The Wolf and the Watchman

You can't fool me! You are indeed a wolf after all. I've seen enough to know and, even if I am wrong, you will soon become one. No one can run with the wolf pack without accepting its terms. You have both the fangs and the glint of the predator in your eye. You deny your blood thirst but it rises around you like a stench. One day your teeth will be stained red and then you'll know with certainty how right I was.

The Wolf and the Watchman is a twisty, gritty, historical mystery that makes for an entertaining (if often disturbing) read. I don't reckon it has the depth to rank among works of great literature – the plot doesn't reveal anything compelling about human nature, the characters don't experience transformative growth, the lines don't buzz with electricity (could that be a fault of the translation?) – but this story does immerse the reader in a total sensory experience of another time and place that is wholly satisfying. Four stars would be a rounding up.

When the first blow lands, they don't understand what is happening. The left hand comes up from waist height, and since the hand has been carved as if the palm were open, it almost looks as if he is caressing the face of the closest man. Teeth fly through the air in a cascade of red. Cardell carries the force of the arm's momentum into the next punch, and the next, feels an arm snap, the bridge of a nose crack, a rib cage give way, an eye fly from a socket. Each hit translates into an explosion in his stump and the pain only fuels his rage.

In the first section, it is autumn of 1793 and a drunken Watchman has been roused to fish a corpse out of an interior lake of Stockholm known as “the Larder” – a scummy cesspool filled with butcher's waste, latrine dumpings, and where the washerwomen soak their laundry. This corpse has been perversely mutilated, and the Watchman – Mickel Cardell; a war veteran with PTSD and a wooden arm – is so disturbed by the sight of the body that he can't help but attempt some follow up inquiries as to the victim's identity. This puts Cardell in the path of Cecil Winge – a young lawyer and moral crusader, sometimes employed as a detective for Stockholm's police department, who is nearing the end of his battle with tuberculosis – and as Winge is in need of an able body to help in what he assumes will be his last investigation (and as the dissolute Cardell could use some extra coinage), the unlikely pair teams up to attempt to identify the corpse. Winge's investigative tenacity leads to him being called a wolf in that opening quote, and Cardell's special skills are demonstrated as he moonlights as a bouncer at one of Stockholm's many dingy pubs. This first section was my favourite: the mystery compelling, the setting dripping with palpable filth, and a running undercurrent of social commentary:

Look at the two of you! A bag of bones and a cripple in rags, and you dare to look at me in that way. What can people like you know about the desires of nobler men? Men who have grown up under the yoke of generations of wealth, waiting for their inheritance of goods, property, domains, and titles. These men were raised to rule. The responsibility weighs heavily on them. They are in need of relief in a way that you cannot even imagine.

The second section rewinds to the summer of 1793, and with the story of a country bumpkin named Kristofer Blix who comes to the big city to find his fortune (told charmingly through letters that he writes to his sister back home), I was thoroughly fascinated by the tale it tells of the economic and power disparities of the time and place. There were many satisfying twists in this section, and I'll spoil none of them.

The next section rewinds further to the spring of 1793, and we follow along with a young woman, Anna Stina Knapp, as she thwarts a male friend's attempt to rape her – and is accused and convicted of whoring for her troubles, sent to a workhouse for fallen women and doomed to spend the rest of her miserable life starving, spinning wool, and avoiding her jailers' whips and advances. Despite the further illumination this provides for the book's setting, I found this section less compelling and it diminished the intrigue I had been enjoying around the main plot. 

Violence has never appealed to Winge on his path of rationality. Now he wonders if there is a place where love allows itself to be translated into violence, a place out of reach of his own. Somewhere far away, a lone howl rises towards the moon.

The final section jumps ahead to the winter of 1793, where all the threads converge, and it seemed to me that author Niklas Natt och Dag unnecessarily complicates his story's denouement – there are too many last minute tangents that didn't add to the mystery's suspense or its resolution. On the other hand, the portrait of eighteenth century Stockholm painted by Natt och Dag (I love that that translates as “Night and Day”; one of Sweden's oldest surviving noble families) was totally worth any disappointment I might have felt for the mystery itself.

Figuring

 Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry – intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth – not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love?

