Tamara Drewe

A friend at the library suggested Posy Simmond's graphic novel, Tamara Drewe, because she'd read Gemma Bovary by the same author. Hmmm, obviously this was going to be the retelling of another classic, but what was it? The discreetly copulating sheep in the background of the cover wasn't giving me any clues, but then, Ah! There it is, inside front cover: a classified ad for a writers' retreat, far from the Madding Crowd.

In college, friends Gavin and Jeff mocked me for using the phrase far from the madding crowd as synonimous with getting away from irritating people. I don't know if they're right or wrong about that, but I've always been a little shy of using the phrase again, unless I'm talking about the novel (which I never do). Also, I'm a little shy of Thomas Hardy in general. Actually, shy is the wrong word. I have never recovered from reading Jude the Obscure and still feel sick to my stomach when I think of that novel, so there was NO WAY, I'd be reading Far from the Madding Crowd to better my "enjoyment" of Tamara Drewe. (I did use Wikipedia, though, so I got the plot points which are confused and varied and mostly morally deadly. Hardy's pretty big on come-uppance).

No worries, Tamara Drewe is a fun romp through the characters of a small English village--modern day--in which a returning vixen enchants and meddles with the locals which include a group of writers in that advertised classified ad. Normally, the abundant text that accompanies the graphics would turn me off--I want either a novel or a graphic novel, not some amalgam of the two--but the text gave great insight into the characters. There's the dowdy ever-returning writer, fussily working away at a literary text; The playboy writer; the seemingly self-sacrificing wife of said playboy running the retreat. There's the unnaturally handsome gardener; the bored local girls; the rock-star boyfriend with ex issues, and Tamara herself. Things turn out a lot better for everyone (barring a death or two), than they do in Thomas Hardy's original and I really enjoyed reading this.

Every time I read a graphic novel, I always wonder how the same story could possibly be told any other way. This book was no exception. I am a little disappointed at my online preview of Gemma Bovary because the pictures are so similar that I thought for a minute that the same characters appeared in both. I'll probably still read it, though, and I've already read Flaubert's Emma Bovary so I can make a more informed comparison.

The BFG / SilverFin

Okay, yeah, so I've been reading kids books again. I had never read Roald Dahl's The BFG so I didn't mind reading it for work. I was reminded of what perfect writing for kids can be. I don't mean the story is perfect and a lot of people find Dahl's stories too gross, too dark, or even too silly for kids, but it's quite nice. Never mind that I feel like I'm swearing every time I mention the title. Dahl sets a scene up nicely:

In the silvery moonlight...the houses looked bent and crooked, like houses in a fairy-tale. Everything was pale and ghostly and milky-white. Across the road, you could see Mrs. Rance's shop where you bought buttons and wool and bits of elastic. It didn't look real. There was something dim and misty about that too.

Why you are buying "bits of elastic" is unclear, but that detail gives this book that delicious old-timey feel of a cozy childhood (even if said childhood is in an orphanage, from where you are soon to be snatched by a giant).

But the descriptive writing isn't why a kid reads this book. He probably reads it for the whizzpopping and all the talk of whether that's rude to do in public or not (yes, it's just what it sounds like) and all the made-up words. Dahl was a terrible speller but loved to play with language so you have giants with names like Maidmasher, Fleshlumpeater, Bloodbottler, and the Big Friendly Giant himself who can't speak properly but knows how to get his message across. There are lots of plays on words or meaning for adults and sophisticated readers. Thus the bad giants like to eat Turks because they taste of turkey. They avoid Greeks because, yes, they're greasy. The Welsh taste of fish (work it out for yourself) and the people of Wellington have a great boot taste. And don't think the BFG is just swizzfiggling us.

Dahl sticks up for the little guy and revenge is always swift and ugly, because so are the brutes in the real world.

Brutes are a nice segue into SilverFin, the first book in a series about "the young James Bond." It was exactly the kind of book I would have loved in middle school because I was reading the actual James Bond books at that age, which just seems weird now. I'm not sure why Charlie Higson felt compelled to create a back story for James Bond. Maybe just because he wanted a character at Eton to introduce himself to the housemaster as "Bond, James Bond." Mostly, I suspect, because he thought it would sell books to have a ready-made spy in the making for his series. It seems unnecessary because these are pretty rip-roaring adventures, though a bit anachronistic(set sometime in the 30s? but I kept forgetting that). It's more like the Hardy boys, except much more graphic and, yeah, frightening. The baddie is closer to what you'd expect from the new screen James Bond and it's a little weird to find in a kid's book. Seeing people being fed (somewhat discreetly) to ravenous eels is not something I'm going to forget soon.

