Le Roi de fer by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witnessing the End of Chivalry “The king was still against the balustrade. He looked at the black hand of the grandmaster planted in the red cinders. A burnt hand; all that remained of the illustrious order of the knights of the Temple. But this hand was immobilized in the gesture of anathema.” Starting in 1314, Maurice Druon’s Le Roi de Fer (The Iron King) (1955) works three interrelated plots together: the cruel end of the Templars and the unfolding of their grandmaster’s curse; the efforts of King Philip the Fair’s unhappily married daughter Isabelle, Queen of England, and her larger than life cousin Robert Artois, to nail the wives of Philip’s three sons for adultery; and the French countryside love story of a young Lombard (Italian) money lender in training (who at one point travels to London with Bocaccio’s father). As in the best historical fiction, Druon makes his story come alive by convincingly setting the historical stage of his novel through vivid details of daily life in the past, here in the early fourteenth century, including its superstitions, passions, pleasures, machinations, and brutality, focusing on the aristocracy but not neglecting the commoners. It's a compelling book because everyone is so human, while the situations they’re in are often so terrible: interrogating or being interrogated via torture, attending or suffering gruesome public executions, learning that their sons are cuckolds or daughters adulterers, gloating over the downfall of a nemesis, using blackmail to stop a persecution or poison to kill an enemy, and so on. King Philip is ruthless, unforgiving, and cold, like a statue, an Iron King (“In the terrible function of justice he filled, Philip the Fair seemed absent from the world, or rather he seemed to communicate with a universe vaster than the visible world”); he regrets that his people complain about taxes and don’t appreciate what he gives them; he’s only comfortable with animals like his hunting dogs; he hasn’t stopped missing his deceased wife, the only woman he ever loved. Queen Isabelle is pious, cold, and cruel like her father Philip, but also misses loving and being loved, because her husband King Edward spends his love on dirty rascals from the streets around the port of London. Druon perks up his narrative by dropping occasional foreshadowing bombs, like this: “People called on to play a decisive role in the history of nations are most often ignorant of the collective destinies incarnated in them. The two personages who came to have this long interview, on an afternoon in March 1314, in the palace of Westminster, couldn’t imagine that they would, by the linking of their acts, be the first artisans of a war between France and England which would last more than a hundred years.” Or this: “But destinies slowly form, and no one knows, among all our acts sewn at random, which sprout and flourish, like trees. No one could imagine that the kiss exchanged on the border of the Mauldre would conduct the beautiful Marie to the cradle of a king.” He writes many cool lines on human nature and life: “The suffering of others, the blood of others, the insults of his victims, their hate or their despair, didn’t touch him. This insensibility was a natural disposition aiding him to serve the superior interests of the kingdom. He had the vocation of public good as others had the vocation of love … There is in history a singular line, always renewed, of fanatics of order. Destined for an abstract and absolute ideal, for them human lives have no value if they threaten the dogma of institutions; and one could say that they have forgotten that the collectivity they serve is composed of men.” He describes characters memorably: “This curious slowness that she had in her voice, gestures, and even in her manner of moving and looking at something. She gave the impression of undulating softness and abnormal placidity; but irony shone in her eyes between her long black eyelashes. The misfortune of others, their struggles and their dramas, surely delighted her.” He can even write lyrical romance scenes: “And they stayed like that [kissing] for long seconds, among the peeping of birds, the far off barking of dogs, and all the great respiration of nature that seemed to lift the earth under their feet.” He also includes some helpful notes to explain historical concepts or events or laws, etc. I found the French of the 20th-century book harder to read for some reason than that of the 19th-century Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, looking up and not finding more words in my Kindle dictionary in Druon’s book than I did in Dumas’. Moreover, it is true that there are few “good” characters in Druon’s novel; there are flawed ones or out and out vile ones, like Nogaret. But I was completely caught by The Iron King and look forward to reading the next six books in his Les Rois Maudits (The Accursed Kings) series. View all my reviews
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Hadashi No Gen Vol.1 - 10 Complete Collection [In Japanese] by Keiji Nakazawa
