Monthly Archives: March 2011

My mystery book group met this past Saturday to discuss Mystery Man by Colin Bateman. It was a good discussion, as always, about a book that struck me as strange. The book didn’t quite come together for me, but it was very funny, at least in places, and kind of a puzzle to think about. What made it so odd was the fact that it’s written in first person from the point of view of a man who is mentally disturbed, to one degree or another. It’s a little hard to tell just what’s going on with him because, of course, he’s the narrator and we get no other perspective on the story. This made reading the book as uncomfortable as it was amusing.

The narrator is strange, paranoid, and often kind of nasty, although this is presented in a funny way. He lives in Belfast and owns a mystery book shop, and he’s the kind of guy who sells a customer a map when they ask for directions, even though he could easily point the way. He needs to make money after all. And there are scenes like this one:

So he gave me their number and said they were on the Newtownards Road and I thanked him for his time and still suitably enthused, or bored, I was about to phone them when the shop door opened and a man came in and asked if I could recommend the new John Grisham and I said, yes, if you’re a moron.

It’s enough to make me wonder how in the world this guy (unnamed) ever keeps a bookstore open. His methods of drumming up business involve hosting events like Serial Killer Week, and inviting the famous author Brendan Coyle to teach creative writing classes. Coyle is a local author of literary fiction who “dabbles” in crime writing every now and then (and could be, as Emily points out, John Banville/Benjamin Black):

He is a vain, boorish snob, and sometimes I wonder why I ever bothered inviting him to teach a monthly creative writing class in No Alibis.

Then I remember that it’s because he does it for nothing and that I also sell a lot of books off the back of his visits. The only reason he does it for free is that I convinced him that he should be giving something back to ‘his’ people, and he was sucker enough to fall for it. I like to think that every minute he spends talking twaddle in No Alibis in one minute fewer spent trying to write crime, which is a blessing for us all.

The narrator turns into a detective when the real detective in the shop next door disappears. The missing detective’s customers wander over into the mystery bookshop hoping they can find some help there. The narrator is skeptical of their plaintive requests for help at first, but he soon gets caught up in the fun of solving cases, all of which he gives a name such as The Case of Mrs. Geary’s Leather Trousers or The Case of the Fruit on the Flyover. Eventually a really big case comes along, The Case of the Musical Jews (or, in earlier editions of the book, The Case of the Dancing Jews — Bateman changed details in later editions to make his story different from the real-life story of a woman named Helen Lewis).

The narrator needs to be pushed into taking on this big case, however. As a paranoiac, he is utterly afraid of just about everything, and he knows this case could be dangerous. It’s the woman who works across the street, Alison, the woman whom the narrator has had a crush on and has spied on for years, who is enthusiastic enough about taking on detective work to push the narrator into it. He keeps calling her his sidekick and getting upset when she takes too much initiative, but it seems pretty clear that she provides much of the brains and just about all of the energy and ambition of their operation. The two of them, along with the narrator’s assistant, Jeff, work together with varying degrees of competence and sanity until the case is solved.

Bateman’s sense of humor isn’t exactly mine, but still, there was an awful lot in this book that was funny, and the book seemed even funnier during the group discussion, as we retold the best stories and laughed over them. Hobgoblin loved this book and particularly the narrator, but for me, there was something about him that never quite came into focus. I wasn’t sure exactly how reliable he was, if at all, and if he’s completely unreliable, then where does that leave the reader? There weren’t many opportunities to see the narrator from other people’s perspectives in order to begin to figure him out, and there was a lot he never told us about himself. The book is very much a spoof of detective novels, which is part of the fun of it, but it was hard to tell whether it was merely a spoof, or whether there was something more serious going on at the same time.

I also had trouble believing the relationship between the narrator and Alison. He has had a crush on her forever, pretty much, and the story of how they meet is fun. But after that, there are a number of scenes where he treats her quite badly, and she is always ready to forgive and forget, unrealistically, worryingly so. But, again, I was unsure how seriously to take all this. Is the author mocking wildly unrealistic relationships in novels, or … not? I kept hoping for some answers to these questions and never really found them.

I wonder whether I would have had these problems had the author’s sense of humor been more like my own. We discussed in our group the possibility that Irish readers might find the book funnier and more coherent than American readers. Bateman seems to be writing for an Irish audience (which makes sense, of course) and does little to help readers from elsewhere along. Maybe it partly boils down to a matter of culture.

Mrs. Ames is the second book by E.F. Benson that I’ve read; a couple years ago I read his Queen Lucia and enjoyed it quite a lot (I received Mrs. Ames through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program). Mrs. Ames, published in 1912, covers much the same territory as Queen Lucia, published 8 years later. Both books are about small-town English life among the leisured classes. They are about gossip, dinner parties, and social rivalry. Neither book delves into anything terribly deep, dramatic, or tragic. In both books Benson shows affection for his pampered, petty characters, while at the same time making it clear just how absurd they are.

Queen Lucia is about Lucia’s struggle to maintain her control over the local social scene, and Mrs. Ames finds herself doing the exact same thing. The threat to Mrs. Ames takes a while to emerge, but it turns out to be Mrs. Evans, the doctor’s wife, who is relatively new to town. She has ideas for entertainments — masked costume parties! — that the town has never seen before. She also, more ominously, begins to spend more and more time with Mr. Ames, and the two of them begin a flirtation. It is entirely innocent to begin with, but over the course of the book grows increasingly serious.

