Small Things Like These

 

Some nights, Furlong lay there with Eileen, going over small things like these. Other times, after a day of heavy lifting or being delayed by a puncture and getting soaked out on the road, he’d come home and eat his fill and fall into bed early, then wake in the night sensing Eileen, heavy in sleep, at his side — and there he’d lie with his mind going round in circles, agitating, before finally he’d have to go down and put the kettle on, for tea.

I really wanted to love Small Things Like These — I favour Irish storytellers and this opened with delightful prose and turns of phrase; eventually turning to deal with darker matter — and as ever, I feel a bit heartless when a book about important events, which other readers found affecting, leaves me cold. This is quite a short read, quiet and atmospheric, but I think it was a bit too quiet for me. Even so, Claire Keegan is enjoying critical success with this story — and any effort to shine a light in the dark corners of history is a worthwhile endeavour — and while I liked everything that’s in here, I simply wanted more.

What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new? Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn’t feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

Touching forty, Bill Furlong has five well-behaved daughters and a capable, pragmatic wife. And while every day he witnesses people suffering the effects of an economic downturn (the setting is New Ross, Ireland in 1985), as a fuel supplier, he is able to provide his own family with just enough of everything: the girls go to the only decent school in the area; he finds the cash to pay off the butcher (even if he lets too many of his customers put their bills “on the slate”); his wife, Eileen, might even be able to get new windows to replace the draughty ones in the upcoming year. Even so, Furlong feels a midlife malaise, and his constant wondering if this is all there is to life sets a tense and sombre tone for the novel. We learn Furlong’s back story — as the son of an unwed mother who raised him in a Protestant widow’s big home, his childhood was both privileged and challenging, with the other Catholic kids calling him names and beating him up — and the reader grows to understand that Furlong still mentally walks the line between insider and outsider in the community. So when he discovers some disturbing facts about the girls’ “training school” that operates out of the local convent, he’s presented with a dilemma: Should he intervene and risk his family’s fragile social standing or can he live with himself if — like every other person in the city, county, and country — he turns a blind eye to the stranglehold of the Church and their treatment of young women?

He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Perhaps my problem is that there’s not a lot of facts and details in this book: Furlong is dealing with his mid-life crisis and what he discovers at the convent is meant to shake him out of his malaise and decide what kind of person he really is; we are stuck solely in his troubled mind. In an afterword, Keegan explains Ireland’s Magdalen laundries (how many tens of thousands of young women were involved; that the last one was closed in 1996), and while I do appreciate a light being shone on that dark history, neither we the readers or Furlong himself actually see what’s going on in the convent (yet he’s been the fuel supplier there for his entire adult life and never stumbled upon the true nature of the “training school” before?) I think I would have rather seen more goings on in the convent or for there to have been more acknowledgement that the community knew exactly what the nuns were up to and willfully ignored it. Instead we get this existential crisis and a provocation to action — and Keegan gives just barely enough information for us to understand what the stakes are for Furlong and his family if he does act — and the whole seems intended to ask a question instead of taking a stance. And that wasn’t enough for me; rounding down to three stars despite admiring the writing.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious Scoundrel, a Mythical Manuscript, and the Biggest Scandal in Literary History

 

The cell’s occupant was one of the most notorious criminals in eighteenth-century France. He had spent the bulk of his forty-five years reveling in depravity: engaging in blasphemous acts with a prostitute, torturing a beggar, poisoning whores, hiding in Italy in the romantic company of his sister-in-law, locking away girls and boys in his château for his own sexual designs, and narrowly surviving a bullet fired at his chest. For years, he had evaded the law — breaking out of an Alpine prison, dodging a military raid on his home, absconding from the clutches of a police squadron, and eluding his own public execution. His name was Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, but most people knew him as the Marquis de Sade.

