the series grew, we begin to learn a little about the man and his hidden passions.

If that sounds like a criticism, it isn’t meant to be.  P D James had a clear view of the way in which she wanted to write her novels.  I’m confident she had learnt from previous leading murder mystery writers and understood the conventions.  Create a situation in which there is an unusual and apparently inexplicable death – not the means of dying, of course, but rather offering no clear evidence as to who and why.  Set the story in a location where the number of suspects is small enough for the reader to know and able to learn about them all, and yet do so by offering sufficient red herrings to keep you  alert and uncertain to the end.

She also realised the importance of having a key character whose fancies and foibles would help garner a committed readership.  For Dorothy Sayers it was Peter Wimsey; for Agatha Christie it was Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.  We have to assume that James didn’t want to have the extravagance of either Wimsey or Poirot:  Lord Peter Wimsey was a wonderful upper-class character, close to appearing a buffoon, with a brilliant mind behind that monocle, while Poirot was also larger than life, a fussy Belgian fop, with a mania for neatness and order, but similarly brilliant.

Unlike these two, and very far from the quiet village dwelling Miss Marple, Adam Dalgleish tends to hide his intelligence, nor is he more than mildly unusual (just those few mentions of his poetry and penchant for fast cars). However, like Wimsey and Poirot, he keeps his own counsel, often working away at discovery without offering evidence of too much drama.

What P D James offers is far more insight into how he thinks than does Sayers or Christie.  We are privileged to discover how his ideas unfold, to understand the questions he asks and the tasks he assigns to various subordinates.  In a sense , it is the mystery he is trying to solve that holds us, too.  Once a murderer has been uncovered, Dalgleish is allowed to slip back to Scotland Yard, and the rest of his life remains largely untold.  However, as I’ve already  mentioned, James eventually relents, and we’ll eventually learn a little more about this patient and rather taciturn man in later murder cases.

Going back to Cover Her Face reveals one other aspect of James’ novels.  This book is relatively short, just 250 pages in my paperback edition.  By the time A Taste for Death was published, surely one of the more exceptional books in an outstanding series, the page count has increased.  It is 469 pages long (also in the paperback edition), and it is in a smaller type.  I would guess it is at least twice the length of the first book.  More complex?  Possibly.  Certainly richer in terms of the depth in which all the characters are examined.  I feel there is a greater exploration of the psychology of the key characters in this later story:  if all her writing was assured , right from the start, it seems she was more willing to offer greater detail to the reader as the series progressed.  Of course, such an approach also ensured we could more easily be tangled up in the possibilities of who did what to whom without too many tangential distractions!

Incidentally, A Taste for Death was the 7^th book in the series of 14 novels.  Some see it as her best book.  It was to receive the 1986 Mystery Writers of America Best Novel Award ( as runner-up) together with the1987 CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction.

P D James died just over nine years ago, on 27 November 2014, aged 94, survived by her two daughters, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.  There were many obituaries at the time.  However, one, Murder Most Intricate, stands above all the rest:

As he neared the house, down the quiet autumnal streets of Holland Park in west London, Commander Adam Dalgliesh felt a shiver of apprehension. It was the same slightly nervous curiosity he experienced when entering a country church, pushing at the heavy door to find darkness, sweet with incense, that filled nave and chancel but also held, at its heart, a mystery. That was, he knew, an analogy his creator P.D. James would relish.

Greetings exchanged, she led him to the drawing room for tea and shortbread.  … He looked for the first editions of Jane Austen, her favourite author, whose work she had happily imitated in 2011 in “Death Comes to Pemberley”. But then he turned his detective’s attention to the woman herself.

She sat upright, small and spry, with no need for the stick that rested by her side. Her hands, folded in her lap, were strongly veined, almost tough. An Indian silk scarf was carefully draped around a scrawny neck. She wore a heavy pendant and a large ring, each of which appeared to be a Victorian memento mori. From beneath her silver hair she gazed at him with an expression that combined intelligence, good humour and, vitally, detachment. These were eyes that could look unflinchingly on the corrugated pipes in a slit throat, on the gooseflesh of rigor mortis and on the strangely colourful coils and pouches pulled from the human abdomen during a post mortem. She had worked, after all, for some years in the forensics department at the Home Office. Long before that, too, she had been fascinated by death, looking for drowned corpses on the way to school and wondering whether Humpty Dumpty really fell, or was pushed. She had often noticed, as Dalgliesh had, an expression of faint surprise on the faces of the dead. …

She and Dalgliesh did not disturb each other’s privacy. Since 1962, when he had first swung out of a police car in “Cover her Face”, she had never described his sex life nor quoted his poetry, an odd sideline for a detective. She had let slip, however, that he was the man she would like to have been. The poetry was part of it, for she felt crime fiction was undervalued as literature. She wrote it differently, using the confined English settings she knew but introducing, as well as bloody disruption, exact science, note-perfect backgrounds and exquisitely worked motivation. …

Their conversation passed so quickly, in a gale of shared experience and enjoyment, that Dalgliesh did not notice the darkness falling. He saw it only when his hostess, drawing on the phrases of the 1662 Prayer Book deeply stored in her head, mentioned the “perils and dangers of this night”, and briskly drew the damask curtains. The pages of his notebook were empty, save for a dusting of sugar from the shortbread. He had had no need to write anything, since they inhabited each other’s minds; and as much as she had created him he had also, perhaps, created her.

This was the Obituary published in The Economist on 29 November.  Such a word perfect, intelligent way to mark the passing of a person I regard as an outstanding author.

 The Name of the Rose

There have been many occasions when I have realised that I am a rather naïve reader.  I pick up a book, read it, and if it’s fiction, follow along enjoying the story.  Sometimes, years later, I’ll read the same book a second time.  For good books, that’s often a revelation:  older, I can see more, both in the complexity of the story and in the insights into the characters.  It’s been like that with Don Quixote by Cervantes.  I think I’ve read it at least five times, and each time around it becomes an even richer experience, as the events become the background, or perhaps better described as the setting, rather than the sole focus of my attention.

The Name of the Rose, written by Umberto Eco back in 1980 (although it didn’t appear in English until 1983) is more than that.  It’s like a traditional English plum pudding.  Each time you dip in you pull out more gifts.  A very special plum pudding, a ‘magic pudding’, because there is always more to be found and enjoyed, and the gifts are embedded in some very rich material!  The setting is an Italian medieval castle run by the Benedictines as a monastery, with a diverse range of characters including cellarers, herbalists, gardeners, librarians, and young novices.   It’s a setting where we discover that first one, and eventually half a dozen monks are found murdered in diverse and bizarre ways.  It’s a setting where a bookish, very erudite Franciscan has been sent to solve the mysterious events, which grow in complexity and confusion after his arrival.  It’s the setting for an author’s masterpiece.

