Monthly Archives: February 2019

The Cure for Death by Lightning: Gail Anderson-Dargatz

24 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Fiction

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“The scrapbook was my mother’s way of setting down the days so they wouldn’t be forgotten. This story is my way. No one can tell me these events didn’t happen or it was all a girl’s fantasy. The reminders are there, in that scrapbook, and I remember them all.”

During the Second World War, Beth Weeks was 15, living on a farm in British Columbia with her parents and her brother Dan. Her father, John, used to be a gentle man but became unpredictable and paranoid after he went into the forest chasing a bear that had attacked Beth. The Indians from the nearby reservation said he was taken by the spirit of Coyote, who lies in wait for those who are weak.

John’s mood swings have the family living in a constant state of tension. Dan has been threatening to sign up for the war but he doesn’t trust his father with Beth (with good reason, as it turns out). There is an undercurrent of rebellion in the house because of the way John treats Dennis and Billy, the two hired hands from the reservation nearby. Beth is being pursued by an unseen thing—there are sounds of rushing winds like something is running towards her, but she never sees anything. Could it be Coyote, looking for a wife?

Beth’s mother finds solace by turning to her dead mother for comfort and advice. Beth finds hers in the Indians from the reservation, especially in Billy and Nora, a girl her age with a bell necklace. The girls rebuild Nora’s great-grandmother’s underground hut and go there when Beth’s father or Nora’s mother get too much for them.

Beth’s mother records the events around her in her scrapbook: the day when it rained blue flax, covering the earth in flowers, the time when Sarah Kemp is killed by a bear, and the night John set fire to the hut of the Swede, their neighbour, with whom he had a running battle over boundaries.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has an eye for detail, not just of the landscape but the way people interact with one another. At Sarah’s funeral, her senile grandmother mistakes Beth for her grand-daughter: “The whole crowd was still and staring expectantly, greedily, not shuffling self-consciously as they would if Mrs. Halley would have mistaken one of the pretty Hambrook sisters for Sarah. They watched to see what would happen next. They watched to gossip later.”

The land and the rhythm of the seasons are an intrinsic part of the story. Anderson-Dargatz’s description of living on a farm made me wonder if she was writing from experience—it is so real, you can smell it and hear it. The making of beet wine (there are recipes scattered throughout the book), bringing in the harvest, and the milking of cows every morning, no matter what else is happening in your life. They pick up on your mood, so if you are upset, they can make milking very difficult.

The characters are very well-drawn—no one is entirely good or bad, they’re just regular people with their flaws and strengths. Beth, the centre of the story, is a strong character. She has to deal with a difficult father, bullying in school and a mother who isn’t always there, but somehow manages to get through it. Even John, who is a difficult character to like, has moments of fragility.

And yes, there is a cure for death by lightning, “written in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favorite pancakes:

Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more.”

Macbeth: Jo Nesbo

17 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Books in translation, Crime / Thriller, Fiction

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Translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett

A town in Scotland where the sun never breaks through the clouds, pollution hangs heavy, unemployment is high and people are in thrall to a potent drug called the brew, manufactured and sold by the drug lord, Hecate.

This is the setting for Jo Nesbo’s grim, gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.[1]  He turns it into a police procedural, set around the 1980s (I think).[2] Macbeth is the head of the town’s SWAT team. A former drug addict, he is well-liked and respected by his colleagues. The new police commissioner, Duncan, wants to clean up the town by getting rid of Hecate. This isn’t going to be easy: Hecate’s tentacles spread deep into the town, and many in the local government and police are in his pocket.

As the book starts, Duff, a police inspector, has been tipped off about a large shipment of drugs arriving at the port. Thinking that he would get all the credit if he pulls it off by himself, he does not inform Duncan and turns down Macbeth’s offer of help. But things go wrong, and Macbeth—who is there with his team, including his trusted friend, Banquo—saves the day.

Walking back from the raid, Macbeth and Banquo are stopped by two women of indeterminate age with ravaged faces and “cold inscrutable [eyes] that don’t let you in, that only reflect their surroundings”. The women are joined by Strega, a man-woman in leopard-skin tight, who works for Hecate. The women predict that Macbeth will become head of the Organized Crime Unit and then Chief Commissioner. He dismisses them but then, as soon as he gets back to the police station, Duncan makes him head of Organized Crime. This is the beginning of the end for him: as Strega says to Hecate, “If people see the soothsayer’s first prophecy fulfilled, they’ll believe the next one blindly”.

