Orlando

 

She was reminded of old Greene getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.

I don’t know where I got the idea that Orlando was Virginia Woolf’s least accessible novel because, although it does serve as an important critique of gender, art and whose stories are worth telling, it’s couched in an amusing plot that romps through four centuries of British social and literary history. Even if upon its release this wasn’t immediately recognised as a love letter to Woolf’s paramour Vita Sackville-West, with the constant subversion of and commentary on gender norms, it’s incredible to me that this became Woolf’s most popular novel to date and no one seemed to see it for the radical piece of writing it was (I went looking for a contemporaneous review, and this one from October 21, 1928 in The New York Times interpreted it as “an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity”; how I wish I really knew how the average reader responded to this in the day!) As for my own response: I found Orlando to be both a mind-bending narrative and a wry work of feminist writing; it’s timely and timeless and I’m delighted to have finally gotten around to it.

He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

Orlando is subtitled “A Biography”, and a bit of digging reveals that Woolf described this in her diary as: “A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando. Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” Further digging explains that this was undertaken not only as a sardonic response to Woolf’s father’s work as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (with few exceptions, the stories of manly men), but also as an exploration of Vita Sackville-West’s great heartache: the loss of her ancestral manor home, Knole, which she was blocked from inheriting due to her sex. And so: as Orlando opens above, we meet the titular character — “he, for there could be no doubt of his sex” — as a sixteen year old living in a town-sized manor; a wannabe poet and acquaintance of Queen Elizabeth. Over the next four hundred years, Orlando will receive a Dukedom and an Ambassadorship; travel to Constantinople and back again; fall in love with both men and women; and turn into a woman himself, ending the novel in 1928 as a thirty-six year old wife and mother. The character’s seemingly impossible age and gender are never explained or much commented upon — this isn’t magic, it just is.

The following (long) passage rather nicely demonstrates Woolf’s wry voice here as Orlando is first smitten with the Russian Princess, Sasha, while out skating with his fiancee on the frozen Thames during the Great Frost of 1683:

He beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question.)...A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow — so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be — no woman could skate with such speed and vigour — swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.

Orlando will eventually lose Sasha — and the Lady Euphrosyne — and after escaping the amorous clutches of the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory (who will, in time, be revealed as the Archduke Harry), Orlando makes his way to Turkey, and eventually awakens (after a long sleep) as a woman. By way of explanation:

We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he' — her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

And isn’t that a powerful lesson for how one should react to such a change? While others might want to debate what is or isn’t “against nature”, all one needs to understand is that Orlando was a man, and is now a woman. As for Orlando herself: She’s perfectly sanguine about the change, and while at first she assumes that she’ll still be attracted to other women out of habit, she eventually learns to enjoy the attraction she holds for men. She will also need to deal with a lawsuit, upon her return to England, which wants to disinherit her from her ancestral home and income because of her gender; and she will learn that there are societal differences in how male and female writers are regarded.

Another timely, if hundred year old, observation:

Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or four hundred years ago would be denounced — and by her own family most loudly — as a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.

Throughout the years, Orlando rubs shoulders with: William Shakespeare; Addison, Dryden, Pope and Swift; British monarchs from Elizabeth to Edward; and always, she is attempting to distil literary truth into a single poem — “The Oak Tree”; a feat which will take four hundred years and diverse experiences across time, space, and gender. This radical act of “a voice answering a voice” — as an achievement independent of class or age or gender — seems to be the heart of Woolf’s thesis, and Orlando both advocates for its necessity to the human experience and demonstrates how to answer the call. I loved this; I can’t believe this is nearly a hundred years old and so much more accessible than I had thought.

Old God's Time

 

Enough time goes by and it’s as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God’s time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they’re gone. Maybe old God’s time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn’t mean it could be summoned back, or should be.

Oof, but I love Sebastian Barry. Old God’s Time tells the story of a retired police detective — taking his due rest at a seaside town outside Dublin — and although this Tom Kettle has settled into his solitary routine of walking to the shops and watching the tides, when two city detectives come asking for his help with a cold case, Kettle is forced to confront old ghosts and demons; even if his memory isn’t quite what it used to be. As Kettle recalls how he met his quirky and beautiful wife June — and the joy they had in raising their two children Winnie and Joe — this, at times, had the feel of a heart-warming love story; but as he also recalls stories from his and June’s time as orphans raised in church-run institutes, this is a too-familiar story of loneliness and abuse and what it takes to survive such. What makes this magical storytelling is Kettle’s muddled memory: It’s often unclear whether he’s confused or fantasising, intentionally misdirecting or unwittingly protecting his wounded heart, and while the reader wants to take this decent man at his word, interactions with other characters force one to rethink what one’s been told, repeatedly. And through it all, the same situations repeat themselves — over time and across distances from a seaside castle in Dalkey to a New Mexico pueblo — and the question is repeatedly asked: What would you do to protect a child? And also: In God’s old time, just how is “justice” served? I smiled, I nodded; I cried and I gasped: I could ask for nothing more.

He stared at the rumpled sheaf, recognising all too well the very colour of the paper, the typed-out parts, and the long gospel of whatever they incorporated executed in a sober black ink. Paperwork, the policeman's penance. He had no desire, not even a smidgen of it, to take the documents. He felt the great rudeness of his hesitation. They were only boys. Well, Wilson might be forty. A grizzled face, really, with a little scar above his left eye. A childhood wound maybe. We all have our childhood wounds, thought Tom.

