Perhaps because of its unique social geography, the degradation of mid-sized city economies, or the silo effect of the city's makeup, London seemed the perfect place for sex traffickers, drug dealers, and serial killers. They stopped here on their way through, as Ontario's superhighway 401 connects us easily with Detroit and Toronto. The Forest City was made a safe haven for the worst criminals by the covered eyes and ears of our citizens. Londoners can be remarkably incurious people.
\My husband was born and raised in London, Ontario, apparently at the same time that that small, conservative city was unofficially known as the serial killer capital of Canada (and perhaps even of the world), and while reading Vanessa Brown's account of those still unsolved murders, The Forest City Killer, I couldn't help but wonder what those years must have been like for my inlaws: bringing children into a world where the daily headlines warned of young people being found raped, murdered, and left, half-naked and bloodied, exposed to the elements. When I asked Dave about this, he said he had never heard of any connection between London and supposed serial killers while growing up (giving credence to Brown's assertion that Londoners are particularly good at ignoring their city's unseemlier side), and it seems outrageous that fifty years later, these victims' families are still awaiting justice. As Michelle McNamara did for the Golden State Killer in I'll Be Gone in the Dark (who was eventually found as a result of the attention McNamara brought back to those murders now attributed to him), Brown's primary purpose seems to be to revive these cold cases and put pressure on the various police departments to retest evidence, follow up on new connections, and get the public talking again, perhaps prompting people to finally reveal what they know. With a respectful discussion of the various crime scenes and an always empathetic narrative around these victims and their families, Brown strikes just the right balance between relaying information and maintaining dignity for those involved; a worthwhile project, done well. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Someday, someone is going to write a book about the English case, as we are dealing with some of the wackiest people that existed. Mrs. Harrison and Glen Fryer were both insane. Even a TV drama could not come up with weirder people. – Dennis Alsop Jr
As an amateur historian, journalist, and trained antiquarian who runs an independent used bookstore in London, Ontario, Brown has both officially and informally spent her life collecting the stories of the locals she meets and talks to every day. After learning about London's history with serial killers from Michael Arntfield's Murder City, Brown eventually arranged a meeting with Dennis Alsop Jr: the son of a detective with the Ontario Provincial Police who investigated many of London's murders in the late 60s/early 70s, and who is now in possession of his deceased father's personal archives. With the aid of this new information (including Alsop Sr's personal theories; those things the police know but can't prove in court), Brown develops and relates her own theories, apparently unique in the online sleuthing community, and if any of this can catch a killer while he may still be alive, it seems a worthy project. What I might object to is the middle chunk of the book – focused on the strange and coincidence-laden story of “the wackiest people that existed” – that makes for interesting reading, but may only be tangentially related to the case that Brown is building.
And while I appreciate the frustration that the victims' families and modern researchers might feel towards what they now regard as shoddy police work at the time, Brown spends a lot of ink editorialising about those investigations when she could just let the facts speak for themselves. It would seem that at the height of the runaway hippie days, the police were unwilling to search for missing young women until weeks passed (assuring a family that their long-missing daughter “is probably off somewhere married by now”, or in the aftermath of a church group needing to organise its own search party when the police refused, officially commenting, “If three hundred men couldn't find her, I doubt three hundred and six could have either”). There's no arguing that victim shaming and moral relativism were prevalent in those chauvinistic days: A coroner sneers that a teenaged murder victim hadn't been a virgin, a divorcee probably wasn't the victim of rape because people knew she liked to sleep around, it's implied that a sex predator could have been contained if his wife had met his needs, a judge cautions a jury that they couldn't add rape to a murder charge if it's found that the body had only been violated after death. Weird and nasty stuff to the modern reader. When an adolescent is found dead, bloody and bruised, her genitals exposed and her mouth stuffed with pink tissue, the police reaction is incredible, but I didn't need Brown to spell it out for me:
Detective Herb Jeffrey said, “We feel the victim knew the person who picked her up.” When asked about the type of person who would commit such a disgusting, violent act, Jeffrey ruled out an abnormal mind. He said, “Perverts destroy. This was more like the work of a healthy male.” The implication was that a man had been overcome with lust and arousal, that this kind of behaviour – kidnap, murder, and sexual assault – was just a natural offshoot of a healthy man's desires.
