It's a Mystery

It's a mystery to me how my very fair-skinned daughter could walk around un-sunscreened in a sleeveless top in the sunshine all day yesterday and not get pink shoulders. It's a mystery why someone would practice long and hard enough to be able to make a sandwich with his feet. It's also a mystery why I would pay to watch this.

The main mystery for today is how Elizabeth George's last two books have been so boring. I thought that What Came Before He Shot Her was just an aberration, probably because it focused on characters I didn't already know. But the newest one, Careless in Red, has Lynley and Havers in it, two of my favorite characters, and it's still as boring as the book is long. Did she have a good editor when she was younger, and now has too much power to have to accept editing suggestions? Or is she just so full of herself she thinks she can write any old long-winded, sloppy way and we'll keep reading her books? Well, she's wrong about me. Passages like this one make her books not even worth carrying home from the library:

He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family--the four of them then, the three of them now--they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a respository of secrets. She'd believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother's troubles, her mother's periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had alwasy been referred to as "a bit of an embarrassing situation." Don't breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and "What's the cow up to now?" from her granddad. But "Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?" was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually thing would return to normal, whatever normal was.

After about 500 pages of that kind of overblown prose, having learned too many details about too many characters' lives, the completely improbable mystery is finally revealed. It follows up on one of about 200 red herrings, the rest of which are left, stinking, on the shore.

There are good Elizabeth George mysteries: A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, Well-Schooled in Murder, A Suitable Vengeance, For the Sake of Elena, Missing Joseph, Playing for the Ashes, In the Presence of the Enemy, Deception on His Mind, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, A Traitor to Memory, I, Richard, and A Place of Hiding. But that, it seems, is that. I'll never know what else happens to Lynley, unless one of you, against my advice, wants to plow through hundreds of pages of tripe just to find out what he does next. It's just not worth it to me anymore, and that's sad.

I don't think I know any other mystery series where the quality plunged this precipitously before I was finished caring about the characters. But I came late in life to reading mysteries. Do any of you know another series where this happens? Share your warning!

Take Three, They're Small

It's been forgettable fiction week here. I read Billie Letts' Shoot the Moon and listened to the audiobook of Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero. I'd liked previous books by these authors--I liked Letts' Where the Heart Is (made into a pretty good movie with Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd). I also liked Ondaatje's The English Patient (made into a very long movie with Kristen somebody and one of the Fiennes brothers).

Every time I'd get in the car, I'd fall into an Ondaatje reverie, roused every fifteen minutes or so by a phrase that was just too flowery, trying too hard to be literary. I liked some of the images, though, and I actually had to go to the library and get a copy of the book because I got so fascinated with the sound of one character's name. The name turns out to be Marie-Neige, but the reader on the audiobook pronounces it with a creditable French accent, and I kept trying to figure out if it was some form of Marjory or another common name. Ultimately, however, there didn't turn out to be much of a plot, and I didn't like any of the characters, with the possible exception of Marie-Neige, who is only a memory.

When I had the time to pick up Shoot the Moon, I had trouble falling for its forced folksy charm. The title comes from this passage:
"What does it mean, 'shoot the moon'?"
"It means he's gonna go for all the tricks."
"The whole kit and kaboodle," Jackson said.
"Kind of like getting married," Lonnie explained.
"How's that?" Mark asked.
"Well, say you find you a woman you just can't get enough of. You want her so bad you can't eat, can't sleep." Now you know this is a woman who's gonna keep your bed warm on cold nights, make you potato soup when you're sick. She's gonna believe you even when you're lying. Hell, she's the only person in the world who's gonna know what you wanted that you never got, and what you got that you never wanted. But you know for certain there's gonna be times when this woman's gonna make you miserable. She's gonna bitch if you forget your anniversary. She's gonna want you to watch some crying movie on TV when there's a ball game you wanna see. She'll expect you to skip your poker game and keep her company when she's feeling blue. In other words, she's gonna be a pain in the ass some of the time. So, you gotta make a decision. What are you gonna do? Walk away from her? Or go for it all. Give her up? Or shoot the moon."

I could have enjoyed this kind of dialogue if the plot had been halfway decent and a few of the characters had been developed past the "aren't we friendly in this small town" point, but the big mystery of the novel, when it's finally revealed, is unbelievable, and the murderer's motive is like an afterthought. I think Letts had such a good idea for a mystery that she had to begin writing it, but then couldn't think of a good way to solve it.

Reading Shoot the Moon in my moments of free time and listening to Divisadero whenever I got in the car made me feel a little like Goldilocks--one was trying too hard to be a work of literary merit, and the other wasn't trying nearly hard enough. Then I came across a copy of an old familiar poem that I was surprised to see is by Michael Ondaatje. It's entitled "The Strange Case":

My dog's assumed my alter ego.
Has taken over--walks the house
phallus hanging wealthy and raw
in front of guests, nuzzling head up skirts
while I direct my mandarin mood.

