Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

Last month, I was pleased to receive a copy of Faith, Hope and Carnage as a Christmas present, as I’d heard about the book but hadn’t gotten around to buying it. The book os co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, but their collaboration was not in the traditional sense of celebrity biographies (i.e., the celebrity lends his name and the partner does all the actual writing).

For one thing, the book wasn’t written in the traditional sense. Rather, it is the transcript of an extended interview with Cave, conducted through phone calls over a roughly year-long period. The start of the timeline is shortly after the first COVID lockdowns, which are to some extent an impetus (a book written by phone being an apt medium in the era of social distancing).

The pandemic is thus naturally a subject for discussion, but the biggest theme is certainly Cave’s experiences as a grieving father in the wake of his son’s death in 2015. I doubt the years lessen the pain in an absolute sense, but they do offer Cave some time in which to reflect and articulate the experience, which those without children can never understand, and those (like me) who have kids but have not lost one can sense only as a sort of vertigo. I make no claims that I can in any way truly understand the abyss the grieving parent plunges into, but since becoming a parent, I can, in contemplating such a thing, peer queasily over the edge.

Though the book deals in grief, O’Hagan’s questions never feel exploitative. He is a good interviewer, probing where he senses more could be said without driving the conversation, pushing back on some statements in a way that is not confrontational, but prompts Cave to delve a little deeper or offer a clearer sense of his meaning. This isn’t needed often, for Cave is, in my opinion, a great thinker. There is an unfortunate tendency to assume people in a creative field have an innate understanding of larger issues, but Cave has long struck me as someone who truly thinks deeply about things. He is the sort of religious person that I greatly admire. Not a zealot, because zealots are invariably shallow thinkers who don conviction as a kind of flashy armor, but one who doubts as much as they believe. One whose belief is fueled, almost paradoxically, by that doubt. As someone who struggled with belief and wound up on the other side of the equation, it is always fascinating to me to read from someone who wrestled with the same questions and reached the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Cave is known most of all as a musician, and while the book avoids the trappings of the standard music interview (when’s the new album out? What does this song mean? Who are your favourite artists?) some discussion of his work is inevitable—and much appreciated. It’s particularly intriguing to read his discussions with Sean while in the process of writing Carnage with Warren Ellis.

I loved this book, loved it’s intimacy, loved Cave’s passion that has mellowed with wisdom into a surprising optimism. I was sad when it ended. As a Cave fan, I’m certainly the target audience, but I’ve also never been huge on biographies or books about my favourite bands for their own sake. Too often, these feel more like collector’s items than works of literature. This one is different. I would recommend it to people who haven’t even heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. What Cave has to say cuts deeper than fandom.

Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.

This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.

Fairy Tale - Stephen King

I was pleased as always to come across a new Stephen King novel last month. It’s comforting to know that he’s out there, and I’ll have something enjoyable form him to read every year or so. It’ll be a sad day when he’s gone.

Fairy Tale treads a similar path in broad strokes to another of his more recent works, 11/22/63. In both books, a young narrator befriends an old recluse and through their friendship discovers a portal to another world. Except in 11/22/63, it’s a question of when, and in Fairy Tale it’s a question of where. In this case, the world of Empis, a kingdom once majestic but defiled by a usurping king. Drawn to the world by the promise of a cure for his ailing dog, Charlie Reade finds himself slowly transformed into a storybook prince, albeit one with a dark side, and becomes embroiled in the struggle to right past wrongs and restore balance to the kingdom. The book follows and plays with fairy tale convention, demonstrating the allusive richness that King has become known for, especially in his later years.

The writing is pure King, effortlessly readable, with rich turns of phrase now again dropped in without tarnishing the sense of genuine dialogue needed in a first person account. As always, King’s characters are his strongest point, and the long set up as Charlie meets and befriends the cantankerous old Mr. Bowditch, scenes that would be mere water treading for a lesser author, are in some ways the best parts of the book.

Too Naked for the Nazis: The True Story of Wilson, Keppel and Betty - Alan Stafford

I sometimes come across books through odd channels. In this instance, I read a review for a movie (I don’t even recall exactly which movie) that made a passing reference to the Sand Dance. Curious, I looked it up on Youtube, and found an intriguing video of two extremely thin men with fake moustaches in what likely would have bee described at the time as “oriental garb” doing a tap dance routine on a carpet of sand. After a bit more digging, I discovered the duo was really a trio, and that there was a book about them called Too Naked for the Nazis.

With a title like that, how could I resist?

As the full title suggests, the book tells the story of the vaudeville trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, largely forgotten now but nearly a household name in Britain during their heyday. Wilson and Keppel began as a duo, but made an inspired addition of a talented young chorus girl named (or rather, stage named) Betty Knox. A young mother with a history as a runaway and a love of performing, Betty helped shape the act for over ten years before departing on good terms, lending her name to a host of other Bettys, including her own daughter.

