Yugoslav Mystery by Arthur Catherall

This novel is the second or third of Mr. Catherall’s young adult novels I’ve read, and I’m beginning to get a feel for his style and genre. He reminds me of the adult spy novelists Nevill Shute or Alistair MacLean, or even Helen MacInnes, but a bit more tame with teen protagonists. I would guess that boys ages 13 to 16 would find Catherall’s novels quite intriguing.

This mystery takes place on an impoverished island off the southern coast of the former Yugoslavia. It’s several years post-World War 2, but the people who live on this island are still trying to recover from the war and all of its many depredations and consequences. One of those consequences of war is that our protagonist, Josef Piri, fourteen years old, lives with his grandfather and his mother, all of them believing that Josef’s father died in the war before Josef was born.

One day while Josef and his grandfather are out fishing, a police boat comes alongside to ask if they have seen an escaped fugitive on or near the island. Josef, in fact has and does see the escapee clinging to a rope alongside the police launch, out of sight and desperate to remain so. What is the right thing to do? Remain silent and help the man escape or give him up to the authorities?

The choice Josef makes leads him and his entire island village into quite an adventure. There are guns and hidden treasure and narrow escapes and various people who are not what they seem to be. Josef must draw again and again on his courage and his innovative ideas to protect his family and the other villagers and to understand his heritage as his father’s son.

The story takes place in Communist Yugoslavia in about 1960, and it was published in 1964. The Communist government is far away in this story, and is neither praised nor criticized. The villagers, including Josef and his family, live far from the day to day reach of the government, and their lives continue with very little government interference or help. There are a couple of mentions of government aid to the villagers, but it’s not significant. And the adventure that Josef’s encounter with the police boat and the escaped fugitive brings has little or nothing to do with Communism or Marshal Tito.

Christmas in Mexico, 1960

Nov28

The Year of the Christmas Dragon by Ruth Sawyer.

At first glance, this Christmas story seems to be set in the mountains of China, home of many dragons, including the King Dragons. In fact, the story does begin with a boy named Chin Li in China:

“He could see dragons everywhere: immense, ancient dragons; lazy, fat dragons; small scrawny dragons. Except for size they all looked alike. They had shining green scales covering their bodies and tails. They had black spots here and there, and their noses and claws were black. The splendid part of them was their wings; these were a bright red, and when they spread their wings Chin Li could see they were lined with gold.”

However, Chin Li and a certain dragon with whom he becomes friendly are infected with wanderlust, and they travel together across the ocean to a new land, Mexico. And there the dragon falls asleep and sleeps for a very long time, only to awaken to another friendship with a Mexican boy named Pepe. And as Christmas approaches, Pepe tells the dragon about the wonderful true story of Christmas:

“For a number of days Pepe came to the barranca shouting with the joy of the Christmas. Many things had to be explained to the dragon. Angels, for instance. Pepe told about the shining light about their heads, about their wings, white as a dove’s, about the heavenly music they could make. Pepe’s eyes shone with some of the light as he told, and his voice caught some of the heavenly music. He had to tell about the star that shone the first Christmas Eve. No one had ever told him how large and bright it had been. ‘It must have been brighter than the moon,’ Pepe explained. ‘And truly it must have been larger than the largest rocket ever sent into the sky.'”

How Pepe’s dragon becomes the Christmas Dragon and how the year of the dragon’s wakening becomes The Year of the Christmas Dragon complete this tale that dragon lovers will find enchanting. The reading level and interest level of the story is about on par with other dragon tales such as My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett or The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame.

For Christmas giving, pair this book with a stuffed dragon toy or a dragon costume, and you will delight any dragon fan below the age of 10.

Midnight Hour Encores by Bruce Brooks

Aug21

One of my favorite YA novels is The Moves Make the Man by Bruce Brooks. So, when I found another YA novel by Mr. Brooks at the used bookstore the other day, I snapped it up immediately.

Midnight Hour Encores is about a cellist, Sibilance T. Spooner, not a basketball player. And it takes place in the mid 1980’s (published in 1986) as the aforementioned Sibilance asks her leftover hippie father Taxi to take her to San Francisco to meet her mother. Taxi, despite his love for 60’s music and culture, has been the responsible parent in Sib’s life, the one who took her to cello lessons, gave her a home, and gave her plenty of space to grow up into one of the world’s most promising cellists and a very confident and prepossessing sixteen year old woman.

However, as Taxi and Sib travel across the country in an old VW bus, they find that each of them has been harboring a few secrets. And when Sib finally meets the mom who left them when Sib was a baby, things become very complicated.

