Jan Hilliard's Morgan's Castle (#readindies)

 "What a lot of ways there are to murder someone, she thought..."

Oh, what fun this one was! 

The sixteen-year-old Laura Dean had thought she might work at the local five-and-dime for the summer; there were supposed to be some college boys in town with summer jobs of their own. But her Aunt Amy has other plans, any local boy is bound to be heedless, and Laura's father Sidney is not to be trusted.

Aunt Amy's school friend Charlotte Morgan is writing a book about the Morgan family wine business and needs a secretary, she says; her daughter-in-law has recently died in a tragic accident and maybe she needs a new daughter-in-law, too. 

In fact there have been quite a few tragic accidents in recent memory at Morgan's Castle. And just how heroically well poor Charlotte Morgan has held up in the midst of all these *accidents*...it's no wonder everybody admires her so...

There's not a lot of mystery in this crime story--even if you managed to miss the word 'murderess' in the blurb on the cover--but there is a lot of humour. It's quite darkly funny, a bit Arsenic and Old Lace, though with more real suspense than that. You suspect somebody will be murdered during the book (and somebody is) but who will it be, and how will our murderess be stopped? That's assuming she is, of course.

There's also a fine romance budding, just not the one Aunt Amy and Charlotte Morgan have in mind. 

Jan Hilliard is a pseudonym for Hilda Kay Grant (1910-1996). She was born in Nova Scotia, but lived most of her adult life around Toronto. Morgan's Castle came out in 1964 and is set in the Niagara area. Her first novel won the Stephen Leacock Award for best humorous book of the year, and this one ought to have been in the running, too. The book was reissued last month by the Montreal-based independent Véhicule Press, as part of its Ricochet line of Canadian Noir reprints, edited by Brian Busby. 

Brian kindly supplied me with a copy of the book, and I am very glad he did.

February is #readindies month, hosted by Kaggsy at Bookish Ramblings. 

 

It also fits the My Reader's Block challenge: 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1964). Damsel in Distress.
 

Josef Škvorecky's The End of Lieutenant Boruvka (#mystery, #europe)

"In the few works of fiction written so far by Czech authors about the events of the year 1968 and their consequences, the heroes have inevitably been intellectuals. In this collection of crime stories, however, I have tried to look at some of the causes and results of that bust-up of Marxism through the eyes of a simple man."

The End of Lieutenant Boruvka is the third of Škvorecky's four books about Boruvka, the Prague homicide detective. It came out in 1975 in Czech, and was translated into English by Paul Wilson in 1989. That quote is from Škvorecky's introduction.

The book contains five stories set in the years 1967-1969. Lieutenant Boruvka is melancholic as a rule, and never more sad than when he solves a case. The earlier books were nevertheless pretty funny. This one, set around the years of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, is not without humour, but distinctly darker.

In the first story, 'Miss Peskova Regrets', a club dancer, who may occasionally engage in a little light prostitution, is found dead in her apartment, asphyxiated when the gas on her stove is no longer lit. Accident? Suicide? Of course not.

'Strange Archaeology': Years before Boruvka was a homicide lieutenant, he was a lowly investigator in the Missing Persons department. His first case was the disappearance of Kvetuse Rerichova. Rerichova had taken all her money out of her account, packed up all her clothing, and told her mother she was going away for the weekend. She never came back.

Rerechova's father and brother had escaped to New York earlier, and Boruvka wraps the case up as a successful escape to the West. His work is so clean he's promoted for it. Then years later a body's found while excavating for new construction. Rerechova? Yes.

In 'Ornaments in the Grass' two sixteen-year-old girls are found gunned down in a meadow by a sub-machine gun. Various military units had been engaged in maneuvers in the area and the girls had been flirting with the soldiers. Surely one of them had to do it, right?

The invasion (August 20-21 of 1968) occurs between the third and fourth stories. There's personnel changes in the office. Major Kautsky, Boruvka's boss's boss, who serves the usual function in such stories of obstruction and illogical requests, turns out to be a hero in the aftermath, and is now in jail himself. Boruvka is saddled with a new sergeant, Pudil, a zealous communist and an anti-semite.

In the fourth story 'Humbug', a delivery driver Krasa for a candy company is banged over the head with a wrench. It turns out Krasa's last name had once been Schoenfeld and he'd served time for thinking about fleeing the country. Pudil is happy to label the victim as a bourgeois Jew and not look very deep.

The final story is 'Pirates'. A spy for the secret police is living in an apartment and clearly spying on one of his neighbours. Then he's murdered. Which of the neighbours was he actually spying on and which one did it?

In the first four cases, Boruvka has pretty clearly determined the murderer, but is not allowed to bring the case to a conclusion for political reasons. In the fifth, he takes matters into his own hands. (Consider the title. Though I will note there is yet another book, which I haven't read.)

Many of the recurring characters reappear. Sergeant Malek, Boruvka's impulsive but wrongheaded underling, performs the same role here, though in the last two stories he's outclassed in his wrongheadedness by Pudil. Eve Adams, the lounge singer, who pretty much served as the protagonist/detective in the previous one, also appears here. And Lieutenant Boruvka's wife and daughter also reappear. There's a plotline through all five stories about Zuzanna, the daughter. It turns out she's pregnant, by somebody she's not married to and won't be getting married to. 

The title of the first story is an allusion to the Cole Porter song 'Miss Otis Regrets' and at the beginning Zuzanna is listening to the song. Lieutenant Boruvka doesn't yet understand what's up with his daughter, but when he hears the song, he gets worried.

We're not told which version Zuzanna is listening to, and I suppose Ella Fitzgerald is more likely, but I figure you can't go wrong with Fred Astaire, even if, by 1960, his voice (and his dancing) were no longer what they'd once been:

I may very well now think this is the best of three I've read, though I reserve the right to change my mind back to the first one. 😉 All three are a lot of fun.

Covering the Czech Republic for this year's European Reading Challenge.

Leah Horlick (#poem)

 

Guilt

At first, like a head cold--then, three glasses of wine--no five.

Hour twelve, a low-grade fever. Hour fourteen, your whole body is

on fire --

each joint snaps open, heat coiled inside your knees. A reaction to

the measles booster, days before the trip. Fades like a hangover,

then rears

its host of heads again. We chose not

to go to Chișinău -- We have no business

being here anymore. Reroute to Iași. It's the heat,

driving stick, a last hiss,

writing to the chief rabbi

I'm sorry we're not going to make it--

the GPS, the roads, Russian, the car

which really means

I'm sorry we are afraid

-Leah Horlick

I've never had a measles booster, but I had the shingles one not too long ago.  That's about how it was.