Last week driving the babysitter home.
She, unaware dog sat in the dark back seat,
talked on about the kids' behaviour.
On Huron Street the dog leaned forward
and licked her ear.
The car going 40 miles an hour
she seemed more amazed at my driving ability
than my indiscretion.

It was only the dog I said.
Oh she said
Me interpreting her reply all the way home.

When I first read this, at babysitting age, it didn't strike me as creepy, the way it does now. But it's certainly Ondaatje at his best, in that the image will stay with you for a long time.

Suppertime

"yeah, it's suppertime...oh, it's supper, supper, suppertime, the very best time of day"

Like most families with middle and high school age kids, we don't have supper together more than once or twice a week. We've all gotten to where we enjoy those evenings, though. There's less of the "I'm done, so can I jump up and race off" than there used to be (when Walker was small, staying in his place for an entire meal necessarily included dancing in place beside his chair). There's more preparation done together, like table-setting and sometimes even suggestions for what to have. Since none of us enjoy planning meals or cooking but all of us enjoy eating, we've found ways to make the task less onerous over the past year.

Last night we all came in about six and had to take care of our caged animals, who get released and entertained and/or petted once a day, and we had to find things in the refrigerator that we could fix for a quick supper. We discovered that we're out of salsa, a staple in our house and something that we keep a spare bottle of in the pantry, ordinarily. But when we had to throw away everything in the refrigerator during our nine-day power outage, we didn't realize that we'd just opened the last bottle of salsa, and so we had none for supper last night. The meal was more bland than usual, but the conversation is getting better all the time.

After supper and homework and video watching and showers, I had to read this poem to everyone. It's by Lisel Mueller and entitled "Love Like Salt":

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays by the sea.

Ron waited until I'd finished reading the poem to say that salt crystals are square, and so not "intricate" as far as he could see. I said I didn't really get the "wineskins" part. All of us enjoyed the image of the salt on the floor, as something all over our kitchen floor is a pretty usual part of fixing supper around here. And we agreed that "talking of holidays by the sea" is the very essence of love, for us.

The Gone-Away World

I just read a book that I enjoyed so much (and exclaimed over so frequently) that Ron asked me if this could be my book of the year. Usually I pick a new book that I've liked and send it to the people on my Christmas list who might like it. This one could be it.

There's just one slightly negative thing about this book--it takes a good while to get into it. It took me about 70 pages, and that's with the encouragement of bookchronicle, who has it on her list of the ten best books of the year. The book is Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World.

One of the things that made me start to enjoy the book was this reference to ninjas:
"Just hearing Master Wu say 'ninja' is like hearing a concert cellist play 'Mama Mia' on the ukulele. Ninjas are silly. They are the flower fairies of gong fu and karate. They can jump higher than a house, and burrow through the ground. They know how to turn invisible. They...can do things which are like magic."

But I think what got me hooked is this passage on p. 72:
"'And the moral of this story?'
'Don't leave the path.'
'No. The moral of this story in so far as it has one is that cannibals can study logic, and that if you are going to leave the path, you better have your wits about you and know better than to trust the first scary old lady who talks to you in a public place. 'One of my sisters lies and the other tells the truth!' What a load of crap. For God's sake, why doesn't he ask the barman? Or just retrace his steps? The man's an idiot.'"

Yes, The Gone-Away World has ninjas and a pirate king and secret societies and an evil villain with a fearsome weapon, and it's set in a sort of post-apocalyptic world so it's kind of like science fiction except that the world maybe turns out to be different than you think and your idea about what is normal has to change a bit, and by the time you get to the end of reading it, you've done more than laugh at the funny parts (and there are plenty of those), and you've done more than follow the digressions from the main plot (and boy, are there a lot of those). What you've done is that you've become a slightly more thoughtful person than the one who began reading this book. Partly this happens because of the way the story is told--you begin with a group of people who are called on to solve a crisis, and then you go back to their youth and find out how the crisis came to be, and then you go along with the narrator to analyze the way the fictional world works, like trying on corporate thinking for size, and finally you have to take a stand with the characters, as good and evil are sorted out.

I read this book more slowly than I read most things. It took me about a week of dipping into it for maybe half an hour a day, at first. The thing is, there are stories in this book that can almost stand alone, like the story of the man who acted out the scene from a button I found in Washington D.C. in the 1980's: "I don't love you since you ate my dog." And there are characters and situations that are satisfying to read about in a way that doesn't seem to advance the plot, like the story of K. and why he calls himself that. And like the introduction to this teacher:
"'What I an about to tell you,' says Professor Derek the following day, 'may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane--if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain--I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell....what you need to get your heads round is that I am such a massive geek, such a totally terrifying concentration of nerdhood, that I have actually cracked the code for human social behavior using mathematics. I am able to interact with people on what appears to be a casual non-scientific footing, and even get laid like a regular guy, because I made an intense study of behavioural and statistical ethnographics, and I am constantly running a series of predictive and quantitative calculations in my head, which provides me with acceptable human responses within the normative band and counterfeits qualitative judgement so well the difference is within the margin of error.'"

