Sunday, October 23, 2016

"A Night Too Dark"/ "The golden age for fictional spies"





Sept. 10, 2016: I was reading the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010 and it had "New and notable fiction" blurbs.  I can only find the big reviews.

Book Review of "A Night Too Dark," by Dana Stabenow


 

By Patrick Anderson
Monday, March 1, 2010
A NIGHT TOO DARK
By Dana Stabenow
Minotaur. 323 pp. $24.99

Dana Stabenow is one of those regional crime novelists who too often don't achieve national attention. She was born in Alaska in 1952 and has lived there ever since, and this is her 17th novel about the Aleut private investigator Kate Shugak. It's an outstanding series and one that has, in fact, won awards and begun to turn up on bestseller lists here in the Lower 48. If you've never visited Alaska, it's also an intriguing introduction to that big, brawling, rather bewildering state. Once you've met the strange characters who inhabit the Shugak novels, Sarah Palin becomes easier to comprehend.

Kate is only 5 feet tall but fears neither man nor beast: Early in this novel she takes down a knife-wielding roustabout and a charging grizzly bear. Her two live-in loves are Sgt. Jim Chopin, a hunky state trooper, and silver-gray Mutt, who's half wolf and half husky and whose ever-changing moods make him somewhat more interesting than the trooper. Kate started her career as an undercover investigator for the DA's office in Anchorage but later moved to the small, isolated town of Niniltna, where she works as a PI and also heads the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association, the primary governing body in that corner of Alaska.

The plot of "A Night Too Dark" centers on the Suulutaq Mine, where vast gold deposits have been discovered. The gold isn't being mined yet because environmental questions must be answered, but the prospect of a billion-dollar bonanza has various hustlers and corporate vultures circling. (The Suulutaq Mine is fictional, but Stabenow has said it is based on the controversial real-life Pebble Mine in southwest Alaska.) Kate has deeply mixed feelings about the mine; the region needs the jobs but doesn't need the environmental damage and the threat to its way of life. However, she and Sgt. Jim are drawn there after two of the mine's employees mysteriously die and a third goes missing.

This plot unfolds nicely, but what makes the novel outstanding is Stabenow's vivid portrait of the Alaskan culture. In the opening pages we meet an old-timer with a long white beard whose "Carhartt bibs were frayed and stained, the black-and-red plaid Pendleton shirt beneath it patched and faded, and the Xtra Tuffs on his feet looked like they'd been gnawed on by ferrets." We meet the town's four "aunties," Native Alaskan women in their 80s who are the community's social arbiters. We learn that it is unwise to ask an Alaskan "Where are you from?" because so many have pasts they are determined to escape.

We attend a board meeting of the Niniltna Native Association and discover that Native Alaskans are just as angry, stubborn, greedy and duplicitous as anyone else in politics. We learn that in today's Alaska, outsiders sometimes marry indigenous Alaskans for their money -- the Alaska Claims Settlement Act of 1971 having awarded huge amounts of land and nearly a billion dollars to them through regional corporations like the one Kate heads. As a result, at least some Native Alaskans have become prosperous. We see that Sgt. Jim doesn't bother much with dope smokers, bigamists and poachers, if they otherwise behave. We also learn, after a quiet dinner at home, that he and Kate are partial to spontaneous displays of affection: "She laughed harder when he cleared the table with a sweep of one arm and threw her down on it."

Stabenow is blessed with a rich prose style and a fine eye for detail. At one point she devotes two delightful pages to detailing the beauty of Kate's garden ("The deep purple spire of monkshood, its cluster of closed blooms giving off an air of mystery, appeared and disappeared around every bend of trail"), and elsewhere we're treated to a digression on the hunting and cooking of moose ("Old Sam liked his meat crisp on the outside and bloody close to the bone, and this took time and care.").

Stabenow doesn't say much about Alaskan politics, except to have Kate quip, "Anyone in Juneau [the state capital] in their right mind is an oxymoron." However, in an interview with Publishers Weekly, Stabenow said that she'd met then-Gov. Sarah Palin twice, the second time in 2007, when Palin named her Alaska's Artist of the Year. Stabenow added, "She didn't mention the novels either time." This is alarming. It's always wise to greet a novelist with "Loved your book," whether or not you've read the book in question. The writers are invariably grateful, and none has ever been known to demand proof. If Palin can't figure that out, how can she ever hope to lead a great nation?
Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Post.



