The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas

I’d intended to read Fred Vargas ever since Emma first mentioned this French crime writer, so when she announced that The Chalk Circle Man was one of my Virtual Gift Exchange books, I had no more excuses. Well here it is, almost 6 months later, and I finally read the book–the first of a series featuring Commissaire Adamsberg.

The book begins with Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg freshly transferred as the new commissaire to the 5th Arrondissement in Paris. Adamsberg is originally from the Pyrenees and there’s the general impression from those he works with that he’s more than a bit strange and ”primitive,”  but in reality it’s truer to say that he’s not exactly the most socially competent person on the planet. He certainly hasn’t been promoted due to any glibness or ability to swing office politics in his favour. No, he’s been promoted thanks to a wonderful reputation gained through the solution of four murders.

In some ways, The Chalk Circle Man doesn’t feel as though it’s the first book in a series. There’s a definite sensation that we’ve slipped into a certain time slot of Adamsberg’s life. He’s 45,  in love with Camille, a free-spirited woman who has disappeared by choice, and even though Adamsberg had casual affairs, Camille is always in the back of his mind. The book begins with Adamsberg solving the murder of a textile merchant in his own inimitable fashion. It’s the conclusion to this case that begins to build respect for Adamsberg from his skeptical colleagues.

Adamsberg’s next case involves the appearance of blue chalk circles drawn in the wee hours in various sections of Paris. Items, seemingly random items, are placed within these circles, and while it’s the general consensus that the circles, accompanied by a cryptic message, are the work of some harmless nutcase, Adamsberg is clearly disturbed by them, and he fears the worse. With the discovery of a body inside one of the blue circles, Adamsberg’s predictions are realized. Adamsberg has a serial killer on his hands.

Series books rely on a main character strong enough and interesting enough to pull in a repeat audience. I’ve always seen the appeal of a series character–after all, if you, the writer create a really interesting character–a police inspector let’s say or a PI, why drop them once the last page is turned? The most successful series balance the crime solving with the main character’s personal life, so we readers buy the next book–not because we want to read about the next crime, necessarily, but because we want to hang out with the main character again. And again. Adamsberg is a very appealing character, and his unique approach to crime struck a chord for this reader. There’s a scene early on between Adamsberg and Inspector Danglard (who incidentally is the perfect foil for Adamsberg) in which the two men discuss the subject of murder, and Adamsberg brings up a story from his past, concerning a dog, and he tells this story to illustrate some fundamental beliefs:

“The point of this story, Danglard, is the evidence of cruelty in that little kid. I’d known for a long time before this happened that there was something wrong with him, and that was what it was: cruelty. But I can assure you that his face was quite normal, he didn’t have wicked features at all. On the contrary, he was a nice-looking boy, but he oozed cruelty. Just don’t ask me any more, I can’t tell you any more. But eight years later, he pushed a grandfather clock over on top of an old woman and killed her. And most premeditated murders require the murderer not only to feel exasperation or humiliation, or to have some neurosis, or whatever, but also cruelty, pleasure in inflicting suffering, pleasure in the victim’s agony and pleas for mercy, pleasure in tearing the victim apart. It’s true, it doesn’t always appear obvious in a person, but you feel at least that there’s something wrong, that something else is gathering underneath, a kind of growth. And sometimes that turns out to be cruelty–do you see what I’m saying? A kind of growth.”

“That’s against my principles,” said Danglard, a bit stiffly. “I don’t claim my principles are the only ones, but I don’t believe there are people marked out for this or that, like cows with tags on their ears, or that you can pick out murderers by intuition. I know, I’m saying something boring and unexciting, but what we do is we proceed by following clues, and we arrest when we’ve got proof. Gut feelings about ‘growths’ scare me stiff. That way you start off following hunches, and end up with arbitrary sentences and miscarriages of justice.”

Both men have stories to illustrate their theories about crime and murderers, and these stories, which involved early cases in their respective careers, shaped their thinking. Adamsberg has a level of intuition about crime, so for example, he immediately intuits that there’s something sinister about the blue chalk circles while everyone else think they’re just the work of some harmless nut. Adamsberg, however, does not rely on intuition alone. There were several times in the novel when one small detail doesn’t quite fit with the established narrative of crime, and even though other people are satisfied with the solution, Adamsberg is not.

The crimes in The Chalk Circle Man are conducted by a somewhat implausibly adaptable and clever killer, and the best parts of the novel are the refreshingly bizarre characters connected to the story.  Adamsberg has his own unique approach to solving crimes (which involves a great deal of solitary rumination and scribbling), and his sidekick, the melancholy Danglard, who doesn’t quite know what to think of his new boss, is a single parent swamped with children–including one dumped on him by his ex and her lover. There’s also unpredictable oceanographer Mathilde Forestier who has temporarily given up watching fish to watch humans, including the Chalk Circle Man. She believes in salvaging lost souls–not by charity or pity, but with her warm personality and  generous nature. She has already salvaged seventy year-old Clémence, a creepy spinster who obsesses over the personal ads, now employed to do a little work for Mathilde. Mathilde meets a blind man, Charles Reyer, seemingly by accident, who’s struggling with bitterness at his condition, and she rents a room to him while refusing to allow him to wallow in self-pity.  All these characters are somehow or another connected to the case, and the characters are so much fun, that they lighten the darkness of the crimes.

Lucky for me, there are 8 Commissaire Adamsberg novels in English from Vargas (including one graphic novel & the eighth in the series to appear this year). I have some catching up to do. So many thanks to Emma for choosing The Chalk Circle Man.

Translated by Siân Reynolds.

Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon

“She devils are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing.”

I expect that many people who read this post will have seen the film, Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. The film is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t really do justice to the Fay Weldon novel on which it’s based. The film with Roseanne Barr and her rival in life and love played by Meryl Streep is really very funny, but the book is much, much darker, and while like the film version, this is a tale of revenge, the book is much more subversive and its humour is black. You’ll laugh at the film but chances are you won’t have the same reaction to the book. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was the first Fay Weldon novel I read, and it sealed me as a fan. Weldon is an outspoken feminist writer who’s come in for her share of controversy, and simply because she is a figure of some controversy, she’s all too easy to misquote. 

While Weldon’s work obviously fits in any feminist canon, her work can also be considered Transgressive fiction for the way her marvelous characters subvert societal norms. Weldon’s frequent themes include gender inequality, female reinvention, female identity and self-image and the often vicious relationships between women. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil is a tremendously powerful story–the tale of how one woman, a wife and mother, is abandoned by her husband and replaced by a prettier, sexier woman. Rising from her despair and thrusting aside all societal norms, maternal concerns, & obligations the discarded woman eventually triumphs over her enemies. Yes, a story of female empowerment and a rather frightening tale of a woman scorned who, because she’s willing to go as far as necessary, learns to live her life according to an entirely new set of rules.

Ruth, an overweight, unattractive woman who’s 6′ 2″, is an excellent wife and mother. While she’s appreciated by her somewhat scatter-brained in-laws, she’s neglected and undervalued by her accountant husband, Bobbo, who at the best of times says that Ruth is “no beauty, but a good soul.” Ruth, who is virtually powerless in the relationship, does everything to please Bobbo, even tolerating his announcement that he wants an “open marriage.” She’s aware of his extra-marital affairs which he discusses with relish, but now Bobbo has fallen in love with one of his clients, Mary Fisher, a wealthy, prolific author of trashy romances. Ruth is trying her best to ignore the affair, but after a particularly degrading scene, Bobbo moves out of his home in the suburb of Eden Grove, abandons his wife and two children and moves to Mary Fisher’s splendid home, the High Tower.

