Dystopias: When the World Goes Wrong

I love a good dystopia. By which I mean, of course, a book set in a very dark version of the future rather than in an idealized (utopian) one. Some dystopias project present trends or the author's worst fears quite far into the future. For example, Brave New World shows a society in which genetic engineering plus entertainment have achieved a very advanced level of control over humanity, far more so than was the case at the time of writing. Other dystopias are actually about the present day. 1984 was originally meant to be titled 1948, and to be a description of life under a totalitarian regime that is constantly at war, which was of course already happening at the time. Similarly, Lord of the Flies, about the descent into barbarism of a group of boys stranded on a remote island, was apparently a critique of the adults, who were fighting a world war back in "civilization." Other classic dystopias, which they tended to make us read in high school, include Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm. The genre is alive and well, and it seems that new dystopias are being written every year. Lois Lowry has written some terrific ones, such as The Giver and Gathering Blue. There is Agenda 21, which has Glenn Beck's name on the cover but was actually written by Harriet Parke, where the future is one of regimented, cultureless starvation brought about by environmentalist totalitarians. On the other end of the spectrum, The World Made By Hand and The Witch of Hebron by James Howard Kunstler bring to well-written life his vison of a future in which oil shortages, plagues, and an energy crisis have returned North Americans to a preindustrial lifestyle within one generation. (See, you can write a dystopia from any point of view!) A very good recent dystopia was The Office of Mercy by Ariel Djanikian, in which one group of human beings exterminates another group at the slightest sign of suffering. That one will make you cry. Dystopias, especially the classic ones which do not tend to have happy endings, are not good beach reading. They will wrench you, haunt you, and stay with you for weeks. But they tend to be intense page-turners, as well as being an important source of wisdom about our world. So what have I missed? What's YOUR favorite dystopia?

Where In The World Is Graham Hatter?

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, 2006. ... Graham Hatter spends almost all of One Good Turn in a coma, but he still manages to dominate the book due to the way he has lived prior to the coma. A coma is not Hatter’s natural state, and it’s as if his energetic, devil-may-care spirit, not content being confined in a hospital bed, has left his body to stalk the pages of the novel. He causes considerable chaos among his associates and employees by his absence. His crappy housing estates, Hatter Homes, figure big in the plot. Most of all, Hatter lives on in the memories of his now-almost-widow, Gloria, as she moves about her daily life, tweaking her home and wealthy lifestyle to (finally!) fit her tastes. A reader, like me, is alternately tickled and horrified as we come to know Graham through Gloria’s musings. Gloria remembers when Graham got a speeding ticket. He had been speeding, talking on his Bluetooth, smoking a cigar and eating a huge, greasy cheeseburger, all at the same time. And that pretty much sums up Graham Hatter. … Martin, the accidentally successful writer, is Hatter’s opposite. He has trouble making his presence felt, even when he is actually present. He is frequently mistaken for someone else, such as a gay person (which he’s not) or a dead person (not quite). But since Martin is not, like Graham, in a coma, he is actually able to make things happen in the world on occasion, and so … well, you will have to read it for yourself. It is dark, sad, and sometimes graphic, but if you are in a space to enjoy such things, it is also very funny.