Book Review of


Sept. 12, 2016 "The golden age for fictional spies": I cut out this article by Joe Wiebe in the Edmonton Journal on Sept. 18, 2015:

My not-so-guilty pleasure is to dive into a thick spy novel, preferably one set in Europe during the Second World War or the Cold War decades that followed. This low-tech era before the advent of computers and satellites and cellphones is when the cloak-and-dagger genre works best. Here are three recent spy novels by some of my favourite writers:

Leaving Berlin Joseph Kanon Atria Books

Kanon has written several spy novels, including The Good German, which is set in Berlin during the Second World War and, most recently, Istanbul Passage.

He returns to Berlin in this novel, but it’s now 1949, and the city is divided into sectors by the occupying powers: France, England, the United States and the Soviet Union. Once allies during the war, the Soviets are now trying to force the western nations out of Berlin by blockading the city.

Jewish writer Alex Meier grew up in Berlin, but escaped to the United States as the Nazis came to power in the 1930s. A foray into communism in his youth earns him a subpoena from the McCarthy witch-hunt trials, where his refusal to name names results in deportation.

The East German communists welcome their prodigal son back, but little do they know that he has actually been recruited by the CIA, which has promised to allow him to return to the U.S. But almost immediately upon his arrival, his situation worsens when he kills a Russian agent in self-defence.
Not only that, but he learns that his true assignment is to spy on his own old friends, including Irene, his first and only true love.
Leaving Berlin is both a page turning thriller and a thought-provoking study of a remarkable place and time in our history.

The Lady from Zagreb Phillip Kerr Penguin Putnam

Fans of Philip Kerr’s nine Bernie Gunther novels rejoiced when this book came out because we all thought Kerr had ended the series when A Man Without Breath was published in 2013. But Bernie is back in The Lady From Zagreb and will apparently return next year in The Other Side of Silence.
If you haven’t encountered Gunther before, he’s a tough, honourable and outspoken Berlin homicide detective who drinks and smokes too much, has an eye for women that often leads to trouble, and a mouth that almost always does. He’s the quintessential hard- boiled, noir hero who won’t hesitate to use his fists or gun when the situation calls for it, but ultimately succeeds because he uses his brain. What makes him endearing to the reader is the moral compass that guides him through the horrific events caused by the Nazi regime.

Kerr provides his trademark combination of pulp fiction action set against realistically depicted historical events, with an assortment of moral dilemmas for the reader to think about along the way.

All The Old Knives Olen Steinhauer Minotaur Books

Olen Steinhauer started his writing career with a series of five well-crafted novels set in a fictional eastern European country running from 1948 through the days of the Cold War to the end of the Communist regime in 1989. He followed those up with a trilogy of contemporary spy thrillers. His two stand-alone spy novels are The Cairo Affair and All the Old Knives.

The core of the story features two ex-lovers meeting for dinner at a fine restaurant. Henry Pelham and Celia Favreau once worked together in the CIA’s Vienna station.

He’s still a CIA operative, but she left the game several years ago.
Although the story begins innocuously enough, it quickly becomes apparent that Pelham has an ulterior motive.





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"The Nobodies Album"/ "Father of the Rain"





Sept. 10, 2016: I was reading the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010 and it had "New and notable fiction" blurbs.  I can only the find big reviews:



Toward the end of May, a freshly roasted chestnut of the mystery genre appeared on Masterpiece Theater: “The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side” by Agatha Christie. Audiences of contemporary television detective drama have grown used to stylish, clinical programs in which unshockable cops and coroners scan the evidence of grisly slayings. The chief suspense derived from each episode lies in which state-of-the-art device will reveal the “how” of the killing. But the personable, low-tech concerns of “The Mirror Crack’d” remind us of an empathetic era, not long vanished, when the question mark that hovered over any crime scene wasn’t so much “How did it happen?” as “Why?”

In this jaded age, the idea of intentionally setting out to construct a whodunit — however unerodable its appeal — strikes many writers as embarrassingly old-fashioned. So when the proud, private, much-published author Octavia Frost, the protagonist of Carolyn Parkhurst’s new novel, stumbles into an old-fashioned real-life murder mystery, her initial impulse is to resist even attempting to solve it. “I’m not a detective or a lawyer,” she demurs. “Like everyone else, I’ve read a few mystery novels and seen a few crime shows, and I think it qualifies me to form an opinion.” As Parkhurst’s story begins, Octavia has traveled, uninvited, to San Francisco not to sleuth but to visit her son, Milo, who broke off contact with her when he was 23.

Now 27, Milo is the lead singer in a rock band called Pareidolia, whose angry hit songs have titles like “Devastate Me” and “Plutonium Kiss” and lyrics like “I could have beat you to the ground.” Protectively, Octavia tells herself that Milo’s songs aren’t “particularly revelatory.” “How much can you tell about a person from what he writes anyway?” she asks. Octavia would like to think her son’s secrets, like her own, can’t be divined from the words he’s published. And she has persuaded herself that even when her own writing taps their shared experience, once she has “set my own rules for pri­vacy,” her tracks are covered. So when she finds a scrap of paper in a sugar bowl that reads, “Someone is lying,” she reacts with annoyance. “What kind of a B-movie is this?” she scoffs. “If this were a mystery novel, the note in the sugar bowl would spur me to take some action.”