The events in The Name of the Rose take place in the 14th century.  The timing is deliberate, when religious certainties are under threat from emerging new scientific understandings and wild, changing and contradictory social events.  Our investigator is William of Baskerville, from England, a student from the philosophical school of Roger Bacon and William of Occam, the founders of cognitive empiricism, a philosophy based on the exact examination of real evidence revealed by the senses and thus a perfect tool for unravelling a mystery.  To add to the complexity, the story is narrated by Adso, a young novice who idolises William.  Although Adso comes across as somewhat naïve, he plays a key role, and he’s often speaking in the name of the religious faith that it seems likely William has lost, at least in part.

The Name of the Rose is no easy read.  The narrative includes sections describing ecclesiastical councils or theological debates, and others analysing in detail the positions of various European powers on the reform of the Franciscan Order. There are also frequent (and untranslated) quotations in classical  and medieval Latin.  If William of Baskerville is trying to understand murders, we are also trying to understand what’s happening at the same time as attempting to keep up with diversions in a whole that is best described as a labyrinth.  Umberto Eco is known as a semiologist ad so the murder mystery also involves the pursuit of meaning – in words, symbols, ideas, in every conceivable sign the visible universe contains.

Each time I have read The Name of the Rose, I have discovered a different book.  You can just ride along with the core story, beautifully narrated.  You can choose to follow all William’s by-ways or place your focus on Adso’s more linear account.  It is fairly easy to conclude that Umberto Eco is William.  But this is Eco the philosopher and essayist, while the Eco who writes ‘The Name of the Rose’ is Adso: a voice young and old at the same time, speaking from nostalgia for love and passion. William shapes the story with his insight; Adso gives it his own pathos.  He will never think, as William does, that  “books are not made to be believed but to be subjected to inquiry”; Adso writes to be believed.

The year of this story is 1327.  William and Adso have arrived at the monastery to attend a theological debate, neutral ground for a dispute between the Pope and the Franciscans.  The debate concerns the question of apostolic poverty, that monks should be medicants, attempting to live their lives without ownership of lands or accumulation of money, a view that follows the precepts set out in the Gospel of Luke.  However, when they arrive, the monastery is unsettled.  Adelmo of Otranto, an illuminator revered for his illustrations, has died – is it a suicide or murder?   Adelmo was skilled at manuscript artwork, especially concerning religious matters. William is asked by the monastery’s abbot, Abo of Fossanova, to investigate the death.  We soon realise this is going to be an unusual novel: during William’s enquiry he has a debate with one of the oldest monks in the abbey, Jorge of Burgos, about the theological meaning of laughter, which Jorge despises.

Well, debates are fine, and offer an interlude to keep the reader alert.  However, the very next day, a scholar and translator, Venantius of Salvemec, is found dead in a vat of pig’s blood. Interesting?  Severinus, the herbalist, tells William that Venantius’s body had black stains on the tongue and fingers, which suggests poison. The librarian, Malachi of Hildesheim, bans William and Adso from entering the labyrinthine library, a prohibition which we know they will ignore.  They discover there’s a hidden room, from which a valuable book disappears.  Oh, and when Adso returns to the library alone in the evening, he’s seduced by a peasant girl, his first sexual experience.  I hope you’re keeping up:  this is just the beginning!

On the fourth day, another monk is found drowned in a bath, his fingers and tongue showing stains similar to those found on Venantius.  Time for another detour, and a theological dispute.  Then, the next day, guess what – there’s another body: Severinus, after obtaining a ‘strange’ book, is found dead in his laboratory.  Keep up, because another day later the librarian, Malachi, near death, starts talking about scorpions.  Nicholas of Morimundo, the glazier, tells William that whoever is the librarian would then become the Abbot.  I think that’s enough on the plot, but I have to add the pages in a copy of Aristotle’s Poetics were laced with an unidentified plant-based poison, on the assumption that a reader would have to lick his fingers to turn them.  Good way to bump someone off!  Eventually, the series of deaths come to an end, and a fire, which kills the murderer, burns down the library, and then spreads to destroy the abbey as a whole.  Hard to believe, but it all makes sense.

Perhaps I should step back from the book and focus on the author for a while.  Umberto Eco was born in 1932, and he was a polymath, his range of expertise covering medieval history, semiotics, writing fiction, and cultural, political and social commentaries.  In many ways The Name of the Rose is an astonishing display of all these areas of expertise, adding in biblical analysis and medieval studies.  He was a prolific writer, producing books for children, translations from French into English and vice versa, scholarly monographs on history, semiotics and literary theory.  In the midst of all this writing, he was appointed as professor of Semiotics at Milan Polytechnic, and soon after, in 1975, Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna.  He also managed to be a visiting professor to various US universities, including Northwestern, Yale and Columbia.

By the time he completed The Name of the Rose, in 1980, he was still busy publishing books on semiotics.  However, he wasn’t done with fiction, and Foucault’s Pendulum appeared in 1988.  Almost as complex as The Name of the Rose, this novel concerns three under-employed editors at a minor publishing house who decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call ‘The Plan’, is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar.  However, what began as fun soon becomes the source of danger and mayhem:  outsiders hear about the Plan and believe that the men have discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.  Equally unusual was his third novel. The Island of the Day Before (1994), set in the 17th century, is about a man stranded on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international dateline. The man can’t escape (he can’t swim) and most of the book is concerned with  his reminiscences on his life and the adventures that brought him to be stranded.

Umberto Eco continued his academic work.  It was some of those books that kept my attention on his work, especially Kant and the Platypus (how could I not be attracted by a book with that title), another study in semiotics, and even harder to follow than his novels!  I am not sure why this happened, but somewhere in the early 21^st Century, his writing – both fiction and non-fiction – become more pointed and concerned with contemporary issues.  The transition point seems to have been two books, On Beauty (2004) and On Ugliness (2007), two fascinating historical treatments of aesthetics.

However, The Name of the Rose managed to combine semiotics, medieval research and a great story in such a way it remains my favourite of all his works.  It was inevitable that it would arouse criticism.  Some critics saw his work as brilliant, and others considered it was pandering to popular tastes.  That wonderful curmudgeon, Roger Scruton, attacked Eco saying, “[he seeks] the rhetoric of technicality, the means of generating so much smoke for so long that the reader will begin to blame his own lack of perception, rather than the author’s lack of illumination, for the fact that he has ceased to see”.   Nicholas Penny, an art historian, commented “Eco may have first been seduced from intellectual caution, if not modesty, by the righteous cause of ‘relevance’ (a word much in favour when the earlier of these reviews appeared) – a cause which Medievalists may be driven to embrace with particularly desperate abandon.”  That’s at one extreme.  For others Eco has been praised for his combination of wit and encyclopedic knowledge, as well as his ability to make the  abstruse  and academic accessible and engaging.