Fay Weldon’s style is spare, low on descriptions and high on mythic qualities. This is how the novel, alternating between first and third person narrative, opens:

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.

Mary Fisher is forty-three, and accustomed to love. There has always been a man around to love her, sometimes quite desperately, and she has on occasion returned that love, but never, I think, with desperation. She is a writer of romantic fiction. She tells lies to herself and to the world.

Is that hate or contempt lying under the description of Mary Fisher? Probably a bit of both, but add envy to the mix too as Mary Fisher is the embodiment of everything Ruth isn’t: small, petite, feminine and highly desirable. And here’s a quote that shows just how well Fay Weldon can write:

Now outside the world turns: tides surge up the cliffs at the foot of Mary Fisher’s tower, and fall again. In Australia the great gum trees weep their bark away; in Calcutta a myriad flickers of human energy ignite and flare and die; in California the surfers weld their souls with foam and flutter off into eternity; in the great cities of the world groups of dissidents form their gaunt nexi of discontent and send the roots of change through the black soil of our earthly existence. And I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular spot, hating Mary Fisher. It is all I can do. Hate obsesses and transforms me; it is my singular attribution.

While Bobbo and Mary Fisher have the looks, the power and the money on their side, Ruth is dumped with the two squabbling children, a gluttonous vomiting dog who humps anyone lower on the totem pole, a cat who fouls the house, and an unfortunate guinea pig. Bobbo and Mary live in sex-soaked idyllic bliss while Ruth suddenly has to worry about money–how to pay bills and buy food (there’s one great scene in which Ruth directs the children to search the house for coins). To add to the worries, Bobbo tells her to move to a smaller, cheaper home. Part of Ruth accepts what has happened to her–after all, she reasons ”to those who hath, such as Mary Fisher, shall be given, and to those who hath not, such as myself, even that which they have shall be taken away.”

Ruth has always behaved well and put Bobbo’s needs before her own. Why shouldn’t she accept divorce, destitution and displacement and be happy for the few years she had? But Ruth doesn’t see it that way, and she doesn’t react the way Bobbo expects her to.  Strangely, once removed from the position of wife, something begins to happen to Ruth. Liberated from her own repressive behavior,  ”Hate obsesses and transforms” her, and she has revenge in mind. As events unfold, it becomes clear that revenge is an emotion that can take you to the place you want to go. Ruth abandons the roles assigned to her: doting wife, patient mother and begins a transformative journey–both literal and figurative, and along the way she confronts other women in various miserable circumstances including a clueless welfare mother who’s impregnated by a series of transient rogue males, a group of Wimmin, and also the much-abused wife of a judge who has a secret “passion for bondage and whips.” As Ruth continually reinvents herself, she leaves an imprint on the lives of everyone she touches, and rather magnificently, she becomes all the things her husband, to assuage his guilt, accused her of. She becomes a She-Devil who “creates havoc and destruction all around,“  and by abandoning the roles she is expected to endure, and breaking all the ”rules” she plots her revenge…

Since this is a Weldon novel, the economic poverty of women is evident, but Weldon is not a man-hater; rather she revels in the power of sexuality, and she’s also very funny:

“She’s such a good wife,” said Bobbo’s mother, moved almost to tears. “look at that ironing!” Bobbo’s mother never ironed if she could help it. In the good times indeed, she and Angus liked to live in hotels, simply because there’d be a valet service. “And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be!” If she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.

But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised mouth, and hardly saw himself at all; he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved.

review copy

Magnet of Doom by Simenon

Watching the films of Jean-Pierre Melville led me to Simenon’s novel, Magnet of Doom (The First-Born). Magnet of Doom is one of Simenon’s non-Inspector Maigret, Romans Durs (hard novels) so it’s highly recommended for noir fans. Melville’s version of the novel, a 1963 film called  L’Aine Des Ferchaux stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, a washed-up boxer who latches on to a disgraced millionaire. With murder charges and a subsequent scandal about to break, Ferchaux employs Michel as his personal secretary and together they flee France.  Melville’s film strands the two men in the American deep south, and the film is a sometimes peculiar reflection of Melville’s fascination with American culture. You can see the film and then read the book without spoiling either. You’ll recognize the basic raw material, but that’s as far as it goes.

One of the frequent themes in the films of Melville is loyalty between men, so it should come as no surprise to Melville fans that Michel and Ferchaux develop an usual, and even unhealthy bond–you could apply the term ‘co-dependency’ here, but while Melville’s film is ultimately positive when it comes to analyzing the relationship between the aging millionaire and Michel, the Simenon novel on which the film is based is far darker. If there’s any truth to the idea that a relationship can be judged by the way it alters the people involved with each other, then the relationship between Simenon’s characters Ferchaux and Michel Maudet is toxic.

In the novel, Michel Maudet, the son of “small insolvent tradesfolk,” is desperate for work when he applies for the job as a secretary to the very wealthy Dieudonné Ferchaux. It’s rumoured that he’s a difficult employer and the number of secretaries he’s hired and fired in the recent past are proof that he’s not easy to please. Ferchaux isn’t at his home in the Rue des Chanoinesses–he’s retreated to the country, to his villa. Maudet leaves his long-suffering wife, Lina, alone in their bleak hotel room while he applies for the job, and when he learns that Ferchaux isn’t in Paris, he pursues him into the countryside stranding Lina with no money.

Maudet’s determination to get the job may seem normal, but it sets a precedent–at least as far as his priorities. Ferchaux quickly employs Maudet and the idea emerges that perhaps Ferchaux sees Maudet as a version of himself as a young man–hungry, ambitious, and eager to carve a place for himself in the world. But if Ferchaux feels this way, it certainly isn’t reflected in his initial  treatment of his new secretary who assumes the role of a possession rather than an employee who clocks off after a reasonable amount of time. Maudet, after overcoming his dismay at Ferchaux’s Spartan lifetstyle, admires his new employer and he absorbs his stories as if he might become more like Ferchaux through extended contact. While Maudet admires Ferchaux for his courage and the way he effortlessly flouts moral laws, he also envies the power and the fortune Ferchaux possesses. As their relationship continues, Ferchaux seems to envy Maudet’s youth, and there’s definitely a mutual predatory quality to their relationship–after all, each man possesses something the other man envies:

Ferchaux had his eye on him the whole day long, scanning him, watching for his reactions. Once he had said: “you’re impatient, aren’t you?”

There was no doubt what he meant. Impatient to live, impatient to taste and enjoy all that life had to offer. More than anything perhaps, impatient for power, impatient to get to the top.

“I’m still young,” he answered. “I’ve got time.”

Ferchaux had studied the boy’s pointed teeth, his nervous fingers, his sensitive nostrils. What was he feeling? Admiration, perhaps, and mixed with it, envy.

Wasn’t it his own portrait, his portrait at the age of twenty, that he contemplated in Maudet?

“Admit that if you had to do something a bit crooked to get your foot on the ladder … “

Even though Ferchaux is a phenomenally wealthy man, he has a stingy, mean side, and as the novel continues, it becomes clear that Ferchaux’s character was shaped in the Congo where he lived for over 40 years. Ferchaux may have been brutalized by spending most of his life in the Congo, but he is also one of the brutalizers. There are various stories circulating about his life there, and one of the uglier stories which includes murder of Congo natives is perfectly true–although, of course, Ferchaux has a different version of events. One of Maudet’s duties is to take dictation of Ferchaux’s memoirs, and in the beginning–the early days with Ferchaux, Maudet almost falls in love with his employer. Let’s say it’s a kind of homage, extreme admiration of a man who can command respect and put fear into the hearts of others. Maudet would like to be Ferchaux. There’s the underlying idea that a man like Maudet, a man with few principles to trouble his conscience, would also have thrived in the Congo and, just like Ferchaux, he would made a fortune on the blood on sweat of the natives. Dieudonné Ferchaux’s brother, Emile, also spent time in the Congo, but he minimized this period and got out as soon as he could. Emile lives a life of luxury with a chateau, a chauffeur driven car, wears expensive clothing, and mingles with the cream of French society. Dieudonné Ferchaux, on the other hand, nothing less than a bold unscrupulous adventurer who lost a leg in the Congo, has kept his rough edge, and rebuffs ‘the soft life.’