But this isn’t a mystery novel. Or is it? Whether Octavia wishes to think about it or not, there has been a murder, and her son is the prime suspect. His girlfriend, Bettina, has been bludgeoned to death, and he’s been arrested for the crime. Pondering the sugar bowl, Octavia resents the clichéd notion that with her “child’s life in the balance,” she ought to make a Miss Marple of herself and get case-cracking. But with the risk of cliché outweighed by the threat of death row for Milo, her ironic detachment crumbles.

Octavia’s mind-set is up-to-the-minute: quick, adaptable and wired — in the sense of being plugged in to electronic media and technology. She uses Facebook and e-mail, and has kept track of Milo throughout their rupture with a “digital clipping service” like Google Alerts. To salve her ego, she tells herself that he surely does the same thing for her. Nonetheless, even a technologically with-it modern writer can’t always keep her cool. Octavia is in her early 50s, and her history reaches back long before WiFi, news feeds and Web surfing, into the marrow of her bones, the pit of her stomach. Eighteen years earlier, when she was in her 30s and Milo was 9, her husband and daughter (Milo’s father and little sister) died in an accident. Her career as a novelist began after the deaths; her relationship with Milo ended after the novels. Octavia has never seen Milo’s girlfriend, except in photographs in celebrity magazines. What kind of man has her son become in the four years since their rift? Did Milo kill Bettina? And if so, why? What does it say about Octavia, as his mother, that she doesn’t know?

Although Octavia doesn’t want to turn gumshoe, she can’t help believing in her estranged son’s innocence, and hoping some clue might save him. Like Milo, his mother mistrusts facile associations, and she dismisses early media accounts that point to Milo’s guilt — less out of maternal partiality (not that she, in her stoicism, would suggest such a thing) than because “in this strange age of technology and information, in which news is practically injected straight into our veins, replaced with a fresh drip each quarter-hour, nothing is ever final.” By the time she gets off the plane in California, Octavia reflects, “the story will have already changed.” She could construct any number of plausible explanations that would suit her purposes: after all, that’s the trade of a novelist. But that’s also why Milo stopped speaking to her. And it’s the crux of the larger mystery Parkhurst braids into this affecting, intricate novel. What has estranged this son from this mother? And how can a woman who’s able to manage fictional lives so adroitly manage her own so ham-handedly?

My opinion: Yeah, writing fiction is easier than dealing with real life situations for some people. 

“The Nobodies Album” doubles as the title of Octavia’s latest manuscript, which she’s about to hand over to her editor when she learns of Milo’s calamity. Octavia has published seven previous novels, each with a distinct subject and voice. Among them are a story about the guilt-plagued survivor of a shipwreck; a historical novel narrated by a woman tried for witchcraft in Elizabethan England; an account of the life of an infant in a violent home; and a fable of memory loss in which an epidemic leaves all but a handful of people incapable of remembering painful past experiences. She assumes her books have little in common until a fan points out that “so many children die” in them.

Lately, she has resolved to fix that flaw. “There’s no statute of limitations on changing your mind,” she reasons. “You don’t ever have to be done.” Her new manuscript reprints the seven final chapters of her previous books, accompanying each with an alternate conclusion. “Can you imagine what happens when you rewrite the ending of a book?” she asks, almost gloatingly. “It changes everything. Meaning shifts; certainties are called into question. Write seven new last chapters and all at once, you have seven different books.” But can you rewrite a book once it’s published, any more than you can retract an e-mail message once it’s sent or a blog post once it’s online? Can you relive a life? Octavia’s manuscript chapters, new and old, pop up throughout the novel like milestones, marking her journey to cover the distance that has separated her from her son. She had wanted to solve her life by rewriting her books. Instead she must do something harder: start to write her life again.


  
In “The Nobodies Album,” with a light but sure hand, Carolyn Parkhurst joins together four disparate literary forms: the family drama, the short story, the philosophical essay on language and, yes, the whodunit. Her weave is smooth, a vigorous hybrid of the old-fashioned, the modern and the postmodern. She reminds us what an act of will and imagination it has always taken for a writer to convert nobodies into somebodies in any genre, whether at the desk or in the world.

My opinion: This is kind of a deep article. 




Book Review - The Nobodies Album - By C...


