Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

If you're spying for the CIA, you have Langley and the United States of America. You might not see them from your street corner or hotel room, but you know they exist, and their power is a comfort. These men had no such thing. They had no country – in early 1948, Israel was a wish, not a fact. If they disappeared, they'd be gone. No one might find them. No one might even look. The future was blank. And still they set out into those treacherous times, alone.

In 2011, journalist and author Matti Friedman began a years-long interview with Isaac Shosan: a now elderly Israeli man with a unique story to tell about the early cloak-and-dagger days of Israeli Intelligence. Adding in information from others' memoirs, newspapers, and military reports, Friedman paints a picture of what life was like for these young men, sent out mostly unprepared and unsupervised into dangerous territory; the result is Spies of No Country. As their mission was to blend in and observe, this isn't a thrilling book about explosions and assassinations (although there is some of that), and as their unit was disbanded before the creation of Mossad, it would be unfair to call this a look at that famed organisation's genesis. What I liked best about Friedman's last book, Pumpkinflowers, were the parts that he processed through his own experience, but since this book isn't about him, that connection felt missing: what results is a stew of facts without a lot of flavour. Still glad to have read it. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes might not be in their final forms.)

This isn't a comprehensive history of the birth of Israel or Israeli intelligence, or even of the unit in question. It centers on a period of twenty pivotal months, from January 1948 through August of the following year; on two Levantine port cities eighty miles apart, Haifa and Beirut; and on four young people drawn from the margins of their society into the center of events. I was looking less for the sweep of history than for its human heart, and found it at these coordinates.

Essentially: In the aftermath of WWII, as the British were preparing to dissolve the Mandate for Palestine and the UN declared the area to be the new official homeland for Jewish peoples, surrounding countries became unstable, with Arab attacks on their Jewish neighbours and the Jews responding with counterattacks. In this instability, and even though the British forces were blockading Jewish refugees from entering the country, many Arabic Jews breached the border and joined life in the kibbutzes. In this period before the official declaration of statehood – in a time with no politicians, military, leaders of any sort – some men tried to establish order through unofficial means; and although the Brits had ordered the dissolution of a nascent intelligence service (which they had been training in case the Nazis entered the Middle East), that service's leaders began their own recruitment mission. Scouring the kibbutzes for native Arab-speaking Jews – those born in Syria, Jordan, Yemen – they pulled out the young men deemed most likely to pass as native Muslims and began to train them in the details of Muslim ritual, custom, and idiom. Once trained, they were sent to blend in in the neighbouring countries, and Friedman's telling focuses on the four young men who comprised the Beirut cell; men who posed as Jew-hating refugees, operating a kiosk and taxi service, listening for gossip and local sentiment and transmitting the details through a clandestine radio. Trapped behind hostile lines when Israel's War of Independence erupted, these men had no idea what was happening in the new Israeli state and less chance of getting information about the families they left behind in Aleppo or Damascus. This story is really about people who had been treated as “other” in their Arabic countries of birth, who were trained to erase what is other and non-Arabic about themselves, and who were then returned to a new country that was dismayed by the number of Arabic Jews streaming into their borders in the wake of the war and local reprisals in their countries of birth. When Isaac is eventually extracted, he doesn't know where or who he is:

There was no hero's welcome. There was no welcome at all, just a clerk's voucher for a night at an army hostel if he didn't have anywhere better to sleep. He didn't. He thought someone from the Palmac might be there to hear his stories, but there was no Palmac anymore. He was in the same city he'd left two years before on the bus with the refugees – and in a different city, with new people in the old homes. It was the same country he'd left in the chaos of the war, and a different one, where he'd never been. He was the same person and a different person.

There were some themes that I wished Friedman had gone into deeper: the widespread fear of Jews trying to pass as natives in order to destabalise countries (Friedman mentions Moses and the Dreyfus Affair) and the irony of a ragtag cabal accomplishing the ruse. And I wish he had gone further into the idea that Zionism was a European idea (which was essentially communist and atheist) and that these architects of the Jewish homeland were dismayed and disgusted by the influx of Arabic Jews (“Israel is more than one thing. It's a refugee camp for the Jews of Europe. And it's a minority insurrection inside the world of Islam.”) And the natural fallout of this mass migration of the minorities into Israel: the cultural loss to communities with ancient Jewish Quarters now empty of Jews; the fact that it's so much easier to “other” people when you no longer live alongside them. These ideas are all mentioned in passing as integral to understanding modern Israel, and I would have liked more on them. 

And yet, as Friedman writes, the big picture wasn't his focus here. He did a good job of describing the events of the twenty months he set out to relate, and his interviews with Isaac (the only member of the “Arab Section” still living) added some humanity to the base facts. I am left wanting more, but I suppose that only proves that I enjoyed what I got: an interesting little piece of a complex picture.

My Life as a Changeling

I was a changeling, switched at birth with a baby who had died. Torn between my two identities, I was neither. I was no one.