Leah Horlick's book Moldovan Hotel came out from Brick Books, a small Canadian press, in 2021. It's her third book of poetry. (I haven't read either of the earlier ones.) She'd gotten a fellowship to go to Romania and Moldova in 2017 to attempt to come to terms with the tragic history of her Jewish family in the region.

Ritual Instructions for Transnistria

Avoid all travel to Transnistria in northeast Moldova.

-travel advisory from the Government of Canada, December 2017

In your right hand, take the ten-hour tourist visa. Form a window with

your left, frame the last functioning hammer and sickle flag. Walk six

times around the last twenty thousand

tonnes of Soviet ammunition. A tanker spills cigarettes out of its side

like a whale and so we say May the memory of this whale be a blessing.

Wash your hands before you dunk your head

beneath the x-ray at the checkpoint, the x-ray that pretends not to notice 

you. Rabbi, is there

a blessing for the border?

A blessing for the border--

May God bless and keep the borders, seen and unseen, far away from us.

-Leah Horlick

Transnistria is that breakaway region in Moldova (across the Dniester River) that's propped up by Russia. 

She says in an afterword she lifted that final line from Fiddler on the Roof, but I knew that. 😉("Is there a proper blessing for the Tsar?" "May God bless and keep the Tsar...far away from us.")

The title poem is probably the best, but too long to quote. Interesting stuff.

Two Novellas (Elizabeth Smart, Boris Pasternak) #NovNov

Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

The narrator has fallen in love with the poet on the basis of his poems. She invites the poet and his wife to Monterey, California, where she's living, to meet him. She's just as enthralled by the poet in person as she was when she only knew him through his poetry. But can she do this to his wife?

Oh, yes she can.

The narrator is Elizabeth Smart and the poet is George Barker; his wife is Jessica Barker, and the events more or less follow actual events. So, auto-fiction, avant la lettre?

Yes, but. The prose definitely makes this. You see the Psalms there in the title: is that Grand Central Station or the rivers of Babylon? The Song of Solomon is all over the book. So are the Latin and Greek classics, slyly grandiose: "Jupiter has been with Leda, and now nothing can avert the Trojan Wars."

There's also interesting things happening with metaphors from the natural world. The main events take place in the late 30s, but Smart is writing the book during World War II in England. Comparisons to natural features from North America--the Mississippi, Niagara Falls--are inundating, but positive as a rule; those of Europe--the pools in Epping Forest, e.g.--smaller, withdrawn. All mostly involve water, or its absence: the Mojave Desert makes a metaphorical appearance.

But the occasional funny pinprick from outside the bubble lets us see another side. A policeman (and yes, the police do get involved): "'What a cad,' he said, 'And the girl's a religious maniac.'" Why, now you mention it, quite possibly yes... "Are all Americans chaste? All, by law." "Like Macbeth, I keep remembering that I am their host."

The book was first published in England in 1945. Smart came from a well-to-do Ottawa family, and her mother, appalled Elizabeth was publishing her shame (as she saw it) bought up as many copies of the book as she could get her hands on. It was also the end of the war, so, between those things, not much happened with the book at the time. But when it was reissued in the 60s, its reputation took off. Smart continued her bohemian life, bearing four children to Barker, but never marrying him. (Barker continued his caddishness.) She wrote other works (which I haven't read) but this is considered her masterpiece. She died in 1986.

Weird and wonderful. "Girls in love, be harlots, it hurts less."

112p. including an introduction by Brigid Brophy.

Boris Pasternak's The Last Summer

Serezha has just finished his exams, and takes a job as tutor to the eleven-year-old Harry Fresteln. The Fresteln estate is in the Ural Mountains, well away from Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Serezha finds his duties light, writes and gallivants at night.

Mrs. Anna Tjornskold is the widow of a Danish pastor who died young. Suddenly near destitution she takes a job as paid companion to Mrs. Fresteln, but once she's stuck in the remote Ural Mountain region, she discovers her role is more maid than companion. She feels denigrated and trapped and unhappy.

There's a frame set in 1916, but the main events take place in the summer of 1914, the last summer before everything goes to pieces.

Then Serezha proposes to Anna.

It's a promising enough premise for a story, but I can't recommend it, at least in this form. (Penguin, 1960, reprinted many times.) There's an introduction by Pasternak's younger sister Lydia, interesting, though it doesn't tell you what you want or need to know. 

But the main problem is the translation. I guess I'll credit the translator (George Reavey) with trying to reproduce things he found in the original, but it just doesn't read well in English. There's undigested bits of Russian: izvoschik (a cabman, it seems), mahorka (a coarse tobacco), calatch (still not perfectly sure about this one. Kolach? Maybe.) I don't know how you would have sorted those before the Internet. There's awkward bits of English: 'a tent of tremblingly-moist, sultry-laurel birch trees.' And extravagant words, even if they are English. Canicularly? Know that one? Canicular: having to do with the dog days of summer. -ly, adverb. In retrospect, you can probably see the can- of canine in it, but it's certainly a long ways from Basic English. Is the Russian word in Pasternak equally obscure?

Anyway, it needs notes or a new translation or likely both. I don't know if those things exist.

92p, including Lydia Pasternak Slater's introduction.

Sunday Salon

Last Week

There were a couple of books, of course: I finished Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus. Post coming soon? We'll see. It is half-written.

Then a slim volume of poetry, The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch, which came out last year:

Which may be why, in that first eastern winter,

When I looked up to see the silhouettes

Of stripped black branches spidering across

The deeper blackness of a frozen night,...

Our eastern-ish backyard earlier today.
More sunset than frozen night, though...

Kirsch was raised in L.A., but then moved to the east coast, where he writes for The New Yorker. The volume is more or less the story of his move. He writes blank verse well, and yes, that is a bit 'damning with faint praise' in case you were wondering.

Some plays of Plautus, which I'm still thinking about.

Then Try Not To Be Strange by Michael Hingston, a history of the kingdom of Redonda, also out last year, from small Canadian press Biblioasis. Redonda is an actual island in the Caribbean, but the kingdom is a literary in-joke.  M. P. Shiel (born on Montserrat in 1865) was its first king: his father took him to the uninhabited island as a boy and proclaimed him king as a birthday present. Shiel went on to be a popular writer in England; his best known work is the last man sci-fi novel The Purple Cloud. (Pretty good and available from Project Gutenberg.) The kingdom was handed on to the English poet John Gawsworth (friend of Lawrence Durrell and frenemy to Dylan Thomas) before spawning a bunch of claimants to the throne, one of whom was the late Javier Marías.

'Try not to be strange,' is what M. P. Shiel's father told his son as the young Shiel emigrated to the U.K. Not entirely sure the advice was heeded. Pretty entertaining. I preferred the journalistic parts of the book to Hingston's memoir, but your mileage may vary.