As far as I am concerned, his books are always just on the edge of what I am able understand (the passages in ancient Greek one example of bits I simply don’t get), but they are wonderfully enjoyable.  More to the point, you are expected to work away at the text, not assume that all is set out for you!

Here’s an example.  One of the monks, Benno, is explaining why books are important, and not just religious texts:

“We live for books.  A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.  Perhaps then you will understand what happened on that occasion [when there had been an angry interchange about whether the abbey should only focus on books based on divine inspiration].  Venantius, who knows … who knew Greek very well, said that Aristotle had devoted a second book of the Poetics specifically to laughter, and that if a philosopher of such greatness had devoted a whole book to laughter, then laughter must be important.  Jorge said that many fathers had devoted entire books to sin, which is an important thing, but evil; and Venantius said that as far as he knew, Aristotle had spoken of laughter as something good, and an instrument of truth; and then Jorge asked him contemptuously whether by any chance he had read this book of Aristotle; and Venantius said no one could have read it, because if was never found and is perhaps lost forever.  And, in fact William of Moerbeke never had it in his hands.  Then Jorge said that if it had not been found, this was because it had never been written, because Providence did not want futile things glorified.  I wanted to calm everyone’s spirit, because Jorge is easily angered and Venantius was speaking deliberately to provoke him, and so I said that in part of the Poetics that we do know, and in the Rhetoric, there are to be found many wise observations on witty riddles, and Venantius agreed with me.  Now with us was Pacificus of Tivoli, who knows the pagan poets well, and he said that when it comes to these witty riddles, no one surpasses the African poets.  He quoted a riddle by Symphosius:

Est domus in terris, clara quae voce resultat,
Ipsa domus resonat, tacitus sed non sonat hospes,
Ambo tamen currunt, hospes simul et domus una.”

The text continues, but there is no translation of the riddle.  If you want to know more, you had to translate (or find a translation), and then work out the answer to the riddle.  If you know Latin, fine, but if not, you have to find it in English, where it reads:

A house there is which rings throughout the land with song,
The house itself doth sing, the guests in silence throng.
Yet both the house and guests together move along.

Now, that’s a lot of work for what is nothing more than aside, and the first time I certainly didn’t bother to do any of that, but about the third time around I was sufficiently intrigued to realise I had to sort it out (as above).  Incidentally, the answer to the riddle is fish in a river!

This is one brief extract from a complex 500-page novel.  However, it might explain why The Name of the Rose is such a challenging and yet compulsive story.  There are dozens, probably hundreds, of side excursions that invite you.  Are you one of those simplistic people who just wants to know who is killing monks and why?  Fine, do what I did the first time around, and ignore every one of those by-ways.  Are you caught up in the intricacy and complexity of the story and want to chase down snippets and excursions away from the main story.  There’s plenty to engage you, and I have still to track down some Greek quotes.

Does Umberto Eco like to play with his readers, giving them challenges and puzzles to ensure they become really engaged?  Or is it the case that he has what one of my teachers once described as a ‘dustbin head’, a person whose mind was full of lots of discarded bits and pieces?  Or, perhaps, he just likes showing off?  One thing is clear, to read fiction by Umberto Eco is to undertake a journey, one which has a number of twists and turns, and several optional red herrings to chase down.

His non-fiction writing is rather different.  He draws on a vast collection of knowledge, and makes the exploration of beauty, ugliness or the works of other writers fascinating and quite often surprising.  These are books to dip into, to read a chapter or two and think about the territory covered.  However, clever erudite Umberto Eco is allowed full scope to dazzle you in his fictional works.  For me, they are wonderful, packed full of jewels to enjoy along the way, plums as Nabokov would call them.  If you have the time and the inclination, dig into his text and enjoy the fruits of his scholarship, while simultaneously relishing the underlying structure of the plum pudding he offers.  Not sure?  Just sample the first few pages (the first, un-numbered page opens with saying ‘Naturally, a manuscript’), which sets The Name of the Rose up as a translation from a book written by ‘Abbé Vallet’, who we are told never existed …. What a trickster!

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Looking back twenty years, it’s difficult now to remember the first time I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (I’ll call it The Curious Incident from now on).  It threw out a challenge to readers:  do you understand what you are reading?  It is a story about Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy who might have Asperger’s Syndrome, a severe form of autism.  He has a photographic memory, he’s a whiz at science, he just can’t understand other human beings.  Like many people, I had read some articles on Asperger’s, but this was different, this wasn’t a story aboutChristopher, this was a story being told by Christopher.  Six years after it was published, Mark Haddon explained “The Curious Incident is not a book about Asperger’s…if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder”. He explained he wasn’t an expert on the autism spectrum or Asperger’s syndrome.  Perhaps not, but his perspective was exciting.

The Curious Incident is a mystery novel.  Its title refers to an observation made by Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Silver Blaze.  In that book a Scotland Yard detective, Gregory, is talking to Sherlock Holmes:

Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes:  To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes:  That was the curious incident.

The Curious Incident was unusual from the start.  It was published simultaneously as a childrens book and an adult book, in two separate editions.  Perhaps as a reflection of that, it won awards both as an adult book (The Whitbread awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year; and the Commonwealth Writer’s prize for Best First Book), and as a children’s book (the Guardian Children’s Writers Prize).  Oh, and one more thing, the book uses prime numbers to number the chapters rather than conventional successive numbers (so the chapters are 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on).  It has been translated into 36 languages from the original English.

Is it important to know the underlying plot?  Basically, Christopher lives in Swindon, England, with his widowed father, Ed.  He’s been told his mother, Judy, died from a heart attack two years earlier. One night, Christopher discovers that his neighbour Mrs. Shears’ dog, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork.  As he mourns over Wellington’s body, Mrs. Shears calls the police. When a policeman grabs Christopher’s arm, he panics and hits him, and as a result is arrested for assaulting a police officer.  He’s taken to a police watchhouse, put in a cell, but after more is learnt, he is released with a police caution. He decides to investigate the dog’s death, keeping detailed information in a notebook.

A neighbour tells Christopher that his mother had an affair with Mr. Shears.  After finding letters from his mother dated after her supposed death, he becomes distressed and goes into a catatonic state.  This leads to his father confessing he had killed the dog, and admitting Christopher’s mother is living in London with Mr. Shears.  Ed also reveals that he’d killed Wellington in anger, following an argument with Mrs. Shears.  Christopher decides to run away and live with his mother.  After a long, event-filled journey, evading policemen and feeling ill from the trains and crowds around him, he finally finds his way to the home of his mother and Mr. Shears.  His mother decides to leave Mr Shears and returns with Christopher to Swindon.  She agrees to let Ed see Christopher for brief daily visits, who gives him a puppy, promising that he will gradually rebuild trust with his son.