Macbeth shares the day’s events with Lady, the beautiful owner of a posh casino, with whom he is in love. Lady, who is more ruthless and more ambitious than Macbeth, sees an opportunity to consolidate power and persuades Macbeth to murder Duncan. At first horrified by the idea, Macbeth eventually buys into Lady’s argument that together, the couple can do a lot of good for the town. (At least that’s what he tells himself.) He murders Duncan and takes over his job as Chief Commissioner, fulfilling the women’s prophecy. But the murder opens the door to his addiction. He takes a bit of the brew to get his courage up for the murder, and he is hooked. The drug fuels his paranoia, and the murders spiral out of control. Lady is made of sterner stuff but she has her demons too, and gradually, they both start to unravel.

Meanwhile Duff has realized what is going on, and is on the run from Macbeth. He joins up with other cops who take the fight to Macbeth. But will getting rid of one man really get rid of the endemic corruption?  

Nesbo sticks quite closely to the original. There are some nice touches: the brew is concocted by the two ravaged women from their secret recipe said to contain “toad’s glands, bumblebee wings, juice from rats’ tails”—like the witches’ brew. Naming their boss Hecate echoes the play too, where she is the goddess of witchcraft. Hecate in the book does not need witchcraft to cast his spell over the town: all he needs is the brew.

The betrayals in the novel feel more visceral than in the play. Macbeth is a character we are familiar with: the incorruptible cop who breaks the rules and gets results. So when Macbeth agrees to kill Duncan, he goes against the stereotype (I did think he agreed a little too easily, though).  Banquo is not a contemporary of Macbeth’s as he is in the play—he is the man who took Macbeth in as a child and gave him a home, which makes Banquo’s murder even more shocking. The bond between Macbeth and his nemesis, Duff (the Macduff character in the play) is also something Nesbo has added. The two men were at an orphanage together and know each other’s secrets. This creates an intimacy but also an uneasy relationship, which brings more depth to their conflict.

Nesbo underlines the filth in the town: the moral corruption is reflected in the weather and the pollution, unlike Fife a short distance away, which is bathed in sunlight. But the men living there choose to do so, as if too much light will expose them for what they are. The book opens with rain, following a single raindrop as it finds its way down to the main characters, a device Nesbo uses again at the end.

This is a book about power, which is the real drug here. Everyone is on the make and will stop at nothing to further their own ends. It fits right in with the world Nesbo has created in his other books. I found it compelling: the violence could be appalling but I couldn’t tear myself away from the story. I usually have trouble with books where none of the characters are sympathetic. Not here.

[1] Macbeth is part of a series commissioned by Hogarth Press, a contemporary reimagining of Shakespeare’s plays. Margaret Atwood’s reworking of The Tempest, Hag-Seed, has also been reviewed on this site.

[2] Before cell phones, at any rate.

Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

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It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had never been on a boat before, never mind knowing how to sail. But he needed the job so he decided to keep minor details like that to himself.

A book, Teach Yourself Sailing, teaches him the jargon and how to tell one boat from another. He hopes this would be enough to impress grand-aunt Jane at their first meeting. (It is.) He is to pick up the boat, a Cornish Crabber, from a marina near Athens where it was being fixed by a Captain Bob Weare. He is to sail it to the island of Spetses, where Jane and her husband Bob would spend the summer. A dream job—provided Stewart could actually sail a boat.

He enlists the help of Keith, a “rather malodorous person with a black beard [and] a chubby boyish face” who has a crush on Stewart’s girlfriend, Ana, and who owns a boat, a “twenty-one-foot craft banged together out of plywood and tin”. All does not go well. There is thick fog and the boat capsizes, pitching them into the freezing sea. Fortunately, Keith knows how to right the boat by standing on it, and they survive.

Classes with a professional sailor, Tom Cunliffe, give Stewart enough knowledge to go to Athens with some confidence. He finds the Crabber in a terrible state—mouldy and without an engine. Stewart rescues it from Captain Bob and hands it over to two Greeks, both called Nikos. When Stewart worries that the keys are still with Captain Bob, one of the Nikos points out: “Keys are for engine. You got no engine.” Problem solved. New engine, new keys.

By the time Stewart has finished his stint with Jane, he is hooked on sailing. When Cunliffe asks if he would join his crew to sail to Newfoundland, Stewart jumps at it. They set out from Brighton on a rainy day in April, via Norway and Greenland. It is the first time that Stewart was going to be on a boat for weeks on end. He describes living on a boat: sharing a small space with other people (including Cunliffe’s wife and four-year-old daughter) in a small space, keeping watches at night while trying not to fall asleep, the cold, and the comforting tones of the shipping forecast. (And a very funny bit about trying to pee from the side of the ship in the freezing cold.)