Inserting herself into the narrative did add interest for me – learning the history of Brown's research made the subject matter more relatable, as did the local colour she could provide as a resident of the setting – so it's not that I wanted Just the facts ma'am, I just found the running commentary about the state of police work back in the day to be too often snide. I was fascinated to learn that the first detective to respond to a murder case back then would write his name on the victim's hand before anything else to claim the case (talk about corrupting a crime scene!), and I agree with Alsop Jr's assertion that the police often forget that investigations belong equally to victims' families and information and evidence shouldn't be so jealously guarded from them (nor, for that matter, should the victims' non-evidentiary belongings be held indefinitely as their families plead for their return). Brown quotes often from Murder City, makes reference to coverage of some of these murders on the television show To Catch a Killer, and discusses the online sleuthing devoted to London's serial killers on the website Unsolved Canada: it would seem that even if people can live their entire lives in London without knowing it had been the serial killer capital of Canada, there are still many people committed to solving these decades-old cold cases. If, as with the Golden State Killer, the Forest City Killer is caught as a result of this fresh focus on the facts, any narrative quibbles I might have would be moot. I hope that is the case.
The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is the guide to all things. Contemplate the state of the moon until you know it well. Its soundness is the strength of all things, its ruin the corruption of all things. If the moon moves closer to another celestial body then it gives more force to whatever that body can tell us or give us.
I probably wouldn't have read Celestial Bodies if it hadn't won the Man Booker International Prize for 2019, and this kind of book is precisely why I value this particular literary award: written by an Omani woman, Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies tells the stories of several generations of a family living in Oman – a setting which was completely new to me – and along the way, Alharthi describes that country's political and social history, its legacy of slavery and having been a British colony, the rivalries between the urban shaykhs and the rural imams, domestic customs, religion and superstition and the slow liberalisation of a patriarchal society. It's a lot to pack into 243 pages, and as much as I enjoyed this glimpse into a new-to-me culture, Alharthi's real focus is on the hearts and minds of her characters; people whose motivations are familiar and universal. The profusion of characters was a little confusing for me (even with a family tree to refer to) and the plot itself felt a little light (more a series of vignettes than a satisfying whole) but I still really enjoyed this overall experience.
The plot mainly follows three sisters living in the (fictional) village of al-Awafi and the marriages that they make: the mousy Mayya marries the wealthy son of a merchant, Abdallah; book-loving Asma marries the artist Khalid; and the beauty, Khawla, vows to wait for the cousin she was betrothed to as a child to return from his studies in Canada. Point-of-view rotates between an omniscient narrator following something like fifteen different characters, with a continuing, intermittent storyline following Abdallah on a flight to Germany as he considers (and sometimes contradicts) the details previously outlined. It was interesting to see how, in Omani culture, even with the sexes more or less separated from each other from adolescence, each of these characters expected a love match; that everyone seemed to fall in love with someone at a glance, yet for the most part, ended up marrying whomever their parents chose for them. There is a subtle evolution throughout the generations – with the young women being given ever more control over who they will marry – but the main theme seems to be (and the title seems to imply) that fate is written in the stars (even if sometimes, when the celestial bodies are aligned just so, humans can encourage the moon and planets to intervene in human affairs). As someone who has read extensively in Muslim scholarship, Asma believes the following:
Some of those who fancy themselves philosophers claim that God, Mighty is He, created every soul in the shape of a ball. And then He split every one of these spheres into two, and apportioned to each and every human body one half. It is decreed that each body will meet the body that holds the other half of that rent soul. Between the two a passion arises from that ancient bond. From one human being to the next, the effect of this union will vary, according to the delicacy of each person’s nature.
