Sacré Bleu, Christopher Moore

I pulled Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d'Art off the shelf at the bookstore because it has an Eiffel Tower on the spine, and I have a rather well-known weakness for the Eiffel Tower. Opening the cover revealed a "Nouveau Plan de Paris Monumental" circa 1900, further suggesting that this was a book I would enjoy - despite the theme running through the previous reviews here, I've been a francophile much longer than I've been an anglophile. The synopsis reads:

In July 1890, Vincent van Gogh went into a cornfield and shot himself. Or did he? Why would an artist at the height of his creative powers attempt to take his won life...and then walk a mile to a doctor's house for help? Who was the crooked little "color man" Vincent had claimed was stalking him across France? And why had the painter recently become deathly afraid of a certain shade of blue?

These are just a few of the questions confronting Vincent's friends - baker-turned-painter Lucien Lessard and bon vivant Henri Toulouse-Lautrec - who vow to discover the truth about van Gogh's untimely death. Their quest will lead them on a surreal odyssey and brothel-crawl deep in to the art world of late nineteenth century Paris.

Oh là là, quelle surprise, and zut alors! A delectable confection of intrigue, passion, and art history - with cancan girls, baguettes, and fine French cognac thrown in for good measure - Sacré Bleu is another masterpiece of wit and wonder from the one, the only, Christopher Moore. 

 Sacré Bleu is decidedly different than the books towards which I normally gravitate, but I was on vacation and in the mood for something lighter than Bring Up the Bodies, but with slightly more substance than Wodehouse, which were the only two options I'd brought with me.  It had the immediate appeal of a fin-de-siecle Parisian setting, with the added amusement of characters with whom I was already familiar. While I've always loved the Impressionists, I spent quite a bit of time in the Post-Impressionism galleries at the Musée d'Orsay featuring van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec when I was there a few months ago and their famed Impressionist gallery was, of all the injustices, closed for a press event.

Sacré Bleu didn't disappoint - it even made me laugh out loud on occasion. It takes a base of factual art history and artist personalities and imagines some highly entertaining characters. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in particular lives up to his bon vivant billing, and it was amusing to have my beloved Impressionists pop up from time to time. The mystery aspect is engaging, and Moore keeps a very good pace with it, bringing in bits of the past with a deft strategic hand. There are full color reproductions of key paintings included throughout as characters discuss them - a nice touch to prevent alienating readers who haven't studied art history or been lucky enough to see them in their current museum homes. I appreciated that these were included in-text as opposed to in a center insert, keeping them seamlessly integrated with the narrative. Amusingly, the text itself is printed in a dark blue. While certainly gimmicky, it's close enough to black to cause a double-take, but not so blue to be distracting - after the initial realization, it easily fades from consciousness.

The book opens with a bit of discussion about what color is and how it is perceived - I would have liked more of this throughout, as it is something that has always fascinated me. Moore provides a short bibliography of the books he used as research, and I may seek one out for just this purpose.  He touches a bit on the Catholic Church's 13th-century move to assign "sacred blue" as the color for Mary's cloak, but does not give much of an explanation for why this was done. However, a quick google search doesn't provide much clarity either, so my guess is that they were going for artistic consistency and since high quality blue was so expensive it was easy to get artists and patrons on board. And that, really, is not a particularly romantic story.

So while he does not provide all that much in the way of color theory, Moore has written a very entertaining and engaging romp through the art world, and given it just the right intellectual depth by tying it down with some real art history.

Going Solo, Roald Dahl

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the first book I remember thinking of as my favorite. My aunt gave it to me when I was in first grade, and my mom read it to me that year while I had the chicken pox. I had to take those awful oatmeal baths, and she would read to me while I was in the tub to keep me distracted.

For the next few years I devoured all the Dahl I could get my hands on, and his particular blend of quirk and whimsy with just a touch of creepiness was the defining literature of those years of my life. Matilda was my very favorite - I desperately wanted to be able to move things with my mind, and I'd be lying if I said I'd never tried. But the stories in Boy, stories from his own childhood, stayed with me in a different way. These were stories that were true, but not without their own kind of magic. I don't know how I missed Going Solo, his subsequent collection of stories from his young adulthood.

Starting with his first real job in Africa and continuing through his experiences as a RAF pilot, Going Solo is unmistakably Dahlian. It has the same knack for capturing the bizarre that the childhood stories do, the same sort of mischievous glimmer. But there's a maturity to these stories, and especially once Dahl enters the RAF there is a very real sense of danger. It's the Dahl I remember so fondly, but grown up just enough.

