Books to the Ceiling

Eve McNabb has come home to the village of Crossley to bury her mother May. It is, of course, a sad occasion, but an additional element of mystery intrudes when a letter arrives addressed to May by a woman named Jean. Eve has no idea who Jean is, but it is apparent from the letter’s wording that the correspondent does not know of her mother’s passing. The missive also alludes to a relationship Jean claims to have with May that passes beyond the bounds of mere friendship. Who is this woman, and what kind of hold did she have over May McNabb?

As a child, Eve had been quite close to her mother. For the most part, it was just the two of them; her father Tom had left the family early on and emigrated to Australia. Not long after his abandonment, May had informed Eve that her father was dead. In her professional life, May McNabb had been a teacher and headmistress whose reputation for probity was unquestioned. But on this one subject, she had resolutely declined to provide any specifics. Now, saying her final goodbyes to May, Eve finds herself plagued with doubts and questions. What was the real nature of her father’s fate? An even more radical question suggests itself: Might he still be alive after all?

Eve little suspects that by dint of her inquiries, she is embarking on a journey that will comprise both joy and heartbreak. One thing is for certain: her life will never be the same.

For over two decades, ever since I first discovered the joys of crime fiction, I’ve been enjoying the works of Robert Barnard. Last fall, as part of our Smithsonian mystery tour, my husband and I had the pleasure of meeting this fine writer. Barnard is not only a much-honored author of mysteries; he is also an authority on the Bronte family. The talk he present to our group at the Bronte parsonage was fascinating.

[Robert Barnard addressing our group at the Bronte Parsonage]

[Robert Barnard receiving the Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 2003]

Barnard has fielded several series in the course of his writing career. (He has also written a number of standalones like Last Post. See the entry in Stop! You’re Killing Me for the complete rundown.) An early title in the Perry Trethowan series, Death by Sheer Torture, is a riff on the country house mystery tradition, at which Barnard pokes exhuberant fun in the course of the novel.

Another of my favorites is The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori, which features policeman Charlie Peace. Haworth is where the Bronte Parsonage is. As our tour bus was entering this jewel of a village last fall, we drove right by the Tandoori featured in the eponymous novel! (Oh, dear - will we ever have a chance once again to have this much fun in the beloved old country?…)

Last Post finds Robert Barnard in top form. Eve McNabb is an enormously appealing protagonist; you’ll find yourself rooting for her from start to finish. I know I did.

How could Jean Loftus and her husband Kenward have lived in Asshe House for decades and not have known about the body buried in the back garden? This is just one of the many questions that surface in the course of Elizabeth Ironside’s elegantly written and meticulously constructed puzzler, The Accomplice. All kinds of surprises lurk in this narrative, not the least of which concerns the true identity of the extravagantly named Evgenia Konstantinovna Chournoroukaya. This illustrious-sounding personage turns out to be none other than the aforementioned Jean Loftus!

As the novel opens, Jean/Evgenia is an elderly widow increasingly immobilized by severe arthritis. She can no longer move about Asshe House with ease and has thus decided to turn the stately home over to her stepson Marcus and his wife Naomi. It is the latter’s project of re-landscaping the back of the house that causes the bones, long buried beneath the roses, to be brought to light.

Evgenia’s back story is told in chapters interspersed throughout the present day narrative. It is equal parts fascinating and harrowing. She came of age at the worst possible time, in the worst possible place: Latvia during the Second World War. She suffered terrible losses before she was able to emigrate to England and start a new life.

Zita Daunsey is Evgenia’s friend and solicitor. She lives with her son Tom, who has cerebral palsy. Zita is also recently divorced from Oliver, who, it seems, couldn’t deal with Tom’s disability. She was thus put in the grotesque position of having to choose between her husband and her child. She chose Tom. It makes for a difficult home life, and there are times when she feels frustrated and resentful, but Zita loves her son fiercely. By all accounts she should loathe her ex-husband with an equal ferocity, but instead, she pines for him and misses him. Such are the vagaries of the human heart…

When Xenia, a student, comes from Russia to stay with Mark and Naomi, events in the novel take an unexpected turn. Xenia claims to be Evgenia’s distant relation, a contention which Evgenia herself rejects out of hand. But that doesn’t faze Xenia, who has a plan of her own devising which she doesn’t hesitate to put into action.

