The Herring in the Library by L.C. Tyler

The Herring in the Library

L.C. Tyler

London: Pan Macmillan, 2011.

I do love a good mystery, and when a writer contrives to write a series that spoofs The Great Mysteries of Yore, I’m in heaven.  This book was hilarious.   I started out with a pencil in hand, but soon realized that if I made note of every passage that made me laugh, I’d have the whole book marked up, which would rather defeat the purpose.  The humour is arch, the narrators wonderfully unreliable, and although the allusions to Dame Agatha heavy enough to serve as murder weapons themselves, it is P.G. Wodehouse who is the presiding muse.

The comic series features mystery writer Ethelred Tressider, a woebegone man who is obsessed with his unsatisfactory amazon rankings, and his literary agent Elsie Thirkettle, an interfering chocoholic who reminds poor Ethelred endlessly that he’s a second-rate writer.  In this one, the pair confronts a classic locked room mystery, and they take turns narrating (and undercutting each other’s progress) to the solution.

I will admit that the plot of this third in the series was a wee bit thin, but the characterization more than made up for it.  The outcome of the investigation was also a foregone conclusion, but getting there was so much fun that I forgive all.  I have every intention of reading the rest of the series, and am thrilled to discover that L.C. Tyler ranks with Sarah Caudwell for intelligent and witty comfort reading.

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Treasure Island!!! by Sarah Levine

Treasure Island!!!

Sara Levine

New York: Europa Editions, 2012.

I’ve been marooned in the land of Game of Thrones.  Nothing like half a dozen 800-page books to slow down the reading pace.  I got hooked when I rented the first season of the HBO series, then I went back to read the book of the ten hours of movies I’d just devoured.  Somewhere around 1200 pages in, though, I got fed up and had to switch gears quickly.

Treasure Island was the cure.  A different marooning.  My friend Kelly recommended Levine’s book, but I wanted to go back to the original first.  I read an edition illustrated by Robert Ingpen, which was deliciously drawn.  Each page of the book is in full colour, to make it look like the book is printed on aged parchment.  Long John Silver is perfectly menacing in all his scarred glory, but Ingpen very cleverly leaves the boy hero Jim Hawkins vaguely drawn so that the reader can imagine him or herself as the narrating hero.

And this is exactly what the narrator of Levine’s humourous telling does.  A drifter of a twenty-something, the unnamed narrator is insufferably self-absorbed.  Luckily, she’s also funny.

If life were a sea adventure, I knew: I wouldn’t be a sailor, pirate, or cabin boy but more likely a barnacle clinging to the side of the boat.  Why not rise, I thought.  Why not spring up that very moment, in the spirit of Jim, and create my own adventure?  …  I must have been the tiniest of boats rocking on the sea of Robert Louis Stevenson’s consciousness…; I must have been a sea-bird streaking through the azure sky of his daydream; in just the same way spirits are said to commune across cultures, time and continents, Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Treasure Island felt cosmically intended for me. (15)

Like Gabriel Betteredge, from Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, who treats Robinson Crusoe as his bible and font of all wisdom, Levine’s narrator adopts Treasure Island as her personal self-help bible in order to make herself the hero of her own life.

I delved into my backpack for the golden compass I had made for my new life.  This was not a long, gangly composition; I had merely–merely!–written down boy hero Jim Hawkins’ best qualities, which formed, I realized every moment with increasing warmth, the Core Values of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

I am copying it out hurriedly here; of course, the original was carefully hand-lettered in a serifed style on a creamy seventy-pound piece of paper with a lovely deckled edge.

BOLDNESS

RESOLUTION

INDEPENDENCE

HORN-BLOWING (17)

We are to treat “independence” with enormous irony.  Never was there a more barnacle-like hanger on of a boomerang child.  Never was there a narrator more unreliable, less honest and brave than good old Jim Hawkins.  Another of the narrator’s lists is of her therapists.  It is long, and deservedly so.  She is batshit crazy.