After a long and (somewhat) celebrated career with the Gardaí, Tom Kettle could be forgiven if he declined to put his retirement on hold after only nine months to help his old squad with a notorious cold case: but with advances in DNA evidence, and a strong sense of duty, Kettle decided to dress himself “with care” one morning and present his Travel Pass to a ticket agent at the local train station in order to make his way into Dublin. Nearly immediately we learn that things aren’t exactly as they seem to be, but between Kettle’s confusion about the present and the revelation of clear memories from the past, a life is eventually described of a man who is decent and caring, and undeserving of the pain he has suffered.

Old God’s Time is set in the “present” of the 1990s, and not only does this allow June to be presented as a free-spirited anti-war hippie, but Tom’s career saw him dealing with car bombs, returning runaway children to the notorious laundries and orphanages, and being forced to allow the Archbishop to deal as he chose with the hard evidence of predatory priests. Ah, but the times have changed: there’s a fragile peace afoot, the Church’s grasp has been loosened, and a man’s toothbrush might hold the key to events thought buried in the sands of time. If only poor old Tom Kettle was more clear about the past…and the present.

He didn’t care, at the core of the thing, he didn’t care a jot for himself. His ancient burden of ‘a sense of justice’, a heavy bloody thing that would break a civilian’s back, he knew, was not a burden he could ever put down, even now. Even now, as something gnawed at his own safety, his peace, like a monstrous rat, that was the tune that rose first of all things to his lips. Find out the truth and penetrate the crime. Bring the guilty to justice.

Barry brings the seaside setting to beautiful life: the light on the water; the changing skies throughout the days and the seasons. He also, for a shortish novel, packs in a lot of detail — from thirty years of Kettle’s history to the intersecting lives that all seem to circle through similar experiences — and as murky as the plot can feel with Kettle’s fantasies and memory gaps, it all propels to a shocking and fitting conclusion that brought me to tears. This was an experience — precisely suited to my tastes — and I can’t give fewer than five stars.

Booker Prize Longlist 2023

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀’

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein * My favourite of the list

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escofferey

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Pearl by Siân Hughes

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

 

Unless a tree is particularly large, or unusually shaped, it will not stand out as an individual, and unless it is isolated from its mates, it will seldom announce itself from a distance. But despite being embedded in a forest of similarly large trees, the tree that came to be known as the golden spruce was an exception on both counts. From the ground, its startling colour stopped people dead in their tracks; from the air, it stood out like a beacon and was visible from miles away. Like much of the surrounding landscape, the tree was incorporated into the Haida’s vast repertoire of stories, but as far as anyone knows, it is the only tree, in what was then an infinity of trees, ever to be given a name by the Haida people. They called it K’iid K’iyaas: Elder Spruce Tree. According to legend, it was a human being who had been transformed.

I read an early copy of the upcoming (2023) rerelease of The Golden Spruce with a new afterword from author John Vaillant (wherein he cringes at some of his outdated language and attitudes in the original release and gives updates on Grant Hadwin — the man at the centre of the book’s mystery — and on the Haida people’s quest for self-government on the unceded territory of Haida Gwaii). This is my favourite type of narrative nonfiction: a central mystery explored through a deep dive into the history, geography, botany, sociology, and politics of a region, extrapolated into a lesson for people everywhere. For those who don’t know: On January 20th, 1997, logging surveyor and renowned outdoorsman Grant Hadwin swam across a freezing river in order to surreptitiously compromise a centuries-old Sitka spruce — a magical mutant whose unlikely golden needles were integral to the local tourism industry and sacred to area First Nation peoples — and after it toppled, he then disappeared while supposedly travelling to his day in court to answer for his act. Vaillant explores the history of the Haida people — from precontact with Europeans to today — the history of the logging industry, the unusual and harsh geography of British Columbia’s coast and offshore islands, and interspersed with it all, the story of how one man became jaded with the logging industry and decided to make a hugely controversial statement by felling a sacred tree. Meticulously detailed and compellingly written in engaging prose, with a message on moral and cognitive compromise that should resonate with every reader, this is exactly to my taste and satisfaction; rounding up to five stars.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard to say who was more inebriated by greed: the Europeans who were seeing profits in the hundreds of percent, or the Natives who were suddenly able to leapfrog their way to the top of the social hierarchy and put on spectacles of largesse hitherto unimaginable by any potlatch host on the coast. So eager were the Natives to get their hands on the traders’ various technological marvels that a man would readily sell the otter cloak off his wife’s back and, on occasion, her back as well. And so desperate were the Iron Men to acquire these skins that they would trade away virtually anything that wasn’t crucial to the journey home; this included Native slaves from down the coast, firearms, silverware, door keys, and the sailors’ own clothing. These were boom times for all concerned, a rapacious festival of unrestrained capitalism.`

The Haida people were long known as fearsome warriors — travelling up and down the coast in massive dugout canoes; raiding, looting, and enslaving other peoples — and when they first made contact with Europeans, they were fiercely savvy in the rules of trade and bargaining. Due to an incredibly profitable Chinese market for otter skins, a mutually advantageous partnership arose between European traders and the Haida people — in which the Europeans risked the perilous journey around the southern tip of South America in order to get to the west coast of Canada and traded iron goods and weapons for a seemingly unending supply of otter skins — but despite sea otters originally numbering in the millions, they soon became extirpated from much of their range and the market collapsed; leaving the Haida people vulnerable to exploitation when the Europeans, and then the North Americans, set their sights on the inland trees that the Haida had no immediate need for. As Vaillant notes, the otter trade “set the tone for every extraction industry that has come after”; unrestrained capitalism extracts to the last drop, but even the greedy logging companies knew to leave the famous golden spruce alone.