But the reality of her marriage to Khalid, content as it may be, turns out to be something different:
She began to realise that there was no way she could be Khalid’s other half, once upon a time sundered but which (he assured her) he had now found. This was because Khalid, on his own, took on the likeness of a celestial sphere complete unto itself, orbiting only along its already defined path...In the end, and with a great deal of patience, self-examination, and occasional sacrifice, they learned to create enough space that each could orbit freely. When they collided, and if they fused, Asma and Khaled knew it was only a temporary disruption, and that each path would return to its own course.
Fate vs freedom was a recurring theme, and while I appreciate that Abdallah's continuing story on the airplane demonstrates that even the son of a wealthy merchant may have little real freedom (particularly his inability to free himself from reliving unhappy childhood scenes under a strong man's thumb), it was the women's stories that most intrigued me here. From the story of a slave whose daughter will grow up into servitude long after slavery is officially abolished:
On the 26th of September 1926, Ankubuta was roaming the sparse expanse outside of town, bending over to pick up the few branches she could find, when the first pangs came. As she saw to the birth of her own daughter, with a rusty knife to separate the baby's life from her own, the men gathered in Geneva to sign an accord. Their signatures abolished slavery and criminalised the slave trade. It was Ankubuta's fifteenth birthday, but she was as unaware of that as she was that the world held a place called Geneva.
What the thought of marriage to a virtual stranger offers to Asma:
She'd be one of the women now, and finally she would have the right to come and go, to mix freely with the older women and listen to their talk, to attend weddings, all of them, near and far, and funerals too. Now she would be one of the women who sat around their coffee in the late mornings and then again at the end of the day. She would be invited to lunch and dinner, and she would issue her own invitations, since she was no longer merely a girl. Marriage was her identity document, her passport to a world wider than home.
And what “freedom” meant to Salima, mother of the three daughters, as she was growing up:
She felt pangs of hunger, that most familiar of sensations from her childhood, all the time she was growing older, crouched at the foot of the kitchen wall in her uncle's fortress-like compound, denied the bounties of its kitchen. True, she had not spent her childhood stirring big pots or sweeping or carrying water or wood on her head. True, she was not a slave or a servant. But nor had she ever had the satisfaction of a full stomach or the pleasures of wearing pretty clothes or learning embroidery, since Shaykh Said was not her father but only her father's brother. She couldn't leave the confines of the walled compound or play with the girls who lived nearby. She didn't have a part in the shared laughter and play when women and girls were bathing in the falaj, nor in the dancing at weddings like the girls from slave families did. She couldn't be given remnants of old clothes out of which she could make gowns for wooden dolls. But equally, she didn't have gold chains or bracelets to put on, nor could she enjoy the delicacies of the table like the daughters of the shaykhs did. She grew up at the foot of the kitchen wall, always hungry, always observing slave women's freedom to live and dance, and mistress women's freedom to command others, adorn themselves as they liked, and make visits to their likes to other well-off families.
But the times do change: by the end of the book, a young woman can cancel a marriage contract when her betrothed becomes abusive; a middle-aged woman can ask for a divorce when small seeds of dissatisfaction grow into a mass too large to ignore; an older woman can call down an effective curse upon her philandering husband, and freedom is gained whether written in the stars or not. There is a lot happening in this small book, and while I don't think the format worked 100% for me, I learned plenty and was often surprised by where the story went; an ultimately satisfying reading experience.
Claws sliced the air not five inches from his back. Even in his terror, Blanky marveled – he knew that the arc of his kick had put almost ten feet of air between him and the mainmast as he swung past. The thing must have sunk the claws of its right paw – or hand, or talon, or Devil's nails – into the mast itself while hanging almost free and swinging six feet or more of massive arm at him. But it had missed. It would not miss again when Blanky swung back to the centre.