Although The Accomplice was written in 1996, it was not published here until ten years later. Despite being greatly admired by reviewers and readers alike, Elizabeth Ironside’s novels could not find a publisher here until Maggie Topkis of the famed Partners & Crime mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village decided to import them directly from the U.K. She hand sold Ironside’s Death in the Garden with so much success that she decided to take things a step further. Felony & Mayhem Press, founded by Ms. Topkis in 2005, specializes in reprinting titles of interest that are no longer in print, at least in this country and possibly in the U.K. as well.

Meanwhile, she had an interesting experience while tracking down the author of the two aforementioned works. “Elizabeth Ironside” turned out to be the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, wife of the British ambassador to the U.S.!

[Lady Catherine and Sir David Manning]

Felony & Mayhem has a great list, but good luck trying to tease it out of a site that’s perpetually “under construction.” Titles are classified as British, Traditional, Historical, Hardboiled, Espionage, or Vintage. Topkis engages in a little ad hoc readers’ advisory on the back cover of each book. “Who’s Likely to Like This?” she asks rhetorically on the back off The Accomplice. The answer is, “Fans of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters and Death in the Garden.” I agree, though for the record, I found Death in the Garden somewhat tedious in spots. For my money, The Accomplice is an altogether more compelling, tightly constructed work.

(A good way of getting a list of titles published by Felony & Mayhem is to do a search on Amazon for “Felony & Mayhem Mysteries.” )

One final word concerns the novel’s title. Ironside uses the word “accomplice” at several critical junctures in the narrative to describe the way in which an individual, by not acting on knowledge that he or she possesses, becomes an accomplice with regard to another’s malevolent actions. In other words, the author is referring to sins of omission, rather than commission. It’s a provocative concept, with crucial moral implcations for the characters in The Accomplice.

There’s an interesting article in today’s Washington Post about the current state of the publishing business. “Turning the Page on the Disposable Book” goes a long way towards explaining some of the more odious practices of today’s book publishers. As we bibliophiles have long thought, the bottom line orientation of these entities largely accounts for the spectacular mediocrity of much of their product. (And we won’t even get onto the subject of worthy tomes going out of print with lightning speed.) Surprisingly, though, author Jonathan Karp offers a cautiously hopeful prediction concerning the direction in which he thinks the business might be heading.

“Not My Fault,” an essay by Jacob Heilbrunn that appeared in the June 22 New York Times Book Review, makes a rather apt companion to Karp’s article. Heilbrunn quotes the following comments by historian Michael Beschloss:

“Forty years ago, publishers had a pretty high standard for who should write books…There were fewer books published. You had better possess some literary ability.”

Further comment from Yours Truly not being necessary, I’ll end here!

An eclectic and intriguing list of favorites, appearing on Medieval Mysteries, was recently brought to my attention. (One of the things I like about this site is that it highlights works of nonfiction as well as fiction and mystery.) This particular list was compiled by M.B. Gilbride, one of the site’s three reviewers. It was begun as a list of “all-time favourite medieval books,” but Gilbride ranges far afield here, regarding both genres and time periods.

“M.B. Gilbride” is a heavily cloaked pseudonym. Click here for is his/her list.

Two novels included in this enumeration have also given me great pleasure: Morality Play by Barry Unsworth and The Egyptian by Mika Waltari.

This is a good place for me to plug two favorite nonfiction titles about the Middle Ages. Eric Jager’s The Last Duel is a great example of nonfiction that reads like fiction; from the halfway point to the end I couldn’t put this book down. And then, of course, there’s the book that first sparked my interest in this time period: A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman.

[Barbara Tuchman, 1912-1989]

Another annnotated list that I frequently consult is “Mysteries To Take to a Desert Island” by the late Grobius Shortling (aka Wyatt James). This list mixes the “usual suspects” with completely unfamiliar authors and titles - at least, they were unfamiliar to me.

The kickoff title is A Coffin for Demetrios by the great Eric Ambler. I had the good fortune to be reading this thirteen years ago in Paris, where the culminating action of the novel takes place.