We could call the beginning of Maudet’s relationship with Ferchaux a honeymoon. After Lina reenters the picture to form an uneasy trio, there’s an emerging sense of jealousy, and she also senses a sort of “vicious” quality in Ferchaux’s attitude to Maudet. At first she doesn’t understand why Maudet admires Ferchaux–a man whose soiled reputation and crimes in the Congo have made headlines, but Maudet defends his choice:

“I’ve got a chance of entering into a world that was closed to me before, as it’s closed to most people. A world in which you juggle with millions–you call the tune and thousands of little people have to dance to it…”

Shortly the three characters-Ferchaux, Maudet and Lina go on the run. With 5 million francs in a suitcase, a large amount of money on deposit in a South American bank and a stash of diamonds, the plan is to live in exile in a godforsaken hole where French law cannot reach. Fate dogs our characters all the way from France to a South American hovel, and there the relationship between Ferchaux and Maudet simmers unhealthily as each man experiences a sick, growing dependence on the other and Maudet mingles with a strange crowd of ex-pats, prostitutes, rich, lonely socialites, and a seller of shrunken heads.

The book’s title, Magnet of Doom refers both to the relationship between the two men and to the idea that the conclusion is ominously unavoidable. In the Congo, Ferchaux did whatever he deemed necessary to bolster his success–he didn’t shrink from murder, torture, & there’s one great scene detailing the very deliberate humiliation of a groveling employee & his wife who’ve established a bourgeois “suburban villa” in the Congo. Morality is absent from Ferchaux’s mind, and so his actions are based on success and survival rather than any moral code. One of the issues between the two men is the question of whether or not Maudet is made of the same material:

“You see Maudet, the question you ask me is one to which no one has the right to answer…. A leopard doesn’t hesitate to jump over a paling, because it knows its strength. But when a jackal tries the same thing and gets caught on the pales….It’s not a pretty sight, that…. I’ve seen it….”

Clearly Maudet initially worships the much older man, but as his power wanes, so does Maudet’s admiration. It’s almost as if Maudet saps the strength from the other man, and perhaps some of this is a natural process. In these two men, however, a terrible and unhealthy dynamic exists with Ferchaux initially baiting Maudet  to see just how far he’ll go:

What Michel wanted to know and what he sought for in Ferchaux’s eyes was the answer to a question that was so vague and terrible, a question which he had never formulated, yet which both men understood, a question which could be summed up in the words: how far?

Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury

The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac

Back to Balzac for the story, The Unknown Masterpiece–a story that found its way into the Jacques Rivette film, La Belle Noiseuse (1991).  This is a story about three artists, and I read the NYRB edition which includes another story, Gambara. To the two, I preferred the latter story, but more of that in another post.

The Unknown Masterpiece is less than 40 pages in my edition, and the story opens in 1612 with a young, poor artist, Nicolas Poussin pacing in front of the home of a famous painter, Porbus, the court painter of Henri IV. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the courage to knock at the painter’s door, but Poussin is passed on the stairs by a very elderly man who is admitted into the painter’s residence, and Poussin drifts in too.

While Poussin is in awe of being in the presence of Porbus, a man whose talent he admires, the elderly man, an artist named Frenhofer, doesn’t exactly lavish praise on the paintings. According to Frenhofer, the paintings may be anatomically correct, but they lack life:

The old man sniffed. “Good? … Yes and no. Your lady is assembled nicely enough, but she’s not drawn alive. You people think you’ve done it all once you’ve drawn a body correctly and put everything where it belongs, according to the laws of anatomy! You fill in your outline with flesh tones mixed in advance on your palette, carefully keeping one side darker than the other, and because you glance now at a naked woman standing on a table, you think you’re copying nature–you call yourself painters and suppose you’ve stolen god’s secrets! … Brrr! A man’s not a great poet just because he knows a little grammar and doesn’t violate usage! Look at your saint, Porbus! At first glance she seems quite admirable, but look again and you can see she’s pasted on the canvas–you could never walk around her. She’s a flat silhouette, a cutout who could never turn around or change position.

Frenhofer, a man of strong opinions, demonstrates his theories on a painting that belongs to the young artist Poussin, and the seemingly slight alternations he enacts make a convincing argument. Poussin’s ‘good’ painting is transformed into something magnificent, “a picture steeped in light.”

Frenhofer invites Poussin and Porbus back to his studio, and while there, the men admire a portrait of Frenhofer’s model. Frenhofer admits that he’s “failed to find [is] a flawless woman,” and later Poussin offers Gillette, his lover and his model to Frenhofer….

The intro by Arthur C. Danto states that Poussin and Pourbus were two very real artists, and that the latter was “the leading portraitist of his era.” Danto argues that the three artists “are, so to speak, the spirits of Past, Present, and Future.” I didn’t interpret the characters in the same way–to me they were three artists who are at various points in their respective careers. With the appearance of Gillette, Balzac introduces the theme of the artist’s sacrifice to Art, but there’s another theme here–the Quest of Idealism. Gambara also explores the exhausting possibilities of Idealism, so the pairing of these two stories in one volume is appropriate.

The Unknown Masterpiece asks the questions: “What is art?” and “What is a masterpiece?” “Would we recognize a masterpiece if we saw it?” and finally “Who decides if something is a masterpiece?”  By this point in the story, I thought of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (Piss Paintings)–one, which according to an internet source, sold for $1,889,000 back in 2008. For these paintings, canvases were prepared with copper paint and then urinated on with this result:

Ah, what price art!

But back to something truly beautiful–the Girl with the Pearl Earring–a painting I recently saw which is, btw, much more beautiful than expected and something that Frenhofer would admire. The young girl who posed for the painting seems very much alive

Her eyes seemed moist to me, her flesh was alive, the locks of her hair stirred … She breathed

Translated by Richard Howard

Thérèse Desqueroux by François Mauriac

Théresè Desqueroux by François Mauriac is one of two picks made by Emma for the virtual gift exchange. The book had been a topic of conversation before the exchange as there’s a new film version with Audrey Tatou in the role. I’m not sure if I’ll see it as I don’t think anything can be better than the 1962 version. But back to the book….

Thérèse Desqueroux begins with the dismissal of a court case against a young married woman, and on the first page she exits the court house. A chilling reception awaits from Thérèse’s father, and a discussion between Monsieur Larroque and the barrister Duros reveal snippets of an extraordinary conversation; it becomes evident that a local doctor charged Thérèse with attempting to poison her husband, Bernard. Since this is a serious accusation, you might expect a celebratory period following the dismissal, but instead Duros and Larroque discuss the best line of attack; Duros favours aggressive newspaper coverage denying “A Scandalous Rumour,” while Larroque explains that “for the family’s sake we’ve got to hush the whole business up.”  And what of the young woman who’s the object of this horrible accusation? Her emotions don’t fit the moment; she’s cool and detached, and yet here in a conversation between Thérèse’s father and barrister, she reveals an underlying aggression:

“After my son-in-law’s evidence it was a foregone conclusion.”

“Hardly that-one can never be quite certain.”

“Once they’d got him to admit that he never counted his drops….