Which leads to:

On the Stack

Some of those are the same as last week, but then I added three Redonda-related books to the stack. Am I really going on a Redonda bender? Maybe! The new ones are:

Javier Marías' All Souls

Javier Marías' Between Eternities and other essays

Lawrence Durrell's Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

I also downloaded M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski from Project Gutenberg, which is supposed to be Shiel's answer to Sherlock Holmes, written after Holmes went over the Reichenbach Falls and everybody still thought the great detective was dead.

Linking up with Readerbuzz' Sunday Salon:

Sit down, stay a while. How was your week?

Brooke Clark's Urbanities (#poem)

 

Hot Tip

Here's my advice on how to shine on the epigram-writing scene:

  a poem should not mean, or be; but it should be mean.

Take that, Mr. MacLeish! Brooke Clark's Urbanities came out from Fitzhenry & Whiteside, a small Canadian press, in 2020. It's a collection of mostly epigrammatic poetry adapted from classical models:

from Advertisement

...so here's my pitch: I've tried to write some poems you might enjoy--

  a radical idea now, to deploy

the resources of poetry, not to stretch and strain

  syntax until it cracks, but to entertain.

He writes in the afterword, "The original impulse behind this book was to try to capture some of what I loved about Martial in English." (Both the poems I've quoted above are adaptations from Martial.) But he goes on, "These are not direct translations, however, and none of the poems in this book is a particularly good guide to what the original actually says."

An example of his method is his treatment of Catullus 2, the poem about Lesbia's sparrow, now a cat:

from To A Fortunate Feline

A sweet deal, Toast, being Chloe's pet:

you hop up on her lap and get

a giggle or a happy sigh;

your paw slides up her inner thigh

demesnes denied the human hand...

Catullus, at least based on where he placed Lesbia's sparrow, was more a breast man. There was also a version of Catullus 51, which is Catullus' version of the Sappho poem. Clark's version begins, "That man seems like a god to me." I quite liked his two Horace adaptations, but they're a little long to quote. There's also Mimnermus (a favorite of mine in Greek), Callimachus, others.

I do wish he'd identified the poems he was adapting from. Some I recognized, but especially with the Martial poems (a poet I hardly know at all) it would have been fun to compare, but I generally couldn't.

One last Martial adaptation to end (and nearly the end of his book):

Envoi

So that's my book. Such trifles don't make a literary star,
  but they can't have been all bad--you read this far.

Stardom's for those whose luminous lines sear with sincerity.

  You laughed a few times? Good enough for me.

Brooke Clark also edits the contemporary poetry website Asses of Parnassus, whose self-proclaimed brief is short, witty, formal poems, and so they generally are...

Graeme Gibson's Five Legs (#MARM)

 "And just because they're Canadians you know, it doesn't mean they aren't any good." [128]

Five Legs was Graeme Gibson's debut work of fiction, first published by the Canadian independent House of Anansi in 1969. The back of my 2012 reissue suggests it was 'a breakthrough for Canadian experimental fiction.' The need for a breakthrough was certainly felt, and the main characters in the novel are all wondering what it means to be--is it even possible to be?--a Canadian artist.

The basic story is this: Lucan Crackell is an English professor at the University of Western Ontario, when one of his M.A. students, Martin Baillie is killed by a hit and run driver. Baillie had only just become engaged to Susan. Baillie hailed from Stratford, Ontario and the funeral will be there (an hour's drive from London normally). Crackell is planning to take two of Baillie's fellow students with him; at the last moment he's cadged into taking a third, Felix Oswald, as well. It's winter; there's a snowstorm with black ice and whiteout conditions, but they make it; the funeral happens, and Baillie's remains are put into the ground.

But that bald outline doesn't much give a sense. You did notice the word 'experimental' up there, right? The novel is told entirely in stream of consciousness and quoted speech. (The opening quote is a discussion among painters overheard by Crackell.) Of the six sections, the first three are in the consciousness of Lucan Crackell, the last three in that of Felix Oswald.

We wake up the morning of the funeral with Crackell and his wife Rose. The opening paragraph in its entirety:

"RRRINGGG! And aware suddenly of the day. Grey chills. Blessed Jesus what a night, what a terrible night. Like a mouth full of." [1]

There was a cast party the night before--Rose does makeup for a play--and Crackell is badly hungover. Rose, too, feels a bit nauseous, but Crackell is hoping in her case that's morning sickness and not alcohol. "Within her perfumed body grows my seed. Dear Heaven I hope it's true!" [37]

But otherwise Crackell's thoughts generally revolve around the past. He has three events which haunt him: the abuse he suffered from both boys and masters at his boarding school; his affair with Vera, who carried his child but would neither marry him nor have an abortion and moved to England--does he have a ten-year-old child running around in England?--; and, most relevantly for his current trip to Stratford, his dismissal from his job teaching there for public drunkenness. At times he feels his life is over: "And my life's ploughed under in this world; the seeds are dead." [35] 

I don't--or at least not any longer...--have much sympathy for people who feel their life is over at 30. 😉

Should he have gone to Europe? Would Vera have had him if he'd thrown it all over and followed? Quotes from T. S. Eliot run through Crackell's head; it's pretty clear Crackell once had artistic aspirations, and England is the place of writers--at least if you're a Canadian in the 60s. Now his aspirations don't much run past propagation.

Going to Europe's a motif. Martin Baillie was torn between two women: Susan and Valerie. It's Susan who wants him to finish his degree, settle down, teach; she has long, creepy conversations with Crackell about how Martin will settle down, won't he? Valerie would have run off to Europe with him; he could have lived cheaply and wrote. He'd decided on Susan--at least according to Susan--and then later that night was killed. Though Oswald believes this was true, and unfortunate.

Then we switch to Felix Oswald. While the jumble of thoughts in Crackell's head run to the events that sank him in the past, Oswald's run to fantasies in the present. Oswald, as Baillie's roommate, is pressed into service as a pallbearer. I suppose anyone who has ever served as a pallbearer has had fearful thoughts about what if I drop this thing; Oswald's run to comic excess and are aided by the ice and snow of the day.

There's a hostility between Oswald and Crackell. Crackell failed Oswald on an exam once, which led to Crackell hating Oswald, though not necessarily vice versa. (Which strikes me as absurd, but also quite true.) But it's the hostility of sameness. From one of the Felix Oswald sections, Oswald's thought: "He [Baillie] had a choice you see, just like I've, maybe even you [Crackell] had once." [218] The choice between escape and buckling down. Accepting responsibilities, if indeed that is what it is. Oswald, too, is writing:

"You're doing some writing." [This is Crackell to Oswald in an Oswald section.] Sudden pain and glaring. I...Nodding, and. It's crap, all crap he.