What a sadly compelling story Gail Gallant shares in her memoir My Life as a Changeling: After Gallant's parents lost the youngest of their three daughters, Gail, in a road accident, her devoutly Catholic mother begged God to send her back to them. When another baby girl was born the following year – with all the same features and attended by a pain-free birth – her mother declared it a miracle and named this infant “Gail” as well. Eventually giving birth to three more children, the busy mother's attention and affection were hard to come by, but as the “miracle baby”, Gail enjoyed her special place in the family's mythology – until she grew older and realised the psychological toll this otherness, this “changeling” role, had taken upon her. Gail Gallant's story isn't of some extraordinary life meant to enthrall or entertain the reader, but her experiences are just unusual enough to have expanded my notion of what a life can look like; and that's a good reading experience to me. (Note: I read an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)

I began to see a psychiatrist. For the first time ever, I started to really think about the role the other Gail had played in my life. The circumstances of my birth had always made me feel special. At the same time, though, I felt as if I had to do something special to deserve this miracle. I had to make up for the family tragedy. Pay the debt.

My own mother – from Prince Edward Island like the author – was meant to be named Maggie until my grandparents' best friends lost their infant daughter, Brenda, to some epidemic, and in honour of her, my mother was christened with the name “Brenda” as well; at no time, however, was it suggested that my mother was that same wee soul sent back to Earth (yet now I wonder what effect this tossed-off story actually had on her child's mind?) By contrast, Gail Gallant was told that she was the return of the dead Gail, and she began to worry why God had answered her mother's prayers when children died (and stayed dead) all the time; what purpose did God have for her? She became particularly pious (which earned her some degree of approval from her cold mother), but young Gail was terrified that the Virgin Mary would appear to her and assign her some dangerous task suited to the saints and martyrs that she learned about. She began to experience a duality in her personality – Gail believed that other Gail lived under her bed – and she became so adept at projecting one face (the pious) while hiding her true one (the terrified), that she embarked on a life in which no one ever saw the “real Gail”. As she details her entire life story, this duality had repercussions for her in school, at work, and in her personal relationships. And through it all, her mother remained cold and her father remained distant; this is not the story of a happy life.

All my life, you have been my dead sister. They named me after you. I am so much like you, if you'd been born later, they'd have named you after me. But you are more real than I have ever been. Admit it. You are Gail. I am only the “other Gail”.

I find it intriguing that Gallant has successfully harnessed her early dread of/fascination with the supernatural – she has written a couple of YA books around hauntings – and I appreciate the thoughtfulness and reflection she has put into this memoir. Maybe not of wide appeal, but I am pleased to have learned of Gallant's unusual origins.

I may have liked this even more for the points of similarity I found between the author and me: Not just the bit about my mother's name (which really is odd), but because her parents were from PEI, the entire family would drive down there every summer from their Toronto-area home (on such a trip, the original Gail died in a crash); and as my mother, my brothers, and I were all born in PEI, my family would drive down there every summer from our Toronto-area home. The Catholicism wasn't so pronounced in my home, but I recognised what Gallant was talking about - and I may not have feared an apparition from the Virgin Mary, but I certainly did fear accidentally conjuring "Bloody Mary" in the dark of my bedroom. Finally, I was touched deeply by the scene in which Gallant went to her first birthday party and she wanted to cry when the girl's father got all the friends together in a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday, "Until that moment, I had believed that all fathers were depressed and disengaged by nature." 'Nuff said about that, but I did have many pings of recognition while reading this book and want to stress that I don't think of three stars as a mediocre rating.

Tunesday : Red Red Wine

Red Red Wine

Written by Neil Diamond, as Performed by UB40

Red, red wine
Goes to my head
Makes me forget that I
Still need her so

Red, red wine
It's up to you
All I can do, I've done
But memories won't go
No, memories won't go

I'd have sworn
That with time
Thoughts of you would leave my head
I was wrong
Now I find
Just one thing makes me forget

Red, red wine
Stay close to me
Don't let me be alone
It's tearin' apart
My blue, blue heart

[Red Red Wine Toast Section]

Red red wine you make me feel so fine
You keep me rocking all of the time
Red red wine you make me feel so grand
I feel a million dollars when you're just in my hand
Red red wine you make me feel so sad
Any time I see you go it makes me feel bad
Red red wine you make me feel so fine
Monkey pack him rizla pon the sweet dep line
Red red wine you give me whole heap of zing
Whole heap of zing make me do me own thing
Red red wine you really know how fi love
Your kind of loving like a blessing from above
Red red wine I love you right from the start
Right from the start with all of my heart
Red red wine in a 80's style
Red red wine in a modern beat style, yeah

Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me Red wine the kind make me feel fine
Make me feel fine all of the time
Red red wine you make me feel so fine
Monkey pack him rizla pon the sweet dep line
The line broke, the monkey get choke
Burn bad ganja pon him little rowing boat

Red red wine I'm gonna hold on to you
Hold on to you cause I know your love true
Red red wine I'm gonna love you till I die
Love you till I die and that's no lie
Red red wine can't get you off my mind
Wherever you may be I'll surely find
I'll surely find
Make no fuss
Just stick with us.

Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me Red wine the kind make me feel fine
Make me feel fine all of the time
Red red wine you make me feel so fine
Monkey pack him rizla pon the sweet dep line
The line broke, the monkey get choke
Burn bad ganja pon him little rowing boat

Red red wine you really know how fi love
Your kind of loving like a blessing from above
Red red wine I love you right from the start
Right from the start with all of my heart
Red red wine you really know how fi love
Your kind of loving like a blessing from above
Red red wine you give me whole heap of zing
Whole heap of zing make me do me own thing
Red red wine in a 80's style
Red red wine in a modern beat style, yeah.

Red red wine you make me feel so fine
You keep me rocking all of the time
Red red wine you make me feel so grand
I feel a million dollars when you're just in my hand
Red red wine you make me feel so sad
Any time I see you go it makes me feel bad

I was in high school when UB40 released this song, and since I wasn't cool enough to listen to reggae, Red Red Wine was a fine introduction to the beat for me and my friends; AM radio-friendly, and it was played all the time. I also wasn't cool enough to listen to any of the early rap or hiphop of the time, so Astro's reggae-rap in the "toast section" sounded intriguing and non-threatening to my suburban ears as well. We would have sang along if anyone had any clue what the lyrics were - and reading them here today, I realise that I had no idea he was saying:

Monkey pack him rizla pon the sweet dep line
The line broke, the monkey get choke
Burn bad ganja pon him little rowing boat

We would have felt pretty subversive rapping along to that at the high school dances - because those were the times and I was that uncool. Relistening to it now, I think this song has weathered the years just fine, even if I'm using it in the most basic of ways to introduce this week's topic: a Niagara Wine Region tour we took on the weekend.

Dave had his annual offsite for the senior leadership team, and as always, spouses are expected to drive down separately, join in for dinner on the Friday night, spend all of Saturday together, and then join the SLT for dinner Saturday night. This is supposed to be a "treat", but there's nothing that I would like less than spending one day a year acting like these are my friends and window-shopping together. Sigh. So I didn't go to Niagara-on-the-Lake until late Saturday afternoon, and this year, there was a group activity before supper: a guided tour of three wineries before a dinner with wine pairings.

First of all, the small bus that picked us up from the hotel had some other couples on it already and I couldn't even sit with Dave. Then, the bus driver was a non-stop-talking know-it-all (he kind of reminded me of Joe Pesci as Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon), and everything was "We sell however many barrels of wine around the world" and "We had a wet summer that resulted in blah blah for us": everything was "we" as though he was intimately involved in the wine-making process himself and it got on every one of my nerves. At least there would be red red wine.

The first winery we went to was family owned and produces some of the finest ice wines in the world. The underwhelming tour guide showed us a trophy room of all the awards they have won, we were given an exhaustive history of the family's generations, and while the tour of their cellar was briefly interesting, an in-depth explanation of the custom-made furniture down there was not. Also not appreciated: the bus driver hovering, and if one made a quiet yet slightly sarcastic comment to one's husband meant to sound like a legitimate thirst for knowledge, said bus driver would interject and present a rote lecture on tannins and sugars and how they affect a wine's flavour profiles. Because this was our first stop, the wine tasting included a brief lesson on how to properly assess each sample, and that was fine and interesting and the wine was tasty enough for us to buy a few bottles.

The next winery was owned by two brothers, and it was the most interesting because it was small and it was one of the brothers - passionate about what he does - who shared his wine with us. His stories were interesting, he answered questions with enthusiasm and knowledge, and buying from him felt like supporting a small business. Meanwhile, the bus driver leaned against the bar, nodding his head in agreement with answers or fist pumping when he learned which wine we were going to be sampling next.

The third winery was Peller Estates, and their set-up is massive: a huge building (obviously perfect for weddings and other receptions) with a multistory fireplace roaring away in the entrance and delicious aromas coming from a restaurant somewhere, and an enormous tasting room with multiple servers ready to pour out any three samples we desired from a long menu. There was nothing really informative at this stop (except for the servers rhyming off the qualities of each selected sample) and we all tilted and swirled our glasses, aerating and swishing the wines in our mouths like experts. Walking around this huge sales room after - looking at three hundred dollar charcuterie boards, thousand dollar carafes - we didn't feel too bad about not buying anything at this stop.

So, after sampling nine different wines (which maybe added up to three full glasses), we were bused to dinner at a lovely restaurant. Being a group, we were given a limited menu from which to select our three course meal, and as they're the experts, the wine pairings were chosen for us. Food was good, conversation was good, but my tummy was left a little queasy after mixing multiple reds and whites and ice wines. Trying to sleep in a too-soft hotel bed later didn't help the queasiness.

When we first set off on this outing, I told Dave that I keep seeing a Groupon to do one of these Niagara wine tours by bicycle - I think it's self-directed and ends up at five wineries - and while at first we thought that sounded kind of fun, that's probably just too much (yes, you can swirl and spit out the samples, but what's the fun in that?) With three stops this time, and only one of them really interesting to me, I don't know if I'd be up to doing another wine tour. On the other hand, without the bus driver hovering or directing us, it could be just as much fun as we make it. 

Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me little time, help me clear up me mind
Give me Red wine the kind make me feel fine

Where the Crawdads Sing

As night fell, Tate walked back toward the shack. But when he reached the lagoon, he stopped under the dark canopy and watched hundreds of fireflies beckoning far into the dark reaches of the marsh. Way out yonder, where the crawdads sing.

I had to wait a few months to get Where the Crawdads Sing from the library – this is definitely a book with a lot of buzz – but despite its hype, its long list of four and five star reviews on Goodreads, and Reese Witherspoon's stamp of approval on the cover, this read fell totally flat for me. It started with a lot of promise – a little girl is abandoned in the marsh by her family one by one, and as we watch her growing up and taking care of herself in one timeline, a murder investigation and courtroom drama plays out in another – and then it all fizzled out into bad romance, bad mystery, bad storytelling. Just not for me.

The story is set in the North Carolina coastal marshlands, and in the beginning, I thought that what author Delia Owens got right was the nature writing:

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace – as though not built to fly – against the roar of a thousand snow geese.

But eventually, as Kya – alone in her shack in the marsh from the age of seven – becomes a keen observer of the nature around her (and after being taught to read by a former friend of her long-gone brother, she becomes an educated expert on the local flora and fauna), it became cringe-worthy to me the way that Kya could relate all human behaviour to what she observes in the critters of the marsh. Also annoying to me: that Owens couldn't have someone cook or send out for a meal without listing the five items on their plate, and I hated the amount of poetry that Kya recited in her head; would eventually skip over the stanzas. And the metaphorical language that I thought suited the nature writing felt overblown when used elsewhere:

• Soon after they arrived, he took up drinking and poker at the Swamp Guinea, trying to leave that foxhole in a shot glass.

• Kya was rigid at first, not accustomed to yielding to hugs, but this didn't discourage Mabel, and finally Kya went limp against the comfort of those pillows.

• Kya leaned over gently, as if to kiss a baby. The microscope's light reflected in her dark pupils, and she drew in a breath as a Mardi Gras of costumed players pirouetted and careened into view. Unimaginable headdresses adorned astonishing bodies so eager for more life, they frolicked as though caught in a circus tent, not a single bead of water.

And, okay, I can accept that despite going to school for one day of her life, with all her solitary hours to devote to reading and observations, Kya could basically teach herself college-level biology, but I couldn't buy that the first time she's alone with a boy she has a crush on and he points out an interesting shell, this is the reply of a conversation-avoiding hermit:

It's an ornate scallop, Pecten ornatus. I only see them rarely. There are many of that genus here, but this particular species usually inhabits regions south of this latitude because these waters are too cool for them.

I found the writing itself to be clunky and overwrought, and once Kya was old enough to yearn for romance, the narrative went to uninteresting (to me) places. And I don't even want to talk about the overall plot and the dissatisfying ending; don't want to talk about the shallow characterisations and improbable developments. This just wasn't for me, but I will allow that is is apparently of wide appeal.

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Their trauma became mine – had always been mine. It was my inheritance, my lot. My parents' tortured pact of secrecy was as much a part of me as the genes that had been passed down.

As ought to flit through anyone's mind who sends away a DNA test “for fun”, when Dani Shapiro got her results back, she learned that her father – the man she had lost in a car accident thirty years earlier but who had remained the touchstone of her identity throughout her life – turned out not to be genetically related to her. How ironic a turn of events for a frequent memoirist (Inheritance is Shapiro's fifth): not only is Shapiro singularly well-trained to illuminate and interrogate the facts of her life, but this new information turns the spotlight back on her motivations – why else had she been so obsessed with her own life if not for the simple reason that she always suspected there was a dark secret to uncover? Shapiro is a talented writer and the details of her situation go beyond the routine – sometimes facts really are stranger than fiction, and in Shapiro's hands, they make for a fascinating story. (I read an ARC and quotes might not be in their final forms.)

There are many varieties of shock. This is something you don't know until you've experienced a few of them. I've been on the other end of a phone call hearing the news that my parents were in a car crash and both might not live. I've sat in a doctor's office being told that my baby boy had a rare and often fatal disease. I have felt the slam, the blade, the breathless falling – a physical sense of being shoved backwards into an abyss. But this was something altogether different. An air of unreality settled like a cloak around me. I was stupid, disbelieving. The air became thick sludge. Nothing computed.

Because of Shapiro's and her journalist husband's contacts and resources, within thirty-six hours of learning of her DNA results, the pair were looking at her bio-father's Facebook page and wondering what to do with the information. Having been raised in an Orthodox Jewish family – and repeatedly told by family and strangers alike that the blue-eyed blonde Dani sure doesn't look Jewish – it was earth-shattering for her to now look at the photos of a strange man and see the planes and contours of her own face in them; to watch videos of him on his blog and see that he and she use the same hand gestures while delivering talks. It was particularly hard to see pictures of this man with a large, laughing family – celebrating Christmas no less – when her own childhood, as an only child in an unhappy home, had been so tense and lonely. Shapiro's mother was a pathological narcissist with a borderline personality disorder, her father was depressed and fragile, “consumed by his own sorrow”. As she writes about the instability of her homelife, “An invisible live wire stretched between my parents and me. Touch it, and we might all go up in smoke.” 