I went into The Curse of the Marquis de Sade knowing very little about its eponymous subject — I read Justine when I was twenty or so (and remember nothing of it), and I saw my daughter perform in a university production of Marat/Sade (so I knew something of his time in the Charenton Asylum) — and knew nothing at all about the novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, described here — about four libertines who enslave a group of mostly children and sexually torture them for a month — so I found the twin stories that Joel Warner relates about the life of Sade and the history of this manuscript to be entirely shocking, fascinating, and stranger than fiction. Deeply researched and engagingly related, Warner uses the life of the Marquis de Sade — and the bibliophiles who would eventually stop at nothing to acquire his handwritten manuscript — to explore questions about art and freedom and obsession, and I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Was Sade a revolutionary, working to expose the rotten core of the aristocracy to which he had been born? Was he a radical philosopher, aiming to lay bare humanity’s most cruel and twisted desires? Or was he simply an unrepentant criminal, chronicling his own atrocities, committed or simply dreamed of? There is also the puzzle of the manuscript itself. Sade worked on the text from seven to ten o’clock each evening, since its content was far too scandalous for him to be caught composing it during the day. When he reached the end of a sheet of paper, he pasted another below it, creating an ever-lengthening roll. After twenty-two nights, he flipped the document over and continued to write. The result, after thirty-seven days of work, was a scroll formed from thirty-three sheets of paper fastened end to end, measuring just over four inches wide and stretching nearly forty feet. Both sides were covered with words — 157,000 in total — the text so tiny it was nearly illegible without a magnifying glass.

It definitely takes an entire book to relate all the twists in the life of the Marquis de Sade — he wrote The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille, but was transferred to another prison just before it was stormed; he narrowly escaped an appointment with the guillotine during the Reign of Terror; and not only did he spend his later years homeless or in filthy prison cells and mental wards, but after death, his skull was “borrowed” (and lost) by a German phrenologist — but what I learned for certain: it wasn’t only Sade’s erotic writings that ran him afoul of the morality police; he actually did kidnap, poison, and torture youths and sex workers, so he’s not exactly the poster child for free expression; his life wasn’t driven by kink, but psychopathy. And it made for compelling reading.

And as for The 120 Days of Sodom: Its contents are of debatable literary and artistic value — early sex researchers valued it as a catalogue of taboo fantasies and the Surrealists resurrected it as a stream of unfiltered subconsciousness — but the uniquely-made manuscript itself was always highly prized, and Warner traces its fascinating path through the hands of thieves and heirs and millionaire erotica collectors; from the mason who first found it hidden in Sade’s cell at the Bastille, to the rare book collector who repatriated it to France, only to watch his empire crumble mere months later. And it is this last bit that the entire book is working toward: When Gérard Lhéritier came up with the novel business plan to allow investors to own fractional shares in rare manuscripts — with the option to sell them back to his company, Aristophil, five years later at their then current value — was he inventing a unique investment instrument, or running a Ponzi scheme? Both Lhéritier and Sade seem to share a callous disregard for the wellbeing of others, but what constitutes overreach in the government’s efforts to control someone like that? Is it a coincidence that the French government didn’t take much notice of Lhéritier’s business dealings until he was able to acquire a manuscript that they then declared a piece of national patrimony, or is Lhéritier just the latest victim of the curse of the Marquis de Sade?

Lhéritier insisted that he wasn’t France’s Bernie Madoff. Madoff’s Wall Street firm hadn’t been selling anything tangible; Aristophil, meanwhile, had traded in real manuscripts with real value. The truth, declared Lhéritier, would emerge when he finally had his day in court. When asked how many years in prison he thought he’d receive, he flashed his roguish smile and made a circle with his fingers: zero.

From the No. 1 Compagnie des Aérostatiers (hot air balloonists who ferried the mail out of France during the Prussian siege of 1780) to Sade’s elderly great-great-great-granddaughter trying to join the student protests of 1968 outside Théâtre de l’Odéon (which had been built on the site of the Marquis de Sade’s birthplace, likely without her knowing that fact) to a bizarrely coincidental EuroMillions lottery win and Pierre Cardin's restoration of the crumbling Sade castle, there are so many interesting facts and coincidences in The Curse of the Marquis de Sade, that as straight history, this is a satisfying read. But by counterplaying the two stories of the life of Sade with the life of his most notorious manuscript — and culminating with perhaps the biggest investment con in France’s history — Warner elevates the material to ask compelling and relevant questions about what it means to be a decent person; what do we owe to ourselves and others in the face of our own desires? Excellent read.

Set Adrift: My Family's Disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle

This I have come to believe: when a boat goes down, it’s only the shell of things — the hull and the bodies — that vanish. When there are no survivors and no meaningful recovery of wreckage, there’s only speculation, the barest possibility of ever knowing what happened, and the legacies of unresolved grief. The absence of the dead shapes the story of the living.