Meanwhile, Grant Hadwin grew in his career as a talented logging scout: with an uncanny ability to survey access roads into hard-to-reach areas, and an aptitude for backwoods survival in harsh conditions, Hadwin both dearly loved the old growth forests of Haida Gwaii and contributed much to their destruction. He also suffered from mental illness (his brother did not survive his battle with schizophrenia), and after experiencing a mystical epiphany in the woods, Hadwin started firing off Unabomber-type anti-society screeds to the media and logging outfits. Ultimately, he seemed to believe that chopping down the famous golden spruce (which he apparently didn’t know was sacred to the Haida) would draw attention to the evils of the logging industry:

“When society places so much value on one mutant tree and ignores what happens to the rest of the forest, it’s not the person who points this out who should be labelled,” Hadwin told a Prince Rupert reporter who questioned his sanity. In the short term at least, the collective reaction to the loss of the golden spruce ended up proving his point: that people fail to see the forest for the tree.

The Golden Spruce ends with the fruitless search for the missing Hadwin, the (unsanctioned by the Haida) efforts to clone and market copies of the fallen mutant tree, and a survey of modern-day loggers who acknowledge the permanent damage they are doing while being unwilling to walk away from their big paychecks (Vaillant compares this to stockbrokers, soldiers, and slaughterhouse workers: people who insulate us from the dirty work that support our lives; the unspoken “moral and cognitive dissonance” that allow us to succeed and function in this world). And although he states that First Nations’ stories are considered “owned” by their tellers, and would never be shared by someone outside their community, Vaillant gives us a couple of versions of the Haida’s tale of the golden spruce in order to conclude:

At the root of the golden spruce story is a very simple message: respect your elders, or you’ll be sorry. However, beneath this surface layer of meaning, the parable could also be read as a lesson on how to survive the loss of one’s entire village to massacre, how to weather a stint in residential school: don’t look back; don’t try to return to that dead place. But everyone in a position to deny or confirm this, or any other theory, is dead. Like the tree and the man who cut it down, the story is a puzzle or, more accurately, a piece of a puzzle, the whole of which can never be fully known.

The tale of the golden spruce is still a puzzle to this day, but it’s an intriguing story and I am happy to have finally read Vaillant’s multidisciplinary approach to it. Happier still to have read an updated version, twenty-five years after the initial destruction of this magical mutant tree.

Return to the River: Reflections on Life Choices During a Pandemic

 

As gleeful as I am to return to the river, I am still haunted by the demise of my former marriage. As much as I’ve dissected every aspect of my life, at the end of the day, my day, with whatever time I have remaining, like a passenger on a departing cruise ship after waving goodbye to those I’ve loved and painfully miss, I have to dedicate myself to step away from the stern, make my way to the bow, and move on with my life’s journey. I will simply, quietly, sail off into the sunset.

Author Dave Pelzer is famous for having written A Child Called “It” (a memoir of having suffered through “one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history”), and with the release of further memoirs, he “was the first author to have four #1 international bestsellers and to have four books simultaneously on the New York Times bestsellers list”. Although I hadn’t read any of his prior books, I was roughly aware of Pelzer’s story and was intrigued to learn where he finds himself today as relayed in his latest memoir: Return to the River. Written in the wake of a devastating divorce and working through the COVID pandemic as a first responder, Pelzer had plenty of reason to give up on ever finding happiness and security; but as a child who had had to rely on incredible inner strength and perseverance just to stay alive, Pelzer finds the motivation to keep going. In a narrative that shifts between the present and the past, Pelzer reviews his entire life here — from the abuse he suffered at his mother’s hands to his happier days in foster care, his career in the Air Force, as a bestselling author and motivational speaker, and ultimately, as volunteer Fire Captain battling California wildfires — and while this does make for a satisfying standalone read, I can see how this would be even more satisfying for someone more intimate with Pelzer’s life story. For me personally: While I appreciated the overview of the author’s life, I felt I was missing out on the details (I don’t really know why he got divorced, or anything about the mother of his grown son, or why he was forced to move out of his dream home — why is he broke today after all those bestselling books? — and while none of that is any of my business, I felt the gaps). On the other hand: It’s valuable to learn that an abuse survivor doesn’t just shake the pain off when he gets to adulthood; even if he writes bestselling books, wins countless awards, and is respected as a rock solid first responder, living a life in service to others doesn’t necessarily equal service to oneself — and that’s an interesting lesson to learn in one’s sixties. I would rate this a 3.5 and am rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I’m losing it. I feel as if my inner confidence has somehow slipped from my grasp. I realize my emotions are a potpourri of adapting to the increasing stress of COVID World, being a first responder, moving, struggling to find a place to live, a heart-wrenching divorce, leaving my firefighting family, and dissecting my life. Yet, I know, I feel, I am a shell of the person I used to be. From deep within, I have no battery stores to draw from. I feel I’ve foolishly exposed my life to too much kryptonite.

The title “Return to the River” is meant both literally and figuratively: After his divorce, Pelzer was forced to sell his beautiful Zen-like Sea Ranch dream house, and as he had reached his sixties and felt his body beginning to baulk at the demands of firefighting, he decided to quietly retire from the volunteer work and look for a place to live along the Russian River; the site of one of his only happy memories from childhood when his family vacationed there; a memory that sustained him through the worst years of the abuse he suffered at his mother’s hands. But between the wildfires and the pandemic that saw people displaced from their homes — his upscale community had residential streets choked with people living out of run down RVs and cars — Pelzer found himself at the end of his rope with nowhere to land. The quest to find a new home drives the narrative of the memoir — with frequent memories and hard-won wisdom thrown in — and Pelzer eventually returning to the river sees him returning, permanently, to that fleeting sense of happiness and security he had held on to so tightly as a child.

