Doors Open

You're just a regular guy--okay, not regular, regular because you've made a killing in the tech world--but you're youngish and you're a little bored and you have a couple of friends who have the same hobbies as you, mainly you all like fine art. Did I mention you're bored and you have a lot of money? What if one of your buddies comes up with a seemingly brilliant plan to "free" some fine art from the clutches (and locks and keys) of the local (Edinburgh) banks? Would you do it?

Husband Ben loves books about regular people who get involved in high crime. Things like Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (made into a decent movie) or Mark Bowen's real-life story of an accident involving a Brinks truck, Finders Keepers. I've passed Ian Rankin's Doors Open to Ben because I'm thinking it's right up his alley. Rankin is a good writer who happens to write thrillers--or rather, police procedurals. I've always enjoyed his Inspector Rebus books, but he retired his hard-drinking, insubordinate character in last year's Exit Music. Probably about time, too. So it was with great pleasure that I found myself deep into this one-off about Mike Mackenzie trying to pull off a bank heist (but only for art's sake, of course). How many people have been sitting around a pub (or the national equivalent) with a bunch of buddies and thought, "yeah, I could do that."? That's pretty much what Mike was doing, and what his friend Allan hoped they were doing, and then Professor Gissing pushed them to do more than speculate about it.

Turns out there's a lot to pulling off a big robbery. I will say that for all the things that go wrong (and, yeah, duh! They do go wrong-ish), Rankin makes it seem achievable. Or, I guess I should say, he makes the whole plan more or less believable. There were some scenes where my tv-inspired mind was screaming, "NO, obviously the cops will trace you when you do that!" but I was along for the ride (and wrong to worry, in a few cases). I also decided that much of police work depends on coincidence--you happen to know something about art, or you happen to have been tailing a criminal element and he runs into an art lover and then you put it all together when some art goes missing...Later, I thought this might not be true, but I bought it while I read it.
I'm glad Ian Rankin stayed in the game without having to resort to sticking his creaky old Inspector Rebus into new and increasingly unlikely scenarios.

I'm wondering if husband Ben (a software engineer himself) will recognize himself in this particular scene? One of the recessed lights in the kitchen needed replacing, too, but it was a halogen thing and fiddly to install. Mike would sometimes joke that when the last bulb fizzled out, he'd have to find somewhere else to live. This pretty much describes how Ben's office ran for years, getting dimmer and dimmer as the engineers opted to move existing lightbulbs to burnt-out areas, rather than, God forbid--purchase new ones and install them properly. For this moment alone, I bow to Rankin's knowledge of human nature among the software set.

Where You Are

This is a reread of Where You Are by George Constable, but so worth it for the mood I was in. Lake Stevenson is a tidy young old man. I have no idea how old he's supposed to be-late 20s, mid-thirties?-- but he seems perfectly content with his vaguely bacheloresque life. Content, it seems, until an elderly aunt dies and bequeaths him a stately house in the fancy part of town. Okay, that's normal enough, but there's a catch. The catch is Randall, the aunt's beloved springer who comes with the house and must remain in said house for the remainder of his days (and he's still relatively young).

Ah, dilemma, what's a tidy soul to do? Lake loves his apartment, loves his life, thinks he loves his girlfriend...Then again, accidents happen. Maybe they happen especially to small dogs whose brains appear pretty tiny.

I think I want Lake's problems even though he himself is not very likeable. He's a little prone to lying, though he claims not to do it on purpose, this embellishing--like telling someone his name is Luke Stephenson instead of Lake Stevenson. A bit awkward later when he has to confess. So, I don't want his flaws, necessarily, but I don't mind having to deal with a wealthy woman's bequeathal, even if it involves some moral quandaries (In spite of appearances and suggestions, no harm comes to any dogs in the telling of this story).