My rating: 5 of 5 stars A Manga Epic about War, the Bomb, and Buckwheat Whew! I finally read Kenji Nakazawa’s atomic bomb manga epic Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). Twenty years ago, I bought the three-volume set in the Hiroshima Peace Museum (the original was published in ten-volumes from 1973-1987), but I’d never read it ‘cause it’s so long (2600+ pages) and promised to be so horrifying. It turned out to be a harrowing but also funny and moving story and good practice for reading Japanese (e.g., I learned the Hiroshima dialect way to hostilely address a person: “Odore!”). Inspired by Nakazawa’s experiences before, during, and after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the story recounts eight years in the life of his fictional alter-ego (Barefoot) Gen Nakaoka, from age five to thirteen, including his relationships with his family, friends, and nemeses as they struggle to survive before and after the bomb. Throughout, Nakazawa relates historical facts (e.g., how American scientists developed the bomb, how American researchers took samples from the victims to see what effect radiation had on them, and how American authorities suppressed such info to avoid criticism) and reveals Japanese culture (e.g., foods, clothes, jobs, baths, beds, houses, songs, jokes, schools, and communities) and human nature (from selfish and cruel to generous and loving). He draws and writes many memorable scenes, like the following: Gen’s father being beaten by the Japanese police. Gen and his family being helped by their good Samaritan Korean neighbor. Gen and his little brother fighting over a grain of rice. The atomic bomb detonating and destroying. Gen trying to free his family members from their collapsed house as an inferno approaches. Gen helping his mother bear his baby sister. Gen losing his hair. Gen caring for a badly burned young artist whose family won’t touch him. Gen mistaking Ryota for his deceased little brother. Ryota recalling reaching for a cicada when the bomb detonated and killed his parents. Gen trying to steal milk for his sister from the US military but ending up with condoms. Gen earning money by scavenging scrap metal, collecting sewage, and selling skulls. Gen learning how to draw perspective from an old artist. Gen going on a date to Miyajima with Mitsuko. Gen giving Mitsuko’s chastened father a portrait of her. Although Nakazawa depicts the terrible nature of the bomb, he also shows how Japanese war fervor, atrocities against civilians in China and Korea, and abuse of Chinese and Koreans in Japan, deprive the country of innocent victim status. Some of the most disturbing parts of the manga occur before the bomb when, because his father is antiwar, Gen’s family is tormented by neighbors, teachers, and police. Nakazawa’s art looks like that of 1970s manga, ranging from realistic to cartoonish and effectively using camera shots, dynamic motion lines, and expressionistic emotion lines. His panels are rectangular or square, and he dramatically employs rare full-page, half-page, or third-page pictures. He depicts the aftermath of the bomb as a hellscape: buildings collapse, streets buckle, telephone poles snap, and everything burns (even horses); semi-nude people shuffle with hands outstretched before them, their melting skin dripping like wax, or stagger like walking cacti, their bodies bristling with glass fragments; corpses bloat and burst in the river; maggots squirm, flies swarm, and mass cremations smoke. An appalling visual assault on the senses. Maximum body horror. Nakazawa also draws beautiful pictures, like in establishing shots of the sky, as in a small panel showing three flying birds silhouetted against the sun and singing “chi-chi-chi.” He also draws subtle and moving images, as when a closeup of the kids’ footsteps through the sand leads to a zoomed-out picture of their silhouettes starting to run home from the beach with a bright sun above them. He evokes strong emotions via his layouts, as when Gen has been missing his hospitalized mother, and the turn of a page reveals a close-up of her smiling face, evocative lines radiating out from it, her eyes with stars in them. She’s home! Nakazawa also effectively uses suspense and time, as when he informs us that the bomb detonated on August 6th at 8:15 AM, so the family wall clock reading 7:00 means 75 more minutes of “normal” wartime life. When Gen assures his mother that they have nothing to worry about, we worry for them. And when the family clock reads 8:00, they should have fifteen more minutes, but when we turn the page the bomb detonates, time having skipped forward to shock us. Throughout the epic, Nakazawa vividly shows that “In any and every way, war ruins people’s lives.” Gen meets many physically and psychologically damaged people, like the burn-scar-faced girl he says is beautiful only to have her curse him and try to commit suicide after she sees her reflection. At the same time, Nakazawa depicts the resilience of the human spirit. Despite everything he experiences, Gen lives spunkily and encourages other people to try. Surviving adversity makes us stronger, as Gen’s father tells