Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

Hardcover, 416 pages, Pub September 27th 2022 by Doubleday Books, ISBN13: 9780385547970

A Kate Atkinson novel is something to celebrate. Britain comes roaring through, “olden” culture perhaps more strongly than that of recent days. This novel is set in the 1920s, a time of great change after the Great War, and a time of gathering wealth…for a few.

The ‘culture’ I speak of that is unique to England is the strength, sophistication and, dare I say, deceptiveness of British women. I can assure you that while America has had strong female leaders, the only women approaching the personalities of everyday housewives Atkinson liberally sprinkles throughout her novels are pioneer women wielding long guns.

Atkinson does her time warp manner of writing again: she trained us all well in her earlier novels (e.g., Life After Life, A God in Ruins) to work through the confusion. All the time she is telling the tale, we are thinking she is misdirecting, forcing us to make connections, to solve a mystery we didn’t even know was a mystery. She must be happy she trained us so well.

It must be exquisitely difficult to write a novel expressing the viewpoints of so many characters and still write it all in a straightforward timeline. It can’t really be done, when you think about it. At some point the reader is going to have to retread some ground. In Shrines, the author doesn’t bother with your confusion: the reader is suffering the same confusion as one of the characters.

But what characters! So many, and so recognizable! The gruff nightclub owner Nellie and her passel of disappointing and dissolute children, the righteous police inspector, the criminal policeman looking for the last best chance, the savvy schoolgirl, the bright, capable and attractive spy. It is such a delicious stew that we don’t care how often she turns the tables on our understanding by introducing another piece of the jigsaw.

It doesn’t make for fast reading, I would say, but it does rather emphasize the pleasures of re-reading. Sometimes books are so good one would rather just wallow there for a week or so, being thrilled again and again with the club-owner’s strong-minded and (one imagines) strong-bodied son of a certain age: not so young as to be green but not so old as to be past falling hard in love.

It did occur to me that readers of Ms Atkinson’s novel must surely be mostly women. Surely the variety of unique women in this novel would overwhelm any man who this way wanders. Women, of course, are completely aware of the range of skills and talents of others of their sex, but those who still think of women as ‘the fairer sex’ may find themselves out of their depth.

This is definitely a mystery, but isn’t all of life? It begins with a mystery and ends with a different one. There are big questions and big surprises: we needed to be reminded, perhaps, that strong drugs were available since the 1800s for those who hungered for them. And those drugs wreaked havoc on societies before ours, in much a similar manner. Abortion was available, but not as safely as we have enjoyed in the past fifty years.

The novel is a triumph. It is a novel for adults—not in the sexual sense—but in the sense of reminding us of aftermath of world war, the horrors of the 1920s for those who had nothing but their passion, and the grotesqueries of those who had too much of everything except passion. And then there were the supposed ‘protectors’ who exploited and abused…these cannot be forgotten. Sometimes it roiled my stomach so, I had to put it aside…when reading of the young girl who wanted to go ‘on stage.’ So hopeful. God help us all.



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Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig

Hardcover, 355 pages Pub May 2nd 2017 by Grove Press ISBN13: 9780802126450 Literary Awards: National Book Award Nominee for Fiction (2017); Man Booker Prize Long List (2017)

This deeply impactful novel, contrary to what the title might suggest, is not merely beautifully written and proportioned; it is weighted with historical, cultural, philosophical, and political insights from an area of the world well hidden from the sight and understanding of the majority of Americans. The novel is so dense with authentic-seeming detail that it demands the kind of close attention few novels warrant.

In a L.A. Times interview, Charmaine Craig tells us this novel is based on her mother Louisa’s story. Craig could not have done a better job of memorializing her mother’s memory, and it was heartbreaking to hear her recount meeting the popular Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi a few years ago and being recognized as her mother’s child.

Craig spent nearly a decade writing this novel, using some of the time researching and reading declassified CIA documents to see how her mother’s first husband was murdered in the process of peace talks with the Burmese leadership, apparently with the help of some double-dealing by the CIA. Her mother, a one-time beauty queen, became a leader of Karen rebels in the mountainous eastern region of Burma. While at first Craig did not want the book to be political, it is clearly a political document, and extremely informative for that. It puts the political wrangling in Burma, particularly now in this time of Burma’s opening to the West and the Rohingya persecution, in historical and global perspective.