I didn't learn much about why the future James Bond becomes who he is---um--today, but I did learn some really gross stuff about genetic engineering (mostly fake and unrealistic, but that's okay), and that it is possible (not once, but twice) to escape from horrific situations with a broken leg. A good read, though perhaps a little slow in places for adrenaline-rush young readers.

Miracle at St. Anna

The movie of this book was messy, awkward and occasionally downright nonsensical (though nicely filmed) so it's a bit of a wonder that I picked up the book, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I'm happy to report that the book is pretty good. James McBride is trying to do a lot in this book about black soldiers in Italy during WWII. He's covering Buffalo soldiers, race relations (at home and in the army), Italian regionalism, Italian partisans, art...Hmm...What else? Oh yes, religion and miracles. It's pretty messy, but I liked it well enough.

I wasn't always sure how much to trust of what McBride wrote, but it seems well-researched. In The Miracle of St Anna, four black American soldiers get separated from their unit in their attempt to save the life of a little Italian boy. They end up in a small village high in the hills and there they struggle with their role in the fighting, their clueless (and often racist) commanders in absentia, their relationship with the villagers, with one another, with the "enemy"--both known and unknown--and with the little boy who is part of the "miracle" in the title. (That's not really a spoiler).

This being a war novel, there are some fairly graphic descriptions of wounds, but this is essentially a novel of the living (not that everyone lives--yes, that's a spoiler). It's also primarily a window into the experiences of black soldiers in the newly "intergrated" American army. According to McBride, black units--or Buffalo soldiers--were sent mostly to Italy because it was considered a less important arena than the other areas of fighting. Of course, that was an underestimation and the terrain alone was often as difficult as the battles. He writes: "But in central Italy, the war was fought out of the public eye, at night, in winter, in cold, chaotic blackness, by Gurkhas, Italians, Brazilians, British, Africans, even Russian defectors, and most of all, by American Negroes, who were convinced that the white man was trying to kill them, in mountainous terran where icy winter rains and high winds lashed the trees and bushes with hurricane force, pushing aside sanity and loosing all the ghosts and goblins of Italy's past."

The contrast in the treatment, experience, and responsibilities of the black soldeiers with what they experience back home is often heartbreaking and the characters are all a bit ambivalent towards America even while they long for its comforts.

The four main characters--Train, Stamps, Hector, and Bishop--are pretty well drawn and I found them interesting in their contrasts and their relationship to one another, but McBride makes a really weird choice about who survives in the end, and the framing device is even weirder (though not as weird as in the movie). I do like that we're led to believe in various miracles throughout the book, but that most of them fall through in the end in one way or another. I wouldn't say there's a great sense of closure although McBride tries for it. I guess that's a bit like life--we want things neat and tidy and for everything to work out for everyone, to the point that we may even read miracles or signs in everything, when really, not everything connects or even makes sense.

Don't bother with the movie, but try the book.

House of Splendid Isolation

Ireland has been on my mind lately. I've been craving sheperd's pie (and eating it), listening to old Pogues, new U2 and I absolutely love Amy MacDonald's album. I don't know, maybe it's spring that brought this on: all that green. In any case, searching for a good Irish novel, I gravitated to Edna O'Brien. I guess I'd never read her and thought I should start there.
House of Splendid Isolation is two seperate stories together, but always the story is of Ireland: What is Ireland? Who is truly Irish? And what is true love of country. Because of course you can't have a novel about Ireland without The Troubles as a backdrop.

Josie is an old widow in the titular house which is abruptly invaded by an IRA terrorist nicknamed the Beast. Like so many other things in the messy war for independence, McGreevey doesn't appear to live up to this name, and Josie herself is not what she appears. Captor and Captive must somehow coexist while forces--both physical and figurative--converge on them.

At first, Josie tries to get him to leave. "You see, it's not very nice at my time of life...It's not very convenient." She said, and wished that she had not said "my time of life." He apologised for the inconvenience, said there weren't many safe houses around, and that surely it was big enough for two.