Levine’s short novel develops into an anti-adventure.  Instead of heading out to conquer the world, the narrator must move back home with her parents after a series of mishaps that leave her unemployed, homeless and in charge of a stolen parrot.

Her sister, whose library copy of Treasure Island the narrator steals, complains that she hates books without any female characters.  (She has been looking for books to read to her third grade class.)  This sense of a faulty script is the key to understanding the narrator’s predicament.  She is one of the lost Special Snowflake generation.  What is a college graduate with an over-developed sense of entitlement  to do in the world that cares nothing for her ability to write a good English essay?  (Thanks, Marcelle.)

Bury herself in her index cards and wreak havoc on the lives of those around her.

The result is a very funny read, full of madcap (domestic) mayhem.

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Among Others by Jo Walton

Among Others

Jo Walton

New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2011.

My husband observed, not long ago, that the reading material I have been choosing to read aloud with the eldest two boys has been largely fantasy (boy magicians, hobbits, mythological creatures, both ancient and contemporary).  I was really taken aback because I had not made those choices deliberately or out of a preference from my own childhood reading.  I would never have called myself a fan of fantasy.   I did not read fantasy much at all as a child, but in my second childhood it seems to be what my boys and I are gravitating towards.

Perhaps it’s a gendered thing.  As Mor, the tweenaged protagonist of Jo Walton’s Among Others, notes, the only other girl her age at her science fiction book club was introduced to sci fi by her boyfriend, and most of the people are male.  Most, but not all.  And that’s it.  It’s a passing reference to the demographics of the group, and gender will come up again in her observations about who leads the weekly discussions, but for Mor, science fiction is a way to bring her into a community, not to divide her from one.

Mor’s story is written as a journal, and begins very much in medias res, with Mor trying (not very successfully) to settle in at a boarding school where she’s been sent by her father’s family, after having run away from her (unfit) mother and been put in an orphanage.  In the space of a few pages, she meets her father for the first time and then meets his extensive library, which contains many fantasy and sci fi titles and authors she has already come to love.  A bookworm of the first order, and, again, in a very short span of time, she discovers, to her great delight and to her social salvation, that there is such a thing as book clubs and makes friends and meets a beautiful boy at her book club.  A boy so beautiful, she is afraid she has conjured him by magic.

Magic is the fantasy element of this novel, and it is so deftly handled that you could read Mor’s engagement with magic either as genre fantasy or as a psychological puzzle.  In fact, she invites you to question her over and over (and over and over) again.  Plausible deniability is a catchphrase, and she comes back again and again to the loopholes in magic that make it possible to, well, wave a wand, and make all things magical appear perfectly normal.  She sees fairies, and so does her twin, but her twin is dead so there’s no one to corroborate her story.  She casts protective spells and makes other kinds of magic that may or may not have enormous repercussions.  Having just read and very much enjoyed Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, which is a contemporary retelling of a Russian fairy tale that keeps a graceful balance between fairy tale and realism, I felt perfectly at home in the liminal space of this book.  I neither wanted to believe nor disbelieve Mor.  I just wanted more and more and more of her story, which makes me a victim to its magic after all, I guess.

If ever there was a book designed to bring me out of books-about-books blogging hibernation, this is it.  I don’t know when I’ve ever read a novel with so many loving references to other books in it.  It was delightful.  And I haven’t even read most of the books she refers to.  I imagine that the pleasure factor is exponentially higher if you can relish with her the discovery and love of books you have also loved.  Fantasy may not have been what I pulled off the shelves as a child, but it connects me so blissfully to my boys now.  I don’t feel like an imposter in the world of fantasy that they love any more than Mor feels like an imposter in her book club (she has plenty of other places from which to feel excluded and plenty of other reasons to feel like an impostor).  What comes through so clearly is this girl’s immersion in a body of literature that has kept life and limb together for her.   And who could fail to love a narrator who so clearly lives for (and in) books?  That the book also feaures three very lovable librarians is icing on the cake.