"Yeah." Ducking my head, thinking. I've been thinking. Uncertain and smiling.

"How's it going?" Who told him, shifting; how does he know?

"Well, uhm," it's...

"Difficult, yes...Particularly in Canada, it seems,..." [236]

Does Oswald escape, to Europe, assuming that is the answer? We don't learn, but the novel ends in an Oswald fantasy, "...then running ahead to the heat, he's running, skipping, free-sliding." [268]

The introduction, by Canadian cultural studies professor Sean Kane, says that the novel sold well when it first came out, even as well as a non-experimental Canadian novel might, but I had a hard time finding any contemporary reviews online. One quoted on the back of the book compares it to Pynchon, but that doesn't really seem convincing, despite those two alluring women whose names begin with V. Kane calls it "the first novel to bring the full artistry of literary modernism to Canada." Is that true? Only in 1969? I don't really know. 

But the use of stream of consciousness is the signal of literary modernism and, of course, the ancestor is Joyce, Ulysses in particular, and the consciousness of Leopold Bloom, and not Molly, in even more particular. (And certainly not Mrs. Dalloway.) "Couldn't, no I couldn't ugly thing disease I might." [187] Poking around in my copy of Ulysses, I can't entirely tell you why that reminds me of Joyce, though it does. But then this: "Tastes of urine, it does! I can always taste it." [223] There, I know. Just take a look at the start of chapter two in Ulysses.

While I couldn't find much in the way of contemporary reviews, the book is an important exemplar of Margaret Atwood's theses in Survival, her 'Guide to Canadian Literature,' of 1972. She notes the interest in what it means to be--to survive as--a Canadian artist, the theme I've highlighted, in one chapter, but she also looks at the relationship to wild animals and nature that's definitely there--the title comes from a deformed ox one of the characters sees--a theme I've basically glossed over...

From Survival I know (though I haven't read the novel myself) that Gibson's next novel in 1971 Communion continues the story of Felix Oswald.

In any case Gibson must not have been offended by her analysis because a year or two later he became Mr. Margaret Atwood, though in the mid-70s, it was perhaps not yet clear she was going to become the more famous author. They remained married until his death in 2019. Maybe ten years ago we saw the two of them here in Toronto at a small theater's production of a Molière play, where their very appearance generated an audible buzz. 

And is the reason I read the novel now for the Margaret Atwood Reading Month hosted at BuriedInPrint. And thanks to Marcie for hosting!

No Other Life (#BrianMooreAt100)

 "'There is no other life,' my mother said."

Fr. Paul Michel is a priest, an Albanesian, who has spent his career teaching at an elite school in Ganae, an island in the Caribbean. He's about to retire and return to his country of birth, Canada, where he no longer has any particular connection. The novel is a reminiscence about the one important event, the one important person, in his life. 

Early in his teaching career the school established, reluctantly, a few scholarships for the impoverished, who are generally blacker than the elite, and one of the students they took in, on Fr. Michel's recommendation, was the orphaned Jean-Paul Cantave. Cantave becomes Fr. Michel's boy, his Petit. Cantave is a brilliant student, who goes on to become a priest and join the Albanesian order, studying in Europe, and finally returning to Ganae to help his native land. 

And become its president. 

It's still the era of liberation theology, though just barely. John Paul II is pope, and the future Benedict XVI is head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, and they have little brief for left-wing priests in politics. 

There are no Albanesians, there is no Ganae, and--it is a novel--there is no Jean-Paul Cantave. But the Albanesians are more or the less the Salesians, Ganae is more or less Haiti, and Cantave is more or less, though probably less, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

Well. Aristide's own story is not yet ended. No Other Life came out in 1993, so Moore couldn't know its complexities, but he clearly has some understanding what they might be like. Aristide had been elected president of Haiti in March of 1991 and turfed in a coup later that year. Cantave faces a coup as well. Is Cantave a good man? What does it mean for a priest to be a good man in a dire political world? Dedicated to this world or the next? Fr. Michel's mother had encouraged him to become a priest, but on her deathbed has a crisis of faith, and declares to her priest/son there is no other life. But does Fr. Michel believe that? His own faith doesn't seem to be rock-solid. The ending gives a hint of the conclusion Fr. Michel came to, but remains ambiguous.

I thought this was very good. Like The Colour of Blood that I read earlier this year, it's a novel of a man of faith facing a difficult political situation and wondering what to do.

It just so happened that I was reading about the Plain Style in an entirely different book (Timothy Steele's introduction to The Poems of J. V. Cunningham). Moore is the absolute master of a spare, pared-down style. Steele quotes Cicero (from Orator):

"He follows the ordinary usage, really differing more than is supposed from those who are not eloquent at all. Consequently the audience, even if they are no speakers themselves, are sure they can speak in that fashion. For that plainness of style (orationis subtilitas) seems easy to imitate at first thought, but when attempted nothing is more difficult."

This could equally have applied to Moore. But it makes him difficult to quote, because it all looks so danged ordinary.

I admit to having found Moore uneven in the past, and until this year I thought his best books were about terribly sad lives of poverty and limited scope (Judith Hearne, Ginger Coffey) and so difficult to read for their subject. But The Colour of Blood and No Other Life make it clear he's got another very sharp arrow in his quiver.

It would be Brian Moore's 100th birthday this year. Cathy at 746books is hosting a readalong.

Brian Moore's Fergus (#BrianMooreAt100)

 

Hubert and Fergus and weather that looks more Ireland than LA

A couple of weeks ago I read Brian Moore's The Color of Blood and enjoyed that so much I thought I should try another Moore. Cathy at 746Books and Brian Moore At 100 are hosting a readalong of Moore's novels and this month's book is Fergus, his novel of 1970. I saw I could get it from my library, so I did.

Fergus Fadden is a novelist and scriptwriter living in the LA area. He's 39, recently divorced and is short of money for alimony and child support; he's taken a purportedly lucrative Hollywood job scriptwriting for the team of Redshields (director) and Boweri (producer). He's living with Dani, 21, and is more interested in marrying her than she is him. He's haunted by his Irish past.

And when I say haunted, that's more literal than metaphorical. His father, who is long since dead, is the first to show up. Page 2, in my edition:

"Fergus was afraid. He looked away as a child looks away when it sees something which upsets it. Then, uneasily, he looked back at the yellow sofa. His father was still there."

Fergus quite rightly wonders if he's losing it. And we're allowed to wonder for a while, too. But when his sister Maeve shows up, who's living in Ireland and not in LA, and at an age younger than she would be in life, she eats a plum. Fergus later finds the pit and deduces only Maeve could have eaten it. Hmm.