[Eric Ambler, 1909-1998]

Last month I wrote about the book Into the Wild. We finally had a chance to see the film last night, and I feel like my heart got broken all over again.

I was angry at Chris McCandless almost the entire time I was listening to the audiobook. He seemed like an out-of-control narcissist with impossibly grand notions about his personal destiny. Only as his sad, pathetic end became imminent did my ire begin to subside. In the film, though, right from the beginning he comes across as a rather appealing person, a free spirit with a generous heart.

Generous, that is, except where is parents were concerned. It was as if cutting off all contact with them (as well as with his sister Carine, whom he professed to love) gave him the power to hurt them that he seemed to crave. But - in recompense for what injury, exactly? In the film, the McCandlesses are shown to have engaged in some knock- down- drag-out battles when Chris and Carine were young children. (This is something I don’t remember from the book.) In addition, during the summer between his high school graduation and his freshman year at Emory University, Chris found out that his father Walt had not been fully disengaged from his first wife when he began a family with Chris’s mother Billie. (She ultimately became Walt’s second wife when he finally obtained a divorce.)

“That meant we were bastards!”, or words to that effect, are uttered at that point by Carine in a voice-over narration that I found to be one of the films few weak features. As for the implication that this revelation caused Chris to reject his parents, I don’t buy it. I think he was looking to justify a rejection that was already happening; the story of the early infidelity was as good a reason as any, in his young mind, to heap contempt on the heads of two people whom he already viewed as hopelessly compromised by their bourgeous suburban existence.

And there’s one other thing. Walt McCandless was a brilliant, accomplished engineer. I think that Chris was afraid that if he chose to compete in any way with Walt, he might not measure up. As a father, Walt McCandless appears to have been somewhat judgmental and rather stern, possibly remote in his aspect - in other words, not in the mold of the touchy-feely, postfeminist Dad. ( I just re-read the last sentence and realized that I could be describing my own father. Perhaps because I was a daughter, and a somewhat sickly one at that, I managed to get enough caring from him to satisfy my needs. He and my mother were cruelly ravaged by old age, and I drew close to him at the end. It was an unexpected gift. )

Into the Wild depicts Chris McCandless’s slow, agonizing death with unsparing realism. It was hard to watch - I was riveted but at the same time wanted desperately to avert my eyes until it was finished. My husband and I both felt that Emile Hirsch, in the title role, was completely convincing.

In her review in Salon, Stephanie Zacharek informs us that Jon Krakauer ceded his book’s film rights to Chris McCandless’s parents. I believe that those rights are worth a great deal of money, and I admire Krakauer for that generous, gracious concession. Likewise, Sean Penn deserves praise for waiting patiently until Walt and Billie McCandless were ready for the story of their son’s brief life to be told on film. Penn has amply rewarded their trust with this meticulously crafted, gorgeously photographed work.

[Emile Hirsch as Christopher Johnson McCandless]

I just finished listening to the latest in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective series, The Miracle at Speedy Motors. As always, with Lisette Lecat’s subtle and sensitive reading, it was pure delight. Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle humor is mixed with a sadness just as gentle. As he charts the lives of his characters, some feckless, some reserved to the point of timidity, the author’s love of Africa in general and Botswana in particular shines through.

But meanwhile, it’s business as usual for Mma Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, Mma Makutsi, Mr. Polopetsi, and the rest of the cast of characters at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors (which also houses the office of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency). Mma Ramotswe receives mysterious letters containing veiled - and not so veiled - threats. A woman in search of her family comes to the agency and asks for help. Mma Makutsi and her fiance Phuti Radiphuti, proprietor of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, make a fateful purchase together: a spacious bed, with a spectacular headboard shaped like a large heart and upholstered in bright red velvet.

And most poignantly, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni goes in search of a cure for the paralysis of Motholeli, the foster daughter that he and Mma Ramotswe are raising in their modest home on Zebra Drive.

One of my favorite scenes in the book occurs as a heavy rain is tapering off:

“Flying ants. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the air was filling with flying ants, rising up from their secret burrows in the rain-softened ground, gaining altitude on beating wings, dipping down again. It was a familiar sight following the rains, one of those sights that took one back to childhood no matter what age one was, and brought to mind memories of chasing these ants, grabbing them from the air, and then eating them, for their peanut-butter taste and crunchiness.