Let's Just Write Good Fiction, People, Not Preachy Fiction

A review of The Sign, by Raymond Khoury, 2009. I picked up this book because it looked interesting. The Sign, wow. What could it be? Aliens? Ancient prophecy? Will we get a thrill of mystery as clue after clue is revealed? No such luck. If you haven’t heard of Raymond Khoury, think Dan Brown. Similar themes, similar writing style. From chapter to itty-bitty chapter, the book jumps around the world: Antarctica – Massachusetts – Egypt – Mexico – Egypt – Antarctica. This is supposed to give the book a fast pace (“never relents,” according to the blurbs). For this reader, it went agonizingly slowly. You get a little bit of action in Massachusetts, things start to get tense, then the scene moves to Egypt. You think that perhaps in Egypt, we will find out more, but after a few pages of cinematic conversation in which nothing is revealed, we are back to Antarctica. I call the conversation cinematic because, despite an international cast of characters (Egyptian, Croatian, Czech), all of them talk exactly the same, i.e. like characters out of a Hollywood police drama. For example, here is how a Croatian monk, living in a Coptic monastery, sums up his situation to a couple of Americans: “There’s not much to tell. They contacted us. They said they were making a documentary … The abbot wasn’t keen, none of us were. … But they were coming from a very respectable network, and they were very courteous, and they kept on asking and insisting. Eventually, we accepted.” Come on, Mr. Khoury. Not a single bafflingly misused word, or just one case of awkward word order? How often does this monk speak English? And speaking of English, there is Khoury’s own. Here is how he describes a certain bad guy: “He was a ruthless and imaginative political strategist, he had a mind like a steel trap, and [an] appetite for detail. … His effectiveness was further enhanced by an easygoing, gregarious charm – one that masked the iron resolve underneath and helped when one was a dedicated polemicist ready to take on the red-button issues that were splitting the country.” (p. 122) Golly gee. How many clichés can you squeeze into two sentences? (And even getting one of them wrong? Isn’t it supposed to be “hot-button” issues?) As it turns out, the Sign (spoiler alert) is coming neither from aliens nor from supernatural forces (between which, by the way, Khoury sees no difference), but from a very covert, deniable U.S. government group that has gotten ahold of some cutting-edge technology. The Sign, which first appears over the tragically melting ice caps at both poles, was originally meant to scare people into stopping global warming. But as often happens, the bad guys have had an internal disagreement about how to use the sign. The good bad guy (let’s call him Bad Guy B) wanted to keep the sign vague and occasional, so that no one religion could claim it. This, in addition to stopping global warming, might have the desired effect of nudging people toward pantheism or at least religious relativism. But Bad Guy A (the one described above), wants to steer the sign in the direction of a specifically Christian miracle, creating a specifically fundamentalist fervor. (He does this by kidnapping and brainwashing a Mother-Theresa type to be his mouthpiece). The two bad guys’ conversation about this is revealing. Bad Guy B is principled and thinks that deliberately stirring up religious fervor “might help get rid of one evil [global warming], but you’ll be feeding one that’s just as vile. One that’ll turn our world into a living hell for any rational person.” Got that? Belief in God is not just irrational, it’s “vile.” And it leads to hell. Bad Guy A replies: “You know that was the only way to go. These people don’t read newspapers. They don’t research things on the Internet. They listen to what their preachers tell them – and they believe them. Fanatically. They don’t bother to fact-check the bullshit they hear in their megachurches. They’re happy to swallow it whole, no matter how ridiculous it is … We need these windbags. We need them to sell our message.” (page 212) All I can say is, Wow. No, I don’t mean, Wow, Khoury thinks the Internet is a reliable place to fact-check, although that might make us scratch our heads as well. Rather … Wow. Has this guy ever met even one evangelical Christian? So that was where Khoury completely lost me. But I kept reading, partly because I wanted to earn the right to write this review, and partly because I wanted to find out what happened to the two “good” guys (a former car thief, and a Czech scientist-cum-couch-potato named Jabba, the funnest character in the book). And I was well rewarded when the car thief borrowed a garbage truck and crashed it through the façade of the “stately Georgian mansion” inhabited by Bad Guy B, killing bodyguards like flies in the process. He then puts Bad Guy B in the trash compacter, but thankfully, doesn’t compact him. That would have taken the book in a completely different direction. Later, the Mother Theresa character assured me that “of course I believe in evolution. You’d have to be a blind half-wit not to.” Another character finds this attitude to be “much less dogmatic than I expected.” The funny thing is, I think that I (or the person Raymond Khoury imagines me to be) am actually part of the intended audience of this book. His idea is that all of us evangelicals believe as we do only because we’ve never been exposed to any alternative view. So, we will pick up his book because it appears to be a novel about God (or maybe Satan, given the cover art). Then, the “relentless pace” of the action will draw us in, and when we read in the characters’ mouths Khoury’s compelling logic against belief in God, organized religion, and ID, our minds will be blown open, our world will be rocked. Then, the insults will give us added motivation to convert to materialist environmentalist atheism so that we can belatedly join the group of those in the know. It’s a weird experience reading this kind of a bait-and-switch, because often it goes in the other direction, with Christian writers trying to convert unbelievers through mediocre fiction. Khoury isn’t too fond of Tim LaHaye. Would he be insulted to hear that, as far as this reader is concerned, he is the Tim LaHaye of the atheist world? Anyway, reading this book and then reflecting on my experience was certainly enough to cure me of making any such attempts. Let’s just write good fiction, people, because the preachy fiction doesn’t work on thinking believers. It might work in movies, at least for the duration of the film (I’m looking at you, Dances with Wolves), but books don’t overwhelm the senses quite so much. But I digress. If the garbage truck scene sounds like enough fun to make you plough through the anti-religion rants, then this book is for you. About the science behind the book, I don’t know. I haven’t done the Internet research to find out whether “smart dust” a real thing. If the science of the book is as well researched as the historical and religious parts, then it’s mostly made up. But it’s possible that Khoury put more time into the part that interested him more, the part he actually believes in.

