A quotation on the back of the book jacket from a reviewer refers to Mr. Ishiguro’s “inimitably out-of-kilter vision.” THose are just the words I was looking for as I read this book —out-of-kilter. I find that frequently as I read more recently published fiction, in the last fifty years say, I feel a sense of culture shock. These people in I’m reading about are off-kilter, not quite insane, but not thinking logically, not quite right. Eldest Daughter says it’s a feature of post modern fiction and post-modern culture. I guess I’m just a modernist, or maybe Victorian.

Anyway, I picked up When We Were Orphans at a used book sale because I enjoyed Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go so much. I didn’t enjoy this book as much. The narrator was . . . odd. (It must be the week for odd. See this review of The Book Thief.) Christopher Banks, the aforementioned narrator, is such a distinctive personality that it is hard to decide, but I almost convinced myself that Ishiguro was trying to make Banks the embodiment of what was wrong with the British attitude toward the world, and particularly China, prior to World War II. Banks is blind, majoring on minor issues that don’t seem at all minor to him, while the world around him is a literal war zone. The British, too, were blindly crying out “Peace, Peace!” when there was no peace. Then again, Banks’ blindness has to do specifically with his parents and his orphaned state. The British government wasn’t searching for its lost parents. So the analogy only goes so far before it breaks down.

Mr. Ishiguro tells a good story and creates intriguing characters, even if his protagonist does have a bit of a bug in his brain. The other characters in the novel are believable, but negligible. Christopher Banks is the center of interest. The setting for the second half of the story is Shanghai, 1937. Wartime Shanghai is vivdly portrayed, even though the person doing the portraying is somewhat myopic. Somehow the author manages to enable us to see through his narrator. And that vision leads to an ambiguous ending in which Christopher Banks believes he has finally found out what happened to his parents, but I’m not so sure I’m buying the story. So we’re left with more post-modern ambiguity. It’s pretty good slightly off-kilter ambiguity, as evidenced by the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out two days later, if you like that sort of thing.

If you’ve never read anything by Ishiguro, I recommend Never Let Me Go. (Semicolon review here.) If you like that one, and if you like off-center, you’ll probably enjoy When We Were Orphans, too.

The only other book I’ve read by Booth Tarkington was Penrod, a story about a mischievous boy growing up around the turn of the century. I remember it as funny and profound upon the subject of boyhood, kind of like Tom Sawyer.

The Magnificent Ambersons, aside from the time period, the early 1900’s, and the setting, the American Midwest, is not at all like Penrod. As an under current in the book, Tarkington preaches about the general nastiness and inevitability of urban sprawl and how the automobile and the factory have destroyed community and cleanliness and all that makes life worthwhile. Preaching aside, Mr. Tarkington still manages to tell an engaging story, a sort of family epic, the rise and fall of the Ambersons.

Georgie Amberson Minafer is a spoiled rich brat, reared in luxury and with a sense of entitlement. The Ambersons, George’s mother’s family, are the center of society in their “Midland town.” From the beginning of the novel, the author sets Georgie up for disaster; the entire town is waiting for George Amberson Minafer to get his “come-upance”. As George grows up the reckoning is delayed again and again, but the most casual reader must know that George’s pride goeth before a fall. George’s favorite word for other people, all others who aren’t Ambersons, is “riff-raff”. His attitude can only and always be described as condescending, even with the young lady with whom he falls in love.

So, The Magnificent Ambersons is first of all a cautionary tale. Pride is destructive. Things change; no one stays on top forever. Fortunes come and go. Only those who are strong, wise, and flexible, and maybe even lucky, can persevere to enjoy the good life.

However, the book is not just a preachy, moralistic fable. It’s a picture of life at the turn of the century, of how change affects different personalities. It’s a love story about a mother who idolizes her son, and a young man who loves his family pride more than he cares for the woman who is willing to overlook many of his faults and who could have made him happy. And the ending is about forgiveness and hope and the possibility that broken things can be, if not mended, perhaps made new.

I’ve not seen the Orson Welles movie based on this book, but I plan to do so. After reading the novel, I can see how this book would make a great “old movie”. No modern remakes, however, nowadays a writer and director would most likely ruin the movie version with gratuitous sex and a plot in which only the characters’ names were borrowed from the original book.