Some memoirs satisfy with their shocking tales, some satisfy with their thoughtful analysis of the common human story, and every once in a while, I discover a memoir that combines each of these elements with beautiful language and I find myself moved and enlightened in a way that it would be hard for a novel to match. Set Adrift is one such rare and perfect gem: Sarah Conover was a toddler when she and her sister were orphaned by a family yachting accident, and as her grandparents, in particular, were persons of note in the community, Conover is able to explore both the public record of their disappearance and her own private struggle with growing up as an orphan in the middle of a large and broken family. I was fascinated by everything here — Conover shares much about her situation that was surprising to me — and I am enlarged by having learned of her journey to wholeness. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

For years, I blithely summarized the accident and its aftermath in careless shorthand to others: My parents, Lori and Larry Conover, grandparents, Harvey and Dorothy Conover, as well as family friend Bill Fluegelman, drowned during a freak storm in the Bermuda Triangle. My parents left behind two young orphans — my sister Aileen, almost three at the time, and me, eighteen months old. People would look to me for some clue as to how I felt but would find little in my affect to guide them. I’d been schooled in dissociation and numbness: no Conover ever spoke of the perishing. None of my parents’ generation could bear this cataclysmic break in their lives.

The Conovers were an uncommonly experienced boating family: Sarah’s grandfather, Harry Conover, was a competitive sailor for over fifty-five years (rated among the top dozen ocean-racing yachtsmen of his time, he “collected a lot of silverware”), he spent time as the Commodore of the Cruising Club of America, and made his fortune co-founding a publishing company that put out Yachting Magazine (among other titles). So when his highly admired yacht, the Revonoc, disappeared in a freak squall on the short jaunt from the Florida Keys to Miami on January 1, 1958, it sparked a vast search and rescue operation that was covered in the national news. No sign of the yacht or its wreckage — other than its dinghy, which washed ashore — would ever be found. Because this was such a high-profile disappearance, Conover is able to quote from sources as varied as Sports Illustrated and the official Coast Guard reports (including the government’s official stance on the Bermuda Triangle itself: perfectly explainable factors can cause sudden storms), and I found everything about exploring the mysterious disappearance to be highly interesting.

What is an orphan’s story if she has no memory of her origins? Say the word aloud: or-phan. The mouth warms and wombs the first syllable, or, possessing it momentarily. Then, teeth against the bottom lip while squeezing the diaphragm hard. Phan. The word pushes into the surrounding emptiness, landing nowhere.

On a more personal level, Conover describes how she and her sister were adopted into her father’s sister’s family — a decision that would be challenged for years by her maternal grandmother — and the chaos that this unleashed in her aunt’s family. Despite genuine love and maternal concern from their adoptive mother (and from their new father, too, until that marriage dissolved under the strain), Sarah in particular felt like an orphan her entire life; and especially because her grandmother always insisted that she didn’t belong with the Conovers anymore. But through a love of nature, a spiritual embrace of Buddhism, and continuing education (that would lead to an MFA in Creative Writing), Conover was eventually able to make sense of her journey and find a way to “unstory” her life as an orphan. 

We become the people we think we are — that’s why stories can be dangerous and even self-defeating. Other people can also become who we think they are and that’s why stories can be disastrous. We can’t help but use stories to connect, but beware, stories will use us. They did me, that is, until they didn’t.

Simply the perfect blend of interesting facts and heart-felt introspection; a novel could not do better at capturing what it means to be human.

After Sappho

 

We had begun so long ago with our poems after Sappho, carefully styled in fragments, our paintings and blushes all done in likeness. Perhaps at last the future of Sappho would be delivered into our hands like a packet of books knotted up with string. For example we might open a seemingly ordinary biography, its chapters neatly partitioned, and find that it was webbed throughout with the most extraordinary filaments of a life. A life after all did not happen by itself, in discrete units. Thus this biography would be bound together with all of our lives, twined through from preface to index: curling, animate, verdant. In the end we might become the readers of our own afterwords.