The book chronicles the ups and downs of the troupe’s career, but the real star is Betty. We are treated to a description of her early life in much greater detail than Wilson or Keppel, and follow her in depth long after she leaves the trio. I can’t blame Stafford for this decision, as her life post-Wilson and Keppel was as intriguing as her life during her days with the troupe. Drawn almost by happenstance into journalism, she became a war correspondent, first known for her lighthearted articles on Anglo-American relations during the war, and later for her coverage of the Nuremburg trials, where her sense of justice for all, even former Nazis, earned recriminations from many in the press. To be clear, Betty was no Nazi sympathizer, but she felt that the trials of lower-level defendants lacked the rigor of true justice. She even claimed to have been writing a book to this effect, but the manuscript has sadly never been found, if it ever existed in the first place.

Stafford has a good, breezy writing style, unornate and clear. It reminds me of Irwin Chusid’s writing in Songs in the Key of Z: clearly the work of a devotee, but well researched and discussed without gushing. Too Naked for the Nazis provides a neat snapshot of a period in entertainment history far removed from what we have today, using one longstanding and widely celebrated act as a lens to view music hall as a whole. Recommended for anyone interested in such things.

Petersburg - Andrei Bely

I continue my Russian kick with Andrei Bely’s seminal symbolist novel Petersburg. The book’s history is interesting, in that it had two different publications straddling the Russian Revolution. First released in 1913, it received little notice. It was reissued in 1922 with significant cuts, particularly around anything seen as critical to the revolutionary movement. The first version is widely considered superior, and is the basis of the translation I read.

The story is fairly simple: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukov, son of prominent bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich, is recruited by radicals to assassinate his father with a bomb stored in a sardine tin. There are other components, like the moral quandary of his contact among the radicals, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, who faces his own pressure form their leader Lippanchenko; the unhappy marriage of Sofya Petrovna Likhutina and her husband Sergei, the former of whom Nikolai pines for; and Nikolai’s unusual tendency to dress up in a red domino costume and make a fool of himself around Petersburg.

But the core of the story is almost besides the point. Much more focus rests on the tone and language of the book, which translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad take plains to situate in a context comprehensible to English readers yet faithful to the original Russian, and especially on details of place. The main character of Petersburg is ultimately Petersburg itself, manifest at one point by the living Bronze Horsemen, a symbol drawn from the Pushkin poem of the same name quoted regularly throughout.

As a Symbolist work, Petersburg has moments of impenetrability, but there is a playfulness and sardonic wit that you can appreciate even if some of the details escape you. I would not be surprised to learn that Salman Rushdie read and admired this book, as it feels aligned with his work in tenor if not in form. Ulysses by Joyce is also a good comparison (the only book, incidentally, that Nabokov ranked higher than Petersburg in his personal list of the great 20th century masterpieces of literature).

This is not an easy read, but it deserves its place in the canon.

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

First, I have to admit that the version of The Gulag Archipelago I read was abridged from the original three volumes down to one. I don’t read abridgements as a rule, but this was the only copy they had at the library, and it was at least authorized by the author, so I can hope the key elements were distilled.

The Gulag Archipelago is in part an autobiographical depiction of Solzhenitsyn’s time in a Gulag prison, but it also stretches much beyond that, providing a detailed examination of the Gulag system’s history and sharing stories from dozens of prisoners. The book is unflinching in its criticism, not just of the Gulag system itself, but of Stalin, Lenin, and even Khrushchev, whose “thaw” was supposed to correct the grossest injustices of Stalinist communism but instead simply buried them a bit deeper underground (though it must be admitted that he allowed a bit more criticism, at least).

The tone is so biting, so justifiably aggrieved, that I’m honestly surprised that Solzhenitsyn survived its publication, ultimately suffering expulsion from the Soviet Union rather than prison or death. That alone speaks to some small evolution on soviet punishment, though Stalin set such a lower bar that even serious human rights offences can seem liberal by comparison.

The most shocking part of the book to me was the description of interrogations. I had expected the Gulags to be miserable places, and never thought the Soviets would be averse to using torture, but the breadth and extent of it was absurd, especially because it was all so pointless. Clearly the interrogators knew that these people hadn’t done anything and didn’t have any useful information on dissidence for them. The whole thing was simply a way to meet quotas. As such, why not just round them up and cart them off to the Gulags? It’s not as if there was any actual due process going on.

Solzhenitsyn is foremost among soviet dissident writers, standing alongside Bulgakov and Akhmatova, and deserves his reputation. One day I will need to track down an unabridged translation and readthe parts I missed this time round.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy

It’s been a long time since I read much Tolstoy. Apart from rereading Anna Karenina about ten years ago, I haven’t picked up his work since leaving university. I was always more attracted to the darker psychology of Dostoevsky and the proto-surrealism of Gogol. However, as I get older, I’ve come to appreciate Tolstoy more, and it was nice to read a collection that mixed stories I’d encountered before with ones I read for the first time.

This particular collection contains four stories, which I’d classify as novellas or short novels with the exception of Master and Man, which I suppose you would call a short story (such descriptions are more about pacing and tone than actual word count anyway). In addition to its differing length, Master and Man is also the oddball of the four in terms of its subject matter, as the three other stories all deal in some way with unhappy marriages (something of a recurring theme for Tolstoy, who had a famously unhappy marriage of his own).