But in cases of this kind, you know, Larroque, the evidence of the victim…”

Thérèse spoke in a loud voice:

“There was no victim.”

End of conversation.

There’s a little bit of a squabble about what will happen next. Thérèse says she will spend a short time with her husband before returning to her father, but he’ll have none of that and tells her that she’s with her husband “till death do you part.” A grim statement in light of the recently dismissed court case.

On the journey back to Bernard’s and their home in Argelouse, Thérèse goes back into her past–through her childhood, adolescence and her marriage to Bernard, the brother of her best friend, Anne. The marriage is viewed as a “foregone conclusion” and yet Bernard’s mother, remarried and now called Madame Victor de la Trave isn’t 100% sold on the match. Thérèse is rich and attractive, but there’s a scandal involving her grandmother that’s been successfully swept under the rug, and Bernard’s mother is concerned that Thérèse might inherit her grandmother’s genes.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the honeymoon is an unmitigated disaster–undeniably so because Bernard is oblivious to his wife’s distress:

He remained imprisoned in his own pleasure like one of those charming little pigs whom it is so amusing to watch through the railings rooting around delightedly in their stye. (“And I was the stye,” thought Thérèse.) He always looked so much in a hurry, so busy, so serious. He was a man of method. “Do you think it’s altogether wise?”  Thérèse would sometimes ask, appalled by the extent of his virility. Laughingly he reassured her. Where had he learned to draw such fine shades of discrimination in all matters pertaining to the flesh, to distinguish between what a decent man may or may not permit himself in the matter of sadistic self-indulgence? He was never for a moment in doubt. Once, when they stopped for a night in Paris on their way back, he pointedly left a music-hall where the performance had shocked him. ‘To think the foreigners should see that! It’s a disgrace. that’s the sort of thing they judge us by!…” It amazed Thérèse to think that this Puritan should be one and the same as the man whose sensual ingenuities would be forced upon her in less than an hour.

Thérèse’s memories bring images of her unhappy marriage and the endless days which are coated with a suffocating boredom. Naturally the status quo cannot remain forever, and rather strangely Thérèse discovers the inkling of mental liberation through a platonic relationship with a young man who returns to the neighbourhood.

I saw undertones of lesbianism in the 1962 film version, but I didn’t pick that up in the book. I had a great deal more sympathy for Thérèse as depicted on the big screen, but there’s something repellent about the book’s Thérèse. I think I’m supposed to have sympathy for the fictional Thérèse’s dilemma–marrying a bombastic country bore before she really understands what she wants out of life. And, yes, while I do have sympathy, there are limits. There’s something rather cold and unpleasant about Thérèse. Here she is on the receiving end of one of Bernard’s lectures:

Thérèse was no longer frightened: she wanted to laugh. He was just comic– a figure of fun. It did not matter what he said in that awful accent of his which everywhere but in Saint-Claire made him a laughing stock–she was going away. Why all this fuss? It would not have made the slightest difference to anyone if this fool had disappeared from the face of the earth! The paper trembled in his hand, and she noticed his badly-kept finger-nails. He was wearing no cuffs. He was just a county oaf who looked merely comic anywhere but in his accustomed rut, the kind of man who, from any intellectual, or even personal, point of view, is completely null and void. Only habit makes us attach importance to the life of the individual. Robespierre had been right–and Napoleon and Lenin.

Don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to follow the examples of those three when considering the value of a human life.

Ultimately, are we supposed to have complete sympathy for Thérèse? Clearly her marriage to Bernard is a huge argument for ‘no-fault’ divorce, and while I have sympathy for anyone who married boring old Bernard, he never changed. He was totally himself, a creature of predictable, yawn-inducing habits from the start. Even though the marriage just fell into place, Thérèse wasn’t forced to marry him. After all, she was a wealthy young woman. For this reader, Thérèse has a few vital components missing–not everything can be explained away by the tedium of her daily existence, the suffocation of life with a boring spouse.

Translated by Gerard Hopkins

Anyway, thanks Emma. This was a great pick for me.

Climates by André Maurois

I’ve been picking away at a Balzac biography by André Maurois, so I curious to read the novel Climates (1928). Maurois, who ”kept a secret cupboard filled with Balzac novels” was clearly a Balzac devotee and expert, and I decided that given the Balzac connection, his novel would be, at the very least, interesting. Climates, also known as The Climates of Love, is the story of a man,  Philippe Marcenat and his two marriages, and through the novel, we get a fascinating look at two very different, and yet with the slight shifting of roles, oddly similar relationships. The novel explores some of the unanswerable questions about love: why do we chose to love one person and not another? Why are some relationships satisfying while others are not? Do we tend to fall in love with the same sort of person? Are we more comfortable with some relationship roles than others?  What does the selection of who we love say about who we are and what we need? And perhaps the most intriguing question of all: why do we love people who aren’t good for us?

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a film fan, and while I watch a great deal of foreign film, French film seems to excel at exploring the philosophical depths and treacherously difficult nuances of relationships. Certainly the same is also true of French fiction, and after reading Climates, I have to agree with a statement in the wonderful introduction by Sarah Bakewell that French writers are “more than usually observant and often merciless with themselves. They reveal every power game, every change of emotional weather. Every powerful and embarrassing moment is needled out for us on the page.” This is most definitely the case with Climates, a novel in which one man’s relationships are scrutinized and rather painfully analyzed, and we see that even though our protagonist, Philippe perfectly understands himself, his actions, his desires, and his choices, in this case, self-knowledge does not bring happiness or success in personal relationships.

 Philippe Marcenat comes from a rather staid, conventional and respectable background in the provinces. His father owns a paper mill, and when the novel begins, Philippe is a child set to run and inherit the paper mill in the distant future. The family is well off and live in a nineteenth century Château, the Château de Gandumas–an idyllic if provincial setting. You could say that his family is rather predictably boring, caring a great deal about appearances, but to say that doesn’t really do justice to the fact that Philippe’s family are very nice, decent people but somewhat repressive and eminently respectable. As a child, Philippe develops an image of the ‘ideal woman’ after reading a book called Little Russian Soldiers, and clearly his imagined role with this fantasy woman is to be a sort of devoted slave who aims to please and is rewarded with a smile. This seemingly small experience appears to set the tone for Philippe’s later adult relationships, for while he has numerous affairs, his first really serious relationship is with a young, beautiful, emotionally elusive girl called Odile he meets against the backdrop of a romantic Italian holiday.

Structurally, according to the author,  this is a very simple story: “Part 1 -I love and am not loved. Part 2-I am loved and do not love.” Part 1 which takes the form of a letter to his second wife is narrated by Philippe and is the story of his courtship of Odile and their subsequent marriage. After his first glance at Odile, he is completely entranced:

Why did I feel such a sense of perfection? Were the things Odile said remarkable? I think not, but she had what all the Marcenats lacked: a lust for life. We love people who secrete a mysterious essence, the one missing from our own formula to make us a stable chemical compound. I may not have known women more beautiful than Odile, but I knew plenty who were more brilliant, more perfectly intelligent, yet not one of them managed to bring the physical world within my grasp as she did. Having been distanced from it by too much reading, too much solitary meditation, I now discovered trees and flowers and the smell of the earth, all sorts of things picked by Odile every morning and laid in bunches at my feet.

While Odile Malet brings ”the world of colors and sounds” to Philippe (and we can really feel how entranced he is with her fey qualities), he gives her the stability she lacks. Odile’s home life is less-than-respectable. Her father is a failed architect, and this is Odile’s mother’s third marriage. Odile is inadequately chaperoned, goes into society freely, and her mother takes lovers. Ultimately to Philippe’s mother, the Malets are “not people like us.” Since Philippe and Odile both bring to the marriage the elements the other person lacks, it’s entirely possible to imagine that this couple will enjoy a happy marriage. But almost from the moment this relationship gets off the ground, tiny fault lines form between them (her flirtatiousness, attraction to fake jewelry, “puerile” novels and the fact that Philippe isn’t “much fun,“) and these fault lines widen.

