In April, I composed a biographical sketch of Dorothy L. Sayers. It was meant as a prelude to a post about the Usual Suspects’ discussion of Murder Must Advertise. Among the nuggets I included in the biography was a brief mention of Sayers’s unhappy love affair with one John Cournos. I’ve gleaned from more than one source that Cournos was the model for Philip Boyes in Strong Poison. ( I’m pleased to note that this blog entry was selected for inclusion on the Dorothy L. Sayers Facebook page.)

Joseph Epstein’s luminous piece on Nikolai Gogol and his seminal work of fiction, Dead Souls, appeared in the  May 3 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The article’s title was “Surveying the Surging Immensity of Life;”  the subject, one of the great geniuses in an era of Russian literary genius.  Dead Souls, published in Russia in 1842, is a novel I’ve long wanted to read. Epstein’s  eloquent retrospective was a powerful motivator. I got the book from the library. It was a rather singular edition, put out by an outfit called Wildside Press. I can find no date of publication anywhere. The translation is by one C.J. Hogarth. 

Yesterday, I began leafing through the opening pages of this volume when I was stopped in my tracks by the name of the person who wrote the introduction. It was – is -

John Cournos. 

In the aforementioned blog post I characterized John Cournos as “a self-important writer and ideologue.” This is certainly the impression one gains from reading about his involvement with Sayers. But he appears also to have been a genuinely learned person gifted with a superior intellect. Cournos was born Ivan Grigorievich Korshun in Zhitomir, Russia, in 1881. His parents were of Russian-Jewish background, and although his first language was Yiddish, he eventually gained mastery of Russian, Hebrew, German, and English. His family emigrated to the U.S. when he was ten years old. He relocated to London in 1912, where, years later, he crossed paths with Dorothy L. Sayers. Click here for more information on the life and works of John Cournos.

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I had seen this painting of Gogol before:

Nikolai Gogol, by Anton Moller

But the author’s Wikipedia entry featured a daguerreotype that I’d not previously been aware of:  The photographer’s name is Sergey Lvovich Levitsky.    As I researched this individual, I could not help but marvel that I’d never before heard of him. The Wikipedia entry states that Levitsky “…is considered one of the patriarchs of Russian photography and one of Europe’s most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators.” And indeed he took some striking pictures, including some of the Russian imperial family:

Official engagement portrait of Nicholas and Alexandra, 1894

Czar Nicholas, Empress Alexandra, aand their daughter Olga, 1896

Empress Alexandra, Grand Duchess Olga, andd the infant Maria, 1899

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This is  John Cournos’s description of the plot of Dead Souls:

It was the day of serfdom in Russia, and a man’s standing was often judged by the number of “souls” he possessed. There was a periodical census of serfs, say once every ten or twenty years. This being the case, an owner had to pay a tax on every “soul” registered in the last census, though some of the serfs might have died in the meantime. Nevertheless, the system had its material advantages, inasmuch as an owner might borrow money from a bank on the “dead souls” no less than on the living ones. The plan of Chichikov, Gogol’s hero-villain, was therefore to make a journey through Russia and buy up the “dead souls,” at  reduced rates of course, saving their owners the government tax, and acquiring for himself a list of fictitious serfs, which he meant to mortgage to a bank for a considerable  sum. With this money he would buy an estate and some real life serfs, and make the beginning of a fortune.

I had to smile as I read this. Yet another scam artist on the loose! Whatever the country, whatever the time period, some things never change.

Dead Souls has recently been translated by Donald Rayfield, an emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian literature at Queen Mary, University of London. One critic hailed the new translation as “…a tour de force of art and scholarship—and the most authoritative, accurate, and readable edition of Dead Souls available in English.”  This is a New York Review Books Classics edition. This publisher is doing an outstanding job of making available great, and sometimes unfairly neglected, works from the past.

The Emperor’s Children is about three friends, all of whom had attended Brown University. Now living in New York City, all three are about to enter their thirties without having made their mark on the world, something they felt, with their Ivy League educations, they were destined to do. The action begins in the spring of 2001. The characters experience the shock of nine eleven, yet the trauma does not, for the most part, materially alter their lives.

I thought Claire Messud told this story masterfully. The writing was wonderful, enlivened both by effortless wit and her deep empathy for her characters. So when I heard that she had a new novel coming out, I was filled with happy anticipation.

You probably know what’s coming…. 

Here’s how The Woman Upstairs begins:

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

The narrator, one Nora Eldridge, goes on to spew out copious amounts of  rage, liberally laced with profanity. She obviously doesn’t give a hoot regarding whom she offends or scandalizes. (And trust me, she wouldn’t have said “hoot.”)

Now some might call this a powerful, even a bravura performance. As for me, I wanted to throw the book across the room. Or at least, close it, sigh deeply, and move on to something else. (It is, after all, a library book, so one doesn’t want to damage the merchandise.) After all, why should I care about this irritating woman and her seemingly endless list of grievances?

Nora Eldridge is what the French used to term (and possible still do) “une femme d’un certain age.” In her early forties, childless and never married, she’s by profession an elementary school teacher (irony of ironies). By aspiration, however, she is an artist. One of her students is an attractive little boy named Reza Shahid.  When Reza’s mother Sirena comes in for a conference, she and Nora discover that they have much in common. Sirena is also an artist. She’s Italian; her husband Skandar is Lebanese. They have planned a one year stay in Boston. As the days progress, Nora becomes closer and more intensely involved in the lives of all three members of the Shahid family.

Now it does not take predictive genius to intuit that this tangle of relationships will probably culminate in some kind of crisis. What exactly will happen, though, the reader is left to guess. The problem is, has the reader been made to care enough that this speculation is worth entering upon? I’m on the fence about this question; in fact, I’m on the fence about the entire book. The kind of novel I most enjoy is one in which events seem to unfold naturally and spontaneously and yet with a certain inevitability. You know the kind of thing I mean – you’re halfway through the book before you take stock of how much you’ve actually read.  But with The Woman Upstairs, I was aware of the plot machinery being manipulated. It’s as if the author was thinking, Now what can I cause to happen in Nora’s life that will illuminate her character and at the same time drive the plot forward? Oh I know: I’ll have her meet this family: an appealing young boy, an artist mother, an attractive, slightly mysterious father – and I’ll add a combustible element or two and see what happens.

In other words, the set-up struck me as contrived. And yet….

There’s some powerful writing in this novel. At one point, Nora is fighting her way through what is for her, as for so many unhappy people, the worst time of the year. She has spent it with her aging aunt and father; the talk has been mostly about friends and acquaintances with serious and in some cases terminal illnesses, and who was taking care of whom.

