Away

Speaking as a Canadian of mixed heritage, it's always a bit annoying when our official policy of Multiculturalism forces us to answer the question, "What's your nationality?" Many times over their school years, my kids were told to bring in a dish from or write a report on their nation of origin, and as my husband is also of mixed heritage, there's something rather pointless, to me, about them self-identifying as any single one of the many cultures that went into their makeup. After I don't even know how many generations here, we're Canadians. Nothing hyphenated, just Canadians. But…if I were forced to self-identify, I would have to say that with hair as coppery as Mary/Moira's and my mother's side being of pure Irish extraction, I'm more Irish than anything else. Having had Irish-Canadian friends, and also having visited the Emerald Isle as a teenager, I do have an emotional pull in that direction as well. I've read some Irish fiction over the years, some James Joyce and Maeve Binchy et al, but this was the first Ireland to Canada immigrant story I can remember reading and it had an effect on me that very likely has everything to do with this notion of self-identification.

In Away, Jane Urquhart starts her story in Ireland (poetically evoking its landscape, culture and mythology), introduces the Potato Famine (and its attendant death and devastation as well as emigration aboard the "coffin ships" for the lucky few), leading to pioneering in the harsh Canadian wilderness, and ends with a glimpse into the nascent politics of the young Dominion. Interspersed are scenes from the modern day life of an aged descendant of the O'Malley line as she tells the story of her family, giving voice to it even though she's alone, carrying on the tradition of oral history as related to her by her own elderly grandmother. In many ways this felt like a substitute for the immigration story of my own family that I'll never know, and as such, I made a connection with this book that might make me rate it higher than others who don't feel this connection.

Urquhart, in addition to being a novelist, has also published books of poetry and this lyrical sensibility is displayed throughout the book.

In describing a forest: Leaf and leaf and shadow, shadow and sunlight scattered there, and over here, by the wind.

In describing love: This is what love is like, one is asleep and the other is awake but you never know which one is dreaming.

This is also a political book, making commentary on the British Landlords in Ireland (even though the Sedgewick brothers are treated as oblivious and benign), the treatment of the Irish immigrants in Canada (from the fever sheds in Grosse Ile to the impoverished Griffintown neighbourhood of Montreal), the Fenian Rising, and the Fathers of Confederation (in particular D'Arcy McGee).

As a nation of (predominantly) immigrants, Mary's epiphany on being forced to leave Ireland is a shared part of our Canadian heritage:

She saw the world's great leave-takings, invasions and migrations, landscapes torn from beneath the feet of tribes, the Danae pushed out by the Celts, the Celts eventually smothered by the English, warriors in the night depopulating villages, boatloads of groaning African slaves. Lost forests. The children of the mountain on the plain, the children of the plain adrift on the sea. And all the mourning for abandoned geographies.

And this exchange between the mysterious Algonquin named Exodus and Mary's husband notes an equivalence between the experience of the Irish and the Native Canadians:

Exodus leaned across the table and looked steadily at the Irishman. "And so I told her," he said, "that some white men had seized my people's land and killed many animals for sport and abused our women."

The hands of the two men lay flat upon the table but their eyes never left the other's face. "What did she say then?" asked Brian.

When Exodus replied there was a break in his voice. "She embraced me and said that the same troubles stayed in the hearts of both our peoples."

This exchange has further personal relevance for me since the only other heritage I know of is Mi'kmaq on my father's side. It may also explain why I am open to stories that involve the unseen behind the seen; whether faerie-folk or manitou.

After having read the nonfiction Roughing it in the Bush earlier this year, Away reads like a realistic and well-researched account of the early pioneers to Canada. These two books also highlight the differences in experience that was awaiting the poor Irish (even those privileged enough to have had land awaiting them as in Away, which I can't imagine was a common situation) and the moneyed English who were better able to negotiate and navigate the British culture of Upper Canada. Here's another personal story: As a Canadian of mixed heritage, I honestly don't have either superficial or bone-bred prejudices against other people, no matter where they or their ancestors came from. Over the years, I've heard many of the immigration stories from my husband's family, and as a result, have been amused to watch each of my red-haired girls go off to school with a proudly researched paper on their Italian roots. But it floored me when my mother-in-law once informed me that although she always knew her grandfather came from Tipperary, she had just learned that he wasn't Irish-- he was a Brit who had bought land in Ireland in the mid-1800's, sold it at a profit, and then made his way to Canada. I couldn't help but at that point feel a kind of sleeping with the enemy internal conflict: Was he one of these notorious landlords? Did he somehow profit off the Irish during the Potato Famine? I have no clue, but reading Away brought this time alive for me.

I enjoyed everything about Away, from the fates of the drowned sailor and the Latin-teaching Brian to the beautiful and frenetic step-dancing Aidan. But this was really a story about the women:In this family all young girls are the same young girl and all old ladies are the same old lady. This book connected with me in a way that made me feel like this same young girl, this same old lady, if only because no one has ever taken the time to tell me what my own story is. As much as I proclaim myself Canadian first, maintain my impatience with the official need for hyphenated identities, I will concede that I likely have a need to know what path led me to where I find myself now; perhaps I can even be indulged in mourning for abandoned geographies I never knew.