I'm glad I missed this when I was younger - I think I appreciated it more deeply reading it when I did, six months or so into my first real job. Far from home, if not as far from Dahl is in these stories, the sense of trying to find a place in the unknown resonated. It was a quick, easy read - it is, technically, a children's book - with just enough familiar to feel comforting, and just enough new to stay interesting.

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

I have long been fascinated by the Tudors. I've always loved history, and the further back you go the fewer famous women are to be found, but Elizabeth I stands out regardless. She is captivating for many reasons, but the England that came before her was perhaps even more rife with intrigue than the one she inherited. Though I've read much about Elizabeth and Mary Tudor, and all of Shakespeare's Henry plays, I had not read much about the Tudor Henries. Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, proved an excellent place to start. The synopsis reads:

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph? In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is "a darkly brilliant reimagining of life under Henry VIII.... Magnificent" (The Boston Globe).

It is impossible to read Wolf Hall without knowing that it's all doomed: the reader knows that Henry will marry Anne Boleyn; knows that she and Cromwell will ultimately meet the same fate, both beheaded on Henry's orders. But before these defeats there will be glittering triumphs as they indelibly shape the England, and indeed the world, that we know today. Hilary Mantel takes this England on a precipice and gives us a book that feels marvelously modern in its tensions and its machinations.  The details may be historical, but the emotions and concerns are timeless - this is not primarily an historical novel, it is primarily an interesting one. 

Her Thomas Cromwell is, quite unlike the Major of Troubles, wonderfully intriguing. He has come from nothing, risen to a position of tenuous power as he navigates an England in which his sponsor's place is rapidly declining, and tries to come through unscathed. His past is murky, and comes to the reader in bits and pieces. He has been abroad, has been a hired soldier, has learned several businesses and a score of languages; he knows when to be polished but hasn't quite lost the rough edges, though he seems to know how to use them to his advantage. He is good with people and kind with many, gathering about him a warm, haphazard household. But he is not a man to be taken lightly and not incapable of danger. Here is a profoundly round character with depths both seen and unseen, a man constantly surrounded by others but deeply alone.

In addition to a compelling story and a deeply fascinating protagonist, Mantel has written an incredibly well-styled novel. Her skill is certainly deserving of the Man Booker Prize she received for the book in 2009; her sentences are rich and complex, the kind of writing you can fall into with relish.
Half her dialogue lies outside quotation marks in the narration, along with her Cromwell's inner thoughts, the frequent use of free indirect style telling us so much more about this Cromwell than any history book. When he sees his wife's body after her sudden death:

The room - which this morning was only their bedroom - is lively with the scent of the herbs they are burning against contagion. They have lit candles at her head and feet. They have bound up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself. She looks like the dead; she looks fearless, and as if she could judge you; she looks flatter and deader than people he has seen on battlefields, with their guts spilled.

The layers in the aside alone are enough to make you catch: it was only this morning the room was fine; it was only a bedroom but now it is forever something else. This room, where his wife has died and he has come to see her body, is lively with bright smells, with lit candles. But there she lies, flatter and deader of her sudden illness than the soldiers he has seen fallen in battle, than the soldier he has presumably cut down himself in his time as a mercenary.  Mantel's is the kind of writing that is delicious to read, the kind of writing that draws you in and will not let you go.

Wolf Hall, and Mantel's Cromwell, have a distinctive voice, and her exploration of the motives and intrigues at play are masterful - for all that they would change the face of history, the novel is fundamentally personal. We see the world only as Cromwell does, and so it is his concerns that we are privy to; the book revolves tightly around him even as Cromwell's world revolves tightly around Henry's whims. The world of the book is simultaneously domestic and expansive, private and public, and it is a pleasure to watch it unfold and puzzle out some of Cromwell's character as it goes.

This was a book that I was loathe to put down and loathe to finish, wanting there to be more of this world and this writing. Luckily, there is a sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, published last month, and even more luckily a third to come and finish out the trilogy. Though an interest in the history led me to the book, I think it would be trivial to the enjoyment of it. This was a wonderful, fascinating read, and I heartily recommend it.

Troubles, J.G. Farrell.

Nicholas, I hated this book.