Suspicion of Guilt

By Barbara Parker, 1996 ... Gail Connor has had a hard time lately. Her husband left her. Her sister was murdered, and Gail was charged with the crime. All this happened in the last book, Suspicion of Innocence. Now Gail, the Miami lawyer, is back. In this book she has a Cuban-American boyfriend (who was her defense lawyer briefly in the last book), a 10-year-old daughter, and at her firm she is trying to make partner. … This is a legal thriller, with lots of action, confrontations, and also steamy bedroom scenes. The plot is believable and gets consistently more tense toward the end. The author, a lawyer herself, clearly knows what it’s like to work at a firm. Also, we get to see lots of Miami. The book even had me turning to Google Earth so that I could orient myself. Which way does Miami face, now? Where’s the coast? Where do these causeways lead? As you would hope from Miami, a lot of the action takes place on or near the water. … If you like the genre, you will like this book. I don’t even particularly like it, yet I read the whole thing and often neglected my duties to read it because the book is such a page-turner. … So why don’t I like it? One major problem is Gail Connor herself. For most of the book, I found her hard to identify with. The scenes between Gail and her 10-year-old daughter are painful. I could identify with both of them in those scenes, but it seemed to me that Gail was not really trying to listen to her daughter. Of course, Gail was under a lot of pressure. That happens when you’re in a character in a legal thriller. Gail also doesn’t seem to really like her boyfriend for most of the book. She is so prickly that she bristles at him constantly. Perhaps this has to do with personality. To make partner, as a woman, and also to get involved in an unofficial murder investigation, you have to be bloody-minded. But I spent much of the book annoyed with Gail for how she treats wonderful Anthony. … Except when they’re hopping in bed, of course. Does anybody really do that after a day in which they’ve been arrested / beaten up / chewed out by their boss / nearly killed? Maybe in Hollywood. Anyway, I advise skipping those scenes, they border on porn. … It’s not all Gail’s fault that she’s not too likeable. She has some stiff competition from the other characters in the book. Gail’s mother, Irene, is terrific. I have already mentioned Anthony. And there is the murder victim, a large-livin’ Miami socialite. And Gail’s irrepressible Cuban-American office intern, Miriam. Even the murderer himself is a well-drawn character … a jerk, but a familiar kind of jerk. And the way these people talk! Whether it’s the octogenarian Miami aristocrat (“By God, aren’t you lovely? And tall. A strapping young woman.”) or the fiftyish black police detective (“I might want to reinstitute some paperwork from an incident over at Mrs. Tillett’s house. You understand what I’m saying?”), you can almost hear their voices saying it. … Gail redeems herself with her daughter, and with me, in the obligatory scene at the end when they’re fighting for their lives with a desperate killer. I might be willing to read about her again, if only to see how the daughter turns out.

The Holy Thief

The Holy Thief: The Nineteenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael, of the Benedictine Abby of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury
by Ellis Peters (pen name for Edith Pargeter)

The “holy” thief is a monk, a novice from another abbey, who visits Shrewsbury. His name is Tutilo. He is, as it turns out, a thief and a liar, but he also posses a certain sweet innocence, perhaps the kind that comes from shortsightedness.

Tutilo contrives to steal Shrewsbury’s prized possession, the reliquary containing the bones of St. Winifred. He smuggles the reliquary, protectively swathed, onto a cart of wood headed for his own monastery.