And so in addition to the above Goodreads review I have just a bit more to add. One might wonder why I don't know the immigration stories of my ancestors, or even what the cultural makeup is on my father's side beyond him being 1/4 Mi'kmaq, and the answer was posted here before in my review of Little Bird of Heaven (my father snorting derisively at me when, as a child, I asked him if I was really mostly Irish, and also his oft-repeated refrain of  "If it was any of your goddamn business someone would have told you by now".) So yeah, questions were not encouraged in my immediate family and I rarely ever saw my grandparents as they lived far away. When  we did visit my grandparents, the conversations were pretty superficial -- I never knew these people who are now all gone.

Here's my only exception: In July of 2010, Dave, Mallory and I went over to visit my maternal grandmother in PEI (Kennedy stayed behind in Nova Scotia with my brother Ken, and although he was supposed to bring her and his kids over to visit our grandmother a week later, he decided against it. This would turn out to be the last chance any of us from away had to see her). We knew that "Mom" (as we called her because my mother's father had been determined to be "Pop" to his grandkids) was in questionable health, and so a long visit was discouraged, but we were cleared to take her out to Tim Horton's for a bowl of soup and a coffee. It was a bit shocking to see my vibrant grandmother looking so pale and frail, but worse, her sharp mind was now wandering and as we sat together, she would get into these ruts and a few short stories were repeated over and over, as though they were just occurring to her for the first time in years. One of these stories was perhaps the most interesting glimpse into my heritage that I will ever have.

I wanted to refer to the absent Kennedy, so I told Mom that just like her, her eldest great-grandchild is a great reader. Mom sighed and said, "When I was a girl living out in the country, my own grandmother who lived with us was always busy, always cleaning something, always dusting away at the corners. If she happened to see me with a book in my hand, she would crack me over the head with her goose wing and say, 'Get your nose out of that novel. Don't you have something useful to do?' And it didn't matter what kind of a book it was, she always called it a novel. And the boys? Well, the boys, my brothers, could do no wrong, you see. And I could do no right." And here her eyes squinted, and her voice became deep and blustery in that wonderful and vaguely Irish, PEIslander lilt. "But on the night she died, was it one of the boys that sat up with her all night long? It was me." She told this story three times as we sat there, word for word, a familiar lament that she was hanging onto until the end, and it gives me the only clues I have: I knew that my grandparents were all born in Canada, and I knew that this grandmother's parents were farmers (I had met my great-grandmother, known as "Country Mother", several times before she died in her nineties), but this was the first I heard about this great-great-grandmother, and was intrigued to learn that she lived in Canada as well. That's it-- I still have no idea when the original Irish folks left Ireland, I have no idea if it was related to the Famine or not. I remember learning in college that in most societies oral traditions are passed down matrilineally, and that's probably why I am most attracted to the notion of my maternal grandmother's grandmother, and why I regret that I don't know her story in the way that Mary's story is passed down to Esther by Eileen in Away. I don't feel the same responsibility to my father's ancestry, I suppose, because he has a sister who has a daughter-- and there's a chance she has become the repository for that line of the family. 

More thoughts on the Irish: When I was a girl, my best friend was Cora Ryan. Her parents were Irish immigrants to Canada, coming in the 1950's or 60's. Her mother was a bit uptight, a bit cool, but she worked hard to maintain a very comfortable home for her family, and when she told a rare joke, it was in a severe tone that made you pause for a beat before realising it was time to laugh. Cora's Dad, on the other hand, was a jovial and loving red-faced man, prone to breaking out into song at gatherings, and despite my general shyness and awkwardness, he gave me a real feeling of belonging when I was visiting their house. As Christmas of 1981 approached, Cora's Dad beckoned me upstairs one evening, and as he went room to room in their century farmhouse to plug in the electric candles that sat in each window at the holidays, he explained that they were an Irish tradition, an invitation to absent friends. As he plugged in the last one, he asked, "Do you think you can remember where all the candles are in this house?" I nodded and he said, "Good, then this will be your job from now on. This year and every year after, any time you're visiting, you will be the candle lighter." I was horrified and had to choke back tears as I asked, "Didn't Cora tell you? That we're moving to Alberta at the end of the summer?" He did not stop his tears, and throwing his arms around me said, "I didn't know, but from now on I want you to know that every Christmas there will be candles in these windows, candles for you." That was the kind of person he was, loving and kind in a way that I didn't know in my own family, and not unlike my father-in-law (with his Scottish-Italian heritage, I'm certainly not saying that the Irish have a monopoly on warmth).