I was, by then, burning, not sleeping. Who would do the same for me, in my dotage? Who would be my good girl?….No: I derived a certain bitter thrill thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not, I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline. Spontaneous combustion, almost. Almost.

She ends this tirade by hurling profanity at Christmas.

At times, one is grateful for the Shahid complication. Otherwise, this novel would be one long rant. But more than that: it would be one long howl of pain. Beneath all the anger, there is clearly a woman who is being driven around the bend by an almost paralyzing loneliness. Allusions to T.S. Eliot, the early twentieth century’s great poet of anxiety and dread, appear frequently. When Nora firs meets Sirena, she is powerfully struck by the sensation of encountering a kindred spirit:

It was the strangest feeling, of relief and alarm at the same time. Like seeing a ghost. like seeing a ghost or having an epiphany–who is he who walks always beside you?–a feeling that you have no choice but to trust completely.

Nora needs desperately to make just such a connection. She’d spent years nursing her mother through her final illness, and as a result, felt bereft. She struggles to articulate the experience, and its aftermath, so Sirena will understand:

And I told her about how I used to paint big messy pictures, but  how when my mother was sick, and for all the years she was dying, one small capacity at a time, I stopped being able to paint, stopped being able to make any big gestures at all, and turned instead to little things, to rooms the size of show boxes, Joseph Cornell-scaled dioramas, as if these, at least, could not be taken from me–these are the fragments I have shored against my ruin.

As I was reading The Woman Upstairs, I kept pausing to analyze my feelings about Nora. Did I pity her? Admire her? Something in between? At times she annoyed me; at other times she aroused feelings of compassion. Interestingly, in a recent interview with Claire Messud in Publishers Weekly, the interview asks if she, Messud, would want to be friends with a woman like Nora Eldridge , whose outlook on life is “almost unbearably grim.”  Messud responds with a tirade of her own:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?” Nora’s outlook isn’t “unbearably grim” at all. Nora is telling her story in the immediate wake of an enormous betrayal by a friend she has loved dearly. She is deeply upset and angry. But most of the novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy, wonder, anticipation—these are things these friends gave to her, and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn’t matter, in a way, whether all those emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness.

Whether you can enjoy a novel whose central character is not very sympathetic is a question worth pondering. Indeed, I have pondered it, along with other readers, at various book club discussions. And the fact is, The Woman Upstairs would make a terrific book club selection. By the second chapter, I was dying to talk to someone about it; the feeling only intensified as I read on.

One more comment about this novel. Unlike many works of contemporary fiction – including crime fiction – this novel has a terrific ending. You could say that in a matter of moments, the Woman Upstairs attains something that she’s been striving for all along: a purpose driven life. Is there an irony in how this comes about? I’m not sure. It’s one of the many things I need to discuss with you, after you’ve read the book.

Claire Messud

  I’ve been a fan of John Harvey’s novels since the days when he was writing about Charlie Resnick, an extremely appealing detective who lived and worked in Nottingham. The last entry in this series, Cold in Hand, came out in 2008.  There was a gap of ten years between that title and Last Rites, the one that preceded it. Meanwhile, Harvey had created a new character, retired policeman Frank Elder. Recently, yet more protagonists have been created.

Good Bait is a standalone – or it is considered thus, I suppose, until or unless Karen Shields and/or Trevor Cordon appear in subsequent books. DCI Shields is based in London; DI Cordon, in Cornwall. They’re both involved in separate investigations, which, as the novel progresses, tend more and more to converge. With this kind of narrative, I often find that one thread is more vivid than the other. So it is in this case. Trevor Cordon is pursuing an inquiry on his own time – one that, for him, has a distinctly personal element.

Generally speaking, I liked Good Bait, though I found myself becoming somewhat impatient with  it from time to time. John Harvey is a reliably skilled and intelligent writer. So: recommended, but not with wild enthusiasm.
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  I’m a big fan of the novels of Karin Fossum. In recent years, she’s been the author of some of my favorite mysteries. The Caller is about a series of practical jokes being played on strangers by a feckless youth. As the story proceeds, the jokes become increasingly sinister, causing more and more pain for innocent individuals. As is characteristic of much Scandinavian crime fiction, the sense of dread mounts steadily and inexorably as events unfold.

As with Fossum’s other books, the writing is spare and beautiful. She’s master of the plot-driven novel whose characters are fully fleshed out and intriguing, if not always likeable. One who most definitely is likable is her series protagonist, Inspector Konrad Sejer. Among his other winning character traits, Sejer loves dogs. His beloved (and outsized!) Leonberger having passed from the scene, he’s now the proud owner of a Shar Pei named Frank.

Leonberger

Shar Pei

I want so much to recommend this book, but I feel that I must give fair warning: Late in the narrative, a terrible thing happens to a child, and for this reader at least, the event is described in more detail than was strictly necessary.
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   Jessica Mann reviews crime fiction for The Literary Review. She also writes  novels in the genre. Some years ago, I read A Kind of Healthy Grave, which features series character Tamara Hoyland.  I’ve  been enjoying Mann’s reviews in the aforementioned magazine for several years now, so I decided to read another of her novels. As I was looking for something set in Cornwall, I chose A Private Inquiry. 

Barbara Pomeroy is an arbitration judge. Her profession consists of rendering a decision as to whether a given development project can go forward in the location for which it is intended. It’s a job that demands intellectual rigor, scrupulous fairness, and a great deal of traveling. She loves it.

With her husband Colin and son Toby, Barbara lives in St. Ives, a town on the coast of Cornwall famed for its rich concentration of artists. Colin himself is a painter who is slowly but surely gaining recognition. Barbara must perforce spend much time away from her  family, and it is while she’s away that a mysterious newcomer to St. Ives begins to insinuate herself into their small family circle.

The other major character in this novel is Dr. Fidelis Berlin, a child psychologist and specialist in parent child relationships. A breast cancer survivor, Dr. Berlin is unmarried and has no children of her own.

A Private Inquiry is a work of psychological suspense rather than of police procedure. Although the hardback is a mere 176 pages, the author creates a rich, fully realized world, peopled with complex characters whose fates are of paramount importance. The writing is terrific. The puzzle at the novel’s heart is cunning and compelling. (A Private Inquiry was a finalist for the 1996 Gold Dagger Award.)