him early on: “Be like buckwheat! The more you step on it and press it down, the stronger and straighter it grows.” It becomes an inspiring refrain for Gen. There are other themes in the manga: Hard work and a positive attitude improve your chances of survival; in any society, in wartime or peacetime, there are unethical, amoral, and cruel people (e.g., politicians, officials, police, gangsters, and any majority) exploiting and tormenting weaker people, and we must oppose such bullies with all our strength; families don't have to be biological to be strong; art should be borderless. At times Gen seems too articulate, intelligent, and aware for his age, serving as mouthpiece for the creator Nakazawa. At one point, Gen’s mother says, “Any time you sense a war feeling starting, you have to immediately speak up loudly against it. There’ll always be some people who say, ‘for the country,’” and Gen replies, “Mom, I won’t let another war happen! No matter what noble and beautiful things people say, I won’t be deceived.” Another time he stops “Kimigayo” from being sung at his junior high school graduation ceremony, telling the audience that the song represents the emperor, who is a war criminal, and that Japanese soldiers cut babies out of pregnant Chinese women with bayonets. Such messages are apt and necessary, but I can’t always believe Gen’d be able to deliver them. The manga has other slight flaws. Given its antiwar thrust, it indulges in too much typical Japanese slapstick violence among family members--though that may be a matter of cultural taste. Nakazawa seems to distinguish between different kinds of violence, acceptable one-on-one fighting vs. abominable bombing and war. Gen is righteously violent: as he ages, he moves from biting evildoers’ fingers to the bone and headbutting their groins to knocking them out with his fists. More than once the manga condones the killing of wicked yakuza by Gen’s surrogate little brother Ryota, being nothing compared to what war criminals did during WWII. Finally, there’s a bit too much potty humor, as when Gen pees on malefactors. All that said, the work is majestic. Anyone wanting to know what it was like to live in Hiroshima before, during, and after the bomb while affirming the power of the human spirit to survive horrors should read Hadashi no Gen (and there are English and other translations). View all my reviews
Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Last night a-marrying—to-day a-burying" I can’t believe my Mom read Eric Brighteyes to me when I was in Junior High school! Imagine her, a “cheerful by nature” Unitarian Mother for Peace, reading something like this to 12-year-old me: “Here, it would seem, is nothing but hate and strife, weariness, and bitter envy to fret away our strength, and at last, if we come so far, sickness, sorrowful age and death, and thereafter we know not what. Little of good do we find to our hands, and much of evil; nor know I for what ill-doing these burdens are laid upon us. Yet must we needs breathe such an air as is blown about us, Gudruda, clasping at that happiness which is given, though we may not hold it.” I guess she read it to me cause she knew I had a Viking fetish. The edition we read of H. Rider Haggard’s 1891 Icelandic saga pastiche was published in 1974 in the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library series, with the original beautiful monochrome wood cut illustrations by the splendidly named Lancelot Speed. The book must have been beyond me: adult storyline (a love triangle tragedy), archaic syntax and vocabulary, and Icelandic setting (with Norse gods like Odin and Ran, supernatural figures like the Norns and Valkyries, and exotic cultural features like weregild). And from that first reading, over the decades I forgot everything but a few scenes, like the hero waking to find his sword sticking through his lover’s heart, and only retained a vivid memory of having been excited and moved by the story. So I was curious to reread the novel a while ago (in 2011). I found it a brutal, beautiful, fascinating, and powerful tale of Norsemen and Vikings and witches and berserkers, in all their bleak, brave, destructive, and passionate glory. Despite (or because of) the tragic deaths prophesied early in the novel for the main characters, and despite (or because of) their pride, anger, jealousy, gullibility, and violence, I cared about Eric, Skallagrim, and Gudruda, as well as about supporting characters like Asmund and “villainous” characters like Swanhild, and suspensefully read their inevitable progressions toward their foretold dooms because I kept hoping that somehow they would avoid them. Haggard manipulates his characters with supernatural devices (potions, spells, gods, etc.) while never making them do anything they couldn’t do anyway due to their own human hearts. And the thrall Jon, the amateur skald who turns out to have kept the saga of Eric Brighteyes alive, has his own minor but interesting role to play in the story… There is a grim humor in the novel, as when Eric takes to calling Skallagrim “the drunkard” or to mocking cowed foes. There is horror, too, as