Somewhere out of this came the idea that I should go with the Ryans on their biannual trip to visit friends and family back in Ireland in the last few weeks before my family moved, and to my eternal surprise, my parents agreed (I've never said they don't love me). That was an astonishing culture shock for a 14 year old, but also felt like a homecoming. We stayed with Cora's aunt and uncle in Killaloe, more or less right here:

There were parties most nights at which there was singing and dancing and, having been prepared for the eventuality beforehand, Cora and I would pull out our flutes and play a couple of heart-wrenching duets her brother Sean had written for us. Her Dad gave us a walking tour of the village and pointed across this small river to where there was still a town with English settlers, complete with an Anglican church that had once been Catholic before the troubles. This was the first I had heard of Ireland having been a British holding, and getting the story from the mouth of a patriot, it was duly impressed on my mind as a horrifying and illegal occupation. This was such a painful part of Mr. Ryan's psyche that so far as I know, for the rest of his life, he never applied for Canadian citizenship as it entails an oath of allegiance to the Queen. There were children, dressed in rags, begging for coins in Limerick and this was my first glimpse into this kind of poverty. But there was also the incredible scenery, the green fields and mountains that give Ireland its nickname. We saw castles and cow-filled pastures and ate periwinkles on the beach at Kilkee, and everywhere we went, people, strangers, told me that I was home. And it's worth restating that I knew that when my three week Irish vacation was up, I was to get on a plane to Alberta, leaving the home and friends I knew, to start over in a place where I had no roots, no references, no candles in the window.

My last thoughts on Ireland: In the summer of 1988, my mother had the opportunity to take her parents on a trip of a lifetime to Ireland. They had a rental car and drove through the big cities and the small villages, went to Northern Ireland (where they were warned against leaving any packages on the seat of their parked car-- it would be assumed it was a bomb and panic would ensue) and they breathed a sigh of relief when they crossed the border back into the Catholic, more familiar Ireland. In one village, they stopped at Dowling's Pub on a lark, where upon seeing my grandfather, the waitress exclaimed, "Well if you aren't just the very likeness of William Dowling!" To which Pop replied, "But I am William Dowling." The waitress explained that the owner of the pub was also William Dowling and that he was away for a couple of days-- if they could stay around they were in for a surprise. Unfortunately their schedule didn't allow them to stay still that long, but as my mother said, they felt at home wherever they went.

And to tie this up with a reference back to the book that started these thoughts: I am most definitely made up of many different cultures and think of myself as Canadian first. Yet, there is something about the Irish part of me that wants to be in the forefront, whether it's a matrilineal bias, or my brushes with its culture, or that I just have more Irish blood than any other. I can identify with the notion in Away that a person doesn't need to be born in Ireland to be enchanted by its ghosts. Something is also impelling me to pass on an Irishness to my kids that I'm barely familiar with. We named our firstborn Kennedy in order to honour my brother Ken, but also because I wanted her to have a strong Irish name. I thought it unfortunate that it translates as "ugly head", but didn't think she would really need to know that part until she was old enough to know that it doesn't matter. When we were expecting again and I was looking through the baby name book, I was drawn to finding one that not only mirrors Kennedy in form (it is not a coincidence that Mallory is also consonant, vowel, double consonant, vowel, consonant, y), but I was also hoping to find a name with a similarly unfortunate meaning, and of course Mallory means "unlucky one". Thus armed, the first time they were old enough to flip through that same baby name book and ask me why I would have chosen names with such bad meanings, I was able to explain that it's an Irish tradition to say horrible things about babies in order to fool the Banshee. Of course no witch was going to steal one of my babies if I referred to her as ugly or unlucky. I do believe they find this story satisfactory, but the bigger truth is that I do, too. As my mother has been wont to say, "I'm not superstitious but I don't take any chances."

I wonder if that is an Irishism?

A further note added 19/01.14: I played around with mundia, an online ancestry site, and found that my grandmother's grandmother's name was Margaret Daughtery, born in 1846, but unfortunately, that's all the information I have on her. I had told my mother, just before Christmas,  that I was looking into our family tree and she and my father sounded excited that I even cared. She called me the next day to say that she had looked and found some documents and information that might be of interest to me and she was going to put it right in the mail  -- and that was a month ago and, of course, I haven't received anything. 

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

I first encountered Francois Rabelais second-hand, more than twenty years ago, while going through a Robertson Davies phase. In The Rebel Angels, a young woman is researching Rabelais for her thesis and the stodgy old (male) professors around her wonder if it's appropriate material for a young lady. There were many innuendos about what ribald, perhaps even obscene, material this was, and being of about her age at the time, I filed it away as yet another reference I didn't understand and should look into some time. Over the years I've encountered his name, particularly in the adjective Rabelasian, and have seen him linked to the notions of the carnivalesque and the grotesque. Wanting to understand all of these terms more fully, I decided this was the summer I finally tackle the bawdy monk and his thousand pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel. 

Rabelais was a monk, he studied law, and eventually studied medicine to the degree that he became a practising physician; a true Renaissance man. He was able to read Latin and Greek (even some Hebrew), translated many of the classics into French (often for the first time), and standardised spelling and written grammar (creating many new words for his native tongue, as Shakespeare did for English). It is argued that in the first book of Pantagruel, Rabelais essentially invented the novel, and being so incredibly well read, he used the narrative form to share, and debate, the philosophy and views of everyone from Plato and Aristotle to Plutarch and Pliny, while also borrowing heavily from the Adages of his contemporary, Erasmus, and Greek and Roman mythologies. I read the translation by M. A. Screech, a scholar who has been studying Rabelais' works for decades, and he skillfully guides the reader through the more obscure references and does his best to maintain the puns and other wordplay of the original. I would have been lost without Screech's guidance, but something was a bit diluted when all of the jokes were explained to me right before I read them. 