I raced through this book and was sorry when it ended. Very highly recommended. (Alas, it is neither owned at Howard County Library nor currently in print in the U.S. I got a perfectly good copy from a third party seller on Amazon. That copy is now available for loan.)
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  I so enjoyed A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming that I decided to read another work by him. I chose The Trinity Six, partly because it concerns that most notorious (and endlessly fascinating) clutch of spies, the Cambridge Five.   Sam Gaddis, a divorced academic short on funds, gets a tip about  a spy scandal that could have international reverberations. Problem: anyone who gets near this subject tends to end up dead – or at least, missing. Still, Gaddis knows there could be a  book in this – a sensational book, and one  that could aid him in his solvency dilemma. And so he sets out to pin down the truth – or lack thereof – of the allegations in question.  This is, naturally, is always a dangerous mission in a novel of espionage.

Gaddis’s quest has him careening all over Europe and Russia. He himself soon becomes as much the object of pursuit as the pursuer. There’s danger around every corner! And this was one of my problems with The Trinity Six.  It makes use of  the standard tropes of the genre without adding anything terrifically unique to them. Yes, there’s suspense; yes, there’s moral ambiguity. But the plot was so complicated that I gave up trying to tease out the various threads and had to be content to simply hang in there for the wild ride. Parts of it were fun. Other parts were baffling.

So: The Trinity Six had its enjoyable moments, but for this reader, it lacked the charm and the compelling quality of A Foreign Country. Still, Charles Cumming is at the forefront of the new wave of espionage authors, and deservedly so. He’s a good writer, and I would definitely read another novel by  him.

Here’s a video interview of Cumming conducted by Dominic West:

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  Finally, we come to Chelsea Mansions, the eleventh entry in the series featuring DCI David Brock and DI Kathy Kolla. Barry Maitland’s meticulously crafted procedurals set in London are among my favorites. This one gets off to a flying start with an act  that is both audacious and outrageous: the murder of a seventy-year-old American woman, committed in the street in broad daylight, in full view of aghast onlookers. Another killing soon follows, the victim this time being a Russian businessman.Could there possibly be a relationship between these  two apparently disparate events?

Brock and Kolla are soon on the case, but Brock can’t be, for long. He is taken ill with a mysterious ailment. Kathy is beside herself with worry about this man who is both her mentor and her close friend. Meanwhile, one John Greenslade, a Canadian linguistics professor in town for a conference, becomes involved in the investigation. Greenslade seems just as anxious about David Brock’s illness as Kathy is. This puzzles Kathy, with good reason.

These and other tantalizing questions are not amenable to easy answers. Kathy and her team are dogged and skillful investigators. Brock’s indisposition has left Kathy in charge, with nearly disastrous consequences. She’s so good at her job, she’s almost too good – at least, in the estimation of certain people.

Other titles I’ve read in this series are The Marx Sisters, All My Enemies, Babel, No Trace, and Dark Mirror. If pressed for a recommendation, I’d choose The Marx Sisters or Dark Mirror, but really I’ve very much enjoyed them all. And that most definitely includes Chelsea Mansions. There is something of a story arc in this series, but I don’t think it’s necessary to read the novels in strict chronological order – that is, unless you’re compulsive about such things. (And you know who you are!)

I always learn things of value from these novels. At one point, Brunetti is observing the activity of a colony of cats that live in what he terms a cat condominium, a structure expressly set up for their use in front of the church across the street from the police station. ‘Unruly creatures, cats,’ he think to himself, ‘and profoundly, incorrigibly disobedient.’ Turns out that the Commissario likes cats and would be happy to have one or two in his home, were it not for  the fact of Paola’s allergies. He then recalls this line of poetry:

‘For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.’

This quotation is from a poem entitled “Jubilate Agno,” written by Christopher Smart. This is a lengthy work, consisting of  four fragments and running to some twelve hundred lines. In the poem’s best known section, Smart praises his cat Jeoffrey and speaks lovingly of what he perceives as the feline’s relationship with God. From 1757 to1763, Smart was confined to two different asylums for the mentally ill. It was while he was resident in the first, St .Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, that he composed Jubilate Agno.  During this period, it is believed that Jeoffrey was his sole companion.

I very much like the use Leon makes in these novels of the   third person limited point of view. It has allowed her readers over the years to attain a kind of intellectual and emotional intimacy with Guido Brunetti. The pace of her narratives is not necessarily swift. Sometimes, in fact, it seems downright leisurely. There’s a reason for this. Time must be allowed for pithy observations of Venice, in all its uniqueness and peculiarity. (Leon, a native of New Jersey, has dwelt in La Serenissima for some thirty years.) Likewise, the reader gets to spend time en famille with  Brunetti, Paola, and their two children, Chiara and Raffi. This last is one of the chief pleasures of this series. This is a close and devoted family. Meals are taken together, including lunch – on weekdays – very civilized. The meals are invariably delicious; Paola is a terrific cook. The conversation at table is often both bracing and raucous. Here, Brunetti has just a told a joke they’ve all heard many times before: “Chiara slapped her hands over her erars, knowing what was coming. Paola sighed; Raffi ate.”  They all chime in at different parts of the story.

The cacophony gradually ebbs. This is how Brunetti experiences the rest of the meal:

He ate the rest of the dinner, though he didn’t know what it was he was eating. He drank a glass of wine, left the second one unfinished, drunk with the words that crossed the table, their different meanings, the fact that they indicate time: future and past; that they indicated whether something had been done or was still to do; that they expressed people’s feelings: anger was not a blow, regret was not tears. Atone point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what  was not, could invent an alternative reality.

In all my years of ardent crime fiction consumption, this was a first for me: a policeman – or any fictional character, for that matter -  ready to cry over the use of the subjunctive! (As a great fan of the subjunctive mood, or rather, the correct deployment of same, I really appreciated this odd but illuminating  interval.)

Guido Brunetti is a born and bred Venetian. Its culture, its folkways, are deeply embedded in his make-up. He no longer attends church, but one thing he does firmly believe in is the unique and special status of his native city. This brief exchange with a member of his team, herself newly arrived from Naples, pretty well sums it up:

As they passed San Giorgio, she turned to Brunetti and asked, in an entirely normal voice, “Do you ever get tired of all this beauty?”
His gaze passed beyond her to the clouds scuttling behind the dome. “Never.” The answer was automatic, unconsidered, true.

I haven’t said much about the plot of this novel. As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t read Leon’s novels primarily for their plots, but because they give me the chance to hang out with an exceptionally appealing group of people in a wonderful place.. But in fact, The Golden Egg relates  a particularly gripping and ultimately bleak story. When he learns the truth about the actions of certain individuals, especially a certain woman, Brunetti is gutted. It takes all of his natural resilience to lift his spirits in the face of this egregious example of just how far some people will go in the pursuit of easy money. A walk alone on the Beach at the Lido is his chosen restorative.