Figuring is one of those genre-defying reads that I find so hard to write about. Maria Popova, much-respected creator of the Brain Pickings blog, outlines her thesis (above) at the beginning of the book, and then she proceeds to illuminate the lives of pioneering thinkers (as it says in the book's description for Goodreads, “mostly women, mostly queer”), primarily by illustrating the ways in which these lives intersect with others (but don't call this a biography). Popova focusses on scientists and artists and the ways in which these two seemingly disparate disciplines interplay with each other – from Pythagorus' “music of the spheres”, through the Transcendentalists' melding of the two in the contemplation of nature, to Rachel Carson engaging the public in science with her poetic prose – and by circling back again and again to the same figures, she underlines the connectedness of everything (in human civilisation as in nature). And while this all adds up to an impressive and erudite aggregation, I also found it trying my patience: it felt too long, but I couldn't tell you what should have been cut out; I admire this book more than love it. 

Popova mainly focusses on the astronomers Maria Mitchell and Caroline Herschel, mathematician Mary Somerville, the writer/critic Margaret Fuller, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, poet Emily Dickinson, and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. I have to admit that I was amazed at how little biographical information I knew about even the names on that list with which I was familiar: and especially the fluid and stymied sexuality that led so many of them to live out their lives in lonely frustration. Intersected into these main narratives are the influences of people such as Kepler, Pythagoras, Goethe, and Pauli; Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (and who knew that Herman Melville was hopelessly in love with Hawthorne?), the Brownings and the Darwins and Charles Dickens; Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Really, too many names to recount them all. Mostly, though, these are stories of pioneering women who reached the pinnacle of their disciplines but were nonetheless denied access to the reins of power: denied the vote or publication, dismissed as “hysterical”, or literally denied entry to laboratories and observatories based solely on their sex. Yet, while the biographical information was the most interesting aspect of Figuring for me, Popova cautions against the adequacy of constructing a life from what a person leaves behind:

In lives like Emily Dickinson's – lives of tessellated emotional complexity encrypted in a private lexicon, throbbing in intensity bloodlet in symbol and metaphor – the inevitable blindspots of biography become eclipses. Because we bring our whole selves – our beliefs and our biases, our experience-sculpted curiosity and our limited knowledge – to all we do, each biographer is less an instrument of truth than an interpreter of meaning. And yet: Like a scientific theory, a biography is a map – one of many possible maps – to an objective external reality that may never be fully discernible or describable to the subjective observer but that is still best explored by mapping, by approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable.

And still, Popova takes many opportunities to try and illume the eclipses; to approximate the landscape of truth:

As Carson walked off the stage to a resounding ovation, she was stopped midstride by the sight of Dorothy standing quietly in the back of the lecture hall. With their eyes locked, Rachel approached her without a word, greeted her with an impulsive kiss, and whispered: “We didn't plan it this way, did we?” They went back to Carson's hotel for an hour – two bodies in physical space, behind a closed door, behind the curtain of partial records we mistake for history. All that survives of their relationship are the letters they exchanged while they were apart. But what transpired while they were together? The words that flowed between them, the torrents of touch, the glances each containing a galaxy of feeling, a universe of sentiment – unrecorded, unrecordable.

I have included large chunks of quotes here because Popova is an entrancing writer – better for me to allow her to speak for herself than try to describe her craft. Figuring is filled with declaratives which gave me pause at every turn, so here are a few examples:

• Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on a current of time.

• The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.

• We are never one thing, our slumbering potentialities stirred into being by situations in which chance and choice conspire to make us the people we are said to have been.

On the down side, I became annoyed by Popova's too deliberate links between everything and everyone; the following paragraph illustrative of the way in which she would introduce nearly every new thread:

Three nights before the Elizabeth sinks – as the deadly mycobacterium is weaving its way through Annie Darwin's body in England, as France is mourning the sudden loss of Louis Daguerre to a heart attack, as Emily Dickinson is beginning to fall in love with Susan Gilbert in Amherst, as Harriet Hosmer is dreaming up her sculpture Hesper, the Evening Star in Boston – John Adams Whipple uses Harvard's Great Refractor telescope to make the first daguerreotype of a star: Vega, the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, object of one of Galileo's most ingenious experiments supporting his proof of heliocentricity. “Nothing should surprise us any more, who see the miracle of stars,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Aurora Leigh.