When I started After Sappho I got that same kind of breathless feeling that I had when I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power or Emma Cline’s The Girls — that deep-gut reaction to having feminist truths named that had formerly only been experienced — and I luxuriated in author Selby Wynn Schwartz’s lyrical prose; was intrigued by her episodic biographies of women who dared to break the patriarchal molds they had been born into. But as the book proceeded, it began to feel less like a novel and more like a textbook or a series of Wikipedia entries: it read as all surface, no depth; all sizzle, no steak. It became a bit of a slog — despite frequent yummy prose — and while I admire the effort, and appreciate what I learned, this, unfortunately, did not satisfy me novelistically. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

We longed for writing tables that were not in the kitchen, stained with onions; we wanted to read the novels kept from us because they were decadent and suggestive; we wanted to exchange the finger-pricked linens of our trousseaus for travel guides and foreign grammars; we wanted to meet each other in rooms and discuss the rights of women, we wanted to close the doors to the rooms and lie in each other’s arms, the light pouring in the window, the curtains drawn back, the view over the bay running in cerulean and azure swaths into the open sea. We dreamed of islands where we could write poems that kept our lovers up all night. In our letters, we murmured the fragments of our desires to each other, breaking the lines in our impatience. We were going to be Sappho, but how did Sappho begin to become herself?

Covering a period between the 1880s and the 1920s (and mostly centering on queer white women from Western Europe), Schwartz sketches the lives of women artists familiar to me (Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf among others), and many more names unfamiliar. And while I was moved by Sibilla Aleramo’s early experiences of watching her mother dive out the window, and being married off to her rapist (as per Italian law at the time), or learning of Radclyffe Hall and her efforts to convince the British House of Lords that she was as fine a gentleman as any of them, there were so many unfamiliar names, criss-crossing each others’ paths over the years, that the storyline became both confusing and tedious to me. And because these lives are treated at a surface-level, with no effort made at exploring these women’s interiority, the lyrical Greek chorus/fragments from Sappho bits just added to the confusion instead of elevating the material.

Readers according to Colette were like lovers. The best were attentive, intelligent, exigent, and promiscuous. She urged us to read widely and well, to seek out precisely the novels prohibited to us and lie down for hours in bed with them. We should read to gorge and sate ourselves, Colette enjoined us; after a good book we should lick our fingers.

I wish that this book had impelled me to lick my fingers in its aftermath, but despite its initial promise, I lost engagement with this material pretty quickly. Certainly not a waste of my time, but simply not to my taste.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler

Night of the Living Rez

 

At the bridge to the reservation, the river was still frozen, ice shining white-blue under a full moon. The sidewalk on the bridge hadn’t been shoveled since the last nor-easter crapped snow in November, and I walked in the boot prints everyone made who walked the walk to Overtown to get pot or catch the bus to wherever it was us skeejins had to go, which wasn’t anywhere because everything we needed — except pot — was on the rez. Well, except Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond, but those Natives who bought 4K Ultra DVDs or fresh white doilies had cars, wouldn’t be taking the bus like me or Fellis did each day to the methadone clinic. That's another thing the rez didn’t have: a methadone clinic. But we had sacred grounds where sweats and peyote ceremonies happened once a month, except since I had chosen to take methadone, I was ineligible to participate in Native spiritual practice, according to the doc on the rez.

Natives damning Natives.

Although technically a collection of twelve short stories, Night of the Living Rez reads like an episodic novel (so I am moved to review it like one, despite each story being a perfectly composed pearl; consider this the review of the necklace they form together). Each story centers on David (“Dee” to his friends, or to his Mom, “gwus” [boy]) — a member of the Penobscot Nation whose mother whisked him away from his white father’s home in the middle of the night to raise him on the reservation in Maine where she grew up — and the stories jump around in time from when he was a boy playing stick fights in the swamp with his buddies, up until he’s late-middle-aged and visiting his Mom in an elder care facility. Author Morgan Talty fully fleshes out David and his family in these stories: this is modern life on a reservation, with poverty, addiction, and trauma, but also community, friendships, and love. There’s a fascinating blend of modern and traditional worldviews in these tales: as the title implies, the spirits and monsters of the Penobscot belief system haunt the land throughout David’s life, but even more compellingly, the title story itself is one of modern circumstances and their horrifying true life consequences. I loved everything about this collection: David is a character you can’t help but root for — not in spite of his flaws, but because you witness how they came to be.

