Category Archives: Books

I don’t feel like I need to write an entire post on Julia Spencer-Fleming’s detective novel In the Bleak Midwinter, but I did want to say that I liked it quite a bit and am eager to read further into the series. In fact, I made sure to find a copy of the second in the series while I was out book shopping last weekend. As is usual for me, it wasn’t the plot that made me like it so much, although I found the plot perfectly satisfactory. It was the dynamic between the main characters that held my interest. There’s Clare Fergusson, the Episcopal priest who gets drawn into the mystery when she finds an abandoned baby on the church steps, and there’s Russ Van Alstyne, the police chief in charge of the investigation. It’s probably a little unrealistic the way Clare kept accompanying Russ on his police work — would she really have been able to do that? — but the dynamic between the two of them is so interesting that I was willing to overlook this.

I also liked the setting, which is in upstate New York, near the Adirondack mountains. It’s pretty far from my home town in western New York State, but the territory is still somewhat familiar, especially the small town culture and the dark, snowy winters. I thought as I read about when the best time to read a book with a title like In the Bleak Midwinter is. Do you really want to read about bleak midwinters in the summer? Or while you’re in the middle of winter? Or in the fall when you dread winter’s arrival, or the spring when you can’t wait for it to warm up? IS there a good time? But that comes from someone who is no fan of winter, and I know some people feel differently. And I liked the book enough to be willing to read it no matter the season.

I did wish Spencer-Fleming had given more information on Clare’s religious faith; I wanted to know how she went from being in the military to being a priest (there is an explanation hinted at in the story of a family tragedy, but it’s not developed) and what her faith means to her now. But perhaps these things are developed in later books.

My weekend with my parents was very good; western New York can be miserable in the bleak midwinter, but it’s beautiful in the summer with temperatures that are more moderate than home and rolling green fields and orchards. I was able to ride my bike along Lake Ontario twice, which was great, and I went book shopping twice with my dad, which was also great. We found two used bookstores that we hadn’t visited before, and discovered a couple more that we didn’t make it to this time but can explore later. In addition to the next Spencer-Fleming novel, I bought a copy of Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Sadly, I probably won’t get to the book this summer to participate in Litlove’s reading of it, but at least I now have it on hand. And I also got Pierre Bayard’s book Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles. I love the title and premise of the book — can he really be right about Holmes? — but I’ll have to read The Hound of the Baskervilles before I pick this one up. That will be something to look forward to.

I also brought home my mom’s copy of Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture. It happens to be the copy I gave her for Christmas last year. But no, I did not buy her the book in hopes she would let me borrow it later. Not really. At least not consciously…. I’ve been flying my way through the Little House series and have made it through three books and am in the middle of the fourth. They read very, very fast, and it’s been great fun to remember all the details and rediscover their charm. But more on that later.

I very much enjoyed Wendy McClure’s book The Wilder Life, which tells the story of McClure’s return to her childhood obsession with the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the Little House on the Prairie series. I have no idea what someone who wasn’t obsessed with the series would think of the book, but I was obsessed as a child, and so her story sounded very familiar to me. I read and reread all the books, imagining what it would have been like to be Laura and live in her time and also what it would be like to introduce Laura to late twentieth-century life. I don’t remember when I started reading these books and when I stopped (I haven’t reread them as an adult), but I know I reread them over the course of many years. I watched the television series too, but it was always clear to me that it was only very loosely based on the novels. There was no danger I was going to get them mixed up, as many people do.

My experiences were similar to McClure’s — she read and reread the books and thought of Laura as a friend. Now, as an adult, she comes across her childhood copies of the novels and becomes fascinated by them all over again. The fascination quickly turns to obsession as she decides she wants to try some of the things described in the novels, such as churning butter, folding hay into sticks to burn, and making candy out of molasses and snow. She also decides she wants to visit the Ingalls and Wilder homesteads, which, since she lives in Chicago, isn’t too, too hard to do.

So she sets forth on numerous trips to Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and South Dakota. She even makes it to the town in upstate New York where Almanzo, Laura’s husband, grew up. In between all these trips, she researches Laura’s life and the culture that’s grown up around the books, and she contemplates what her personal and the larger cultural obsession with Little House on the Prairie means.