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Blogger Lizzie Hayes recently had a chance to interview Donna Leon. Here’s her delightful write-up of the experience.

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Here’s my favorite video of Venice. For me, it captures the allure and the mystery of the place. The music is The Four Seasons (Le Quattro Stagioni) by Antonio Vivaldi; the violinist, Federico Agostini:

Click here to read the story of  the dramatic ‘rediscovery’ of Vivaldi’s music.

Even though she was on vacation, Etta worked hard to keep up with her voluminous correspondence: 

[Picture credits: Mom, Dad, grandparents - basically anyone present with a camera or a smartphone!]

The little boy would have spent his first few months of life in Maggie’s amiut. There he would have lain warm and naked, the filling in a sandwich of animal fur and human skin. His earliest view of a landscape, one whose contours he would never forget, would have been the rise and fall of his mother’s strong, sealskin-scented back. When he was hungry, his mother would have lifted him from the hood and put him to her breast. When he shat, she would have cleaned his naked skin with her hair. For months he would have slept, watching the Arctic world go by, and dreamed. By the time summer came he would probably have already been eating what would become the mainstay of his diet, seal meat, chewed and softened by Maggie. Already the breezes and the low contours of the land would have been familiar to him. He would have had a strong sense of where he was.
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The only land lying between the d’Iberville and northern Siberia, 1,500 miles distant across the polar ice cap, was the mountainous ice capped terrain of Ellesmere Island. It was a forbidding place. Layers of peaks stretched back as far as the eye could see like a great army waiting the call to march. Ice mist glittered from the crags and drifted into the air and it would have been easy for anyone of a superstitious nature to suspect the island of being some kind of rocky anteroom to eternity, an in-between world where discarded spirits and the souls of never-born children curled up from the high peaks like mist and real life was just a dimming dream.

McGrath is exceptionally eloquent when describing the deprivation and terror experienced by the Inuit during that first harrowing winter on Ellesmere Island:

On 15 October 1953, the sun set over Ellesmere Island for the last time that year. For the next four months the Inuit would be living in perpetual darkness. On good days, when the clouds were drawn back, the sea ice reflected the moon’s glow and so long as the Inuit were out on the ice, they could see their footprints. On bad days, and most days were bad days, they could not tell what was beneath or above or around them, nor in which direction they were travelling or even when their journey, however short, might end. The Inuit of Inukjuak had no word for the void that opened up around them. At first, they tried to carry on with the routine they had worked so hard to establish while there was still light….But the dark exhausted them and pretty soon it was almost impossible to maintain a routine. Their body clocks broke down and the brain could not tell whether it was day or night or something in between. The absence of light made hunting an almost daily terror. Though they could no longer see it, the constant creaking and cracking of the ice reminded them that they were surrounded. The ice around the Lindstrom Peninsula often broke open without warning and floes were blown away on the high winds. Rime frost and beached ice collected at the shore and right at the sea’s edge the smooth spread of the ancient ice foot gave way to rough ice rubble and pressure ridges. The hunters had not had time to learn the position of all the contradictory currents and eddies in the sound before the dark came down, and they did not know where the ice was at its most unstable. Around the cracks there were patches of rotting ice and, beyond these, smooth fields of the open sea ice interrupted by immense, embedded icebergs.

Later, when a new family arrives, they must endure the same awful privations:

After a few days, the Flahertys discovered that their internal clocks had broken, waking them at all hours and disturbing their sleep. In the dark, everything seemed at the same time simpler and more complex. Objects became silhouettes whose sharp outlines obscured detail. Their own fingers dissolved into tentacles floating in a sea of contradictory impressions. Adults felt shorter, children taller, eyelashes felt thicker, noses more fleshy. The others, who had gone through it all before, attempted to reassure them, but there were so many bewildering new sensations that it was impossible to feel comforted.

It was decades before the injury done to these people was acknowledged by the government of Canada. Redress for these wrongs was obtained by the formation of a new legislative entity: Nunavut, created on April 1, 1999. Nunavut means “Our Land” in the Inuktitut language. At 787,155 square miles, it comprises one fifth of Canada’s land mass and is the fifth largest country subdivision in the world.

The government made further reparations by establishing a fund containing ten million Canadian dollars, the purpose of which was “…to provide housing, travel, pensions and compensation for the sixteen families who were relocated to the High Arctic in 1953 and 1955 and their descendants.” McGrath adds that there were calls for the government to issue an official apology to those whose lives were blighted, and in some cases lost, due to the Arctic relocation. At the time of her writing, however, no such gesture had been forthcoming. (The Long Exile was published in 2006.)

For more information, see the Wikipedia entry.   There is also now a tourism initiative for Nunavut.

The story of the Inuit of Inukjuak and their forcible removal to Ellesmere Island is one of suffering, endurance, and ultimately, vindication and triumph. It is told with compassion and conviction by Melanie McGrath. The reviewers in both Booklist and Publishers Weekly used the word “riveting” to describe  this narrative. The Long Exile is a masterful recounting of a story that needed to be told. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Melanie McGrath

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Nunavut scenes

   RECEIVE ME FALLING by Erika Robuck. Bea described this novel as historical fiction with some supernatural elements. This was Robuck’s first novel, self-published in 2009. Her second and third books have been published by NAL/Penguin. You can learn more about her at www.erikarobuck.com. Bea Also informed us that Erika Robuck is a local author. Howard County Library does not currently own RECEIVE ME FALLING, but it does own Robuck’s second novel, HEMINGWAY’S GIRL. (Her latest, Call Me Zelda, is scheduled to be reviewed this week in the Washington Post.)

  THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS by Isabel Wilkerson was recommended by Lorraine. Subtitled ‘The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,’ this magisterial account has garnered numerous awards and accolades. The reviewer in Bookmarks Magazine states: “In The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson has composed a masterpiece of narrative journalism on a subject vital to our national identity, as compelling as it is heartbreaking and hopeful.” It so happened that Wilkerson was giving a talk at the library that evening; the event was filled to capacity.

  Dorothea Benton Frank’s novels set in the South won praise from Robin, who also recommended SNOW IN AUGUST by Pete Hamill. 

Pete Hamill

From the Amazon.com review of Snow In August: “In 1940s Brooklyn, friendship between an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy and an elderly Jewish rabbi might seem as unlikely as, well, snow in August. But the relationship between young Michael Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch is only one of the many miracles large and small contained in Pete Hamill’s novel.” Robin also enjoys Lisa Scottoline’s legal thrillers.