Jenny, at Jenny’ Books, was the first whose recommendation I came across, then Kerry, at Pickle Me This, also recommended it.  Now, when Kerry or Jenny rave about a book, I generally go out and get it.  When they both rave, I know it’s  A Sure Thing.  It is.

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With all her novel-reading

Here’s another to add to my list of favourite first lines, from Elizabeth Taylor’s Palladian:

Cassandra, with all her novel-reading, could be sure of experiencing the proper emotions, standing in her bedroom for the last time and looking from the bare windows to the unfaded oblong of wall-paper where ‘The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice’ in sepia had hung for thirteen years above the mantelpiece. (5)

Elizabeth Taylor lived in Penn, in Buckinghamshire, which is where I lived for several months when I was four and my family was between countries (Liberia and Haiti).  I went to my first school there, and I expect I learned to read in Penn, though I have no specific memories of learning.  This coincidence has endeared Taylor to me, and I feel a tiny bit proprietorial on the basis of having shared a village with her for a few months, unbeknownst to both of us at the time.

This year is Taylor’s centenary, and I’ve followed the lead of Buried in Print and decided to read a few of her novels this year.  Palladian was wonderfully arch, and the narrator kept winking at the reader each time the heroine did what novel-reading heroines do.  My favourite kind of narrator. 

 

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A Refreshingly Forward Foreword

Author’s Note

This is not so much an author’s note as an author’s reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.
Neither novels or their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
I appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

from The Fault in Our Stars
John Green

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Etienne’s Alphabet by James King

Etienne’s Alphabet

James King

Toronto: Cormorant, 2010.

The wonderful Buried in Print suggested this as a read for my dictionary month, and I am so glad she did.  (Her review is here.)  A finalist for the 2011 Toronto Book Award, this is King’s fifth novel.  King has also written eight biographies, and in this book the biographical mode meets dictionary meets fiction.

Etienne Morneau, a reclusive young bank clerk who has found a comfortable home with his landlady after growing up in orphanages, is the fictive autobiographer of this novel.  In the last five years of his life, he teaches himself to draw and makes thousands of drawings.  After struggling for six months to write a conventional account of his life, amounting to just five pages, he adopts the dictionary as his vehicle for verbal self-expression.  It is, he says, an attempt to reclaim some order from the chaos arising from his creative burst.  From A to Z, he writes scenes and snippets that add up to a life. 

Now, I’ve been reading dictionaries all month, and I have to say that it’s a form that really does lend itself to a clipping pace.  One entry after the next, quick bursts of meaning and information, constant structural milestones that keep you going from A to Z.  Yes, for fiction, there is some loss of narrative continuity, but with each entry, you start fresh, and when orphanhood is a prominent theme, that freshness, that lack of continuity, is all the more poignant.

The dominance of letters, words, is also striking because Etienne Morneau’s writing is secondary to his drawing.  After his landlady finds thousands of drawings in his room after his early and sudden death (heart failure), she contacts a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, who declares the dead man a “primitive artist of undoubted genius.” The fictive editor of this autobiographical manuscript does his work 40 years after the drawings are found and celebrated.  This belatedness, and the fact that the reader never sees what his art is like, puts us, I think, in a position similar to Etienne’s: outsider looking in.  As I read, I wished that this book had been given the T.S. Spivet treatment, with illustrations adorning the margins.  But to deprive the reader of access to his visual art, is, after all, part of the impact of the story.  As Etienne writes under BOOK, “For better or worse, pictures–not words–allow me to wander freely in the enchanted world of possibilities.”  By depriving the reader of any purchase on what Etienne’s art looks like, we are deliberately left outside of his enchanted world, and we struggle along with him under the encumbrance of words.

King manages, even with such a rigid structure, to build suspense, to build up a narrative pace that moves from exposition to revelation.  Under ALPHABET, Etienne writes,

I have a penchant for facts.  No doubt about that.  Once, during the middle of an examination by a physician, I noticed the acronym ‘OCD’ in large red capital letters next to my name.

