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Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom

Jul2

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.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G.K. Chesterton

Jun21

Weird. Nightmare-ish. Imaginative. Chestertonian. Spoilers follow.

The Man Who Was Thursday fits all of these adjectives, and to be honest I’m not sure I understand what Chesterton was doing in this novel about a subversive policeman poet who infiltrates and stands against the forces of anarchy. Only it turns out that there are no real anarchists? Or maybe only one or two? Is Chesterton saying that evil is, in the end, only an illusion? That God provides men with the illusion of evil in order to test them and give them the opportunity to suffer and show courage? Or is it that in order to confront real evil, men must “tested by fire” and know suffering? Maybe I’m not intelligent enough for Chesterton.

However that may be, the plot moves quickly and furiously through madcap chases and revelations and surprises. The characters are rather difficult to keep straight, especially since their essential personalities keep changing or being revealed to be other than what the reader first thought them to be. The story is full of such twists and turns and unexpected developments, and by this literary technique Chesterton draws his readers into a dream world in which reality changes colors and aspects in a rapid-fire sequence of fantastical events.

The penultimate scene in the novel is a Job-like Council in which a Real Anarchist confronts the forces of Law and Order and Righteousness. And the Real Anarchist is answered, as Job was answered, with a question: “Can ye drink of the cup I drink of?” The themes of the novel are revealed to be those of redemption through suffering and of the seemingly contradictory faces of God, his justice and his mercy.

It’s a strange nightmare of a vision, and yet Kafka said of Chesterton’s writing, “He is so gay, one might almost believe he had found God.” C.S. Lewis apparently (according to my book’s introduction by Jonathan Lethem) compared Chesterton to Kafka, but Lethem says that Chesterton is instead the anti-Kafka, “so thrilled by his acrobatic stroll along the razor’s edge of nihilism the he earns his sunniness anew on every page.” The book does end with more questions than answers, but also with the main character having “an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.” Chesterton’s vision of the epic battle of Good versus Evil ends with a sunrise.

NOTE: I thought the strange and bewildering variety of covers at Amazon was somewhat illustrative of the many ways in which Chesterton’s nightmare turned into good news has been understood (or misunderstood) by various people. In a brief commentary appended to my edition, Chesterton even writes that a group of Bolshevists in Eastern Europe, without the author’s permission, “tried to turn this anti-Anarchist romance into an Anarchist play. Heaven only knows what they really made of it; beyond apparently making it mean the opposite of everything it meant.” If so, Chesterton has only himself to thank for writing a story with so many 180 degree turns and unmaskings that when a reader is finished he’s so confused that he’s not sure what’s opposite and what’s inside.

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean

Jun19

Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean. Recommended at Chasing Ray. (Read her review for a much better understanding of the book than I got.)

This book is the sort of story that you read straight through to the end, then shake your head, and think, “I must have missed something.” Then you try to decide whether to go back and re-read, and if you’re me, you don’t.

Gentian is a precocious, gifted, astronomy-loving, fourteen/fifteen year old middle sister. Her parents are involved, but hip and hands-off, allowing the three girls to explore and make their own decisions. Therefore Gentian, and to a lesser extent her sisters, come under the spell of Dominic, the new boy next door. I couldn’t figure out whether Dominic was a vampire, since he only seems to come out at night, or a warlock, since he casts a spell over Gentian that makes her forget her friends and family, or something else, something faery.

I wish someone else would read this one and explain it to me. I liked the characters enough to want to know what was going on, but I didn’t think I would gain any understanding by taking a second tour through the book. In fact, the characters, Gentian, her sisters, her family, and her friends, reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s characters, and that was enough to keep me reading. Maybe I just don’t know enough about the occult because it definitely felt occult-ish with all the star-gazing and pagan philosophy and magick, with a k.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Jun14

Ishiguro could be a playwright, or at least a writer of monologues, as well as a novelist. I’m impressed by his ability to inhabit the mind of his narrator and enable the reader to do the same. In this book, when the consummate English butler Mr. Stevens felt unsure, I, too, had questions. I thought I knew more than Mr. Stevens, the narrator of the novel, himself, could see undercurrents and subtleties that he had chosen to ignore or was unable to see. But I couldn’t even be sure that I was not blinded by my own assumptions. I felt pity for Mr. Stevens, the coldness and futility of his life service to an ultimately unworthy cause. And yet . . . . It’s that ambiguity that gives the novel its beauty and makes it stay with me.


I imagined actor Anthony Hopkins as Mr. Stevens throughout my reading although I’ve not seen the movie version of Remains of the Day. I’m sure Mr. Hopkins did an admirable job in the role. However, I do wonder whether the movie was able to capture the nuance and self-deception and melancholy inherent in the novel.

I really liked Never Let Me Go, also by Ishiguro. I was not as taken by When We Were Orphans, another book I read by this author last year. Remains of the Day ranks with Marilyn Robinson’s Gilead as a novel of reminiscence, of confronting old age and lost dreams, and of assessing one’s legacy at the end of a long life. What if you spend your life in well-meaning and faithful service to a cause that turns out to be unworthy, even fraudulent?