So the book is part travel narrative, part biography, part memoir, part cultural criticism, and probably some other things as well. I was fascinated to read about the ways that the novels do not reflect what actually happened in Laura’s life; for example, Laura was too young to remember the events in Kansas in Little House on the Prairie, so that book was fictionalized and based on family anecdotes. The stories from Little House in the Big Woods took place after the ones in Little House on the Prairie, after the family had retreated from Kansas back to Wisconsin, even though it’s first in the series. And there are other shifts and omissions that are surprising for someone who took the novels as faithful to real life. McClure is good at discussing the significance of all this.

She is also very good at describing what the home sites are like. She times a couple of her visits to see Laura Ingalls Wilder pageants and festivals, which involve look-alike contests and stagings of the family story. She is decidedly spooked by fundamentalist, survivalist, end-times people who have latched onto Laura’s story and to pioneer ideals generally as a way to deal with the coming apocalypse. She also meets many people whose religious views aren’t quite so extreme, but who admire the Ingalls family for the simple, self-sufficient, godly life they led. Which I think is hogwash. Not that their lives weren’t simple and self-sufficient, and even godly, but this admiration comes from nostalgia for a simplicity that never really existed and rests on a misunderstanding of what the Ingalls’s lives were really like. I suspect at least some of the Ingalls family wouldn’t have minded trading some simplicity of living for greater comfort and security, or at least that’s true for Ma Ingalls.

McClure has an informal, breezy style, and I’m not really a fan of informal, breezy writing, but her voice never gets irritating or over-the-top cute, and she pulls it off pretty well. She comes across as warm and interesting, and a great guide to what she thinks of as “Laura World.” I was certainly very happy to return to the world of the books in her company.

Jo Walton’s novel Among Others was a lot of fun. I also felt it had a number of kind of obvious flaws, but, still, it was absorbing and enjoyable. It has a fabulous book club in it and a teenage girl who is obsessed with books, and it also has magic and fairies, and it takes place partly in Wales. Those are all very good things.

Morwenna, otherwise known as Mori, is the protagonist, a teenage girl who just lost her twin sister in a car accident. Mori herself suffered a hip injury that has left her with a limp and in need of a cane. It was more than just a car accident, though, as it happened when the twin sisters were battling their mother for reasons that are mysterious through much of the book but involve magic used for evil purposes. Mori has run away from her home in Wales to escape her mother and has found refuge with her father in England, whom she has never really known. Her father lives with his sisters who decide Mori should be packed off to boarding school as soon as possible. So she goes, and is (not surprisingly at all) miserable there. She not only has a limp and can’t participate in sports with the other sports-obsessed girls, but she is Welsh and doesn’t come from money.

Her only consolation is that she gets to spend the hours normally devoted to athletics reading in the library. She is an avid science fiction and fantasy reader, and this forms the one connection she has with her father, who has the same reading tastes and sends her books frequently. She also discovers the joy of interlibrary loan, and keeps both the school and the town librarians busy recommending and ordering books. The best moment, though, is when she finds out about the science fiction book group run through the town library. Here she finds her community: a group of people equally obsessed with books as she is.

But there is another sense in which she is an outsider: she sees fairies and knows how to do magic. The fairies were in much greater abundance in Wales, but she finds them in England as well and tries, with mixed success, to communicate with them. She also, with equally mixed success, explores her ability to do magic. In desperation one day, she casts a spell in order to find some friends to help her cope with her loneliness and unhappiness. This leads to a lot of uncertainty, though, because when she finds those friends in the form of the book group, she’s not sure if they are genuine or there just because of the spell she cast. Magic, she knows, is complicated and dangerous, with unknown consequences. Not least, of course, when used with malicious intent by one’s own mother.

All this is a lot of fun. The flaws I mentioned earlier have to do with the meandering pace of the plot, in part; while I enjoyed reading about all the book group meetings, the details of how she gets there, how she gets home, how she gets to the bookstore, how she gets home, etc. take up an awful lot of space. There is a lot of action at the novel’s end, but it’s all bunched up in a way that feels rushed and unsatisfying. And then there’s Mori’s love interest, Wim, whom I was not terribly fond of. I found their relationship unconvincing.

That said, this is still a book I read quickly and contentedly. I haven’t read much science fiction in my life, and Walton made me want to read more. That’s a pretty good recommendation for a book, I think.