If that was all there was to The Curious Incident, it would never have achieved the prominence it did.  The story is fine, both exciting and emotional at times, but so are thousands of others.  However, it is much more than that.  Where to begin?

The story of The Curious Incident is told by Christopher, and the account of the inner life of an autistic 15-year-old boy is astonishing.  I don’t mean Mark Haddon researched how autistic children think and behave, nor am I suggesting this was based on detailed research.  Indeed, he has made it clear, this was not the case.   Rather it is a careful and compelling exercise in constructing the world view of a boy who is different.  You’re aware of how different things seem right from the beginning of Chapter 2 (the first chapter of the book).

It’s just after midnight, and Christopher sees a dog, lying on its side, clearly dead with a garden fork sticking out of it.  It had been driven in hard, Christopher decides, because the fork hasn’t fallen over.  The dog’s body was still warm.  This first short chapter is followed by an introduction to fact that Christopher has an amazing brain, an amazing memory, but that his focus is on the physical world, not the world of people.  After this brief background, we are back to Christopher and the dog in Chapter 5 (the third chapter, of course).  He pulls out the fork and hugs the dog’s dead body.  Mrs Shears comes outside, screams at Christopher and tells him to put the dog down.  He does, but she keeps screaming and he curls up into a ball.  Incidentally, that chapter was a page long.

Next, we read that Christopher plans to write about the murder of the dog, and we discover he is a student in a special school for children with various kinds of handicap.  By the next chapter, Chapter 11 (are you keeping up with the numbering?), we are back to the dog, and Christopher confronts the policeman who has been called to the scene.  The policeman is hurried in his questioning, Christopher wants to hide from all the noise, and when the policeman touches his arm, frightened he punches him on the nose!  This is when he was taken to a nearby police station.

From Christopher’s perspective, the unfolding scene is making little sense.  Indeed, for the next few pages we read about his knowledge of the Milky Way and prime numbers.  His description of his arrival at the police station is compelling.  He hands over what is in his pockets – the list includes a Swiss Army Knife with 13 attachments, a piece of string, part of a wooden puzzle, 3 pellets of rat food for his pet rat Toby, £1.47 (a £1 coin, a 20p coin, two 10p coins, a 5p coin and a 2p coin), a red paperclip, and his front door key.  He’s escorted to a cell, “a perfect cube, 2 metres long by 2 metres wide by 2 metres high.  It contained approximately 8 cubic metres of air”.  Not knowing what will happen next, he mulls over some (rather extraordinary) escape scenarios.

The next chapter takes us  on another detour, in this case into why Christopher finds people confusing:  some of the time they communicate by non-literal expressions, which he can’t understand, including metaphors.  He knows what ‘metaphors’ means, but he thinks expressions like ‘I laughed my socks off’ or ‘He was the apple of her eye’, are clearly not true in the way they are used, because rather than conveying a picture, these phrases sound like lies.  He takes words literally, and clearly, from that perspective, imagining someone has an apple in one of her eyes doesn’t have anything to do with her liking another person!

I hope these brief snippets convey something of the flavour of the book, as the reader moves between learning how Christopher sees unfolding events, and his thoughts and questions about a variety of topics, often unrelated to the events of the moment.  Twenty-five pages in, we learn Christopher cannot tell lies, and that he is going to write a journal about everything that happens when he decides to look into the dog’s death.  He is going to be a detective.

As we become increasingly familiar with Christopher, we begin to understand two aspects of how he sees the world.  Yes, as I mentioned a moment ago, he is very literal in what he sees and how he understands what he hears.  At the same time, his brain works at high speed:  one moment he is observing an event, and the next minute he is thinking through a mathematical puzzle, or reviewing some knowledge he has acquired.  It’s fascinating, because we realise he can’t forget anything, and at the same time, he makes sense of things using scientific or mathematical principles.  Too much information, however, will overwhelm him, creating painful interference in his head, especially so when he is interacting with other people.  Like a magician, Mark Haddon takes us into Christopher’s world, and, surprisingly quickly, we both understand and feel comfortable as we live inside it.

However, there is another issue we need to understand.  Christopher is physically unable to deal with people.  Those he knows well, his mother and his father, he can talk to, but he avoids touching them, and will scream if they touch him.  As for strangers, they are people to whom he gives a very wide berth.  Any attempted contact, as when the policeman touched his arm, leads to a violent reaction.  He can navigate the world around him, he likes animals (one at a time), but the only people with whom he can interact are those he has learnt to accept.  These include his parents, teachers at his school, and, as his adventure develops, some of his neighbours.  Every interaction is shielded, however, as Christopher takes care to be ready to deal with what he sees as the unpredictable and threatening nature of other people.

Haddon’s achievement is subtle.  After a few pages and almost without noticing, you are absorbed.  Christopher isn’t odd or weird.  Just the opposite,  You feel quite comfortable seeing the world as he does.  In part this is achieved by the frequent swapping between the events of the story and Christopher’s ruminations on various mathematical, cosmological and physical problems.  It isn’t just a matter of balance, though the shifts are carefully alternated.  Rather it is that this structure offers another way in which you begin to slip increasingly easily into how Christopher’s mind works.

I’m not sure if I can convey how this happens.  At one stage we are on a railway platform for five hours, as Christopher is building up the courage to get on a train, a decision slowly made easier as the activity at the station shifts from a typically busy rush hour pattern to having just a few travellers around.  However, we join Christopher in slipping away from observing the changes on the platform to consider such matters as the variations in tadpole numbers year by year, or looking at stars and wondering why people choose to give constellations names, especially as there are so many images that could be fitted to the visible arrangement of stars in the night sky.  It is as if Mark Haddon has taken us on some kind of magical travel, and we find ourselves living in a different world from our own yet doing so comfortably.

When Christopher was on his way to the Swindon Railway Station, for some of the time he was able to see the British Railways sign above the rooftops of town.  However, as he got closer the sign disappeared, often hidden behind by the shops and houses around him.  What to do?  Normally, Christopher would have made a map in his head, but there was too much going on.  He stood still outside a greengrocer’s shop, and worked out a plan:

“I knew the station was somewhere near.  And if something is nearby, you can find it by moving in a spiral, walking clockwise and taking every right turn until you come back to a road you’ve already walked on, then taking the next left, then taking every right turn and so on …”

In case the reader can’t visualise this, Christopher offers the reader a map.  However, as he points out, this is a hypothetical diagram, since he hadn’t memorised the actual map of Swindon, nor did he know exactly where he is.  Instead, he concentrated on his rules, and built up a map of the centre of Swindon as walked.  “that way it was easier to ignore all the people and all the noise around me”.  He arrived at the station.  If that sounds impossible or crazy, try it for yourself.  It works.