Books of such regional particularity are rare things in English; that Craig attempts to share with us the tumultuous experience of her parents and grandparents growing up in such a consequential time and in such a distant clime is a rare gift. What makes this spectacular novel well worthy of its place on the 2017 Man Booker Prize long list is not the accuracy of its history, but how Craig’s characters navigate and philosophize their roles in their own fictional histories. Deeply meaningful statements on the human condition are sprinkled throughout the book, observations and philosophies articulated by one or another character facing a great challenge.

The predominant religion of Burma is Buddhist, though many Karens are animist or Christian. Craig spent some time explaining the following phrase:

“It is better to be in a position of having to ask for charity than to be in the position of never having to ask.”

This sounds very close to a lesson I’d once heard from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk from Vietnam, who said that having less than one needed offered an opportunity for developing and expressing compassion. Craig explains that having to ask for something develops one’s spiritual muscle.

In another circumstance, Craig draws a lesson from a Jewish rabbi when one of her characters is appealing for advice:

“One of man’s injunctions is to strive to live joyously. In the face of these terrible wars abroad, when our very peace is threatened, we must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure.”

What a remarkable and completely freeing and true thing to say. At the end of the novel, several characters look upon their lives and recognize this necessity to strive…to find greatness in the midst of failure. The lessons are applied, and it is grace-giving and forgiving and loving, despite all.

Individuals engaged in a civil war lasting generations are concerned with the state of their souls:

"I’ve been trying to figure out all these years—in defending our rights with this revolution—is whether or not we have the right to kill…It seems clear enough that violence, murder even of the murderous, is a surrender of a kind. But do we have the right to stand by and watch people be made slaves…"

I love that Craig asks these big, earthshaking questions because the answers are the things that may save us. The questions show us we are worthy to be saved. We will all come across these questions in the course of a life and to have a story big enough, consequential enough, to introduce them without pedantry is a tremendous gift.

Craig mentioned in her interview that she worked as an actress for a time until the stereotyping in Hollywood became too much of an obstacle to great work. I can tell her from this side of the screen the failures of imagination by casting directors and producers are agonizingly apparent. But I wish I could encourage her to “be the change you seek” and to write for the screen if she can. I would tell her the country is hungry for diversity of color and experience and she is likely to be very successful, if that is where her heart lies.

I feel so grateful for this big dense book of history and imagination. Craig is enormously talented and I wish her every success. The book is also available in audio, read by the author, produced by Blackstone Audio. The author has a disconcertingly American voice when one might expect something accented, even British. However, were Craig to publish the book she says in the interview that she wrote first--the one about her mother and herself growing up--that American accent would make all kinds of sense. Sounds like a good sequel, doesn't it?

However one consumes this book, I highly recommend it.




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Lightning Men (Darktown #2) by Thomas Mullen

Hardcover, 384 pages Pub Sept 12th 2017 by Atria/37 INK ISBN13: 9781501138799 Series Darktown #2

Thomas Mullen’s Darktown series, about the first black policemen in Atlanta’s police force, is about race but it is also about the institution of policing. We are seeing how corruption and discrimination can take hold, and we ask ourselves what is the best way to combat the ever-widening spiral of deceit. We interrogate our own moral grounding and question whether we would be able to withstand the social and economic pressure put to bear to get us to go along on controversial arrests or worse.

It is that evaluative distance and internal interrogation that Mullen creates in us that may be the most remarkable thing about his books. We are thinking critically and watching the narrative unfold from a protective distance even though his stories are gripping—after all, this is life and death in neighborhoods just like ours—and we really never know where he is going to steer us next. But these novels aren’t really mysteries, and they aren’t police procedurals in the typical sense. Do we need a new genre category for the historical and sociological recreation he manages?