Throughout my life, I’ve always ventured down life’s different paths. And somehow, some way, while the journey may have been fraught with peril, things have more than worked out. I just need to find a pathway that leads me there. Of all things, I have faith. I only wish I had more time.

There’s not a whole lot to this memoir, but it was enough for me: The stories Pelzer shares here of the abuse he suffered were horrifying and I don’t feel the need to read his other books now. But, again, for those who have been following Pelzer’s journey, I think this would be a fascinating follow up. More than anything: I wish the author well and do hope that he has found a place of peace and security.

Rouge

 

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?” He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,” he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?”

Part fairy tale, part indictment of the beauty industry, Rouge tells a story that could be pigeonholed as fun, creepy horror if it wasn’t so crushingly relatable. With magic mirrors, predatory bogeymen, and fantastical transformations, author Mona Awad isn’t exactly going for literary realism here; but as an examination of mothers and daughters, the time girls and women spend harshly judging ourselves and each other, the pain we will endure in an effort to inspire envy and desire — these are important social issues and there is much literary satisfaction in Awad wrapping their examination in the stories through which we (in the West) would have first internalised the impossible ideals of feminine beauty and behaviour. And the whole thing’s pretty damn creepy. I was entertained throughout while recognising that I was being shown hard truths, and if I had a small complaint, it would be that this felt just a tad too long. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

As Rouge begins, Belle (Mirabel Nour; a name that “looks like night but means light”) has travelled from her Montreal home to California in order to settle her recently deceased mother’s affairs. We soon learn that Belle’s relationship with her mother — who had been a great beauty; a wannabe moviestar in the perfect Chanel red lip — had been complicated; and while they weren’t exactly estranged, there are reasons why the two women weren’t living in the same city anymore. As Belle starts to go through her mother’s things, she begins to receive online ads for a swanky looking spa named “Rouge”; and when Belle tries on a pair of her mother’s red heels, her feet seem to know the way along the cliffside trail that eventually leads to the “opulent monstrosity” known as La Maison de Méduse, where Belle is welcomed and admired as the Daughter of Noelle. Could this be Rouge? It kind of looks like a spa; it does have a gift shop.

The narrative splits between the present and Belle’s childhood — we learn that Belle has holes in her memory leading up to the time that her mother decided to move without her to California, when Belle was ten — and as Belle has “treatments” in the present that seem to be erasing her sense of self, gaps from the past are filled in even as the present is slipping away. Belle’s behaviour becomes ever more erratic, and while there are friends of her mother’s who offer to help guide her through her grief, it’s hard to judge their motivations; hard to tell wolf from huntsman. And through it all, Belle is chasing her mother’s beauty secrets.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Right from the beginning, we watch as Belle engages in obsessive beauty rituals — so many layers of cleansers and masks and essences and creams — and learn that she compulsively watches a series of YouTube beauty videos created by a Dr. Marva. In scenes from the past, it’s shown that the child Belle was entranced by her mother’s natural beauty and sense of style, and while Noelle was a pale-skinned redhead who avoided the sun at all costs, she was forever telling Belle (who has golden skin and dark hair from her [absent] Egyptian father) that she was the lucky one with the beautiful colouring; and Belle wasn’t buying it. Not only does this setup allow for an examination of the jealousy that can be present between a mother and daughter (the child jealous of an adult’s freedom to explore and display her sexuality; the adult jealous of a child’s youth and freshness), but at the cult-like Rouge (is it a spa?), the ultimate goal seems to be achieving the “glow” — a brightening or moon-like luminosity — of whiteness; there’s an added, insidious layer to the beauty ideal Belle is chasing that underscores her OCD behaviours.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

I’ll put this slightly spoilery observation behind a spoiler warning ***: In one subplot, not-Tom-Cruise (some kind of shape-shifting shadowy figure from beyond the looking glass) was able to attach itself to the child Belle (leading to the holes in her memory), and the only thing I want to note about that is how scarily easy it is for a grown man (or male energy in Tom Cruise form) to flatter and lure a prepubescent girl: I recognised lonely young Belle’s yearning for love and acceptance, and coupled with the cult of celebrity in teenybopper magazines, I could completely accept that Belle would do Tom’s bidding if he said she was beautiful and leaned in for a kiss. *** And reframe it as: There were many, many relationship details in this fairy-tale-like story that were completely relatable to me, and as with all the best fairy tales, it serves as a mirror and as a warning. The storytelling is cinematic (the publisher’s blurb describes this as “Snow White meets Eyes Wide Shut”, and that feels about right), and while there are some funny bits, it’s of the wincing, ironic variety. More than anything, this is creeping horror — showcasing the horrors of modern life — wrapped in fairy tale motifs, and it made for a compelling read that I felt in my bones. Just to my tastes.

Crook Manifesto

A man has a hierarchy of crime, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, a crook manifesto, and those who subscribe to lesser codes are cockroaches. Are nothing.