And here is where the story begins its slo-mo slide into farce. For the reliquary never reaches its destination. The men driving the cart are mugged, the cart is stolen, the wood scattered, and the reliquary ends up in the possession of a local nobleman. By the time it is tracked down, three parties have decided they have a claim to it: the monks from Shrewsbury, the monks from Tutilo’s abbey, and the nobleman to whose house it has come. One of the best scenes in the book occurs in Chapter Four, when the priors of the two monasteries are arguing with each other and with the nobleman. Each of the three is trying to press his own claim by speculating about St. Winifred’s intentions. One maintains that she orchestrated events so as to get stolen because she wanted to go to the new abbey. Another maintains that she orchestrated all the events, including the ambush, because she wanted to end up in the nobleman’s house. The prior of Shrewsbury, of course, maintains that she never wanted to leave Shrewsbury at all. The nobleman is half-teasing in this scene, but the two monks are deadly serious.

The scene, taken by itself, reads like a satire of medieval saint worship. There are several difficulties. First, they are trying to ascribe godlike knowledge and power to a dead woman. Yet somehow they realize that this is not quite right, that she is not all-knowing and all-sovereign like God. This allows them to ascribe to St. Winifred just the degree of sovereignty needed for their respective arguments. The issues raised are not so different from those that come up any time something happens that is clearly not in line with the revealed will of God. But the difficulties of St. Winifred’s sovereignty are even greater because in her we are dealing not with an omnipresent, invisible being, but rather with a being located in, or tied to, a block of wood. In short, with an idol. And idols, for all their purported power, can be stolen by people, knocked out of a wood cart, etc.

Faithful readers of the Brother Cadfael series are let in to an additional irony. Those who read the first book, A Morbid Taste for Bones, know that the reliquary everyone is now fighting over does not actually contain the bones of St. Winifred. At the time she (everyone, even Cadfael, refers to the bones as "she") was to be brought from her native Wales to Shrewsbury, St. Winifred’s actual bones were reinterred, and another body placed in the reliquary. Very few of the characters know this. Cadfael, of course, was involved in the switcheroo up to his eyeballs, and at the time did it because he thought it was St. Winifred’s will, just as Tutilo thought it was her will to get stolen.

And this is where the story steps back from being a satire. There is some lingering mystery surrounding the reliquary. Cadfael, for one, still refers to the reliquary as “she,” though he knows the actual she is back in Wales. He still prays (in Welsh) to St. Winifred at her altar in Shrewsbury, and does actually sense her presence there. Perhaps it is because her bones did rest in the reliquary for a few hours before being reinterred, or because she is “able to send her grace” over the distance from Wales to this place where she is also honored.

But it gets even worse. Not only does Cadfael subjectively sense St. Winifred at her altar in Shrewsbury, but “she” has actually done a miracle there. In one of the books between One and Nineteen, a boy with a deformed leg was healed when he knelt before St. Winifred’s altar and heard her saying to him, “Step forward, you know you can.” He did, his leg was straightened, and he is now her most passionate devotee at Shrewsbury.
And as the book progresses, it becomes evident that St. Winifred, in response to the pagan-like divinations of the characters, is perfectly able to make her will known.
So what Peters has done here is make St. Winifred like God, and the reliquary rather like the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament … St. Winifred’s power and presence are focused at the reliquary (by her own choice), but she is not bound to it.

In fact, Peters has drawn an excellent picture of God in her portrayal of St. Winifred in this book. It is much warmer, more nuanced, and more personal than the attitude in the series to God Himself. I think the reason for this is that Peters is basically a humanist, and St. Winifred is human. Peters does not love God, but she (and Brother Cadfael) do love St. Winifred.

Come to think of it, that was probably the attitude of many who participated in the saint cults. God was alien, distant, and probably hostile, but a local saint, one who speaks their own language and who was once human like them … such a person they can know and love. The saint cults were a sign that the Gospel had not really reached these people. The Gospel, among many other benefits, tears down the dividing wall of hostility between God and people. It enables us to really know and love God, to really come near. It tells us that He has been human like us, and He does speak our language. We need a God like this, and if we do not get the privilege of knowing Him, we will invent Him in a saint, a hero or a spirit.