I do not regret those times, although they were fleeting. Their last chords still resonate within me, and if I listen carefully and silence the noise of the present, I can make our their pure but already doomed sound.

We are taken through every stage of this marriage including “the first knock to send a fine crack through the transparent crystal of my love. An insignificant episode but one that prefigured everything to come.” Our narrator, Philippe does not spare himself as he details the disintegration of the marriage, and this is somewhat unusual, as so often the narrator–especially in the matters of love–will tell a slightly slanted story. Not so here. Philippe admits that in the marriage he finds himself in an unusual position, and one that he does not care for. In the past, he’s the one who loved lightly and decided when his relationships with various mistresses were to end. Now the tables are turned, and Philippe acknowledges that Odile has the power in the relationship. Yes, he’s male and has the money, and in theory should be the one in power, but his adulation of Odile dictates his amount of tolerance which is accompanied by overwhelming jealously and a sense of powerlessness.  At the same time, he also admits that “as early as the second month of our married life I knew that the real Odile was not the one I had married.” Odile brings a lot of emotional baggage to the relationship, and while it’s emotional difficulty that Philippe craves, it also erodes the foundations of their marriage.

Part 2 is written by Philippe’s second wife in the form of a letter to her husband–along with quotes from his diaries. Here we see Philippe in his second marital relationship. This wife is all the things that Odile was not, and yet the opposite is also true. Philippe’s attraction is partially explained by the similarities he makes between the two women “rather like hanging a garment on a peg.” Outsiders might predict that Philippe’s second marriage would be far more successful than the first, yet is it? He has a wife who worships him and is content just to be in the same room together, but is this the sort of relationship Philippe wants?

In the novel, Maurois argues that each relationship creates a climate, an environment, physical, mental and emotional, and that these climates alter as we move from one relationship to another. One climate may not suit while another may be preferable, and one of the difficulties presented by marriage and examined in the book is the undeniable fact that  ”one cannot just transfer one’s personality intact from one environment to the next” (Bakewell).  One of the first annoyances Philippe encounters after returning from his honeymoon with Odile is her choice of curtains, and it’s no coincidence that domestic details are given a fair amount of attention in the novel.

It’s impossible to read this novel without contemplating the power of memory. Philippe’s early memories shape his later life, and are his memories of Odile accurate or has she improved in the frequent replays of their life together?

Why do some images remain with as clear to us as when we first saw them, while others that might seem more important grow hazy and fade so quickly?

The introduction discusses some aspects of the author’s personal life and those autobiographical elements that entered the novel. The character of Odile, strangely sad at times in spite of her love for life, seems to be so alive in these pages–almost as if she could step, laughing, from the pages. I take that as a tribute to the author’s love for the woman who was the basis for the character. Authors often write in order to answer unresolved questions in their lives. How gratifying it would be, in theory at least, to be an author who had the talent to write and then solve some of the issues in life. In the case of Climates, this superb novel does not appear to bring any ease to Maurois or chase away the ghosts that haunted him. In fact, if anything, there’s a lingering discontent, an acknowledged hopeless regarding his shortcomings and a strong, overpowering sense of loss.

Review copy. Translated by Adriana Hunter.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

“From now on, you’re going to wear mink, baby.”

No Orchids for Miss Blandish  (1939) by James Hadley Chase has been on the reading radar for some time. I saw the film version in 2010 and then Emma, from Book Around the Corner reviewed the book here. After seeing the film version, and reading the controversy about the book, I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. The book is far darker, far more unpleasant, so if you like your crime books bleak, nasty and downright unsavoury, then you might want to check out No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

The story begins with a couple of cheap crooks, Bailey and Old Sam, stopping at a gas station on the way to Kansas City. Old Sam is sleeping, so Bailey, worried about money and even contemplating robbing a bank if things don’t look up soon, steps inside the diner for a Scotch. Bailey and Old Sam form an ad-hoc gang with a sleaze ball named Riley as the brains of the operation. It’s slim pickings for these trio of bottom-feeders. The lucrative jobs are too big and complex for their slipshod 3 man operation, and that leave the petty jobs that don’t yield much. It seems to be a lucky break when tipster fat Heinie, a “leg man for a society rag that ran blackmail on the side” waddles into the diner and mentions that multi millionaire Blandish is throwing a party for his daughter’s 24th birthday. Her gift will be the family diamonds and after the party at the Blandish mansion, she’ll move on to the Golden Slipper nightclub with her boyfriend, Jerry MacGowan. Bailey keys onto the fact that the couple and the diamond necklace will be alone and vulnerable. Heinie warns him off any thoughts of knocking off the necklace as Bailey and Riley ”aren’t big enough to handle a job like that.”  But to Bailey, the job sounds like a cinch: Waylay a society dame and her cream puff escort then grab the diamonds. Simple.

Bailey takes the idea to Riley, the head of the gang, and a man in Bailey’s opinion who spends “too much time in the sack with that broad of his,” a cheap, mouthy striptease dancer named Anna. The plan is to go to The Golden Slipper while Miss Blandish is slumming and then follow the couple, waylaying them along the route, and making a fast smash and grab. But the plan goes wrong and morphs into a kidnapping, and then bad luck sends members of the vicious Grisson gang into their path….

The Grisson gang, considered by other crooks as “good third-raters,“ is led by Ma Grisson–a tough as nails, “big, grossly fat and lumpy“  woman  who sounds as clever, mean and evil as the FBI fabricated-for-the-media version of Ma Barker. (This can’t be coincidence as the author, James Hadley Chase was supposedly influenced by the tale of the Barker Gang when he wrote No Orchids for Miss Blandish.) Ma Grisson sees the Blandish heiress as means of becoming the “richest, the most powerful, and the most wanted public enemies of Kansas City.” In other words, the Blandish girl is a ticket out of the small-time, and with a prize like that Ma Grisson is willing to take some risks.

Some of the novel includes the dynamics between the various gang members. There’s an unlicensed alcoholic doctor, “Doc” who comes in handy when the boys need stitching up, Eddie who “wouldn’t have been bad looking, but” for the cast in his eye, Flynn, Woppy and finally Ma’s son, the dysfunctional, psychotic, and none too clean Slim Grisson, the man with a taste for knives.

He was tall, reedy and pasty-faced. His loose, half-open mouth, his vacant, glassy eyes made him look idiotic, but a ruthless, inhuman spirit hid behind the idiot’s mask.

Slim Grisson’s background was typical of a pathological killer. He had always been lazy at school, refusing to take the least interest in book work. He began early to want money. He was sadistic and several times had been caught torturing animals. By the time he was eighteen, he had begun to develop homicidal tendencies. By then, his mental equipment had degenerated. There were times when he would be normal to the point of being quick-witted, but most times he behaved like an idiot.

Slim is barely held in check by his mother who “refused to believe that there was anything wrong with him.” So there’s an inherent, festering sore in the gang’s power structure: Slim is out-of-control and yet his mother refuses to reign him in. It’s with the introduction of Miss Blandish into the equation that the power balance within the gang changes.

More gangs have come to grief through a woman than through the cops.

The novel’s violence is swift, merciless and sadistic. The 1948 film version of the novel played like some sort of deranged love story, and that glamoured up what’s really at play here. After all, there are some things worse than death….