To back up a step: Nick, a good friend of mine, is currently in pursuit of a Ph.D in English. That is to say, he reads a lot of novels. So you would think that I could trust him when it comes to recommendations. Normally, however, I simply ignore his suggestions; we generally have very different taste in literature. We share, though, a love of grand British country houses of the interwar period, with a particular interest in those that are somehow slightly decaying. There are few better backgrounds for a novel than the dying throes of a fading class, when the reader knows that the power is slowly slipping from those privileged hands and destruction looms just around the corner. Thus he spent several years recommending J.G. Farrell's Troubles. The back of the book reads:

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles.

This, then, had all the makings of a hit. The setting seemed perfect - here we have a country house that is actually crumbling, history approaching at an even more rapid clip than usual. Promisingly, it is the start of a trilogy on the dissolution of the British empire, so it even offered follow-up reading. The recommendation was not acted upon for several years mainly because of the difficulty in acquiring the book - I finally found a copy at a used book store in Toronto. So by the time I started reading, I had some very high hopes.

Alas.

I don't ask for protagonists or even supporting characters to be likeable. It's nice when they are, certainly, but more than that I want them to be interesting. The characters in Troubles, especially the protagonist, all felt flat. They rarely felt like real human beings, but instead skittered through the pages, acting in strange ways for inexplicable reasons.

The Major, as the narration constantly refers to him, is dull. The habit of referring to him by his military title has an odd dehumanizing effect, making it feel as though he thinks of himself as some cardboard version of a soldier rather than an actual individual man. In addition to seeming oddly formal, the rank hardly seems to fit. To reach the status of Major, even in a time of crisis, presumably one must either come from money and privilege or demonstrate some leadership capability. Decamped as he is to Ireland, at a hotel where he is a personal guest and not a paying one, it seems unlikely that this Major gained his commission by virtue of his birth. But if he was a man of action before or during his time in the military, he's certainly not one anymore.

Little is said of his wartime experiences, but with enough prior knowledge of the era it isn't too difficult to imagine that he spent most of it waiting in the trenches, not doing much of anything but worrying. There is an unspoken element of shell-shock to him, and a certain feeling of being quite lost in the world, both of which make sense given the circumstances. But he has very little in the way of an interior life, almost nothing in the way of forward movement. His primary emotions are boredom, frustration, and obsession. For most of the book, I got to share in those first two. He is oddly committed to riding out his Irish adventure, if one could call it that, until he is absolutely forced to leave. He makes as few decisions and takes as little action as possible, but he is no Hamlet; there is no soliloquizing here.

The "beautiful and bitter" Sarah Devlin feels like a caricature. She runs hot and cold, but mostly cruel. It is impossible to see anything but misguided lust in the Major's obsession with her.  Her cruelty seems to be her main source of entertainment, without much in the way of deeper reason.

She also has the infuriating habit of talking in parentheses. I have no objection to parentheses as a rule, and believe that they have a legitimate and useful place in written communication. That place, however, is not in written dialogue, contrary to what Farrell clearly thought. The parentheses only appeared in her dialogue, and were clearly meant to convey her particular style of speaking, but every time they occurred I had an image of someone doing air-parentheses in the midst of a conversation, some mutant form of air-quotes with cupped hands and wide eyes. I found the unusual punctuation use distracting to the process of reading rather than distracting to the conversation as presumably intended.

The hotel, almost a character as well as the setting, is indeed decaying, with holes in the upper floors and balconies crashing down and an actual jungle overtaking the inside. The whole thing seems so fetid, though, that it has lost all sense of grandeur save for physical enormity and has become a massive hovel. I spent the whole book wanting the place to finally burn down, as the very first page had promised. I prefer my decay, it turns out, metaphorical rather than literal.

I would wholeheartedly not recommend this book. I feel slightly odd starting off with such a negative review, but it was this book and all of the things I wanted to complain about to Nick that first gave me the idea for this project, so I've decided to go with it anyway. Next time, I will write about something I actually enjoyed reading. In the meantime, if you've read Troubles and have anything to add or dispute, fire away! 

let's talk about books

I used to spend hours every week immersed in books: reading books, talking about books, writing about books. Fiction and non-fiction. Novels, plays, academic treatises. A steady march of words across a constant stream of pages, a seemingly never-ending stack to be read.

Now I work in a world that is very different from my college life, with very little opportunity for literature. I miss it dearly, and so I hope to use this space to talk about what I've been reading in my spare time. To steal a phrase from James Wood's How Fiction Works, I want to get my hands "inkier with text," to consider more thoroughly my reactions and responses to the books I read and keep a record of them. I love discussing a book I've liked, or arguing about one I haven't, so I'm looking forward to giving this a try!