Other figures than Fergus' parents and siblings show up as well. Aunts and uncles. A couple of priests from Fergus' youth. The married neighbor Fergus once lusted after, and her dentist husband. Ex-girlfriends. Friends from the places he's lived--Ireland, New York. He talks to them, wants to talk to them, feels they're real enough he has to talk to them, even though other (likely real) people might be in the room and seem unable to see whom it is he's talking to. This leads to comic complications.

Various factions accuse him of terrible things: the priests, the neighbor's husband; others stand up for him, his parents at times, his friends, though often ironically. It's an odd setup, but actually fairly successful. It gives a real picture of a man going through a personal crisis. Not that I'm now necessarily all that sympathetic--any more at least--to someone who's worried his life is already over at 39... ;-)

The Boweri/Redshields episodes, though, I have to say, I liked less. They're a bit background to the main personal crisis, but I wish they had been further in the background. The pair are a bit too much stock Hollywood movie-producing villains. And, what's especially disappointing, as I learned from Cathy's review of the book, this is based on an actual episode in Moore's life as a scriptwriter for Alfred Hitchcock. Whatever one may think of Hitchcock, he should at least make for a more interesting figure than these two. 

Having previously noted Moore's failure in 1987 to predict the fall of the Iron Curtain, I was also amused by this:

"...twenty years from now, when birth control will be permitted for Catholics..."

This, in 1970. It's a good thing Moore didn't hang up his shingle as a pundit.

All in all, though, quite a good novel, funny and poignant both, even if this one didn't quite rocket up to be among my favorite Brian Moore novels. Next month's book in the year-long readalong is The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, undoubtedly one of Moore's most celebrated. I have a copy, which I read something like twenty-plus years ago, not too long after emigrating to Canada. I remember it as pretty great, but terribly sad. We'll see whether I have the emotional wherewithal to reread it next month...

For more information on Moore, I definitely recommend the pages from Cathy's blog and University of Exeter Brian Moore at 100 blog linked above.

Brian Moore's The Color of Blood (#BrianMooreAt100)

"It is a reminder that there are times when resistance, violence, even death, are preferable to tyranny...I am an inadequate leader. I have allowed my people to come to the brink of such violence, to a confusion between the wrongs that some have done to us and the wrongs that some among us now advocate that we do in return...Remember that, no matter which government rules us, we remain a free people, free in our minds, free in an unfree state."

That's from a speech Cardinal Stephen Bem gives at a religious celebration near the end of the novel. Bem is the leader of the Church in an unnamed Catholic country in Eastern Europe. (Call it Orsinia or Ruritania if you like.) The time is before the fall of the Iron Curtain (the novel comes out in 1987) and the country is still under the thumb of Russia. The cardinal is being driven to the Residence when, on the second page, someone tries to assassinate him. It's a novel that doesn't mess around. It's a swift 180 pages in my edition.

Moore's earliest publications were pseudonymous thrillers. This isn't a thriller (or not just, because it does thrill) but I'd say his training from those early books shows up well in this.

The cardinal survives, but neither his chauffeur nor the man holding the gun pointed at him do. The gunman was a passenger in another car, and the driver of that car, a woman, disappears. Who was he, who was she, who was behind the assassination attempt, who can the cardinal trust? And what is the right thing for a genuine, though not perfect, man of God to do in this troubled situation?

A few pages later he's taken into custody. He's told it's protective custody, but is it? And just who is it they are they protecting him against?

A popular blurb on Moore's novels declares he was Graham Greene's favorite living novelist; of the half-dozen Moores I've read this is easily the most Greene-ean. There is nothing wrong with that by me. Cardinal Bem has to make sense of various factions, all with their own agenda: unions, Security Police, church officials of at least three different political stripes, Communist officials of the state--the Prime Minister is an old schoolmate--but also those officials' Russian minders. Some of them want violence, and some of them want to avoid it at any cost. But as Bem notes in his speech above, sometimes avoiding violence at any cost is, in fact, a cost too high. But I don't want to give away Cardinal Bem's final choices.

Moore did not foresee how close the fall of the Iron Curtain actually was in 1987, but then almost nobody did.  

'...the tyranny of an age when religious beliefs have become inextricably entwined with political hatreds...'

I thought: which age isn't that? But of course Moore was from Northern Ireland. He may very well have known that to be a problem that wasn't ever entirely going away.

The novel was shortlisted for the Booker its year, but lost out to Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. I quite liked Moon Tiger, but I probably would have picked this. I thought The Color of Blood was very good. This may very well have just rocketed up to be my favorite Moore, though such comparisons are always silly and it's been twenty years since I read Judith Hearne and Ginger Coffey so I might rethink that if I reread them. Highly recommended.

This year would be Brian Moore's hundredth birthday and Cathy at 746 Books (with help) is hosting a celebration.

And while Moore emigrated to Canada, became a citizen, was living in the US when he wrote this book, and it's a book about somewhere in Eastern Europe, he *was* born in Northern Ireland, so...I think we get to count it! 

Reading Ireland Month

Coming to Canada

Coming To Canada is an autobiographical sequence of poems by Carol Shields from her birth in Chicago that ends when she moves to Canada, newly-married, at the age of 22. It came out in 1992.

The edition I have came is 1995 from Carleton University Press and includes selections from her first two volumes of poetry, other uncollected new poetry, plus an introduction by Christopher Levenson, a Canadian poet.

I never quite know what to say about poetry, so maybe I'll just quote one. From the autobiographical sequence, but not especially autobiographical:

Aunt Ada

Aunt Ada never  went to church
Her head ached or her back
and no wonder 

She had the pies to bake
and the wash and the children under
foot and not so much 

as a minute to sit and ponder
how she'd earned such
blessings or how to take 

the anger from her look
or thunder
from her touch. 

No one remembers
Aunt Ada much,
except she stayed home sick 

on Sundays, rebuked
God, did her work
and grew a little kinder.

I suppose I could make sure you notice the rather sly slant rhyme scheme.

Levenson, in the introduction, almost, but doesn't quite, blame Carol Shields for being so impersonal. Titles of other poems (not from the sequence) include things like "Our Old Aunt Who Is Now In A Retirement Home" and "A Friend Of Ours Who Knits." I think I actually preferred these kind of impersonal poems. Or there was this:

A Physicist We Know

Even while
we talk, he abstracts
himself, making terrier
leaps of speculation
on the quiet. 

His smile
is detached and social,
disenfranchised by
his secret alphabet
of air. 

Occasionally
he emerges in fractions,
lopsided with camaraderie,
looking rather hysterical
and frantic. 

Then we see him sympathetically
as an exile
and don't dare
ask, is it lonely in there?

"terrier leaps" and the closing particularly make that poem work for me.