She’s dressed nice. Casual. A white T-shirt and black yoga pants and white sneakers. She doesn’t do yoga. All the white on her makes her look more Native, more Indian (she hates that word — Indian). But nothing makes her look young. She’s Native, and she has trauma. So do I — I’m the one who saw it — but she thinks she has more. She doesn’t say that, but she thinks it. Maybe she’s right. Maybe older Natives have more trauma than younger ones.

Central to these stories are David’s relationships: with his friends (and especially his best friend as a young man, Fellis) and with his Mom (who drinks boxed wine nightly with her live-in boyfriend). In the first story, Burn, David (who was unsuccessful in trying to scam some pot from a dealer) stumbles upon Fellis in the woods. Fellis had passed out in a snowbank, and when he woke up and realised that his hair had frozen into the ground, he was trapped until David found him, cut off his braid, and helped him home. Fellis gives David some money to go buy pot and snacks, but he also asks David to retrieve his hair from the woods so they can burn it and keep the spirits away. And this really sets the tone for the book: Until Fellis mentions burning the hair, these could be any two young guys; there’s a universality to the experience, but the ending makes this a particularly Indigenous tale.

The second story, In a Jar, tells the story of David and his Mom’s resettlement on the reservation. Nearly immediately, David finds a glass jar beneath the stoop of their new house — “filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. Wild. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.” — and recognising bad medicine when she sees it, his Mom calls her friend Frick, the medicine man who will eventually move in, and he performs a cleansing ceremony. Even so, in the stories that follow, David and his family never seem quite able to shrug off the buried curse (which I reckon one could read as the lingering effects of colonisation, systemic racism, intergenerational trauma, etc.).

With stories that jump around nonlinerally, traumatic events are hinted at and then revealed — we see David attempting to rob his grandmother for drug money before seeing him as a ten-year-old boy and learning what set him on that path — and the format was a very satisfying reading experience of foreshadowing and then filling in the blanks; with each story standing artfully on its own.

How’d we get here? That’s Fellis’ question, but it’s mine too. How’d we get here? I’m starting to think that each time I ask it, each time I consider an answer, I wind up further from where I should be, from where I was. Where I had been. I left a lot of things behind. Or maybe that’s not it — maybe it’s that a lot of things had left me behind. Friends. Family. Relationships. The future.

I did love everything about this: From Talty’s sentences to the perfect little world created in each individual story to the overall whole they formed. There’s pain and humour and life to be found here and I leave feeling like I have witnessed something absolutely true about the modern Penobscot experience; I could ask for nothing more.

Olav Audunssøn: III. Crossroads

 

“You shouldn’t stand for it, Master Olav,” said the priest angrily. “You shouldn’t allow your son to spend time with those folks you deemed it wise to settle at Rundmyr. What the boy learns there is not to his benefit.” Olav didn’t know what to say in reply. When he remained silent, the priest told him what Eirik had said about his father. “The whole village is laughing at that son of yours because he lies so often, and they’re such stupid lies.” By now they had reached the crossroads. Sira Hallbjørn reached up to take hold of the horse’s bridle and held on to it as he looked up at Olav’s face. There was still a glimmer of daylight in the fog that was again growing heavy. Olav was surprised to see that the priest seemed deeply distressed.

I’m really enjoying Tiina Nunnally’s new English translations of Sigrid Undset’s The Master of Hestviken (originally published in 1927), and this third of the series’ four volumes set in 13th century Norway — Crossroads — sees Olav Audunssøn continue his struggle to reconcile his conflicting duties to traditional ways and to the Church. Piling on grief to guilt, Olav trudges through his life as the Master of his allodial estate — denying himself creature comforts and the salve of the sacraments — and despite his ersatz son and heir, Eirich, becoming a laughingstock in the community, Olav is too consumed by the past to worry about the future, or for that matter, the necessities of the present. Once again, Undset flawlessly employs Olav’s struggles to demonstrate the time and place, and this time around, Olav is beset by spirits and visions as he attempts to find meaning at midlife in what has been an existence made more challenging by his own burdened conscience. As the title implies, Olav finds himself at a crossroads in this volume, and the path he ends up choosing was both surprising and satisfying for me. This series is a fascinating epic of mediaeval Norway and I can’t wait to see how it all ends. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Cattle die,
kinsmen die,
the man himself dies,
yet one thing I know
that never dies:
the judgment upon each death!