Before I left on holidays, someone asked me what I would be reading and I was excited to reply that I was finally getting around to The Terror by Dan Simmons – a book, as I understood it, that was about the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845, filled with all of the historical bits about the British Navy's quest for the Northwest Passage, rumoured cannibalism, and spoiled tinned goods. As someone who has read quite a few nonfiction books about the Franklin Expedition, a straight fictional treatment of the story on its own might not have drawn me in, but what's special about this book, as I explained, is that there's some kind of preternatural monster that begins preying on the expedition's crew when they find their ships icebound and helpless. And to add another layer of interest for me, this creature is apparently based on Inuit legend; according to the people who actually live there, this creature might actually exist. The Terror does include all of these layers, but as much as I was looking forward to reading it, as strong as the narrative began, in the end, it became too long, too repetitive, the creature didn't make nearly enough appearances, and when the tie-in to Inuit mythology came crashing in at the end, it felt abrupt and culturally insensitive. Just barely more like than dislike for this one.
The first chapter, set in 1847 as Captain Crozier of the icebound HMS Terror inspects his ship's lower holds, ends on the perfect note:
Something, Francis Crozier suspects, has dug down through these tons of snow and tunneled through the iron-hard slabs of ice to get at the hull of the ship. Somehow the thing has sensed which parts of the interior along the hull, such as the water-storage tanks, are lined with iron, and found one of the few hollow outside storage areas – the Dead Room – that leads directly into the ship. And now it's banging and clawing to get in. Crozier knows that there's only one thing on earth with that much power, deadly persistence, and malevolent intelligence. The monster on the ice is trying to get at them from below.
The second chapter then rewinds to 1845, following Captain and expedition leader Sir John Franklin as he prepares for the voyage in the final days before sailing. Again, Simmons hit all the right notes – ominous warnings from other polar explorers about the unsuitability of the two ships under Franklin's command, an introduction to Franklin's history of incompetence and pride, the drawing out of suspense until we can learn more about the monster from the first chapter – and for the longest time, I was satisfied by the shifting timelines and multiple POVs. But this is a long book, and being satisfied for the longest time doesn't mean that I was satisfied for most of this (for example: around page four hundred, Crozier spends pages making a mental list of everyone the expedition had lost to that point and how they died and I truly resented the recap; if I didn't remember any specifics to that point it's because I didn't find them important; Simmons was making a long book needlessly longer and he lost my trust. A couple of hundred pages later, Crozier went through this mental muster again. Ugh. Also: I don't ever need to hear the terms “Preston Patent Illuminators” or “Frazer's Patent Stove” again [I doubt that the crew used these ungainly names, so why should Simmons? Repeatedly?], be told once more that a man with scurvy can be startled to death by a gun shot, nor be reminded that while muskets are more accurate, the seamen were more comfortable with shotguns. One time for each would have done it. Too long made too much longer. Double Ugh.)
Blanky knew a secret that made even his sanguine personality wane: the Thing on the Ice, the Terror itself, was after him.
There were many scenes that I did like: Franklin's death took my breath away, I was thoroughly mesmerised by the Carnavale, Hickey's dance took me completely by surprise. Spending months in the dead of winter trapped aboard ship in the ice, and then spending weeks and months hauling sledges across unyielding fields of snow boulders, all while suffering scurvy, malnutrition, and mortal terror, was described in grueling and pitiable detail. I know that the grind and boredom and relentless labour was kind of the point here, but I just wish that more happened in this book; there's a monster following you on the ice, how was that not more exciting? Of course, we all understand that the most monstrous thing out there is man himself:
“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?”