The book works.  Mark Haddon could have attempted to describe what autism or Asperger’s is like from the outside.  “Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities, and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language.  Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody, physical clumsiness are typical of the condition.” (from Wikipedia).  Clinically that might be useful, but it leaves someone like me at a complete loss as to how a person with Asperger’s experiences their daily life.

However, in saying the book ‘works’ I don’t want to imply this story should be read to help you understand Asperger’s.  That wasn’t Haddon’s intent.  As he said, “it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.”  I read novels because I enjoy ‘seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way’.

The novels that remain long after I read them do exactly that.  In some cases it is because they tease out the small domestic misunderstandings and assumptions that underpin daily life.  Thank you, Jane Austen.  Others put a story into an unfamiliar context and challenge you to make sense of what is happening, not just as a puzzle (although I do enjoy murder mysteries), but because they illuminate behaviour and expectations in unexpected ways.  Thank you, Becky Chambers.  Yet others toss the trappings and systems of conventional behaviour out of the window and offer a very unexpected perspective on how we think and manage relationships.  Thank you, William Golding.

One review put it well.  “ Haddon does something audacious here, and he does it superbly. He shows us the way consciousness orders the world, even when the world doesn’t want to be ordered”, adding that “the great achievement of this novel is that it transcends its obvious cleverness.  It’s more than an exercise in narrative ingenuity.  Filled with humor and pain, it verges on profundity in its examination of those things—customs, habits, language, symbols, daily routines, etc.—that simultaneously unite and separate human beings”. This comment by Charles Matthews was in the article ‘Narrator is Autistic – Reasoning is Artistic’, (in the San Jose Mercury News back in June 2003.  And, no, I don’t regularly read the San Jose Mercury News – this came from Wikipedia!).

The Curious Incident was published in 2003.  To go back and read it again twenty years later is to find it remains compelling, touching, and even thrilling.  It almost feels like a privilege to see the world as if you are doing so from inside Christopher’s mind.  Mesmerised, you reach the end of the long final chapter, Chapter 233 – and it’s a shock:  you want the story to continue.  We don’t want to leave Christopher at this point.  We want to know more about how his life unfolded.  Come on Mark, do your duty man:  where’s book two?

Kurt Vonnegut

When I first read Slaughterhouse-Five, way back in the 1970s, I knew almost nothing about postmodernist novels and their importance as a development in literature.  As far as I was concerned, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel was like a complex mosaic, bits and pieces of a story with any semblance of a simple linear thread abandoned right from the start, as we jumped backwards and forwards in time, location, and between apparent reality and fantasy.  It was also unputdownable.  Not only was that true for me when I first read Slaughterhouse-Five, but it is also embedded in the book itself, with the disjointed fragments compelling you read on, as you had to know what was happening, what had happened and what would happen next.  I suppose you have already anticipated my next comment:  if you haven’t read the book, you should.  Really, you should.  I think it’s one of the great novels of the 20^th Century, a powerful anti-war novel, a chilling yet sometimes hilarious mixture of science fiction and graphic writing, in large part based on the realities of the Second World War.

Before I go any further, perhaps I should step sideways at this point, and provide a little background on Kurt Vonnegut.  Born in Indianapolis in 1922, he was studying engineering at university, and enlisted in the US Army in 1943.  In late 1944, the German forces launched one last, huge offensive against the Allied forces in the Ardennes region of Belgium.  The battle, to become known as The Battle of the Bulge, was a huge and costly fight that lasted nearly seven weeks, with some 90,000 casualties on each side.  It was the largest battle fought by the US in the Second World War, the third largest in the country’s history.  Vonnegut was captured by the Germans during the onslaught and was interned in Dresden.

He was there in February 1945, during the infamous three day bombing of the city, when more than 3,900 tons of bombs and incendiary devices destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5km²) of the city centre.   An estimated 25,000 people were killed, although disputes still continue over the number.  During the bombing Vonnegut hid in a meat locker three stories underground, part of a slaughterhouse being used as a prison.  “It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around”, Vonnegut said in an interview in 1977. “When we came up the city was gone… They burnt the whole damn town down.”

After returning to the US, Vonnegut went back to university as a GI student, studying anthropology.  His dissertation was on the Ghost Dance phenomenon towards the end of the 19^th Century, which would bring back the dead, and help the native American people stop the westward advance of the colonists and unite the tribes throughout the region, but it wasn’t finalised.  He left the university and started working as technical writer for General Electric.  Three years later, he resigned to become a full-time freelance writer.  In 1952 he published his first novel, Player Piano, a satire about automation.  To begin with his books sold in small numbers, but in 1963 he completed Cat’s Cradle, and suddenly became rather famous.

The structure of Cat’s Cradle was an indication of what would characterise all of his later novels.  It has a narrator, John, who wants to write about one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist’s human side.  This scientist, Felix Hoenikker, has developed a second threat to mankind, ‘ice-nine’, a fatal poison, a strange liquid-like compound which was stable at room temperature, and more dense than liquid water.  When dropped in water it would sink, converting all the surrounding water into ice-nine.  Much of novel’s action takes place on a fictional Caribbean island, San Lorenzo, where John was researching a religion, Bokononism.  After all the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.  A complex but pointed critique of amoral science.

Six years later, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death appeared.  It describes in random order the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, including his early childhood, his time as an American soldier and chaplain’s assistant during the Second World War and after, alongside chapters describing Billy’s occasional time traveling.  Among many other plots, the novel includes Billy’s capture by the German Army, and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war.  Various critical commentaries have described Slaughterhouse-Five  as an example of ‘unmatched moral clarity’ and ‘one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time’.

I can’t readily summarise the plot, but I can’t help trying!  There are various themes that are important to the action.  Billy is a poorly trained and disoriented American soldier who discovers that he does not like war.  He’s sent to the front line during the Battle of the Bulge and narrowly escapes death. Captured in 1944 by the Germans, he’s transported to Germany, and arrives in Dresden to work in a forced labour camp.  During the extensive allied bombing raids over the city, Billy and his fellow prisoners are held in an empty slaughterhouse (yes, it’s called Schlachthof-fünf, ‘slaughterhouse five’).  German guards hide with the prisoners in the underground section of the slaughterhouse and together are among the few survivors of the city centre firestorm.  Sounds familiar!  Back in the US,  Billy is hospitalized with PTSD symptoms and is introduced the novels of an obscure science fiction author, Kilgore Trout.  I hope you’re following!