I definitely want Lake's job. He has started his own company whose sole purpose is to make directions user-friendly. Just the sort of neat and tidy job that a neat and tidy oldish young man might excel at. In my case, I just think it's an amusing line of work. There are some entertaining before and after exercises on manuals his company is redoing, but I love this scene when Lake is trying to forget his dog/house/old aunt/girlfriend troubles by immersing himself in work. Lake devoted half an hour to analyzing a booklet on worker safty in a lumberyard. It had been produced by someone in the lumber company and was riddled with problems--cryptic warnings, a blaming tone, afterthoughts. At one point a phrase seemd to link higher pay to faster work. A plaintiff's lawyer would love it.
This reminded me of the farmer I worked for a couple of years. His wife, thank goodness, ran the farm stand, because if Jake had been left to it, he would never have made money. He once put up such a dire, hand scrawled sign about the evils of peeling back his corn without first purchasing it, that we had to rip it down in the dawn hours lest he get arrested for threatening bodily harm on the wealthy customers innocently hoping for produce. Some people simply shouldn't try to explain things in writing. Or they should hire Lake Stevenson to do it for them.

In Where You Are, Lake kind of bumbles along, making mistakes of the non-written variety, failing at this and that in his personal life, offending people left and right, but you know in the end, that he will do the right thing. Whatever that may turn out to be.

Consequences

I've been thinking about getting old and what that means. My mother and I have both had significant birthdays this month, my husband's grandmother is now confined to bed, and my mother-in-law's uncle died yesterday. All of these events, tumbling together have me thinking about how the generations move on. Penelope Lively's book Consequences traces the lives of three generations of women, from pre-WWII to present day. Lorna escapes her parents' upper class life in London for the love of a young artist, great before his time. Their daughter Molly sails through an unconventional youth to become her own woman sometime in the 1960s. Her daughter Ruth struggles more than her mother and grandmother did to find her path, but each finds happiness in bits and pieces.

Lively tries to tie the women together but I didn't see much resemblence. This isn't so much a book about legacy as it is about the familial ties we create. Traditional family is absent, if not often rejected as Lorna, Molly, and Ruth forge ahead. These women all had to get on mostly on their own so there's a sense of sui generis to their successes and occasional stumbling blocks. What matters here are the characters and Lively is brilliant with these. The best lines go to Lucas, a constant friend from Lorna's early days with Matt, the love of her life. Lucas is no patriarch although he nearly outlasts them all, but his presence is everywhere. He counsels and loves Lorna, Molly, and Ruth through the years in his own haphazard ways. He's an accidental father and father figure, but never really steps up or changes who he is. In a less certain author's hands, he would have been made the gay uncle. Instead, Lively makes his presence essential without overshadowing the role of the women who are her focus.

When Molly reports she's lost her job as librarian, Lucas says, "Was it the turquoise skirt, and those earrings? I always felt you didn't dress the part."

"No, it was Lady Chatterley's Lover," Molly explained. [she'd scandalized the trustees by suggesting a lecture on banned books--remember, this is London in the early 60s and D.H. Lawrence's book had gone to trial]

Lucas sighed, "Well, I suppose you can argue that you fell on your sword for freedom of speech. An interesting entry for the curriculum vitae..."

When Molly rejects her maternal grandparents' lifestyle, she tells Lucas, "I think I have dropped out of the upper-middle class. I can't seem to fit there at all."

"I shouldn't worry," said Lucas, "It's called social mobility. Mind, it usually operates the other way--upward rather than downward."

When Molly's daughter Ruth passes the age of 43, long outliving her grandmother's final age, she reflects, Youth was gone, then, which was occasionally dismaying but a truth that could be confronted, and faced down. More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: What was it that was not chosen?

I loved reading about the different lives of these women and they did all seem to make choices, in spite of Ruth's reflections. They are all granted their happiness even if it doesn't last as long as they would have liked, or even if it is unexpected, unintended happiness. This is a great book for multi-generational discussions and between Consequences and Family Album (as well as Heat Wave from years ago), I am firmly back in Penelope Lively's fan camp.