Toward the end of this luminous novel, Mma Ramotswe speaks of ordinary miracles that occur every day. And I couldn’t help thinking of the fact that I was called to fill in at the last minute at my alma mater, the Central Library, Wednesday night - and who should appear but a patron I hadn’t seen a long time who just happens to share my love of British police procedurals!

Okay, maybe not a miracle - but certainly a fortuitous meeting. We fans of that crime fiction category constitute a somewhat small group. For most American readers, familiarity with this subgenre begins and ends with Elizabeth George. Ah, but there is so much more!

Doing readers’ advisory for this patron is a real challenge, as she’s well up on most of the luminaries in the field: Reginald Hill, Ruth Rendell, Peter Robinson, et. al. She hadn’t read John Harvey for a while, so I urged to try his latest, as well as Peter Lovesey’s. And I recommended wholeheartedly The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill.* Finally, I hope she tunes into this blog, because for some inexplicable reason, I forgot to tell her about Peter Turnbull! For me, the great challenge of readers’ advisory has always been the need to summon up titles and authors from out of thin air. I keep a running list, and Turnbull is most certainly on it - plus I just wrote a review of Once a Biker **- but still, he didn’t come to mind while the patron was standing in front of me. Only later, when I was back home, did I remember..ah, well, I believe the expression for that is “l’esprit d’escalier” - the perfect riposte you think of as you’re climbing the stairs and heading off to bed.

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I find the simple goodness of Precious Ramotswe, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and Motholeli deeply moving. And Alexander McCall Smith’s uncanny ability to depict that goodness in a way that is neither cloying nor sentimental is - well, a miracle.

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* I was rather amused to read the following in a review of The Various Haunts of Men, the novel that precedes The Pure in Heart in the Simon Serraiiler series:

“I confess that I had not paid any attention to [Susan Hill] because of her seemingly plain name, which did not cause me to sit up and take notice. Now that I’ve read her, I realize that her name belies her literary complexity.

Well said! And what a refreshingly candid admission from George Easter, the reviewer and the editor/publisher of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine.

** Since I posted the review of Once a Biker, Martin Edwards has comtributed a thoughful comment. One of the things that has really impressed me in meeting with British writers of crime fiction is their tremendous generosity toward one another.

From time to time, a feature piece entitled Second Reading appears in the Style section of the Washington Post. In it, columnist and reviewer Jonathan Yardley discusses a literary work from the past that is in danger of being forgotten. In this past Saturday’s edition of the paper, he drew our attention to a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald written by Andrew Turnbull in 1962. Admittedly, says Yardley, subsequent biographers have unearthed new information about Fitzgerald. But the direct quotes that Yardley provides convinced me that I need to get my hands on this book. Turnbull’s writing is simply gorgeous.

Yardley allows that his interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald borders on obsession:

“I admit to having read, and occasionally reviewed, far more of this stuff than probably is good for me. For more than half a century I have been fascinated by Fitzgerald’s story, that of a generous, decent and sublimely gifted man brought down by fatal flaws of alcoholism and self-destructiveness, and my admiration for his masterwork, ‘The Great Gatsby,’ grows more intense year by year.

Since leading a discussion on Gatsby last January, I have come to share Yardley’s sense of loss and sadness regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby is a work of genius, a quintessentially American story, and so, in many ways, was the life of its author.

So by all means, read “Andrew Turnbull’s Great Fitzgerald.” Then you can set about trying to acquire the book. Naturally, it is out of print; in addition, it is not owned by our local library. It is available through interlibrary loan, though, and also from our reliable friend abebooks. com

Once a Biker is the sixteenth entry in Peter Turnbull’s series of procedurals featuring Chief Inspector George Hennessey and Detective Sergeant Somerled Yellich. This outing begins with a cold case: a disappearance from years past that turns out to have been a murder.

The novel opens with 45-year old Tony Wells unburdening himself to social worker Gillian Stoneman. Wells used to run with a motorcycle gang called the Dungeon Masters. It has been two decades since the gang’s leader ordered the murder of one of its members, Terry North, and his girlfriend. The girlfriend’s body had been found shortly after the crime was committed; not so with Terry North. Now, dying of cancer, Tony Wells feels the need to reveal a secret: where Terry North is concerned, he quite literally knows where the body is buried. A subsequent search in a place called Foxfoot Wood bears out Wells’s revelation.