"Father of the Rain" by Lily King: 

If you could return as an adult to the staging ground of your youth — showing people you’d turned out all right after all; taking that Ferris wheel ride with the middle-school crush who’d ignored you; reassuring your parents about how wise, how capable, how worthwhile you were — would you? Would it be the grown-up thing to do? Daley Amory, the protagonist of Lily King’s third novel, “Father of the Rain,” confronts this question as she revisits the wealthy Boston suburb where she grew up in the 1970s, summoned to tend to her narcissistic father, a man who lives by the WASP code, circa 1952, in which martinis, filet mignon and brick-red pants are what matter and “to take something seriously is to be a fool.” At 29, Daley, an earnest Berkeley-bound anthropologist, yearns to fix her father’s life, so as to mend her own. But was his life broken, just because it broke hers?

King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue. Silently or aloud, her characters betray the inner tumult they conceal as they try to keep themselves together, wanting others to see them as whole. Whether they’re children, teenagers or adults in their 40s, 50s and older, they demonstrate through their confusions that what we like to call coming-of-age is a process that doesn’t always end. Like people in real life, King’s characters alter their behavior each time they interact with someone different — parent, sibling, friend, lover, student, boss — exposing the protean nature of personality. Context controls character.

My opinion: The last sentence was deep.

King’s masterly first novel, “The Pleasing Hour,” follows an under-parented 19-year-old American au pair through a year in France as she negotiates her rapport with the members of a French family. They have secrets; so does she. In King’s second novel, “The English Teacher,” an emotionally numb single mother in her 30s (the teacher of the title) tries to impose a conventional life on herself by marrying a widower with three children. She thinks of his marriage proposal as “rehearsing, hypothesizing,” unable to regard her choices as anything but rough drafts.

In “Father of the Rain,” King reverses her practice of backing into past causes from the present. Instead, she begins amid the welter of Daley Amory’s childhood at its most painful moment, deep in her “child mind, which senses only the visceral — the smells of my father, low tide, wet dog, and the sounds of sea gulls and church bells and station wagons.” It’s early in the Watergate summer of 1974, the day after Daley’s 11th birthday, the day before her mother will leave Gardiner Amory for good, fed up with his drinking and his zestful bigotry. While her mother plays Lady Bountiful in the family’s backyard, holding a pool party for underprivileged African-American children, Daley goes to the pet shop with her father to choose a puppy for her birthday present.

“I’m not saying you’s not ugly because you is ugly,” her father croons to the new pet. “But you’s a keeper.” Back home, he mixes himself a martini, jeers at his do-gooder wife, then invites Daley to join him in streaking nude around the pool to taunt the guests. The next day, mother and daughter will drive off, leaving him behind. Daley agonizes: When they come back, will her father still consider her a keeper? Her fear is justified. Returning at the end of the summer, Daley finds another mother swimming in her pool, another child sleeping in her room. While she was gone, her father replaced his family.

The advantage of following Daley’s story chronologically — from her chaotic, insecure adolescence to her orderly, insecure adulthood — is that it helps explain the disproportionately large space that childhood miseries occupy in the adult psyche. Ours is an age fluent in ­“therapy-speak,” and close friends habitually discuss their parents’ scarring misbehavior, trading tales of family woe like ghost stories. When, at a graduation, a wedding or a funeral, those friends at last meet the groused-about malefactors — a mild lady with a snow-white bob and a hopeful expression, a courtly father who jokes amiably with his children’s peers — they ask themselves, wonderingly, These nice people, these were monsters? Decades past the age of the night light, it’s hard to understand the terror of old shadows.

But it’s a long time before Daley, haunted by her adolescent turmoil, can muster the courage to assemble a family of her own. When, in college and after, she makes wary steps toward that goal, she avoids the men who are most drawn to her, “overgrown prep school” kids with “long bangs, athletic achievements, loose-limbed walk, cow eyes and quick sardonic responses.” Such boys, she tells herself, “turn into men like my father.” Instead, she falls in love with an academic named Jonathan Fleury, a black man who grew up in the projects in Philadelphia, far from beaches and lobster traps, someone who, unlike her, has “the ability to articulate emotions that most people simply feel as a clump in the belly.” “I’ve never crossed the color line before. It just never seemed worth it,” Jonathan tells her before their long-deferred first kiss. Nonetheless, they make plans to live together in California — until a crisis pulls Daley back to her father in Massachusetts.

Daley doesn’t tell her father she has a boyfriend, much less that she has “crossed the color line.” Persuading him to join A.A. to secure her companionship, she transforms herself into the dutiful daughter she thinks he wants, cooking him steaks (though she’s a vegetarian), donning a tennis skirt to wear at the club (though she’s a feminist). But Gardiner remains defiantly himself — minus the vodka. When he spews racist remarks before dinner, Daley thinks, “Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice?” Eventually, Jonathan confronts her: “Everything is at stake for you. Don’t you get that?” But Daley is in the thrall of her 11-year-old self. “I want a father who doesn’t get drunk. He wants a daughter to take to the club,” she tells herself. “You want him to make your whole childhood O.K.,” Jonathan protests. “This isn’t about me,” she retorts. “It’s about him.” But is it?