K2 Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous MT

Today's news--or yesterday's news--is that the first woman to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world (all over 26,000 ft) completed her quest on Annapurna. Annapurna seems to be the last mountain for a lot of people in this rarefied club of completely insane climbers. Ed Viesturs, who wrote (with David Roberts) K2:Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain, almost got hung up on Annapurna. That mountain almost became his Waterloo, but when he finally summitted in 2005, he became only the 6th person in the world to join the 14 club. So now, Oh Eun Sun of South Korea is another first.

But Viestur's book focuses on K2 and there's a reason he calls it the world's most dangerous mountain. It's not a "savage" mountain, as some climber/writers have termed it. It's not some malevolent being, but the fact remains that in an era when summitting Everest becomes almost humdrum (apparently), K2 remains the province of experts, and of very few succesful summits. Usually statistics give me a headache and my eyes glaze over. I forget whether the number was 400 or 4,000 (or even 40). I'm embarrassingly useless with numbers, but this statistic stuck with me: In 2008, 290 climbers reached the top of Everest, while only 18 reached K2. More sobering are the deaths to success ratio. Only 1 died on Everest that year while 11 died on K2. If you look at the all-time successes versus deaths on the two mountains, 1 in 19 died on Everest while 1 in 4 died on K2. Not very cheery, so why do people do this?

I'm the first to admit I'm an armchair ice climber. In fact, give me Antarctica survival tales to really perk me up. Just don't ask me to set foot outside my own house if the wind is whipping up a storm of snow in the dead of winter. I do love hearing about other people's efforts, and--unlike some--I prefer a good success story to a crazy cartwheel into the void. Better yet, give me a crazy cartwheel that is arrested by a well-timed ice ax, and I'm happy. Or give me a lost, snowblind climber (like Michel Parmentier who waited in vain for his climbing partners) who is talked down K2 in a storm by another climber working from memory! Chamoux got on the radio and did a remarkable thing: he tried to talk Parmentier down, giving him the "beta" of the route from memory..."Keep right, keep right, don't veer to the left, then straight down for perhaps two, three hundred metres...over" Turning to the others in the dome tent, with the radio off, Chamoux said, "He has perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that he finds the ropes. If not..."

Viesturs has everything in this book. I thought it would get boring and/or repetitive once he stopped writing about his first-hand experience, but not once did I get bored. He covers the earliest efforts in 1902, he writes about the 1938 and 1939 expeditions and the horrible 1954 first summit that spawned a decades-old feud and lingering bitterness. He also covers the deadly summer of 2008 in which a horrible percentage of summitters--or near--summitters came to very bad and/or unknown ends. I like Viestur's tone. He oftens says he doesn't like to second-guess other climbers or air dirty laundry, as he calls it, but he subtly explains how he might have acted differently or he gently tries to rehabilitate some climbers whom he believes were treated harshly. This book is full of facts without being dry and it has reignited my interest in reading more.

My only complaint was that it was very hard to keep the characters of each expedition clear. I would have liked a nice appendix which listed dates and names and any "firsts" or interesting discoveries that came from each expedition. Still, this is a nice overview of the history of K2 and a reminder that climbing such heights is still for the skilled, the dedicated, and the (perhaps) slightly unhinged.

Here's Viestur's on The Daily Show just after he became the first American to climb all 14 8,000 Meter mountains.

Family Album

Have you always wanted a large family, fantasizing about the giddy happiness of your progeny as they play in the manicured yard? Would you love a top-rated kitchen? Do you desire to pull off gourmet meals (that said multiple children will eat sans complaining)? Okay, but what if that came with a few secrets you had to keep, a blind eye you had to turn, an aloof husband, an inscrutable au pair who's long outlasted her original purpose for hire? What if those 6 beloved children scattered as far as the earth could take them? Oh, except for your favorite child, the ne'er do well, addicted child who was never at fault for all the paths on which he was led astray.

