The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

 

Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young — in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment — these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.

The Bomber Mafia is a different kind of book from the magpie mind of Malcolm Gladwell: Although there are several fascinating digressions*, this is primarily the straightforward story of the birth of the US Air Force in the aftermath of WWI, how they strove to perfect precision bombing before the American entry into WWII, and how the realities of battle can trump philosophical best intentions. I’m no aficionado of WWII trivia and there were many stories here I hadn’t heard before; much was fascinating. Still, this felt a little light for Gladwell; his conclusions a little pat. He explains in the intro that he has had a lifelong obsession with war histories (and with bombers in particular), so it might just be that Gladwell is too close-up with this material to see a bigger picture? And I see from other reviews that this was originally an audiobook (with audio clips of interviews, music, and sound effects), so that might be the better format in which to experience this? But at any rate, I was not disappointed overall: Gladwell cracks open some interesting nuts of history here and I was happy to squirrel it all away in my own generalist’s mind. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime. It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in a basement lab at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back. And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself — What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?

Gladwell starts with the birth of the US Air Force at the Air Corps Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama (the aviation version of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.) In the wake of WWI’s devastation for infantrymen, these early dreamers, the “Bomber Mafia”, conceived of a world in which airplanes could replace soldiers on the ground, flying into the heart of enemy territory and disabling “chokepoints” of war manufactury. There’s interesting bits about Carl Norden and his invention of the first bombsights that would allow for precision bombing (the legend goes that with a Norden bombsight, you could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up), and what Gladwell stresses most of all, is that the founding philosophy of the US Air Force was that precision bombing would reduce the deaths of soldiers and civilians by solely targeting munitions factories and refineries and the like.

Action moves to WWII, and in the European theatre, Churchill expects the USAF to join the RAF in their “morale bombing” operations (targeting Dresden and Münster to force German surrender despite the Blitz on London having not broken English resolve), and when the story moves to the Marianas islands in the Pacific, the real heart of the Air Force’s philosophical dilemma is reached: Japan must be defeated at any cost, and when General Haywood Hansell’s precision bombing runs prove to be costly and ineffective, he will be replaced by General Curtis LeMay; a commander unafraid to fill his men’s bombers with weaponised napalm and burn Japan to the ground.

The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm — a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover — when they stopped to rest — that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths.

General LeMay would say after the war that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been superfluous; the real work had already been done to force Japan’s surrender. And in a fascinating twist, the Japanese government would eventually bestow on LeMay their highest honor for a foreigner — the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun — in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. A Japanese historian is quoted as saying that he wanted to thank the Americans for the firebombing and the atomic bombs; if the Japanese government hadn’t been forced to surrender, there would have been a devastating land invasion, the Soviets would have carved the country up, and there would have been mass starvation in the winter of 1945 if General MacArthur hadn’t mobilised massive amounts of food aid. Despite it being concluded of the first night of firebombing that “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man”, the point can be made that this subversion of the precision-bombing-to-avoid-deaths philosophy went on to save countless more lives. So, as Gladwell asks in the beginning, put in the position of General Hansell (morally opposed to firebombing) or LeMay (reluctantly accepting of), what would you do?

There is a lot to fascinate in this narrative — Gladwell pulls threads from many directions to weave a unified whole — but it’s not a very long read and the moral quandary at its heart felt a little manufactured. A little slight, a little pat, but definitely interesting while it lasted. Rounding up to four stars.


*Digressions of note: The stunning architecture of the Air Force Academy Chapel that reinforces that branch of the military’s commitment to the unconventional; the western approach to bombing Japan started from India and travelled over the Himalayas (a route known as the “Hump” or “the aluminum trail” for the scattered debris from hundreds of airplane crashes); although the jet stream over Tokyo was unknown to American pilots in 1945, it had been discovered in the ‘20s by Japanese scientist Wasaburo Ooishi, but he only published his findings in Esperanto (ha!).

The Strangers

 

He’d always talk about being a Stranger like it was a good thing, like it was the opposite of what the world seemed to think it was. “Never forget who you are, Margogo, and who you come from. We are warriors, us. We are Métis. We have fought and won our freedom. We’ve never lived by their rules. Aren’t meant to. We have to be free.”

The Strangers tells the story of four generations of a Métis family (the “Strangers” of the title), as told in rotating POVs by four women of the family (a grandmother, her daughter, and two teenaged sisters from the third generation). It wasn’t until after I finished this that I realised that one of these teenagers was a central character in Katherena Vermette’s last novel (The Break) — and while it isn’t necessary to have read one before the other, I had some questions cleared up once I made that connection. Once again, Vermette has created a roster of incredibly real characters whose stories touched my heart (I was in tears, more than once, over moments of simple human connection), and once again, she has taught me what it is like to live as a member of the urban Métis community of Winnipeg — the pressures, stresses, and prejudices unique to this particular racialised group — without me, as a citizen of the dominant, settler culture of Canada, feeling blamed or vilified. The Strangers touched me emotionally, taught me intellectually, and was a satisfying literary journey; this is everything I love in a book. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Back then, we were always so happy to see each other. It was like Christmas every time. Mama was in treatment and normal, and Phoenix was in a group home in West St. Paul. I remember missing and loving them both so much. Phoenix missed me too. She’d always give me a hug so big and so long I thought she’d never let me go. She’d hug me before she hugged anyone else. Even Sparrow who was so small she’d cling to my side for the first bit, unsure about Phoenix and Mama, as if they were strangers.

There is a satisfying irony to this book’s title: Not only is this a family of “Strangers” (apparently a very common Métis name), but with some kids going into foster care, others being raised without getting to know all of their extended family, people keeping secrets from one another, or otherwise disappearing or becoming unknowable, this is a story of how members of the same family can become strangers to one another. It’s also a story about cultural identity: how strangers judge people by the shade gradients of their skin, how ancestral knowledge can be encoded in “bone memory” even if it had never been outwardly passed down, and between “Pretendians”, the proud Indigenous storytellers and ceremony-keepers who keep their culture alive, and those blonde-haired blue-eyed Métis who try to “pass” as white, how much of identity is self-created:

To think she was almost free of it. She had almost overcome the sad Indian stereotype. She’d almost became an example. She used to try and tell herself she was only Métis, not a real Indian, as if that could spare her from it. Even though it never spared her family. It never made any difference at all to anyone on the outside looking in. She tried to hide it, kill it in her, be as white as possible, pass, but it didn’t much matter what she did. To the world she was still a squaw. Trying to reason that she was only half a squaw didn’t matter much to anyone else, not even her. And here she was now. Alone in a big empty house. Her family useless — every last one of them. Nothing to look back on but a bunch of shameful stories. No successes to speak of. Nothing to show for a life of hard work. Until now.