Gardiner Amory, whatever his failings, has a permanent address. He knows how to marry and remarry, how to hold his liquor and keep up his tennis game. His daughter thinks he’s a mess, but to himself and his peers, he seems “perfect the way he is.” Some of his friends think Daley’s the one with the problem. “I wish you wouldn’t focus on your father’s flaws,” a neighbor chides. King shows the truths of their conflicting perceptions. Certainly, at 60, Gardiner doesn’t want to be reformed. “I know exactly what I want,” he blurts out at last, sick of his daughter’s interference. What he wants is for her to “butt the hell out.”

In “Father of the Rain,” King knowingly, forgivingly, shows both why Daley can’t butt out and why she must. Daley knows she’s guilty of being “bad at trusting the future,” but she can’t admit that this weakness is a crime against herself. Her father, with his unreflective gusto, and her lover, with his pragmatic idealism, have more in common than first appears: both engage with the future, however complicated, however uncertain. In their different ways, these two must steer her forward, teaching her about the duty she owes herself.


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Sunday, October 16, 2016

"A fine foray"/ "Tonight's top story: we're all growing old"

Sept. 10, 2016 "A fine foray": I cut out this article by Robert J. Wiersema in the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010:

Stories: All-New Tales
Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
HarperCollins
430 pp.; $29.99
Reviewed by Robert J. Wiersema

Fantasy writer Neil Gamain — the closest the literary world comes to a rock star — throws down the gauntlet in Just Four Words, his introduction to Stories: All-New Tales, which he edited with writer Al Sarrantonio. “What we missed,” he writes of contemporary short fiction, “what we wanted to read, were stories that made us care, stories that forced us to turn the page. And yes, we wanted good writing (why be satisfied with less?).

But we wanted more than that. We wanted to read stories that used a lightning flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it before”.

The difference between Gaiman and the average reader — who has long been calling for more literate, absorbing, narrative fiction — is that, as this anthology of 27 stories attests, Gaiman can deliver the antidote to this literary malaise. Stories is a powerful collection of new fiction from some of the best writers, both genre and literary, currently at work.

The blend of writers and styles means that Stories is a volume in which, literally, anything can happen, both within each story and from story to story. There is nothing predictable here, nothing staid or routine. And, perhaps more significantly, there’s not a single misstep, not a single story that can, or should, be skipped: Stories is a winner from cover to cover.

The majority of the stories in the anthology have some fantastic component, however slight, which allows for unpredictability and for a rewarding twist in the tale. It also allows writers to be seen in a perhaps unaccustomed light. Readers familiar with Jodi Picoult for her children-in-peril novels, for example, will assume they’re on steady ground with Weights and Measures, which follows the aftermath of a child’s death. That steadiness quickly fades, however as the mother and father begin to change, literally and physically, as a result of their grief.

Similarly, Walter Mosley is best known for his hard-boiled Easy Rawlins novels. Some of that voice carries over to Juvenal Nyx, but this is not a detective novel but a dark, passionate vampire story that will make Twilight-lovers blanch.

Other writers are writing solidly within both reader expectations and their comfort zone.

Gaiman himself weighs in with what feels like a traditional tale, The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. His contribution has a quest, hidden treasure, mysterious islands and, at the close, a sense of what might almost be a moral teaching: that which you seek is not necessarily what you find.

That Chuck Palahniuk is represented with a skewed take on a pop culture icon will likely not come as much of a surprise: his Loser is a surreal, acid-addled journey through The Price is Right, which “still looks exactly like when you were sick with a really high fever and you stayed home to watch TV all day.” It’s not among his best stories, but it definitely satisfies, both in its startling conclusion and its immersive use of a drugged-out, dislocated, second-person point of view.

Readers will find their own favourites. Personally, it is the stories that address, in some way, the act of storytelling itself that I find the most powerful. Kat Howard’s A Life in Fictions, for example, is a strangely powerful account of what happens to a writer’s muse in both good times (when she is becoming different characters, taking on their traits and quirks) and bad (as when her world freezes, the writer suffering from writer’s block). The condition she imposes upon the writer in the story’s last page speaks volumes not only about the value of artistic creation but of its considerable costs to those caught in its wake.