In large part, this story writes back to the diagnosis in those three letters.  He reveals to the reader so much more than is dismissed by the label.   He is self-deprecating, honest to a fault, but he is also capable of great warmth.  For each letter of the alphabet, Etienne precedes his catalogue of words with a character sketch of the letter:

H is a model of simplicity and integrity.  Its fence-like structure prevents it from having any pretence to handsomeness.  The crossbar dividing its two verticals must be rendered expressively for it to have any hope of catching the eye.  If a letter can be said to be a wallflower, that claim can be made for H.  I often think myself its human equivalent.

Luckily, words and pictures allow him much more scope than OCD and wallflower, and his dictionary was a wonderful read.

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A Bookish Passage from the Booker Winner

A description of the narrator’s girlfriend’s bookshelf:

Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form.  Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes.  There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle.  I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own.  Further, they seemed to be an organic continuation of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending

I think it might be the most honest passage in the book.  Certainly the most reliable characterization of Veronica.  Anyone with the good sense to choose I Capture the Castle as her comfort read can’t be as mad as her boyfriend makes her out to be.

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Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie

Luka and the Fire of Life

by Salman Rushdie

New York: Knopf, 2010.

A review in isn’ts.

I read this book and thought immediately about how I would write up my review by beginning with the statement that while I get a bit impatient with Rushdie’s fiction, I love his non-fiction.  “Imaginary Homelands” is one of my favourite essays of all time.  I would then quote from it the passages that I’d highlighted in my many readings of the essay, tell you all how he speaks for me and my peripatetic childhood, rave about how wonderful it is when an author can tell you something about yourself.

That isn’t going to happen.  I lost the damn book.  The damn precious book.  I know it’s on the shelves here somewhere, but I can’t find it anywhere. 

So, to Luka. 

Here’s the thing: I don’t want say too much about the plot because I liked it, but I felt that the reviews I’d read had spoiled the plot for me.  They gave too much away.  This post isn’t going to do that.

I read several reviews in book review pages, and I hurried to read Rushdie’s latest because it’s a book by a dad for his son, about a dad and his son, and I just love the gesture. 

In this book, Luka has to travel to the World of Magic in order to save his father, the storyteller Rashid Khalifa.  Something of a sequel to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was written for Rushdie’s eldest son, this book is for his youngest son, Milan, pictured with Rushdie above, and the narrator refers explicitly to sibling rivalry: rivalry between both brothers and books.

Rushdie has so much fun with words.  Here is Nobodaddy, Luka’s sinister guide, when Luka has difficulty in believing that they are really going to the World of Magic:

Just a story? … Only a tale?   My ears must be deceiving me.  …  You of all boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.  Do rats tell tales?  Do porpoises have narrative purposes?  Do elephants ele-phantasize?  You know as well as I do that they do not.  Man alone burns with books. (34)

Nobodaddy looks a lot like Luka’s father, who is also, of course, Rushdie himself, and I was reminded of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, in which a parallel world exists where the protagonist’s parents are played by sinister look-alikes.  Luka also has the amazing presence of mind and groundedness that Gaiman’s child protagonists have. 

Despite knowing too much of the plot ahead of time, I found this a very cleverly plotted book.  It is also an impassioned tribute to and argument in favour of imagination, creativity and narrative, written and oral.  It is a book about the magic and power of books and stories, about how that power can wax and wane.  When Luka arrives at the Heart of Magic, he notices that the world is in a state of disrepair.  The Insultana of Ott (ha!) explains,

Magic is fading from the universe….  We aren’t needed anymore, or that’s what you all think, with your High Definitions and your low expectations.  One of these days you’ll wake up and we’ll be gone, and then you’ll find out what it’s like to live without even the idea of Magic. (132) 

While I got a bit impatient with Rushdie’s narrator, I found Luka very endearing.  He’s an able adventurer, clever and humble.  The ending to the story isn’t ever seriously in question, but he gets us there in wonderful style.

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The Incident Report by Martha Baillie

The Incident Report

Martha Baillie

Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2009.

