TO LOVE AND BE WISE

The third of Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant mysteries, and my favorite so far (mostly because it featured the small-town-where-all-the-eccentric-characters-are-suspects trope). It’s still only a fraction as awesome as Brat Farrar or Miss Pym Disposes, but it was an absorbing train read and gets bonus points for a very interesting twist ending.

P.S. Although a lot of the selections are pretty bonkers, I was happy to see Grant included, and decently ranked, on this list of bangable male characters in British literature. I’ve got a bit of a crush on him.

A RING OF ENDLESS LIGHT

In the fourth book in Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin family series, we’re back in Vicky’s first-person narration (after a third-person detour for The Young Unicorns) and the clan is heading back to their former life in small-town New England after that adventurous year in NYC. But first, they’re spending the summer at the island home of Grandfather Eaton, who’s dying of leukemia. As if trying to come to terms with her grandfather’s illness weren’t enough, Vicky is also mourning the death of Commander Rodney, a family friend, and dealing with the reappearance of Zachary Grey, the bad-boy-with-a-death-wish from The Moon by Night whose suicide attempt was the cause of it (the Commander had a heart attack after rescuing Zachary from drowning). And she’s not only getting romantic attention from Zachary, but also from Leo, Commander Rodney’s solid-but-boring son (awkward!), and maybe from Adam Eddington of The Arm of the Starfish, a colleague of Vicky’s brother John who wants her to help him with his marine biology research. Which leads to the little matter of Vicky’s discovery that SHE CAN COMMUNICATE TELEPATHICALLY WITH DOLPHINS.

I know I read A Ring of Endless Light once as a child, because who could forget OMG DOLPHINS. But I remember being a bit befuddled by it, and with good reason. This is a superb book, all casual-beachy-relaxing on one hand—morning swims, hamburger cookouts in the cove (I was always intrigued by islands as a child and still have a real soft spot for summer-vacation-at-the-seaside stories, although Over Sea, Under Stone is the only example I can think of off the top of my head)—and serious metaphysics on the other, but it’s even stronger within the context of the other books. Vicky has been gradually coming of age since the series began, but in this book she’s grappling with the Big Two, sex and death. Death in particular looms large, not only in Grandfather’s heartbreaking deterioration, but Leo’s loss of his father, Zachary’s loss of his mother, Adam’s mourning for Joshua (from Starfish—so glad I detoured to read that book before I got to this one), the demise of a baby dolphin, and even the death of a sick little girl in Vicky’s arms. The sex is purely theoretical (although Vicky does at least acknowledge that it could happen if she wanted it to, which surprised me at first until I realized this was published a full 20 years after the very wholesome Meet the Austins), but it remains a constant undercurrent as Vicky tries to untangle her feelings for the three very different men she encounters. I like, though, that the story isn’t a conventional teen romance where the central question is “Which boy will she choose?” Vicky is a fully realized character with bigger fish to fry (those newly discovered pyschic powers, for one), and the guys don’t represent a potential happy ending, just three very different possible responses to death and approaches to life. Although there’s no good-versus-evil battle here, this is hands down the deepest YA book I’ve ever read: It is literally about a girl trying to figure out the meaning of life. With a little help from some dolphins.

HENRIETTA SEES IT THROUGH

This sequel to Henrietta’s War, by Joyce Dennys, is just as lovable as the first volume. As World War II drags on, Henrietta’s narrative of small-town life on the home front is increasingly shadowed by anxiety and melancholy, but she and her friends endure all indignities with wit and aplomb. She derives much humor from her own endearing haplessness; as, for example, when she enters her dog, Perry, in the local dog show:

We nearly won the Dog Race (Owner to Run Backwards) too, but just at the finish Perry caught sight of the spaniel and twisted his lead round my legs. Some people fall elegantly and gracefully—I am not one. When I got back to my chair, Lady B said, “Fancy those knickers lasting all this time. Didn’t get you get them before the war?”

And if Henrietta hadn’t already earned my affection, her status as a fellow book lover would have won me over:

To part with even one of the tattered and incongruous volumes which form what I am pleased to call my library is, for me, worse than losing a front tooth. Sometimes I wake in the night and writhe to think of the books I have lent to people and never seen again. Once I groaned aloud and woke Charles. “What is the matter, Henrietta?” he said. “Have you got a pain?”