With the stories of these three generations of women unspooling over the length of the novel — and with some threads filling in information on the previous and ensuing generation — the reader watches as family traits get passed down; as well as similar triumphs, familiar fights, mistakes, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities for connection. Although there’s no real explanation for why the men throughout the generations all seem to have become punks and criminals (their behaviour is not overtly linked to systemic prejudice, addictions, or lack of opportunity), it was amazing to watch as Phoenix becomes more self-aware over her years in the system (with medication to mellow her mood and Indigenous teachings giving her something to connect with, she’s not quite the “monster” that people say she is). As the storyline progresses, Vermette does a masterful job of letting the readers in on who these characters are; puzzle pieces click into place to show a betrayal here, an unacknowledged meanness there, and we can see the moment where lives were nudged off the rails. I cried for them because Vermette made me care for them and I am enlarged for having got to know the Strangers. A book to watch come literary awards season.

August Into Winter

 

Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uniform for him, grey flannel trousers, starched white shirt, and mulberry bow tie. Tall and so lanky that he verged on emaciation, Sickert had both hands up on the top of the door frame from which he hung like human drapery. An elaborate stack of towering pompadour crowned his narrow head, a hairdo that he had adopted during his days when he had played tenor sax for the Rhythm Alligators, a local dance band. Ernie had an expectant air, an I’m‑preparing‑to‑lick‑ice‑cream look on his face.

Guy Vanderhaeghe is a reliably excellent writer and his literary hallmarks are on full display in August into Winter — this is a very manly historical fiction, set firmly on the Saskatchewan prairie as only he can describe it, with good guys and bad guys, heart-thumping action and heart-touching drama — and I am delighted to have had an early read of this fine novel; I have no doubt it will be up for all the Canadian literary awards this year. Slightly spoilery from here, but not much beyond the publisher’s blurb. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“I’ve got a problem. A big one. The storm has cut Connaught off from the outside world. Completely. Telephone, telegraph lines, they’re all down. Roads are impassable.The foreman of the section gang came in on a handcar at six o’clock and said that the railway trestle bridge over Cutbank Creek to the east is ready to collapse and that the embankment on the west line has washed out. There’ll be no trains running to Connaught for days. Which means that I can’t contact any other detachments to let them know what’s happened here, can’t warn them that Ernie Sickert is on the loose. It all falls on me. I’ve got no one to turn to for help.”

It’s August of 1939 and Ernie Sickert — the twenty-one-year-old pompadour-wearing, hepcat-talking, sax-playing, commando-wannabe — has gone from playing bizarre pranks on his neighbours in the village of Connaught to committing an unspeakable act of violence. Thinking himself smarter than everyone around him and basically untouchable, the psychopathic Sickert picks up his “girlfriend” Loretta (a twelve-year-old orphan with stick legs and a threadbare hand-me-down dress) and drives his mother’s Oldsmobile into the heart of a torrential rainstorm. Once the car inevitably breaks down, Ernie and Loretta make a run for it and the town’s rookie cop enlists the help of a couple of locals to track them down. These locals, Oliver and Jack Dill, are WWI veterans who still carry the mental aftereffects of their time in combat (Jack is a religious obsessive, writing an interminable opus on The City of God, and the reclusive Oliver is a recent widower whose dead wife had befriended the Sickert boy when he was a child), but with their horse skills, knowledge of the area, and combat experience, the Dill brothers are soon in hot pursuit of the runaways.

The great glacier of anger that was Oliver Dill was grinding the bedrock of his being to gravel. The pressure of it was inescapable; sometimes he felt it a little less, sometimes a little more, but it was always present. For the last three years the glacier had been moving toward some unknown destination the way an icefield moves, inch by inch. This afternoon it had brought him to this point: Would he act as Judith would want him to act and try to spare the boy’s life? Or would the glacier follow the natural course of its inclinations, implacably inch forward and crush Ernie Sickert?

Along the way, the posse adds the local schoolteacher to their number (Vidalia was a recent transplant from Winnipeg; a fiercely independent woman who finds herself stranded in Connaught after the schoolhouse burns down), and as her history unspools, we learn that she is mourning the death of her lover: a Communist intellectual who was recently killed when he joined the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As the action of this novel mainly takes place from August into November of 1939 (hence the title) — the timeframe in which Europe was bracing for another World War and Bolshevik sympathisers like Vidalia were stunned by Hitler and Stalin’s nonaggression pact and subsequent carving up of Poland — the very specific moment in history affects everything that happens (and as each chapter opens with a headline and news snippet from the Winnipeg Evening Tribune, we are always aware of the larger events playing out in the background of the very local drama). When Oliver Dill eventually offers Vidalia a job typing up his brother’s manuscript, we are treated to long passages of Jack’s religious mania; and when Vidalia then decides to spend some of her time typing up the diary that her dead lover had kept in Spain, we then intimately learn of the unimaginable hardships faced by the Mac-Paps.

Vidalia was stalled. Coming to the end of Dov’s journal left her wondering if life wasn’t a court convened and presided over by idiots. Left her wondering why she had clung so tenaciously to optimism, to belief in a better future if those things could be taken away as easily as they had been taken from Dov, by an accident, a stumble in the dark, by a politically motivated arrest.

All of Vanderhaeghe’s characters in this novel are incredibly complex — with complicated histories revealed at length — and I found them, for the most part, to be frustratingly unknowable. Vidalia is prickly and standoffish — a self-satisfied intellectual and a feminist whose ambition outstrips her opportunities — but Oliver Dill falls for her, acting puppyish and playful in a way that I wouldn’t have predicted from the gruff loner we meet in the beginning. Vidalia does not want to be taken care of (even if she has few options), Dill can’t help but be a caregiver (he has taken care of Jack for twenty years, took care of his late wife in her final years), and I’m not certain that I loved (or completely bought) how their storyline ended.

For many years, in his mind Dill had been trying to correct the past. But the past was beyond correction. If the past led to death then death was surely beyond correction too. You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step. His heart was where it was.

This is a longish novel (my kindle app clocked it at around eleven hours for me), and with so much at play — Oliver’s memories from WWI, Dov’s account of the Spanish Civil War, the news from Europe on the eve of WWII, everyone’s personal backstories, and Jack’s manuscript — it got to feel like a bit much. But the muchness is rather the point: Everyone is carrying their pasts into the future, and it’s undeniably a burden. The plot of August Into Winter has plenty of truly heart-in-your-throat moments and I found the conclusion to the main conflict to be perfectly satisfying. This is a long road and definitely worth the trip; that Ernie Sickert is one creepy piece of work.

Take your lead from me, Mayfield. Do as I do. Creative havoc, well‑played, leads to victory. Creative havoc is the jazz of war.