A Work in Progress review of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Another thrift store find, I picked up a paperback copy of this 1994 novel for 66 cents because I had heard of it, and it sounded interesting. On the front and back of the novel other adjectives are used to describe the story: “compelling,” “heart-stopping,” “haunting,” and “luminous,” are a few. I think I’ll stick with “interesting,” even though it’s not nearly so descriptive.

Snow Falling on Cedars is the story of a Japanese American fisherman, Kabuo Miyamoto, who is accused of the murder of another fisherman, Carl Heine. The plot reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird, a courtroom drama in which local prejudices and racist stereotypes play a big part. Most of the action of the book takes place in 1954, about ten years after World War 2. However, each of the characters revisits the war years in flashbacks that illuminate the motivations of the people involved in the trial. Miyamoto is married to Hatsue, a Japanese American woman who grew up on San Piedro Island with him and also with the other major character in the novel, Ishmael Chambers. Chambers, as the editor and publisher of the island’s only newspaper, is writing about the trial, and he is also involved with the Miyamoto family in another way: he was Hatsue’s secret boyfriend during their high school years, before the war.

Well, thought Ishmael, bending over his typewriter, his fingertips poised just above the keys; the palpitations of Kabuo Miyamoto’s heart were unknowable finally. And Hatsue’s heart wasn’t knowable either, not was Carl Heine’s. The heart of any other, because it had a will, would remain forever mysterious.
Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”

These are the final words of this murder mystery that attempts to transcend the genre and make some kind of commentary on the Meaning of Life. P.D. James does a better job. Harper Lee did a better job. First of all, there’s no mystery in Snow Falling on Cedars. It’s obvious from the beginning of the novel who didn’t kill Carl Heine, and the only mystery exists in figuring out the details of how Heine did die and trying to second-guess the author’s intentions in regard to the man who is accused of Heine’s murder.

Secondly, the novel tries to do too much. Is it a commentary on race relations and the injustice of sending Japanese nationals to Manzanar during World War 2? Or is it a courtroom drama about justice and injustice in the American system of law? Or is it a story about war and how it changes men? Or maybe it’s a novel about first love and the impermanence of innocence and the tendency of the world to disillusion and take away our youthful ideals. Or it could be an existentialist novel in disguise: we make ourselves real by the decisions we make. All of that stuff is in there, but I’m not sure any of it is developed as it could have been. Characters and themes keep getting in the way of each other instead of complementing and completing one another. Completion, resolution, or even character growth are not terms that I would use in connection with this novel, although the trial itself does come to an end.

I hesitate to question the literary quality of Guterson’s award-winning novel, but I must say that I found it disappointing. The novel raised many questions. Can human beings form any deep. lasting, or meaningful relationships? Does “accident rule every corner of the universe”? Or is the human heart free to make decisions and to remain unpredictable? Is the author trying to say that people of Japanese descent and people of Caucasian descent can never understand one another? (A seemingly near-racist conclusion.) Or is it that we are all unknowable? Is the American justice flawed or does justice triumph in the end? Do the people in this novel learn anything, or do they just act on impulse and a desire for self-gratification?

Guterson is quoted in his Random House bio: “Fiction writers shouldn’t dictate to people what their morality should be. Yet not enough writers are presenting moral questions for reflection, which I think is a very important obligation.” I think he’s got plenty of questions ,reflection in abundance, but isn’t the place to get any answers or even find out which questions are the most important and need answers. The characters in the novel are just drifting through life in reaction to whatever “weather conditions” come along. When individuals in the novel did make a definite decision about something, I never understood why they made the decisions they did.

I recommend Snow Falling on Cedars with reservations. It may grow on me. I know I’m still thinking about it a week after I finished reading it. However, by next year this time, I may have forgotten all about Guterson’s novel. I’m just not sure it goes deep enough to stick.

By the way has anyone seen the movie based on this book, and if so, what did you think of it?

Once upon a time, several lives ago, I was a Spanish major in college, and for a literature class I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic, Cien Anos de Soledad—in Spanish. In the middle of the book something odd happened; it started raining yellow flowers, I think, or something like that. I re-read and re-read, but I couldn’t figure out whether there was some Spanish idiom I wasn’t getting or if it was really supposed to be raining yellow flowers. I had to ask the Spanish professor, and he said that yes, it was raining yellow flowers, and that was my introduction to “magical realism.”