That cost is also the subject of Michael Moorcock’s stunning Stories. It’s a bit of delightful dissonance that one of the most straightforward, unadorned stories in this collection comes from one of the most celebrated, unabashed writers of the fantastic of the last half century. Stories is a chronicle of the intertwined lives of writers, editors, their lovers and friends, spanning decades, an account of love and friendship, sex and death, hatred and loss. It’s about the power of art to unite and divide, and the value of art, finally, as an aspect of self, the importance of having “a few stories of my own to tell and some rotten bloody friends to remember.” It’s a beautiful, haunting story.

The trouble with this collection is simply that there’s so much to recommend it. I haven’t even touched on Joe Hill’s brilliant, off-kilter The Devil on the Staircase, or the sad joyfulness of Elizabeth Hand’s The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, or Lawrence Block’s chilling “Catch and Release or … there’s simply too much. With Stories, Gaiman and Sarrantonio have curated a glorious, breathtaking treasure box of story: Indulge yourself.


Book Review: Stories: All-New Tales edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantoni...

By Special to National Post
Stories: All-New Tales Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio HarperCollins 430 pp.; $29.99 Reviewed by Robert...

 "Tonight's top story: we're all growing old": I cut out this article Katherine Govier in the National Post on Jul. 31, 2010:

Catherine O’Flynn has chosen for the subject of her second novel ( What was Lost, her first, was published in 2007) the deliberately unsexy topic of local television news, its poignancy and its perilous state. The place is Birmingham; the hero is the gormless but kind Frank Allcroft, a news presenter at Midlands TV.

Frank seems out of place at work, where his ambitious and deeply concerned co-anchor, Julie, wants to take the coverage from the merely banal to the provocative. Instead of new eco-friendly fire engines for Coventry, she feels they should cover the local lady who makes replicas of world landmarks out of clothes pegs and burns them on Bonfire Night. This year she has made a replica of the Sacred Mosque of Mecca.

We never find out if this goes to air, unfortunately. The novel is composed of very short chapters that jump in point of view from that of Frank, to his older and more glamorous ex-colleague, Phil, to Phil’s friend Mikey, and back to Frank’s childhood. It’s a quiet, eventless existence, despite the odd unclaimed corpse on a park bench: Frank takes his daughter to look at the buildings designed by his father, who he never really knew, and he makes frequent visits to his mother, Maureen, who is in a senior’s home called Evergreen.

Maureen is a charmless woman who refuses to be happy in her son’s presence, although he knows for a fact that a man called Walter can bring a beam to her face. The exchanges between mother and son are the best in the book, hopeless and rather funny:

Frank ignored this and looked over toward the window. “They could do with someone clearing up the leaves out in the grounds.”
“Maybe they leave them there deliberately. Maybe they think that dead leaves are exactly what we should be contemplating as we sit here waiting to fall off the branch.” “Mom …” “You see how you fare. You’ll be old one day. You see how you cope when all your friends are dead, and you senses are gone.”
“Your senses aren’t gone, Mom. You’re in excellent health …” “Ha. That’s a joke.” “… You’re seventy-two Mom — that’s nothing. They sit and talk in the lounge, they listen to music, they walk in the garden.”

“ ‘Why aren’t they screaming’ Frank, ‘Why aren’t they screaming?’ Do you know who wrote that?”
“Larkin. You quote it ever time.”

There are also some comic accounts of the antics of live television in Britain’s heartland: Presenters using a carrot to entice a guinea pig to pull a cart carrying an obese rabbit, celebrities visiting people in their home to get married couples to tell each other what they don’t like in their spouse in what is called tough love. This is described in the publicity material as satire: It isn’t satire, it has no bite, it is merely an alternately scorning and affectionate tribute to a dying form of television. It was perhaps never so alive, in Canada, but what local TV we had is dying in this country too, and I sometimes miss going to the station in Calgary to talk about a book, between episodes on eyebrow plucking and an interview with the Shriners about their parade.

But O’Flynn’s observations, in whatever spirit they are made, do not make a novel. The failure of town planning that has seen Birmingham redesigned every two decades in an attempt to get it right — one attempt by Frank’s father — also comes in for comment. But that is not the driving force either, here. We are intended to care about Phil’s death, under mysterious circumstances, about Mikey, about Frank who is apparently 43 but feels 75.

And that is difficult because he is so placid, so limp. What can you say about a man who answers “That’s understandable,” when a colleague expresses outrage? Who lets himself be known as “the unfunniest man on earth” just because he doesn’t want to hurt the feeling of an out-of-work joke writer? Nice guy, but. We come to understand how his cold father damaged both Frank and his mother. And we can celebrate to know that at least the caustic Maureen manages to spring herself not out of Evergreen entirely, but out of her branch, and relocate in a new one near the sea.