Of these, Family Happiness explores the theme most overtly, dealing as it does with a young woman who marries and older man only to have her expectations gradually wither. Interestingly, the book is written from the woman’s perspective and is very much on her side. Her husband is not made out as a villain—Tolstoy’s characters are too psychologically complex for such easy characterization—but sympathies lie more with her as the younger, more naïve party who believed an impossible dream and watched it buckle under the weight of reality.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best story of the four, and though unhappy marriage is a theme, the focus is ultimately on Ivan’s growing sense of mortality, and his fear not just of dying, but of dying after having lived his life so pointlessly. Praskovya, his wife, is not entirely sympathetic, but there was a humanity in her flaws that felt like a real person rather than a caricature. When her husband falls ill, she treats as either an uncooperative patient or a deliberate nuisance, by turns discounting his pain and chastising him for not doing more to treat it. Her lack of sympathy is harsh, but feels real, reflecting the weight illness puts on the caregiver as well as the sick.

The Kreutzer Sonata is the most Dostoevskyian of the four. It is written as the extended confession-cum-manifesto of a bitter and cynical man who killed his wife after believing her unfaithful (all we know for sure is that she was sitting at a table with another man; whether more was going on I’m not sure). The killer is wistful but unrepentant, seeing his act as necessary but blaming himself for causing it—not by being the murderer, but by “defiling” his wife through marriage and intercourse. He’s a weird dude.

Master and Man is the most tender story, and significantly the only one where a marriage doesn’t feature prominently. The relationship is instead (as the title implies) between a lord and his servant. Impious and greedy, the wealthy landowner Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov travels through a snowstorm in an effort to beat his competitors to a land deal he believes will be very profitable. On his wife’s assistance, he brings the peasant Nikita with him. Nikita knows he is underpaid by his master but lacks other options. Despite feeling forced to work for him, Nikita is loyal to Vasili and does his best to serve him well. When their sledge gets trapped in the snow and Nikita begins freezing to death, Vasili shows selflessness in covering him with his body. IN lesser hands the story would feel hackneyed, but Tolstoy gives a rich reading of the inner lives of both men, ultimately justifying the action.

Overall, a solid collection of Tolstoy’s work.

The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare - Christian Brose

The Kill Chain is another one of those library holds I only half-remember making. The writer, Christian Brose, was a long-time advisor to Senator John McCain, and in this book extends McCain’s vision for an evolution in military thinking better adapted to current geopolitical threats: namely China. He paints a chilling picture of China’s rapidly advancing military strength, which is due to put it on par or even above American power in the near future if great efforts aren’t made to course correct. His points are clear and well reasoned, though a bit repetitive, and I found most chapters orbiting around the same few arguments, namely:

• America’s post-Cold War military has made assumptions about its capability—namely, that it can outmaneuver and outgun its opponents and will fight exclusively on their territory—that are increasingly untrue given the rise of Russia and especially China.

• Military acquisitions focuses too much on platforms (aircraft carriers, jets, etc) that are expensive and large, rather than a modular force made up of large amounts of more expendable components.

• Communication is far too hampered between forces, limiting their ability to close kill chains effectively (a kill chain being not necessarily about killing, but the operative process of identifying information, communicating it to the right source, and acting on it).

• Artificial Intelligence will play a critical role in the future of warfare by eliminating much of the mental “grunt work” of locating targets, calculating options, etc, presenting commanders with a clear high level picture of the battlefield

While Brose spends most of the book hammering these points, he does offer a more hopeful conclusion wherein he points to how America can cope with military parity with China, and how this could in some ways actually play to our advantage. It was an interesting book, written competently. I trust Brose’ expertise, though his example of the chilling effect of modern warfare—Russia’s capture of Crimea—makes me wonder where this supposed elite fighting force disappeared to during the invasion of Ukraine.

Who By Fire - Matti Friedman

As I get older, I sometimes encounter stories that make me wonder how I could possibly have never heard about them before. In Who By Fire, Matti Friedman gives an impressionistic yet precise account of an event that should be part of the broader Rock ‘n Roll mythos alongside Elvis’ hip-shaking Ed Sullivan debut, The Beatles’ rooftop concert, and the fatal stabbing at Altamont Speedway.

In October 1973, Israel fought a brief and brutal war with Egypt and its Arab allies, waged by the latter in retaliation for an ignominious defeat in the Six Day War a few years earlier. The Israelis, careless with bravado from past victories, were caught completely by surprise, and faced the very real threat of annihilation. This conflict, launched on the eve of the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur, drew Jews from around the world to come and defend their ancestral homeland, regardless of whether they’d once lived there or even visited (echoes of this can be seen in Ukraine today). One of these Jews, who came not to fight but to work on a kibbutz and free up a younger man for the front, was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen never saw a kibbutz. Israel knew he could serve the land he called his “myth home” better with his true gifts of poetry and song. And so he roved about the battlefields of Sinai with a contingent of musicians, playing concerts for weary troops, drifting between platoons like a phantom, leaving many who heard and saw him wondering if the encounter was even real. No footage of these concerts exists, and only a few photographs can be found.