“No, Charles, but I keep thinking of that copy of Barchester Towers which I lent somebody and never got back.”

“For crying out loud!” said Charles, and went to sleep again.

This leads to my favorite part of the book, in which Henrietta’s agony at having to donate books for a scrap drive to aid the war effort results in her stealing a complete set of Fielding to rescue it from being rendered into pulp (which seems perfectly reasonable to me). I highly recommend that you check it out for yourself.

A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD

My feeling for Alan Bradley’s third Flavia de Luce book is pretty consistent with my thoughts on the first two. I can’t resist mid-twentieth-century small-town British novels or intelligent and intrepid girl detectives, so when a new title in this series is released I snap it up at the library with great satisfaction. I’m still not sure I really buy Flavia as a character—not that I expect her to hew to any sort of objective reality for average 11-year-olds; on the contrary, I prefer my literary children as precocious as possible. It’s just that there’s a whiff of artificiality in Bradley’s writing that puts me off at times. I can barely put my finger on it, and if the Internet is to be believed, all of her other readers love Flavia unreservedly, so I may be alone in this opinion. I have a feeling that my increasing addiction to quirky-charming books actually written during this period makes me a bit more critical of modern-day simulations (I had a similar vague feeling about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, if you will recall).

But even if nothing quite beats the real thing, it’s fun to see a mashup of that old-fashioned screwball eccentricity with the whip-smart badassery of good YA heroines today. (One of the things about Flavia that rings most true for me is her relationship with her trusty bicycle, Gladys, which she personifies as adorably as only a lonely kid can: “‘Sorry, old girl,’ I said to Gladys in the gray dishwater light of the early morning, ‘but I have to leave you at home.’ I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face. ‘I need you to stay here as a decoy,’ I whispered. ‘When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they’ll think I’m still in bed.’ Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy...At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, ‘Don't do anything I wouldn't do,’ and Gladys signaled that she wouldn’t.”) This book kept me happily entertained for a couple of days of train commuting, and sometimes that’s enough.

JULIE OF THE WOLVES

I chose this book for book club and was relieved to discover that it’s still good after all this time. I loved it as a kid, not quite with the same intensity as Island of the Blue Dolphins (I didn’t own a copy of it, so there was less obsessive rereading), but in the same general manner, with admiration for its protagonist’s genius for lonely survival in extreme wilderness (eating regurgitated caribou meat from the mouth of a wolf, for instance), jealousy for her close kinship with animals (let’s face it, getting accepted into a wolf pack totally one-ups having a pet sea otter), and the fetishized grief that only preteen girls can feel at the sad parts (oh, and they are still sad, twenty years later). Jean Craighead George’s Eskimo heroine, Miyax/Julie, is just as hardcore but a bit less stoic than Scott O’Dell’s Karana, allowing for more focus on her emotional journey; she braves the elements not because she’s forced to, but because she’s caught between cultures, trying to navigate the shift between the traditions of her people (Miyax was raised in a remote seal camp, living in a manner you get the feeling was already old-fashioned even at that time) and the white-influenced modern world of plastic parkas and hunting by plane. When I was younger, the most tragic part of the story seemed to be the death that occurs (if you’ve read the book, you know what part I’m talking about), and while I still shed tears at that point, now it seems to me that the true sadness lies in Miyax being forced to accept that the life she yearns for is impossible; “the hour of the wolf and the Eskimo is over” (just as the real heartbreak of Island of the Blue Dolphins is knowing what happened to Karana once she left the island). Miyax must come to terms with the world as it exists, not as it should be, which is the kind of message that only increases in poignancy for adult readers.

I was shocked to discover that George wrote two sequels to Julie of the Wolves, Julie and Julie’s Wolf Pack, until I realized they were published more than two decades after the first installment, in the 1990s, when I wouldn’t have been looking for them. I’ll definitely be checking them out now.

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

“Before my eyes he grows suspicious, capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, Pa, think how terrible the fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet I have money always in my thoughts and my desires; and the whole life I place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of life!”