This photo does not do the cover of the book justice, nor do any others I have found.  On the cover of The Incident Report is a photograph of a book with black binding called The Incident Report, a novel by Martha Baillie.  The photograph is sharp enough that you can see that it has a fabric hardcover binding, but there is a visible laid and wove pattern of the paper used for the actual cover that competes with the horizontal lines of the photographed fabric cover.  Art and life duke it out in the visible signs of texture.

Inside the covers, art and life also duke it out, and form continues to be a defining principle.  The protagonist of the novel is Miriam, and her story is composed of 144 incident reports about the goings on at the Allan Gardens branch of the Toronto Public Library.  These are often short (one paragraph, rarely more than one page) sketches of the crazies who come in to the library, and it must surely be one of the premises of this novel that Information Studies (formerly known as Library Science) should include classes in social work.  I call them “crazies”; Miriam is less judgemental, almost emotionless.  As Karen Luscombe states in her review,

When she happens upon a “sticky mess” left by one of the library’s “determined masturbators,” Miriam’s absurd über-restraint simply compels: “The books, soiled by what looked like common semen, we bagged in clear plastic and I withdrew them from the collection. No other actions were taken.” The effect simply harrows.

My favourite incident report is one I am afraid I will be doomed to enact in my dotage:

Incident Report 92

An elderly patron identified himself as Ovid Mallory.  He came to the Reference desk to say he had “lost his ideas.”  As he could not recall his phone number or address, the police were called.  The time was 5:30 PM. (135)

Baillie herself has worked as a public librarian, and the end papers of the novel (the numbers 1-9 written closely and repetitively in ballpoint pen and covering the front and back of loose leaf paper) were papers she found in her own librarian life. 

I had no reason to believe the writer of numbers was a man, but often as not, beliefs ignore reason. (41)

In addition to the sketches of the library’s crazy patrons, a mystery and a love story unfold, so the short reports do begin to accrue narrative continuity.  Miriam finds the score to Rigoletto in the photocopier, and then she begins to receive threatening notes from a man who adopts the identity of Verdi’s mad anti-hero.  The blurring of art and life becomes a threat, and the police are called in. 

Ultimately, there are actually few discussions of the content of books in this book about books.  Miriam’s father had been a bibliophile with the hoarder’s illness of amassing things and substituting goods for emotional gratification.  His books clog the passageways and staircases of their house, they overtake the garage, they threaten to topple onto all of them.  Odd that she would choose the profession of providing books to people when they are such a source of sorrow and shame at home. 

The intertextual references are to opera, music, painting, fairy tales, which of course appear in books but are part of an oral tradition.  Books themselves are used as projectiles, screens behind which to masturbate, and surfaces on which to ejaculate.  Miriam does go in search for books for patrons, but more often she provides them with other things: web sites, sheet music and toilet paper to take home.  The library is many things to many people. 

The form is clever, but I rather thought it proved its point too well: we are a fragmented lot, but we crave continuity.  Our society is fragmented, the minds of both the mentally stable and unstable are fragmented, we crave stability, but it is in short supply.  When Miriam meets her lover, Baillie uses the brevity and impressionism of the incident reports to great effect for the sex scenes.  There are flashes of eros, and they are beautiful.   But flashes of eros are not enough, and Miriam keeps asking Janko to tell her stories about himself.  In that repetition she not only hopes to build a narrative identity for him, she also tests him, probing for gaps in his story that might indicate that he is not telling the truth.  

She needs more, and so did I.  I found the fragmented sketches to be an obstacle to pleasure, and while I became more engaged as the mystery of Rigoletto unfolded, the appeal of the descriptions of the patrons wore thin. 

As a book about books, though, it succeeds brilliantly and darkly.  Like Audrey Niffenegger’s The Night Bookmobile, this book warns that we get lost in books at our own peril, that human connection trumps falling into a well of lost plots. 

For a link to an interview on CBC, visit Martha Baillie’s site here.

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