From this material, alongside entries in Cohen’s journal and interviews with spectators, Matti Friedman pieces together a rough account of Cohen’s travels. It is solid journalism, precise when it can be an honest about its gaps when it can’t. Yet the strength of the book is not in reconstructing the minutia of a tour schedule (an impossible task; even Cohen didn’t know where exactly in Sinai he was most of the time), but in capturing the feeling of obligation and looming terror that haunted that war and all others. Indeed, Cohen isn’t even the true protagonist of this book. His concert is more a lens through which to view the lives of several young Israelis fighting for their survival and the survival of their country.

I was moved by this book in ways I didn’t expect. I feel I have a deeper knowledge of Cohen and his myth home for having read it. Though it lacks a cohesive ending, it is powerful from start to finish and adorned throughout with lovely prose. Worth a read from any Cohen fan, but even if you know his work only vaguely (as was the case for some of the soldiers he played for), this book still has a lot to offer through its timeless reflection of war and art, and the place one has in the other.

Remain In Love - Chris Frantz

I’ve been a huge fan of Talking Heads since university, so it was only a matter of time before I picked up Remain in Love. The book is not a chronicle of the band itself, but a memoir of its drummer and founding member Chris Frantz, which is actually more interesting. I’m already familiar with the contour’s of the band’s rise and untimely dissolution, and much of the popular press for the band has focused on its frontman David Byrne. I love and admire Byrne as an artist, but I was also aware going in that his relationship with the band ended on fairly sour terms, and that the responsibility for this was largely his.

Frantz is not shy about pointing this out.. He acknowledges (implicitly for the most part, but also outright in a couple of instances) how important Byrne was to the success of Talking Heads, while also emphasizing that it was never a one man show. He makes a strong case for his own contribution, and to an even greater extent that of his wife and creative partner Tina Weymouth. The assumptions of the music industry at the time were that Talking Heads was essentially a vehicle for Byrne’s genius, and the other heads were little more than musically adept side players. I must admit I’d made similar assumptions myself. Frantz sets the record straight, and rightly points to his and Weymouth’s work wtih tom Tom Club as evidence that the talent pool in Talking Heads was deep all around.

Despite recalling some less than pleasant moments of friction with Byrne, there is little bitterness in Frantz’s book, and his treatment of his former bandmate seems pretty evenhanded. There were a couple of anecdotes that I thought were petty to include (the thing about the turd on the bed was second hand and unverified, and though Frantz admits this, he shouldn’t have spread the rumor without knowing for sure it was true). For the most part though, he gives credit where credit is due.

My favourite parts of the book were naturally those describing Talking Heads’ ascent, and Frantz does not skimp here. More than half the book follows the band from its early days at CBGB to its pre-stardom tours. His discussion of how Remain In Light was made were fascinating, as were the anecdotes of the creative foment of New York in the mid 70s. It truly is mind-boggling to think that the foundation of twenty years of music were built in a few square blocks of crime-ridden Manhattan.

Frantz writes in an easy, plain-spoken, conversational way. There are no poetic flourishes, and some ocassional repetitiveness that makes it feel almost like it was dictated. This isn’t a problem, and is vastly preferable to literary overreach, which can be jarring if not done well. Frantz must have kept a tour diary, because he is able to give great detail about cities visited and sets played, though there are some moments where memories may be muddled or conflated (he has a young Damon Albarn, singer from Blur, tending bar in a London hotel during their 1977 tour, when he would have been only nine years old. I believe this happened, but probably on a later tour).

Above all, his profoung love for Tina Weymouth shines through and is a pleasure to see. As a rare celebirty couple that has stayed together since young adulthood, I’ve long admired Frantz and Weymouth. Reading about how much he loves her still warms my heart. May they Remain in Love for many more years to come.

Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce

I’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke, and was only aware of it from pop culture references until picking up Donn Pearce’s novel. I didn’t know what to expect beyond it being about a nonconformist prisoner who eats a lot of eggs. As a novel, it exceeded my expectations, narrrated in a dreamy, impressionistic style by a man named Sailor, about whom we know almost nothing.

Cool Hand Luke uses first person pedestal narration. which is a writing workshop way of saying that the narrator is a character but not the main one. The narrrator can feature prominently (think Fifth Business or To Kill a Mockingbird) or tangentially (think the Great Gatsby or Breakfast at Tiffany’s) but they are not the protagonist. Rather, the serve to bear witness to the protagonist, who is usually a tragic figure. In Cool Hand Luke, the narrator is kept so vague that he is barely a character—chapters can go by when you forget that he’s in the story, and not just a disembodied voice telling it. This feelign is underscored by the prose, which uses a non-colloquial poetic diction to convey scenes.

This is contrasted with portions narrated by another inmate, Dragline, who accompanied Luke on his final, fatal escap eattempt. Much of the novel is actually takign place during one of Dragline’s retelling of this episode to new inmates, though Sailor, our ghostly narrator, gives his version of events for much of the same period. There’s no line breaks or even dialogue tags to indicate who is speaking, but Pearce handles the transitions well with his command of vernacular dialogue. It’s always quite clear when we’re listening to Dragline or Luke and when we’re listening to Sailor.