But we somehow doubt Frank has it in him to effect change. Still he does, in his steady, quiet way, work through the puzzle of Phil’s death and find himself with a valuable and life-altering piece of news. Then he decides to keep quiet.
Definitely in the wrong business.

The News Where You Are is an easy, pleasant read, and offers some insights about growing old, at 75, or at 45, or perhaps refusing to do so at all.

Katherine Govier’s most recent novel is The Ghost Brush (HarperCollins).




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"Dispersing the demons of doubt"/ "Hollingshead acts normal with return to short fiction"

Sept. 12, 2016 "Dispersing the demons of doubt": I cut out this article Jamie Portman in the Edmonton Journal on Sept. 18, 2015:

LONDON — Tessa Hadley has finished serving the tea and cookies. But she’s still not quite ready to discuss her late-flowering emergence as one of the English speaking world’s finest writers. She must first apologize for the distant rumble of a washing machine.
“It was stupid to put it on and have it spinning away in the kitchen,” she says with a smile.

In brief, this pleasant, unassuming woman is the picture of quiet domesticity as she sits in her North London apartment and finally begins discussing the mysterious processes of crafting fiction while also going out of her way to explain why Canada’s Alice Munro is one of her heroes.

But she’s also trying to come to terms with something that clearly confounds her — a London critic’s recent conclusion that she now touches greatness as a novelist.

Her newest book, The Past, has just arrived to the customary plaudits. But one review in the Guardian newspaper has gone even further, describing her as “one of the country’s great contemporary novelists.” Indeed, it also suggests Hadley, a late starter who didn’t publish her first novel until she was 46, may yet prove to be the “greatest” among her peers.

So how does she respond to that? “That could really go to my head, couldn’t it?” Hadley, now 59, is comfortable in her laughter. “That’s the kind of review you dream up in your delirium.”

Then common sense takes over. “It’s very lovely to have such supportive reviews. It’s quite liberating. … The demons of doubt are dispersed and you can write better.”

“But as a writer, you must never go around wondering whether you’re great or not. Who could know that? What matters is the work you put on the page and the mystery of writing words that may affect someone you’ve never met.”

Readers of The Past are likely to be affected by a great deal — including the very atmosphere of the old house that, in its own way, constitutes one of the novel’s most important characters.

Hadley gives us four adult siblings — three sisters and their brother — gathering for a traditional summer holiday in their grandparents’ crumbling country house. It’s a place overflowing with childhood memories, having become their second home after their mother left their father and sought sanctuary with her parents. But now, on what could be their last summer here, tensions are simmering.

There’s Alice — whom Hadley describes as “romantic and exuberant but with all kinds of inner fragilities and anxieties.” There’s matter-of fact Fran — “the only one of the sisters who has children.” And there’s Harriet, once of revolutionary bent, now shy and controlling, and soon to be challenged by an unexpected emotional crisis: “Suddenly, horribly, when she’s 50, the great tide of life will sweep her from her moorings.”

Roland the male sibling has brought along his latest wife, Pilar, who proves to be one of the wild cards in the narrative. Another is Kalim, the surly self-absorbed son of Alice’s current boyfriend, who has designs on Roland’s teenage daughter Molly.

Hadley’s previous novel, the highly praised Clever Girl, chronicled the surprising odyssey of lower-middle-class Stella, a character who at times seems to have everything working against her as she navigates her way through the turbulence of the last half of the 20th century.

That novel, ultimately a portrait of human resilience, encompasses one of Hadley’s favourite themes: “The highest test is not what you choose but living with what befalls you.”

My opinion: I'm going to that put that above line into my inspirational quotes.

This new novel, The Past, revisits this thesis. As a novelist and human being, Hadley is sensitive to the accidents of life — “where you were born, who you happen to meet, the mischance or good fortune that befalls you,” she says. “I love the old fashioned humility of that.”

But she risks being dismissed as an author of domestic fiction or, more pejoratively, “a woman’s writer.”

“Most novels are about families,” Hadley says, caustically. “Not all of them, but many. Yet, if a woman writes it, it’s called domestic fiction. If a man writes it, it’s called ‘revolutionary experiment.’ ” She finds reassurance in the observations of John Updike — a favourite writer — about “giving the mundane its beautiful due.”

Hadley, who teaches creative writing at Bath University, urges her students to study Alice Munro closely.

“We can come up with rules of thumb about writing … but she will break all of them,” Hadley says. “She is an extraordinarily innovative formalist. She invents things to do with the story that we are all beneficiaries of.”

Hadley is striking a personal note here.

“Alice Munro changed my life,” she says, “more perhaps than any other writer. She’s a genius.”