And then there's the Inuit presence that ultimately rubbed me the wrong way. “Lady Silence” – a young Inuit woman whose tongue had been chewed off by someone or something– is present from the first chapter, and even if it's historically accurate for the seamen of the day to have referred to her as the “Esquimeaux bitch” or “heathen witch”, her mysterious and mute presence makes her out to be, if not less than, then certainly other than human. In a scene reminiscent of the one I liked about the monster trying to claw its way into the Terror's hull, there's a later one in which a young lieutenant discovers Lady Silence's secret sleeping quarters, from which she had apparently forced her way out of the hull:
Could Lady Silence have done this to the ship? The thought terrified Irving more than any belief in magical ability to appear and disappear at will. Could a young woman not yet twenty years old rip iron hull plates off a ship, dislodge bow timbers that it had taken a shipyard to bend and nail into place, and know exactly where to do all this so sixty men aboard who knew the ship better than their mothers' faces would not notice?
It was with the symmetry of this scene that I really began to dislike Simmons' use of the Lady Silence character, and as other Inuit are introduced, my feelings didn't improve. And then when Simmons recounts the Inuit creation myth and other sacred stories – including the history of where the Terror from the Ice may have come from – that felt like cultural misappropriation; these weren't his stories to tell, and he just wedged them in at the end – and then decided to make a white man join the Inuit and become a leader on their spiritual journey. Lady Silence – if she needed to be a character in Simmons' story – could have been a strong and competent teacher trying to help the expedition to survive, but instead, she's an exotic beauty with literally no voice, certified virgin by the ship's doctor, who peers into men's souls and sleeps in the nude. No thanks.
Because I know the Inuit material really tainted my experience with The Terror, I'm going to end with a couple of officially published reviews. A positive one from Kirkus Review from 2010:
Simmons convincingly renders both period details and the nuts and bolts of polar exploration as his narrative moves back and forth in time to show the expedition’s launch in 1845 and its early days in the Arctic. Tension builds as the men struggle to survive: The thing is a constant menace, and deaths continue to mount as a result of brutal Arctic conditions. The supernatural element helps resolve the plot in a surprising yet highly effective manner. One of Simmons’ best.
And this contrary opinion from Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times from 2007:
That persistence alone isn’t enough to transform a bad idea into a good one is probably the chief lesson of the Franklin expedition in particular and the quest for the Northwest Passage in general. The passage, in fact, resisted discovery until 1906; the construction of the Panama Canal soon rendered it unnecessary. The attempt to produce a massive historical novel — one that might achieve the commercial glory of, for example, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell” or “The Crimson Petal and the White” — isn’t, of course, a folly on that level. The quest for the Big Book is neither as heroic an endeavor nor, fortunately, as lethal. (“The Terror” won’t kill you unless it falls on your head.) But when a writer as canny as Dan Simmons can talk himself into something as foolhardy as “The Terror,” you know there’s a kind of insanity loose in the world of publishing, and all I really want to say in my one little page is, Stop the madness.
I tend to the latter opinion.
My old man, your grandad, he used to say to me, 'If you like school you'll love work then live happily ever after.' She don't say nothing to that, just sort of rolls her eyes. I try to explain: – What I mean is that it's your start in life, so you gotta go in with the right attitude. You get out what you put in, don'tcha? She just shrugs and don't say nothing. And I suppose she's right to be a skeptic n all. The stuff about the old man, he said nothing of the kind, I just made that up. Churchillian-style motivational speech, that sort of thing. Reality was, the old boy didn't give a monkey's about what I got up to at school. Yeah, she's right, school was a load of bleedin bollocks.
I read a lot of Irvine Welsh before I joined Goodreads or started this blog, so there's no record anywhere of how much I loved Trainspotting and its prequel Skagboys (I didn't love the sequel Porno quite as much, but I did enjoy being in that world again), or how much I loved an earlier collection of Welsh's short stories, Reheated Cabbage. Kennedy, however, does know how much I love Mr Welsh and she bought me this book while she was in Edmonton, buying it from the used book shop that she knows her Dad and I used to frequent. I can really dig into transgressive fiction if it feels authentic to lived human experience and Welsh is the master of employing the shock of grit and muck to explore serious social issues. But that's not really what's on offer here in If You Liked School, You'll Love Work; a collection of four short stories and a novella, there's no deep dive into psychology or sociology; shocks come for shock's sake; and where Welsh swaps his trademark underclass Scottish dialect for the voice of Americans, he doesn't read as quite believable. Some of these offerings were just okay, some less so, and three stars is a sentimental rounding up. In any case, much love and thanks to Kennedy for picking such an appropriate gift.