Lisa Scottoline

  THE ROUND HOUSE by Louise Erdrich was recommended by Caroline. From the book description on Amazon: “One of the most revered novelists of our time—a brilliant chronicler of Native-American life—Louise Erdrich returns to the territory of her bestselling, Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves with The Round House, transporting readers to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.” This novel won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction.

Louise Erdrich

  BURNT MOUNTAIN by Anne Rivers Siddons was recommended by Emma. From the Booklist review: “Siddons mixes in a touch of the supernatural to bring the novel to an exciting climax, but what’s most appealing here is the layered family drama and the lush world Thayer inhabits…A master storyteller with a remarkable track record, bestselling Siddons returns to her signature Southern setting in her newest blend of emotional realism and a sliver of magic.”

  SWEET TOOTH by Ian McEwan was recommended by Phyllis.  Called “tightly crafted” and “exquisitely executed” in USA Today, this novel has an opening that grabs you by the throat: “My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service. I didn’t return safely. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, although he certainly had a hand in his own undoing.” Called “the connoisseur of dread” by Daniel Zalewski in a New Yorker Magazine feature piece, Ian McEwan is one of my absolute favorite writers. I greatly enjoyed SWEET TOOTH, but my favorite McEwan novel is probably ENDURING LOVE, a tale of obsession and the strange twists of fate that are part of the human condition.

Ian McEwan

  SWEET TEA REVENGE by Laura Childs and THE SNOW CHILD by Eowyn Ivey were both recommended by Dottie. Laura Childs is the popular author of the Tea Shop series and the Scrapbooking series, mysteries which are usually classed in the ‘cozy’ subgenre.    THE SNOW CHILD was Amazon.com’s selection for Best Book of the Month for February of last year: “In her haunting, evocative debut Eowyn Ivey stakes her claim on a Russian fairy tale, daring the reader–and the characters–to be lulled into thinking they know the ending. But, as with the Alaskan wilderness, there’s far more here than meets the eye.” In his review of this novel for the Washington Post, Ron Charles says: “The real magic of The Snow Child is that it’s never as simple as it seems, never moves exactly in the direction you think it must…Sad as the story often is, with its haunting fairy-tale ending, what I remember best are the scenes of unabashed joy.”

Joyce Carol Oates

THE GRAVEDIGGER’S DAUGHTER by Joyce Carol Oates made a powerful impression on Connie. She spoke of the novel with quiet and compelling eloquence. From the Publisher’s Weekly review: “At the beginning of Oates’s 36th novel, Rebecca Schwart is mistaken by a seemingly harmless man for another woman, Hazel Jones, on a footpath in 1959 Chatauqua Falls, N.Y. Five hundred pages later, Rebecca will find out that the man who accosted her is a serial killer, and Oates will have exercised, in a manner very difficult to forget, two of her recurring themes: the provisionality of identity and the awful suddenness of male violence.” Sounds harrowing, but remember – this is Joyce Carol Oates. I admire the amazingly prolific Oates; I especially like her short stories. But she can be kind of scary….

Connie also recommended the novels of R.J. Ellory, two of the best known of which are A SIMPLE ACT OF VIOLENCE and A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS.      Ellory has a rather unique life story.

  KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM: STORIES THAT HEAL by Rachel Naomi Remen was Peggy’s recommendation. She said that this book had been given to her as a gift during a difficult time in her life, and that it had helped her enormously. This is the book description furnished by Amazon: “Praised by everyone from Bernie Siegel to Daniel Goleman to Larry Dossey, Rachel Remen has a unique perspective on healing rooted in her background as a physician, a professor of medicine, a therapist, and a long-term survivor of chronic illness. In a deeply moving and down-to-earth collection of true stories, this prominent physician shows us life in all its power and mystery and reminds us that the things we cannot measure may be the things that ultimately sustain and enrich our lives.”

  THREE WEEKS IN DECEMBER by Audrey Schulman and A GOOD AMERICAN by Alex George were both recommended by Barbara, who spoke with deep conviction about the first title. The action in Three Weeks in December takes place in Rwanda, in two distinct time periods: 1899 and 2000. This novel was of special interest to Barbara because she’s been to Rwanda and greatly admires the people of that country and what they’ve been able to achieve, despite a horrific history. (If you get on the Amazon page for this title, you’ll see numerous customer raves.) Here’s the book description Amazon provides for THE GOOD AMERICAN: “It is 1904. When Frederick and Jette must flee her disapproving mother, where better to go than America, the land of the new? Originally set to board a boat to New York, at the last minute, they take one destined for New Orleans instead (“What’s the difference? They’re both new“), and later find themselves, more by chance than by design, in the small town of Beatrice, Missouri. Not speaking a word of English, they embark on their new life together.” 

  STILL ALICE by Lisa Genova and LIFE AFTER LIFE by Kate Atkinson were both recommended by Rita. The first is the story of Alice Howland, a distinguished Harvard professor who at age fifty is suddenly and unexpectedly afflicted with Alzheimer’s.   As for LIFE AFTER LIFE, the plot description on the Amazon page begins with this question: “What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?” It goes on: “On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.” LIFE AFTER LIFE has gotten mixed reviews, but Rita liked it very much and gave persuasive reasons for her opinion.

Kate Atkinson wrote one of my favorite books of the past decade: CASE HISTORIES was at once almost unbearably poignant and genuinely funny; in addition, it’s one of the most elegantly structured novels I’ve ever read. I’ve not enjoyed any of her subsequent books anywhere near as much, but I’m going to try Life After Life, especially since the group has selected it for future discussion. 

Kate Atkinson

  MAN IN THE WOODS by Scott Spencer was DruAnne’s recommendation. From Bookmarks Magazine: “What happens if we’re not made to pay for our crimes? This question lies at the heart of Man in the Woods, a psychological and philosophical thriller about belief, guilt, responsibility, love, religion, and the randomness of life.” From the starred review in Publishers Weekly: “Spencer, a deft explorer of obsessive love and violence, confronts the consequences of doing wrong for all the right reasons in his exquisite latest.” DruAnne emphasized the fact that the moral questions implicit in this narrative make it an especially good choice for discussion. I was pleased by that observation, as it provided a nice segue into the first title I was presenting to the group:

  Josephine Tey’s BRAT FARRAR, written in 1950, is the story of an audacious imposture and its far reaching consequences. The story plays out against a pastoral setting in England, where the love and knowledge of horses reigns supreme. In particular, it’s the story of the Ashby family and their country home Latchetts. A serene peace resides there – until the sudden reappearance of Patrick Ashby, the long absent son and heir to the estate. It’s as if he’s returned from the dead…. The moral crisis that occurs at this novel’s climax creates an almost claustrophobic tension. The first time I read it, I was riveted.