This book was not as good as The Moves Make the Man, at least not as good as I remember that book to be. (I haven’t read it in twenty years, but I liked it a lot.) Midnight Hour Encores did have its moments, and the emphasis on the idea that people grow and change and that people are complicated and hard to pigeonhole—that was good. The casual acceptance of kids and adults having casual sex was a minor aspect of the book, but I could have done without the assumptions. The ending surprised me, in a good way.

If you’re interested in the 1960’s or in the world of top-flight teen musicians or in complicated family relationships, you might enjoy Midnight Hour Encores. If you haven’t read The Moves Make the Man, I highly recommend it, even if you have no interest in basketball whatsoever.

The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman

Oct15

When thirteen year old Sophie, bored with her life in the summer of 1960 in rural Louisiana, wishes for a magical adventure, a nameless, capricious, ghostly creature sends her 100 years into the past to the year 1860 in Louisiana, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Sophie gets a lot more adventure than she bargained for, and she soon realizes that going back into the past isn’t all fun and games.

The Freedom Maze is kind of a Gone With the Wind tale, set on an antebellum Louisiana plantation and told from the point of view of the black slaves instead of the white masters (or mistresses). In fact, it might be a good balance or antidote to Gone With the Wind and other romanticized versions of life in the Old South. It certainly wasn’t all belles and balls and big dresses, especially not for the slaves who made the economy and culture of the region workable by their bondage and labor. I thought it was fascinating, educational, well-written, and terribly sad, with a touch of hope at the end. Older middle grade readers (age 13 and up) who are interested in learning the truth about what slavery was really like will find the story illuminating.

Warning: This book contains “hoodoo” and herb magic and superstition and ghostly magical creatures. The way these things were portrayed in the book wasn’t a problem for me as a conservative, evangelical Christian, but if you don’t want any elements like these in your reading or your child’s, then The Freedom Maze is not for you. Even more problematical for some readers might be the recurring stories of attempted rape and miscegenation as slave owners “meddle with” their female slaves producing light-skinned progeny who remain enslaved and considered “black.” That this sort of thing happened frequently is undeniable, and the descriptions are not graphic. However, my eleven year old would be clueless and confused as to what was going on in this story. My thirteen year old just might learn something about the tragedies of life and of our history.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

May7

This 123-page novella about a middle-aged widow who opens a bookshop in a seaside village in England felt familiar as I read it, but I must not have been paying proper attention when I read it the first time in May of 2008. I didn’t really remember it, and I was surprised and saddened by the ending of this tragic little story of the life and death of a dream.

In 1959 Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in Hardborough. In 1960, “she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.” The characters in this quiet story are vivid and engaging:

Florence Green, “a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance.”
Mr. Keble, the bank manager who gives Florence sage advice: “If over any given period of time the cash inflow cannot meet the cash outflow, it is safe to predict that money difficulties are not far away.”
Mr. Brundish, “a descendant of one of the most ancient Suffolk families,” who “lived as closely in his house as a badger in its sett.”
Raven, the marshman, naturalist, amateur veterinarian, and prognosticator.
Milo North, who works for the BBC, is tall, and goes through life “with singularly little effort.”
Kattie, Milo’s girlfriend, the dark girl with red stockings who comes to stay at Milo’s house only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
Eleven year old Christine Gipping, the third Gipping daughter, very thin and remarkably fair, who becomes Mrs. Green’s invaluable assistant, ideal in that she has a talent for organization and never reads the books.

There are other characters, some not quite so endearing, who populate the village of Hardborough, and as Mrs. Green’s little bookshop stirs the waters, so to speak, of village life, it becomes clear that someone or something doesn’t want her to succeed. Perhaps a small bookstore is more disturbing to the status quo than would be imagined.

Raven: “They’re saying that you’re about to open a bookshop. That shows you’re ready to chance some unlikely things.”
Florence: “Why do you think a bookshop is unlikely? Don’t people want to buy books in Hardborough?”
Raven:”They’ve lost the wish for anything of a rarity. . . Now you’ll tell me, I dare say, that books oughtn’t to be a rarity.”

What do you think? How unlikely is a successful bookshop? (More unlikely nowadays than in 1960, I would think.)

1960: Events and Inventions

Feb7

January 1, 1960. French Cameroon becomes an independent country.

January 9, 1960. President Nasser lays the foundation stone of the Aswan High Dam as work begins on the engineering marvel on the Nile River in Egypt.

March 21, 1960. In the black township of Sharpeville in Transvaal, South Africa, local white police officers open fire on demonstrators who are protesting apartheid laws in South Africa. Sixty-nine people are killed and 186 are left wounded. Police Commander D.H. Pienaar is quoted: “If the natives do these things, they must learn their lesson the hard way.”

April 19, 1960. Labor and student groups overthrow the autocratic First Republic of South Korea under Syngman Rhee. This revolution leads to the peaceful resignation of Rhee and the transition to the Second Republic.