As other reviewers have noted (there's one on The Gone-Away World site), the sheep images are among the funniest parts of the book (besides the fact that everyone who reads this book will be compelled to try putting their teeth on a doorknob). I loved this bit about the sheep:
"sheep are a nightmare if you're trying to construct a perimeter defense, because they can end up cutting a path right through it and leaving themselves in pieces as markers showing the cleared route to all comers....sheep surviving for a prolonged period in a heavily mined area will gradually evolve, and left long enough would develop into more intelligent, combat-hardened sheep, possibly with sonar for probing the earth in front of them, extremely long legs for stepping over suspect objects and large flat feet to distribute pressure evenly and avoid activating the fuse. A warsheep would be a cross between a dolphin and a small, limber elephant."
A warsheep! That is just a funny word, sort of reminiscent of Douglas Adams at his best (and Harkaway does list Adams as one of his influences, along with P.G. Wodehouse, Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, and Neal Stephenson).

The story of how the narrator survives being shot and how he then helps to save the world is the focus of the last third of the book, where everything comes together so unexpectedly (for me) and so satisfyingly that it's hard to describe, except perhaps to say that it's like finding out what the watermelon in Buckaroo Banzai's file cabinet is for and not being disappointed by the explanation. Here's one facet of the explanation that won't entirely spoil the plot for you:
"The Go Away War and the Reification were a great chaos which brought an end to everything we knew. By accident or subconscious design, we destroyed the pattern of our lives, reduced our species to tiny pockets of survival and engendered a world whose very fabric responded to our thoughts. Humbert Pestle, silver at the temples and tough like a yew tree, survived the cataclysm but was appalled by the havoc that it wrought. Seeing in his mind the cogs of the great progress scattered willy-nilly all about, Pestle longed to put them back in the clockwork and make it run again. Nor was he alone. We all of us looked at the turmoil around and were afraid, and instead of going out to meet it and sniff it like good mammals, good primates, we got cold feet and fell back upon our cold blood; like lizards on a cloudy day, we wished ourselves back in the comfort of our holes; we wanted our finite horizons of predictable problems and predicable joys."

This is not a predictable book. It's an amazing book, about honor and sacrifice and what makes us human. Long after you think you've settled in to being amazed as you read, you'll continue to be amazed over and over.

Reading To Learn to Love

I have learned to love Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana series, featuring Mma Ramotswe. It took me a while to relax into the first one, entitled The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. At first I found the main character slow in her thinking, and the plot rather thin. But I was not appreciating the simplicity of the plot and the dignity of the character, which grew on me until by the end, I was enjoying it on its own terms.

Over the last few years, I have enjoyed Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men, The Full Cupboard of Life, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Blue Shoes and Happiness, and The Good Husband of Zebra Drive in much the same way, as an occasional oasis in a desert of disagreeable characters and complicated plots. Once I tried one of the Isabel Dalhousie books by the same author, but I found it vaguely pretentious and mightily boring.

So when I found the newest Botswana novel, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, at the library, I wasn't expecting much more than an hour or two reading about life at a slower pace. I did get that (in fact, I saved the book for before-bedtime reading), but I was surprised to find that I like this book as much as I grew to like the first one. It is the crowning glory of the series, so far, and my only qualm about recommending it is that you really need to have read the previous novels in order to enjoy the many charms of this one fully.

When I began reading The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, I was the mother of a ten-year-old and an seven-year-old. Now I'm mothering a fifteen-year-old and a twelve-year-old; the interval has done nothing but increase my patience, and my understanding of passages like this one:
'There were many dangers in this world, and the longer one journeyed through life the more one understood how varied these dangers were. That, thought Mma Ramotswe, was why one worried more and more about others: one could imagine the manifold disasters that might befall them."

Also, merely by taking me out of my own country, reading this novel enlarges my perspective, until I'm thinking like the main character, who
"put out of her mind the things that had been worrying her. For out here, out in the acacia scrub that stretched away to those tiny island-like hills on the horizon, the concerns of the working world seemed of little weight. Yes, one had to earn a living; yes, one had to work with people who might have their little ways; yes, the world was not always as one might want it to be: but all of that seemed so small and unimportant under this sky."