In Family Album, Penelope Lively builds this world up and lets time tear it down. Alison doggedly insists she has created a perfect childhood for each of her grown children. She loves her home and hearth and doesn't quite understand why they don't all come home more often. We get the kids' perspectives in here as well. Most of their memories are decent--there's the usual sibling rivalry and their father's lack of attention, there's some scary-seeming cellar game that turns out fairly tame, but the children seem to have come out more or less unscathed. . They don't, however, share their mother's enthusiasm for Allersmead, the family home--or for children and cooking, for that matter--and they look a bit oddly on Alison and Charles continuing to rattle around in the old Edwardian house, not quite moving out of the 1970s and still housing their au pair, Ingrid. Why she's still around isn't really that much of a mystery, though Lively takes her time explaining her presence. This is more a book about what we take and what we leave of our happy/unhappy childhoods.

My favorite character is Charles, the patriarch, though he's more like a distant uncle who shuffles in and out of the lives of his wife, au pair, and children. He's a scholarly writer, who bypasses the usual path to scholarship (teaching is somehow beneath him). Ironically, his greatest publishing triumph is a book on adolescence and youth, though he has very little idea of his own children's lives as they grow up, not even fully aware of their ages at times. Sarcasm is learned early and applied often among the inmates of Allersmead. He's a great character because he's not evil, and not a bad father in his own way (I guess). There doesn't seem to be much room for parenting with Alison on site anyway. Any left over mothering or parenting is taken up by Ingrid. Not that Charles minds. He's too busy in his own head to pay attention to what goes on around him. He's an interesting character.

All the grown children are drawn differently enough to keep them straight and I've always loved a book that shows trajectory from youth to adulthood, I love seeing the neatness of: this is who I was and now here I am. There's nothing too neat about their lives, though, and the veil is slipping even from Alison in her dream state. She's got talent to spare in the kitchen and so she herself is never made ridiculous. I appreciate how rounded Lively developed each character. It's a good read.

Years ago, I'd read Heatwave by Penelope Lively and I loved it, loved the twist at the end, but after that I'd never found anything else by her that I could finish. Family Album has started me back into her books.

**The picture I've posted of the cover is not the cover I read from. It must be the British version, but I liked it so much better than the American version. The friendly chaos better captures life in Allersmead, both as it was (sometimes) and how Alison wanted it.

Marriage and Other Acts of Charity

Being parted by death is what happens if a marriage works, writes Kate Braestrup in her new memoir, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity. This statement is received with awe by the young Maine State Warden and his fiancee as Braestrup councils them, pre-nuptials. This is part of her job as chaplain and she knows both marriage and death, as well as what it's like to be parted from marriage by death. Her last book was the excellent and moving Here if You Need Me, a reflection on the untimely death of her state trooper husband and her subsequent path towards ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and then Maine State Warden chaplain.
Marriage is a messier collection of thoughts on marriage and love, and yes, sex (here, as delivered to middle school students). It's perhaps easy to be maudlin with death if you've never experienced true grief, but I think love is even harder to pin down--your choice is to be sappy or depressingly realistic. Braestrup strikes an admirable balance, though I suppose it helps to focus on marriage to make her points. Marriages tend to be complicated and inscrutable.

There are some great observations, written elegantly, as when Braestrup writes, I bear witness to the ways in which love resurrects itself in the face of loss. Braestrup is, after all, a chaplain so that much of her thinking about love also encompasses love of God, but she's Unitarian, so the writing and reflections are of a more spiritual nature than they are of edicts found written in Biblical stone. When she meets a part-time pilot who fears more than anything the helplessness of a plane crash, the falling through the ether untethered, she suggests he could look on the experience with curiousity rather than one of fear and hopelessness. Perhaps this seems quaint or neat or religious, but I take the same comfort the pilot did when Braestrup says, If I ever fall out of an airplane, I hope I remember to be curious. Since it's my last adventure, I hope I actually pay attention.

There's no pretty way to have a loved one back after death. No matter how much we think we wish that, it can't and shouldn't happen. Just ask Stephen King and countless others (I'm thinking of an X-Files episode). Braestrup writes, We can't have our dear dead ones back, not as they were, not as we loved them. It isn't the beloved that resurrects. It's love itself. Instead, if we are able to love again, open our hearts to love, we keep that loved one close. It's like a little legacy from a lost one.