And so the jokes: Yes, there were more poop and fart jokes than even my young nephews would laugh at, but these were mainly in the first two books, when the giant king, Gargantua, and his giant, scholarly son, Pantagruel, are introduced. I'm including the following long passage between Gargantua and his father, Grangousier, because of the poop and the way that it captures the general flavour of the book:

"I have," answered Gargantua, "by a long and curious experience, found out a means to wipe my bum, the most lordly, the most excellent, and the most convenient that ever was seen."

"What is that?" said Grangousier. "How is it?"

"I will tell you by-and-by," said Gargantua. "Once I did wipe me with a gentle-woman's velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that was comfortable. At another time with a lady's neckerchief, and after that I wiped me with some ear-pieces of hers made of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them (turdy round things, a pox take them) that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance. Now I wish St. Antony's fire burn the bum-gut of the goldsmith that made them, and of her that wore them! This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page's cap, garnished with a feather after the Switzers' fashion.

"Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it I wiped my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they scratched and exulcerated all my perinee. Of this I recovered the next morning thereafter, by wiping myself with my mother's gloves, of a most excellent perfume and scent of the Arabian Benin. After that I wiped me with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade, which is a tail-scarlet, with lettuce, and with spinach leaves. All this did very great good to my leg. Then with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey, but that gave me the bloody flux of Lombardy, which I healed by wiping me with my braguette.

"Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, in the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a table-cloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them."

"Yea, but," said Grangousier, "which torchecul did you find to be the best?"

"I was coming to it," said Gargantua, "and by-and-by shall you hear the tu autem, and know the whole mystery and knot of the matter. I wiped myself with hay, with straw, with thatch-rushes, with flax, with wool, with paper, but,

"Who his foul tail with paper wipes,
Shall at his ballocks leave some chips."

"What," said Grangousier, "my little rogue, hast thou been at the pot, that thou dost rhyme already?"

"Yes, yes, my lord the king," answered Gargantua, "I can rhyme gallantly, and rhyme till I become hoarse with rheum. Hark, what our privy says to the skiters:

"Shittard,
Squirtard,
Crackard,
Turdous,
Thy bung
Hath flung
Some dung
On us:
Filthard,
Cackard,
Stinkard,
St. Antony’s fire seize on thy toane (bone?),
If thy
Dirty
Dounby
Thou do not wipe, ere thou be gone.
Will you have any more of it?"

"Yes, yes," answered Grangousier.

"Then", said Gargantua, "A Roundelay.

"In shitting yes’day I did know
The sess I to my arse did owe:
The smell was such came from that slunk,
That I was with it all bestunk:
O had but then some brave Signor
Brought her to me I waited for,
In shitting!
I would have cleft her watergap,
And join’d it close to my flipflap,
Whilst she had with her fingers guarded
My foul nockandrow, all bemerded
In shitting.

"Now say that I can do nothing! By the Merdi, they are not of my making, but I heard them of this good old grandam, that you see here, and ever since have retained them in the budget of my memory."

"Let us return to our purpose," said Grangousier.

"What," said Gargantua, "to skite?"

"No," said Grangousier, "but to wipe our tail."

"But," said Gargantua, "will not you be content to pay a puncheon of Breton wine, if I do not blank and gravel you in this matter, and put you to a non-plus?"

"Yes, truly," said Grangousier.

"There is no need of wiping one’s tail," said Gargantua, "but when it is foul; foul it cannot be, unless one have been a-skiting; skite then we must before we wipe our tails."

"O my pretty little waggish boy," said Grangousier, "what an excellent wit thou hast? I will make thee very shortly proceed doctor in the jovial quirks of gay learning, and that, by G—, for thou hast more wit than age. Now, I prithee, go on in this torcheculative, or wipe-bummatory discourse, and by my beard I swear, for one puncheon, thou shalt have threescore pipes, I mean of the good Breton wine, not that which grows in Britain, but in the good country of Verron."

"Afterwards I wiped my bum," said Gargantua, "with a kerchief, with a pillow, with a pantoufle, with a pouch, with a pannier, but that was a wicked and unpleasant torchecul; then with a hat. Of hats, note that some are shorn, and others shaggy, some velveted, others covered with taffeties, and others with satin. The best of all these is the shaggy hat, for it makes a very neat abstersion of the fecal matter.

"Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure. But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temporate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs, and such is the opinion of Master John of Scotland, alias Scotus."

Even considering the coarseness of a lot of the humour, there was wicked satire to be found about the consequences of bad teachers in youth and the folly of ill planned wars. In the third book, I relished the lampooning of the practise of law (I loved Judge Bridoye and his gobbledygook legalese) but most especially enjoyed Panurge's dilemma: wanting to marry but dreading becoming a cuckold, he asks the advice of everyone he meets. From the dire warnings of fortune tellers, fools, professionals, and other methods of divination, he is able to twist their admonitions into the blessing he has been seeking. Although admittedly coarse, this story from Frere Jean was the funniest bit to me: 

(Hans Carvel was a jealous husband and) during one of the many nights that he was lying beside her racked by such torments, he dreamt he was addressing the devil and telling him of his misery. The devil comforted him and placed a ring on his big finger saying: "This ring I give you: as long a it remains on your finger your wife will never be carnally known by another man without your knowledge and consent."

