7/26/08: I’m over halfway through this book, “the third and most ambitious of a trilogy of novels exploring the inner lives of representative young Americans from the perspective of a ‘class war’.” “The them of the novel are poor whites, separated by race (and racist) distinctions from their near neighbors, poor blacks and Hispanics.” The words of explanation are Ms. Oates’ commentary on her own novel in an afterword at the end of the book.

I’m finding the novel condescending and full of stereotypes: the spoiled rich girl, the poor but violent young man full of unresolved rage, the eternal victim of that “victimless crime”, prostitution. I’ve been borderline poor, not in the inner city, and I’ve lived among poor people in the city. I don’t believe there is any “class war” in the U.S. Racism, yes. A division of classes, yes. But the poor people I have known mostly don’t think of themselves as poor, resent being classified as poor, intend to become middle class or rich as soon as hard work or a lucky break will enable that to happen. And there are all sorts of poor people. Some are hard working and others are lazy. Some are conscientiously religious, and others are profane and vulgar. Some are happy; others are morbidly depressed. Ms. Oates’ them are all the same: materialistic, violent, and devoid of moral values (probably because moral values are “middle class values” in the jargon and the perspective of the sociologist).

Ms. Oates again: “Few readers of them since its 1969 publication have been them because them as a class doesn’t read, certainly not lengthy novels.” How patronizingly untrue. And yet, Ms. Oates’s main character, Maureen, one of them, reads and enjoys Jane Austen and other novels. Perhaps the author is correct in writing that the poor as a class don’t read novels like them because they generally prefer hope and optimism to a vision that condemns them to generations of poverty and violence and victimhood.

7/27/08: I was sitting in church this morning thinking about Loretta, Maureen, and Jules, the central characters in them. Even though I still believe they tend toward stereotype, there are people out there, them, who fit the stereotype. What does the Gospel have to say to the Lorettas, hard as nails, seen it all, loud, brash and poverty enslaved? How can the Church, Jesus’s church, reach and speak to the Maureens of the city, victims of a bad home, bad education, a dearth of values, and their own longing for something better? If Jesus himself could speak to the Samaritan woman who was both of these women in one, can’t the Church somehow act redemptively in the lives of women like these as Christ’s representatives? And Jules. At a point in the story Jules, the smart but criminally destined young man, has a Bible and time and inclination to read it. (He’s in the hospital.) But he says, “My main discovery is that people have always been the same, lonely and worried and hoping for things, and that they have written their thoughts down and when we read them we are the same age as they are.” Jules finds hope and fellow feeling in the Scriptures but no salvation, no change. How could Christians, how could God’s Spirit, reach a man so embedded in sin and degradation and lift him up, not into the middle class, but into heaven itself? I’m not sure. I know it happens for some people, but not for others. I do know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only hope for people like Loretta, Maureen, and Jules . . . and for people like me, good old middle class me, just as sinful and degraded in my own middle class way.

There you have it. I have already this week established myself as a philistine and an anachronism. A family member, who shall remain nameless, accused me of calling her an elitist when I confessed my lack of appreciation for one of her favorite novels, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. And now I fear that the kindred spirit-ness that a certain blogger and I have shared in the past is tinged with a lack of understanding on my part. I will say that them made me think about poverty and racism and class struggle and sin, but I didn’t enjoy reading it and don’t wish to repeat the experience anytime soon. (Maybe some of the other novels of Joyce Carol Oates would suit me better? She’s quite a prolific writer, and this one is the only one I’ve read.)

So be it. Give me Dickens or Dostoyevsky or Victor Hugo or just a rousing adventure by Tolkien or Dumas. There’s plenty of poverty and and evil and violence in those authors’ books, but there’s also something else, a lack of inevitabliity, dare I say, a sense of hope? From the twentieth century, I’ll take Alan Paton or P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers or even my newest discovery Wendell Berry (something of an anachronism himself). But saints preserve me from the modern sociological novel.

Joyce Carol Oates fans, we’re still friends, right?