Shapiro learns that her parents, who had met later in life (this was her father's third marriage), had had trouble conceiving and eventually used the service of a fertility clinic (at a time when artificial insemination was unregulated and of dubious legality). The question that most hounded Shapiro was: If an anonymous sperm donor was used to increase the couple's chances of conception, could her parents, and especially her father, have possibly known? As an Orthodox Jew – someone to whom blood links and heredity meant everything – how could he have accepted a non-Jewish child as his own? Although she at first had qualms about sharing her results (and especially among elderly family and friends of her father's), Shapiro's quest for the truth eventually saw her meeting with anyone her father may have confided in. And as shocking as this revelation must have been, I was amazed by how understanding everyone (from Rabbis to family) were. When Shapiro met with her father's sister – now in her 80s and the relative that Dani was most afraid of alienating – the old woman had soothing words for her niece that touched me:

Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you could possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it – and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

I'm purposefully not revealing any of the more strange details of Shapiro's journey because the in-the-moment revelations made for a compelling read. But I will add that she goes over the ethics of secrecy and anonymity and whether children have a right to full disclosure – in a world that's becoming ever more connected and open, how could decades-old guarantees of “secrecy” even be protected? With more and more of these DNA samples being sent off “for fun”, there are sure to be more skeletons rattling out of closets everywhere, but not everyone can make such a thoughtful and interesting memoir out of the bones.

In Our Mad and Furious City

I think about why it had to be a younger that done it. Why it was that when we saw the eyes of the black boy with the dripping blade, we felt closer to him than that soldier-boy slain in the street. But now I know this city and its sickness of violence and mean living. These things come in sharp ruptures that don't discern. It was the fury. Horror curled into horror. Violence trailing back for centuries, I heard as much in mosque and from rudeboys on road. So when the riots blew up in the Square, when the Umma came out and the Union Jack burned in the June air, the terror had become unwound and lightweight. Each of us were caught in the same swirl, all held together with our own small furies in this single mad, monstrous, and lunatic city.

Apparently inspired by the real-life killing of British soldier Lee Rigby in London in 2013 by Muslim extremists (and the subsequent anti-Muslim backlash), In Our Mad and Furious City covers two days of life in a low-income housing block in the wake of a similar murder. POV rotates between five local residents – ordinary people unaware of the bedlam soon to descend on them – and it would seem that author Guy Gunaratne's premise is that tribalism is the natural response of oppressed peoples, but that there are always those who can break those ancestral bonds and walk away from violence. I thought there were some really fine scenes in this book, but with some strange plot choices and a melodramatic conclusion, I don't think that it added up to more than the sum of its parts. I would rate three and half stars, and am rounding down against other titles longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Ardan and I could not be more different on the surface. But that didn’t matter when our common thread was footie, Estate, and the ill fit we felt against the rest of the world.

Some early scenes revolve around young men gathering for a game of football in the grassy Square between the four towered block known as Stones Estate. Selvon lives off estate, but as he went to school with some of the boys who live there, he's part of the crew. Selvon is the son of Caribbean immigrants and he listens to motivational tapes, he runs and boxes, and his only goal is to escape the neighbourhood. Yusuf was raised the son of the local imam – his parents are Pakistani immigrants – but with his father now dead, he is under pressure from the fundamentalist new imam to turn his back on his friends and their world and recommit to the faith and lifestyle of his community. Yusuf is intelligent, well-spoken, and conflicted. Ardan is the son of a single mother – a Catholic escapee from Belfast during the Troubles; now a drunk and neglectful mother – and he is really the heart of the book: unloved and submissive, he has a talent and a passion for Grime music and would have the best chance of escaping the estate if he only had some confidence. As Selvon's father has recently suffered a debilitating stroke, all three young men are now essentially fatherless. Rounding out the five POV voices are Selvon's father and Ardan's mother. Taken together, these five perspectives paint a gritty picture of estate life with crushing poverty, constant threats of aggression, and people trying to find support amongst their various tribes. 

Although for the most part the impending violence takes place off the page – we learn that a group of Britain First nationalists and the Muhajideen from the local mosque are gearing up for a confrontation over the murder of the soldier – Gunaratne uses the memories of older characters to make the point that these confrontations have always happened (and presumably always will for as long as we separate ourselves into tribes). Ardan's mother, Caroline, was raised in an IRA family, and we see what it was like when she went to a rally that called for revenge attacks against Protestants:

The crowd threw itself forward, the floor shuddered with it. Damian stood with his mouth open, lost to it all. We both watched as the man grasped the air, his palms long and white, his ring that glinted against the light. He then shouted something I couldn't make out above the cheering and I stumbled with excitement. He walked offstage then as the crowd began howling themselves...They held up photos of the dead, the starved, the dying. I saw my brother join the shouts and the horrifying freedom in his eyes as he chanted. I raised my fists too and joined the chorus. Aye, there was I. My pale, youthful arms raised with my brother's.