Mrs. Ames sees what is going on and does her best to win her husband’s attention back, although, at the same time, she begins to wonder just how happy she is in her marriage. Her attempts to win back her husband’s affections provide some of the book’s uncomfortable comedy: she tries a wrinkle cream and colors her hair to get rid of the gray, but, sadly, her husband doesn’t notice and the women think she looks odd and see right through her attempts to regain youthfulness. It’s kind of pathetic, and yet perfectly understandable and sad.

In an effort to regain her place at the center of society that Mrs. Evans took away with her costume party, Mrs. Ames takes up the cause of women’s suffrage. Here’s where the book gets particularly interesting, and where the comic tone wavers a bit. Mrs. Ames began not caring at all about votes for women, only wanting to make a splash and force people to choose sides, but over time she finds she is genuinely concerned. The suffragist movement speaks to her vague feelings of dissatisfaction with her life and her marriage, and she sees that having greater independence and political involvement could bring a new meaning to life.

This part of the story climaxes in a scene where Mrs. Ames is forced to choose between, on the one hand, her loyalty to her husband and the codes of politeness she has spent her whole life blindly following, and, on the other, her new-found belief in votes for women. Her husband has invited a local politician to dinner, the very same man, unfortunately, that the suffragist group has decided to heckle during his speech later that day.

How Mrs. Ames resolves this dilemma and whether her unhappiness and her husband’s love affair will rip apart the social order provide the drama for the rest of the novel. I enjoyed the book very much, although it’s the book’s unevenness of tone that, strangely, made me like it: I found it fascinating that Benson was willing to take the story in a darker direction than anything in Queen Lucia, even if it disrupted the tone of light comedy established earlier in the book. The novel’s portrayal of women’s fight for the vote is mixed, but Benson does write some moving passages about Mrs. Ames’s self-awakening, and he is far from dismissive of her unhappiness. So, while this may not be a brilliant novel, it’s an entertaining, funny one that offers much that’s serious to think about.

Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is already fading a bit from memory, since immediately after it I read Mrs. Ames by E.F. Benson, and the two books have some major similarities. They are both about English village life, they are both examples of the novel of manners, and they are both extremely readable with charming and gently ironic narrative voices. More on Mrs. Ames later.

Simonson’s book tells the story of Major Pettigrew and his friendship with Mrs. Ali, a Pakistani woman who owns a shop in town. It’s the type of small town society we’ve all heard about if not lived in ourselves, where everybody knows everybody’s business and the life of the town revolves around social events and gossip. Being a novel of English small town life, it’s very much about class and also about race. As Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali begin to spend more time together, the gossip begins and some ugly attitudes emerge.

The novel is also about family dynamics. As the story begins, Major Pettigrew has just lost his brother Bertie; once the funeral is over, it’s time to start thinking about what will happen to Bertie’s antique Churchill gun, one of a matched pair, the other of which the Major owns. It’s no surprise to learn that while the Major’s father clearly wished the pair to be reunited upon the death of one of the brothers, the new widow is reluctant to give the valuable weapon up. Conflicts ensue.

The story is a pleasurable one; Simonson handles the romance between the Major and Mrs. Ali very well, and she brings her characters together in entertainingly dramatic scenes. What I enjoyed most, though, is the narrative voice. Simonson is excellent at creating an understated, quiet, but nonetheless very funny satirical tone. The Major’s son Roger is particularly ridiculous: he is obsessed with appearances and social climbing and he and his American girlfriend (yes, the Americans in this book are the horrible clueless Americans of the stereotype) are self-absorbed, rude, and generally awful. For example, in this passage Roger asks the Major whether he will vouch for him as he and his girlfriend try to rent a cottage. Roger says:

“The issue is the widowed Mrs. Augerspier. She wants to sell the cottage to the ‘right’ people. I need you to come with us and be your most distinguished and charming self.”

“So you would like me to come and kiss the hand of the poor widow like some continental gigolo until she is confused into accepting your meager offer for a property that probably represents her entire nest egg?” asked the Major.

“Exactly,” said Roger. “Is Thursday at two good for you?”

Simonson is also particularly good at handling the issues of race and colonialism that underlie the story. The Major is a little out of his depth as he meets Mrs. Ali’s extended family, but his politeness gets him through his encounters with an unfamiliar culture. Mrs. Ali shows grace and patience as she deals with the clueless and rude townspeople who don’t quite manage to acknowledge her as a real person with thoughts and feelings. Simonson deals with the colonialism issue partly by having the Major and Mrs. Ali read Kipling together. As they discuss him, they delicately touch on the colonial legacy that shaped both of their lives:

“I used to consider myself a bit of a Kipling enthusiast,” said the Major. “I’m afraid he’s rather an unfashionable choice these days, isn’t he?”

“You mean not popular among us, the angry former natives”? she asked with an arch of one eyebrow.

“No, of course not …” said the Major, not feeling equipped to respond to such a direct remark …

“I did give [Kipling] up for many decades,” she said. “He seemed such a part of those who refuse to reconsider what the Empire meant. But as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy. It’s so hard to maintain that rigor of youth, isn’t it?”

“I applaud your logic,” said the Major, swallowing any urge to defend the Empire his father had proudly served. “Personally, I have no patience with all this analyzing of writers’ politics. “The man wrote some thirty-five books — let them analyze the prose.”

The Major and Mrs. Ali are such charming characters. I’ll confess that I got some of the minor ones confused now and then, but the Major and Mrs. Ali are wonderful company to keep while reading a novel. There is much to admire and enjoy in this book, particularly if a quiet love story and a book about small town conflicts appeals to you. Simonson does an excellent job with her material.