Mullen places us in the moment by citing newspaper headlines mentioning what is happening in the country and around the world in 1950:

“Late morning the house is quiet with Cassie and the kids out at a park. Rake read the paper and enjoyed the solitude. An American minesweeper had become the first U.S. ship sunk in the Korean conflict; Joe McCarthy was insisting on a more thorough investigation into the Communist infiltration of the top echelons in the American government; and officials announced that the mysterious explosions in a Brooklyn neighborhood, initially feared to be a Red attack, had in fact been caused by a gas leak…”

These headlines do more than situate us in 1950, they also remind us that prejudice and crazy theories about racial or political superiority have been around before and have passed, though not without a fight. One of the very next scenes is a meeting between a cop seeking information on an old case and an FBI agent who’d been involved at the time. The FBI man suggests they meet in a coffee shop to discuss the matter, and the moment Lucien Boggs, a black policeman, begins to walk into the coffee shop attached to a department store, we wonder…Mullen doesn’t let us down. He shows us the disdain and harsh attitude of the woman behind the counter, and the surprise and shutting down of the FBI agent who told Boggs to wait outside until he finished his coffee.

Earlier, a white cop came across a flyer posted to a stop sign in a suburb of Atlanta: “Zoned as a White Community” and emblazoned with a lightning bolt, “just like the ones sewn onto the sleeves of SS troopers he’d seen in Europe.” Mullen takes time to discuss the group he calls the Columbians, a group distinct from the KKK, indeed disdainful of it. This group supported Nazi ideas including the concept of a master race, and apparently believed America fought the Nazis in World War II only because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, making ‘sides’ more clearly defined. Otherwise, America had been more concerned about the red menace from the Soviets.

The rivalry between the Columbians and the KKK, who are derided by practically everyone for the bedsheets disguise, is central to this story and instructive in that it clarifies motives and actors in the messy phenomenon that is racism today. Mullen also spends some time answering the notion that blacks bring misfortune upon themselves. He opens the story with the release of Jeremiah Tanner from prison. Tanner had paid his debt, and readers are inclined to be sympathetic. Throughout the story, our impressions of Jeremiah will change several times, from believing him the most evil of all to believing him the most generous of all. This is Mullen’s skill.

The black lives in this latest novel are so much more difficult and complicated than we imagine at first. Their choices all appear to be bad ones. No surprise, then, that they find themselves in the middle of illegal or compromising situations again and again, and yet when we hear their explanations, they sound rational, making choices we might make in the same place. When you have bad choices, your decisions may look poor also.

The white men’s lives are less appealing altogether. There are a couple of white policemen wrestling with the morality of discrimination and the exclusion of black folk, but most make no effort to push back against the few bad apples that extract fealty or promise retribution within the force. They would revolt against the bad guys on the force, we sense, but they aren’t impacted enough. They need stronger incentives to do right. They aren’t heroes after all, just working men.

Mullen also manages to pack in an excellent example and discussion of the lack of reasonable housing in Atlanta at the time for blacks who did not want to live in substandard apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. The real estate industry wouldn’t certify black realtors so called them “realtists,” a word I found laughably close to “realists.” The phenomenon of “white flight” from neighborhoods into which black residents have moved is discussed in some detail.

When Mullen’s first book in this series, Darktown, came out last year, I asked him how he could write the black man's point of view. His answer shows his authorship of these characters:

“As far as the black point of view in the book, roughly half of the book is from black characters' perspective and about half is from white characters' perspective. But what's important here is that each character has his or her own, unique perspective--no character should be a mere stand-in for their race, or gender, or religion, or anything. I always want my characters to feel as 3-D and authentic and real as possible, in my other books and in DARKTOWN.”

But are his characters authentic? Authentic enough for the series to be acquired prior to publication by Jamie Foxx for TV production. Let’s just say the outline of the characters are there, and our imaginations (or actors) fill in the missing bits that make the piece real. So this is interactive fiction, in a sense. It needs our imagination, experience, and constant attention to understand what precisely is happening here, and to whom. This is an impressive series.

NPR's Scott Simon interviews Thomas Mullen about Lightning Men:


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Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

Hardcover, 272 pages Expected publication: Sept 5th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9781524732738

Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall.

Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle the state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths?

The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love.

During eight years of that twelve year-period 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone was willing to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further.

The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with few degrees of separation. Most appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made.

In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers.

Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been.

A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love.