Like it took me a while to relax into the pace of the first Botswana novel, it took me a long while to learn how to live with the pace of a small town. People would wave at me, driving around town, and I never waved back because I didn't look into the cars to see who was inside. Now I do. I've learned the charms of going to the drive-up pharmacy and having the clerk hand me a refill for my son that's already charged to my account, all without having to ask my name. I moved away from the town where I grew up and was glad of it, because I could make my own way without being known merely for family connections, but now I can see the comfort Precious Ramotswe takes when people speak to her of her dead ("late") father: "that people should still speak of him; that touched her. One did not have to be famous to be remembered in Botswana; there was room in history for all of us." And even on the second day of the John Freshwater inquiry downtown at the County Service Building, where I went this morning to attach a photo to one of our passport applications, I find it mostly reassuring to live in a town so small that people who are on opposite sides of an issue still have to find ways to get along. It's like Mma Ramotswe's conversation with a bank guard: "Here in Botswana if anybody came to rob the bank you'd probably know exactly who they were. You could simply threaten to tell their mothers. That would put a stop to any bank robbery."

In the end, I think I'm not alone in longing to be more like Mma Ramotswe, a woman who can understand and forgive almost anything. Her assistant, a mere mortal like you or me, realizes from watching her that "evil repaid with kindness was shown to be what it really was, a small, petty thing, not something frightening at all, but something pitiable, a paltry affair." And it's a relief to see through Mma Ramotswe's eyes, because she sees hope for everyone. But she's not a simple-minded moralist. You can laugh with her about why her assistant's father-in-law is demanding the seemingly outrageous dowry of ninety-seven cows!

I'd like the eggs and spam

I got this button from B&b ex libris, by way of J. Kaye's Book Blog:

Missed Chances

My dissertation adviser is coming to the local college to give a talk in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to seeing him again, but feel a little apprehensive, like you do anytime someone you admire comes around with that how-did-your-life-turn-out question trembling at the back of his mind.

To a career academic, my life may not look like a happily ever after story. I didn't end up with the big prize, a tenure-track teaching job. Now even one of my closest friends, an academic, has taken to lecturing me about various subjects, perhaps because I often venture opinions bluntly, rather than couching them carefully in academese. So what do I say, to anyone who has chosen what I think of as the sell-your-soul-to-your-job path in life? That there are other paths to intellectual fulfillment? Will whatever I say come out as defensive--or worse, patronizing?

I think it's easy to assume that the other guy has gone down the wrong road, if he's not on the road you're on. What we all want is to consign everyone who did not make the choices we made to the city of missed chances, like in the Stephen Dobyns poem "Missed Chances."

In the city of missed chances, the streetlights
always flicker, the second hand clothing shops
stay open all night and used furniture stores
employ famous greeters. This is where you
are sent after that moment of hesitation.
You were too slow to act, too afraid to jump,
too shy or uncertain to speak up. Do you recall
the moment? Your finger was raised, your mouth
open, and then, strangely, silence. Now you walk
past men and women wrapped in the memory
of the speeches they should have uttered--
Over my dead body. Sure, I'd be happy with
ten thousand. If you walk out, don't come back--
past dogs practicing faster bites, cowboys
with faster draws, where even the cockroach
knows that next time he'll jump to the left.
You were simply going to say, Don't go, or words
to that effect--Don't go, don't leave, don't walk
out of my life. Nothing fancy, nothing to stutter
about. Now you're shouting it every ten seconds.

In the city of missed chances, it is always just past
sunset and the freeways are jammed with people
driving to homes they regret ever choosing,
where wives or helpmates have burned the dinner,
where the TV's blown a fuse and even the dog,
tied to a post in the backyard, feels confused
uncertain, and makes tentative barks at the moon.
How easy to say it--Don't go, don't leave, don't
disappear. Now you've said it a million times.
You even stroll over to the Never-Too-Late
Tattoo Parlor and have it burned into the back
of your hand, right after the guy who had
Don't shoot, Madge, printed big on his forehead.
Then you go down to the park, where you discover
a crowd of losers, your partners in hesitation,
standing nose to nose with the bronze statues
repeating the phrases engraved on their hearts--
Let me kiss you. Don't hit me. I love you--
while the moon pretends to take it all in.
Let's get this straight once and for all:
is that a face up there or is it a rabbit, and if
it's a face, then why does it hold itself back,
why doesn't it take control and say, Who made
this mess, who's responsible? But this is no time
for rebellion, you must line up with the others,
then really start to holler, Don't go, don't go--
like a hammer sinking chains into concrete,
like doors slamming and locking one after another,
like a heart beats when it's scared half to death.

Maybe we can't get it all straight once and for all. Maybe all I can do is overcome my pride enough to say some of what I think, and a little of what I feel. Maybe this is one of the many tests of adulthood, and as Indiana Jones says in The Last Crusade, "only the penitent shall pass."