April 21, 1960. The planned futuristic city of Brasilia becomes the capital of Brazil. The picture above is central Brasilia in 1986.

April 27, 1960. Togo gains independence from France.

May 1, 1960. Several Soviet surface-to-air missiles shoot down an American Lockheed U-2 spy plane. Its pilot, CIA agent Francis Gary Powers, is captured.

May 11, 1960. In Buenos Aires, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct the fugitive Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in order that he could be taken to Israel and put on trial. Eichmann is later convicted and executed.

July 1, 1960. The UK- and Italian-ruled territories of Somaliland gain their independence and unite to form the nation of Somalia.

October 1, 1960. Nigeria declares their independence from the United Kingdom and becomes a member of the British Commonwealth.

The Love Letters by Madeleine L’Engle

Feb24

The Love Letters may be my favorite of Ms. L’Engle’s books. I just re-read it for my Semicolon Book Club, and it did not disappoint. I did notice a few new things this time. (I hadn’t read the book in several years.)

The story takes place in two time periods: a 1960’s present and 17th century Portugal. In the present, Charlotte is in Portugal on an unannounced visit to her mother-in-law, the great cellist, Violet Napier. Charlotte has run away from New York and from her marriage to Patrick, Violet’s son, for reasons that are not clear in the beginning of the novel but that unfold as Charlotte comes to identify with Mariana Alcoforado, a Portuguese nun (b.1640, d.1743) who is the purported author of a book called Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

I realized that in the book, in Charlotte’s story at least, not much happens. The story is mostly about Charlotte’s internal struggles as she comes to terms with the death of her marriage. Mariana’s story has more of a plot, but part of the interest of the novel is in finding out what happened to Mariana. So stop here if you want no spoilers.

The Love Letters is a book about vows and about keeping vows, and about that all-consuming philosophical question of the sixties that has continued to preoccupy people into the twenty-first century: “You think, then, that values change? That there are no absolutes?” And if there are moral absolutes, how do we as imperfect people relate to those laws of conduct and morality?

I think in some ways The Love Letters gives an inadequate answer to those very important questions. Both Charlotte and Mariana come to the somewhat reluctant conclusion that their marriage vows are irrevocable and inextricably bound to their personhood. However, Charlotte’s story, especially, is incomplete. How does one keep one’s vows to, keep loving, a person who is not keeping covenant with you? Mariana at least has God, from whom she has run away, but who has never, even in her darkest hours, deserted her. Charlotte is not even sure she believes in God, but in the end she turns back to Patrick, to her marriage, hoping that God will help her to restore what has died.

“Supposing,” she said, slowly, “you are sitting in a train standing still in a great railroad station. And supposing the train on the track next to yours began to move. It would seem to you that it was your train that was moving, and in the opposite direction. The only way you could tell about yourself, which way you were going, or even if you were going anywhere at all, would be to find a point of reference, something standing still, perhaps a person on the next platform; and in relation to this person you could judge your own direction and motion. The person standing still on the platform wouldn’t be telling you where you were going or what was happening, but without him you wouldn’t know. You don’t need to yell out the train window and ask directions. All you need to do is see your point of reference.”

Charlotte keeps saying throughout the book that she is looking for a “point of reference”. Of course, the only fixed point of reference for human beings is God Himself. Charlotte goes back to Patrick with God as her witness and strength, or else she can’t really go back at all. Am I saying that non-Christians can’t have strong marriages, can’t keep their promises, can’t love? In a way, yes. None of us can bear the pain of loving truly and deeply and vulnerably and sacrificially because our own brokenness and sin get in the way. Only God can enable that kind of love; only He is stable enough to be a point of reference. Maybe He does the enabling in some non-Christian marriages and relationships as a sort of common grace, but I am convinced that it is only He that holds this world together.

The monthly tea for the Semicolon Book Club will be held this Saturday at 3:00 P.M. at my home. We will further discuss The Love Letters by Madeleine L’Engle. Email me at sherryDOTearlyATgmailDOTcom for more information. The book selection for the Semicolon Book Club for March is John Adams by David McCullough.

Other books that may be of interest to readers of The Love Letters:

Mariana by Katherine Vaz. In this novel, a Portuguese-American author gives her version of the story of Mariana Alcoforado.

Certain Women by Madeleine L’Engle. Another book about marriage and keeping vows and in which another historical person, this time King David of the Bible, becomes a point of reference and identification for a modern-day man.

Letters of a Portuguese Nun: Uncovering the Mystery Behind a 17th Century Forbidden Love by Miriam Cyr.

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Not because of the Portuguese connection, although that may be what made me think of them, but Ms. Browning’s poems of love are much more controlled and formed than Sister Mariana’s passionate outpourings and because of that, in my opinion, more profoundly passionate.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.