Still there's no doubt that she's better known as a novelist, and for reason. Levenson's introduction spends at least as much time talking about her novels. I've read some, though not all, pre-blogging, and her biography of Jane Austen more recently. The last of her novels I read was The Stone Diaries, her most famous, so brilliant and so heart-breaking I haven't dared to read another since. I've long felt I need to, and am now beginning to feel I have the strength to, revisit that.

Poem For A Thursday (#pocketpoem)

Exile

Ben-Arabie was the Camel
  Belonging to the Zoo.
He lived there through a dozen years,
  With nothing much to do,
But chew, and chew, and chew, and chew,
  And chew, and chew, and chew. 

He wondered when he might go home,--
  And what they kept him for;
Because he hated Zooish sounds
  And perfumes--more and more;--
Decidedly he hated them
  Much more, and more, and more. 

And why the world turned white and cold
  He did not understand.
He only wanted lots of sun
  And lots and lots of sand;
Just sand, and sand, and sand, and sand,
  And sand, and sand, and sand. 

He longed to see an Arab Sheik,
  And Arab girls and boys;
The kind of noise he yearned for most
  Was plain Arabian noise;
(The sound  of little drums and flutes
  And all that sort of noise.)

He leant against the wind to hear 
  The sound of harness bells;
He sniffed the air for scent of spice
  The nomad merchant sells;
He dreamed of pleasant tinkling bells,
  Of spice, and tinkling bells. 

The keepers said that he grew queer.
  They wondered why he sighed;
The called him supercilious
  And crabbed and sun-dried;
(Indeed he was quite crabbed and
  Exceedingly sun-dried.) 

But ere his woolly fur was gone
  They put him on a train--
For a rich old Arab bought him
  And sent him home again;--
O joyous day! He sent him home;
  He sent him home again!

-Virna Sheard

The biographical note from my Canadian Poems says:

Sheard, Virna (d. 1943) Born in Cobourg, Ontario; educated there and in Toronto. Author of several books of fiction, for children and adults; her selected poems, Leaves in the Wind, appeared in 1938.

I learned from Deb Nance that today, the last day of National Poetry Month, is also Poem in a Pocket day. Share a poem on social media. Well, alright then! For a weekly poem, see Holds Upon Happiness. This week it's Jane Kenyon.

The Indian Vampire Story

A few weeks ago I read Phillip Ernest's novel The Far Himalaya and enjoyed it. That led me to read his first novel The Vetala, even though I would have said from the description it's not my kind of thing. I think it's even better, and very good indeed.

I haven't read much vampire literature--Dracula fairly recently and one Anne Rice novel years ago--and I generally steer clear of the films, so I don't particularly know, but this strikes me as fairly innovative. And even if I'm wrong, and it's not innovative in the world of vampires, I think it's still a very good story.

That story takes place mostly in India, and Nada Marjonivic, a Sanskrit scholar, is studying a seven-hundred-year-old book, the Amrutajijnasa, or the Inquiry into the Undead. Just from the translation of that title you may suspect how her investigation is going to go, and, of course, you're partly right. But there are complications.

Dr. Marjonivic has just returned to India from her European university to study what she believes is the only existing copy of the book; her elderly mentor and fellow Sanskrit scholar has just died and she will now be in charge of the study and of the manuscript itself.

Vetala is a Sanskrit word and vetalas are actual undead figures in Indian lore, though the manuscript Inquiry into the Undead is a creation for the novel. Dr. Marjonivic has experience of these Indian undead in the past; now in her mid-40s, her boyfriend twenty years before was killed by one. The Inquiry is not just an inquiry; it also indicates, though imperfectly, how to lay one to rest. The titular vetala of the novel became one at the time the Inquiry was written, and has carried on, wreaking havoc, for those seven hundred years.

I thought the novel made very good use of its Indian setting. Hindu reincarnation complicates the more familiar Western version of the vampire; an episode from the Mahabharata influences the choices the characters make; the multilingual nature of Indian society is important; the countryside, with its temples, are where the events take place.

The reader gradually comes to understand the emotional tangle that accompanies the more spectacular supernatural events.

Very enjoyable.

Joan Flood's Left Unsaid (#CanBookChallenge)

Left Unsaid is the story of Delia Buckley, a Catholic Irish woman born in the late 1940s. The story is mostly set in Kiltilly, what I assume is a made-up village, near to Limerick, in Ireland. The novel occurs in two times:

In 1967, Delia has an affair with Daniel Wolfe, married, twenty years older, a famous author, Protestant, and owner of the village's Big House. She gets pregnant, thinks maybe he'll leave his wife for her, but, of course, she's wrong.

More of the novel occurs in 1990. Daniel Wolfe is now widowed and recently diagnosed with terminal cancer; Delia Buckley is an established nurse specializing in end-of-life care. Daniel offers to hire her--at well above her usual rate--to look after him until the end. He's presumably feeling guilty, and she's wary of the tangle, but she needs the money: her sister is institutionalized and her aging parents' farm is mortgaged to the hilt.

The novel starts with a bang, and it ends well, too, with a satisfying amount of surprise and resolution. There was a point in the middle, though, where I was a little less happy. With a title like Left Unsaid and the backstory outlined above, we expect some secrets. Quite unsurprisingly Delia didn't get the abortion Daniel gave her the check for in 1968. Ah, but where's the child? was a question we were clearly meant to ask.

But there were too many secrets. (So very many secrets!) This led to some portentous prose in the middle whose double-meaning irony I admit to not quite seeing through, but was too obviously there. "Surely she'd understand that if her mother felt the need to stay away from the family all those years there was a good reason for it." "Your mother kept things from you for a good reason, I'm sure." There were a few too many statements along those lines.

Ah, well. I still enjoyed it. The prose is clear and straightforward, with a pleasant acknowledgment of Irish dialect. (For example, streelish--a word I didn't know and which I see my spell-checker disapproves of, but is easily Google-able.)

Left Unsaid came out with Signature Editions in 2017. Part of my process of poking around in Canadian small presses. Joan B. Flood is a Canadian who emigrated from Ireland. She's written an earlier YA novel, plus some shorter works, none of which I've read.

Jim Nason's Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals (#CanBookChallenge)

Jim Nason's Spirit of a Hundred Thousand Dead Animals came out from Signature Editions in 2017. It's the story of Skye Vannan and her grandson Duncan Johnson. It covers a great swath of time from 1938, when Skye is just eighteen and deciding on her path in life, to 2011, when Duncan Johnson finds love as his grandmother dies.