when Swanhild makes an evil pact with her familiar-demon-sending, or as when her eyes glow red as she casts a sleeping spell, or as when all the men whom Eric has killed or caused to die crowd silently around his fire. And numerous impressive scenes: Eric wrestling Skallagrim, Skallagrim inopportunely indulging his fondness for ale, Gudruda cleaning Eric’s festering wound, Eric awaking after his wedding night, the Norns revealing their weaving of Eric’s life and its end, and so on. Haggard’s style is epic, archaic, and laconic (“I care not for this rede”; “thou shouldst take my helm”; etc.) and plenty of Icelandic saga words like “fey,” “athling,” and “baresark.” And plenty of alliteration, clauses beginning “For,” and vivid and meet similes. Characters (especially Eric) are wont to break into Anglo-Saxon-esque alliterative verse in moments of intense emotion (similar to what Poul Anderson later does in The Broken Sword): "Hence I go to wreak thy murder. Hissing fire of flaming stead, Groan of spear-carles, wail of women, Soon shall startle through the night. Then on Mosfell, Kirtle-Wearer, Eric waits the face of Death. Freed from weary life and sorrow, Soon we'll kiss in Hela's halls!" Haggard even imagines a sentient sword precursor to Stormbringer: "Thou art a strange sword, Whitefire," he said, "who slayest both friend and foe! Shame on thee, Whitefire! We swore our oath on thee, Whitefire, and thou hast cut its chain! Now I am minded to shatter thee." And as Eric looked on the great blade, lo! it hummed strangely in answer. The reader of the free Librivox audiobook, Brett Downey, does not have a charismatic voice, and his female characters verge on the artificially feminine, and yet he reads the rhythm, pauses, and words well, and I came to enjoy listening to him. I liked his gruff Skallagrim voice and his simple, good natured Eric voice. He effectively overdubs his voice a few times when a large number of men shout in unison. And Haggard’s prose is so distinctive and savory that it is just a pleasure to hear it spoken aloud (though I’d like to time travel to hear my Mom—bless her heart—read it to me again…) If you like Viking stories or tragic heroic fantasy like The Broken Sword and The Children of Hurin, you would probably like this book. And if you are interested in the history of fantastic fiction, you should read it, because, apparently, it’s the first modern English novel to pastiche the Icelandic sagas and also influenced Tolkien. View all my reviews
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Heiligman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars informative, suspenseful, absorbing, and moving--but oh, the present tense and short sentences! To write Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers (2017), Deborah Heiligman read the letters between the brothers and their family members and friends and spent years researching and thinking about her subjects until she was ready to write her book. And it is excellent: informative, absorbing, suspenseful, and moving. Heiligman tells the story in fourteen parts called Galleries, beginning with a Threshold and an Entresol and ending with an Exit, as if in reading her book we are walking through an exhibition of Vincent's paintings and the life that produced them. The Galleries range from Beginnings (1852-1872), move through topics like Missteps, Stumbles (1875-1879), The Quest (1880-1882), An Expanded Palette (1885-1887), and A Sense of the Finite (1890) and end with Remains (1890-1891). Each Gallery is made up of multiple chapters with titles like The Rose and the Thorn, Vincent and Theo Walking, Sorrow, Uncle Vincent’s Paintings, A Happy Visit, and Theo Alone. There are plenty of epigraphs from letters. Each Gallery begins with a two-page monochrome reproduction of a relevant sketch or a painting by Vincent. In the middle of the book, there is a set of eleven color reproductions of important paintings. After the book come useful appendices: People (family, friends, colleagues); Vincent and Theo's Journey (a chronology); Author’s Note (why and how Heiligman wrote the book); a Bibliography (books and articles); Endnotes (supplemental information and citations of letters); and Index. Through the course of the book, Heiligman provides many interesting details about Vincent’s family, childhood, failed attempts to become an art dealer and a missionary, painstaking efforts to learn how to become a painter, early dark sober works, discovery of vibrant color, artistic theories, techniques, and media, struggle with mental illness, friendships with other artists, relationship with Theo, and so on. As for Theo, there are interesting details on his successful career as an art dealer in the Netherlands and Paris, his relationship with his beloved (but difficult) older brother, his long pursuit of an initially uninterested woman and eventual marriage to her, his syphilis, and so on. If, as Heiligman says before her book begins, “The world would not have Vincent without Theo,” she also demonstrates that the world would not have Theo without his wife Jo. Not only did Theo support Vincent financially