To give you a sense of what Lars Iyer’s novel Spurious is like, here is the opening paragraph:

I’m a terrible influence on W., everyone says that. Why does he hang out with me? What’s in it for him? The great and the good are shaking their heads. Sometimes W. goes back to the high table and explains himself. I am something to explain, W. says. He has to account for me to everyone. Why is that?

Even though the novel opens with a statement of what “everyone says,” it’s quickly obvious that this is really what W. alone says and that it’s W. speaking from the start. The novel is a story of a friendship of sorts between W. and the narrator, Lars, a very odd friendship where W. insults the narrator but seems to like hanging around him anyway, and the narrator simply reports the insults and doesn’t seem to mind them. Insulting the narrator seems to be mostly a way to fill the time, something to do when life isn’t very interesting.

The entire novel (which, I have to say, is about right at 175 pages — any longer and it would get dull) continues on much like the opening paragraph: the narrator describes his not-very-exciting doings but mostly reports what W. says to him. They are philosophy professors in England, and they travel around together to conferences when they can and struggle along with their work when they can’t. They are desperately searching for an idea to make their names as thinkers, but it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen. W. is forever reading a book he can’t understand and the narrator spends too much of his time on administrative work. As nasty as W. can be to the narrator, he’s equally hard on himself:

‘When did you know you were a failure?’ W. repeatedly asks me. ‘When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own — not one?’

He asks me these questions, W. says, because he’s constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He’s not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.

The narrator moves seamlessly back and forth between quoting W. and taking on W.’s voice to report what he says (as in the first paragraph above), and pretty soon it comes to seem like they are actually the same person. It takes a while to catch on to what the pronouns mean, but soon enough you get it straightened out, and then it’s like living in both the characters’ minds at once.

Which is kind of a scary thing. They are obsessed with apocalypse, convinced the world is falling apart around them. They also talk a lot about messianism, their crazy hope that something will save them, although this seems highly unlikely. Much more concrete and believable is the apocalypse that is coming soon to the narrator’s apartment: it has the worst infestation of damp and mold you can imagine, and it gets worse as the book progresses. The narrator has carpenters and plumbers and everyone he can think of come and try to figure out the source of the damp, but they can’t. So he lives with crumbling plaster and mold spores and tries not to get too sick from it. All the attempts to work, the conferences, the trips and conversations with W. are a distraction from the mold, a symbol, of course, of everything going wrong with the world.

This is a strange book, but it’s fun: the conversations are entertaining, even as they are kind of sad. It reminds me of a Beckett play where two warped characters have warped conversations in order to distract themselves from their painful lives. And what’s not to like about that?

Spurious began as a blog, which Iyer adapted into the novel. I haven’t read many of the blog posts, so I’m not sure about the differences between the blog and the novel, but I like the idea of using a blog to develop ideas to turn into a book. The blog says there’s another novel coming out in 2012, Dogma, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.

So, what is Our Tragic Universe about? (By the way, I first wrote about this book here.) It tells the story of Meg, a thirty-something writer living in a small English town in Devonshire. She makes a living, or sort of makes a living, writing reviews and formulaic young adult science fiction novels. Based on some early successes, she got an advance a long time ago to write a literary novel, but she hasn’t been able to produce it. She writes and then she deletes, writes and deletes, and gets nowhere. Her boyfriend is looking for a job, although he is extremely picky and not actually looking all that hard. He is so wrapped up in his unhappiness that he has no time to think much about Meg and hers. They live in a damp cottage that makes it difficult for Meg to breathe, but her boyfriend never notices.

What gets the action going is Meg accidentally reviewing the wrong book; it’s a silly mix-up, but it leads in interesting directions: the wrong book turns out to be the kooky science (or “science”)  book I mentioned in my last post, which leads Meg, once she submits her review of the wrong book, to an assignment reviewing a whole bunch of kooky science, health, and self-help books, which gives her interesting fodder for a whole series of conversations with friends. And that accounts for much of what takes place in the book: there are a lot of scenes where people are sitting around having interesting conversations about all sorts of things: end-of-the-world theories, how placebos work, local legends of dangerous but elusive monsters, how to write novels, how and whether to get out of bad relationships, and the relationship of stories to real life. There’s action in the book, too, but it’s pretty desultory and not really the point.