  I can never talk about BRAT FARRAR without also mentioning another novel by Tey, written in 1949, called THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR. As with the Dorothy L Sayers classic GAUDY NIGHT, there is no actual murder in this mystery; still, a deeply sinister force is doing its malign work.The story centers on two women who have a monstrous accusation leveled against them. Marion Sharpe and her mother have recently taken up residence in a house called The Franchise, in the village of Milford. Their dearest wish is to eke out their savings in peace and quiet, but instead they find themselves at the center of a firestorm with absolutely no idea how they got there, or how to get out. That is, until an unassuming solicitor named Robert Blair somewhat reluctantly answers their plea for help.

Josephine Tey is something of a mystery herself. Her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh; she wrote novels and plays under a variety of pseudonyms. She was born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1896. Little is known concerning her personal life, although some details have been filled on this site. Having been ill for some time, she ultimately died of cancer in 1952. She’d been secretive about her illness, as about almost everything else, and her death came as a profound shock to those who knew her.

Tey wrote eight novels that can be considered crime fiction. Detective Inspector Alan Grant, her series character, appears in six of them. Her most famous novel is The Daughter of Time, which I read ages ago and probably should revisit one of these days. But in the meantime, I’ve developed a huge fondness for the two above discussed titles.

Joesphine Tey is often grouped with four of her contemporaries: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio March, Margery Allingham, and Agatha Christie. Together, these writers are sometimes referred to as “the Grandes Dames” of Britain’s first Golden Age of crime fiction.

Josephine Tey

Dorothy L Sayers

Ngaio Marsh

Agatha Christie

Margery Allingham

(A word on Ngaio Marsh: my three favorite novels by her are The Nursing Home Murder, A Clutch of Constables, and most especially Death in s White Tie.       There’s a nicely done two-season traversal of her works available on DVD, featuring Patrick Malahyde as Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn. These DVD’s are owned by the Howard County Library System.)

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We had two submissions from book lovers who were unable to attend our session on Thursday. Here’s what Jeannie kindly sent via email:

   The books I was going to mention are “Mao – The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang, which is a detailed history of Mao; very clearly biased against Mao, but who can blame her — she cites 70 million Chinese deaths because of him. It’s long and tedious at times, but ultimately very intriguing. Now I’m in the midst of reading “Bound Feet and Western Dress” by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, which is a biography by an American- born woman of Chinese descent about her great Aunt who lived through many dramatic cultural changes. I’m not an historian and know next to nothing about China but I’ve grown more and more interested through historical novels and our recent readings.

  Finally, THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald was suggested by Doris, in view of the fact that a new film version starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan, is due to be released on May 10. Several years ago, another book group I’m in revisited GATSBY in tandem with DOUBLE BIND by Chris Bohjalian. The latter contains story elements from the Fitzgerald classic, and treats the events in the lives of Jay Gatsby and Tom and Daisy Buchanan and the others as though they actually happened. Although I did not care for Bohjalian’s novel, I enjoyed revisiting THE GREAT GATSBY and along with it, the bittersweet life story of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. 

[Click to enlarge]

This was one of the most stimulating, even revelatory discussions I’ve had the pleasure to be present at in quite some time. What a pleasure it was to  be among such eloquent and impassioned book lovers! Heartfelt thanks are owing to my AAUW colleagues and friends.

Murder Must Advertise was Mike’s choice for our April book. She got us started with some background material on the author. Born in 1893,  Dorothy Sayers was the late-in-life only child of the Reverend Henry Sayers and Helen Mary (Leigh) Sayers. Although born in Oxford, she grew up in the village of Bluntisham, in the fen country of eastern England.  Sayers  enjoyed a happy childhood, where her apparent gifts were recognized and encouraged by her parents. In 1912 she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. She completed her studies there in 1915. At that time, Oxford did not grant its full degree to women. That policy changed in 1920. Sayers returned to the university in order to be among the first women to receive this momentous and well-deserved honor.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, Sayers was desperately cobbling together various means of employment and still dependent to an extent on her parents’ largesse. Finally, in 1922, she landed a  job writing copy at  H.F. Benson, an advertising agency in London. She worked there until 1931. It was during this period that she conceived and began writing the Lord Peter Wimsey novels.

Dorothy Sayers’s personal life at this juncture can best be described as turbulent. Eric Whelpton, her first love, enjoyed her company but never really reciprocated her affections. She then became involved with John Cournos, a self-important writer and ideologue who served as the model for Philip Boyes in Strong Poison. When  that affair ended, she took up with Bill White, a cheerfully unpretentious person with whom she could just have regular fun. A bit too much fun, as it turns out: in June of 1923, Dorothy realized she was pregnant. Bill White reacted badly to the news. She might have considered marrying him, but it turned out that he was already married, and already a father.

Sayers took a leave of absence from H.F. Benson and went into seclusion, in order to see the pregnancy through, in strictest secrecy. Once the child was born, he was given to Ivy Shrimpton. a favorite cousin, to raise and care for. Shrimpton and her mother ran a home for foster children; this presented the perfect camouflage for the presence of Sayers’s son, whom she named John Anthony.

In 1926, Dorothy Sayers married Oswald Arthur Fleming,  a World War One veteran and journalist invariably  known among his acquaintance as “Mac.” Mac was divorced, with two children by his former wife. Dorothy and Mac’s marriage  was not without its challenges. Mac had been injured in the war and was ultimately unable to work. Dorothy had to support them both. In addition, Mac drank heavily and came to resent his wife’s growing success and fame as the author of the Lord Peter novels.

Meanwhile, with her new husband, Dorothy came clean about her past. When told about John Anthony, Mac was not only undismayed but actually expressed a desire to bring the boy into their family circle. In the event, John Anthony never did come to live with them, even though they “informally ‘adopted’” him. (I’m not sure exactly what that means.)John Anthony also took ‘Fleming’ as his last name.

The marriage endured until Mac died in 1950. At the time, they were living in Sunnyside Cottage in Witham, Essex. Sayers stayed on in the cottage after Mac’s death. She suffered a massive and ultimately fatal heart attack seven years later. She was 64 years old.