 

Return of the Trickster

 

 

The transforming raven was speaking to him as magical beings speak to one another, sharing thoughts. The insanity of the magic Jared had unleashed left him with no way to deny he was a Trickster himself, that he was a part of the crazy, that his amateur dabbling had created the shitstorm that had eventually landed him in Emerg. Again.

 

Return of the Trickster is a completely satisfying conclusion to Eden Robinson’s Trickster series. Once again, teenaged Jared Martin faces unspeakable dangers with love, courage, and above all, decency. He is also snarky and irreverent and this is probably the funniest volume in the trilogy. As in any good Fantasy finale, Robinson brings back old characters, reveals the history behind long standing feuds, and marches her characters towards an epic showdown between shades of good and evil. Maybe I can agree with others who think the ending and epilogue are a little rushed, and maybe I would have liked for Jared to be less drained and helpless than he was through most of this, but I leave this book, and this trilogy, feeling entertained and satiated; I can ask for no more.

Not a single person he knew was going to be happy about his new shape-shifting ability. No one liked his biological father. Not his mom, not his grandmother, and not his new friend, Neeka, whose otter people had a bad history with him. Certainly not the thing that had been claiming to be his aunt. Was she really? He hadn't thought to ask, being in the middle of a kidnapping and then a torture session that had apparently only lasted a weekend but had felt like forever.

After being sucked into another dimension in Trickster Drift — where he was repeatedly killed, eaten, and brought back to life to be killed and eaten once again — Jared finds himself in a hospital room at the beginning of Return of the Trickster, his organs trying to escape his body. Getting back to our dimension apparently drained Jared of his Trickster magic, and as enemies and their henchmen escalate their threats against him and his loved ones, Jared is forced to accept alliances that feel out of his control, recommit to his sobriety, and attempt to protect his family while swooning around without power, energy, or a clear mind. Being a newly confirmed Trickster alienates Jared from his mom and both of his grannies (who all have history with his father, Wee’git), but when the danger escalates, Jared will find himself surrounded by strong allies (mostly women, mostly family). The heart-thumping, gruesome conclusion sees a showdown between: Tricksters and witches and a Wild Man of the Woods; fireflies and otters (even though they’re not really fireflies or otters); coy wolves (disguised in stolen human skins); ghosts and poltergeists and other ultradimensional beings; a toe-sucking Sorcerer (“raw need in a skin-suit crawling around in the dark”); an insatiably power-hungry Ogress; and perhaps most frightening of all, Jared’s own grandmother, the Halayt Sophia.

The root of supernatural ability is simply the realization that all time exists simultaneously. Encoded memories so frayed you think they’re extinct, but they wait, coiled and unblinking, in your blood and your bones. When you shift out of our dimension, you run the risk of dispersion so profound even the memory of you is obliterated. Universes are stubbornly separate. You are the wet and pulsing distillation of stars, a house of light made bipedal and carbon-based, temporary and infinite. You are also the void.

I love this world that Robinson has built out of her Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations’ traditions, and while I am fascinated by the supernatural entities at the center of this story, I appreciate that Robinson also brings in details from real Natives’ lives — from the rez to environmental activism to dissatisfaction with attempts at reconciliation for residential school survivors. Jared’s snark keeps all of this light, though — he and his cousin, Kota, think that you could make a decent soap opera out of their family drama, As the Bannock Burns — and I think the most entertaining thing about this book was flipping back to read Robinson’s ironic chapter titles at the end of every one because they only make sense in hindsight (my favourite was “Cthulhu Do Do Do Do Do Do”). I’m completely satisfied with the whole trilogy and if Robinson decided to write some spinoffs, I’d read those, too.

The Mystery of Right and Wrong

 

In any case, they soon come back. The flickering along the wrack continues until morning comes. The sirens, now that night is done, must go back to the sea and hide — they lost their voices when they died. They cannot sing their secret song, “The Mystery of Right and Wrong”; they know the words but no one who would sing them truthfully to you.

 

In the publisher’s blurb, it states that in The Mystery of Right and Wrong, critically acclaimed and beloved Canadian author Wayne Johnston “reveals haunting family secrets he's kept for more than 30 years”. With a main character named “Wade Jackson” — an aspiring young novelist from a Newfoundland outport — it is immediately reinforced that Johnston will be cutting close to the bone with this book. What follows is rather harrowing: this is a story of domestic abuse, systemic abuse (from the Nazi occupation of Holland to South African apartheid), intergenerational trauma, and mental illness. It is also a love story, a coming of age story, and an inquiry into whether, in the aftermath of abuse, either evil or free will can exist; the titular “mystery” of right and wrong. In a lengthy afterword, Johnston explains which parts are true (and how they played out in real life), and that part gobsmacked me; I can totally see how a masterclass on Johnston’s work can now be taught, with this novel serving as the key that unlocks it all. This book is courageous and important and compelling, and to be fair, it was also a bit too long, and although Johnston explains the reasons for the segments in verse, I found them, as they went on, exasperating. I am grateful to have received an advanced reading copy of this book five months before publication and I am daunted by the idea of being the first to review and “rate” it, but here goes: based on its importance and artistry, five stars; based on my personal “enjoyment” of the reading experience, I’m knocking it back to four. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Note especially, there was no particular formatting for the segments in verse and I reckon that could change.)

I wasn’t sure if the book was making me worse or if it was all that was holding me together. My supposedly secret illness. But it somehow reassured me to think about the ways my sisters coped. Carmen had her drugs. Gloria had her hypersexuality, though not many people called it that at the time. Bethany had her anorexia. I had my diary and Het Achterhuis, which I kept reading even after I knew it by heart. The thought that we were all freaks made me feel less like one.

Wade Jackson — a recent university graduate, working as a newspaper reporter while he plans his first novel — meets a young woman in the university library, which they both frequent as a quiet place to work. Wade will be so struck with this Rachel van Hout — beautiful and quirky, born in South Africa and brought along with her family to St. John’s as a teenager when her professor father took a job there — that despite some alarming proclivities, Wade will immediately throw his lot in with her. No matter how odd, damaging, or dangerous Rachel and her three sisters’ self-harming behaviours become, Wade commits to the long haul. There is a real heaviness and dread to the plot — what will the sisters do next and how did they get this way? — as POV skips through time and rotates between Wade, Rachel, the encoded diary she keeps, and long snippets from the epic verse Rachel’s father wrote and forced the girls to memorise as children, The Ballad of the Clan van Hout:

Girls, get used to contradictions, truthful lies and false non-fictions. What isn’t there is everywhere; the things which are, are not, you see, however much they seem to be — and what is not is what will be as long as you and I agree.