"Not us two," she said tartly...

"We'll survive."

But of course, that's the big question. Can they, and will they survive?

I didn't like the mixing in of Josie's younger days with the present-day action. I thought it was a distraction and didn't really explain much about who she was and whether or not she would sympathize with McGreevey. I kind of skimmed those parts. I really liked the ambiguity inherent in the acts on both sides of the battle. Some of the Guards sent to chase down the Beast are conflicted, especially those born and bred locally. They know the myths, the songs, and they love Ireland as well. But who is right? Because we also hear the painful story of a woman wounded in a bank robber (presumably done to bankroll terrorism) who recites to the doctor all the names she'd chosen for the child she is about to lose. Beast, indeed.

As the story goes on, the race between the Guards and McGreevey--both of whom have a job to do--takes on an inevitability that seems to symbolize the continuous race for the ownership of Ireland. There is also the constant threat of betrayal. I know Ireland has been stable recently (barring a few deaths), but the conflict still exists and this book--already old (1994)--is a reminder of that.
There's some nice writing here. One image that struck in my mind about the decaying grand house was "...over the light switch, like some rustic fetish, a tranche of toadstools ripening in the sun." How lovely the word "tranche", but also how gross. And McGreevey is almost electrocuted turning on said light.

Another nice image: Heaven to sit in front of the stove in the nicely varnished room [of the boat] and smoke, and watch the dark coming on, that nice queer sensation of dark coming over water, creeping over it, and the mountains gettting dark too and bulky..."

It still makes me want to visit Ireland.

The Names of the Dead

It's been awhile since I've read a Vietnam War novel and so Stewart O'Nan's The Names of the Dead felt disorienting and anachronistic at first. I was having flashbacks to the 80s when it seemed like every book was about the war, and this book, with a 1996 pub date was even a little late to the party. It had also been awhile since I'd read such a creepy book that was not billed as a thriller/mystery.

Larry Markham is minding his own business in 1982 upstate NY, failing his marriage, working a simple, dull job (Wonder Bread delivery driver! Nice 70s/80s touch), and facilitating a disabled veterans support group. The group doesn't feel too cliched, which is either a credit to O'Nan's writing or a result of my hiatus from such books. I liked that every story the members tell, is given shorthand to the reader: "It was a rat story" or "it was a tiger story," as if all war stories are the same, and these guys have heard it all, are almost making them up at this point.

One day there's a new guy, Creeley, in the group--briefly and angrily--and the next day the guy's stalking Larry with a vengeance that of course ties in to Larry's year (1968) in Vietnam. But this is no neat and tidy revenge story. The lack of true explanation for Creeley's methodical circling is a metaphor for the Vietnam War. We get Larry's stories that he never shares with group, his father, or his wife, but it barely makes us know him more. He's forever marked by his 11 months in Vietnam, but it doesn't explain him. We don't really know enough about Creeley, but we imagine the creeping fear of being hunted by him.

The intersection of Larry's year in Vietnam and glimpses of his current life doesn't work as a perfect metaphor, but I do like that as a new recruit, Larry just kind of goes along and is clearly just learning the ropes. Sure, people die, but the living are still a tight squad. Then almost suddenly, things change. About the time Larry gets back from his leave (and his mother's funeral) all hell is breaking loose. The war becomes like a mudslide for him as the deaths of his fellow soldiers come in rapid succesion until Larry is the last one standing.

At home, in 1982, Larry's just going along with his life and then the problems start to pile up. Is Creeley the root of it all? Or is that just how life goes? Sometimes problems pile up, even if your not being stalked by a psycho Vet you don't know or don't remember. (Larry's therapy group is particularly incensed by Creeley because they feel he gives them all a bad name. This is a nice touch, allowing O'Nan to write about the psycho vet without seeming cliched.)

O'Nan's writing was, as always, great. He seems simply to be capturing life in his books. This one just happens to have the drama/trauma of a messy war as its backdrop. I kind of wanted more closure at the end. Yeah, yeah, Larry goes to the newly constructed Wall in Washington, but I wanted Larry's life to be resolved. I guess that's not how the Vietnam War or a good writer works.

addendum: I'm continuing my race into the past by reading Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation, another early 90s book about troubles of the 70s/80s (Ireland, this time).