Hennessey and Yellich have been led to the victim but not to the perpetrator(s). And thus begins an investigation that will take them, along with junior officers Thompson Ventnor and Reginald Webster, deep into the history and the heart of the Dungeon Masters.

Now, if you had told me that I would be fascinated to learn the mores and folkways of a motorcycle gang, I would have laughed in a suitably deprecating manner. But it is these revelations, rather than the actual homicide investigation, that kept me riveted to Once A Biker. Turnbull goes deeper than the surface bravado - and the rather shocking degradation of female members - to explore the odd combination of hubris, vulnerability, and unwritten yet binding rules that accounts for the tight cohesion of a gang like the Dungeon Masters.

Peter Turnbull’s novels have some unique features that I always enjoy. For instance, chapter headings are reminiscent of Victorian novels - or even 18th century novels like those of Henry Fielding. Here’s the heading for Chapter Three: “Tuesday ,18 June, 12.15 hours - Wednesday, 19 June, 01.35 hours in which a bedroom yields dark secrets and both Ventnor and Webster are at home to the gentle reader.” Later, in Chapter Five “…useful information is obtained from an apostate and George Hennessey is at home to the gracious reader.” In chapters such as these, we are afforded a tantalizing glimpse into the private lives of series regulars. Surprises often lurk there.

For a novel about a motorcycle gang, Once a Biker contains some curiously formal, almost antiquated dialog. The diction in these passages adds poignancy to a situation which often involves the delivery of bad news. Here, Hennessey and Yellich are talking to Garry Wells, Tony’s embittered father. Hennessey assures him that for several years prior to his death, Tony had been living as a law-abiding citizen. Garry responds:

“Well, thank you for saying that but…well…he was a very selfish person. He wanted everything and he wanted it yesterday. He was our son, he died young in life of a cruel illness, but he was no saint. But your kind words are welcome, sir. Thank you.

This series benefits greatly from its setting in the ancient northern city of York. We accompany Hennessey as he walks along the medieval walls - something I myself was thrilled to do three years ago. At one point, the Chief Inspector gazes up in wonder at York’s incredible Minster, the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe. ( I can’t imagine living in such close proximity to this sublime edifice. I think I would feel blessed every minute of my life! )

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Peter Turnbull treads lightly - very lightly - on the internet. From the extemely brief biography on Tangled Web UK, I learned that Turnbull was a social worker for some years in Glasgow before returning to his native Yorkshire. From the Gale Database Literature Resource Center we learn, among other things, that this author was born in 1950 and that his father was an engineer and his mother, a nurse. Turnbull earned degrees at various institutions of higher learning in England and Wales. He has worked as a steelworker and a crematorium assistant in Sheffield and in London; in addition, he has been a social worker in Brooklyn, New York. ( I must admit that last bit really made me want to know more about him!)

There’s a sad little twist at the end of Once a Biker that caught me completely by surprise. I’ll say no more about it at present…

In a quote cited in Literature Resource Center, Emily Melton of Booklist Magazine observes that “This low-key Scottish author writes refreshingly intelligent books that are an absorbing blend of gritty murder mystery, human-interest story, psychological profile, and wry social commentary.”

I couldn’t agree more.

I was delighted to open the Style & Arts section of today’s Washington Post and see this piece on Michio Kaku. As it happens, I am currently making my way, in a relaxed, nonlinear fashion, though his Physics of the Impossible.

In Florida, in my junior year in high school, I took chemistry and fell head over heels in love with the subject. As the teacher was a young, adorable guy from Boston with that great accent, I fell for him as well. Many were the afternoons that my lovestruck friends and I spent “helping out” in thre chem lab, sighing over Mr. P. while we washed beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks.

Anyway, I got an A for the year in chemistry (no surprise there!), and full of the hubris of youth, I went on to take physics my senior year. What a humbling experience that proved to be! I was utterly bewildered, from the first day of class. Ultimately I scraped by with a D - my first ever. I was mortified!