Braestrup has her eyes wide open about the difficulties of love and marriage and she's honest and harsh with herself about her first marriage and doesn't allow Drew's death to make him perfect either. That doesn't diminish the pain of her loss, but it sets her up for a new relationship. They'll always be messy. Just ask the porcupine. Apparently, porcupines mate for life and chaplain Braestrup and a warden contemplate the sadness of roadkill porcupines when they're out working one day. We sighed and were silent for a moment, imagining a porcupine grieving in some dim, bewildered way, beside a road-killed mate. Just don't try asking a game warden how a porcupine mates. You'll get the joke answer that particular question deserves. Maybe relationships are all prickly and dangerous. We just have to stay relaxed and keep our sharp fur lying low.

Rooftops of Tehran

This novel of "forbidden love" seemed like it would be a perfect follow-up to my forced reading of Wuthering Heights, and it was, though the forbidden love wasn't quite as advertised. I got started on my Persian kick with Persepolis (books and movie) by Satrapi, and then friend Whitney suggested Dalia Sofer's Septembers of Shiraz, which I really enjoyed. Mahbod Seraji's Rooftops of Tehran is set just before the Iranian revolution, in 1973 and most of the action takes place in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood. 17-year old Pasha spends many of his days and evenings on his rooftop with his friend Ahmed, mooning over the girl next door. Beautiful Zari is betrothed to Pasha' mentor, a man known affectionately as Doctor, so Pasha is naturally conflicted by his emotions. Plus there's the whole repressive society issue.

Actually, what was so interesting about Rooftops of Tehran was the insight it gave into Iranian life. When my fourth grade son saw the cover, he was surprised to see so many buildings. He said it didn't "look like Iran". Never mind the lack of worldly knowledge I've clearly imparted to him, because he has a point. I think that here in the west, we tend to lump Iran in with other Islamist societies and we can easily forget how European Iran was, especially when the Shah was in power (no, I'm not pining for those days--I realize he was a dictator). There is a funny moment, in fact, when one of Pasha's teacher talks of how much he admires Americans for their discipline (remember, this is 1973) and I was a bit smirky about that until the teacher went on to illustrate his point by citing the fact that "everyone stops at stop signs, even when there is no car coming from the opposite direction. That's discipline for you. Discipline means respecting the rules regardless of the circumstances. We don't even stop at red lights in this country." He also mentions the well-placed trash cans on American streets. I guess if that's what he means by discipline, he has a point. I never thought about how orderly things are in this country (especially in light of the tea parties and the shouting at the president that seems prevalent today). I think of Switzerland as orderly and of Italy as chaotic. I always sort of think of us Americans as essentially lazy, but it is true that we do tend to follow rules. Pasha himself agrees silently with his teachers, at least in so far as admitting that Iranians are cheaters. Everyone in school cheats, or feels justified cheating because they themselves have been cheated. He sees it done perhaps more in the spirit of sharing, but he understands his teacher's point.

Still, Pasha, and particularly Ahmed, are chafing under the old rules of their lives, along with the rapidly changing ones enforced by the dreaded SAVAK--or secret police. Bad things happen, revolution is in the air, and people are killed or hurt. There's a sense of dread permeating this book as I worried about each character, but it wasn't nearly as harsh as Septembers of Shiraz. I was, in fact, surprised by the normalcy of the lives these characters lead. The relationships among the young and the old of the street are very interesting, particularly well done is the deep friendship between Pasha and Ahmed. It's not often that I've read such a nice, easy friendship between two young men.

I will admit that the ending was a little lame. The novel floats between Pasha in some kind of mental hospital in 1974 (don't let that discourage you, as it almost did me), and the summer of 1973, so we know something awful has happened. The fact that the characters move on from this 'event' is both good and interesting. I saw the 'event' coming from a mile away and didn't like it, but I'm not sure how else Seraji might have ended his novel. It's still greatly worth reading for the education and insight you get about Persian society.