(Popova inserts herself into the figuring when she writes that she went searching for Margaret Fuller's tombstone “a million and a half hours after her death.” Ugh.) I appreciate that Popova was reaching for something beyond biography with this work, but in a way it was like listening to someone describe an afternoon she spent going down the Wikipedia rabbithole, clicking here and there as her interests dictated – the course of which doesn't necessarily follow what would have been interesting for me (and, therefore, the description of which isn't entirely interesting to me either). For instance: I was really enjoying the narrative of Rachel Carson's life – I would pick up a biography on her in a heartbeat – but when it got to the assassination of JFK (“sixteen hundred hours before King's assassination, 864, 353 after Lincoln's, and 72 after the Gettysburg speech he [JFK] didn't deliver”), Popova weaves in Whitman writing about the assassination of Lincoln (which leads to the chime between Lincoln calling Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” and JFK greeting Carson as “the lady who started all this” [in reference to the environmental movement]), and then moves to how Jorge Luis Borges reacted to the news in his native Argentina, and how Leonard Bernstein dedicated a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony in tribute of JFK's memory, and how the news affected Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals – and I just wanted to get back to Rachel Carson and the events of her life without all these tangents; nothing of Borges, Bernstein, or Casals figures anywhere else in the book and it cemented for me the feeling that much could have been excised for a tighter, more compelling read.

Still, I am left impressed with the working of Popova's mind and the skill with which she expresses herself. There was much I liked in this read, but again: this is a case of more admired than loved.

Tunesday : Adventure of a Lifetime

Adventure of a Lifetime

(Written and performed by Coldplay)

Turn your magic on
Umi she'd say
Everything you want's a dream away
And we are legends every day
That's what she told me

Turn your magic on
To me she'd say
Everything you want's a dream away
Under this pressure, under this weight
We are diamonds

Now I feel my heart beating
I feel my heart underneath my skin
And I feel my heart beating
Oh, you make me feel
Like I'm alive again
Alive again
Oh, you make me feel
Like I'm alive again

Said I can't go on
Not in this way
I'm a dream that died by light of day
Gonna hold up half the sky and say
Only I own me

And I feel my heart beating
I feel my heart underneath my skin
Oh, I can feel my heart beating
'Cause you make me feel
Like I'm alive again
Alive again
Oh, you make me feel
Like I'm alive again

Turn your magic on
Umi she'd say
Everything you want's a dream away
Under this pressure under this weight
We are diamonds taking shape
We are diamonds taking shape

If we've only got this life
This adventure, oh, then I
And if we've only got this life
You get me through

And if we've only got this life
In this adventure, oh, then I
Want to share it with you
With you
With you
Yeah I do
Woohoo
Woohoo
Woohoo

"Adventure of a Lifetime" might be overstating it, but if I haven't been updating on here as much as I have in the past, I suppose it's because I've been intentionally trying to live more life than just read about it or record events of my past. As per my grand plan to better get to know the offerings of our local community, that all seems to be on track; and we had an eventful long weekend to prove it.

Kennedy and Zach came up Saturday morning (we met for breakfast after boot camp) and Kennedy started Googling for some kind of interesting hike we could take the dogs on. She found a place called the Cheltenham Badlands - less than an hour away and a place that none of us had heard of before - so we packed up the dogs and some snacks and hit the road. The landscape - exposed, undulating clay mounds - was very interesting to see, but unfortunately, all of the trails around the badlands have been closed off due to misuse; all we could do was look out over the mounds from a boardwalk, and that was only interesting for a few minutes.

When we got back to the car, Kennedy pointed out that on the way to Cheltenham we had passed the turnoff for Heart Lake - a conservation area that promised lots of trails - so that's where we headed next. When we got there, we realised that the park had a "treetop trekking and zip line" course, so Dave and Zach signed up for that while Kennedy and I decided to check out the trails (I would have liked to try the treetop experience, but we had the dogs, so on the ground we stayed). We didn't realise until Dave paid for their experience that it could take up to three hours, so Kennedy and I said goodbye and headed for the longest hike around the lake. The weather was perfect - a little cool and no burning sun - and we had a fun time making our way through the woods and up and down the well-worn path; doing our best to keep Peaches and Cormac out of the muckiest bits. Cormac was eventually trying to suck water out of the wettest muck, so we stopped on the far side of the lake for a water and snack break.