 The sequel to Harlem Shuffle, Crime Manifesto revisits Ray Carney — son of a notorious criminal, trying to make it straight with his increasingly successful furniture store — and as with the previous novel, this one is divided into three sections: set in the years 1971, 1973, and the big Bicentennial year, 1976. As NYC, and Harlem in particular, get ever seedier — with corruption, murder, and arson out of control and the Mayor responding by laying off first responders — Carney watches as it churns, seeking out stability and opportunity. Once again, Colson Whitehead has written a highly entertaining piece of social commentary — African-American history disguised as a crime novel — and once again, I was thoroughly immersed in the setting, cared about the characters, and recognised the truth of the story Whitehead was telling. You really couldn’t ask for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

It was his own fault. He had been on the straight and narrow for four years, but slip once and everybody is glad to help you slip hard. Crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight. The rest is survival.

As the novel begins, Carney has been “retired” as a fence for four years — not only has the furniture showroom expanded into the former bakery next door, but Carney has bought the entire building and is now a landlord to the apartments upstairs as well; business is good — but when his teenage daughter begs him to find tickets for the upcoming Jackson Five concert at Madison Square Gardens, Carney reaches out to a crooked cop he used to know, and finds himself dragged back into the criminal underworld. One thing leads to another that plays out over the following five years. On the surface, this reads a bit like old-fashioned noir fiction — consider lines like She had an hourglass figure, not in its shape but in the melancholy reminder that time is running short and there are things on this Earth you’ll never experience. Or:Crime isn’t a scourge, people are. Crime is just how folks talk to each other sometimes. — but by loading in details of actual people and events, Whitehead has crafted a story both entertaining and realistic.

As with Harlem Shuffle, I found an interesting device in Crook Manifesto that I don't want to spoil, so consider this forewarned for the next bit:

In Harlem Shuffle, I thought that each of the three sections was inspired by a work of classic fiction (Great Expectations, The Count of Monte Cristo, “dime books'' like Strange Sisters), but here, it felt like each section was inspired by a movie. 1971 was the year that the real life police officer Frank Serpico was shot in the face on duty (and left to die by his fellow officers) after going to The New York Times with his story of police corruption, and even though the movie Serpico wouldn’t come out until 1973, his real life whistleblowing — and the ensuing Knapp Commission empanelled to investigate police corruption — is the catalyst for the crooked cop, Munson, entangling Carney in his crooked business.

The second part, set in 1973, is inspired by Blaxploitation movies like Blacula: not only is that movie mentioned by name, but this section tells the story of just such a film being made in and around Harlem. Carney doesn’t appear as much in this section — although he is an investor and his furniture store is used in a scene — and it was just as satisfying to centre on the film’s bodyguard, Pepper: a mountainous tough guy who had run with Carney’s father back in the day.

The third section (and this is where my theory kind of falls apart, ha ha) is set in 1976, and several characters talk about going to see Midway in SenSurround. If the city is at war — and this is a city firebombed, vandalised, and under siege — the ultimate confrontation, which all of the plot threads lead to, could well be considered a tide-turning battle.

And the switch from books to films makes sense: If Carney had hoped to escape his father’s criminal lifestyle through study and education, as a young man, books would have been how he learned about the greater world. In midlife — as a husband, father, busy entrepreneur and community member — Carney might not have had as much time for reading, consuming culture through movies instead. Maybe? 

Churn.Carney’s word for the circulation of goods in his illicit sphere, the dance of TVs and diadems and toasters from one owner to the next, floating in and out of people’s lives on breezes and gusts of cash and criminal activity. But of course churn determined the straight world too, memorialized the lives of neighborhoods, businesses. The movement of shop owners in and out of 383 West 125th Street, the changing entities on the deeds downtown in the hall of records, the minuet of brands on the showroom floor.

What I interpreted as the “shuffle” of the first book’s title, Whitehead explicitly calls “churn” in this one. Not only does Carney call his sideline as a fence a churn, but he also uses the word to refer to the corruption behind “urban renewal” — mysteriously overinsured tenements burning down and rebuilt shoddily by crooked developers with state funds — and with everyone from the fire inspectors to the politicians skimming a piece of the pie, it’s poor folks looking for a place to live who get lost in the churn every time. There are things you’ll do and things you won’t — the crook’s manifesto — and at midlife, Carney is defining himself in these terms. I understand this is going to be a trilogy, and I can’t wait to see what happens to Carney, and Harlem, in the years to come.

Tough Titties: On Living Your Best Life When You're the F-ing Worst

 

“Tough Titties” is my favorite non-apology, the original “sorry not sorry.”
Want me to work nine to five? Tough titties.
Want me to have kids, like you do? Tough titties.
Want me to watch less TV? Tough titties.
Want me to close my eyes, take a deep breath, and then massage the person next to me at this conference? Yeah, hell no. Tough titties.

                      — Laura Belgray

 

Tough titty said the kitty but the milk tastes good!

                    — my Mom, every time she said no to me.

I hadn’t heard of Laura Belgray before — she’s apparently a well-known “genius copywriter”, and that’s a niche service I haven’t found myself in need of — but this self-helpish memoir caught my attention (that cover! that font!) and I’m happy to have taken a chance on it. I grew up in the same era as Belgray, and while that means that Tough Titties covered all the familiar cultural touchstones (from Laverne and Shirley to Donkey Kong), her life was so different from mine — and her path to success so unlikely — that Belgray’s story isn’t exactly relatable, but it is entertaining. With a self-deprecating but unapologetic tone, Belgray lays her entire life bare (perhaps too bare at points), and if nothing else, her story proves that it’s never too late to discover your calling. I found myself really liking Belgray and I liked this book. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)

I guess it’s what everyone wants. To access their full potential, step into their greatness, and unleash their awesomeness. That “unleash” stuff smacks of rank bullshit and, also, it speaks to me. I always loved the idea of someone unclipping the leash on my awesomeness and letting it run loose in the park. Go, awesomeness, go chase that squirrel!