So, I had reasons to feel hostile toward physics. But in later years, I came to realize how intimately physics was intertwined with the history of the first half of the twentieth century. And books began to appear that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by the nonscientist lay person. Two that I enjoyed in recent years were The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart and Before the Fallout by Diana Preston.

The Prologue in Before the Fallout begins as follows:

“On 6 August 1945, the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration, the Festival of Light, a young mother, Futaba Kitayama, looked up to see ‘an airplane as pretty as a silver treasure flying from East to West in the cloudless pure blue sky.” Someone standing by her said ‘A parachute is falling.’ Then the parachute exploded into ‘an indescribable light.’

Preston goes on to describe what happened next to these unsuspecting persons.The scene remains etched in my mind, probably forever. Silver treasure indeed…

We can only be thankful that physics is now the subject of lively intellectual inquiry, and that we can read about it and experience a sense of wonder instead of dread. In fact, writers like Michio Kaku make physics seem like the stuff of dreams. He refers frequently to the classics of science fiction as well as films like Star Wars and Star Trek, describing a specific scenario from a book or movie and then discussing it in terms of the laws of physics as they are currently known and understood. Fascinating stuff!

Here are some chapter titles in Physics of the Impossible: Force Fields, Invisibility, Phasers and Death Stars, Telepathy, Psychokinesis, Robots, Time Travel, Parallel Universes, Precognition, Perpetual Motion Machines. Michio Kaku considers each of these topics in the light of what is - or might in future be - feasible in accordance with the laws of physics. I read the first two chapters, Force Fields and Invisibility, and then skipped ahead to Time Travel and Parallel Universes. What a long, strange, and thoroughly exhilarating trip it’s (so far) been!

Professor Kaku has a wonderfully sly sense of humor. In explaining how messy and complicated it would be if people traveled into the past, he observes: “History would become an unending madcap Monty Python episode, as tourists from the future trampled over historic events while trying to get the best camera angle.”

I just finished listening to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Although the book was published in 1996, the story is back in the news because of last year’s film by Sean Penn. I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie.

The audiobook consists of six discs, and I almost gave up after the first one. I was finding the company of an arrogant, self-absorbed, monumentally selfish young man well nigh unendurable. I stayed with it and I’m glad that I did, although I found it a profoundly disturbing story.

Chris McCandless’s odyssey across the West began immediately after his graduation from Emory University. He fetched up variously in the tiny town of Carthage, South Dakota, where he worked at a grain elevator, in the California desert, in Bullhead City, Arizona, where he worked in a MacDonald’s, and in several other out-of-the-way places before heading north to Alaska.

And the purpose of all this wandering? Well, there seem to have been several purposes, none of them very clearly articulated. One was certainly to slough off the trappings of the upper middle class existence into which Chris McCandless was born. The child of Walt and Billie McCandless, he was raised in Annandale, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC. His father was an aerospace engineer of considerable eminence, having among other things designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle. Chris had a younger sister Carine and six older step siblings from Walt’s previous marriage. (Annandale is about fifty miles southwest of where I’m sitting at the moment. I lived there for a year in the late 1960’s. It is now part of a suburban agglomeration devoid of any distinguishing features and choking on its traffic.)

From what I read in this book, the McCandlesses did not experience extraordinary friction within the family unit while Chris was growing up. But he was a complicated person, a restless, discontented soul who often seemed at odds with his environment. His relationship with Walt was somewhat touchy. I read somewhere that all boys, as they grow into men, face a reckoning with their fathers. Chris’s way of dealing with this reckoning was to flee from it, as far as he could, as soon as he could.

In fact, he vanished from the lives of all of his family members. At the time of his death, they hadn’t had word of him for several years, despite having at one point hired a private investigator to look for him. It is this willful act of disappearance that I found enraging. Chris claimed to be close to Carine, yet he froze her out of his life along with his parents, supposedly because he feared that if he contacted her, she would in turn tell their parents something that might reveal his whereabouts.

As Krakauer describes the scene, Carine was utterly desolated when she learned of her brother’s death. Chris’s parents were likewise crushed. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised by the intensity of their grief, especially where Carine was concerned. Family is family, I know, but I thought that at least one of them would have hardened his or her heart against this young narcissist who had so perversely hardened his against them.