Mr Stevens on dignity: “I suspect it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public.”

What would he think of the internet and blogging?

Mr. Stevens in accepting an apology: “I am happy to assure you, sir, that I was not unduly inconvenienced.”

Warning: Not much happens in this novel. Mr. Stevens goes motoring. Mr. Stevens runs out of gasoline. Mr. Stevens has tea with an old friend and co-worker. Mr. Stevens reminisces. But there’s a richness there, nevertheless, that well repaid me for my time spent reading.

Abbeville by Jack Fuller

Jun7


Book #6 in Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

“Until the dot.com bubble burst, George Bailey never gave much thought to why his grandfather seemed so happy.” George Bailey goes back to visit his grandfather’s Central Illinois hometown, Abbeville, and perhaps learn the source of his grandfather’s strength and resilience. The novel skips back and forth between George’s story and that of his grandfather, Karl Schumpeter. It turns out that Karl’s story is a sort of serious, more believable version of It’s a Wonderful Life. (George Bailey says he owes his name to his mother Betty’s sense of humor.) And there’s more to Karl’s life than just a tale of endurance through the trials of the Great Depression and two world wars.

This novel can be enjoyed on many levels. It’s a family/generational saga about the ups and downs of twentieth century history as they affect one town and one family. It’s a story of four generations of young men coming of age, with a fishing trip on the river to anchor and serve as a metaphor for maturation and for the financial cycles that affect the family’s lives. It’s a spiritual narrative about a man’s rise to prominence, his fall to ignominy, and his redemption in the love of small things and of work done well.

It seems as if I’m always reminded of some other work of literature when I read a book. This one reminded me of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington, maybe because of the time period beginning in about 1910, and maybe because of the midwestern setting, or maybe because both books are about the rise and fall of a family dynasty in a small town. Abbeville is, however, filled with a grace and sympathy that Tarkington’s novel lacked.

Key quotation from a French cure (priest) to Karl during World War I:

“And as to your fear, remember that God’s grace is nothing you need to repay, nor is punishment the proof of sin. This is the first great mystery, my son, and it is only made bearable by the second, which is love.”

“You see,” the cure said, “fortune is not the outcome of a test. Good or bad, it is the test.”

Thanks to Unbridled Books for sending me a copy of this novel for review. I’ve never heard of Jack Fuller, although the back cover blurb describes him as “a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer who has published six broadly acclaimed novels and a book of non-fiction.” I don’t know about the other six, but I am seriously impressed with the novel Abbeville.

When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin

Jun4

Subtitled A Novel of the Heart, this book tells the story of two people with heart problems: a little girl with a hole in her heart in need of a transplant and a man with a broken heart who can’t escape his past.

The ‘heart” metaphor is worked and reworked like that throughout the book. And there are more details about heart surgery and heart disease and transplantation than you’d ever want to know unless you’re a heart patient or planning to become a cardiologist. You should also know heading into this book that there’s some understated spiritual content (rather generic), and the ending is tricksy, it is, gollum, gollum.

One of the characters in the book says of a novel she’s finished that “it had its moments.” The same could be said of Mr. Martin’s “novel of the heart.” It’s emotionally manipulative, and there were a few plot developments that strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. However, you might be willing to give it a little leeway if you get interested in the characters —and their hearts.

Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos

May19

In Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler tells Scarlett, “Scarlett, I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken–and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken pieces as long as I lived.” I’ve always remembered that statement as a poignant example of man’s inability to mend broken lives and broken relationships, or even to conceive of the possibility of broken lives made new.

Broken for You, however, is not about mending broken things and broken people into an imperfect replica of what once was whole. It’s about taking the broken pieces and making something new. The characters in the book are atheists, Catholics and Jews; the most redemptive and Christlike character is a Jewish holocaust survivor. The ideas and the themes in the book seem to me to be Christian, as evidenced first by the quotations that introduce this spiritual parable:

“They’re so much more than objects. They’re living things, crafted and used by people like us. They reach out to us and through them we forge a link with the past. —Gwendolen Plestcheeff, decorative arts collector (1892-1994)

” . . . He took Bread, and when He had given thanks, He brake it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take, eat, this is my Body which is given for you.'” Mark 14:22.

Broken things really aren’t worth much if they’re broken and then glued back together into their original form. A glued and broken teacup always shows the crack and can’t be trusted to hold tea. Broken lives can’t be remade into what they were before either. And only a miracle worker, a transcendent God, can take the broken pieces and make something new and meaningful out of them.

In the story, a broken woman, crippled in body and mind, uses the broken pieces from a fortune in dishes and ceramics and glassware to create Art with a new meaning all its own. And in the process, a curse is lifted, a community is born and nurtured, a family is reunited, and a prodigal comes home. The coincidences, or miracles if you will, in the story are sometimes unbelievable. The frequent changes in person and point of view were disconcerting but had the effect of engaging me as a reader and making me work at the novel rather than their pushing me away in frustration. Others may find the use of second person in particular to tell part of the story more than disconcerting, but persistence pays off.