Helen MacInnes, but more lugubrious and hopeless.

Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, same setting a few years later, but more complex sentences and British characters.

Alistair Maclean, with less action and more dialogue.

John LeCarre, but set in Spain and less confusingly plotted. (Semicolon review of one of LeCarre’s novels here.

I picked up Winter in Madrid at the library because I read two of Mr. Sansom’s Matthew Shardlake mysteries and enjoyed them very much. (Semicolon review here.) This book is not a mystery, but rather as I indicated by my opening comparisons, it’s a spy novel set in the winter of 1940 as Britain is enduring Hitler’s bombing blitz and hoping that Spain under Generalissimo Franco will not join the Axis powers in declaring war on the Allies.

Harry Brett, the protagonist of the novel, is a survivor of Dunkirk, recently recovered from shell shock and hysterical deafness, who finds himself in Spain working for the Secret Service and spying on an old (public) school friend. That’s public in the British sense, private upper class snob school for us Americans. The friend, Sandy Forsyth, who is the subject of Brett’s somewhat clumsy spying efforts, is a businessman involved in a project that may or may not affect Franco’s decision about whether or not to enter the war. Hence the British interest in Sandy and his project.

The most interesting part of the novel for me was the way that Sansom showed how the belief system of each of the characters in the novel was torn down and destroyed or at least undermined by the realities of life and especially of war. Harry is a conservative, a public school/Cambridge graduate who believes in honor and in traditional British upper class values. But the complications and the sheer messiness of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and of being a spy make Harry’s value system at first difficult to follow and later impossible.

Harry’s friend Bernie is a dedicated Communist, probably the most idealistic of the characters in the novel. He, too, becomes disillusioned and confused when he sees his beloved Party under Stalin in alliance with the Fascists that Bernie just lost his freedom and nearly his life in fighting. He manages to hang on to his socialist ideals and his belief in the Communist Party and the coming day of socialist brotherhood, but it’s a confused persistence in a futile hope.

Then, there’s Sandy the dedicated rebel against authority who believes mostly in himself and his destiny to be the “bad boy” who always somehow comes out on top. Sandy doesn’t like anyone telling him what to do, and yet he works with the Facists in Spain who are the most authoritarian and controlling partners in business a man could possibly have.

Christianity, too, is portrayed as corrupt and bankrupt as the Catholic Church and its priests work with the Fascist regime to oppress the people and control them. In the historical note at the end of the book, Mr. Sansom says, “I do not think my picture of the Spanish Church at the period is unfair; they were involved root and branch with the policy of a violent regime in its most brutal phase and those like Father Eduardo who found it hard to square their consciences seem to have been few and far between.”

What Mr. Sansom does best in this novel is create a sense of place and time, showing the confusion and hopelessness of a Spain that’s coming out of the chaos of civil war into the brutal tyranny and suppression of a Fascist dictatorship. Franco did bring order to a country that was a killing field before his Nationalists won the civil war, but the question of whether or not the “cure” was worth the injustice that imposed it is still open. In fact, one of the questions that the novel comes back to time and again is: Can cruelty and injustice be used to fight greater cruelty and injustice? What happens to the character and moral sense of those who use deception and brute force to fight against evil? If there is such a thing as a just war, then must we use all the weapons at our disposal to fight that war, even the weapons of lies and violence and treachery? If we don’t fight withall our might and without mercy, then aren’t we enabling those who are truly dedicated to evil to win and to oppress and murder others?

Winter In Madrid is described on the back cover as an “action-packed thriller,” but the pace of the novel doesn’t live up to that description. It’s really much slower and more thoughtful than a typical thriller, full of moral dilemma and brilliant characterization. The winter setting is a metaphor for the bleakness of the entire plot, and although I usually don’t like novels that end with very little hope or faith for the future, the ending felt right for this novel. It’s a Candide-ish sort of ending in which the main characters, those who are left, decide to cultivate their gardens as the world moves on from catastrophe to catastrophe.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.