"Thank you kindly, Monsieur Devil," said Hans Carvel. "If ever anyone takes that ring off my finger I shall renounce Mahoun."

The devil vanished, and Hans Carvel awoke full of joy, finding himself with his finger up his wife's thingummy.

This is apparently kind of an old joke, albeit one I hadn't heard before, and all of the books of Gargantua and Pantagruel are laden with such stories and quips that would have been familiar to readers at the time they were written (and this translation by Screech ensures they aren't lost on the modern reader).

The next two volumes are very much like Gulliver's Travels or Candide (even though those books came later, and it's said, wouldn't have existed without Rabelais first paving the way) in that the group of friends go on a sea voyage, in search of the oracular Dive Bouteille, still trying to solve Panurge's dilemma, and meet strange creatures and societies at the islands they stop at along the way. As did Swift and Voltaire later, Rabelais uses satire to show the hypocrisy of everyone from the faux religious to the overzealous papists. Most bizarre island: Ile Farouche, where the heroes battle half-sausage people who are revived by a flying pig that squirts mustard down on them from the air. (!)

In the end, this was a difficult book to slog through, with archaic language and references, but it was worthwhile for me because it answered a question I've had for twenty plus years: What's the deal with Rabelais? I looked through a book I have, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley, and she says of Gargantua and Pantagruel that it is "a piece of work so masculine and French that I find it unreadable". I certainly didn't find it unreadable -- no more so than Infinite Jest or The Tin Drum, beside which I will shelve G & P -- but I would concede that it's not for everyone. Having now read Gargantua and Pantagruel, I would say that the biggest lesson I've learned is how very very little I know about classical thought. I imagine the French in Rabelais' day reading the adventures of Pantagruel aloud to each other in their gilded parlours, snickering over the uncited jokes about Aristotle or Galen, understanding oblique references and gasping at the places where Rabelais has a character disagreeing with established thought. It saddens me, just a bit, to know that at this point I'm never going to acquire this arcane knowledge and wonder if it wouldn't be worthwhile to start teaching Latin in schools again-- if only to have students translating, and therefore being exposed to, the great thinkers upon whose philosophies we've founded western civilisation. As for me, I might just go back and reread some Robertson Davies, now that I'll get the jokes.

As the Dive Bouteille said, "Trinck!"

Anansi Boys

Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spider-webs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.

The last book I read and reviewed, Caught, had me musing on the nature of literature and genre fiction, and my snobbish preference for one over the other. In fact, if anyone had asked me before I encountered Anansi Boys how likely I would be to dabble in Urban Fantasy, I would have replied, "Not terribly likely at all". It was only based on a recommendation for another book by Neil Gaiman that led me to see if my library had any of his audiobooks, and I am thankful for whatever fates not only delivered this book to me but also allowed me to enjoy it as read by the incomparable Lenny Henry . His distinct voices for each of the characters (how perfect was Grahame Coates' voice? And Anansi's!) brought the story alive in the way I believe all of Anansi's tales are meant to be experienced-- aloud.

Anansi Boys is many stories in one: it's about family and mythology and finding the courage to be true to your own story. It was laugh out loud funny in many places, and since it deals with meddling with the gods on their own turf and inviting them to meddle in ours, it is also exciting and dramatic and full of menace. It is also charming, which may sound insignificant or lightweight, but I mean charming as in spell-binding and magical. A lot of the humour comes from that trickstery British sense of wordplay that can grow wearisome, but Gaiman deployed it here exactly to my tastes:

He was having more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.*

*Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all - except possibly on an organic level - had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

I appreciated the philosophical bits:

It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it were; all the rest of the people in the world, the theory suggests, are extras) and what is more, they all know each other. And it's true, or true as far as it goes. In reality the world is made of thousands upon thousands of groups of about five hundred people, all of whom will spend their lives bumping into each other, trying to avoid each other, and discovering each other in the same unlikely teashop in Vancouver. There is an unavoidability to this process. It's not even coincidence. It's just the way the world works, with no regard for individuals or propriety.

And I enjoyed the way the main narrative would periodically stop to explain who Anansi was, why he had feuds with the other animal-gods, and then relate a traditional Anansi tale. I was cheering for Fat Charlie as he began to relate to his trickster-godlike side:

The creature laughed scornfully. "I," it said, "am frightened of nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing," it said.
Charlie said "Are you extremely frightened of nothing?"
"Absolutely terrified of it," admitted the Dragon.
"You know," said Charlie "I have nothing in my pockets. Would you like to see it?"
"No," said the dragon uncomfortably, "I most definitely would not."
There was a flapping of wings like sails, and Charlie was alone on the beach. "That," he said "was much too easy."

There was so very much to like about Anansi Boys and something about it spoke to me at a very deep level, somewhere primal and atavistic. Gaiman seems to have tapped into the Jungian Collective Unconscious, which is not so surprising for a storyteller, and might well always be a consequence of dealing with Anansi, the oldest storyteller of them all.

He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are.