The story is itself fairly simple, mostly the arc of Luke’s arrival at the prison, ascension to a place of honor among the inmates, and a gnawing dissatisfaction that forces him to escape again and again wtih a desperation that flirts wit hthe suicidal. The story is well realised and well told. A truly excellent novel. I’m surprised Pearce didn’t write more, though it seems he only published another two before taking a prolonged hiatus to do other work. I’ll have to seek these out at some point.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder - Caroline Fraser

I didn’t read the Little House books growing up (I was more of a Wayside kid), and the little of the story I know outside of pop culture comes from overhearing snippets my wife read to our daughter. I assume this makes me something of an atypical reader of Prairie Fires. In truth, my interest was mainly in the time and place where the books were set, and I picked up Prairie Fires expecting it to expand on the historical context of the American Frontier. It did do that to an extent, though Laura’s frontier years comprise at most 1/3 of the book. The rest splits in focus between Laura and her daughter Rose. Had I known this going in, I may have been less inclined to begin the book in the first place.

I’m glad I didn’t know it, though, because the Rose Wilder Lane is a fascinating—if infuriating—personality. Though largely forgotten now as anything other than the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Lane was a formidable author in her own right. Prodigious and unscrupulous, she wrote biographies of famous men with only cursory research, leaning in to speculation and outright invention without the slightest shame. Her stories sold to major magazines for alarming sums, yet whatever money she made she got rid of so fast it was almost as if she were allergic to it. Aggressively giving and resentful, her mother’s keeper and dependent, she is a study of contradictions. I’d be surprised if she didn’t have some sort of personality disorder.

Devotees of Little House will likely enjoy the details of how the books were revised, and the symbiotic amalgam of mother and daughter that forged them. I enjoyed it too, though mostly I liked reading about these two very strange, not entirely likeable, but inarguably influential women. Fraser wrote neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job, but painted an honest, thoughtful, unflinching portrait. Her prose is excellent, lightly adorned where useful but not overly florid, rich in detail and context.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and might even pick up some of the Little House books now.

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

I’ve owned a copy of Mason & Dixon for a very long time but never had a strong urge to pick it up, in large part because I had intended to tackle Gravity’s Rainbow as my first major Pynchon work (I read The Crying of Lot 49 a while ago, but it is, in its slight hundred or so pages, scarcely Pynchonian in breadth, if comparable in density). But, for whatever reason, I was looking for something meaty and Mason & Dixon seemed the more attractive option.

The story is ostensibly a fictionalized account of Charles Mason and Jeremiah' Dixon’s journey to chart their eponymous line to resolve a border dispute between Pennsylvania in Maryland. But simply calling it “a fictionalized account” is misleading, as it suggests at most some narrative tidying and invention of secondary characters to make a more cohesive and rounded story. A better description would be to say it takes the story of Mason and Dixon and some of the founding myths of pre-Revolutionary America and tosses them in a blender with about 20 blotters of LSD. The “fictionalized” elements aren’t simply things that didn’t happen (chance meetings with Washington and Benjamin Franklin, for instance), but things that are outright supernatural. There’s an invisible robot duck that’s in love with a Frenchman, a conversation between two clocks, a field of gigantic vegetables (think James and the Giant Peach big), and a talking dog, among other things.

These elements are jumbled together by a frame narrator named Reverend Cherrycoke, who interjects regularly with his own supposition and is interrupted by his niece and nephew. The story veers regularly off course, and there are few signposts to guide you through dialogue or indicate when one scene blends into another, which they do regularly and with hedge maze circuity. The whole book feels like it was deliberately written to be as hard to follow as possible without descending into outright gibberish. Pynchon toes that line deftly, though to call it a pleasurable read would be a stretch. This is a book that wants to be a workout, and while certain passages and images are rewarding, I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what had happened in any given chapter.

Pynchon is a noted stylist, and his writing in this book deftly apes the sound and texture of 18th century prose, complete with esoteric Capitalization and antique verbosity. His humor is pleasantly modern, though its occasional crudity is actually in line with the period it is trying to evoke (recall that the Western Canon’s proto-novel, Don Quixote, includes a scene where Sancho Ponza takes a sneaky dump off the side of his horse, and another where he and Quixote vomit into each others’ faces). I wouldn’t say I enjoyed reading this book, at least not all the time, but I’m glad I read it.

And one day, I really will tackle Gravity’s Rainbow.

The New Testament - (translated by) David Bentley Hart

Growing up as a regular church-goer, I don’t recall being unaware that the English bible was translated from a much earlier text. Certainly if you’d asked me from the age of, say, ten and up what language the bible was originally written in, I would have said something in the ballpark of correct. Yet despite this knowledge, it is easy to feel in your bones something fundamentally unchangeable in the verses you grew up hearing, as if they were phrased precisely that way form the moment of their conception. This is particularly true of the King James bible, whose thee-thou pronouns and archaic phrasings ring with an unmistakably biblical air.