I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel (7 hours). Below please find an NPR Scott Simon interview with Nathan Englander about this latest novel:




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Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

Hardcover, 259 pages Pub Jan 24th 2017 by Viking (first pub October 20th 2016) ISBN13: 9780525427360 Literary Awards Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017), Costa Book Award for Novel (2016), Walter Scott Prize (2017), Costa Book of the Year (2016)

Has an Irishman written the Great American Novel? The question is not theoretical; Sebastian Barry’s latest novel is the fourth time he has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is his seventh, but it doesn't have the density of a novel. It is Barry’s long experience writing for the theatre—thirteen plays already—that lends excitement to this work. After the years of excellent effort, suddenly Thomas McNulty springs full-grown from Barry’s well-tilled field. The success of this gem of a novel set in 1850’s America is all about preparedness and inspiration.

The novel is not long but is fluent and unstrained; it makes big statements about human existence, war, love, about what we want, and what we get. It is remarkable how squarely Barry lands in the middle of the American debate so clamorous around us now, about race, diversity, sexuality, what we fight for and who fights for us—questions we’ve never satisfactorily answered.

Barry gives us humor in a horribly violent world, surprising and delighting us with his deadpan delivery. His diverse cast of characters are reliant on one another, all viewed through the eyes of an Irishman who’d suffered such terrible deprivations as a child that man’s cruelty nevermore surprised him. What did surprise him was that we could find a way to love, to happiness, despite our sorrows.

In the early pages Thomas McNulty meets John Cole under a hedge in a rainstorm. John Cole is a few years older, but both the orphaned boys are wild things, having ‘growed' in the school of hard knocks. Uncanny judges of character, they almost instantly decide they stand a better chance together in the rough-and-tumble than alone and set off on a series of adventures. The pace of the novel is swift. When I go back to find a memorable passage, I am shocked at how quickly events unfolded, and how quickly I am deeply involved.

The language is one of the novel's wonders. Barry doesn’t try to hide his brogue, but uses it: a stranger in a strange land. That distance and perspective allows Thomas to make comment upon what is commonly observed

"Everything bad gets shot in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."

and

"I know I can rely on the kindness of folk along the way. The ones that don’t try to rob me will feed me. That how it is in America."

The novel constantly surprises: when the boys answer the ad hung awry on a saloon door in a broken-down Kansas town, “Clean Boys Wanted,” we prepare for the worst. Within pages we are jolly and laughing, then agonized and pained, then back again, our emotions rocketing despite the tamped-down telling of the historical backward gaze. Our initial sense of extreme danger never really leaves us, but serves to prepare us for the Indian wars, those pitiful, personal slaughters, and the Civil War, which comes soon enough.

The most remarkable bits of this novel, the sense of a shared humanity within a wide diversity, seemed so natural and obvious and wonderful we wanted to crawl under that umbrella and shelter there. These fierce fighting men fought for each other rather than for an ideal. Their early lives were so precarious they’d formed alliances across race, religion, national origin when they were treated fair. “Don’t tell me a Irish is an example of civilised humanity…you‘re talking to two when you talk to one Irishman.”

And then there is the notion of time, if it is perceived at all by youth: “Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending…” By the end of the novel, the characters do indeed perceive time: “I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.” We have been changed, too, because we also perceive time, and sorrow and pain and those things that constitute joy. We have lived his life, and ours, too.

Barry gets so much right about the America he describes: the sun coming up earlier and earlier as one travels east, the desert-but-not-desert plains land, the generosity and occasional cooperation between the Indian tribes and the army come to dispatch them, the crazy deep thoughtless racism. But what made me catch my breath with wonder was the naturalness of the union between Thomas Thomasina McNulty and John Cole and the fierceness of the love these two army men had for an orphaned, laughing, high-spirited, bright star of an Indian girl they called Winona.

Barry understands absolutely that our diversity makes us stronger, better men. Leave the pinched and hateful exclusion of differentness to sectarian tribes, fighting for the old days. We know what the old days were like. We can do better. I haven’t read all the Man Booker longlist yet but most, and this is at the top of my list. It is a treasure.

I had access to the Viking Penguin hardcopy of this novel--I'm still surprised at how small it is, given the expansive nature of the story--but I also had the audio from Hoopla. I needed both: the pace of the novel is swift, and may cause us to read faster than we ought. Barry writes poetically, which by rights should slow us down. The Blackstone Audio production, though read quickly by Aidan Kelly, allows us to catch things we will have missed in print and vice versa. At several stages in this novel, crises impel us forward. As we rush to see what happens, we may miss the beauty. Don't miss the beauty. Books like these are so very rare.



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