The first story, Rattlesnakes, starts this collection off with a bang: A group of three young Americans are driving across the desert after a music festival when their car breaks down in a sand storm. When one is bitten by a rattlesnake ('nuff said about that, but the ensuing scene is classic, squirm-inducing Welsh), the tension is ramped-up. But then, two Mexican immigrants (brought to the States by their older sister to work as gardeners for the rich family she cleans for), who are on the run after the older of the two grows to resent and despise the lazy Americans who expect him to do the work they don't want to, come upon the broken down car and bring a different level of menace to the scene. I'm describing this plot in detail only to make the point that I bet Welsh now regrets making the only two Mexican characters out to be America-hating, gun-toting, could-be rapists and murderers.
The title story is about an ex-pat Scot who runs a bar in the Canary Islands and the various women he tries to sleep with, all while suffering an unexpected visit from his teenage daughter. It was fine. The DOGS of Lincoln Park is about a group of narcissistic young professional women living in Chicago, and I found the whole thing charmless. Miss Arizona is set back in American desert country, and while the plot of this story was a little more interesting (an independent filmmaker forges some surprising relationships while researching a possible film on his mentor), the social commentary was rather predictable:
I distrusted Phoenix, in much the same way as I did all them shabby sunbelt cities with their pop-up business districts, soulless suburban tracts, strip malls, used-car dealerships, and bad homes almost but not quite hidden by palm trees. And then you had the people drying out like old fruit in the sun, brains too fired by heat and routine to remember why they ever did come here in the first place. And that was just the poor. The wealthy folk you only saw under glass; in their malls and motor cars, breathing in the conditioned air that tasted like weak cough medicine. I was used to heat but this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs.
On a side note: I don't think Americans use the term “motor cars” (or, in an earlier story, refer to “the air con” instead of “the ac”), and slips like that were distracting for me. Also: while I did like the metaphor “this place was so dry the trees were bribing the dogs” (which is the only quote from this collection “liked” on Goodreads), it doesn't compare to the richness Welsh can evoke when he's writing in dialect:
Darkness faws like a workin hoor's keks: sudden but yet predictable.
That last bit is from the book's concluding novella, Kingdom of Fife, and while I did like that one of the main characters, Jason King, narrated his story with a dense Cowdenbeath dialect, I didn't love that his voice alternated with that of Jenni Cahill; a rich local girl who narrates in plain English. Jason is a bit of a loser (twenty-six and unemployed, residing with his Dad, living for cadged Guinness and table-top football at the local), and Jenni is a nineteen-year-old princess of show-jumping (who in her candid thoughts and conversations with her best friend is as narcissistic and shallow as the women from The DOGS of Lincoln Park; I don't get the sense that Mr Welsh much likes the wee lassies of the upperclass), and the disparity of experience and of voice between the pair makes theirs the unlikeliest of love stories. Ultimately, however, Jason King is just a loveable enough loser that you can cheer with him when he and Jenni take a runner for Spain together:
Ah still think ay masel as the King ay Fife, but ah'm a king in exile, voluntary exile, n ah'm in nae hurry tae git back. Ye kin caw it the Kingdom ay Fife if ye like; ah prefer tae cry it the Fiefdom ay King, ya hoor, sir!
I could have never read this collection and be no worse off for it, but I don't regret spending some vacation reading time with Irvine Welsh. At least now I know what this is and can put it out of my mind.