James Hadley Chase (real name René Brabazon Raymond) was British but chose to set this, his first novel in America, a country he’d yet to visit. Now to the question of versions:  Chase revised the novel in 1961, and I have two versions: a kindle version and a print version which are quite different. The kindle version, originally from Harlequin books, refers to television and Slim being a television addict (“He never grew tired of watching the moving pictures on the twenty-one inch screen.“) The kindle version says 1939 on the front but the Harlequin edition was published in 1951.  The out-of-place reference to televisions in the 1930s is absent in my Bruin Crimeworks edition, and the Amazon description of this book says it’s the 1961 updated version, but inside the book there’s a page “note to the reader“ which says that this version is “yet a further update” to the 1961 update. So how many versions are there?

The revised print version from Bruin Crimeworks is even nastier (read “embellished,” and here’s just a taste–a scene which isn’t so detailed in the earlier kindle version. BTW, I blotted out the victim’s name in order to not spoil the plot suspense for potential readers:

“I’m giving it to you there,” Slim said, pricking the shuddering flesh with his knife. “Right in the guts, *****, and you’re going to take a mighty long time to croak. I know just where to stick you.”

“Come on, Slim! You wouldn’t do that to me. I’m a stand up guy, don’t I keep telling you? You know me. You ain’t gonna cut me like that. No! Slim! …No!… For Christ’s sake…Jesus, God…Don’t do me, Slim!”

Slim, still grinning, held the knife-point just below *****’s navel and put his weight on the handle. The knife went in slowly as if it were going into butter. ***** drew his lips back. His mouth opened. There was a long hiss of expelled breath as he stood there. Tears sprang from his eyes. Slim stepped back, leaving the black hilt of the knife growing out of ***** like a horrible malformation. ***** began to give low, quavering cries. His knees were buckling but the cord held him up so that the blade slowly cut deeper inside him.

Slim sat on the grass a few feet away and gave himself a cigarette. He pushed his hat over his eyes and squinted at *****.

“Take your time, Pal. We ain’t in a hurry.” He gave him a crooked smile as his fingers traced the sky. “Ain’t them clouds pretty?”

And here’s the same scene in the kindle version:

Slim looked over at ***** who shut his eyes. A horrible croaking sound came from him. Slim cleaned his knife by driving it into the ground. The he straightened.

“*****…” he said softly.

****** opened his eyes.

“Don’t kill me, Slim.” he panted. “Gimme a break! Don’t kill me!”

Slim grinned. The moving slowly through the patch of sunlight, he approached the cringing man.

The book has been made into two film versions: No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) and The Grissom Gang (1971). Pick your poison.

The War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie

“The unwelcome thought comes to Brian that two women who were in reasonably good shape when he met them are now, somewhat as a result of his actions, on the verge of nervous collapse.”

In Alison Lurie’s novel, The War Between the Tates (1974),the disintegration of a marriage is set against the backdrop of a society in flux with battles waged at home and abroad. Set in the late 60s, Feminism, a “conflict of generations,” sexual liberation, LSD,  abortions, the Vietnam War, and student protests are topical issues addressed in these pages, and the content conclusively seals this novel as an important read of the era. Not only does Alison Lurie explore some of the controversial elements within American society, but she also examines the fate of one family as traditional morality is challenged by a new value system.

At 39, Erica Tate, who’s written, illustrated and published a handful of children’s books, is a bored housewife and a frazzled mother of two demanding, obnoxious teenagers:  Jeffrey 15 and Matilda almost 13. The Tates moved to upstate New York eight years previously after  husband Brian secured a position in the Political Science department at Corinth University. They purchased a “deserted, sagging gray farmhouse miles out of town,” and they seemed to be set for an idyllic upper-middle class life. That life is under assault, and the onslaught simultaneously comes from several directions: the children are no longer sweet little tots,  and the family’s peaceful isolation is violated by the emergence of a new housing estate with uniformly built ranch homes which spoil the Tates’ view–effectively “blocking their sunset.” But that seems minor when compared to the rot which has set into the Tates’ marriage. In spite of moderate academic success, at 46, Brian who holds the prestigious ”Sayle Chair of American Diplomacy” is nonetheless a “dissatisfied and disappointed man.” Brian Tate always imagined that he’d have a career similar to that of his hero, diplomat, adviser and Political Scientist George Kennan. Although Brian is admired and respected by his colleagues and is a frequent public speaker on American foreign policy, Brian considers himself a “failure.”

Why he asks himself sourly, is he speaking on foreign policy instead of helping to make it? Why does he still discuss other men’s theories, instead of his own?

 Brian is in middle-age and nursing secret disappointments, when a young Social Psychology graduate student named Wendy Gahaghan enters his life : “a small hippie-type blonde in his graduate seminar on American Institutions.” Clearly infatuated with her professor, the emotionally volatile Wendy lays siege to Brian, and while he stops short of telling her to go away and mentally fabricates a number of reasons/excuses for not having an affair, the truth is that he finds her complete worship of everything he says and does flattering. This appeal to his ego eventually breaks down his flimsy defenses, and Brian begins an affair with Wendy. To Brian, Wendy, whose ambition is to “go into the wilderness and live in a commune based on mutual cooperation and mystical philosophy”  is a refreshing change. To Wendy, Brian is a “great man, a hero” and she believes that the book he’s trying to complete will change America’s foreign policy and possibly even save the planet.

And Brian would look across the table–or the bed at his wife, who had never given herself completely to anyone; who merely lent herself. Graciously and sometimes enthusiastically, yes. But like an expensive library book, Erica had to be used with care and returned on time in perfect condition.

This frequently funny campus novel explores academic life through the fallout of Brian Tate’s affair. Erica’s best friend, Danielle is a casualty of divorce, and she thinks that “men will do anything they can get away with.” With her ex, the libidinous Leonard, a former Corinth professor back in New York, Danielle begins teaching French part time, engages in an extraordinary number of sexual encounters, and is part of a ”campus discussion group named Women for Human Equality Now; Brian refers to them as hens.”  Soured by men and at the same time exploring new boundaries to her behavior, Danielle’s “new hobby-horse [is] the awfulness of men.”  Once Erica considered Danielle tainted by her marital experience with Leonard, but in light of Brian’s affair, she finds herself agreeing with her friend’s opinion of men–a sex who will “do anything they can get away with.”

As the relationship between Brian and Wendy becomes suddenly much more complicated, Erica find herself faced with a moral dilemma. The decision she makes involves a large chunk of the story, and this is one of those books in which the reader becomes silently involved through questioning what we would do if we were in Brian or Erica’s shoes. Much of the novel concerns people behaving badly: there’s Brian lying about the affair, Wendy who supposedly wants to merely breathe the same air as Brian, and Erica who begins to feel ostracized by the academic community yet stalked by men who think she’s desperate for a quickie. Meanwhile social unrest and student protests against the Vietnam War hit the Corinth campus right around the time a group of militant feminists decide that one misogynistic professor has gone too far….

The War Between the Tates has a fascinating subtext regarding perceptions. Brian for example, is seen as some sort of god by the gormless Wendy, but Erica’s opinion of Brian has hit an all-time low. Erica perceives herself as an attractive, much-sought after woman, until the mirror shows a reflection that is far from Erica’s idealized image of herself. Erica flounders for a great deal of the book, and that’s partly because she’s no longer sure who she’s supposed to be.

That is the worst thing about being a middle-aged woman. You have already made your choices, taken the significant moral actions of your life long ago when you were inexperienced. Now you have more knowledge of yourself and the world; you are equipped to make choices, but there are none left to make.