Selvon's father, Nelson, joined the Colored Peoples Association when he first emigrated from Montserrat, and what he had thought was a rights group eventually turned into a Molotov-cocktail-throwing mob (apparently based on the Teddy Boy attacks on black West Indian immigrants in London in the early 1950s):

After all that we give for the cause, when the riot come, it was just the same as any other human collapse, the same loose and pointless frenzy. I never not understand the mind of furious men. The hard at heart, all of them hasty scrawled placard. For what? How we go from talking about we rights and decent living to being march out like foot soldiers bent and unthinking and hollow? We dusty group of angered blacks, my brothers and sisters them. How quickly honest talk is exchange for speeching, screaming about we numbers and we bodies and not we needs and means to live? How we plunge and grapple and seize all them loose ideas of unbelonging and offense.

And this easy provocation of the crowds continues into the present as Yusuf attends a rally at the mosque:

The chorus grew louder and I felt the crowd pulse with him. The thugs must pay for this abomination, he said. We were not to be intimidated by their barbarism. The noise grew louder though it was only Abu Farouk's voice I heard. He then thrust the Qur'an into the sky and called his followers to march together. The infidel would not get to August Road this day, he said. The Umma would march to meet them. We would go onward to the High Road and charge the white mob if necessary, and meet the savages in the street. A horrifying chorus rose. I remembered my father then. I thought of the beautiful world Abba described to me when I was young. How I held his Qur'an and recited verse on his podium. I looked around and saw what it had all become.

All three of these groups are linked by their outsider status – Catholics in 1980s Belfast, black Caribbeans in 1950s Britain, Muslims in present-day London – and in each narrative, the bullies of the majority groups have the police and the politicians on their side. And while in each narrative we don't see anyone from the POV of the oppressive majority, it seems pretty clear that although Gunaratne sees a violent response from the minority as understandable, he doesn't think of it as ever justifiable. And if that's what this book stuck to, I probably would have liked it more. Instead, there is a fundamental misunderstanding that leads to an ironic and melodramatic ending – with the arc of inevitability of a Greek tragedy, which is only forgivable in an actual Greek tragedy – and if the point is that individuals can escape their tribes and “choose love”, the author shouldn't have allowed Fate (or whatever his impetus was) to take over. (I had the same kind of negative reaction to the ending of Tommy Orange's There, There, for the same reason.) In a related complaint, there's a clunky thread around whether a character couldn't help but be morally corrupted by Western society (even if he was eventually told to take responsibility), and moreso, I didn't appreciate when a character lost control to his sexual urges and got all rapey. Maybe it's easy to lose individual control to radicalising speechifiers, to society and to one's own hormones – to unwittingly become mad and furious in a mad and furious city – but Gunaratne has created characters here from older generations (Caroline and Nelson, who were able to leave their poisoned tribes), and younger characters who have built their own tribe based on music, football, and familiarity, and their experiences aren't extrapolated to the larger situation. So what's the overall point? I don't know. But I am glad I read this – Gunaratne has an exciting and fresh voice and I look forward to something more focussed from him.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *

Tunesday : Undo Ordinary

Undo Ordinary

Written and performed by River Matthews

From your lips
Your feet, your eyes, your fingertips
I never get tired of loving you

And just a smile
To slow dance with my heart awhile
I never get tired of loving you

And I’ll hold your hand beneath my pillow so
I never get tired of loving you my love
You my love, my love

If clouds were blue
You'd turn them gold
You Undo Ordinary love

If cards were hearts, you’d draw them all
You Undo Ordinary love

So come a little closer now
Come a little closer now
How d’you not give up my love by now
If I were you, I’d have my doubts
But that’s just ordinary

And if the day
Turns our only hairs to grey
I'll never get old from loving you

Cos like the time
It’s you that beats this heart of mine
I'll never get old from loving you

And I’ll hold your hand inside my pocket so
I never get old from loving you my love
You my love, my love

If clouds were blue
You'd turn them gold
You Undo Ordinary love
If cards were hearts, you’d draw them all
You Undo Ordinary love

So come a little closer now
Come a little closer now
How d’you not give up my love by now
If I were you, I’d have my doubts
But that’s just ordinary

I’m inclined
To think that love could leave us blind
But you don’t seem to mind

If clouds were blue
You'd turn them gold
You Undo Ordinary love
If cards were hearts, you’d draw them all
You Undo Ordinary love

So come a little closer now
Come a little closer now
How d’you not give up my love by now
If I were you, I’d have my doubts
But that’s just ordinary

I have written before that I'm becoming less and less enchanted by my job - and especially as it is increasingly moving away from the book business and into more lifestyle goods (which is particularly irksome because of all the woowoo stuff we're selling now: the crystals and the salt lamps and there's no way I'm going to stand around talking up their "benefits"; yeah, they're pretty. Full stop.) But as annoyed as I can be at work some days, when this song, Undo Ordinary, comes up on the playlist, it makes me smile every time: I love this song, only hear it at work, and it serves to remind me that my days there aren't all crap.