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One of the Suspects expressed surprise that a woman as modern and enlightened as Dorothy L. Sayers should be so shamed and secretive about an out of wedlock pregnancy. In Women of Mystery, Martha Hailey DuBose offers a partial explanation:

Today we can only begin to imagine the agonies of conscience [Sayers] must have suffered. England after the war was a profoundly changed place: moral standards and behavioral rules had shifted dramatically in a relatively short time. In London, just as in New York and Chicago, the 1920s roared with sex, drugs, and jazz. But some things remained verboten, and for women of Dorothy’s class and religion, unwed pregnancy was still at the top of the forbidden list.

DuBose goes on to expound on the likely repercussions Sayers would have suffered had she gone public with her situation: “It would have meant lifelong shame for herself, her child, and her entire family. Her parents, in their seventies, would be humiliated. Dorothy would likely lose her job and all hope of financial independence.”

It should  be remembered that beneath Sayers’s breezy, confident, and liberated exterior there beat the heart of a deeply religious woman. She was in some ways quite conservative. Above all, she was desperate to protect her parents from any anguish or mortification caused by her own actions.

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In the recent Winter issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, editor George Easter states: “Some books should never go out of print.” He was referring to the Lord Peter Wimsey series. Happily this perplexing state of affairs has been at least partly ameliorated by HarperCollins. Under the imprint of Bourbon Street Books, the publisher is in the process of reissuing the books in trade paperback editions with beautifully designed covers.

At this time, the plan includes only the novels featuring Harriet Vane. We can but hope that in the fullness of time,  HarperCollins will see fit to bring forth the remaining series entries.

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In a BBC piece on Dorothy Sayers, Jane Curran writes:

The image of Dorothy L. Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, the great fictional detective of the 1920s and 30s, is of a moonfaced, heavily built, bespectacled elderly woman in mannish clothes.

Curran adds: “Yet she first caused a stir as a tall thin girl, nicknamed Swanny on account of her long and slender neck. “

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Stay tuned for Part Two, in which H.F. Benson is transformed into Pym’s Publicity through the art of the supremely gifted novelist, Dorothy L. Sayers.

Fin has not been back to Lewis for a long time. There are reasons for his lengthy absence. He has no living family members still on the island. But he does have friends, a former lover, and other associations still there. The woman he had loved, and known from childhood, was called Marjorie – Marsaili in Gaelic, pronounced Marshally in that language. Fin’s best friend had been Artair Macinnes. Artair and Marsaili were now married; they had a son named Fionnlagh, which is Fin’s own Gaelic name. If this sounds like a complex and potentially fraught situation – it is.

Nevertheless, Fin must follow orders and return to Lewis, to look into the murder of Angus Macritchie. In times past, Macritchie had been the archetypal schoolyard bully, disliked by Fin and pretty much everyone else on the island. Now he was dead, and it’s up to Fin to find out who killed him and why.

Meanwhile, Fin’s personal life in Edinburgh has been slowly and painfully disintegrating.  He has suffered a terrible bereavement, and his marriage is on the rocks. It’s a good time to get away from Edinburgh. But Fin is apprehensive about returning to the Isle of Lewis – and it turns out, he has good reason to feel that way.

Peter May’s depiction of life on this remote outpost is meticulous and vivid. Here, Fin recalls a moment from his childhood on the island:

The northern part of Lewis was flat and unbroken by hills or mountains, and the weather swept across it from the Atlantic to the Minch, always in a hurry. And so it was always changing. Light and dark in ever-shifting patterns, one set against the other – rain, sunshine, black sky, blue sky. And rainbows. My childhood seemed filled with them. Usually doublers. We watched one that day, forming fast over the peatbog, vivid against  the blackest of blue-black skies. It took away the need for words

In a later scene, Fin and a fellow officer are driving up the west coast of the island:

He watched the villages drift by, like moving images in an old family album, every building, every fencepost and blade of grass picked out in painfully sharp relief by the sun behind them. There was not a soul to be seen anywhere….The tiny village primary schools, too, were empty, still shut for the summer holidays. Fin wondered  where all the children were. To their right, the peatbog drifted into a hazy infinity, punctuated only by stoic sheep standing firm against the Atlantic gales. To their left, the ocean itself swept in timeless cycles on to beaches and into rocky inlets, , creamy white foam crashing over darkly obdurate gneiss, the oldest rock on earth. The outline of a tanker, like a distant mirage, was just discernible on the horizon.

Peter May’s writing is powerful and persuasive, at times ascending to the poetic. This gift serves him well when he comes to describe an event of supreme importance to the people of Lewis: the guga harvest. Every year, a limited number of men are invited to be a part of this unique island tradition. It begins with a boat trip across treacherous waters to a rocky island called An Sgeir, where thousands of birds arrive during the summer months to nest and procreate. The guga, or gannets, are considered delicacies by the people of Lewis. The job of the guga hunters is to capture some two thousand birds within a two week period. The young chicks are plucked from their nests while the frantic parents flap their wings and screech in protest. The necks of the chicks are quickly broken; then they are plucked clean, slit open to receive sea salt as a preservative, and otherwise made ready for the return trip. Ultimately they will be presented to the islanders of Lewis, perfectly preserved and ready to eat.

It is considered an honor to be selected as a participant in the yearly guga harvest. Fin received just such an honor during his last summer before leaving the island to attend university in Glasgow. It is a distinction he could have well done without. He has no desire to go, but once chosen, it is virtually impossible to decline. And so, with  a heavy, heart, he joins the team of hunters. After the inevitable rough crossing Fin catches sight of An Sger for the first time:

Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rising straight out of the ocean in front of us….I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized  that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wingtips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air.

(The white streaks are actually bird guano. Fin had smelled An Sgeir before he’d seen it.)

An Sgeir was barely half a mile long, its vertebral column little more than a hundred yards across. There was no soil here, no grassy banks or level land, no beaches. Just shit-covered rock rising straight out of the sea.

Fin adds that he couldn’t imagine a more inhospitable place. But this is just the beginning. While engaged in the arduous labor of unloading two weeks’ worth of supplies, Fin discovers how hard it is to maintain your footing on the island. The rock is made slick not just by the guano but by the slimy green vomit produced by petrel chicks terrified by this sudden human invasion. Add to that the unceasing racket generated by the avian multitudes, and you have a sort of Hell on Earth. And there they will stay for two full weeks, carrying out the multifaceted operation of catching, killing, and preparing the birds.

There is only one place to shelter on An Sgeir. It is a blackhouse.

Although Fin can’t help but admire the ingenuity, resourcefulness, and just plain toughness of the guga hunters, he finds the two weeks on An Sgeir an awful experience, an endurance test that can’t end soon enough. And at the end of two weeks it does end. But not without two momentous occurrences, the full import of which Fin does not grasp until many years after the event.