In the moment I could understand why these sections are set apart in verse — and in the afterword Johnston further, intriguingly, explains the impetus behind his use of poetry — but as I began with, and perhaps it comes down to the novel’s length, it eventually became just too much as a reading experience. However, the insight these sections allow into the mind of the girls’ father, Hans van Hout, are integral to the plot and allow us to take his self-mythologising with a grain of salt. (But honestly, less would be more for me.) As the action moves from Newfoundland to South Africa, and back home again through Amsterdam, Hans’ origin story will morph and change; but everywhere and in every time we are forced to consider what is and isn’t credible, defensible, or justifiable.

It struck me that Rachel had been right when she said that history happened not in some nebulous, exceptional elsewhere, but in ordinary concrete places, to commonplace people. My world shrank to this pair of unexceptional streets, to Hans and his family, to Anne Frank and hers. History, the war, the fate of the Franks, were personal, local, terrifyingly actual and immediate. I imagined Hans as a teenager looking out of one of the windows of the house, his hands pressed to the glass as the Nazis marched past, their boots clumping on the cobblestones, row after row of bluff and bravado and menace without purpose, a lethal behemoth composed of men just like the ones who ran South Africa and those who supported them, greater only in number, driven to savagery by a group of men whose madness they need not have fallen for but did for reasons that flattered none of humankind.

There is a lot of disturbing material in this book, reflecting the fact that there is a lot of disturbing material in life (certainly there has been enough in Johnston’s life that he claims to never be surprised by anything of which a person can be accused or to which they might confess). To make a novel out of this kind of material — a novel that employs that material to explore nuanced questions of right and wrong with artistry — is no small feat; to learn that the author is using this vehicle to expose and explore close-held secrets and pathologies is breathtaking. I have no doubt that The Mystery of Right and Wrong will make a big stir upon its release and I am looking forward to reading what others make of it.

Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

 

Josephine Schell thinks I’m going too far. She’s all about ecosystems and caloric needs, and maybe she’s right. But maybe there was also some latent gene that woke up in those creatures when they stumbled across Greenloop and found themselves facing a herd of cornered, isolated Homo sapiens. Maybe some instinct told them it was time to swap evolution for devolution, reach back to who they were to reclaim what was theirs.

I liked Max Brooks’ World War Z way more than I expected to — the “oral history” format, the examination of how different people behave under stress, the credible details of political/military/community responses to a global threat — and the fact that it was about “zombies” was beside the point. Brooks attempts that same kind of alchemy with Devolution — with a “found” eyewitness diary interspersed with research and interviews, details focussing on a diverse group of people under pressure, commentary on the failure of government systems in the wake of natural disasters — and the fact that it is about “Bigfoot” is (mostly) beside the point. Devolution is a compelling, cinematic horror story — with just enough quotes by the likes of Jane Goodall, Teddy Roosevelt, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to ground it in reality — but I didn’t find it as philosophically engaging as Brooks’ former novel (but I do think it will make a better movie). I’d give it 3.5 stars and am rounding down in order to rank Brooks against himself.

I wish we had more time. If just to practice with the javelins. No chance now. I probably shouldn’t have wasted all this time writing. But just in case something happens to me, I wanted there to be a record. I want someone, anyone who reads this, to know what happened.

The hoots are getting louder now.

In an introduction, our unnamed narrator explains how a diary (found and digitised by Senior Ranger Josephine Schell) was sent to him by its author’s brother. The diarist, Kate Holland, had become a recent resident, along with her husband Dan, of the “isolated, high-end, high-tech eco-community of Greenloop”; and after the community was physically untouched, but became totally isolated by, the eruption of nearby Mount Rainier, the diary goes on to recount Greenloop’s encounter with the ravenous Sasquatches who had been displaced from their mountaintop habitat. The format of Devolution frames this “firsthand account” between snippets of the interviews that the author conducts with both Josephine Schell (who is investigating the Greenloop site after the fact) and Kate’s brother (who is still looking for her, thirteen months later). I didn’t love this format — maybe because the diary was, by design, too focussed on the experience of one person; a newcomer who didn’t really know the others — and for an adventure tale, there was a definite lack of immediacy when everything is reported after the fact, by someone who obviously survived the events she writes about.

On the other hand, this story of rich, citified, back-to-earthers who are forced to face their own shortcomings when their high-tech fails is a fitting cautionary tale for our times:

Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it. And I really can sympathize. Who doesn’t want to break from the herd? I get why you’d want to keep the comforts of city life while leaving the city behind. Crowds, crime, filth, noise. Even in the burbs. So many rules, neighbors all up in your business. It’s kind of a catch-22, especially in the United States, a society that values freedom, when society, by nature, forces you to compromise that freedom. I get how the hyper-connectivity of Greenloop gave the illusion of zero compromise.

But that's all it was, an illusion.

Greenloop was founded by an ecomessiah — a charismatic high tech entrepreneur who brags that self-sufficiency means that their community generates all the power, heat, and water it could need but also has no mechanics, doctors, or more than a week’s worth of food because all of that is a phone call/drone delivery away — and the people who followed him into the woods are primarily highly educated older folks who believe that nothing in nature wants to hurt them. When the eruption destroys Greenloop’s buried communication cable and the only road out, most of the residents believe that government systems will kick in and rescue them — until the news they hear on their car radios inform them that the outer community is in chaos. Some residents will continue to live in denial, some will start to prepare for the long haul...and then the hungry Sasquatch attack.

I think the human mind isn’t comfortable with mysteries. We’re always looking for answers to the unexplained. And if an answer can’t come from facts, we’ll try to cobble one together from old stories. If we’ve heard about UFOs when we happen to see a light in the sky, or a Scottish lake monster when we happen to see a ripple in the water, or a giant, apelike creature when we see a dark mass moving among the branches...

While Devolution is an examination of how we in the West have become so disconnected from nature as to have become helpless in it (further infantilised by being too trusting of high tech and government to save us), it is important to the themes that it’s a tribe of Bigfoot that confront the community. Once the residents are forced to accept just what these hooting, reeking creatures in the woods really are, their first instinct is to befriend them; Greenloop was founded on Rousseau's beliefs that man (and the man-like, I suppose) is naturally peaceful in a state of nature. But supported by fieldnotes from primatologists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, we learn that our closest primate cousins are capable of ecstatic blood lust while hunting, and that’s the horrifying state of the creatures hunting the people of Greenloop. And while the title “Devolution” seems to refer to the Bigfoot (as in the opening quote), as the protections of civilisation are stripped away from the human combatants, they experience a sort of Lord of the Flies devolution themselves and are not above a certain amount of hooting, reeking blood lust themselves. This is more cinematic than thought-provoking, but it made for a propulsive read and I'm pleased to have picked it up.