A former coworker of mine came into the store last summer, and when I was telling her then how the job has changed, she said, "Then why don't you apply at the library and work with me?" I laughed and pointed out that I'm not educated as a librarian, and she said that neither is she - but she works there anyway. And that has been niggling at me for months. How much would I love to be in a job again that is about books? And then when I went on a girls' weekend in January and Jenny asked if I had ever considered applying at the library - as a friend of hers had in their hometown, and she's loving it there - it felt like the universe was nudging me in that direction (yeah, I'll unashamedly embrace my own brand of woowoo, thanks).

So, a few weeks ago I looked at the library's "Careers" page and found that they were looking for a Children's Programmer - which would be an excellent fit for my education and experience. I got really excited. I applied and used my former coworker as a reference, I had already left my current job in my mind - and then didn't even get called for an interview. Which is deflating, but okay. What I now know is that making such a change would make me happy, and the back of my mind is humming with, "How do I undo ordinary and move forward into extraordinary?" I'll get there.

Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from My Father

My dad was determined to take care of me properly. He made pancakes and cookies and sewed my clothes. He was actually good at that. He was a little worse at what he regarded as an integral part of parenting: the dispensing of life advice. But, nonetheless, it was one of his favourite things to do.

Wisdom in Nonsense is the transcript of a talk that Heather O'Neill gave as part of the CLC Kreisel Lecture Series in 2017 (the Canadian Literature Centre itself having the mission “to engage in scholarship, foster research, and promote public interest in Canadian literature, with a view to enhancing an understanding of Canadian literature’s richness and diversity”). Other speakers in this series have included Margaret Atwood (on the Canadian literary landscape of the 1960s), Lynn Coady (on the digital vs physical book debate), and Tomson Highway (on the many languages and communities that have shaped him). That seems like an eclectic mandate, and for O'Neill's part, she titled her lecture, “My education. On unusual muses and mentors. And how I had to teach myself everything in order to cross the class divide.” In essence, this is a series of essays on the curious lessons her single father passed down to her (Learn to Play the Tuba [and you'll always have a job] or Never Keep a Diary [because it can be used against you in court some day]), and along the way, O'Neill reveals the gritty landscape she grew up in and the outcast characters she fraternised with; all recognisable to anyone who has read her wonderful novels. Ultimately, I don't know if this, as is, would have wide appeal (or if it really measures up to the topics other authors tackled in the Kreisel Lecture Series) but I enjoyed it well enough and would love to see the story of Heather O'Neill and her dad stretched out to book length. Random quotes – 

From Lesson 6, Never tell Anyone What Your Parents Do for a Living:

By teaching me to lie about who I was, my dad instilled in me the notion that the differences were actually superficial. They were just outward trappings. And if you were to change coats with a rich person, then you would immediately become one. In life there will always be someone trying to take your personhood away. Someone trying to get you to think you are less than they are. It happens with colour, it happens with gender, it happens with class, it happens with education. There are people who will have you believe that class is hereditary. That you are less of a person. I was a child of a janitor, but he wanted me to be treated like the child of a professor of philosophy.

From Lesson 8, Crime Does Pay

As a child, I was crazy about cheese. So in the evenings my father would stop at select grocery stores to steal the most expensive cheese on display. At home, he would arrange the cheese in cubes on a plate that was covered in a pattern of rabbits: blue cheese, camembert, gruyère. He would pronounce them in funny ways because he couldn't read very well. He would bring out the plate while we were watching television, and we would eat them with frilly toothpicks. We'd turn from the episode of The Benny Hill Show we were watching and nod at each other whenever the mouthful was particularly delightful.

From Lesson 10, Respect Old Timers:

I feel that I need to pause for a moment and interrupt this train of thought – just in case you're getting the idea that my dad was this wonderful guy. Full disclosure: he was an asshole. There's no way around it. His behaviour was pretty shocking. He was the kind of guy who would be watering the grass, then turn the hose on someone walking by, thus instigating a fistfight. My father would always brag about the bar fights he had gotten into as a young man. He claimed that the most underrated weapon in the world is the ketchup bottle. It is inconspicuous in your hand and creates high drama when it is smashed against someone's head. In the interest of journalistic integrity, I thought I'd put that out there.

This book is very short – just forty pages after the introductory bits – and I am glad for the hints it makes about the influences that O'Neill brings to her writing. It might be more interesting to watch or listen to O'Neill delivering this lecture, but it also made me curious about the rest of the books in this series. Certainly worth the time I put into it.

Lady Chatterley's Lover

What did the man want? Did he want to rouse the house? What was he standing there for, transfixed, looking up at the house like a love-sick male dog outside the house where the bitch is? Goodness! The knowledge went through Mrs. Bolton like a shot. He was Lady Chatterley's lover! He! He!