On his wedding night in 1947, Billy is abducted by a flying saucer, and taken to a planet many light-years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. There, Billy is put in a transparent geodesic dome, an exhibit in a zoo; the dome representing a house on Earth. The Tralfamadorians next abduct a pornographic film star named Montana Wildhack.  She and Billy fall in love and have a child together. Billy is instantaneously sent back to Earth in a time warp to re-live both past and future moments of his life.  In 1968, Billy and a co-pilot are the only survivors of a plane crash in Vermont.  He shares a hospital room with Professor Bertram Rumfoord, who is researching an official history of the war. They discuss the bombing of Dresden; the professor claims that the bombing of Dresden was justified despite the great loss of civilian lives and the complete destruction of the city.  Then Billy time-travels back to 1945 in Dresden. He eventually dies in the USA in 1976, at which point the United States has been partitioned into twenty separate countries and is attacked by China with thermonuclear weapons.  I hope you are keeping up with all this.

Guess what, there’s more!  One of his children, Robert Pilgrim, appears to be a typical troubled, middle-class boy.  He turns into an alcoholic when he’s 16, drops out of high school, and is arrested for vandalizing a Catholic cemetery.  As grows older he becomes obsessed with right-wing anti-communist views, to the point he changes from being a suburban adolescent rebel into becoming a Green Beret sergeant.  He goes to fight in the Vietnam War, and returns a decorated hero with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star and Silver Star.

If Vonnegut is the books ‘Narrator’, then Billy is clearly his alter ego.  Both confront the horror of war, the random nature of death, and the impact of increasingly horrific technologies.  Escaping bombs, whether they are conventional in 1945 or thermonuclear later in the book, it is always by chance.  Fatalism is another strong theme, especially for Billy who jumps between time periods, always knowing what will happen to him.  Some characters, like Kilgore Trout, reappear in other Vonnegut novels (Trout is central to The Breakfast of Champions, another postmodern novel dealing with free will, race relations and suicide).  Even the Tralfamadorians return in later novels, despite our being told in Slaughterhouse-Five they have revealed to Billy that the universe will be accidentally destroyed by one of their test pilots, and there is nothing they can do about it.  Alien technologies are as dangerous and as unpredictable as anything humans dream up!

Slaughterhouse-Five is an extraordinary book.  It welds together real events, wild science fiction, and a sustained critique of what people do to one another.  Forty years earlier, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, had offered an equally devastating critique of war.  Erich Remarque was German and had seen active service in World War One.  At the beginning of his book, Remarque writes, “This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war.”  It is a clear-eyed and depressing description of the conditions soldiers faced, documenting the monotony between battles, the constant threat of artillery fire and bombardments, the struggle to find food, the poorly trained young recruits (their limited skills ensuring they faced lower chances of survival), and the overarching role of random chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers.

In Remarque’s book the battles are not named and seem to have little overall significance, except for the possibility of injury or death.  They result in pitiful gains, some battles seeing them advance no more than the length of an average football field, gains only to be lost in later actions.  Remarque describes the surviving soldiers as old and ‘dead’, emotionally drained and shaken.  “We are not youth any longer.  We don’t want to take the world by storm.  We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life.  We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”  All Quiet on the Western Front will convince you there’s no need for another book about war:  it seems to say it all.

However, Slaughterhouse-Five does do more.  It puts the technology of war into sharper focus.  If Remarque wanted to convey how war destroyed soldiers mentally, not just physically, Vonnegut wanted to take the examination one step further.  By the time he was writing, technology had reached the point that soldiers were shaped and controlled by the impersonal technological systems of warfare, and not the other way around.  Remarque told us about the soldiers, but Vonnegut created characters and events to illustrate the impact of the bombs and weapons themselves.  Remarque wanted us to understand what war was like; Vonnegut wanted to make us recognise the complexity of reality, offering scenes and alternative perspectives, as if we were looking into a series of disconnected mirrors.

What is the allure of postmodernist writing?  Fiction had already undergone one big shock when modernism invade the territory, putting character’s interior lives and perspectives at the centre, and leaving the ‘story’ as the framework within which this examination took place.  It was an uncomfortable change.  Modernist literature emphasised fragmentation and extreme subjectivity, often presenting the reader with an insight into some kind of existential crisis.

However, while modernist authors sought to resolve or make sense of internal concerns and perspectives, postmodernists seemed to decide that the chaos around them was irresolvable.  As Vonnegut’s work amply demonstrated, the best approach was to ‘play’, offering multiple, often contradictory elements, within which the reader would wander.  Vonnegut was an exemplar of this approach, using irony, playfulness, black humour, pastiche, metafiction and magical realism, but all within a compelling zigzag narrative.

Slaughterhouse-Five appeared at a time of extraordinary experimentation in writing, journalism, film, and popular music.  Perhaps another of the vivid illustrations of what was happening was in Tom Wolfe’s work.  I’m not referring to The Bonfire of the Vanities, a wonderful and scathing depiction of Wall Street Greed, but in his two earlier  collections of articles and essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby in 1965, and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers in 1970.  Neither had the dizzying time shifts of Vonnegut’s novels, but they were both stunning.  In the first collection there were articles about the custom car culture, stock car racing and more, all told in an almost comic-book style, and the second was an ‘account’ of Leonard Bernstein hosting a party including Black Panther members, followed by a critique of the administration of welfare programs in San Francisco.  Funny yet devastating, very much Wolfe’s signature style.

Vonnegut has something of Wolfe’s nonfiction style but expands it.  Wolfe went on to adopt a more conventional novel writing approach.  Vonnegut chose to write his novels as collections of small pieces, brief experiences, each focused on a specific point in time.  He is reported as having said that his books “are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips…and each chip is a joke.”  As you read Slaughterhouse-Five, it is clear that the non-fiction that runs under the surface of the book was driving the content, not just in some of the scenes, like the bombing of Dresden while prisoners of war were hiding in the slaughterhouse, but in his trying to make sense of war and explain its pointless horror.

How many more books will be written about the dehumanising and destructive nature of war?  Several, I suspect, because while we can read what Vonnegut or Remarque have to say, we remain insulated from the real effects.  Living at a comfortable distance from the events they describe, today we imagine war in the future will be about hi-tech drones, surgical strikes, and battles managed online by smart technologists safe in bunkers.  Cinema and television will present stories about extraordinary heroes saving people and destroying enemies with the latest firepower, but preferably doing so in some distant jungle or desert plain.  Danger at a safe distance.  As Vonnegut comments as various disasters occur in his book: “So it goes”.