A very short summary of what has happened in the series so far: (After many roadblocks, Olav had married the love of his life, Ingunn; secretly killing the man who had raped her and claiming the child resultant of that rape as his own. Olav and Ingunn moved south to take over Olav’s ancestral homestead on the Oslo fjord, and as Olav worked to improve his holdings [always tormented by guilt over the mortal sin he had committed without publicly confessing, in accordance with Ingunn’s pleading], Ingunn slowly wasted away, only giving birth to a daughter who survived infancy.) As Crossroads begins, Olav is numbed by grief, sleepwalking through his duties as the Master of Hestviken; not even able to rouse himself to discipline the lying, fabulist son who will inherit the estate. Early in Crossroads, Olav is asked to accompany a merchant ship to England (a country he had visited in his youth), and escaping his own life seems to be just the solution he hadn’t known he’d be craving. Several temptations (carnal and monastic) present themselves on this trip, but it is overhearing the fighting songs of a band of English soldiers that reminds Olav of a time in his life when he felt purpose and happiness; this epiphany is profound in the moment but will prove to be short-lived.

He had pretended that he was afraid of losing his life — he who had been so weary of his own life for such a long time that if it hadn’t been for Ingunn’s sake, he would have declined to stay among the living for even one more day. He refused to go back to that. His sacrifices would mean nothing if he now chose obedience, poverty, celibacy, and, in the end, thralldom and a martyr’s death — for he placed no value on what he would have to give up. But what lay ahead of him promised gains beyond measure — adventures and lengthy travels and finally peace and God’s forgiveness, so that he would be admitted, once again, into the legions of the Lord. Yet now he understood, at long last, that he had to choose. Not between God and one thing or another on this earth, not even his own mortal existence, but between God and himself.

Choosing between God and himself is the “crossroads” of the title, and Olav will continue to sleepwalk through his life with this choice over his head for a dozen more years until, once again, the fighting songs of battle wake him from his torpor. When a Swedish duke leads a group of mercenaries into Norway — and the nearly fifty-year-old Olav is appointed a chieftain in the resistance — he will swing his forefathers’ singing axe, Ættarfylgja, and remember what it is to be alive:

When the boy saw that the master of the estate was dressed for battle, he had asked to stay with him. Suddenly something resembling unrestrained joy flared up inside Olav, as if shackles had been thrown off him. Darkness behind him, darkness in front of him. And here he stood, utterly alone except for two armed strangers, and he had no idea what tomorrow would bring.

This pivot from consuming grief, domestic conflict, and mystical visions into an exciting battle tale was a surprising and satisfying swing, but if I had a complaint, it would be that I lost some of the excitement as characters explained why this duke was set against that duke due to recent and historical factors — and while I completely appreciate that many readers of historical fiction would want all of the facts of the setting included, the backdrop was less interesting to me, personally, than staying focussed on the frontlines. Still, as the series heads into its final volume, I can’t wait to see how this invigorated Olav lives out the rest of his life.

Olav Audunssøn: II. Providence

Olav Audunssøn: I. Vows

Booth

 

The Booth family is gratified by the depth and breadth of national mourning for Junius Brutus Booth. Every American paper reports Booth’s death and most include long eulogies. But one response is memorable for its brevity. Rufus Choate, a storied trial lawyer turned Whig congressman, a man famous for his soaring and sustained bouts of oratory, says simply, “There are no more actors.”

In an Author’s Note at the end of Booth, Karen Joy Fowler explains that “during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings”, she began to wonder about the families of shooters — what it must be like to love someone who becomes universally despised — and then she began thinking of the Booth family, and started working on a novel about the family of John Wilkes Booth; pointedly not focussing on John himself as he was a man who had sought notoriety and was not deserving of Fowler’s attention. Then when Trump was elected president, Fowler recognised that “Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob” were still true in the modern day, and she realised that the story she was writing about the radicalisation of the man who would become Lincoln’s assassin could be seen as a warning for the present: it is still true that a house divided against itself cannot stand and growing partisanship imperils the Union. So, on the one hand, Booth is stuffed full of interesting historical information about the Booth family (I had no idea how famous the Booth father and older brother, Edwin [the nineteenth century’s “greatest Hamlet”], were), and on the other, Fowler never lets us forget that she’s drawing a line between the past and the present; the parallels are obvious and underlined. As a work of historical fiction, this was well done (with the caveat that, as a longish book, too much detail can feel tedious to me), and as a work of political commentary, an essay expanding on the Author’s Note would have sufficed for me. This felt a bit of a slog; just okay to my taste.