The best part for me, and the aspect of the book that most made me like it (in addition to liking Meg very much), was the conversations about stories and the debates about genre vs. literary fiction, debates that are so serious they almost cost Meg a friendship. Meg’s friend Vi is an anthropologist who has been developing a theory of the “storyless story,” a narrative that resists the typical form of stories: a beginning, middle, and end that add up to some kind of coherent meaning. Storyless stories don’t add up to anything; they might possibly just wander on, going no place in particular, or they might have an ending that seems to come out of nowhere. Zen stories are examples of storyless stories, as Vi explains; they are:

… are constructed to help you break away from drama, and hope and desire. Some of them are funny. All of them are unpredictable. They’re not tragedies, comedies or epics. they’re not even Modernist anti-hero stories, or experimental narratives or metafiction. I lost count of the times someone would say, “I’ll tell you a story,” and then recite something like an absurdist poem with no conflict and no resolution. One of these “stories” was about a Zen monk who, on the day he was going to die, sent postcards saying, “I am departing from this world. This is my last announcement.” Then he died.

Meg feels ambivalently about Vi’s theory, since it threatens the work she does, writing those young adult sci-fi books:

I didn’t pay too much attention to this stuff any longer, considering that my entire existence now depended on me being able to take a good but unhappy character from bad fortune to good fortune in a credible way, and give them a bottle of oil — if that was what they wanted — as a prize at the end. I wanted to make my ‘real’ novel less formulaic and more literary, of course, but if I listened to Vi’s theories, then my only narrative strategy would be ‘shit happens’.

In a way, this forms the fundamental tension of the novel: how will Meg reconcile her success at genre fiction with her desire to write something “less formulaic”? What is at stake when pursuing one form of writing versus the other? What would it be like to have as one’s only narrative strategy, “shit happens”? When Meg and Vi get into a dispute over the value of Meg’s writing, it’s not just an argument; it’s an attack on Meg’s livelihood. She teaches classes in writing genre fiction, after all, covering the “rules” for good narrative arcs and the most fundamental types of plots: the hero overcoming an obstacle, the quest narrative, etc. It takes her much of the book to work through exactly what she thinks of Vi’s ideas about narrative, and this isn’t just a cerebral exercise because her thinking about narrative involves thinking about the relationship between stories and life, her life specifically, and the difficult choices she needs to make.

I still think this is a deeply flawed book — too much going on in it, too much awkwardness as I wrote about last time — but it turned out to be a very enjoyable flawed book, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to read more of her work.

I don’t know what to make of Scarlett Thomas’s writing. I liked, but also felt ambivalent about, but at the same time have fond memories of, her novel PopCo. Our Tragic Universe is evoking much the same response, although I had more doubts as I was reading it than I had while reading her earlier book. I often found myself shaking my head over the awkwardness of the writing and the structure, and I seriously considered putting the book down at around page 50. I’m glad I kept reading (this is why I hesitate to put books down — because I do sometimes change my mind!), but I have to conclude that either Thomas is an awful stylist or she doesn’t care about style and is going for something else. I think the latter is true, but the awkward moments do get painful.

For the first 100 pages or so I got annoyed at the way she would move into lengthy passages of back story without giving you enough of a reason to think the back story matters. I found myself wanting to skim these sections. I don’t know how writers do it, exactly, but somehow it seems that if you want to leave the main narrative to move back in time or to tell someone else’s story or explain something or whatever, you need to make the reader see why it’s important and make the reader willing to go there. Instead I thought, okay, when are we getting back to the main story?! I’m bored, and I don’t get what’s going on here! Starting on page five, which is actually the third page of the book, we get a two-page description of a bizarre science book the main character is reading, and it’s unclear why that description is there. It turns out that the book is important to Thomas’s story, but there’s no way to know that at the time, and when I read it, I had no idea why some kooky author’s bizarre theories about the end of the world mattered to the plot. I know getting information across to the reader in a natural, graceful way is difficult, but surely an established literary novelist could do better than this?

And yet I did end up enjoying the book. I became fond of the main character, and I loved the long conversations the characters have where they talk about crazy scientific ideas or the end of the world or how stories work. I love the fact that the main character is a writer who is struggling to figure out how to make the switch from writing genre fiction, which she can do easily, to writing literary fiction, at which she is stalled. She spends a lot of time thinking about differences between the two and why those differences matter and those ideas are great.