But however we feel about them, these are works of translation, and suffer the same limitations as any translated work. Compromise and distortion are, to some level, inevitable. Such is true of the King James bible, in which its authors’ decisions to translate pneuma as “ghost” rather than the much more accurate “breath” have fundamentally colored perceptions of dogma for billions of people, among other items. The Revised Standard Version, though hewing closer to the original text, has its own issues, and more modern translations have relied on a committee structure that flattens style across books and imparts a sameness to the prose that makes for easier reading, but obscures the true magpie origins of the new testament as it was first compiled.

David Bentley Hart sought to address these shortcomings in his own translation of the New Testament, which adopts as its guiding principle to be unswayed by doctrine or tradition and instead depict a “pitilessly literal” interpretation of the original prose. The result is a startling and engaging work, full of linguistic peculiarities and quirks that enrich the historical nature of New Testament. The differences in style (and also in some cases the deliberate cribbing) between the gospels gives a sense of oral histories, and the tortured grammar employed in some epistles and Revelations underscores that these were not erudite scholars, but simple people compelled to share their understanding of the world.

There seems little to say about the book’s contents, well known as they are. The style is, by its very nature, a bit off-putting at times, and there are some passages that simply sound wrong to me even though I don’t dispute their greater accuracy. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) will always remain with me, even if the text would be more accurately read as “for what does it profit a man to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit his soul?“ However, the rawness of Hart’s translation lends the book its own power, and there is at times a poetry that arrives from its very crudeness.

This is an important work of scholarship, and a good version of the New Testament for those who have some familiarity with the text but want to wade through it in its entirety for the first time.

Orthodoxy - G.K. Chesterton

I picked up G.K. Chesterton’s celebrated work of Christian apology Orthodoxy hot off the heels of the incredible The Man Who Was Thursday. Orthodoxy is a much different sort of work, which was no surprise, but it thrums with the same gleeful energy. In its pages, Chesterton offers a primer, not for conversion generally, but for his conversion, explaining the many ways that Christianity came to him as the answers to questions he didn’t even quite realize he was asking. The result is the slightly meandering but always amusing meanderings of a fleet mind.

Chesterton positions Christianity almost as an inevitability of thought. His arguments are often well-reasoned, though some of them feel kind of spurious. I was particularly unconvinced by his reasoning that miracles have been proven because they have been reported, and skepticism of these reports comes from intellectual bigotry, and not, say, a perennially unfulfilled request for slightly more evidence. He compares this to a court ignoring eye-witness testimony because the witness was only a peasant, ignoring the fact that in said trial, there is at least the indisputable fact of a dead body to discuss. The skeptic wants to see not only that the miracle was divine, but that it actually happened in the first place.

Nevertheless, Chesterton is a great thinker, and it’s a pleasure to read his thoughts. I can’t say I was converted, but I was certainly entertained.

The Seventies: A Look Ahead at the New Decade - Editors of the National Observer

Chantal bought this book ages ago at a church bazaar or rummage book sale, mostly as a sort of curio. I finally picked it up and read it the other day. The premise is pretty much spelled out by the title: a collection of essays penned by writers from the National Observer in early 1970, speculating on what was then the coming decade. Each chapter covers a different subject, and the topics are wide-ranging. Space exploration, the economy, politics, foreign policy, the environment each get a chapter, as do perhaps less expected fields, such as oceanography manners. One chapter predicts trends in the arts, and Vietnam, perhaps not surprisingly, gets a look in all to itself as well.

Having been born after the decade under speculation ended, it was interesting to look back at what the writers predicted, seeing where they were wildly off the mark and where they were prescient (sometimes almost eerily so). I could reflect more immediately on some chapters than others, based on my knowledge—it was pretty obvious what came true and what didn’t in the space and Viet Nam chapters, whereas in the medicine and oceanography chapters I could only say vaguely what came true and what didn’t (I know we have submersibles that can operate at 20,000 feet now, but did they begin operation in the 1970s as predicted? I have no idea).

Below, I’ve given a quick summary of what each chapter nailed and what it whiffed on, based on my recollections:

• Space Exploration: called GPS and satellite imagery, but wildly optimistic on moon colonies (supposed to be in operation by 1979. Oops)

• The Economy: no wild predictions, basically right on Keynesian Economics avoiding another depression.

• Medicine: my big takeaway here was how much was still on the horizon in 1970. Organ transplants were in their infancy, as were antidepressants (Lithium was the new big thing). Not sure if they really took off in the seventies, but they were right on the general trend.

• Foreign policy: more or less on target, except about Japan becoming a regional political power (they nailed it on their economic influence though).

• Lifestyle: ranging from the insane (see-through body stocking with modesty patches) to the prescient (modular construction to cut down on home costs).

• Vietnam: Humility in their predictions, as they made it clear they didn’t know, but erred on the optimistic side in assuming South Vietnam stood a chance.

• The Arts: Another chapter of home runs and strikeouts. Pretty much predicted punk (“In underground music, I think you’ll get a return to root forms, a sort of new classic approach to rock”) but completely wrong on cinema (predicted the doom of major studios and the continued rise of small, meaningful films at the expense of big budget epics. Someone didn’t see Jaws and Star Wars coming, that’s for sure).

• The environment: focused on pollution ,and right that it would be somewhat curbed. No sight of climate change yet.