I doubt that in real life Ellis Peters was a saint worshipper. But she knew her medieval history. She was steeped in the beauties, limitations and assumptions of the period. She writes about saint worship with great sympathy because it is such a human thing, and with belief because she was really able to become her medieval characters as she wrote for them. That is what makes this such an excellent series.

A sad day for racing-mystery readers

Author Dick Francis has died. I am glad to read that he still has one more novel coming out! I'll review his novels some day.

The Brother Cadfael Mysteries by Ellis Peters

When I read historical fiction, I like the dream to be vivid and continuous. I don’t want to have to worry that the plot will get thin in places because the author doesn’t know what he or she is doing, or that the characters’ motivations (or their speech for that matter) will start to resemble those of 1990s Californians, like Kevin Costner’s in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

Ellis Peters (a pen name for Edith Pargeter) really knows her stuff. She knows the setting of her stories intimately … both the region of England (Shrewsbury, in Shropshire, near the Welsh border) and the period of history (the 1130’s and 1140’s). So her Brother Cadfael mysteries are really, really terrific historical fiction. For example, clothing terms. The men wear cottes, and sometimes capuchons. They carry things in scrips. Peters is familiar with the daily schedule in the abbey (Prime, Compline, etc.), the herbs that Brother Cadfael grows in his garden, and the processes by which he makes from them pills and ointments. She also knows the country round. Many of the books come with a map in the front to help us make sense of the story. Sometimes the map is just of the town of Shrewsbury and the Benedictine abbey where Brother Cadfael lives. Other times it includes the surrounding countryside, depending on where the action takes place. Some of the best books take us into Wales, where the customs and language are different. (Conveniently, Brother Cadfael speaks Welsh.)

But it’s not just period detail with no action. Peters’ plots often take a while to set up, but once they start to unfold, the drama just keeps coming. The realities of medieval life are what drive the plots and produce the drama. For example, of the three Brother Cadfael stories I just finished, arranged marriage figures crucially in all three plots. Between the three, they also feature a leper colony, stolen treasure, a jongleur, a castle siege, a duel, a kept woman who later becomes a nun, and a hostage situation. This in addition to the requisite minimum of one murder per story and one pair of young lovers. Sometimes there are two couples, often more than one murder. Brother Cadfael plays cupid as well as detective.

Overarching the events in and around Shrewsbury is the civil war between King Steven and Queen Maud that was raging throughout England in the 1130’s and 1140’s. Sometimes Steven and Maud figure crucially in the plot, other times they are just background. In many books they make personal appearances. The political background about Steven and Maud can be overwhelming if there happens to be a lot of it in the first Brother Cadfael book you pick up. But over time, as you read more of the series, you will get to know Steven and Maud just as well as the other regular minor characters. Neither Steven nor Maud is portrayed as being the “right” cause … indeed, a theme of the series is that there are good people and villains on both sides. It is admirable to be faithful to whichever monarch is your lord or lady, yet at the same time, the faithfulness of people on opposite sides also serves to perpetuate an increasingly senseless war.

The books are densely written and that can make them hard to get into. Some of them get off to a slow start, and you have to stick with them for several chapters before they become page-turners. The reason is that it can take Peters several chapters to lay down all the threads for an intricate plot. But when the net is in place and she starts pulling on it, things will happen fast! If you are looking for one of the more accessible BC books to start with, I recommend Summer of the Danes or Virgin in the Ice.

Not another "angels" book!

Angels and Other Strangers
by Katherine Paterson, 1979

I confess, when I was first given an attractively bound little book with “angels” in the title, I cringed inwardly. More sentimental, mass-produced, contrived plots with bad theology? Forgive me, Bob and Ruth, my reading friends, I should have known you better than that. I realized my mistake when I read the back of the book, which told me that Katherine Paterson is the author of Bridge to Terabithia. Oh, this lady can write! Maybe I should re-examine her angels book.

Turns out the stories were written, one a year, for Paterson’s Presbyterian minister husband to read to his congregation at Christmastime. The first year, when the minister requested a story, Paterson went to the library to find one. But she could find only sentimental, contrived plots with bad theology. And she said to herself, “I could do better than this!”