Silver Tears

 

I put my hand to my breast and felt the necklace hanging there. I ran my fingers over the silver tears that felt so fragile even though they were pretty robust, according to Mom. The island grew larger before my eyes and I shuddered as a cold shiver ran down my spine.

I don’t know what it was about Silver Tears that prompted me to pick it up: this is not ordinarily my sort of thing and I may not be the best judge of its merits. I suppose I thought this would be a mindless thriller (and it is kind of that), but I also didn’t realise that it’s the second book of a series; and although author Camilla Läckberg does a good job of unobtrusively catching the reader up with the events of the previous book (The Golden Cage), this may be more thrilling, and the flashback scenes might be more earth-shattering, for those readers who started the series from the beginning. As for me: I didn’t love the writing (and although I lost patience with the plot, I did keep reading to see how it would end) and I didn’t love the overall philosophy (that men are animals and women are therefore justified in doing whatever it takes to make their way in the world). This was just okay, and even though Silver Tears ends on a cliffhanger, I can’t imagine picking up the next in the series. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

As soon as Giovanni had realized he couldn’t use mastery and male dominance to convince her to agree to his terms, the meeting had been turned to her advantage. Faye loved the game of negotiation. The opposing players were usually men, and they always made the mistake of underestimating her expertise simply because she was a woman. Later, when they had to admit defeat, there were two types of men. There were the ones who left the meeting boiling with rage, their hatred of women even more firmly entrenched. And then there were the ones who loved it, who were turned on by her commanding presence and know-how, who left the meeting with a hard-on in their trousers and an inquiry about whether she was free for dinner.

As Silver Tears opens, we immediately learn that Faye is hiding out in a remote Italian villa with her mother and young daughter; that Faye is the billionaire founder of a cosmetics company; and that Faye framed her husband for their daughter’s supposed murder, for which he is serving a life sentence back in Sweden. I’d imagine all of that is covered in The Gilded Cage, so to propel the action of this second volume, we also soon learn that someone is buying up stock in a hostile takeover of Faye’s company; Faye’s ex-husband has escaped from prison; and one dogged Swedish police officer still has questions about her murdered daughter, whose body has, obviously, never been found. As Faye returns to Stockholm in order to deal with the business situation, she must keep an eye out for the ex-husband, stay one step ahead of the police, all while forging a formidable sisterhood with wronged women (presumably characters from the first book), engaging in several steamy sex scenes, and falling in love with a new man. Meanwhile, action in the present is intercut with scenes from Faye’s childhood (in which her mother was routinely beaten by her father and she herself suffered unimaginable abuse) and the lesson learned seems to be that men are evil and chauvinistic, so women are morally free to respond in any way that promotes their own interest and welfare.

She pictured him out there. Once upon a time she had loved him more than anything, perhaps even more than she loved Julienne. Now she just wanted to destroy him for what he had done to their daughter, and for the humiliation he had heaped on Faye. For all the women who had been in her place, suppressed, feeling worthless, who had taken their lives, been deprived of their dignity. Who had been kept as serfs. Exploited. Women who were still shackled, even if the appearance of those shackles had changed over the centuries.

Silver Tears doesn’t really pass a credibility test (could Faye really successfully hide her daughter in Italy — even calling and facetiming her from Sweden — while at least one police officer doubted she had been murdered?), but I concede that the details of thrillers don’t always need to add up. My bigger problem was Läckberg’s bizarre version of feminism: All of her female characters are gorgeous, and while they bristle at the men who would treat them as sex objects, they (and especially Faye) are happy to use their sexuality to their advantage in business situations, to come onto younger, less powerful men (which, of course, delights the men in this reversal of power dynamics), and to justify criminal behaviour if it protects their own interests (forget about setting up her husband for the “murder” of their daughter, Faye does much worse in this book and I suppose we’re supposed to cheer the girl power?) Not for me, even if the “mystery” kept me reading to the end.

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

 

The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies that we have made. They thought of themselves as humble people who had made the best of a bad situation and who had shown bravery and thus reaped its rewards. They believed that the universe had imploded four times previously, and that they were living under the fifth sun, thanks to the extraordinary courage of an ordinary man. Elders told the story to their grandchildren: “When all was in darkness, when the sun had not yet shone and the dawn had not yet broken, the gods gathered and spoke among themselves.” The divinities asked for a volunteer from the few humans and animals creeping about in the darkness. They needed someone to immolate himself and thus bring forth a new dawn.

Fifth Sun attempts a “revisionist history” of the Aztec peoples; one based primarily on their own writings. And while author Camilla Townsend (Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University) has put together a comprehensive and multi-sourced timeline (there are fifty-four pages of endnotes, eighteen pages of bibliographical references, and the lengthy descriptions of nearly thirty original “annals”, “libros”, and “codices”), this book is more thorough than interesting. I ultimately learned quite a bit about the Aztec (including the fact that “Aztec” is a pretty meaningless name that no Mesoamerican peoples would have used for themselves) but it was a bit of a slog with repetitions, the intrusion of authorial bias, and no clear through-line to the narrative. I am glad to have read this for what I learned but it was more work than pleasure.

For generations, those who have wanted to know about the lives of ancient Native Americans have studied the objects uncovered in archeological digs, and they have read the words of Europeans who began to write about Indians almost as soon as they met them. From these sources more than any others, scholars have drawn their conclusions and deemed them justified. But it was a dangerous endeavor that inevitably led to distortions. To make a comparison, it would never have been considered acceptable to claim to understand medieval France with access to only a few dozen archeological digs and a hundred texts in English — with nothing written in French or Latin. Yet different standards have been applied to Indians.

It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but when the victorious Conquistadors established their Spanish culture in Mesoamerica and encouraged indigenous young males to be baptised and educated (in order to read the Bible), they were unwittingly giving the conquered the means to record their history, too. Some of these newly literate young men — grasping that their history could literally be erased — began to record the oral histories of their elders and to transliterate their culture’s pictographical records; and based on her translations and intertextual understandings of these, Townsend believes she has been able to put together the most accurate picture of Aztec society (from about two hundred years before Cortés to eighty years or so after the death of Moctezuma). What I learned of the precontact society: the central valley of what we know as Mexico was settled by successive waves of indigenous people from elsewhere (“Aztec” means “people from Aztlan”; a mythical place in the north, which several tribes claimed as their origin), and when the people who called themselves the Mexica moved in, the only land they were allowed was an unwanted reedy, inarable island in the middle of Lake Texcoco. Over the years, the Mexica people built the impressive city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), and through warfare and intermarriages, they would eventually share ruling power over the valley with the Tlacopan and Tetzcohco peoples. Townsend is very thorough in her recounting of this “prehistoric” time, and while I confess to finding much of it confusing, she does make it very clear that by the time Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan was rich and powerful, first among equals, and rival (not to mention subservient) cities were only too eager to aid in its downfall.