But, my god, the dialogue is so awkward! The characters lecture to each other, going on for pages sometimes in a completely unrealistic way. And I was unsure of Thomas’s use of first person. The main character, Meg, tells the story, and is self-aware to a certain extent, or at least her voice is calm and thoughtful, but the boyfriend with whom she is living is clearly depressed and his behavior toward her is emotionally abusive. I found it frustrating and hard to believe that she hadn’t left him a long time ago. She is depressed herself, but I couldn’t quite reconcile her actions with the intelligence and insight of her voice.

I’ve spent most of this post telling you the problems I saw with the book, but the truth is that it won me over, and once it did, I became interested in the question of why I liked it when it’s obviously so flawed. I guess I’m intrigued by the idea that Thomas isn’t interested in trying to follow what we might think of as the rules of good fiction (realistic dialogue, coherent structure, convincing characters). She’s most interested in the ideas the book explores, and since the book explores the question of what fiction is and what its effects are, it’s fitting that she gets a little experimental.

I’ve hardly told you what the book is about, I see. Perhaps I’ll do that in another post.

Cakes and Ale is the fourth Somerset Maugham novel I’ve read, and with each book I keep changing my opinion of him. I really liked Of Human Bondage, which was my first book, and then I listened to The Painted Veil, which I loved. So far so good; I thought at this point that I should eventually read everything he wrote. Then I got to The Razor’s Edge, which I didn’t like at all. It felt dull and ponderous. I like idea-driven novels, but in that one, I didn’t care about the ideas and didn’t like how they were presented. With Cakes and Ale, I’m beginning to think Maugham may not be quite as good as I thought. There were interesting aspects of the novel and enjoyable moments — particularly the discussions of authors and writing — but I was hoping to love it and I didn’t.

The novel tells the story of the Driffields — Edward Driffield, a famous author, and two Mrs. Driffields, his first wife, Rosie, and his second, Amy. (My edition has a preface by Maugham that says Edward Driffield is most emphatically not Thomas Hardy, in spite of what anybody says, which meant that I spent the entire novel thinking of him as Thomas Hardy, of course.) It’s narrated by William Ashenden, a writer himself who knew Edward and Rosie at various points in his life. There’s another writer involved as well, Alroy Kear, who is planning on writing a biography of Edward, who in the present tense of the novel has passed away. Alroy approaches the narrator in an effort to gather information about Edward’s life, which sends him off on long reminiscences of his time with the Driffields.

The difference between what the narrator remembers about the Driffields, what he chooses to tell Alroy, and what Alroy will actually put in the biography is the novel’s source of tension. The Driffields — Edward and Rosie — were…not quite proper. The narrator first meets the couple when they move into Blackstable, his hometown. Edward’s father was a bailiff and Rosie had worked as a bar maid, which was a big part of the problem, but they also never quite followed the rules as they were supposed to, and everyone knew it. Eventually Edward’s fame as a writer comes to make up for his social deficiencies, but Rosie was always a bit of a scandal.

The novel is really Rosie’s story in many ways, in part because of the narrator’s fascination with her and her bohemian ways that stayed with him all his life. But there’s also the problem of what to do about the troublesome, sexually-suspect first wife after she is gone and the second wife is trying to establish her husband’s reputation as a respectable, important writer. How should that first wife be portrayed in the biography, and what to do about episodes such as the time the Driffields skipped town with debts and servants left unpaid? And what about Rosie’s sexual history?

It’s all a question of class, of course, about how Alroy and Amy Driffield try to transform Edward from his working-class roots into a solid bourgeois, respectable writer and how the narrator questions and resists them. It’s also about writers and writing. Alroy Kear is the object of much scorn from the narrator; not only is he going to whitewash Edward’s past in what is sure to be a bland biography, but his writing, at least according to the narrator, sounds blandly boring as well:

I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle is an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word … he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle.

There is no room in Alroy Kear’s world for the exoticism that someone like Rosie Driffield can offer, and so the narrator scorns him.