Belgray acknowledges right from the start that her “‘it all works out’ perspective comes from a place of privilege”, and along with a private school education, when she was done college she moved back home with her parents in Manhattan’s Upper West Side — working sporadically as a bartender but mostly partying, for years — until she figured out what she wanted to do with her life. Networking and lucky breaks — an internship here, a temp job there — saw her plucked to write ad copy for Spy magazine, creating content for an early blog, and eventually, writing the promo copy for Nick at Night sitcom marathons. Belgray says that she’s essentially lazy and disorganised, routinely late for work and late with assignments, but one can only assume that she was massively talented at this work if she was kept around — and this “do as much as you feel like doing and it will all work out” doesn’t feel like transferable advice. Is this a self help book?

As for the memoir aspects of Tough Titties: Belgray admits to being an obsessive person — obsessed with body image in particular, and she is constantly referencing her diet and exercise regimes — and obsessed with money (a cultish self help group she went on a Costa Rican retreat with became tired of hearing of Belgrave’s goal of tens of millions of dollars), and obsessed with being desired (which manifested in a lifetime of unhealthy partnerships before she met her husband). I may be the same age as Belgray, but not being from NYC, I never skipped school to play videogames in seedy Times Square arcades; never snuck into Studio 54 underage; wouldn’t namedrop Anna Sui babydoll sundresses, Clergerie slides, or Kangol bucket hats. Belgray and I don’t have much in common beyond our ages, but I liked her; we could be friends.

Best thing about getting older, unimaginable as it was in my teens (or even my forties), is, you stop caring so much about being noticed and attractive to the opposite (or same) sex. Not that I don’t desperately buy every neck cream and still want to be considered “hawt.” But these days, “You’re so lucky” is what I say to a friend who can sleep all night without getting up to pee.

Belgray discovered that her niche was writing short, funny bits (which is great practice for someday writing an entertaining book), and she eventually began to make her millions when she started using her online presence to teach others how to write short, funny bits for their own online pursuits; the dream job she created, in her fifties, that allows Belgray to sleep ‘til noon, keep her calendar blank, and still make her afternoon dance class:

I wanted to sit on the couch, blissfully unaware of the time, and write my emails, which had replaced blogging as my main form of content. They were the most me thing I wrote. If I could get paid just to write those, I fantasized, I’d be getting paid to be me. Happily, I found a way to do just that. Once I finally created my own courses and group programs, which, bonus, could help many people at once, I used my emails to sell those. And that, to oversimplify things, is how I got to my first million. Write fun things and then the money comes in, minimal appointments on the calendar.

Again: This is not exactly a self-help book — most people can’t not work at a job that’s not perfect while waiting for friends of friends to give them a break. Belgray does give some advice along the way (mostly along the line of “self-help books are pretty much BS”), but the biggest takeaway is that she learned something about herself through the opportunities she was given and only discovered how to make a dream job out of her talents in her fifties; and that’s an interesting and valuable lesson. As for her life story: Totally not relatable to me, sometimes off-putting, but I’d go get a Tasti D-Lite with her anytime to hear Belgray tell more stories.

Harlem Shuffle

 

Now come on, baby, I don't want you to scuffle now
Just groove it right here, do the Harlem Shuffle
Yeah, yeah, yeah, do the Harlem Shuffle
(oh do the monkey shine)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, do the Harlem Shuffle

— Bob & Earl

I always look for a novel’s title within the text (much can be learned from what an author plucks as meaningful), and as Harlem Shuffle doesn’t include its titular phrase anywhere, I decided to google it to see if it has a meaning I’m not aware of. First of all: I was surprised to learn that the song of this name was originally written and performed by the African-American duo Bob & Earl in 1965, and a few different websites that give the meanings of lyrics told me that the “Harlem Shuffle draws from line dances that originated in ballrooms during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s”. That wasn’t much help, but one website suggests that the song tells the story of a heroin addict shuffling down the streets of Harlem, swaying and itching and ooooh, do that monkey shine. That seems like a better allusion for what Colson Whitehead was writing about — heroin does make an appearance — but I sense that Whitehead was being more metaphorical than that: the “Harlem Shuffle” of the title seems to really be about the main character’s sideline as a fence for stolen goods (shuffling items in and out and making them legit), and also his striving for respectability (shuffling his way up through Harlem’s class structure). The last two novels I read by Whitehead (The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys) were necessary and finely-written social commentary on African-American history, and while Harlem Shuffle is that, too, it’s also highly entertaining, with a huge cast of colourful characters and a tense and interesting plot. I learned a lot about classism within the Harlem African-American community in the 50s and 60s — from paper bag clubs and country hicks to Strivers Row — and I really cared about the characters; top-notch reading experience on every level.

Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked, in practice and ambition. The odd piece of jewelry, the electronic appliances Freddie and then a few other local characters brought by the store, he could justify. Nothing major, nothing that attracted undue attention to his store, the front he put out to the world. If he got a thrill out of transforming these ill-gotten goods into legit merchandise, a zap-charge in his blood like he’d plugged into a socket, he was in control of it and not the other way around. Dizzying and powerful as it was. Everyone had secret corners and alleys that no one else saw — what mattered were your major streets and boulevards, the stuff that showed up on other people’s maps of you.