• Oceanography: We didn’t get bubble stations on the ocean floor, sadly. The other stuff seemed more or less right, though I can’t speak to the timeline.

• Politics: Foresaw the death of the New Deal and the drift of the South, but prematurely buried the two-party system.

• Education: nascent view of technology in schools.

• Travel: They were right about trains in the US, that’s for sure.

• Manners and Mores: Nothing too outré. Saw the slow decline of religiosity.

• America’s Reputation: This was more about its current reputation than speculating on the future.

Not a bad grade, overall. A few big misses, but the writers were clearly thoughtful in their speculation. Not something I’m likely to reread, but was worth picking up for sure.

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

I first read The Haunting of Hill House in a larger collection of Shirley Jackson’s work, and while I enjoyed it, it was overshadowed by We Have Always Lived In the Castle, Jackson’s greatest work and, to my eyes, one of the crowning achievements of 20th century literature. But Hill House really is an excellent book, and I was happy to revisit unhappy Eleanor as she undergoes her strange symbiosis with the eponymous building. For that’s how I always interpreted the book: the house found her and knew her for its own and, through its designs, kept her.

Eleanor is masterfully rendered in this book. Jackson creates remarkable characters, but Eleanor may be her crowning achievement, even more than Merricat Blackwood (though Merricat will always be my favourite). Broken by the toil and slow cruelty of an unhappy childhood cap-stoned by her years as her mother’s nursemaid—details revealed only in secondhand snippets, but precise and vivid enough to undergird a novel all their own—Eleanor tumbles from subservience to her mother to subservience to her sister. A letter from Dr. Montague inviting her to participate in a study of the paranormal gives her a chance to escape, and she snatches it with wild abandon.

In a lesser book, Montague would be the villain, his purposes for drawing disparate characters to Hill House convoluted and sinister. But he is actually a sympathetic man struggling to unite the spiritual and empiricist halves of his mind, a longstanding battle that informs his particular, idiosyncratic fascination with the paranormal. The glamorous Theodora, very much a mirror opposite of Eleanor, is the only other invitee to arrive, apart from Luke Sanderson, nephew of the house’s owner who is foisted off to keep him out of trouble. The fact that he actually doesn’t need such keeping is another detail a lesser writer would have missed.

Jackson’s characters are not broad. They are complex and troubled and hard to pin down. They bounce form camaraderie to conflict with such rapidity that it can feel shocking, but it all feels earned and natural. There are hints that the house may be manipulating them, but the extent of this is never clear. Even the actions of the ghost—if indeed there is a ghost; I tend to think the spirit is the house itself, birthed in trauma, rather than restless human soul—are opaque despite being realized in great detail (the cold spot is a nice touch, and the phantom hand Eleanor holds in an imagined darkness is one of the sharpest scenes in any horror book). Jackson draws few signposts, and the reader can infer to the best of their ability what exactly causes the final tragic events to unfold.

A neat parallel to We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the arrival of Dr. Montague’s wife, whose pigheaded spiritualism clashes with his own more nuanced take, causing a disruption in line with that of Merricat’s cousin in the later book. Their relationship is magnificently rendered, frosty without any of the cliches that mar depictions of martial strife in many other stories.

Shirley Jackson is one of America’s greatest writers. Had she not somehow excelled herself with Castle, Hill House would be her magnum opus. Any author would be proud to have such a book as their best work. The fact it is only number 2 speaks to her tremendous talent.

The Man who Was Thursday: A Nightmare - G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton was one of those writers whose name I absorbed during University without knowing much about what he actually wrote. I’d heard of him primarily as an essayist and Christian apologist, and was surprised to learn he’d written a novel. After starting The Man Who Was Thursday, I was even more surprised to learn exactly what kind of novel he’d written.

The Man Who Was Thursday is a strange and remarkable work, earnest and funny and rich in philosophical thought. In its surrealism, its humor, its persistent questioning of reality, it it antecedent to everything from Kurt Vonnegut to Franz Kafka to Philip K Dick. I can think of only one author who serves as a clear inspiration, and I like to think Chesterton would agree, for he namechecks the man in the novel (the first of the moles to fall goes by the name Gogol).

The story begins with two poets in the park: the fierce anarchist Gregory and the logical but single-mindedly anti-anarchist Syme. Syme goads Gregory into revealing his anarchist club, at which point Syme reveals himself to be an undercover policeman charged by an unseen man (or perhaps entity is a better word) to root out anarchy. Through manipulation of Gregory, Syme is elected Thursday, one of seven figureheads of a European anarchist cabal led by the enormous and enigmatic Sunday.

One by one, Syme’s fellow figureheads are revealed to be other than they claim, until the whole conspiracy folds in on itself and becomes something of a metaphysical puzzle for its principal members. The ending felt a bit weaker than the rest, settling into convention for a novel that was otherwise totally unconventional, but I’m not sure how such an odd book could end.

Chesterton’s prose is exquisite, whip-smart and hilarious, masterfully contorting ideas into impossible forms that somehow hold firm. More than most authors, his intellect is on plain display in his writing, not because he is showing off, but because it was so fill to bursting in his head that it had to go somewhere, and the page was as good a destination as any.