Whether through fiction (literature or otherwise) or my abiding fascination with quantum mechanics, this notion of the "truths beneath the way things are" is an area in which I love to linger and Anansi Boys is a thoroughly enjoyable world within our world.

Caught

I remember encountering two conflicting ideas a few years ago. First, someone quoted an old professor who had said something like, "There are too many great books in the world, more than you can read in a lifetime, to waste your time reading merely good books." I armed myself with this philosophy as a mental justification for not accepting the kinds of books that people like to recommend to me: My mother-in-law is a fan of historical romances and is forever saying things like, "This book started out okay but got a little better and I thought that you might like to read it Krista"; or my brother suggests thrillers or sci-fi ("Don't you ever just read a book for its plot, Krista?"), but with my quest for the great books, I have been able to politely point out that I have my own book pile to get through and no thanks to yours. Then I read another quote that challenged my notion of the great book: "Anyone who states 'I don't read genre fiction' is masking intellectual insecurity." That floored me, and being a person of moderate intellectual insecurity, I had to wonder, "Is it true? Do I focus my reading on literature because I don't want to be seen reading pulp? Or is it not a public unmasking that I'm afraid of, but rather a revelation of the lie I'm telling myself; am I not as smart as I think I am?" This reminds me of the movie A Fish Called Wanda, wherein Kevin Kline's Otto character was constantly reading and attempting to quote from Nietzsche (a name he can't even pronounce) and Jamie Lee Curtis, as Wanda, called him stupid anyway:

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?
Otto: [superior smile] Apes don't read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!

It should have been easy to just dismiss this "intellectual insecurity" business, but since it resonated with me, I needed to reconcile the notions of "great books" and "genre fiction" and concede that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, even if I have zero interest in Romances and Westerns and Sci-Fi and Crime… 

And then Lisa Moore, quickly climbing to the top of my list of favourite authors, releases Caught; a book that, right from the garish, pulpy cover, announces itself, unabashedly, as genre fiction: Crime; Adventure; Detection. With her mastery of mood and place and character, Moore elevates the cliché to the sublime, to the literary, and proves that a great book can be found within any framework.

We meet Slaney on the run, having just escaped from prison, and with Moore's customary layering of past and present, we quickly learn what crime he was convicted of (drug smuggling) and where he is heading (more drug smuggling). It's a wonder why someone would break out of prison just to commit another crime, but we soon realise that Slaney's youthful optimism, his hubris in the face of obvious obstacles, is his strength and his undoing.

This time they would do it right. He could feel luck like an animal presence, feral and watchful. He would have to coax it into the open. Grab it by the throat.

(H)e knew how to look at people so they could be who they were, which basically meant he had a capacity for trust. He thought of trust…as a vestigial organ, near his liver, swollen, threatening to burst. Maybe it would poison him. But it was also his special skill. His strength.

The fact that Slaney trusts the people around him (despite discovering Hearn's many lies, despite his reservations about Carter and Ada, despite getting a bad feeling about Brophy) makes his eventual capture a foregone conclusion (also reinforced by the title Caught in bold red font on the cover). But as Patterson muses about the foregone conclusion of a bullfight:

It was the certainty that satisfied some desire in the audience. The best stories, he thought, we've known the end from the beginning.

Which begs the question: If we know how this story will end, what's the point of reading it? To which I would answer: It's about the journey. Within the framework of the Crime genre, Moore writes with her astonishing craftsmanship. The irony of the authorities knowing Slaney's every move, from having allowed the prison break to using ghost cars to pick him up while hitchhiking to move him along to his next criminal venture, was jarring and delicious; I found myself sympathising with and rooting for each side in this cat and mouse game; both Slaney and Patterson deserved to come out on top.

There is a chapter in Caught (Truth and Knowledge, pp 131-136) that perfectly illustrates what I think of as Lisa Moore's unique style. It relates two stories about Slaney as a twelve year old, two events that happened on the same afternoon: a baseball game that reveals his character and formative relationships with Hearn and Jennifer; and finding his parents with an encyclopedia salesman at home, which captures their hopes and expectations for him (and adds further irony since the reader knows Slaney becomes a convict). Although there is a definite sequence of events, ballgame then meeting the salesman, the stories are interspersed, a page about one, a couple paragraphs about the other, weaving back and forth, until the revelations seem larger than the sum of the two events. It's this type of alchemy in Moore's writing that make the journey more than worthwhile-- I could reread this chapter over and over again and not see how she accomplishes the magic of it.

Lisa Moore seems to address my own misgivings about genre fiction through the indiscriminate tastes of the youthful Ada:

Ada was reading murder mysteries and Hemingway and she had a Fitzgerald and a really good Dashiell Hammett, she said, and when she was done she tossed them over the side…She'd read three Agatha Christies in two days…Ada closed the book and sat up straight, looking hard at the horizon as if she'd just figured something out.

The big reveal, she said. That's my favourite part.

Why are you reading those stupid things? Carter asked.