I was disappointed in part by Rosie as a character; the back cover of my edition promises that she is Maugham’s “greatest heroine,” but she never quite came to life for me. It was the moment when the narrator tells us what she wasn’t a big talker that did it: I had pictured her as vivacious and voluble, and when I tried to picture her being quiet, I couldn’t do it. Then I began to doubt that I had really understood her at all. I’m also not entirely sure I like the narrator. There are times his mildly ironic tone is amusing and I can’t help but agree with his dismissal of Alroy Kear, but there’s something off-putting about the voice, something distancing. I suppose the mildly ironic tone gets a little wearying after a while. I don’t think that we are meant to read the narrator uncritically; as a writer himself, he is not exactly a disinterested observer of the fates of Driffield and Kear, and his detached, judgmental attitude toward his subjects seems self-serving. But critiquing the narrator in this way wasn’t enough to make the book a satisfying read.

I read this book for the Slaves of Golconda and am jumping over to join the discussion right now. Please feel free to join in!

My mystery book group met this past weekend to discuss Josephine Tey’s mystery The Daughter of Time. In a way, I’d like to write simply that while it’s not a historical novel, it’s all about Richard III, that you have to be prepared for some serious history, and that it’s really good and I liked it a lot, and leave it at that. Because that it wasn’t historical fiction but was all about Richard III is all I knew about it when I picked the book up, and I’m glad I didn’t know more. So if you’re interested in reading this book, you might stop here.

I was glad not to know more because I was delighted to discover the structure of the novel: the fact that it takes place solely in a hospital room and that nothing happens action-wise except people coming and going, bringing books and having conversations about them. What an unusual structure for a mystery novel, and how cleverly done! I love that the mystery is entirely historical, about the question of whether Richard killed the two princes in the Tower and if he didn’t, then who did. (As a side note, I was in the Tower just a few weeks ago, and now I wish I’d read this book beforehand. They had an exhibit about the question of Richard’s guilt, and you could vote on who you think the murderer was. Alas, I can’t remember who the other options were.) I love that the mystery is solved solely through historical research and logical deduction. Although there’s a lot of intuition involved as well, as the whole mystery gets going when Tey’s detective, Grant, decides that Richard does not look like a murderer. He has this feeling, based on his years working with criminals, that Richard isn’t one.

I also loved how the mystery branches out from the question of who killed those princes to questions of history and history writing. As much as the characters research historical events, they also think a lot about how we learn history, what we remember and don’t remember from our history classes in school, the various ways history gets written, and why historical untruths get perpetuated. Tey is great at covering a whole lot of ground answering these questions without making it seem formulaic or contrived. Grant and his fellow researcher, Carradine, get a hold of history textbooks, historical fiction, scholarly tomes, and contemporary accounts and documents, and they survey various types of people on what they remember and what they believe about history, all without awkwardness in the narrative. And it turns out that history is shockingly unreliable. People believe things they’ve heard from authorities they no longer remember, and often those “authorities” turn out to be biased or lazy researchers or too busy looking at the larger picture to get the details right. And once people believe a certain thing, they resent finding out otherwise. Rather than accepting correction and being grateful for the truth, they get angry at the person bringing the news.

The book’s epigraph is “Truth is the daughter of time.” Wikipedia just told me that the full sentence is “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority,” from Francis Bacon. That explains the title — the idea that time will eventually lead to truth and will win out over so-called authorities — but I wonder how much the book really backs up that idea. Grant and Carradine are on a quest for truth, and at least within the frame of the book they find it, and yet theirs seems a lonely crusade in a world that seems determined to cling to falsehood. Carradine has decided by the end to write a book against “tonypandy,” their term for received versions of events that turn out to be false, but who can really win against common opinion that’s been passed down for generations? I’m not quite sure if this book is undermining the idea that time will bring us closer to truth, or, more simply, celebrating Grant and Carradine as savvier, smarter seekers of truth than most other people. What it certainly does do is celebrate the joy of research and discovery. Rarely in a novel is scholarly research shown in such detail and made to seem so much fun.

Grant is very suspicious of the way history gets written as narrative. He wants facts, concrete bits of information gleaned from primary sources, not the stories woven around those facts — or woven around no facts at all, which is often the case. But we can’t do without narrative — without turning history into a story. All Grant is doing is creating a counter-narrative to the one historians and textbooks have been telling all along. And that is what Tey is doing as well, of course, making the argument that by delving into facts and turning those facts into a narrative, the detective and the novelist — neither of whom are “authorities” — can reveal something true. Whether we believe it or not is another matter.