I’ve already started Orthodoxy and will be reading a lot more of him in the near future.

Shardik - Richard Adams

A copy of Shardik has sat on my bookshelf for over fifteen years. I bought it as a teenager, fresh off the heels of reading the incomparable Watership Down and further intrigued by the character’s name check in the third Dar Tower book, The Waste Lands. I know I started it shortly after I bought it, but for whatever reason I put it down after fifty r so pages and didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago. I can understand why, as it is a long book written in a rich, almost antiquated style, and the plot simmers for quite awhile before flaming up into action. I’d read more challenging books by then, though, so perhaps it caught me when I was craving a breezier read. In any case, it sat unread on my shelf all this time, following me between houses and cities, always earning a place among my other books.

But now I’ve read it, and I can safely say I was missing out. Shardik is a fantastic book, densely woven with complex characters and a world envisioned in such detail that it almost seems real. it is the worldbuilding that aligns it with Watership Down, that and the fundamental optimism of its author, which survives the horrors enacted in both books only to emerge unscathed at the end of each. Otherwise, they are very different novels—so much so that I can’t help but admire the bravery (or thickheadedness) of Adams following up a highly successful children’s book about rabbits with a dense religious parable about the evils of slavery and the unfathomable nature of the divine.

The hero, a simple hunter named Kelderek, is greyer than his leporine counterparts in Watership. He starts out with a simple nobility that reminds me of Fiver, but Adams allows for his corruption when given the sacred role of envoy to Shardik, the bear god long worshipped on his home island of Ortelga but unseen for generations, until the chance arrival of an enormous bear driven ashore by a forest fire. Shardik has a rich cast, but Kelderek is its core, and Adams makes the bold choice of making him compromised by his decisions, breaking him down in the third act in a saintly scouring that allows him to reemerge, literally and figuratively cleansed.

Adams’ writing remains superb, deftly outlining the geography, history, and politics of the Bekla and the surrounding regions. His prose is strong, though in this book he has a tendency to use extended similes, in which a scenario is depicted in great detail—sometimes for whole paragraphs—then compared to the current action. As a device, it harkens back to classical texts, and gives the writing an air of antiquity, but there are periods where it feels somewhat repetitive, being employed over and over again in quick succession.

This is a small matter, though, and doesn’t detract form the book’s overall power. It deserves to be ranked among the great 20th century novels.

The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie

The Satanic Verses is one of those books more famous for the events surrounding it than for the text itself. I don’t have much to say about that side of things, as I think the events of the fatwa are pretty well known. What I didn’t know was what exactly it was about the book that aroused such ire. Having now read the whole thing, my impression is that Rushdie touched a nerve primarily by writing about Muhammed (or Mahound as he’s rendered in the book, which was apparently insulting as well) as a man with vested interests in his own divine inspiration, and by expressing ambiguity regarding the truth of his revelations. Yet while these discussions could potentially insult muslim readers, there is nothing in the book overtly designed to offend, and, as is the case with most controversial books, the controversy likely arose mostly from people who had never read the book and had only the roughest, least charitable impression of what was in it. So it goes.

The book is all over the place in the usual Rushdie style, but the story, insofar as it sticks ot one, revolves around two Indian citizens of muslim backgrounds, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, who miraculously survive an explosion in an airplane over London and are imbued by divine and infernal avatars, respectively. Gibreel adopts the holy visions of his angelic namesake, while Saladin grows the horns and cloven hoofs of a demon. Having described these startling events, the narrative promptly swerves in a dozen other directions, leaping backwards to the founding of Islam or describing a bizarre pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea led by a prophetic young girl clad in butterflies. Rich images abound, plot is thin on the ground, and diversion are plentiful. Things do eventually swing back around to Saladin and Gibreel, but never in the way you expect (Saladin’s cursed form disappears abruptly with little explanation and never bothers him again).

Rushdie’s prose is verbose and playful, full of puns and references and crackling images. It can be a little much at times, but his gift for language is indisputable, and he’s a lot of fun to read when he’s not exhausting you with 26 zigzagging sub-clauses in a row.

Having read only this and Midnight’s Children, I can’t claim to be a Rushdie scholar. However, there are clear parallels between the two books that suggest possible preoccupations common to his work: the entwining of the supernatural and the mundane; a deep drawing on history, particularly that of his country and his faith; main characters endowed by circumstances with powers that are both blessing and curse; a twinning of protagonist and antagonist.

There is also something about the way he writes women that struck me in both books. He by no means falls into the typical traps of lesser male authors writing women. They are neither passive objects of rescue nor empty vessels of desire. They are strong and capable, but also strangely cold. They seem less human than deity, and imbued with a cruelty that is not mortal but divine. It’s not a personal, vicious cruelty, but a sort of dry pitilessness. They seem always composed, never weak or vulnerable, and the violence men try to visit upon them is as pointless as fists on stone. There are certainly exceptions to this—most notably Alleluia Cone—and you could point to moments that contradict this impression for most of his other female characters as well. The general impression, however, remains. His women seem just a little farther removed from the reader than his men.