The question I find intriguing is: Was Carter referring to just the Agatha Christies or to Ada's entire book pile as "those stupid things"? Is Lisa Moore purposefully conflating the classics with the genre fiction? With literary allusions throughout the book (Slaney could be thought of as a modern day Odysseus -- on his odyssey there are sirens, sea monsters [giant squid], a Cyclops [spy satellite] and a hurricane [sent from Poseidon because of his hubris ?]) and Hearn becoming a professor of literature, the author is acknowledging the literary while seeming to write an adventure tale. As in all great fiction, there is more to this book than meets the eye.

Although I did enjoy this journey very much, I didn't feel a perfect connection with the characters and plotline, and so I can't give Caught a perfect grade. I am delighted, however, to have been educated on how genre fiction can indeed contain great books.

The End is Near and it's Going to be Awesome

My 15 year old daughter, Mallory, said to me the other day that she had read an article online that stated if the minimum wage in the US was raised to $15/hr, there would be far less poverty and a more equal distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Being cynical by nature, I explained to her that if the Fry Cooks at McDonald's were making $15/hr, a Big Mac would soon cost $9 and this would disproportionately affect the lower income families who might eat out at the chain; the bottom line is, the fat cats will still keep getting richer; not since Henry Ford has anyone seemed to care if employees were being paid enough to consume the goods they were making (just think of the people who actually make iPhones and Nikes).

Reading The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, it's clear that Kevin D. Williamson shares my daughter's enthusiasm for easy answers: in every area of government that he examines (from Social Security to Education to Law Enforcement), Williamson details the awful state of affairs in each, offers up what these programs should look like, but doesn't explain how to transition from one way of doing things to the other; essentially, he fails to explain how to wrest control from the fat cats who have entrenched power.

I did enjoy quite a bit of the political philosophy in The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome, from the notion that "politics is violence" (just try not paying your taxes and see how long it takes before the men with guns show up at your door) to "the social contract is the only contract that somebody else can sign for you, without your consent, and still be held to be valid -- and a valid expression of your consent at that". And I also enjoyed the fact that Williamson remained bipartisan-- the problems in the US go beyond Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians; the problems are endemic to all of centrally planned politics.

Some bits that jibe with my own beliefs:

(On the impending bankruptcy of the entitlement/welfare state) The US government is, in an important sense, a promise -- a promise that is not going to be kept.

(On public education) With a market that is literally captive, ensured revenue with no meaningful accountability for performance, above-market compensation rates, heavy political protection from emergent competitors, and the biggest lobbying budget in Washington, the public schools have a setup that no robber baron or mafioso would have dared to dream of -- and summers off, to boot.

Some things that bothered me, leading me to wonder at the scholarly level of this book:

The English language has spread throughout the world (it is one of two official national languages of India) not because of unadulterated admiration for Anglo-American culture but because Chinese-speaking, German-speaking, and Hindi-speaking people wish to participate in the global economy, and speaking English makes that a great deal easier. Um, isn't English one of the official languages of India due to a hundred years of British rule in the subcontinent?

Also, Williamson name drops iPhones and Apple and Steve Jobs repeatedly-- was he getting paid for the product placements? He should be, for the amount of times it happens, and it seems out of place in a book that rails against vested interests.

And, several times, Williamson quotes long passages from his source material in which those books quote their source material. Isn't it Writing 101 to only quote primary sources?

I went into this book hoping to learn how the end of business as usual in American politics would be "awesome", but like Mal's uncritical enthusiasm for a seemingly simple solution to poverty, I think that Williamson's optimism is premature: with no systems suggested to move from a centrally planned government to the series of community-based and grassroots organisations that he proposes to take their place, I fear the result would be chaos; Hobbes' anarchic alternative to the Leviathan that Williamson dismisses out of hand. Awesome.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

As a "semi-autobiographical work of fiction", perhaps The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold can only really be understood and appreciated through the lens of the author's real life ordeal. Like the eponymous Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh was feeling ill and, suffering from insomnia, self-medicated with powerful sleeping draughts and alcohol. Waugh decided to escape an English winter with a trip to Ceylon, but once aboard ship, he began to have auditory hallucinations that ranged (in his fictionalised account) from the mundane (a dog) to the insidious (voices prompting him to jump overboard).

I assumed that Pinfold/Waugh was suffering from some form of paranoid schizophrenia, but learned that according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists:

Both author and protagonist describe alcoholic hallucinosis – a relatively rare complication of prolonged alcohol abuse which involves the development of psychotic symptoms. In heavy drinkers the disorder tends to occur in the tailing-off phase of a binge rather than on stopping completely, and is characterised by auditory hallucinations.

The self-parodying way in which Waugh unfolds the hilarity and humiliation of Pinfold’s journey belies the imaginable horror of his own experiences. Writing to his wife Laura from his own cruise he describes the “acute persecution mania” from which he is suffering and the discomfort of hearing malevolent voices repeating everything he has thought or read. By this point of his life Waugh had alienated himself from his friends and frittered away most of his money. Service as a Royal Marine in wartime, and supporting his second wife, six children, and an alcohol habit had taken its toll and, like Gilbert Pinfold, the voices heard at sea probably speak of a myriad of unconscious fears. For Pinfold there are questions about sexuality, religious belief, fascism, alcoholism, literary mediocrity, and a death wish. For Waugh we wonder to what extent these are shared.