Skye Vannan makes for quite a fascinating character. Though not as extreme, she has a bit of the irascibility of Olive Kitteridge. She's born into a wealthy family in Edinburgh, and though she's not a beauty we're told, she could marry well. (As her mother expects her to try--we see how Skye comes by her difficult nature.) Instead she wants to be a veterinarian, still an unusual profession for a woman in Scotland. She marries a Canadian soldier at the end of World War II and moves to rural Ontario (Kincardine) where she becomes the region's vet. Her wealthy family mostly drops her.

Skye's one child, a daughter, dies in a car crash; her daughter's husband, wracked with guilt--he was driving--descends into the alcoholism he was already approaching. Skye is left to raise her two-year old grandson. Duncan shows a preternatural talent for drawing animals.

Can Skye come to terms with her own brusque nature? Can she break the cycle of difficult parents producing difficult children? Those are the questions of the book, and they're well-handled. Though she can't make it work out perfectly in the end, there's a measure of hope for the future with Duncan, though I did feel he was the less interesting character.

The other thing particularly to be said about the book is Jim Nason's astute handling of time. It covers a period of seventy-plus years, and the book moves successfully back and forth in time, revealing as it needs to to move forward, but with mysteries still hidden.

The title, though? It's suitable enough, I guess, with a veterinarian as the main character, and it has particular  reference to the veterinary school in Edinburgh she attends. But not particularly appealing, I thought.

Read because I'm poking around in contemporary Canadian literature from small presses, for the Canadian Book Challenge.

Phillip Ernest's The Far Himalaya

Phillip Ernest's The Far Himālaya came out last year from Linda Leith Éditions. It's the story of Ben Doheny, living on the streets in the late 90s near the downtown campus of the University of Toronto.

The novel starts with scenes where Ben, sleeping on campus, is violently harassed by campus police, then later at the Scott Mission, where he is further harassed by his fellow homeless. (The Scott Mission is an actual shelter near to the main University of Toronto campus.) These scenes are painful and, alas, utterly convincing: the author bio tells us that Phillip Ernest lived on the streets of Toronto himself for thirteen years from the age of fifteen.

But it's not (just) a grim and realistic novel of homelessness. Ben is sustained by his love of the Sanskrit language, which gives both him and the novel a view into a larger world. Part of the reason he's drawn to the campus area is the library and the books. He claims to be a graduate student of Sanskrit when he's not, though later he manages to gain some cover from an emeritus professor in the department. He also becomes romantically entangled with Aditi, who is legitimately earning an advanced degree in Sanskrit. Her adviser, Professor Boylan, is the only active member of the department, and he's an utter monster, an abusive drunk, but he does provide the elements of the plot.

Boylan demands Aditi translate the works of classical Sanskrit which Boylan will then publish under his own name; he's so lost to alcohol and drugs he can't manage sustained work any more. Only under these circumstances will he ever--and even then there's uncertainty--approve her thesis. Ben, with his fellow street-dweller Moksha Das, does the translations for Boylan, thus leaving Aditi the time to work on her own thesis. Aditi also has a dark secret in her past that Boylan knows of, and he can, should he wish to, ruin her academic career at any time.

Will Aditi be allowed to finish her thesis and then move on to a career? Will Ben, homeless and still troubled, be able to keep the love of Aditi? The plot moves along with considerable tension to its final resolution.

It was a fascinating novel, set where I live with landmarks I see every day, and full of a cross-section of life I know nothing about. (And, yes, that also means Sanskrit scholars.) I do feel the ending relied overmuch on a deus ex machina character not previously introduced. And, while I have to imagine being homeless implies bodily functions loom much larger than they might otherwise, a little of that goes a long way for me, and there was more than a little here. Still, a very good read.

The Far Himālaya is Ernest's second novel; his first The Vetala (an Indian vampire novel!) appeared earlier, also from Linda Leith Éditions. I'll definitely read others from both the press and the author.

Poem For A Thursday: Coluccio

Where Has All The Mayo Gone?

Hungry late I clank around
the kitchen for a snack.
A pickle first and then why not
I peel apart a pack

of luncheon meat, some Swiss, a leaf
of something limp and wan.
And now oh no the lid's on tight
but look--the mayo's gone. 

It feels like only yesterday
I parked my father's car
and peeked at other shopper's carts
and tootled to a jar 

for slathering on hot dogs
and for dolloping on frites--
there's loads of foods whose fatty goodness
mayonnaise completes. 

My pumpernickel won't go down.
It's like a warning bell,
the chilly clink of stainless steel
on glass. I know it well. 

And wonder under nibbles
if at bottom human lives
aren't always scraping empty jars
with tips of pointless knives.

-Pino Coluccio

I'm more a mustard person myself, but I will admit to being amused by this poem nevertheless. It's classic close observation leading to a more general insight. I especially like 'tips of pointless knives.'

Pino Coluccio is a contemporary Canadian formal poet. This is from his first book of 2005. He has a new book of poems out from Biblioasis titled Class Clown.

Jennifer is featuring a great W. B. Yeats poem this week. 

David Elias' Elizabeth of Bohemia

Elizabeth of Bohemia was the eldest daughter of James I of England; her brother was Charles I, executed by Cromwell. David Elias' Elizabeth of Bohemia is a historical novel that encompasses her entire life.

It's a fascinating period, with lots of great walk-on parts. Shakespeare makes an appearance; so does René Descartes. She could have been married to Gustavus Adolphus. Elizabeth has a crush on the dashing (and older) Sir Walter Raleigh, and sneaks into the Tower of London to visit him. The events of her life are the opening chapters of English Civil War and the Thirty Years' War.

Elizabeth tells her own story: the novel begins in 1612, when she's sixteen, and her father is arranging her marriage to Frederick V, the Elector of Palatine, to shore up alliances among Protestant countries. Elizabeth is hostile to the idea of arranged marriages, especially her own arranged marriage. (She does have that crush on Sir Walter Raleigh.) But she has no power, and the marriage is hastened on, despite the death of her beloved older brother Henry.

In Heidelberg, the capitol of Frederick's realm, she catches the ambition bug, and though she no more than tolerates her husband, she decides to propel him into becoming the king of Bohemia, and make herself queen. Her plot succeeds and they're crowned in Prague. But the Hapsburg and Catholic Ferdinand II can't tolerate this usurpation, and their reign is brief: hence she's the Winter Queen.

Elias' novel has a tripartite structure: the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth in England takes up about a third of the novel; then there are her young married years in Heidelberg, her constant child-bearing; lastly the years after her brief queen-ship, in Heidelberg and finally, a widow, back in England. The realization of her ambitions are glossed over in a page or two--well, they didn't last very long in reality in any case. Frederick was off to fight, before surrendering the throne; there are no war scenes in the novel; we very much see the story as Elizabeth could.

It's an engaging voice, though I have to admit I'm not particularly convinced that it could be the voice of a woman of the 1600s. But then maybe that doesn't matter as long as the story carries you along...