We got back to the starting point after about two hours and were lucky enough to arrive just as Dave and Zach were about to zipline back and forth across the lake itself. Sitting at a picnic table right under where they crossed, Kennedy was able to take great pictures and videos for them, and both dogs got plenty of attention from other spectators.

Back home afterwards, out for dinner and some euchre before the kids went home made for a perfect Saturday. The next day, Dave and I decided to check out the bike route that we'll be taking for the Tour de Grand in a few weeks, so we packed up our new bikes in the car and headed for the Cambridge to Paris rail trail. The route we'll be doing is just halfway and back again (a total of about 20 km), so that's what we decided to do and it was no problem (even though neither of us has been on a bike for probably five years). The weather was gorgeous - high 20s, no wind, and beautifully cool in the tree-canopied shade - and there were plenty of people out on the trail: walking, jogging, cycling. This was exactly the kind of experience I had in mind for this summer: Forging an active link between myself and the Grand River while finding my place in the community of like-minded folks. Only down side: the next day, we both had very sore bums around the sitting bones; we'll need to re-examine our saddle situations.

We cooled off with the first swim of the year, and later that day, Dave's parents and my brothers and their families came for a barbecue and then for some fireworks out in the park (I do believe that Dave is done with putting on a show on the street; in the park for just us was just fine with me; so much for strengthening bonds with the community, lol). I found myself telling my younger brother, Kyler, about the adventures we've got in mind for this summer, and he said that they had the same epiphany a  few years ago: they apparently live close to parks with the most waterfall hikes in Canada, and his family has been checking them out whenever they can. Dave thinks we should lean on all of them to join us on some of our planned adventures, and I'd like that fine.

Related, but not involving me directly, I should memorialise the fact that Dave has been taking equestrian lessons from our former neighbour Sam (she and Corey moved to a farm last fall where they can finally have their horses - and a whole menagerie of other animals - on site with them, and she wanted to offer a men-only riding night which Dave was happy to join in order to live out his John Wayne fantasies). Dave has been having a great time and finds himself a natural cowboy, yeehah!

The Monday of the long weekend was a welcomed down day and the only time I spent reading for days - which is good and bad. I want to be more active and engaged, but I can't believe how long it's taking me to read my current book. Ah well, I'll find the balance that makes me happy.

                                                                             And if we've only got this life
                                                                              In this adventure, oh, then I
                                                                                Want to share it with you
                                                                                               With you
                                                                                               With you
                                                                                               Yeah I do
                                                                                                Woohoo
                                                                                                Woohoo
                                                                                                Woohoo

The Ruin

The house had been derelict twenty years before, and it was rotting now. The roof had collapsed inwards. The front door was missing, and the doorway gaped, dark and threatening. He was glad to see the place in ruins. Glad that no young Celtic Tiger couple had come here with their dreams and their temporary money, to turn the place around and give it new timbers, new sheen. The house deserved to die.

At our last book club meeting, someone suggested we try a mystery, and as The Ruin had been highly recommended to me by someone whose opinion I value very much, I proposed it – and am now filled with regret. This sort of police procedural is not my usual fare, and for all I know this book is a fine example of its sort, but ultimately, I found the plot too convoluted and noncredible, the characters to be flat with improbable motivations, and author Dervla McTiernan wrote with a distracting chip on her shoulder – taking every opportunity to explain the multiple ways in which Irish women and children have been mistreated by the government and the Catholic Church. In the end, I found myself bored by the storyline and annoyed by bad writing. 

“I found Maude, found Jack, in a house with no electricity, damp everywhere, the place basically rotting around them. Their mother was dead. I brought them to the hospital. I saw what had been done to Jack. I never forgot him, Aisling.” And that, at least, was true. “I cared about Jack. I care about him now. If there's something suspicious about his death, I'll find out. But I need you to talk to me. If you hear something, know something, come and find me. I won't let you down.”

The book begins with a prologue: Fresh out of the police academy, Garda Cormac Reilly is sent out on a domestic call of low importance, only to discover two abused and neglected children living in a derelict house with their freshly deceased mother. Fast forward to the present and Reilly – now a Detective Inspector and recently returned to Galway after a stellar career in Dublin – is having trouble fitting in with the local police force; given only cold cases and grunt work, Reilly is surprised when one of his assignments is to reopen the case on that dead mother and her orphaned children. Events in the present seem to be tied to the past, but Reilly is thwarted in his investigation by a lack of cooperation from his fellow Gardai: is this a routine hazing of a too-celebrated newcomer, or could the local police force have something they're hiding? Layer on a few other investigations (a cold case murder, a missing young woman, suspected domestic violence, a drug-addicted mother trying to get out of jail with her baby), then layer on the introduction and back stories of a whole host of characters that McTiernan will apparently be using in her Cormac Reilly Series, and that's a whole lot going on.