"Hollingshead acts normal with return to short fiction": I cut out this article by Michael Hingston in the Edmonton Journal on Sept. 18, 2015:

It’s tempting, when reading any story collection, to look for threads that might tie the individual works together and suggest some kind of larger purpose or intent. With Greg Hollingshead’s new collection, you have to start with the title. Act Normal (House of Anansi) suggests a person desperate to fit in: it’s the kind of thing you might whisper to an unruly significant other just before entering a dinner party, or maybe to a fellow bank robber as the two of you casually stroll past police headquarters. Regardless of the setting, if you need to say it, you aren’t doing it.

Still, I kept an eye out throughout the first story collection in 20 years from Hollingshead, a longtime Edmontonian whose writing has earned him a Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and, in 2012, the Order of Canada, for more potential keys. I didn’t come up with much. In a way it’s a testament to Hollingshead’s reliably off-kilter prose that one of the best contenders I found for an underlying thesis was the following: “One thing led to another. But let me be clear. Any Cheezie I touched I ate. These things are a lot of fun until someone gets hurt.”

So I figured I should ask him directly. While shaping the new book, Hollingshead and his editor, Janice Zawerbny, sat down with a stack of his 21 most recent stories and together whittled them down to the 12 strongest, which are the ones that appear in print. But strength aside, is there anything else the stories have in common?

“Nope,” Hollingshead says, reached by phone from his home in Toronto. “Nothing. Nothing. No, really. Nothing. No.”
OK, then.

Act Normal is Hollingshead’s first book since his 2004 historical novel Bedlam. But it wasn’t supposed to be. Of the intervening 11 years, Hollingshead figures he spent about half that time grappling with an autobiographical novel about his youth and adolescence (or as he puts it, “The novel that people usually write first”). What began as a relatively straightforward story became more and more complicated, until eventually Hollingshead found himself trying, and failing, to thread three separate storylines together.

“It was just an impossible object,” Hollingshead said. “It didn’t resonate, not even to me.”

At first he was reluctant to abandon the idea entirely. So he kept plugging away at the manuscript, polishing a sentence here, a paragraph there, until eventually time made the decision for him. After two years, Hollingshead says, “it’s unthinkable to stop,” because you don’t know for sure whether the novel is doomed.

“After five years,” he adds, “you know for sure.”

Hollingshead hasn’t entirely given up on novels — he’s since written a draft of an entirely new manuscript — but that creative drought allowed him to return to the short form that defined his early career. Hollingshead’s first two books were story collections, and his fourth, 1995’s The Roaring Girl, netted him his first national prize (the Governor General’s Award), and was later published in England, the United States, Germany, and China. But he hadn’t published a story collection since. Until now.

Hollingshead may claim that the stories in Act Normal are simply the best dozen pieces he’s written in the past two decades. (The Drug-Friendly House, for example, was nominated for a National Magazine Award when it first appeared in Edmonton’s Eighteen Bridges magazine.) He also says that several of the pieces detail the ways in which altered states, whether induced by alcohol, drugs, or even just stress, intrude on our everyday lives. Eventually, I found a few more through-lines of my own.

Chief among them is miscommunication — and, more specifically, the fact that even though we routinely misunderstand our fellow humans, our lives and routines keep ticking merrily, and obliviously, along. In The Amazing Insult, a character’s head trauma leads to a total psychological reawakening, as she realizes for the first time “how good people are at accommodating unexpected responses. Mainly they do it by not listening.”

A similar idea crops up in Wing Night, where Hollingshead introduces the concept of a Gettier case. This is a philosophical question about whether knowledge can be considered valid if a person believes it for invalid reasons. “For example,” Hollingshead writes, “you’re correct in believing that your wife is having an affair with Jim, but you’ve got the wrong Jim.” Such faulty information can sustain us for years.

Act Normal is also interested in the relative goodness of humanity. In Sense of an Ending, as a woman struggles to understand her husband’s family, she reflects on living one’s life according to principle. But “what was hers? People are dumb and I hate myself for being one?”

I ask Hollingshead about this line, and he bristles a little. “I mean, you look at the big picture, and it looks pretty hopeless,” he admits. “You take away people’s resources, and we very quickly start killing each other. So there’s that.” But then he recounts a story he heard on CBC Radio, about a man who spent years travelling all around the world, and who declared that, when you get right down to it, nine out of 10 people are decent.

“That’s where I tend to be,” Hollingshead says. “I’m more interested, I guess, in the surprising decency of most people.”
This response, it turns out, is where his character lands, too. “Most people weren’t especially dumb,” Hollingshead writes, “and she wouldn’t have minded being like one of the ones she liked, dumb or not.”


Michael Hingston: Greg Hollingshead comes home to short stories with Act No...

By Michael Hingston
It’s tempting, when reading any story collection, to look for threads that might tie the individual works togeth...


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