One from my #20booksofsummer list.

And one for the Canadian Book Challenge:

The book just came out last month. ARC provided by ECW Press. 

The Last Manly Man (#20booksofsummer)

"For weeks after my reported death, I made light of it with friends, asking them, 'Where were you when you heard I died?'"

Well, it is a Book of Summer

Robin Hudson is a reporter and unit leader for ANN, a cable news agency. She's doing a series on the Man of the Future, in which she talks to an anthropologist, the founder of a multi-level marketing company, a specialist in great apes, and a feminist predicting the demise of men. Except she gets distracted into a murder investigation. The subjects of her story are also the suspects in her murder investigation. Such are the rules of mystery novels...

Since that's the opening sentence of the novel I give above, we know she's reported dead for a while, but isn't. By the end of the novel, the murderer is revealed, although this is less by her Holmesian cleverness than by her reportorial persistence.

The story involves bonobo chimps, atavistic males, and Manhattan, as the cover kind of gives away.

This is the fourth of Sparkle Hayter's comic mystery novels starring reporter Robin Hudson, and it came out in 1998. I read the first three more or less when they came out, but then somehow lost track of them. There was only one more written (which I haven't read) but when I saw this at a charity sale last year I reminded myself of the series. It won't change your life (at least I think I hope it won't...) but it is fun.

One thing that did surprise me was how much of a period piece it now feels. ANN is a stand-in for CNN where Hayter worked, and its business was growing at the time; now not so much. In the novel everybody uses beepers. Pheromones, the attitude toward AIDS, the distinction between separatist and sex-positive feminists. All these things haven't gone away, but they just don't seem as much in the news. I've reached an age where twenty years doesn't seem like it should be that long a time, but I guess the world has changed...

This is the eleventh book from my list for #20booksofsummer, though I've read another six not on that list. I knew I wasn't going to be very good at keeping to a list!

Under the Volcano

Under The Volcano is--famously--a novel about a drunk. It's often taken as a simple roman á clef about Malcolm Lowry's life, and Lowry was a drunk, and so...maybe it's little more than autobiography, a sort of addiction memoir, of the sort we see all the time.

I've set up that straw man to push back at it: not to push back against Lowry being a drunk; I don't know, but the evidence seems strong; but rather against it being simple, against it being a roman á clef, against it being unmediated portrait of the day-to-day existence of Malcolm Lowry.

The story goes something like this: Geoffrey Firmin, the (ex-)British consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, is drinking himself to death. The majority of the novel takes place on the Day of the Dead, November 2nd, 1938, though the first chapter takes place a year later and in it, we learn that Firmin is dead. In the second chapter, Firmin wakes up hungover after a party the night before, and he's in search of (and in need of) the hair of (some, many) dogs. His half-brother Hugh is due back that same day; Geoffrey Firmin's ex-wife Yvonne, estranged because of his excessive drinking, also arrives, unexpectedly, with the idea that maybe things can still be patched up. How he gets through that day (and then doesn't) is the story.

Yvonne seems serious in her wish to patch up things with Geoffrey, but she's also clearly attracted to Geoffrey's younger half-brother. She and Hugh may have had an affair in the past. She's certainly had an affair with Laruelle, Geoffrey's best friend, a French filmmaker, but that occurs only after she's given up on Geoffrey because of his drinking.

Not a lot happens that day. Hugh and Yvonne go horseback riding. The main trio run into Laruelle. Early that evening Geoffrey, Hugh, and Yvonne go to a bull-riding event that's a bust because the bull doesn't buck enough. And then Geoffrey's final end. That's pretty much it. Most of the pages of the novel are devoted to unwinding how we got here.

One thing that's not resolved is why Geoffrey's a drunk. It's sometimes implied that Geoffrey's a drunk because Yvonne has had an affair, maybe more than one, but we learn Geoffrey was a drunk before that; maybe he's a drunk because of the trauma he went through as a naval officer in World War I, but we know he was drinking earlier; maybe it's due to the complications of his Anglo-Indian childhood and orphanhood? But he had opportunities after that; he developed a close relationship with his foster father. Geoffrey writes, and is working on a book--contributing to that feeling of a roman á clef--and could it be the stress of a creative career that sends him to the bottle? Well, in the end, we're not told, and it sort of doesn't matter: by the time of main events, Geoffrey Firmin is already a lost person.

It's the unwinding, the revelation of the backstory, I found fairly sophisticated and interesting. It's where the drama in the book is. The chapters are generally from the point of view of one character, largely rotating among those main three: Geoffrey, Hugh, and Yvonne. At some point in each chapter, the character enters into fugue state, half remembrance, half fantasy. So, during the boring part of the bull-riding, Yvonne's mind drifts off and we learn about her acting career, a successful enough star of second-tier Westerns as a teenager, a withdrawal from Hollywood, then ending with a hope and dream of returning that doesn't pan out. Elsewhere she also dreams of leaving Mexico with Geoffrey and going to Canada with him sober and working on his book.

In other chapters we learn about Hugh's career as a reporter, and his dream of being the hero of the saved Spanish Republic, just as (in 1938) Franco's forces are about to win conclusively.

But it's Geoffrey's memories and fantasies that are the most problematic, the most confused. And this, very subtly, is how we learn that Geoffrey really is lost. In person, people like him: Yvonne wants to reconcile; he has friends still, despite his compulsive drinking, who care about him; they think him capable of reform. But in his fantasy life, his thoughts are substantially past-directed; few of his thoughts touch upon that work he might write, and those confused; a few upon the renewed life he might build with Yvonne; but mostly they revolve around where that next drink is coming from. Hopes and fantasies may be unrealistic, but without them you're dead.

It's a bleak novel to be sure. But there's hope in it, too, just not much for Geoffrey Firmin.

The good news is Malcolm Lowry was at least partly Hugh, and not entirely Geoffrey: he was Hugh's age, not Geoffrey's; he did escape to Canada with the woman he loved; he doesn't seem to have ever escaped his alcohol problem, but he did write a novel that shows up on the Modern Library list of great 20th Century novels as well as other lists of great novels.

The edition I read is shown above and has an introduction by Stephen Spender. I thought Spender's essay was pretty good--he compares and contrasts Under the Volcano with works of high modernism like Ulysses or The Waste Land, which this book both is and isn't--but it should have been an afterword. He gives too much away. We know from almost the start that Geoffrey Firmin dies, but there's a bit of a mystery about the details, and those should have been left mysterious. If you read this edition, save his introduction until after.

Anyway, this one does multiple duty for me: it's on my Classics Club list, my #20BooksOfSummer list, my Back to the Classics list, and counts for my Canadian Book Challenge. Whew!