I read Lady Chatterley's Lover as a teenager (and all I truly remembered about it was her Ladyship twining daisies into her lover's chest hair, which I was surprised to learn I had remembered wrong; it was forget-me-nots woven in further south), so it seemed fitting to pick it up again as a Valentine's reread. Unsurprisingly, all of the social commentary went over my head the first time (not necessarily because I was young, but just because I was me), and now knowing a bit more about the moment D. H. Lawrence was writing in, I can see why characters were sitting around talking about industrialisation and Bolshevism and noblesse oblige. There are several different tacks I could take in trying to review this book from my now older perspective (the evolution of what we consider “pornography”; shifting norms regarding marriage, adultery, and gender roles; the blurring of class), but all I really want to talk about is what I twigged on to this time as Lawrence's major theme: that shame-free, tender-hearted sex is the sole way for a man and woman to truly connect, and moreover, that it's the only route back to the Garden of Eden. I will proceed as though there is no such thing as a spoiler in a book which is now nearly a century (!) old.

Constance Chatterley married her baronet because they enjoyed a mutual mental stimulation (sex not being that fulfilling to either of them), yet when Clifford returned paralysed (and impotent) from WWI and the couple inherited the gloomy family manse in the Midlands, it didn't take long for Connie to realise that a purely intellectual relationship (and especially with a man of dubious intellectual gifts) is not quite a marriage. Items of note overheard among Clifford's highbrow friends during these years: I liked when one visiting lady told about a futurist book she read that predicted babies would eventually be bred in bottles, that women would be “immunised” (against conception), and she suggested that in place of being tied down with the whole procreation thing, humanity might enjoy regular morphine exposure (which sounds a lot like Brave New World to me, which came a decade later). Some male visitors disdain sex, some think it no more intimate than having a conversation with a woman (so why would a man object to someone sleeping with his wife if he didn't object to him talking with her?), and some think sex is a base function that doesn't bear discussion, “We don't want to follow a man into the w.c., so why should we want to follow him into bed with a woman?” Connie's father, among others, suggested that she take a lover, and even Clifford states that if his wife remained emotionally unattached and it produced an heir for Wragby Hall, he'd be behind the scheme. The bottom line is that all of these characters take it as accepted that there's no natural correlation between sex and some particularly human sublime experience. Bored and lonely, Lady Chatterley takes to walking in the woods on Wragby's grounds, and she is seduced by the beauty of nature:

The wood was silent, still and secret in the evening drizzle of rain, full of the mystery of eggs and half-open buds, half unsheathed flowers. In the dimness of it all trees glistened naked and dark as if they had unclothed themselves, and the green things on earth seemed to hum with greenness.

Alas, the nearby coalmines that provide for the Chatterleys' wealth – with their belching stacks and 24-hour mechanical noises and grubby housing with their insolent workers – are never far from her awareness, and when she eventually runs into the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, Lady Chatterley is unsettled by the wild in him as well. When they eventually start their affair and Mellors (who is educated and army-disciplined and seems to be in a class of his own) is free to speak his mind, he mainly decries the “modern condition” of people working in pursuit of money, instead of just enough to sustain themselves and filling the rest of their time being “real men” and “real women” taking delight in each other; all of modern life is the collieries encroaching on the forest; the mechanical displacing the natural. For the first time with Mellors, Connie experiences more than just release with sex: 

She clung to him unconscious in passion, and he never quite slipped from her, and she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring, and strange rhythms flushing up into her with a strange rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness, and then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling, and she lay there crying in unconscious inarticulate cries.

And eventually, the pair are dancing naked in the rain, weaving buds into each other's body hair, and as Mellors “cups her tail” with his hand, stroking “the two secret openings to her body” (which referred, in my mind, back to the man who didn't want knowledge of another's experience in the w.c.), it's the ability to appear open and without shame in front of one another – in a way that Mellors explains is beyond the base rutting that animals engage in – that marks a return to Paradise:

She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Having had her husband's permission (and for the sake of an heir, her husband's tacit encouragement) to have herself an affair, it would seem that Lady Chatterley's only crime was to not remain emotionally unattached (and, I suppose also, for mixing with a commoner), but as seems to be the point, once we have stood wholly naked and unashamed in front of another, we are open to the sublime and forge true and transcendent bonds. And as for Sir Clifford and the flipside to that particular coin: he has his own shame-free scenes – engaging a matronly nurse to care for his body – and when he realises he has lost his wife, Clifford turns to the nurse “like a baby” (which Lawrence frequently suggests here that most men are at heart): “He would put his hand into her bosom and feel her breasts, and kiss them in exultation, the exultation of perversity, of being a child when he was a man.” The book ends without resolution, with Mellors learning the art of farming so as to prepare for when Connie and their baby can join him in a life that returns to nature; one without need for excessive labour in the pursuit of money and overspending; no bowing before the "bitch-goddess Success" or "the Mammon of mechanised greed".

I might have quibbles with anachronistic prejudices and stylistic choices – I wouldn't call this a novel that truly stands the test of time – but I do admire what Lawrence was trying to put down on the page. Perhaps I'll pick it up again a few decades hence and see what I glean anew.