I'm not disputing that the Irish government, in concert with the Catholic Church, has a history of acting abusively and controllingly towards Irish women and children, but to my sensibilities, McTiernan lessens any message she was trying to get across by continuously throwing in detail after detail. The sexual abuse of children by priests is mentioned (as well as the level of control that made parents reluctant to complain about it, although this abuse doesn't actually feature in the story), and there are many discussions about a woman's pregnancy and the fetus' nonstatus as a “baby” and the ease with which she ought to be able to get an abortion, and there are discussions about the inability of social workers to remove abused children from their homes (because keeping children with their mothers, in every case, had been in the Constitution?), and a young woman who was raped was encouraged by her family not to report it because of the shame it would bring on them, and it's mentioned that a single mother was prevented from getting a job as a teacher on moral grounds, an obviously abused wife can refuse to lay charges against her husband, the jailed mother can only keep her baby with her until the infant turns one and then she will be put into the foster system (because her single brother, her only family, would not be allowed to adopt her)...I'm sure I don't even remember everything, but it was just too many issues for one book. 

And then the writing: I found it so basic and cliché-ridden. A sample paragraph:

The words were a punch in the gut, a twisted knife in an open wound, but they woke Aisling up. Anger burned through the fog of grief that had dulled her since Jack's death, and she welcomed it, fed it. She clenched her fists.

I so regret suggesting this to the book club; I won't be back for the next Cormac Reilly installment.

Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild

His last image of Neil, angry and scared, looking at him out the back window as the cruiser headed south down Confederation, was never far from Jason's mind as he talked with Jarvis. Like most natives living in Saskatoon, Jason had heard about “starlight tours”, stories about Saskatoon police driving natives out of town and forcing them to walk back. He wondered if that's how Neil had gotten to the industrial area where he had died.

Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild, released in January of 2019, is the revised and updated version of a book originally published in 2005. I can't speak to just how necessary these revisions might be for the original text (although there were a couple of very interesting facts in the new epilogue), but anything that keeps this horrifying story of racism, abuse, and the stonewalling of a corrupt police force in the public discourse is vital and welcome in today's Canada. Thoroughly researched and squarely reported, I found this account to be equally engrossing and mortifying: Just how can this happen here? Deserves to be read widely.

On November 24, 1990, seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild was out partying in Saskatoon, on what many described as the coldest night of the year. Separated from his friend Jason Roy, Neil was last seen alive in the back seat of a police cruiser – wearing handcuffs, bleeding from the nose, and screaming “They're going to kill me” – only to be discovered a few days later, frozen to death in a field at the city limits. After a perfunctory police investigation – what's one more drunk Indian succumbing to misadventure? – the Stonechild case was officially closed; but it never closed for the friends and family who knew that Neil would never have been walking out there in such thin clothing by his own volition.

In January of 2000, Indigenous man Darrell Night survived being dumped in the freezing cold at Saskatoon's city limits by police officers, and after eventually being convinced to come forward with his story, local media made the connection between Night's indisputable account and two recent freezing deaths of other Indigenous men. When the link was made back to Stonechild's death a decade earlier, the Saskatoon Police Services found themselves at the center of an external investigation by the RCMP.

One native man had brought the terror of the “starlight tour”, long considered urban folklore outside the native community, to the public's attention for the first time. The photos of Lawrence Wegner's frozen body lying face down on the snow-covered prairie sped instantly across wire services to media all over the world. Saskatoon achieved instant notoriety as the little Canadian city where police dumped native people like human trash.

The story that follows of the years-long investigation, interviews, and official Commission of Inquiry make for heartbreaking reading: at every turn, it would seem that the police officers involved either failed in their duties to serve and protect (when they weren't outright harming Indigenous peoples), and when the narrative reaches the commission stage, the courtroom drama is as enthralling as any work of fiction – but with so much more at stake with the loss of actual human lives and the offences to the dignity of Neil Stonechild's mother, family, and friends. The big blue wall in Saskatoon wasn't going to go down without a fight.