So, expect lots of tragedy lurking round the edges of these nine Christmas stories. Some are quite dark and others are dark and funny, but all take a redemptive turn before the end.

Perhaps because Paterson’s children were small when she was writing them, children appear in all nine stories, and six of the nine feature babies. This made the stories especially poignant, not to mention suspenseful, for the mother that I am. I went through each story hoping nothing bad was going to happen to the baby. Sometimes it did. One story deals with a mother grieving after the stilbirth of her daughter, and one with a Japanese minister whose wife, son and baby were killed (before the story opens) when a bomb hit their house. But no such tragedy takes place “on stage,” so to speak.

Paterson’s fictional children aren’t all little angels, either. Their very immaturity and sin even drive the plot in some of the stories. This, whether it’s tragedy or just immaturity, is a part of the fallen world that Christ came to save.

Rainbow Garden

by Patricia St. John, 1960

Perhaps Patricia St. John’s best-known book is Treasures of the Snow. It has been made into a movie. But she has written many excellent books for children. I have read only three of them: Treasures of the Snow, The Secret of Pheasant Cottage, and most recently, Rainbow Garden.

Despite its somewhat namby-pamby-sounding name, and despite the many scenes of beauty within it, Rainbow Garden is not a sentimental book. It’s not about hippy, New-Agey, All-Is-One-style rainbows. In fact the rainbow makes only one appearance, very vivid but very brief, as is the way of rainbows.

Elaine has lived a pampered, but lonely and urban life in London with her mother. Then she is sent to live with a vicar and his family of six children in rural northern Wales – near both the mountains and the sea. In January.
Naturally it’s quite an adjustment. Elaine is not used to being asked to pitch in and do her share of the household chores, as the Owens expect her to do. She is no good at running, throwing snowballs or climbing trees as are the Owen children. One rainy day in the early spring, she looks out the window and notices a very bright rainbow which seems to have its foot behind a stone wall. She quietly leaves the house, runs to the wall, and follows it until she finds a low place where she can scramble over. By the time she does so, the rainbow has vanished. But Elaine has discovered a deserted garden that becomes her place of solace when she needs to get away from the difficulties of her living situation.
Patricia St. John excels at describing scenes of natural beauty in an evocative but not overdone manner. It is clear that she herself loves nature and draws great nourishment from it. And spring in North Wales gives her plenty to describe.

But Elaine is not just being calmed and nourished by nature; she is pursuing a mystery. On her first visit to church with the Owens, she saw an old, ivy-covered gravestone with some words that intrigued her. “In … [indecipherable] … is fulness of joy.” Fulness of joy! … the words stick in Elaine’s mind. She realizes that she longs for fulness of joy. She begins to try to find out where is it is found. She asks Janet, with whom she shares a room. Janet thinks it’s “In heaven is fulness of joy.” But she’s wrong. As Elaine finds out later, the words are from the end of Psalm 16: Thou wilt show me the path of life, and in Thy presence is fulness of joy. This is good news, because she does not have to get into heaven in order to find fulness of joy. She can begin now to discern and follow the path of life.
I cannot remember seeing a verse of Scripture handled so well in a novel. The verse reverberates throughout the story, unfolding gradually and naturally in a way that allows us to feel the mystery, richness and relevance of it, and what a gift it is.

Seven Daughters and Seven Sons

by Barbara Cohen and Bahija Lovejoy
published by Atheneum 1982, Beech Tree 1994

Once upon a time, in medieval Baghdad, lived a man who had seven daughters but no son. To his shame, he was therefore known as Abu-al-Banat (Father of Girls). To make matters worse, this man’s brother was blessed with seven sons. Furthermore, Abu-al-Banat was poor, whereas his brother was rich.
Since he had no son, Abu-al-Banat was forced to teach one of his daughters skills that were normally taught only to boys. He taught her to play chess, so that he would have someone to play against. He taught her to read because she wanted to learn so badly. In the evenings, he would sit and talk business with her, although he himself was not a successful businessman. But his daughter had the gift, and although Abu-al-Banat did not know it, by teaching his daughter he had sown the seeds for future good fortune for his family.