It would become accepted fact that the indigenous people of Mexico believed Hernando Cortés to be a god, arriving in their land in the year 1519 to satisfy an ancient prophecy. It was understood that Moctezuma, at heart a coward, trembled in his sandals and quickly despaired of victory. He immediately asked to turn his kingdom over to the divine newcomers, and naturally, the Spaniards happily acquiesced. Eventually, this story was repeated so many times, in so many reputable sources, that the whole world came to believe it. Moctezuma was not known for his cheerful disposition. Even he, however, had he known what people would one day say, would certainly have laughed, albeit with some bitterness, for the story was, in fact, preposterous.

Townsend busts the myth that Moctezuma bowed down to Cortés as the return of the god Quetzalcoatl (as a seasoned diplomat and compassionate ruler, Moctezuma sued for peace on behalf of his people and was betrayed and murdered by Cortés), and with a detailed recounting of the story of Cortés’ interpreter La Malinche, Townsend goes to great pains to bust the idea that she was a traitor to her people (as an “Aztec” woman from a rival tribe, Malinche was sold into slavery as a child and would have had no loyalty to Moctezuma or the Mexica people of Tenochtitlan). I appreciate that Townsend gave so much space to the story of Malinche (I appreciate any effort to put women’s stories into the historical record), but as she never wrote down her own thoughts and experiences, she is essentially unknowable. I thought it was a reach for Townsend to make references to Pocahontas and Sacagawea, and while again, I do appreciate efforts to bring in women’s stories, the few references that she found to various princesses, daughters, and wives in her source materials were repeated too many times. I also found it odd how many times (at least three?) that Townsend brings up the fact that Europeans had been farming for millennia longer than the Mesoamericans and that that fact alone would explain their dominance at first contact:

The Mexica knew that they were losing. They had no way to explain the discrepancy between their power and that of their enemies; they had no way of knowing that the Europeans were heirs to a ten-thousand-year-old tradition of sedentary living, and they themselves the heirs of barely three thousand. Remarkably, through it all, they seem to have maintained a practical sense of the situation: they knew what needed to be explained. They did not assume greater merit or superior intelligence on the part of their enemies. Rather, in the descriptions they left, they focused on two elements: the Spaniards’ use of metal, and their extraordinary communications apparatus. The old men talking about their experiences used the word tepoztli (metal, iron) more than any other in reference to the Spaniards: “Their war gear was all iron. They clothed their bodies in iron. They put iron on their heads, their swords were iron, their bows were iron, and their shields and lances were iron.”  They grew ever more specific: “Their iron lances and halberds seemed to sparkle, and their iron swords were curved like a stream of water. Their cuirasses and iron helmets seemed to make a clattering sound.” When the elderly speakers paused to wonder at the events, it was to ask how the word had gone out so efficiently to so many people across the sea about their marvelous kingdom. The warriors had seen the ships — but not the compasses, the navigation equipment, the technical maps, and the printing presses that made the conquest possible. What is striking is how quickly they realized that these issues were at the heart of the matter.

Does anyone “assume greater merit or superior intelligence on the part of” the Spaniards? That feels like an argument that doesn’t need to be made...repeatedly. The final sections of the book — recounting the first eighty years of colonialism — felt like a familiar story: the decimation of indigenous people by small pox and other diseases; the greed for gold and power by settlers; the importation of slaves from Africa; the rise of Catholicism and use of Inquisition-like torture to stem insurrection. I did find the Appendix (How Scholars Study the Aztecs) to be very interesting — I wouldn’t have thought that a person would need to argue for the importance of letting a group of people speak for themselves — and ultimately, I am very grateful that Townsend gave them this forum. I just wish it felt less of a slog.

The Winter Wives

 

I knew the Winter sisters from high school. We moved in different circles at university, but I’d see one or both from time to time and, like everybody else, they seemed to be intrigued by my apparent friendship with the Great Chase. If I could have seen the future, it wouldn’t have surprised me that, one day, he and Peggy Winter would be close. They were beings from the same genetic pool. Like Allan, she was tall, athletic. She followed sports, and could discuss team standings as if they really mattered to her. She was, physically, unlike her sister, Annie, who was classically blond with startling blue eyes. Peggy’s hair was auburn, her eyes deep-set and dark, some days green and some days hazel, depending on the light. Allan never seemed to notice Peggy at the time, which I found odd. Then I discovered that feigning indifference is sometimes a subtle tactic to get attention. And it worked for Allan. Peggy wasn’t used to being overlooked.

The Winter Wives is an intriguing, moody read. Author Linden MacIntyre sets us down in medias res — a round of golf with two old friends, we learn that their wives are sisters, one of the men collapses — and it takes the rest of the book to fill in just who these people are, how they met, what they do, what compelling circumstances led to that golf game...and what happens next. And even with all of these questions answered, the reader is still left wondering: can we really ever know another person, or for that matter, ourselves? I see that the publisher is calling this a “thrilling psychological drama”, and I don’t know if that quite captures what’s going on here — but as an examination of memory, relationships, lies, and losses, MacIntyre has written a compelling novel that left me with plenty to think on.  Four stars is a rounding up. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
 

When Allan fell, we were at the tee on the tenth hole of a golf course. It would take a long time to absorb the full impact of what happened there. Up close, death is like a mountain we happen to be standing on. Maybe we can see a piece of it, but the whole remains unreal until there’s distance.

We follow the first person POV of Byron — a rural Nova Scotia lawyer who helped his widowed mother run a farm and a lobster boat while attending university — and as his recollections meander across the events of his life, we learn that his friendship with the imposing Allan (a fellow student, on a football scholarship from Toronto, who’ll do anything to get rich) is his most important and pivotal relationship. When Allan eventually marries local beauty Peggy Winter and whisks her away to a jetsetting life in the sun, Byron will more or less stumble into a marriage with her sister Annie; an apparently less ambitious woman than her sister who is satisfied to stay home on the farm and help take care of Byron’s mother as she deteriorates with Alzheimer’s. Although the two couples don’t seem to spend much time physically together over the years, their business affairs will become intricately enmeshed; and as Allan’s health rapidly declines via a series of strokes, Byron will need to get to the bottom of what has really been going on for all this time.