Was it going to be as simple as that, Worme thought to himself as he listened. Just a matter of saying that Neil was GOA on November 24, to deny any knowledge about the boy's disappearance and death and to say they could not remember associating the discovery of his body with the call to Snowberry Downs? Worme felt his anger and cynicism build as he thought through the strange mathematics in a commission of inquiry that made denying and forgetting add up to nothing happened.

I understand that authors Susanne Reber and Robert Renaud wrote Starlight Tour from a certain point-of-view: although no one can actually prove that Neil Stonechild was dumped at the city limits, where he later froze to death, by Constables Brad Senger and Larry Hartwig, the preponderance of evidence suggests that that's exactly what happened; the Commissioner of the Inquiry, The Honourable Mr. Justice David H. Wright, concluded as much in his findings, and the authors present this narrative from that perspective. I find that to be a fair viewpoint, and although the officers never faced criminal proceedings for their actions, I agree with the assessment of Neil Stonechild's mother, Stella Stonechild Bignell: “They'll have to pay eventually, they will. Whoever did this. We all have to answer to one God – they're going to have to die, too, one day. When you answer to God, you can't take a lawyer with you. No lawyers where they're going.” May it be so.

Fatboy Fall Down

“Eh? Your belly full.” He repeated the sentence each time he brought down his rod on Orbits' hand, on the scabs he had been gnawing at. “Go and stand at the back of the class.” When Orbits was walking to the back, a boy pushed out his leg and he tumbled. The teacher's annoyance turned to amusement. “Fatboy fall down,” he said, and the class erupted.

Fatboy Fall Down traces the entire life of an atypical Trinidadian villager: A man nicknamed “Orbits” in childhood for his tendency to watch the clouds and dream of floating away (at least he was able to get people to stop calling him “Fatboy”); a man so incurious and without agency that he accepts every job and relationship as they come along (and go away again), somehow arriving at a station in life more privileged and stable than the others he grew up around. Forever resentful of his unhappy childhood, without ambition (or, apparently, the intellect to improve himself), incapable of meaningful interpersonal conversations, Orbits is a tough character to feel empathy for. But as he moves from village to town, from working as a tour guide to government drone to minor politician, Orbits' (rather dull) story fleshes out a (rather fascinating) picture of Trinidad – its oil boom and bust years, the government corruption and backwater superstitions that keep a people chained to poverty – that was all new to me. Overall: Orbits' story would get three stars, Trinidad's is worth four, and it's pretty much a coin toss to decide whether to round up or down – I'm happy to have read this but can't imagine it would have wide appeal (beyond a probable acknowledgement at literary award season for author Rabindranath Maharaj).

What would Cascadoo say if he knew that Orbits had failed exam after exam and had hated school for the taunting he had received? That he was less the man he appeared to be and had never truly rid himself of the fear of being discovered and humiliated? That he always felt he was one step away from being dismantled, the remaining bits of him rearranged to be the boy cowering before his bullies?

There's something very distancing about the Orbits character – he has what appears to be a tremendous amount of luck for someone who waits around for opportunities to fall in his lap, but his unhappy childhood drags after him like a ball and chain, and as a result, he is forever waiting to be uncovered as a fraud and it makes him reluctant to speak openly with other characters. So even though Orbits is constantly mentally reviewing his misfortunes, other characters find him standoffish and the reader (this reader) finds him frustratingly self-absorbed. 

Throughout his life, he had done nothing, made no effort, showed no determination. His mood matched the fickle storm: he felt within minutes guilt and relief, shame and satisfaction. He fell asleep with these conflicting feelings, but when he awoke the following morning, they had merged into something less oppositional: the idea that he had survived. Somehow, he had managed.

On the other hand, I very much enjoyed the life and bustle playing out in Trinidad in the background – the vistas, foods, slang, and power struggles. I loved that everyone grows up with these unshakeable nicknames. I appreciated the frequent debates about the pros and cons of trying to emigrate and join family in Florida or Toronto. I was enlightened by tales of bribery and corruption that saw highways built to nowhere while the poor people suffered with unfinished sewers leaving unnavigable potholes on their dirt roads. (And if the point of the book's title is that the entire country is being held back by the lingering trauma of its colonial/slave-plantation roots, then I'll begrudgingly round up to four stars.)