I don’t know why it is, but often the times-and-places that were the most unpleasant for the people who lived in them, make the most romantic settings for stories. I love the milieu in which this story is set. I love the way the characters talk to each other, using the vocative: “O my brother,” or “O father of daughters.” I love reading about the caravans and the spice shops. But I know that, especially as a woman, I would have hated to live there. Not all of us are blessed with the remarkable resilience and survival instincts of Abu-al-Banat’s daughter Buran.
Perhaps one thing that makes such a harsh world seem attractive, is that is it not peopled solely with characters who are bound by their culture. In a world in which the social separation between the sexes was extreme, and in which women were therefore considered barely human, we get characters like Abu-al-Banat, who allows his daughter to dress as a boy and go out into the world to seek her fortune; and like the prince, who when he finally figures out that his friend “Nasir” is a woman, feels attracted rather than repelled. For realism’s sake, we also have characters like the prince’s friend Amin, who considers a reading, chess-playing woman a “freak,” and Buran’s mother, who is completely conventional. But the presence of some choice men who can rise above their culture, as Buran rises above hers (without rejecting it or Islam), make this an adventurous, romantic world rather than just a monotonous, oppressive one.
Apparently there have been such men and women in real life as well, for a note at the end of the book says that this novel is “based on a folktale that has been part of the oral tradition of Iraq since the eleventh century.” It is a well-written, absolutely spellbinding story. I don’t know why it isn’t better known.
See a kid's review of the book.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond

by Elizabeth George Speare, 1958

Connecticut, spring 1687. No one is less suited to be here than Kit Tyler. She grew up in Barbados, used to blue skies, warm seas, a library full of poetry and plays, and all the work done by slaves. Connecticut offers frigid rivers that no one swims in, hard work for everyone from sunup to sundown, and plays are taboo. Practically the only reading material is the Bible (which gets somewhat short shrift in this otherwise excellent book). It also offers some unexpected solaces.

Kit, who had to sell her family’s estate in Barbados to pay off her grandfather’s debts, is as repelled by the harsh and forbidding New Englanders as they are scandalized by her. Nevertheless, her uncle, aunt and cousins welcome her to live with them, and we quickly see that the Puritans in this story are no caricatures. They have varied personalities and complex characters.

This book has everything … tangled love triangles, a dramatic trial scene (guess what kind?), and cameos by historical figures. If, like me, you like to read about the New World colonists when Fall comes around, check out this Newberry Medal winner.

Fine Legal Satire

The Associate, by John Grisham, 2009

Say you want to write a satirical novel about the world of giant, high-powered international law firms, where mind-boggling amounts of money are billed every day, corruption and workaholism rule, and Sloth is the only one of the seven deadly sins that is not rampant.

Your problem: how do you find a likeable protagonist? Most people who work in such firms do so voluntarily. They fully subscribe to the philosophy that includes padding their hours, billing expensive lunches to clients, maintaining an insane, sleepless schedule, and scorning everyone who does not do the same. These people will be hard to identify with, at least for the rest of us who actually have time to read novels. So, where do you get a protagonist who works in such a firm, but who will also be a plausible good guy, one you and your readers can root for?

John Grisham solved this problem by making his protagonist an idealistic young law student who wants to use his degree to make the world a better place, but who is blackmailed into applying to a high-powered law firm so that he can steal its secrets for the blackmailer.

Yes, this book has some elements of a “thriller,” but arguably the richer part of it is the satire. Although not really a humor book, the satire sometimes gets funny. For example:

The sound of important papers being extracted crackled from the backseat, and Kyle knew something was being reviewed … After ten minutes of [driving in] in downtown traffic, Kyle was wet under the collar and breathing heavily … He found the lot but it was full, and this caused all manner of cursing in the rear seat. … Doug was stuffing papers back into his briefcase. Bard suddenly had business on the phone. “I don’t care. Any street. And if you can’t find a spot, then just keep making the block. Let us out here.” Kyle cut to the curb, and a horn erupted somewhere behind them. Both lawyers scrambled out of the rear seat. Peckham’s final words were, “Just keep moving, okay. You’ll find something.” Bard managed to tear himself away from his phone conversation long enough to say, “And be careful. It’s my wife’s.” Alone, Kyle eased away and tried to relax. … Every inch of available space was packed with vehicles and motorbikes. An amazing abundance of signs warned against parking near any potential space. Kyle had never noticed so many threatening signs. … At 11:00 a.m., Kyle congratulated himself because he could now bill the client $800 for driving in circles.

Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler
2008

Not sure how I should review this book. On the one hand, it was well-written enough and addictive enough to cause me to lose all self-control and read it every free moment until I finished it. On the other, the aftertaste it left me with was mostly bleak, modern, meaningless, the impression of a world surrounded by mean people.

Besides that it was on sale at Costco, I bought it because it’s about the author of a famous mystery series and how her books were entangled with her real life. She had taken a very dear friend and made him into a character in one of her books – the murderer, in fact – and now his daughter is wondering why. The resolution isn’t as satisfying as an Agatha Christie would be, but it is realistic, true to human nature. And after all, Wit’s End is not a murder mystery and doesn’t claim to be.

I liked that the novel is interspersed with excerpts from the (fictional) book in question … and reading these helps you unravel what is going on in the novel. I didn’t like that the excerpts are written in the exact same style as the overall narrative. (Someone else noticed that too. Click here for his also-mixed review.)

The blurbs on the book say things like, “Fowler’s subtle humor glides across these pages.” True. There are lots of clever turns of phrase and a few truly funny moments. However, often it seems that you can see the author is trying to be clever. The chuckles don’t seem to arise as serendipitously as they do in an Alexander McCall Smith. Anyone who thinks Wit’s End is funny ought to read his No. 1 Ladies’ Dective Agency series or his Portugese Irregular Verbs series.

Perhaps the bad aftertaste simply came from the fact that the book is set in modern Santa Cruz, California, with all the social and spiritual bleakness that implies. Sample incident: the herione is reluctantly invited to hang out at a bar with people ten years younger than herself. She goes (reluctantly), gets drunk, and ends up bawling when something reminds her of a loved one she lost. After going home, she gets on the Internet, and finds that one of her drinking buddies has already described this humilitating incident on a blog and made some additional catty comments about her.

Another part of the bad taste, perhaps, was that cults, particularly white supremacist ones, figure big in both the plot of the book and the plots of the fictional books-within-the-book. Cults are unpleasant to think about, and when presented in isolation, instantly create a bad impression of all organized religion.

So that’s it. My takeaway impression is that the book is dark, ironic, and somehow a bit shallow … but to be fair I have to note that it is very addictive, and very true to how people behave in this dark, ironic, somewhat shallow society. According to the review I link to above, The Jane Austen Book Club is much better.

Summer

Summer, by Edith Wharton, 1916

Charity Royall is the smartest, prettiest girl in her tiny Massachusets hamlet. But she can’t shake the shame of knowing that when she was a little girl, she was adopted from The Mountain, where the people “aren’t half human.” When a handsome, well-educated young architect comes to the village to look for old houses, gossip and (eventually) passion fly. By the end of the summer, things will be very different for Charity.

Because of the period in which it was written, Summer may remind modern readers of Jane Austen. However, I found the language a lot easier to understand than in Austen’s books. This might be because it was written some decades later, and because it is set in America, not Britain. It is a fairly short book and goes quickly.

One thing that makes Austen fun (and funny) is the scale of moral and social values from which she writes. Also she never comes right out and says it, it’s clear from the way Austen writes about her characters which ones are behaving well or foolishly, which are ladies and gentlemen and which are not. Often the humor comes from the way the well-bred characters respond to foolishness on the part of others.

Wharton in Summer is just the opposite. One thing that makes the book such a pleasure to read is the nonjudgementalness with which Wharton reports the thoughts, behavior and choices of her characters. Charity is not cultured or well-educated, and almost all her choices are foolish ones. Nevertheless, she is a very sympathetic character and we can always identify with her emotions and actions. Wharton portrays her characters without rosiness, indulgence or sentimentality, but (I think it is not too much to say) with a great deal of grace and love. She has nothing but realistic understanding even for Charity’s alchoholic, sometimes lecherous guardian.

This book could break your heart if you read it as a teenager, especially if you were expecting a classic romantic plot and resolution. It didn’t break mine, because Wharton gives you enough red flags that you can brace yourself for what’s coming. But it has really stayed with me. Might be an excellent book to read with teens.