(I am reminded of the novel The Tinderbox, in which a family man whose daughter is a runaway never stops loving her and hoping to find her; meanwhile, the mother’s heart has turned to stone where her errant daughter is concerned.)

Into the Wild is not just about Chris McCandless and his ill-fated Alaskan adventure. Krakauer also relates stories of other men whose lives followed a similar trajectory. These were actually fascinating tales. The one I particularly enjoyed was about Everett Reuss (pronounced “Royce”) whose solo traversal of the southwestern deserts culminated in his disappearance, in 1934. The last trace of him was found in Davis Gulch, a canyon of the Escalante in Utah, where he had made camp with his two burros. After several months had elapsed, a search party found the burros grazing placidly at the bottom of Davis Gulch. Of the twenty-year-old Ruess there was no sign, and never has been, up until this day.

When I first visited the California desert, I had already heard of Reuss as a result of my reading about the history of the American West. I’ve always wanted to know more about his brief life and was pleased to encounter him in Krakauer’s narrative.

Many are the speculations - some plausible, some farfetched - concerning the ultimate fate of Everett Ruess. On the other hand, we know what happened to Chris McCandless. In his case, the question is not what, but why. Jon Krakauer does not attempt to formulate a conclusive answer to this question; he presents the facts to the extent that they are known and leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. But it would not be quite accurate to say that Krakauer has no particular attitude toward his subject. This is from the Author’s Note that prefaces the book:

I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale struck a personal note that made a disapssionate rendering of the tragedy impossible. Through most of the book, I have tried–and largely succeeded, I think–to minimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interrupt McCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.

( I personally found the narrative of Krakauer’s harrowing mountain climbing experience interesting but over long and therefore unnecessarily intrusive.)

In my estimation, Jon Krakauer seems somewhat in awe of Chris McCandless, believing, apparently, that the young man was in some way preternaturally gifted. Accordingly, Krakauer is bewildered, even hurt, by the vituperation heaped on McCandless in response to his story. The book Into the Wild grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for Outside Magazine: “The article…generated a large volume of mail, and not a few of the letters heaped opprobrium on McCandless–and on me, as well, the author of the story, for glorifying what some thoguht was a foolish, pointless death.” He goes on to quote passages from this correspondence. I’m no expert on surviving in the wilderness; still, I couldn’t help but agree with some of what was said:

‘Why would anyone intending to “live off the land for a few months” forget Boy Scout rule number one: Be Prepared? Why would any son cause his parents and family such permanent and perplexing pain?’

After I’d finished the recorded book, I got the print version out of the library. Krakauer places many wonderful, thought-provoking passages at the beginning of each chapter. Some were from the works of well known authors such as Thoreau, Jack London, and Wallace Stegner; others were by wanderer/explorers with whom I was unfamiliar, like Edward Whymper (Scrambles Amongst the Alps) and John Menlove Edwards (”Letter from a Man”). I was hoping to find a bibliography but there was none; an unfortunate omission, IMHO.

By the end of July 1992, ill and weakened by lack of food, Chris McCandless knew he faced death alone in the Alaskan wild, sheltered only by the derelict shell of Fairbanks Bus 142. Eventually he crawled into the sleeping bag his mother had made for him, and there breathed his last: “He probably died on August 18, 112 days after he’d walked into the wild, 19 days before six Alaskans would happen across the bus and discover his body inside.” He was 24 years old.

It is impossible to read the book’s concluding chapter and not feel overwhelmed by sadness. In the epilogue, Krakauer tells how he accompanied Billie and Walt McCandless to the scene of their son’s death. They placed a memorial plaque just inside the door of a bus; they also left emergency provisions under the bed at the rear of the vehicle.

I’m pondering the possibility of a post entitled “Books That Haunt Me - or that I think will haunt me.” Into the Wild will be near the top of the list.

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Here are two interesting and provocative articles about Chris McCandless: “Into the Wild: The False Being Within” by Craig Medred in Far North Science; and “The Cult of Chris McCandless” by Matthew Power in Men’s Journal. The latter piece also offers some intriguing observations concerning the film, which I still have not seen. I guess I’m a bit afraid of it, at this point…