So, when I read on the back cover of River Rising that the novel “explores a variety of complex issues, such as racial equality and religious faith—all with a tasteful touch of magical realism,” I thought I should prepare for a wild ride. What I wasn’t prepared for was the “variety of complex issues” part. And I wasn’t prepared to be blown away by the powerful story that Dickson tells. Comparatively speaking, the magical stuff was fairly tame. It was the part of the book that could be real, the part that felt real, that made me stop, think and breathe deeply.

River Rising is set in southern Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, just before and during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927. The characters are residents of Pilotville, LA, a small town surrounded by swampland, and one stranger who comes to town to find out about his parentage. Hale Poser, the stranger, grew up in an orphanage, became a preacher, and now has come to Pilotville in hope of finding out something about his heritage. As soon as Rev. Poser hits town, strange things start happening, odd things like fruit growing where no fruit is expected to be, things that are attributable either to God or to chance or to Hale Poser the Miracle man. Along with the good and the merely odd, evil things begin to happen, too. A baby is kidnapped, and Mr. Poser may be responsible for her disappearance, or he may be her saviour.

By the time you get this far in the book, I think you’ll be hooked. As you read on, you’ll encounter more “magical realism” but also more and more Biblical allusions and symbolism and more and more food for thought. Hale Poser is Moses, or maybe Noah, or a miracle worker, or a prophet, or maybe a representative of Satan. Pilotville is heaven on earth where black folks and white people work together and help each other and get along, or it’s a hell on earth where things are not at all what they seem to be on the surface. There’s a flood, reminiscent of the Biblical deluge, but also strangely enough, a reminder of recent events in New Orleans, events that hadn’t even occurred at the time that River Rising was written. Even so, the book shows, as Katrina’s devastation showed, that such a flood can be horribly destructive, but also can provide an opportunity for cleansing and for a new beginning.

The novel also explores slavery and race relations using a plot premise that may be as old as the hills but one that I hadn’t thought of before. I don’t want to give anything away, but I was surprised and and intrigued by the basic plot of this story and the possibilities inherent for drawing analogies to spiritual realities.

River Rising was published by Bethany House and is available from Amazon or other bookstores. In case you need more information or persuasion to read this spiritually challenging and fascinating novel, here are a few other blog reviews of River Rising:

Lars Walker: “Buy this book (or at least keep it in mind for when it comes out in paperback). Bethany should be rewarded for publishing something this good, and Athol Dickson ought to be the bestselling novelist in CBA. He ought to be a bestselling novelist in mainstream literature, for that matter.”
Christian Fiction Review: “If this is an example of what Christian fiction will bring us in 2006, we are in for a banner year. Highly Recommended.”
Violet Nesdoly at promptings: “Dickson does not hesitate to sink his teeth into some pretty grand themes.”

Thank you to Bethany House for sending me such an excellent piece of fiction to review.

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up, and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-bye to my friends, and, after watching the perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.
And then the madness seized me.

Isn’t that a delicious beginning for a murder mystery? I don’t know why it’s so appealing, but the thought of a middle-aged spinster gone mad, her madness taking the form of renting a house in the country, is amusing and inviting. And of course, such a lapse in sanity can only lead to crime, murder, and mayhem.

Unfortunately, the rest of this 1907 mystery by Mary Roberts Rinehart does not move along quite so swimmingly. I liked the narrator, Miss Innes, and her companion, Liddy, but the rest of the characters were rather flat and one-dimensional. The plot is involved, with more than one villain, and more than one sub-plot, combining together to keep the reader guessing. But I found that three-fourths of the way through the book I didn’t really care whodunnit.

The writing is fun and feels more like the 1920’s than 1907. Rich people near the East Coast drive cars and have telephones and hire servants and hang out at The Club. I sometimes felt as if I were reading an early Americanized Agatha Christie, but where were the quirky characters with such strong motivations to crime? The novel ambles along, people die, but no one in the police department insists on answers to basic questions. The suspects (because they’re rich?) are free to refuse to tell the police detective whatever information they feel disinclined to share—with impunity. Maybe the police were more patient early last century than they are now.

As an historical exhibit in the history of the detective novel, I can see that The Circular Staircase would be of interest to those studying the genre. As amusement for a rainy day, it falls short. But there is that wonderful opening paragraph . . .

An interesting incident of true crime in the life of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
Mrs. Rinehart’s tombstone at Arlington Cemetery and a brief biography
First Lines, Anyone?: A Semicolon flashback