There is a war on right now.  It pops up on our television screens in between news segments about new economic rationalist government, sexual predators and damaged lives, and the highs and lows of sport.  Once again, a major power (or so it sees itself) is out to crush a neighbour.  This time it is Russia and Ukraine.  It is the same kind of war that Remarque described, characterised by the same ‘monotony between battles, the constant threat of artillery fire and bombardments, the struggle to find food, the poorly trained young recruits (ensuring lower chances of survival), and the overarching role of random chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers.’  While Remarque focussed on the soldiers, on television today we can see the issues through the lives of the civilians trying to stay alive while the fighting continues.  Older men, women and children, the unfortunate ancillary victims of warfare.

What is striking is how little has changed.  Young men and women are sent to fight.  Many will die.  Despite the talk about drone warfare and surgical strikes, it is still a time of artillery, bombs and gunfire.  Civilians will die because technology is imperfect.  Civilians will die because they may be harbouring the enemy in their homes.  Civilians will die because their deaths are the incidental, unintended effects of war, or so we’re told.  Civilians will die; no, civilians aredying in wars right now.  Today we’re all living in the slaughterhouse.

Here and There – Denmark

Louisiana is quintessentially Danish.  I know some people go on about the Mermaid on the Rock in Copenhagen Harbour, or the Hans Christian Andersen Museum and his childhood home in Odense, or the original Legoland Resort in Billund, or, for Australians, Mary Donaldson, the one-time Sydney-based account executive, you know, the one who became Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.  Some Australians are proud of Denmark’s role in providing a breeding sanctuary for Tasmanian Devils.  I have no doubt these are all worthy of attention, but for me they all pale into insignificance compared to Louisiana.  To be clear, I am not talking about Louisiana, the 18^th state of the United States, created in 1812, following the amazing Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  No, I am talking about the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, to be found some 35 kilometres north of Copenhagen, in Humlebæk.  This Louisiana is one of those wonderful art galleries to be found in a garden setting, a centre for contemporary art, painting and sculpture.  For brevity I’ll continue to call it Louisiana, rather than its formal name, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, or Louisiana MMA.

I don’t want to make extravagant claims.  There are other similar outstanding museums of modern art across the globe.  In Australia, Melbourne has the Heide Museum of Modern Art, which was established some twenty years earlier than Louisiana in 1934, with the similar concept of creating a museum for modern art in the grounds of a fine old home.  England is packed out with stunning museums of modern art, as are the USA, Europe and Asia.  What makes Louisiana special for me was the impact of my first visit there in the early 1970s.

Denmark is a delightful country, a small-scale version of Indonesia, with some 1,419 islands (yes, I know Indonesia is vast in comparison, as it has some 17,000 islands!).  Denmark is small, some 43,000 sq kms, about one-sixth the size of Australia’s Victoria, with a population just under 5.9 m (Victoria has nearly 6.7 m residents).  South of Norway, and south-west of Sweden, it is part of Scandinavia.  It is just 4 kms from Helsingør to Helsingborg by boat, the closest point in Sweden.  Helsingør is said to have been the inspiration for Elsinore in Macbeth.  Denmark and Sweden are now joined by a road bridge-tunnel complex some 15 miles long, which links Copenhagen and Malmo (some 28 miles apart in total).  The Jutland peninsula and the islands that make up Denmark are north of Hamburg, and on the map look rather like collection of territory ejected from Germany in an ancient volcanic era

All that geography tells you little about a country that consist of a high-developed advanced economy, a leader in design, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy and high-tech applications, especially telecommunications.  With a high standard of living, it is one of the world leaders in education, health care, civil liberties and policies to ensure LGBTQ equality.  Much to the surprise (and horror) of US visitors,  the Danish economy is characterized by extensive government welfare measures and high taxation, which  allows it to ensure an equitable distribution of income.  Denmark is a member of the EU but not the Eurozone, and it has opted not to use the Euro.  As for climate, and to my surprise the first time I visited, Copenhagen is at a similar latitude to the England-Scotland border.  I could add a whole lot of information about the Danish Vikings in the early part of the second millennium, and the Danelaw in England around 1000 AD, but I want to get back to Louisiana.

To visit Louisiana, I drove up to Humlebæk from Copenhagen.  This was before the Helsingør Motorway was built, and I chose to take the coast road, the Strandvejen.  Much of the journey was close to the beach, water to the right and fields to the left, except for a series of small towns.  The journey took us past conventional and modern beachside homes, and every so we would pass through a small urban area.  We pulled away from the shoreline as we entered Humlebæk, passed through the town, and entered the grounds of the museum.

I have no idea what I expected to see.  What I remember was that it was both stunning, and yet familiar.  Stunning.  This was a museum of glass, minimalist Danish design, simple, spare and light filled rooms containing beautifully displayed modern art, surrounded by grassy areas within which you could see pieces of sculpture.  Nothing was squashed together, both the paintings inside and the constructions outside given room to breathe, to be observed.  Familiar?  I had just driven up the coast, and had seen, and on at least two occasions stopped to admire, modern Danish beach houses.  Those I recall appeared to be huge glass boxes, raised up from the ground, and projecting out towards the sea.  Louisiana appeared to share much of the same aesthetic:  it wasn’t just a stunning gallery complex, it was also testimony to modern Danish architecture:  It was only when I went to the website recently that I realised the old home was still there, around which the museum had grown.

If I don’t want to make extravagant claims about Louisiana, I do want to explain why it had such an impact on me, and how that first experience has reverberated throughout my life.  I had been to art galleries before:  the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, the Tate Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and much later than my visit to Denmark, the Tate Modern in London.  All of these presented art in what I will have to describe as the ‘classical’ style.  Most of those London art museums were old, classical stone buildings, the walls covered with hundreds of paintings, the statuary largely inside (too much rain!), and also with each piece close to the others.  I had learnt from my early visits that you don’t go ‘to the museum’, but rather to a few rooms, and there you spend time looking at just part of the collection.  It was like reading my Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedias:  there was too much there, and you had to school yourself to focus on one aspect, one topic, one era.

In a way that is familiar to me now, on first entering Louisiana I saw art in a completely different way.  It was almost unsettling.  I can still remember going into one room in the museum which had a complete glass wall at one end, large areas of glass on at least one other side, and just one picture in the room.  Not just that room, but going from one after another I entered spaces where the design was to ensure you had room to really look at the art.  It was close to unsettling, especially for a boy who had been brought up on I Spy books.

Do you know about I Spy Books?  It is hard to explain the impact of I Spy books on children like me.  I suppose they share some of characteristics with Pokémon Go!!  Each book was a list of items that you had to find, and then provide details of information that related to what you had ‘spotted’.   A typical example was I Spy London.  To complete the book, you would travel all over London (although mainly the central area) looking out for sights like the house Dickens lived in, the Monument (for the Fire of London), etc.  As you tracked down each item, there would be a question:  in the case of St Martins in the Fields, you had to find the plaque giving the date it was built, and the architect’s surname.  It was Nash, and no, I didn’t remember that detail.  While writing about I Spy books I found a fascinating if rather brief blog by Jen Pedler from 2014.  She decided to follow the I Spy the Sights of London trail and recorded her observations:  since she was using the original book, she also commented on things that had changed since the books were written.  There were quite a few!