Altogether Broken for You is a remarkable first novel. In case I’ve given anyone the wrong impression, it’s not a “Christian” novel, per se, not published by a Christian publishing house. Nevertheless, the themes resonate with a Christian worldview. I’d like to pursue and read more of Ms. Kallos’s work.

If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is passed away; all things are become new.
2 Corinthians 5:17

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

May19

Expanded vocabulary from reading this classic noir detective novel:

loogan: a man with a gun

squibbed off: killed

lammed out: ran away

frail: woman

leery: risky

peeper: private detective

Useful phrases and wisecracks:

“Shake your business up and pour it. I haven’t got all day.”

“Hold me close, you beast.” Actually, that one came from an inept seductress in chapter twenty-three, and I thought it was one of the funniest lines in the book. I can’t imagine anyone putting that line over with a straight face.

“His story had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact. I’d like to find someplace to use that bit of discernment.

“Did you know that worms are of both sexes and that any worm can love any other worm?” Now there’s a conversation stopper.

Has anyone seen the movie version of this book with Bogie and Bacall? Recommended or not?

The Crazy School by Cornelia Read

May17

Apparently, this book is the second in a series featuring “ex-debutante Madeline Dare.” References to the first book in the series abound in this the second, but they’re unexplained. I didn’t care enough to find out where and why Madeline killed a man in self-defense, but I did glean that she did —and that she’s happy to have escaped something in Syracuse.

However, it seems to be a case of “out of the frying pan,” because if Syracuse was bad, a “crazy school” in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts turns out to be much worse. Madeline has a job at this school and residential treatment center for mentally disturbed adolescents. Unfortunately, the administration is crazier than the the inmates. And why Madeline, who’s supposed to be in full possession of her faculties despite being clinically depressed, doesn’t resign within two days of her arrival at Santangelo Academy . . . Maybe it has something to do with the mess she left behind in Syracuse in the first book.

That’s not the only motivational issue in the story, but it’s a minor example. Madeline also returns to her job a few days after a double murder at the school, a murder that the police suspect Madeline of committing. And, like a lunkhead and against her lawyer’s orders, she goes over to have tea and conversation with the guy she suspects is the murderer.

I’m not buying any of that kind of idiocy, and if you are, I’ve got a manuscript tucked away in my bottom desk drawer about a girl who spends the night in a haunted house and . . .

Some Wildflower in my Heart by Jamie Langston Turner

May16


Having loved two others of Ms. Turner’s books, I saw this one at Half-Price Books and immediately snapped it up. I wondered if it would live up to its predecessors in my reading life, A Garden To Keep and Winter Birds. It did.

However, the book does start out, and proceed, rather slowly, and the narrator’s voice takes some getting used to. Margaret Tuttle is a lunchroom supervisor at Emma Weldy Elementary School. She’s a high school dropout, but very well read and educated, nevertheless. On the first page of the novel, she says, “My passion is reading. I am haunted by phrases from things I have seen and done as well, though I prefer by far the haunting from things I have read.”

Margaret Tuttle is haunted by many things, as she indicates, not just books, and although she tells her story in a precise, erudite, almost pretentious tone, she reveals her secrets and those of the subject of her story, Birdie Freeman, at just the right pace. If the ending is rather abrupt, it mirrors life which is full of abrupt endings.

Margaret has decided to spend the three months of her summer vacation writing the story of her growing friendship with a woman named Birdie Freeman. Birdie is a bit too good to be true, and Margaret knows that her portrayal of Birdie is almost unbelievable.

You have seen Birdie Freeman as I saw her: gentle of spirit, high of principle, unfaltering in kindly demeanor. I have added nothing and have omitted only more of the same . . . As extremes are rarely believable, there are readers who will accuse me of selective and slanted reporting, but to them I shall answer that I have told all that I have seen.”

Birdie is the heroine of this novel, and although she is homely and uneducated, her essential character is flawlessly kind and loving. I suppose this Pollyanna-ish portrayal is a problem, but don’t you know at least one person who looks a little too good to be true? Perhaps we assume that behind closed doors there are unseen faults and character deficiencies, and perhaps there are. Still, it’s amazing to realize that there are good, not sinless, but good, people in the world.

I actually found the character of the narrator, Ms. Tuttle, to be somewhat more difficult to believe in. Margaret is a woman who lives in the world, with a husband, a job, relatives, but with no emotional connection to any of it. She and her husband, Thomas, have shared a fifteen year long marriage in which she prepares the meals and cleans the house, and he does the household repairs and pays the bills. They sleep in separate bedrooms and share no romantic or emotional relationship. This sort of platonic marriage arrangement seems rather unlikely, to say the least.

Some Wildflower in my Heart is the story of Margaret and Birdie and of how their friendship changes both of them, but especially Margaret. If you’re a fan of authors Jan Karon or Brett Lott, you might try one of Jamie Langston Turner’s books. Memorable characters living authentically Christian lives in a broken world make for good fiction.

Semicolon review of A Garden To Keep by Jamie Langston Turner.

Semicolon review of Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner.

I am pleased to think that I still have two or three more published books by Ms. Turner yet to experience, and as far as I know she’s still writing and may write more excellent novels. Bring them on.