This diagnosis would explain why the character of Pinfold is eventually cured of the hallucinations in concert with running out of his sleeping draught, and on the advice of his physician, not procuring more. That's pretty much the plot of it, it's a rather thin but enjoyable book, and even though Pinfold's experience didn't fill me with horror exactly, here are a few scenes that struck me for one reason or another. If they mirror actual hallucinations endured by Waugh, they reveal quite a bit about his subconscious mind. 



A young woman believes she is in love with Pinfold and her family encourages her to go to him. Her father says--

"You'll not be my little Mimi ever again, any more after tonight and I'll not forget it. You're a woman now and have set your heart on a man like a woman should. The choice is yours not mine. He's old for you but there's good in that. Many a young couple spend a wretched fortnight together through not knowing how to set about what must be done. And an old man can show you better than a young one. He'll be gentler and kinder and cleaner; and then, when the right time comes you in your turn can teach a younger man -- and that's how the art of love is learned and the breed survives. I'd like dearly to be the one myself to teach you, but you've made your own choice and who's to grudge it you?...But for God's sake come on parade like a soldier. Get yourself cleaned up. Wash your face, brush your hair, take your clothes off."

A radio program on the BBC:

"Gilbert Pinfold," he heard, "poses a precisely antithetical problem, or shall we say? the same problem arises in antithetical form. The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel never vary and they may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot, falseness of characterisation, morbid sentimentality, gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity, which will be found tedious or blasphemous according as the reader shares or repudiates his doctrinal preconceptions; an adventitious and offensive sensuality that is clearly introduced for commercial motives. All this is presented in a style which, when it varies from the trite, lapses into positive illiteracy."

And a hint that Pinfold probably knew that, despite all efforts to find a reasonable explanation for the voices, they were an indication of sickness: 

One night they tried to soothe him by playing a record specially made by Swiss scientists for the purpose. These savants had decided from experiments made in a sanatorium for neurotic factory workers that the most soporific noises were those of a factory. Mr. Pinfold's cabin resounded to the roar and clang of a factory.

"You bloody fools," he cried, "I'm not a factory worker. You're driving me mad."

"No, no Gilbert, you are mad already, " said the duty-officer. "We're driving you sane."

This conversation happens to Pinfold with flesh and blood people and makes me wonder if it actually happened to Waugh, and if it did, how ironic:

The (Scandinavian) woman now leant across and said in thick, rather arch tones:

"There are two books of yours in the ship's library, I find."

"Ah."

"I have taken one. It is called The Last Card."

"The Lost Chord," said Mr. Pinfold.

"Yes. It is a humorous book, yes?"

"Some people have suggested as much."

"I find it so. Is it not your suggestion also? I think you have a peculiar sense of humour, Mr. Pinfold."

"Ah."

"That is what you are known for, yes? Your peculiar sense of humour?"

"Perhaps."

"May I have it after you?" asked Mrs. Scarfield. "Everyone says I have a peculiar sense of humour too."

"But not so peculiar as Mr. Pinfold?"

"That remains to be seen," said Mrs. Scarfield.

"I think you're embarrassing the author," said Mr. Scarfield.

"I expect he's used to it," she said.

"He takes it all with his peculiar sense of humour," said the foreign lady.

"If you'll excuse me," said Mr. Pinfold, struggling to rise.

"You see he is embarrassed."

"No," said the foreign lady. "It is his humour. He is going to make notes of us. You see, we shall all be in a humorous book."

I include this scene because I wondered what Waugh had against Westward Ho!, though having not read it, and only guessing at which it is of the many books there are by that title, it intrigued me, made me giggle:

Mr. Pinfold fought back with the enemy's weapons (and) set out to wear them down with sheer boredom. He took a copy of Westward Ho! from the ship's library and read it very slowly hour by hour.

This scene is included only because it tweaked in me what Annie Dillard referred to as our own private astonishments (discussed in my review of her book For the Time Being and its relation to Zen, Drugs and Mysticism). Remembering his first time parachuting in the armed forces, Pinfold described the freefall thus:

(I)n that moment of solitude prosaic, Mr. Pinfold had been one with hashish-eaters, and Corybantes and Californian Gurus, high on the back-stairs of mysticism.

I enjoyed the way that The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold ended. In what other manner could an author deal with such a trying experience?

Mr. Pinfold sat down to work for the first time since his fiftieth birthday. He took the pile of manuscript, his unfinished novel, from the drawer and glanced through it. The story was still clear in his mind. He knew what had to be done. But there was more business first, a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experience—perishable goods. He returned the manuscript to the drawer, spread a new quire of foolscap before him and wrote in his neat steady hand

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

A Conversation Piece

Chapter One

Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age

Overall, this was an interesting look into a descent into madness (even if it was a temporary state brought on by a mix of alcohol and drugs), and also the protagonist's attempts to logically account for everything that's going on. There were many funny bits and the narrator of this audiobook made much of the material (the menace of Goneril was captured beautifully), but even though I went into this knowing that it was semi-autobiographical, I never felt a real connection to the characters or the plot. My only previous experience with Waugh was Brideshead Revisited, which I barely remember, but I would be willing to try him out again.