The opinions in my book group were generally positive, although not everyone liked Grant’s rather arrogant manner. The question arose of whether this book works well the second time around, and I’m wondering as well if I would like it as much if I were to read it again. Once you understand the premise and the trajectory of the book, it might not be as much fun to wade through all the historical details, which do take quite a lot of wading through. Anybody out there who has read this multiple times have opinions?

This is the second Tey mystery I’ve read, and both have done such interesting things with the genre that I’d like to read more. This one has practically no action directly described, and Miss Pym Disposes only turns into a mystery in the last 1/4 of the book and is as interested in psychology as an academic discipline as The Daughter of Time is interested in history. I’m looking forward to seeing what other unusual things Tey has done with the mystery genre.

I read this book (courtesy of NetGalleys) while in London and on the way home, so it was a while ago now, and it’s high time I say something about it. It tells the story of a couple, Sabine and George Harwood, who move from England to Trinidad in order to advance George’s career. They don’t know it at the time, but they are on the last ship to bring British colonials into the country (Sabine is French, but has married an Englishman). Shortly after they arrive, change begins to happen: Trinidad eventually gains its independence under their charismatic although ultimately disappointing leader, Eric Williams, and the white colonists will lose their status and power.

The novel has an interesting structure: for the first third or so, it takes place in 2006 and portrays an elderly George and Sabine, describing how their marriage has evolved, how their children have turned out, and what their lives have become. After this section, we move back in time to read about their arrival in Trinidad in 1956, and we follow them in later sections through the 1960s and 70s. This backwards structure works well to show how George and Sabine end up where they do: we see the results of their lives in Trinidad first, and then we look back to the causes. So we read about their unhappiness — their overwhelming feeling of listlessness and pointlessness, their estrangement from their children, their isolation, their sense that it could have been completely different — and then we turn to their younger selves and read about the series of decisions that led to their remaining in Trinidad even when nearly all other British families left. They never intended to stay longer than a couple years, or at least that’s what Sabine believed. She was always eager to go, but George fell in love with the place and resisted a move. Eventually, they become part of the island and could no longer fit in back in England if they were to return.

The novel tells the story of their marriage, and also of the political and social changes happening in Trinidad, and the two stories come together in the figure of Eric Williams, the first Prime Minister. In the 2006 section, George finds a collection of letters Sabine has written to Williams — tons of letters, describing her life, her marriage, and her feelings about Williams’s administration. These letters bewilder George — why did she write him so much? Did she know him? It turns out that she met him a few times and they had a couple conversations, but mostly the relationship was carried on in her head. Writing the letters was her way of making sense of the changes happening in her life and in the country, and also of getting a little bit of revenge on George, who was unfaithful to her. Williams is one of the book’s main symbols: a symbol of hope at first, of possibility, and then of disappointment and disillusionment. He becomes a way for Sabine to focus and express her hopes and then her anger.

The other main symbol is the green bicycle of the title: the bicycle Sabine used to ride to explore the city and meet her husband after his day’s work. This was a highly unconventional thing to do, although Sabine didn’t know this at first; she thought she was just enjoying herself and being free-spirited, when she was getting a reputation that stuck with her for being different from all the other British women. As Sabine loses her youthful energy and happiness, the bicycle appears less and less until it is abandoned.

Roffey does a very good capturing the complexity of the situation and telling the two stories — the personal one and the political one — so that while they are connected, they are not conflated or collapsed into each other. The Harwood marriage is powerfully affected by the political context, but it’s not simply a way of making a political point, and the political context takes on a life on its own and is not merely a device with which to tell the story of a marriage. And Roffey also describes the landscape of Trinidad beautifully. In fact, both George and Sabine personify that landscape and talk to it so that it becomes a kind of character in its own right.

Roffey does so much well here, and I enjoyed the book, but I didn’t have that feeling of excitement about it that I always hope for. I didn’t fall in love with it, and it’s hard to pinpoint why. I think I’m feeling some boredom with contemporary fiction — not all of it, but with more straightforwardly realistic contemporary novels. I suppose that while Roffey’s use of language is accomplished, it didn’t bowl me over in the way I want. But there is much to praise in this book, still, and it kept me good company while I was traveling.