Orbits was able to look at all of the unsatisfactory events of his life with a kind of wonder, seeing the losses, the shame and deprivations not as tragedies but as preparations. He suspected this was not an accurate rendering of his life, and that he had failed many people who depended on him, and that he was far from fulfilled, but it introduced a notion of wobbly balance – of his life tilting this way and that but still moving forward. Somehow, he had managed to hang on.

As the action, such as it is, is focussed on the (rather dull and unengaging) life story of the unappealing Orbits, this book was a bit of a slog to get through. But I'm still happy to have read it for the bigger picture.

The Porpoise

The Porpoise is beautiful – polished oak, polished brass, everything singing with little bursts of sunlight. There is a ship's wheel with protruding handles at which you could stand and be Barbarossa or Vasco da Gama, there are cream canvas sails which belly and ripple and slap, there are portholes and winches, there are proper ropes of twisted sisal.

The Porpoise is a book that's very of this moment: It could pass as a volume in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series (as a modern-set retelling of Pericles, it has the ironic self-awareness of Shylock is My Name); it traces the patriarchy/rape culture back to Western Canon foundational texts (as did The Red Word); it attempts to give voices to those female characters from the epics who seemed to exist just to be ravaged or abducted to advance the tales of male characters (like Circe or The Silence of the Girls); and it adds a bit of feminist revenge fantasy (a la The Power). Author Mark Haddon blends all of this together in surprising and effective ways – the sentences are sharp and the characterisations are believable – but the format seems unnecessarily muddied; I might have abandoned this when it first took a hard curve (but am glad I didn't). My other niggling complaint – which I'm still mulling over – is whether this kind of feminist-smash-the-patriarchy story is a man's to tell. Still mulling. As I didn't know the plot of Shakespeare's Pericles, or the original Greek tale of Appollonius of Tyre, the details here were surprising to me – so I'll place the rest of this review behind a spoiler warning. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

***Spoilers Beyond ***

The book opens with a plane crash: A pregnant woman dies at the scene and her husband is initially uninterested in the infant daughter who is saved – until he becomes sexually obsessed with her as a replacement for her mother. This man, Phillipe, is from very old European money, and as he has always been able to buy anything he wants, he is able to keep his daughter, Angelique, hidden away at the family estate; his staff paid well for their loyal silence. Angelique is not allowed friends, public schooling, TV, or internet, so while she has no other models for family life, she does know that her relationship with her father is harmful: when he comes to her at night, she sends her mind far away into the plots of old classics she has read. When Angelique is sixteen, a young art dealer, Darius, brashes his way into the home, and when he intuits what Phillipe's dark secret is – and when Phillipe jealously recognises his daughter's attraction to the young man – Darius is lucky to escape with his life; hiding away on a yacht, the Porpoise, that his friends are set to sail to its new owner in the Mediterranean. Angelique is devastated by the glimpse and denial of a different way of life and she stops speaking, and soon, stops eating. When the scene returns to Darius, the reader watches as he morphs into Pericles – who also happened to command a ship named the Porpoise – and it takes some time to realise that the rest of his story happens in Angelique's declining mind; tracing the story of Pericles, his wife, and daughter, and giving them the happy ending that her own family didn't enjoy.

In both the modern-day and the Classical Greek timelines, Haddon's writing is rich and evocative. In another layer of this mash-up, a couple of sections trace the story of George Wilkins – the pimp and poet that some scholars infer wrote the first half of Shakespeare's Pericles – and this dip into Elizabethan England is also a joy to read. Shakespeare himself leads a freshly dead Wilkins from his bedchamber to meet his fate: being left alone and adrift on the Thames as his small boat is surrounded by the Siren-like specters of the women he had used and abused in his bawdy house:

Is this a punishment? It was bad enough being led here by his offensively prolific one-time collaborator, but to discover that the sex too weak to have dominion in the physical world are possessed of demonic powers in the other is too hard to bear. Dear God, he gave many of these women employment. If it weren't for his business they would have been on the streets at best. The thought is pointless. There is very clearly no one here to whom he can plead his case.