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Peter May’s evocation of life on the Isle of Lewis is deeply resonant. The geography of the place, the social order, the dominance of the church, the entire way of life – all are presented here in minute detail. There were times when I thought it might be too minute. The anthropology threatens to overwhelm the mystery. The actual crime was, for this reader, the least memorable aspect of the book. The cast of characters is fairly large; moreover, the complex narrative alternates between the  present and the past. This brings up a certain  aspect of the narrative style employed by May in this novel: the events of the present time are set forth in the third person, while the sections dealing with Fin’s boyhood on the island are recounted by him in the first person. It took me a while to get comfortable with this method of advancing the story.

  Until I read The Blackhouse, the only knowledge I had of the Isle of Lewis had to do with the famous Chessmen, almost certainly carved by Norsemen in the early Middle Ages and discovered on the island in 1831. (In  the novel, Fin recalls a bit of island legend to the effect that the crofter who found the tiny carvings, mistaking them for the “…elves and gnomes, the pygmy sprites of Celtic folklore,” fled the scene in fear for his life.)

Peter May’s description of the guga harvest is riveting and bizarre to the point of almost seeming hallucinatory. Off hand,  as regards its affect on the reader – this reader, anyway – the only recent fiction I can readily compare it to is Karen Russell’s astonishing story “St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves.” So -  is there actually such a thing as the guga harvest? Indeed there is, as you will see if you click here.

There are actual blackhouses remaining in the Outer Hebrides, although few if any still serve as dwelling places. Here is Fin’s description:

The Blackhouses had dry-stone walls with thatched roofs and gave shelter to both man and beast. A peat fire burend day and night in the centre of the stone floor of the main room. It was  called the fire room. There were no chimneys, and smoke was supposed to escape through a hole in the roof. Of course, it wasn’t very efficient, and the houses were always full of the stuff.

He adds: “It was little wonder that life expectancy was  short.” (Wikipedia has an interesting entry on the blackhouses.)

Restored blackhouse in a museum on Trotternish, Skye

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The Blackhouse presents some structural challenges for the reader, and there were times when the plot seemed somewhat labored, if not downright irrelevant, given the fascination of the setting.. But Peter May writes beautifully, and he’s created an enormously likable protagonist in Fin MacLeod. This is the first novel in the Lewis Trilogy, and I look forward to the next one.

Peter May

He almost cried out in despair, staring up at the cracked, whitewashed ceiling, a married man of forty-one at the mercy of a broken heart.

The place is Tunisia; the year, 1978. The man with the aching heart is Jean-Marc Daumal, not just a husband but a father as well. As A Foreign Country begins, Jean-Marc is deriving no pleasure from his domestic status. Amelia Weldon, his children’s nanny and the love of his life, has without warning, disappeared.

These events are succinctly narrated in the novel’s first chapter. We then leap ahead in time to the present day.  Jean-Marc Daumal himself disappears from the narrative (at least,  he seems to). Soon we meet Thomas Kell, a former MI6 officer: former not due to retirement – he’s only in his forties – but due to disgrace.

But as the main action of the novel gets under way, Kell is being brought back in from the cold. (Did LeCarre invent that expression? So evocative, really.) His handler Marquand needs his help. It seems that the new head of MI6 – its first female head, in fact – has gone missing while vacationing in the South of France. Marquand is convinced that Kell has the skills and the know how to find out what’s happened to her. But it’s a mission that will have to be conducted completely off the books. And as is always the case in these situations, Kell must face the dangers alone. Even if he succeeds, there will be scant glory at the end.

With some reluctance, Kell agrees to take on this extremely sensitive task. In short order, he finds himself in France:

Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice.The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks, and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. “The place,” he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, “where suntans go to die.”

I really do enjoy Cumming’s writing. It’s incisive and insightful and full of the flashes of cynical wit that are so very apt for novels of political and international intrigue.

As with most novels in this genre, the plot of A Foreign Country becomes increasingly complex, but never so much so that it becomes hard to follow. Mainly it was just plain fascinating. I couldn’t wait to find out what was going to happen next. The genuine article, this: a page turner with both brains and a heart. I never stopped caring about the main characters.

Two quotations appear at the front of A Foreign Country. The first, from which the novel takes its title, is the famous first line from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently  there.

This is the second:

“There’s just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job…If you do well you’ll get no thanks and if you get into trouble you’ll get no help. Does that suit you?”
“Perfectly.”
“Then I’ll wish you good afternoon.”

This snatch of dialog comes from Ashenden: Or the British Agent by W. Somerset Maugham. ( Although not published until 1928, the stories that comprise this groundbreaking work were,  for the most part, written during the First World War. They grew out of Maugham’s own experiences while serving as a secret agent for Britain in wartime.)

  The Winter 2013 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine features a brief review by Larry Gandle  of A Foreign Country. He prefaces it with these remarks:

Spy novels…tend to be long drawn out bores reflecting the reality of the inherent dullness of the profession. Spying can be a lonely occupation in which the less striking the figure the better the spy. They should be dull and unassuming like the books written about them.

Gandle then declares himself no fan of the genre – not surprising, given the above comments. But he goes on to say that this particular novel is exceptional:

Charles Cumming has written a compelling spy thriller that moves along swiftly with realistic characters and many exotic locales.There are numerous pitfalls that Kell must traverse if he hopes to successfully accomplish his mission. The fun rests in watching him work.

Gandle concludes by giving A Foreign Country a warm recommendation – praise indeed from one who is generally not enamored with espionage fiction.

At any rate – I agree with him: it was fun watching the resourceful Tom Kell maneuver his way into and out of dire situations. It was more than fun; it was deeply engaging. And in the end, events come full circle in a way that is most satisfying.

A Foreign Country was the recipient of the 2012 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, awarded by the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. In addition, the novel was named Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the Bloody Scotland International Crime Festival last September. (I have  friends who attended that first ever event. This video really drove home how much I missed by not being there!)

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  Last night we watched a film entitled The Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene. Greene was one of the greatest thriller writers of the twentieth century. In addition, he wrestled with the most profound questions about the human condition. My favorite among his numerous works is The Quiet American. The Dangerous Edge is narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi and features appearances by John LeCarre, John Mortimer, Shirley Hazzard, and Paul Theroux.

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I’ve just begun listening to a Teaching Company course entitled Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History. Quite simply: I am enthralled!

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Early in A Foreign Country, Thomas Kell reflects that “A wise man once said that spying is waiting.” That wise man is John LeCarre.