Ray Carney is a social climber: son of petty criminal Big Mike and a mother who died young, Carney put himself through business school and opened a furniture store with his name in two foot letters on the plate glass window out front. Married to a beautiful and educated woman from the best neighbourhood in Harlem — Elizabeth’s parents (“Light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white”) sniff that their daughter definitely married down — and as he and Elizabeth are expecting their second child, Carney would like nothing better than to move his family to a nicer, bigger apartment; if only the business was doing a little better and the rent more than barely covered. Carney’s ne'er-do-well cousin Freddie — more brother than cousin — has been in the habit of bringing the odd bit of jewellery and electronics into the store for Carney to fence for him, but when Freddie gets his cousin embroiled in a major heist with dangerous gangsters, Carney will need to decide which side of the law he wants to operate on and what lengths he will go to protect his family.

The novel is separated into three sections — 1959, 1961, and 1964 — and as I haven’t seen the following discussed elsewhere, I’ll add a spoiler warning here.

Each of the sections seem influenced by a different literary work. I noticed this first in the second section when Carney goes to the Dumas Club (a snooty social club for African-Americans, named after the famous author Alexandre Dumas; son of a French officer and a Haitian slave) and a character says, “If you remember the story of the Count of Monte Cristo — and I realize it’s been a long time since some of you were in school” — there was some chuckling — “he was a man who got things done once he’d decided on a course of action. And that’s the spirit we strive for in our fraternity. The bootstrap spirit that delivered our ancestors from bondage, and now inspires all of us as we try to make a better Harlem.” Hear, hear. This stuck out to me because this section eventually plays out as an intricate Count of Monte Cristoesque revenge plot.

In the third section, we learn that while Carney was hitting his school books, his cousin Freddie preferred “dime novels”: Strange Sisters, Violent Saturday, Her Name — Jezebel. Stories where no one was saved, not the guilty (killers and crooks) and not the innocent (orphans scooped up at bus stations, librarians inducted into worlds of vice). Each time he thought things would work out for them. They never did and he forgot that lesson each time he closed the covers. I took this as a warning for how the plot would develop, and I wasn’t wrong.

This made me return to the first section, and while I couldn’t find any pertinent literary references within it when I flipped through, there was this bit that comes later (after the Dumas reference): Carney hadn’t read Homer or Cervantes, but recalled Great Expectations (humble beginnings) and A Christmas Carol (rueful ghosts) with much fondness. And I have to admit that the first section — and Harlem Shuffle overall — feels totally Dickensian; from the poor orphan stumbling upon an inheritance, receiving help from unlikely allies, and the colourful names (Pepper, Miami Joe, Cheap Brucie, et al) to being dogged by his father’s reputation as though by a rueful ghost, Carney’s story is straight out of Dickens.

The three sections develop in this way like three different types of novels, while always hanging together as a cohesive whole, and it felt like Whitehead pulled off a tidy trick with this format. 

If Carney walked five minutes in any direction, one generations’ immaculate townhouses were the next’s shooting galleries, slum blocks testified in a chorus of neglect, and businessmen sat ravaged and demolished after nights of violent protest. What had started it, the mess this week? A white cop shot an unarmed black boy three times and killed him. Good old American know-how on display: We do marvels, we do injustice, and our hands are always busy.

Again, this is social commentary wrapped up in an entertaining crime novel. Elizabeth works for the Black Star Travel agency (a Green Book type service for African-American travellers) and she adds stories about the dangers for Civil Rights advocates and Freedom Riders; the only white characters in Harlem are the cops who shake Carney down for protection money; the Harlem riot of 1964 — sparked by the killing of an unarmed fifteen-year-old by an off-duty police officer — is the backdrop for the last section. Against this racial divide, Whitehead shows the classism within the African-American community — based on skin tone, economic background, North vs South vs Caribbean islander — and through Carney, examines what it takes to move up the social ladder; ooooh, do that Harlem Shuffle. I loved every bit of it.

Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast

 

Wildfires live and die by the weather, but “the weather” doesn’t mean the same thing it did in 1990, or even a decade ago, and the reason the Fort McMurray Fire trended on newsfeeds around the world in May 2016 was not only because of its terrifying size and ferocity, but also because it was a direct hit — like Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans — on the epicenter of Canada’s multibillion-dollar petroleum industry. That industry and this fire represent supercharged expressions of two trends that have been marching in lockstep for the past century and a half. Together, they embody the spiraling synergy between the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs and the corresponding increase in heat-trapping greenhouse gases that is altering our atmosphere in real time. In the spring of 2016, halfway through the hottest year of the hottest decade in recorded history, a new kind of fire introduced itself to the world.

I’ve read John Vaillant before — I thought that The Tiger was the perfection of a multidisciplinary approach to nonfiction storytelling — and when I began Fire Weather and realised it was about the Fort Mac wildfire of 2016 (a national tragedy that mesmerised and horrified Canadians as it unfolded), I was 100% enthralled. As the human side of this fire was revealed — riveting and emotional stories from the firefighters and the city’s evacuees that display an amazing level of research and interviews on Vaillant’s part — my engagement was ramped up. And when the next section of the book turned to the science behind wildfires and discussed the undeniable evidence that human activity has caused the Earth to get hotter — that we have gone past the tipping point and entered feedback loops that will see hotter temperatures and more extreme wildfires worldwide going forward — I was dead horrified. But when the third section of the book went on to discuss bigger wildfires around the world — notably in Australia and California — that saw greater damage and loss of life, I had to wonder why Vaillant chose the relatively less impactful Canadian story to focus on. And then it dawned on me that it was because, as revealed in that opening quote, Vaillant was able to use the Fort McMurray tragedy as a rhetorical device to equate the greed and rapacity of a wildfire to the greed and rapacity of resource extraction — with the undeniable irony of “the epicenter of Canada’s petroleum industry” being ground zero for a disaster caused by the effects of that very industry — and although he stops short of writing that the tens of thousands of petrochemical workers who came to Fort Mac from across the country and around the world who lost everything in that fire had it coming, he does point out that these workers had a particular penchant for large pickup trucks and other gas-burning toys. And this realisation rubbed me the wrong way. Fire Weather is both an incredible cross-disciplinary account of our warming world and a timely warning about our future of untamable wildfires — interspersed with engaging human stories of how these infernos are experienced on the ground — but I found something so off-putting about Vaillant’s use of the Fort-McMurray-Fire-as-rhetorical-device that I can’t help but remove half a star, and find myself further wanting to round down to four. I still think everyone should read this well-researched, eye-opening work. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.