Like Pokémon Go?  Not really.  The task in each book was to find things in the real world, ranging from the sights of London to birds, wildflowers, aircraft, cars, musical instruments, and more.  Each time you completed a book, you sent it in to the ‘Big Chief’ and, if you had the correct information, you were sent a feather (a feather in your cap!!) and a certificate of commendation.  Some people saw it as a group exercise, but I was determinedly an individual working away at getting the books completed by myself.  The rewards were recognition, getting you out (out of the house, a feature much loved by many parents) and collecting.  Collecting is a habit I have never lost, but as I will explain in a moment, I no longer devote my leisure time to past activities like seeking more and more postage stamps, railway engine numbers, or copies of the first editions of every Australian Penguin book ever published.

More subtly, those I Spy books also worked to develop my interests; while spotting train engines and bird watching were activities shared with a primary school friend some of the time, I pursued them by myself, too.  When I went out with an I Spy book I often did a bit of engine spotting and kept an eye out for any strange birds!  I became a rather obsessive collector (and I probably still am), and kept everything carefully recorded, organised, and in its right place.  While my mother had been keen on my various pursuits to begin with, she later came to regret each one, seeing each as yet another activity from which she was excluded, but which seemed to work a kind of magic on me; happy alone, doing my own thing.  Louisiana was to throw all this carefully organized life of checklists and organisation up in the air.  That approach had worked at school, and it helped at university, but it was of no use in a room with just one painting in front of me.

Perhaps my first reaction in Louisiana might have been a sense of being cheated.  Where were the other paintings?  No I Spy checklist, I allowed the magic of that gallery work on me.  It was the beginning of a process that continued for years.  Perhaps two decades later I was looking at art differently.  Years later I was  taken around the Heide gallery and its storage backrooms by the museum’s director.  So many paintings, but I only looked at two, one of which became central to my teaching and thinking about postmodernism, art, and much else.  On either side of the world, but Louisiana and Heide are inextricably linked in my mind.

The magic from that visit worked its way through me in many different ways.  At the time I was in Humlebæk, I was an academic.  Looking back, I can see part of the change that visit wrought was in relation to me as a university teacher and as a researcher.  Stamp collector Sheldrake was being shifted out of the limelight.  In part, that transition had begun before my visit to Denmark.  I was already losing interest in traditional academic research, spending years pursuing data on some specific topic, exploring the minutiae of  a theory and its consequences.  In part that was because I was more interested in the application of ideas than I was in developing theory.  But it was also because I began to see my ability to collect and recall hundred, even thousands of facts in order to regurgitate them didn’t suit how I wanted to be in the world.  What’s that conventional saying?  ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’  True, but in order to achieve what the picture can, we need a thousand words or more to explore how it speaks to us.

Louisiana inveigled its way into my teaching.  I had never enjoyed lecturing, collecting material from dozens of books and articles, putting them into some kind of order, and then presenting the collage of ‘facts’ to students.  I could do it, as it drew on stamp collector Sheldrake, but I soon realised, when I did it the result was boring!

How can I explain this?  Perhaps by admitting I once earned the disdain of a colleague for my way of teaching business strategy, no lectures, but lots of challenges for them to address.  I believed my students learnt more my way.  The difference between the two of us was simple.  I would shape a semester long course around one book (not a textbook), or perhaps a collection of just a handful of articles.  I assumed the students would read the material.  My task was not to tell them what was there; after all, they could read!  No, what I wanted to do was to have a discussion on the points I saw were at issue, to work together to explore the questions and problems they raised, and to learn from each other’s perspectives.  We had material to work on, but it was a starting point, and it would be developed as the group worked together.  Did those students read other books and articles?  Of course, they did, but their reading was driven by enquiry, an interest in what we were examining, and I expected them to do that for themselves, to follow their own noses!  My rather supercilious colleague would comment that my students lacked a textbook and worried they hadn’t read X’s work.  No, I thought, perhaps they hadn’t, but they had absorbed the principles and practices of strategic thinking and knew how to use them in their careers.

In another sense, the magic of Louisiana changed my approach to reading.  I was a stamp collecting reader, working my way through everything written by each author in turn.  I still do that, in the sense that when I find an author I like I will look out for other books she or he has written.  Voracious reading is a continuing and highly enjoyable addiction. However, I have a much greater appreciation of the depth and richness of some books, those that I go back to and reread and continue to reread.  That is because they speak to me in a way that the stamp collecting side of my character misses.

Like many other people, I read several books for relaxation, enjoyable time spent in an author’s world, trying to work our who killed whom, or when and where the various ‘silk roads’ appeared and prospered, or the latest mindboggling explanations of physics and cosmology.  But those I return to are neither non-fiction nor just simple stories:  they are explorations of human nature, how we live with one another, what we seek to do in life and how to make sense of the world we’re in.  These aren’t books that do this through a non-fiction approach, telling what is or might be the case, but rather less directly, encouraging the reader to think, reflect, and explore the complexities of people, relationships, and how we make sense of one another, doing so through the author’s characters.

What does that mean in practice?  To the despair of some who know me, I reread books like Pride and Prejudice, each time seeing something more to be understood about the foibles of relationships, the consequences of fads and misunderstandings, luxuriating for a few hours inside a small yet fascinating world.  I reread Adam Dalgleish’s cases, no longer exercised by whodunnit, but rather trying to grasp the person in the stories, although the twists and turns of each case still do intrigue me.  Looking ahead, once the last book in this series appears, I’ll reread all six volumes of Philip Pullman’s account of Lyra, Oxford, and its journey through a series of imagined worlds, noting what I missed before and wondering about human motivations, actions and their outcomes.

Did that visit to Louisiana result in a moment of sudden insight and change?  Of course not.  As I have already admitted, in some ways it was rather unsettling, even sightly disconcerting, even if in most ways it was very enjoyable.  However, like many really major influences in life, its impact was slow, subtle, initiating incremental and important shifts in my perspective on myself and on my life.  I have never had the opportunity to go back to Humlebæk.  I would like to, but it is not an item on one of those strange ‘bucket lists’ that some like to draw up.  Excellent contemporary art can be seen in many places.  While I’d like to see the art that is there today, Louisiana’s place in my life is a result of how it entered and shifted my thinking.  That visit is one among those those few key moments which I know have made a major contribution to the person I am today.