And money, in a word, is the theme of Our Mutual Friend, my Dickens read for 2011. I enjoyed five-sixths of this book a lot—it’s Dickens’s last complete novel and a showstopping demonstration as his maturity as a writer, chock-full of what he does best: colorful characters with awesome names, from Rogue Riderhood to Fascination Fledgeby (rather than being structured around a single plot and a few subplots, OMF has a huge cast of interlocking characters revolving around a central idea, similar to Bleak House), and social analysis (sometimes earnest, sometimes satirical).

Unfortunately, near the end, there is a plot twist that almost ruined the book for me. There’s really no way to explain this plot twist succinctly (as friends subjected to my in-person rants about it can testify, it requires me to summarize a very complicated story, and even then I don’t think that expresses the full magnitude of the twist), but suffice to say that it is so supremely ridiculous that it could only have been topped by one of the characters waking up to discover the whole thing had been a dream. I read it on the train, and I could barely restrain myself from grabbing the arm of the passenger next to me and demanding, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!” (I suppose I have to at least hand it to Dickens for completely surprising me, since usually he telegraphs all story developments from 100 pages away.)

Now, Dickens is known for having some silly plot devices, from long-lost twins to spontaneous human combustion, and usually the more crazypants he gets, the more I like it—I don’t read him for restrained realism, but for larger-than-life Victorian melodrama. The problem with this twist is not just that it’s so outlandish, but that it invalidates his entire message, including most of that nice little speech at the top of this entry. The narrative arcs of two characters I’d really been interested and invested in turned out to be a sham, part of a scheme so overwhelmingly creepy that if Dickens had presented it as horror, I would have eaten it up with a spoon; but instead he makes it out to be the best thing since sliced bread, and after the big reveal the manipulated character actually thanks her manipulator for totally making a fool out of her and secretly controlling her life for years on end! I might even have been able to handle this if I felt that Dickens had done it intentionally, but instead it seems like a last-minute cop-out to avoid having to go through with making one of the book’s more lovable characters into a villain. So the author forces through a deus ex machine and gets his happy ending (which, usually, no matter how contrived, is one of my favorite parts of a Dickens novel), but only by betraying his premise (the power of money over people) and shutting down any possibility for character growth (I’d found it so fascinating that here were two Dickens characters who seemed to actually be changing, one for the better and one for the worse, when usually he writes people who are either obviously good and stay that way, obviously bad and stay that way, or ambiguous until tested by events).

This insanity left a bad taste in my mouth as I finished the book, but upon reflection, I still liked OMF overall. It’s certainly not my favorite Dickens (those honors remain with Bleak House for serious goodness and Nicholas Nickleby for frothy fun), but I’m glad I read it, and I’d still recommend it for the advanced Dickens reader (one who already loves him and has read the major works already), as long as you take the ending with a huge grain of salt—like, maybe one of those big blocks of salt they sell for water softeners. There were an awful lot of good bits, after all; I dogeared about a hundred pages, but here are just a few of my favorite excerpts:

• …cheeks drawn in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. [The introductory description of Melvin Twemlow]

• Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.

• “You incarnation of sauciness,” said Mrs. Wilfer, “do you speak like that to me? On this day of all days in the year? Pray do you know what would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R.W., your father, on this day?”
  “No, Ma,” replied Lavvy, “I really do not; and, with the greatest respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do either.”

• Of an ungainly make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures born to be indiscreetly candid on the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle had Sloppy, and he didn’t know how to dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances. Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colors.

(I’m definitely going to start working “Number One in the Awkward Squad” into my everyday parlance, by the way. Possibly also “You incarnation of sauciness.”)

And my very favorite part, because I love that in two paragraphs Dickens is able to paint such a heartbreakingly astute and compact portrait of a character who plays little to no role in the novel. It’s almost like a small story in itself, and it makes me love her:

..Miss Peecher the schoolmistress, watering the flowers in the little dusty bit of garden attached to her small official residence, with little windows like the eyes in needles, and little doors like the covers of school-books.

Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one. She could write a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule. If Mr. Bradley Headstone had addressed a written proposal of marriage to her, she would probably have replied in a complete little essay on the theme exactly a slate long, but would certainly have replied yes. For she loved him. The decent hair-guard that went round his neck and took care of his decent silver watch was an object of envy to her. So would Miss Peecher have gone round his neck and taken care of him. Of him, insensible. Because he did not love Miss Peecher.