From the beginning I was wondering why Vaillant (born in the US but living and writing in Canada; opening here with a Canadian disaster and the efforts of this country’s first responders) was talking in miles and degrees Fahrenheit. When he writes that the “blue chip” outfits to work at in Fort McMurray were Syncrude and Suncor and then translates,“Working for these companies is the boreal equivalent to working for Exxon or Shell”, I had to wonder, “Who is he explaining this to? I don’t exactly know how cool 40°F is, but I know who Syncrude is.” When Vaillant gets to the second section, however, and the climate science (terrifying and undeniable) is followed by the discouraging history of alarm-ringing scientists appearing before (American) Congressional committees since the 1950s (turns out that the petrochemical industry has always known about the greenhouse effect and its world-burning endgame, but, money), I had to acknowledge that Fire Weather was meant for a larger (American) audience and our localised disaster was merely the opening rhetorical salvo. (And I suppose I would have been less annoyed if Vaillant hadn’t started this book with named individuals crying and praying in their Ford F150s as they attempted to flee Fort Mac at a crawl through a literal tunnel of flames; it feels icky to humanise only to generalise.)

The science of wildfires is fascinating and it was definitely frightening to learn that they are evolving in ways so unprecedented — as in the “fire tornado”, a phenomenon witnessed for the first time ever, outside Canberra in 2003 that was three miles high, one mile wide, and so hot that it literally vapourized houses as it moved over them — that we have no tools for fighting or containing them. Every country in Europe — including ice-covered Greenland — experienced a wildfire in 2022 (a phenomenon recorded for the first time ever); as the tundra melts and long-covered peat reserves begin to burn uncontrollably, Canada’s vast boreal forest can no longer be considered a net carbon sink; every time we live through the “hottest August ever recorded”, we should be acknowledging that it’s probably also the coolest August any of us will experience for the rest of our lives — and this hot air mixed with low humidity is a wildfire waiting to happen.

Factoids that blew my mind:

Fire, as far as we know, is unique to our planet.

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator.

“Artist, inventor, citizen scientist and early suffragist” Eunice Newton Foote performed some simple experiments in 1856 that demonstrated the greenhouse effect; facts she then shared with the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, NY. A hundred years later, director Frank Capra collaborated with Bell Telephone on some educational films and made The Unchained Goddess — about the links between pollution and climate change — which was shown in schools to millions of young baby boomers. We can’t say that we weren’t warned.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to make of the following:

By the early 1990s, Republican attitudes toward environmental action of virtually any kind had turned decidedly negative. Meanwhile, energy producers and manufacturers used this extraordinary turnabout as an opportunity to promote even more carbon-intensive products, including plastics (recall the sudden explosion of bottled water in the early 1990s, simultaneous with the first Gulf War).

Was the explosion of the bottled water industry really driven more by the petrochemical industry than by Nestle and Coca-Cola seeing a profit opportunity? Questioning that made me wonder about this: Near the end, Vaillant explains the many ways that the fossil fuel industry is under critical pressure — large insurers are dropping worksites and pipelines as customers; blue chip investment funds are divesting themselves of petrochemical companies; many class action lawsuits are being brought against specific companies for knowingly destroying the planet — and while that may seem like we are at the beginning of the end of burning greenhouse-gas-causing-fuels, and although Vaillant quotes Vaclav Smil (the world-leading expert on energy) several times throughout Fire Weather, Vaillant does not quote from Smil’s latest book (How the World Really Works), in which Smil explains why we simply cannot stop burning fossil fuels in the foreseeable future (or forego plastics; one of Smil’s “four pillars of the modern world”). Without in any way denying that burning fossil fuels has caused our current warming world — and acknowledging that we are in for ever longer and more intense “fire seasons” in the future — if we can’t stop releasing CO2, what should we actually be focussing on? Exploiting the Alberta oil sands might be an energy-intensive, environment-contaminating, low-return industry that has no business being in the centre of the increasingly-more-flammable boreal north, but is shipping Saudi oil across the oceans the better option? (Is carbon capture viable? Please?)

In 2016, people who raised the question of climate change in the context of Fort McMurray, or its fire, were ignored, accused of exploiting a tragedy or, worse, kicking a man when he was down. The province’s brief and contentious dalliance with a slightly more liberal government happened to overlap with the fire and ended abruptly afterward with a return to, and hardening of, the industry-friendly United Conservative Party, among whose devotees Donald Trump is considered an ally and, increasingly, a role model.

Again: I’m left feeling like Vaillant exploited the Fort McMurray tragedy here for rhetorical reasons — weirdly branding all Alberta conservatives as Trump fans for political reasons — and I found it off-putting. On the other hand: The writing — the science, the history, the human element — was so well done that this is closer to a five star read, would likely not be off-putting to most readers, and the message is so important that I hope it is widely read upon release.