Having lost her identity as a happy wife and mother, Erica feels unsure about what’s left and she feels like a “character in a cheap farce.” Danielle drags Erica off to feminist meetings, but Erica doesn’t relate at all to the feminist movement. She considers the “whole feminist campaign … a mistake” particularly when it comes to the issue of sexual liberation. Danielle’s attitude towards sex has undergone a seismic shift since Leonard’s departure, and since she is no longer in a supposedly monogamous relationship, there appear to be no boundaries. She tells a horrified Erica :”I used to think, if they only want one thing, the poor bastards, why not give it to them.” Erica, however, is appalled by the notion of casual sex and thinks that women are doing themselves no favours.

Today, everywhere, Erica thinks, men must be laughing uproariously as they see us dismantling our own defenses from within–removing the elaborate barbed-wire entanglements of etiquette, tearing down the modest walls which for so long shielded our privacy, and filling in the moat of chastity with mud.

Brain is led astray by Wendy’s questionable allure, and so it would seem predictable that perhaps Erica will follow Danielle’s lead in her pursuit of feminism. Author Alison Lurie doesn’t take the predictable route, so instead we see another strange character emerge who becomes the counterbalance or seductive foil to Wendy–Zed, a former acquaintance of Erica’s who makes his way to Corinth and establishes the floundering Krishna bookshop in town. The bookshop is a popular hangout for some of the students–including Wendy. Zed appears to understand Wendy very well and with a totally different perception of the emotionally needy Wendy he argues that ”Weakness can be a strategy just like any other.” Yet just what is Zed’s role in Wendy’s life.?Is he truly as disinterested in the Tates’ marriage as he professes to be? Highly entertaining, amusing and yet fraught with cruel realities about aging not being a defense against acting foolishly, The War Between the Tates presents a rich tableaux of characters set adrift in a shifting moral landscape. 

Review copy

East Lynne by Mrs. Henry Wood

‘Rely upon it, sorrow of some nature comes sooner or later to all. In the brightest lot on earth dark days must be mixed. Not that there is a doubt but that it falls unequally. Some as you observe, seem born to it, for it clings to them all their days: others are more favoured. As we reckon favour: perhaps this great amount of trouble is no more than is necessary to take us to heaven. You know the saying, “Adversity hardens the heart, or opens it to Paradise.” It may be, that our hearts are so hard, that the long-continued life’s trouble is necessary to soften them.’

That’s a heavy moralising quote from the Victorian Sensation novel, East Lynne, but I hope its tone doesn’t deter any potential readers from reading the book as the moralising is one of the delights of the genre. My copy stood neglected on a shelf for more years than I care to think about, and this in spite of the fact that it had been recommended more than once.

East Lynne, published in 1861, a phenomenal best seller in its day, was the very first Victorian Sensation novel–this was a genre that exploded between the years 1860-1880 with its roots, not too surprisingly,  in the Gothic and Romantic traditions. The Victorian Sensation novel capitalised on the dangers to be found in domestic life, and typical plot twists included adultery, murder, bigamy, kidnapping, forgery and fake identities. Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel, East Lynne, as a perfect example of a Victorian Sensation novel includes, murder, seduction, adultery and fake identities. Of course, you can’t have this sort of action without a great deal of emotion and melodrama and a damsel in danger, so the pages are stuffed full of jealousy, rivalry, deaths and disease. Add to this a plot that is burdened with coincidence and happenstance. I lost count of the number of times characters just happened to be in the right place at the right time or how someone just happened to eavesdrop on a vital conversation as he or she hid on the other side of a convenient barrier.

So all those things said, Victorian Sensation novels are sometimes underappreciated. Naturally the popular trend for Victorian Sensation novels played into Victorian morality, so if literary characters do bad things, then bad things happen as a consequence–as well as those extremely painful just desserts. East Lynne includes people who make mistakes, and people who have horrible character flaws, but the novel also boasts a truly nasty, malevolent character in Francis Levinson. My tatty Everyman edition includes an introduction by Stevie Davies, and it’s an intro not to be missed, but in case you have a kindle, the book is also available FREE.

Now for the plot:

East Lynne, which in my edition runs to 640 pages, is the tale of a fallen woman–a woman who impulsively leaves her husband, her children, her home and society, and if that’s not enough, the novel’s sub-plot concerns an unsolved murder. These two story threads may seem disconnected, but Mrs. Henry Wood manages to deftly, brilliantly and seamlessly sew these two elements together, and the novel’s strength is definitely in its clever plot structure.

While the novel includes a fair number of characters, the main players are introduced quickly. The story opens with Earl Mount Severn, a man who at age 49, looks a great deal older, and seems to be pushing 90

A noted character had been the Earl of Mount Severn. Not that he had been a renowned politician, or a great general, or an eminent statesman, or even an active member of the Upper House: not for any of these had the Earl’s name been in the mouths of men. But for the most reckless among the reckless, for the spendthrifts among spendthrifts, for the gamester above all gamesters.

Earl Mount Severn, a spendthrift heavily in debt sells his country estate, East Lynne, to lawyer Archibald Carlyle. The transaction is conducted entirely in secret so that Mount Severn’s debtors don’t hunt him down for payment of unpaid bills. Mr. Carlyle, the novel’s hero, currently lives in a house in West Lynne with his indomitable sister (pushy, in other words), Cornelia Carlyle, and he fancies making East Lynne his estate.

The Earl’s daughter, Isabel Vane, a rather innocent young girl, has no idea that her father is in dire straits for money. Neither has she any idea that she is virtually penniless. When Lord Mount Severn dies unexpectedly, and with such a life of dissipation, we knew he couldn’t last long, Isabel Vane is left without a shilling to her name and is cast on to the mercy of relatives who don’t know what to do with her.

The other major plot thread involves a murder that occurred at West Lynne a few years before. Local wench Aphrodite Hallijohn (Afy) to her friends, fancies herself a ‘lady’ and plays fast and loose with a number of lovers including Richard Hare, the son of the local Justice and the mysterious man known as “Thorn.” One evening, Afy is visited by both Richard and Thorn, and as a result of the visit, her father is murdered. Richard is blamed for the crime, and he goes into hiding–much to the distress of his invalid mother and devoted sister, Barbara.

When East Lynne begins, Richard Hare has been a fugitive from justice for over 18 months, and everyone, except his mother and sister believe that he is guilty. While the taint of the scandal remains in the air of this small, bucolic town, Justice Hare publicly disavows his son, and although no one is convicted of the murder of Hallijohn, the locals accept that Richard Hare committed the crime. Even though the murder is in the past and solved to everyone’s satisfaction (with the exception of the women in the Hare family), the crime continues to cast a shadow over the characters and over the plot. Relevant questions about the crime and the identity of the murderer continued to be raised throughout the novel. It’s as though the murder nags away at the story and there’s the sense that no one will rest until the murderer is caught and ‘justice served.’

Part II coming next: Why East Lynne Works (and not just for the Victorians).

Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann

“Only when he himself received punishment did he feel really big and sure of his position. He hardly ever resisted evil.”

For German Literature Month 2011, I meant to read Heinrich Mann’s wonderful novel Man of Straw (Der Untertan) along with some  other books , so now for the Second Annual German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline and Lizzy, it was time to finish what I started–not just as a point of pride but also because I had throughly enjoyed Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel.  Plus I’d seen the fantastic film version Man of Straw, The Kaiser’s Lackey, so I more or less knew the plot. The biggest obstacle to the book was my lack of knowledge of the politics of the time; the names of various political parties are bandied around, so I needed a little background reading along the way to bolster my understanding. There are also a great number of characters in the small fictional town of Netzig, and as the names begin to appear, it’s a good idea to compile a who’s who list along with their relationships. This helps as the plot thickens.