Annie once explained her theory that memory is a parallel reality. Basically, an extended falsehood, a lifelong lie. At best, a kind of literature. But for me, memory is embedded in sensations, not narrative. Sound and smell. Touch. Music. Aroma. Colour. Revulsion from the smell of blood. Muddy lanes and sodden fields in spring. Fresh-cut hay in summer. The tang of apples in the fall. I associate particular events with certain seasonal conditions.The sharp heat of August feels unlike the warmth of a mellow morning in September or October; autumn has its own unique sensual pungency. And so I can, with relative certainty, “remember” that the series of events I am going to try to reconstruct happened mostly in the autumn and the winter of an extraordinary year. Ironically, I clearly remember the moment when I was told that there was a very real possibility that I could lose important aspects of my individuality. Memory, for one. Ultimately, my independence. Specifically, I recall the particular chill of a winter rainfall.

Due to a traumatic childhood injury (that left him with a limp, repressed memories, and an enduring concussion-related brain fog), Byron seems oddly detached from himself and his own experiences. As he approaches sixty, and having had a mother with dementia, Byron worries that he’s about to lose even more of himself — right at the moment he learns that the people around him may not be who they appear to be. Reality is confused by what people are led to believe (especially in the courtroom and in the gossiping community); people have fake names and nicknames (even “Byron” is a nickname that Peggy gave to the main character in high school because of his limp); the narrative explores foggy questions of consent, abuse, and suicide (medically assisted and a leap from a bridge); and I’m left wondering why this book is titled The Winter Wives instead of “The Winter Sisters” (if they kept their maiden name after marriage, it’s never mentioned, so I wonder if MacIntyre is hinting at a fundamental marriage-long lack of commitment by the sisters?)

There’s a lot to unearth in The Winter Wives, and with Byron’s faulty memory and disconnectedness, it makes for a compelling, if nebulous, examination of reality and selfhood. Moody is the word that feels most fitting and that ultimately made for a satisfying experience.

At Night All Blood is Black

 

In the cold of night, I took off my regulation trench coat and my shirt. I slid my shirt onto your body and tied the sleeves against your stomach, a very, very tight double knot that became stained with your black blood. I picked you up and brought you back to the trench. I held you in my arms like a child, my more-than-brother, my friend, and I walked and walked in the mud, in the crevices carved out by mortar shells, filled with blood-stained water, dispersing the rats that had left their burrows to feed on human flesh. And as I carried you in my arms, I began to think for myself, by asking for your forgiveness. I knew, I understood too late what I should have done when you asked me, eyes dry, the way one asks a favor of a childhood friend, like a debt owed, without ceremony, sweetly. Forgive me.

In At Night All Blood is Black, French-Sengalese author David Diop centres the voice of those who fought mostly unremembered by history — the West African soldiers who served in the trenches under the command of their French colonisers during WWI. Following an inner monologue that circles and meanders and splinters unpredictably, Diop places us in the fractured mind of one such Sengalese soldier: twenty-year-old Alfa Ndiaye, who signed up with his more-than-brother best friend, Mademba Diop; and after having Mademba die in his arms in the opening scene of the book, Alfa enacts a type of ritualised revenge against his German enemies (after all, at night all blood is black) that will at first be commended by his comrades, and eventually feared. When Alfa is ultimately relieved of active duty in order to “rest”, his memories of a childhood in a small Sengalese village add texture and context to his horrific experience of war in the present. This is a short novel that packs a hefty punch, and despite finding the whole thing disturbing and bordering on distasteful, I think that Diop does a service to history by telling this story.

The rumor spread. It spread, and as it spread it shed its clothes and, eventually, its shame. Well dressed at the beginning, well appointed at the beginning, well outfitted, well medaled, the brazen rumor ended up with her legs spread, her ass in the air. I didn’t notice it right away, I didn’t recognize the change, I didn’t know what she was plotting. Everyone had seen her but no one described her to me. I finally caught wind of the whispers and learned that my strangeness had been transformed into madness, and madness into witchcraft. Soldier sorcerer.

Alfa and Mademba are in a mixed unit, with Chocolat and Toubab soldiers serving side by side; and although there’s no real overt racism between these brothers in arms, “Chocolat” seems to have derogatory overtones and a quick Google search tells me that the West African term “Toubab” (for a white European) is negatively associated with colonialism. When their Captain orders the African soldiers to attack like “savages” — with a rifle in one hand and a machete in the other as they cross the No Man’s Land in order to cause maximum fear in their German opponents — it is this play-acting at savagery that will lead to Mademba’s death. And when Alfa then decides to embrace the caricature of the savage — to be the Germans’ worst nightmare and marvel at the fantastical prejudices behind their frightened blue eyes — he will cross a line that makes his own side fear that he has become a dëmm; a devourer of souls. The longer Alfa plays this role, the looser his own grip on reality:

I am the shadow that devours rocks, mountains, forests, and rivers, the flesh of beasts and of men. I slice skin, I empty skulls and bodies. I cut off arms, legs, and hands. I smash bones and I suck out their marrow. But I am also the red moon that rises over the river, I am the evening air that rustles the tender acacia trees. I am the wasp and the flower. I am as much the wriggling fish as the still canoe, as much the net as the fisherman. I am the prisoner and his guard. I am the tree and the seed that grew into it. I am father and son. I am assassin and judge. I am the sowing and the harvest. I am mother and daughter. I am night and day. I am fire and the wood it devours. I am innocent and guilty. I am the beginning and the end. I am the creator and the destroyer. I am double.

This notion of doubling/mirroring/twinning is present throughout — the mixing of white and  Black soldiers, Alfa and Mademba are physical and intellectual opposites, Alfa’s parents (his mother a beautiful young Fula migratory shepherd, his father an old sedentary peasant) are “exact opposites”, there is consensual and nonconsenual sex — and it’s unclear whether Alfa might be suffering from the kind of mental disorder that a French doctor can “wipe away”, or perhaps his condition is straight out of Sengalese mythology. Either way, shell-shocked or possessed, Alfa is left broken in a way particular to his experience as an African soldier serving in a unit commanded by his country’s colonial rulers. This was a tough read of war and a descent into madness — as gutting as a bayonet to the abdomen — and I was often turned off by the depiction and treatment of women characters, but there’s the ring of truth here and I applaud Diop for bringing this story forward.

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

 

It’s time to step back into sunlight. It’s where I find myself now, on the threshold between an old familiar state and an unknown future. Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work, and my thoughts. I’m done with chemo but I still have my port, which my doctors are waiting to remove until I’m “further out of the woods”. I’m left with the question of how to repatriate myself to the kingdom of the well, and whether I ever fully can. No treatment protocols or discharge instructions can guide this part of my trajectory. The way forward is going to have to be my own.