Angelique herself makes an appearance as the sea monster who deals out Wilkes' final punishment – and while I find that in theory to be wholly satisfying (literarily and emotionally), this was where I began to find Haddon becoming heavy-handed with the anti-patriarchy rhetoric (which, again, only kind of bugged me because he's a man). In a later scene, Pericles' daughter, Marina (who was raised by foster parents in a faraway kingdom), has been kidnapped by an agent of the evil Queen. The Goddess Diana and her cohort come to Marina's rescue:

He does not want to die. He has never had this thought before. More deer come out of the dark. Fifteen? Twenty? Equally indifferent, equally unafraid. Then, behind the deer, he sees the women. If he had been asked what would frighten him most at night in the hills he might have said a hungry bear, or a band of armed men perhaps. But this scares him more than anything he could imagine. Tunics, javelins. The world turned upside down, the weak given power. The revenge they could justify if they had the means at their disposal. A life would not be long enough to repay the debt.

(I don't believe that this mercenary actually had those thoughts, but I suppose it's plausible if I remember that it's Angelique – helplessly under the power of her father and rapist – telling herself the tale the way she wants it to go.) As Marina makes her way through the woods, she notes that a young girl is only safe while under the protection of an older man, and the entire narrative is filled with this sort of “this is what the patriarchy/rape culture looks like” inner commentary. Angelique is at one time thinking about Ariadne and Minerva's weaving competition – in which Ariadne wove a tapestry that depicted all of the forms that Jupiter assumed in order to rape unwitting human women (there's that subtext again) – and throughout the book, there are numerous references to spiders and weaving; I really don't need (or like to be) knocked over the head with allusions. But in a book with some missteps (which I am still mulling over), I think that Haddon wrote something quite special here (since this is behind spoiler tags I guess I can add that I like the uncertainty over whether or not Darius ever did leave the estate alive [hard to tell where Angelique's fantasy starts] and I really liked how the assassins trailing Pericles were called off once Philippe and Angelique “were struck by lightning” [it may have tipped the ending too soon, but the foreshadowing in this book always added interest]). I can't fault Haddon for recognising and wanting to help right the imbalance of power between the sexes – the book is so of this moment – I guess I just question the authenticity of a man writing from the POV of the vulnerable female. 

Recursion

He paddles into the cove, picking up speed as he approaches land, running the kayak ashore on a bed of crushed rocks. As he hauls himself awkwardly out of the cockpit, a single memory drops – sitting at that bar in Portland as Helena climbed onto the stool beside him for the first time in their odd, recursive existence.

“You look like you want to buy me a drink.”

How strange to hold three distinct memories of what is essentially the same moment in time.

I reread my review of Blake Crouch's last book (Dark Matter) after finishing this one, and I have to say that my thoughts are exactly the same for Recursion: this isn't great literature, but it's a fun read and would make a thrilling movie (of the sort I don't really watch). I have long thought that if the plot of a book could be satisfactorily presented within an episode of an hour-long series like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, it doesn't really need to be a book, but I didn't regret the length here – I was always entertained and can see this being another best seller for Crouch. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He's experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?

As Recursion opens in November of 2018, we meet NYC Police Detective Barry Sutton as he responds to a suicide call: a woman is threatening to jump from a building, claiming that she has been flooded with hazy memories of a better life that make her current one not worth living. Barry recognises this as another instance of False Memory Syndrome – a seemingly contagious disorder that has been popping up in the area – and as he starts to investigate the phenomenon on his own time, he'll be drawn into circumstances stranger than he could have imagined. In the next chapter, set in October of 2007, we meet Helena Smith: a brilliant research scientist who is attempting to invent a device that can record the memories of dementia patients (like her mother), with a view to re-embedding them once their memories are gone for good. It's not surprising that Barry and Helena's paths will cross when the timelines merge, but Crouch does take the narrative into some surprising places.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.

Layered onto the engaging plot is some sciencey talk (Crouch adequately explains how his device works without relying too much on the mysteries of quantum mechanics), and some philosophical moralising (I suppose it's inevitable that new technology will be grasped by those who want to privitise, monetise, and weaponise), and the plot goes from exploring the possibilities of the science, to crisis, to ramped-up crisis, to freewheeling anything-could-happen-at-this-point (kinda just like how Crouch paced Dark Matter). And it was all fun. I did my best to keep this spoiler free – the details are probably more interesting than I've made them seem.