They were wrapped together in a single blanket, John’s little body hot against Mother’s breasts. She was looking down into his flushed and fretful face, when on sudden impulse she’d said a prayer asking to know what his fate would be. Instantly a flame rose from the ashes and, shaping itself into an arm, stretched toward the baby as if to knight him. In that flame, Mother said, she could read the word Country, followed by Johnny’s name. And then the arm fell back and faded away. This strange, unfirelike behavior taking place on their own little hearth has the whole family excited. It may be an ambiguous fate, but it’s clearly a glorious one, a narrative of such power that Asia will write a poem about it one day, forgetting how angry she once was not to have been given a glorious fate of her own. She was less upset by her own lack of a destiny than by the fact that nobody had ever even bothered to ask the fire if she had one.

Junius Brutus Booth — celebrated Shakespearean actor of the London stage — wooed the beautiful Mary Ann Holmes, and in 1821, moved her to the United States, eventually settling her in a “secret cabin” in the woods northeast of Baltimore. Over the course of twenty years, Mary Ann will give birth to ten children, six of whom will survive to adulthood, and as Junius (equal parts genius, madman, and hopeless alcoholic) spends around nine months of every year touring with acting troupes, Mary Ann (and the enslaved people the family “leases”), work the farm and raise the children and try to stay above the poverty line. The family will move into Baltimore and back to the countryside again; eldest son June will leave to make a name for himself on the stage; Edwin will be taken out of school to travel with his father; the two youngest boys — John and Joe — will be sent to a boarding school; and the two daughters — Rosalie and Asia — will be left to take care of Mother, their brothers, and watch for marriage prospects. Throughout all the years, John Wilkes will be the pet; the scamp, the matinee idol, his mother’s and sisters’ favourite who can do no wrong.

Fowler tells this story from three perspectives: From Edwin’s (the most celebrated actor in the family, his biography is well documented); from Asia’s (she wrote several [some would say apologetic] memoirs of herself and her more famous family members); and Rosalie’s (of whom very little is known, so Fowler was free to have Rosalie’s sections fill in the historical bits from the newspapers and the typical family life of the time). This rotating POV gave a satisfying backdrop for John Wilkes’ formative years, while never presuming to imagine what the future assassin was thinking or feeling. And by giving us the whole Booth story (ending not long after the assassination), Fowler is able to pinpoint a few transformative moments: John was present at “the battle of Christiana” — in which free Blacks repelled a Marshal’s attempts to capture escaped slaves — which some historians point to as the beginning of the beginning of the Civil War; he joined the Richmond Grays militia unit to march on Charles Town to ensure John Brown’s hanging (the battle flag of the Grays reads “Sic semper tyrannis”); he was visiting Edwin’s house in New York City when the anti-draft riots happened (and apparently delighted in watching the city burn). Fowler makes clear that all of the Booth family thought of themselves as pro-Union Northerners, except for John Wilkes, and other than apparently suffering the mental illness and alcohol abuse that seems to run through the Booth family (Edwin says of his brother, “He has all of Father’s madness without the genius”), and some slightly different experiences at school (and particularly coddled at home), there’s no real explanation for how one of the Booths could become a murderer. But again: this isn’t really meant to be John Wilkes’ story; this is the story of America and how slippery the slope is towards considering your countryman your enemy once the drums start beating.

What’s it like to love the most hated man in the country? Loving John is something the world simply will not have. Not loving John is something Rosalie and Asia simply cannot do.

As I’m not an American, I had only a general knowledge of John Wilkes Booth and what Fowler writes about his background and upbringing (and particularly the stories of the more famous and celebrated acting Booths) was interesting and informative to me. And since the symbols of the United States aren’t emotionally affecting to me, it did take this whole, long novel and Fowler’s Author’s Note at the end for me to really understand what it meant for the Confederate Flag to have been “carried through the halls of the Capitol for the very first time” during the insurrection of January 6th, 2021: the events of that day were, naturally, shocking to witness as a non-American, but their meaning wasn’t really clear to me until now. It still felt like a bit of a slog — this is not at the top of my own Booker picks — but it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

Booth by Karen Joy Fowler