They stop in a little town called Norheimsund, in Norway. The already stunning landscape of the fjords is heightened with white apple blossoms “as if bright patches of snow had lingered in the warm green valleys”. Norway is expensive so they live on fish they catch. A group of Norwegian men who come over for a night of drinking are horrified by this, and bring them enough smoked leg of lamb to last for the rest of the journey (which Stewart suspects wasn’t obtained entirely legally).

I love Stewart’s writing: he’s funny and lyrical and his vivid descriptions makes you feel you are there. And you can tell why people do get hooked on sailing: “as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land—all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence—slough away like the old dry skin of a snake”.

Chris Stewart is best known for the books he has written about living in Alpujarras in Andalucia, Spain,[1] and for briefly being a drummer in Genesis. I am so glad they kicked him out—it would have been a real loss to the book world if he was still drumming!

[1] See my reviews of his books: A Parrot in the Pepper Tree on this blog and Driving Over Lemons for Women on the Road (scroll down to the bottom of the page: it was the first one I wrote for the website!).

Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling—Philip Pullman

03 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in About reading, writing and books, Non-Fiction

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“[T]he image of the reader is solitary. We are each alone when we enter the borderland and go on to explore what lies in it and beyond it, in the book we’re engaged with. True, we can come back and and talk about it, and if we talk well and truthfully and interestingly enough we might entice other readers into it, and they too will explore it—but they too will be alone there until they in turn come back and tell us what they found there.”

Daemon Voices is a collection of Philip Pullman’s essays, articles and talks, mostly on storytelling, reading and the craft of writing, but also on politics, art and religion.

Pullman is best known for his fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials. Ostensibly for young adults, these books—like all good writing—crosses age boundaries (and it is worth noting that Pullman didn’t intend the trilogy for a particular audience). I find this happening less now, but writing for children or young adults has often been scoffed at as not being as “serious” or “important” as writing for adults. Pullman dismisses this and is passionate about the importance of children’s literature. Good writing for children or young adults, as he points out, is every bit as important as that for adults. And as for adults reading children’s books, he quotes CS Lewis: “I now like hock, which I am sure I did not like as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had one pleasure, I now have two.”

Writers have responsibilities, says Pullman. They have a duty to their readers to use language well (something that as an editor, I can’t agree with more): be clear and aware of what you are saying. But there is also their responsibility to their families: after all, to be a writer is a job, and they have to make sure they earn enough to provide for their loved ones. I have read a lot on writing and writers but very few say anything about the money-making side of it.  

There is so much here that I am only going to pick out a few things. We get a lot of insight on how Pullman wrote his books, especially His Dark Materials. It takes a single element to give an idea that spark that brings it to life. The first book fell into place when he came up with the idea (or the idea came to him, as he puts it) of daemons. A daemon is an animal version of a person that is constantly with them—the soul, in a way, that is external but part of them. It changes shapes in children and settles into a particular animal when they reach puberty. So when Lyra, the heroine of the trilogy, hears of children who daemons are being cut away from them, it is shocking not just to her but to the reader, and sets the trilogy in motion.

In His Dark Materials, the forces of good fight the Church to stop it taking control of Dust, the essence of consciousness. This reflects Pullman’s view of organized religion. He is not an atheist, because he finds that atheism can be equally totalitarian (something I had noticed too and was glad to find someone else agreeing with me).  

I loved Pullman’s perspective on the story of Adam and Eve, which makes sense. He sees the apple as the fruit of knowledge, which humans had to eat so they could be aware of the world around them. Hence the self-awareness that results when Adam and Eve bite into it, much as we become aware of ourselves when we cross the threshold into adulthood. Once you reach that threshold, there is no way back to innocence. But that does not mean that the Garden of Eden is closed to us forever—the way back is through what Pullman calls “the back door”, through wisdom and understanding.

The reader as explorer: The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

There are also essays on narratives in art, where he examines well-known paintings (there are illustrations, both in colour and black and white). His dissection of Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”, which I’ve known for a long time (my interest in art was sparked by the Impressionists), made me see it in a completely different light. And the quote that I begin this review with is illustrated with “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by Caspar David Friederich: again, a different take on a familiar painting, where the explorer is the reader.

There is some repetition, but that’s hard to avoid in a collection like this. There are things that I disagree with (his dislike of fantasy fiction like Lord of the Rings, for one), but this book wouldn’t be worth its salt if I agreed with everything. If you are a budding (or already established) writer, if you’re passionate about words and stories, then get this book. You don’t need to read it cover to cover—as I did—but can dip into it. There are essays here that I know I will be going back to. His writing makes me want to sit down with him over a meal and have a long discussion about books, writing and everything else.