Mann shows us a post-Bismarck Germany in a state of flux: Bismarck, as Chancellor of Germany, was responsible for the unification of Germany, and concerned about the growth of the Social Democratic Party instituted many social reforms–including the institution of health insurance and accident insurance, and an Old Age Pension Plan. In 1888 Emperor Wilhelm I was succeeded by his son Friedrich III. When Friedrich III died a few months later, Wilhelm II came to the throne, and this marked the waning of Bismarck’s power and influence in Germany.  Bismarck resigned in 1890 at Wilhelm II’s ‘request’ while predicting a dire future for the monarchy.

Published in 1918, Man of Straw is an indictment of the Wilhelmine regime, and it’s no mere coincidence that the book’s main character, Diederich Hessling, a weak, petty, small-minded tyrant who embodies the worst aspects of the society from which he springs, looks incredibly like Wilhelm II or that Diederich’s acts occasionally become mixed up with those of the Emperor. An ultra-patriotic, besotted admirer of the Emperor Wilhem II, Diederich is opposed to any social change and instead admires militaristic culture. In one sense, Diederich is small-town bourgeoise, so he only rates society on its benefits to his own comfort, but there’s another part of Diederich that worships order, repression, and ceremony. A flatterer, a sycophant, and ultimately a coward, Diederich has no principles beyond self-preservation and self-promotion, and yet in Wilhelmine Germany, this mediocre, talentless man of limited intelligence and no imagination rises to the top of the pond scum solely on his lack of merit gilded by his ability to accept political corruption. Through Diederich’s rise that we see a portent of Nazi Germany, and that makes Mann’s novel a chilling read.

Given the subject matter, Man of Straw could potentially be a dreadfully serious and dreary novel, but Heinrich Mann appears to have great fun with his creation of Diederich whose character weaknesses are revealed mainly through his relationships with others. Although Diederich is, at times, capable of the most appallingly bad behaviour, the author creates many comic scenes in which Diederich’s gloriously inflated image of himself is in wild contrast to the weasly, shallow, vain reality. Mann’s novel is incredibly subversive and so it should come as no shock that his books were consigned to Goebbels’ bonfire on May 10, 1933–after all, Diederich Hessling, who loves to blame bad events on jews or Social Democrats, would be a perfect fit for Nazi Germany.

The book charts Diederich’s life beginning with his childhood. The only son of a Netzig paper factory owner, Diederich’s flawed and oddly duplicitous character is already apparent in childhood:

Whenever he had pilfered, or told a lie, he would come cringing shyly like a dog to his father’s desk, until Herr Hessling noticed that something was wrong and took his stick from the wall. Diederich’s submissiveness and confidence were shaken by doubts when his misdeeds remained undiscovered. Once when his father, who had a stiff leg, fell downstairs, the boy clapped his hands madly–and then ran away.

The sympathies we may have had for the child dissipate rapidly with his sneaky behaviour, and by the time Diederich is an adult, his character flaws, while still evolving, are obvious. Mann describes the child, Diederich, as morally weak, and that weakness becomes a veritable abyss in adulthood–not that anyone notices, and this is, of course, another comment on the corrupt society in which Diederich thrives in spite of the fact that he’s a mediocre, inept and emotional twerp. Shipped off to study in Berlin, and initially lost in this more cosmopolitan society, Diederich becomes a Neo-Teuton–a brotherhood of men whose adulation of militarism and ultra patriotism allows them to lead lives of debauchery and faux heroism while violently acclaiming blind loyalty to the Emperor. The Neo-Teuton identity, along with the ends of the moustache turned up at right angles, is cherished, nursed and fetishized by Diederich throughout the novel, and when other men might find themselves questioning their conscience during a moral crisis, Diederich strokes himself with his Neo-Teuton, proto-fascist identity which largely becomes an excuse for his bad behaviour.

Unleashed as a student in Berlin, and bolstered by his proto-fascist ideals, Diederich eventually gathers the courage and moral despicableness to seduce and abandon the daughter of a family friend. Returning to Netzig to oversee the family business upon the death of his father, Diederich aligns himself with those who have the power. In this nasty little small town, a hot bed of gossip and intrigue, a number of significant events take place including Diederich’s courtship of a local heiress whose bovine qualities he finds attractive, and a case of alleged lèse majesté against his almighty royalness the Emperor. These incidents show the town’s citizens at their worst. Herr Buck, a significant figure from Diedrich’s youth, and a hero of ’48 who’s initiated social reform in his factory represents the fading power of Bismarck, and so it becomes the unspoken goal of the petty-minded gossip-ridden community to ruin Buck’s family. Some of the book’s nastiest scenes are built around the legal case for lèse majesté against Buck’s son-in-law– a case in which Diederich plays a significant role. There’s also a sensationalistic play, The Secret Countess, written by the wife of an influential citizen that appears to be a massive derisive joke against the once-respected Buck family.

Since readers are not required to live under Diederich’s tyrannical thumb, we can enjoy his silliness and immaturity from a distance. He talks a great deal about his ‘sacred manly honour,’ but of course honour is a meaningless word that can be flipped around to suit the circumstances. At one point Diederich orders a new machine for his factory against the advice of his long-time experienced workers. Then when faced with the payments, he presses a thoroughly corrupt worker to sabotage the machine in order to get out of paying for it. In another episode, he fobs off one of his sisters on a visiting  lust-ridden paper cutting machine executive, and it’s all very funny. Here’s a scene from his family life–it’s Xmas Day and Diederich is feeling melancholy against the backdrop of his squabbling sisters.

Outside Emma and Magda were quarrelling about a pair of gloves , and their mother did not dare to decide to whom they had been sent. Diederich sobbed. Everything had gone wrong, in politics, business, and love. ‘What is left to me?’ He opened the piano. He shivered, he felt so uncannily alone that he was afraid to make a noise. The sounds came out of their own accord, his hands were unconscious of them. Folk songs, Beethoven and drinking songs rang out in the twilight, which was thereby cosily warmed so that a comfortable drowsiness filled his brain. At one moment it seemed to him that a hand was stroking his head. Was it only a dream? No, for suddenly a glass full of beer stood on the piano. His good mother! Schubert, what loyal integrity, the soul of the mother country … All was silent, and he did not notice it, until the clock struck: an hour had passed. ‘That was my Christmas,’ said Diederich, and he went out to join the others. He felt consoled and strengthened. As the girls were still quarrelling about the gloves, he declared that they had no sense of the fitness of things, and placed the gloves in his pocket, to have them changed for a pair for himself.

I’m not an expert on German Literature, but it seems a no-brainer to state that Man of Straw is a significant German novel–not just for its prescient themes but also for its incredible ability to create a unique time and place and the unforgettable character of Diederich Hessling. While he’s a shallow character, there are times when he appears to know better, but thanks to the society from which he springs, Diederich, once faced with a moral choice, will always chose the easy (and bad) option.

Finally, here’s Diederich on his honeymoon–a trip that’s diverted from Zurich when he hears that the Emperor is visiting Rome:

For a long time he could not sleep for excitement. Guste snored peaceably on his shoulder, while Diederich, as the train roared through the night, remembered how at that very moment, on another line, the Emperor himself was being carried by a train, which roared similarly, towards the same goal. The Emperor and Diederich were having a race! And, as Diederich had more than once been privileged to utter thoughts which in some mystic way seemed to coincide with those of the All-Highest, perhaps at this hour His Majesty knew of Diederich, knew that his loyal servant was crossing the Alps by his side, in order to show these degenerate Latins what loyalty to the Emperor and country means. He glared at the sleepers on the opposite seat, small, dark people, whose faces seemed haggard in their sleep. They would see what Germanic valour was!