Referencing Susan Sontag’s assertion that “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” author Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms is an account of her experience with battling cancer in her early twenties, and what came after; not quite well and no longer sick, Jaouad found herself between the two kingdoms and without a road map out. This is a big — maybe slightly unrelatable — narrative because as an ambitious and hard-working young woman, Jaouad was probably always destined for a big life. It felt a little unrelatable that after graduating from Princeton, and after spending a few months of hard partying as an unpaid intern living in Manhattan, Jaouad decided to relocate to Paris; a little unrelatable that the instaconnection that she made with “Will” before she left the US would develop through texts and emails over the next few months until he decided to join her in Paris. When Jaouad’s strange and persistent medical symptoms (fatigue, itching, brain fog) finally leads to a diagnosis of leukaemia and she is urged to return to her family in New York state, it feels like a greater than average loss of a bigger than average future; it would make for bad fiction that Will follows her back to the States, moves into her parents’ home, and becomes one of Jaouad’s primary caregivers for the next few years. This is a big — if slightly unrelatable — narrative and it is well written, introspective, and as Jaouad was unable to find something similar to read when she was going through her years of therapy and its aftermath, I am sure this will serve as a valuable resource for others. As a general interest read, I would recommend this to anyone. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Spoilery from here.)

What would you write if you knew you might die soon? Bent over my laptop in bed, I traveled to where the silence was in my life. I wrote about my infertility and how no one had warned me of it. About learning to navigate our absurd healthcare system. About what it meant to fall in love while falling sick, and how we talk — or don’t talk — about dying. I wrote about guilt. I also wrote a will in case I fell on the wrong side of the transplant odds. To this day, I’ve never been more prolific. Death can be a great motivator.

Before Jaouad began her first aggressive round of chemo, and not finding much written about a young person’s experience with cancer, she decided to start a blog. When it unexpectedly went viral, she was able to turn the exposure into a series of columns for The New York Times ( Life, Interrupted ), and in the years that followed — as she and Will set up home together in her mother’s apartment in the Village — Jaouad was able to help support them with further writing and speaking gigs (she incidentally notes that she won an Emmy for the video series that accompanied her columns; this really isn’t an ordinary life).

Everything that Jaouad writes about her experience with cancer — the long journey to a diagnosis, her need to self-advocate, the treatments, making and losing friends from the cancer ward, the incredible strain on her family and Will — was very well written. From a social worker advising against Jaouad marrying Will (because she was on her father’s insurance and her upcoming bone marrow transplant alone would cost a million dollars) to the incredible pressure her brother was under as her marrow donor, Jaouad’s story made me think about things in new ways. But it’s in the second half of the book — when Jaouad starts to deal with what comes next — that her story enters territory I haven’t read about before.

After three and a half years, I am officially done with cancer — more than four years, if you start with the itch. I thought I’d feel victorious when I reached this moment — I thought I’d want to celebrate. But instead, it feels like the beginning of a new kind of reckoning. I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal — survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.

Will’s story — this incredible, ambitious but selfless partner and caregiver to someone he had only just met — was so present in the first half of the book that at one point I wondered why Jaouad was photographed solo (with her dog Oscar) on the cover; I flipped to the author bio at the back to see if it said she “lives with Will in X city” (it doesn’t mention a partner), and then I flipped to the Author’s Note at the beginning where Jaouad wrote which names were changed to preserve people’s anonymity, and I literally gasped when I saw the name “Will”.  (And is it maybe a little unrelatable that Jaouad rebounded with a man who turns out to be the bandleader on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show; and is it wrong that it bothered me a little how much Jaouad agonised over being the one to finally end things with Will — while dating Jon, who she's still with — and although she sounds very generous in her painting of Will as an unappreciated angel at the time, I didn't get enough resolution about that relationship; and recognise that nobody owes me more resolution than I got.) The ending of this relationship, while Jaouad wasn’t quite well yet, no doubt prompted what came next — a one hundred day solo cross-country drive to meet up with people who had written to Jaouad in the early days of her blog:

I buy a sheaf of road maps and spread them across the kitchen table. Tracing my finger along the curving purple lines of interstates, blue squiggles of rivers, and green swaths of national parks, my itinerary springs to life. The drive will sweep in a counter-clockwise circle around the country, going from the Northeast to the Midwest, through the Rocky Mountain states, down the West Coast, and across the Southwest and South, then finally back up the East Coast. I’ll travel roughly fifteen thousand miles, drive through thirty-three states, and visit more than twenty people. Oscar and I will go to a boarding school in Connecticut, an artist’s loft in Detroit, a ranch in rural Montana, a fisherman’s cottage on the Oregon coast, a teacher’s bungalow in the Ojai Valley, and an infamous prison in Livingston, Texas. We will go where the letters take us and see what we find.

The variety of people Jaouad meets on this trip (not all are cancer-related connections) give her a new perspective on life, and between the road trip and the writing of this memoir, you get the sense that she has finally found her path towards the kingdom of the well. Again, this part is maybe not super relatable — how many new cancer survivors would have the time, money, and freedom to make a trip like this one; how many have access to a family cabin in the woods in which to later write this memoir? — but again, I got the sense that Jaouad was always destined to live a bigger than average life, and that comes down to talent and drive more than just opportunities (but the opportunities don’t hurt). I was touched and enlightened by this whole thing and am glad to have picked this up.

* I want to note that I’m a little miffed about the VW campervan on the cover — Jaouad writes that she bought the van after her trip, while writing Between Two Kingdoms at that Vermont cabin — and the whole composition just comes off as too PR-staged and Instagrammy to me.

I also want to note that Jaouad's experience chimes with what Jenn Gunter writes in The Menopause Manifesto (reviewed here.)  From having her symptoms dismissed for the longest time, to needing to be the one to bring up to her oncology team the possibile side effect of infertility (Jaouad wouldn't have known about that possibility or insisted on an egg harvesting before she started chemo if she hadn't been researching her condition online), women need to fight to get the medical care that they deserve. It wasn't until Jaouad went to Las Vegas (where she was giving a talk) with a group of her fellow young, female cancer patients that she had the nerve to ask if any of them were experiencing similar sex-related side effects:

No one on my medical team had ever broached the topic of sexual health and cancer during my treatment. No one warned me that menopause is a common side effect of the treatment I had undergone. No one advised me about the available remedies to help with the hot flashes and pain. I had waited for my period to return after the transplant; it never came. At the age of twenty-four, menopause wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. In turn, I’d kept quiet about the changes in my body, believing that something must be wrong with me. I’d told no one about what I was experiencing — not my medical team, not Will, not my mother, not anyone — until now...That night, we were just a group of young women who had received little to no information about the sexual side effects of our disease, trying to puzzle it out together. I cried afterward, overcome by an odd combination of emotions: heartbreak over our shared loss and profound relief — even joy — about breaking through the silence, the shame of it all, together.

 

As with Gunter's book, I am happy that Between Two Kingdoms exists in order to bring this kind of information out of the shadows.