and emotionally and believe in his art and make possible the many paintings by his brother that we love today, but his wife Jo indispensably supported Theo in his support of Vincent and also believed in his art. I had known nothing about her before reading this book. In Vincent’s watercolor painting of a windmill near the Hague, two male figures face each other, one looking taller than the other but also slumped, rumpled, and importunate, and although it rarely shows up in books about Van Gogh, according to Heiligman it should be one of his most famous works. In their letters, the brothers mentioned meeting at that windmill and drinking milk there and talking, and the author’s analysis and description of that encounter and of the painting and of its significance to the relationship between the brothers and her belief that “it makes sense to see the men as Vincent and Theo,” make reading this book worthwhile. I learned many other interesting things from this book. For example-- --Vincent’s difficult childhood, including his awareness that a year before he was born his mother gave birth to a stillborn son who was also called Vincent, and his tendency to destroy his youthful attempts at art if his family praised them. --Vincent’s guilt over being such a financial burden on his brother, and Theo’s saintly generosity and assurances, as in one letter that's excerpted for an epigraph to a chapter: “Your work and... brotherly affection... is worth more than all the money I'll ever possess.” --it’s possible that just as Van Gogh perhaps did not cut off his own ear (did Gauguin do it, and Van Gogh cover up for him?), Van Gogh did not shoot himself (did a boy playing with a gun do it?). -- Theo suffered from syphilis and died horribly from it barely one year after his brother’s death. That Theo accomplished as much as he did for his brother and for the world of art while declining in health is miraculous. That he managed to avoid giving the disease to his wife is as well. Chapter 101, Vincent’s Paintings, is remarkable. For it Heiligman selects some titles from the almost 150 paintings he made during a year in an asylum and arranges them in a two-page spread. The selected titles swirl around the pages like the clouds in the sky in the famous Starry Night painting, and the title of that painting appears on the two-page spread larger than those of the other titles and is placed in the center of a swirl just like the moon in the original painting. Another remarkable chapter is 120, Vincent’s Brother, January 25, 1891, which consists of but two potent paragraphs of one sentence each: Vincent died in Theo’s arms. Theo dies alone. The main flaw I find in the book is that Heiligman writes in the currently trendy style of so much young adult American literature: present tense (which feels affected in a biography) and short sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. I'm not against those things per se, but I do think they are overused in too many books these days and in this one in particular. The 409-page book consists of 121 chapters. The extreme brevity of Chapter 120 increases the tragic power of its contents, but because there are similarly short sentences and paragraphs everywhere in the book, the emotional impact of that chapter and of short sentences and paragraphs anywhere else in the book are attenuated. There are MANY places like the following: Vincent and Gauguin are both prolific, and Theo is having success selling Gauguin’s work. Soon, Vincent is sure, Theo will sell more of his, too. The brothers’ hard work is paying off. Vincent is realizing his dream of the studio in the South. Although he and Gauguin are not the easiest of companions and the arguments continue, it all really does seem to be working. Until it isn't. Anyway, I learned from this book so many interesting things about Vincent and his paintings, Theo, Jo, love, and the art world of the late 19th century in Europe. View all my reviews
The Letter of Marque by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Laudanum, Balloons, Privateers, Lucky Jack Aubrey Early in The Letter of Marque (1988), the twelfth entry in Patrick O’Brian’s splendid age of sail series, a character thinks, “How delightful it is to be at sea once more.” Amen, this reader thinks, because the previous novel, The Reverse of the Medal (1986), takes place almost entirely ashore, and the books are most compelling at sea. In that 11th volume, Jack Aubrey was removed from the list of post-captains and expelled from the British navy for his (innocent) involvement in a stock manipulation scandal. To restore some zest for life in Jack, his friend Stephen Maturin (suddenly wealthy after inheriting a fortune) bought Jack’s old ship the Surprise and secured a letter of marque enabling Jack to go to sea as captain of a private man of war (don’t call it a privateer in front of Jack!). Stephen has become, then, not only the ship’s surgeon, but also its owner. Thus, the beginning of The Letter of Marque consists of Jack trying to mold the crew of the Surprise, about half of whom are former smugglers and privateers, the other half former Surprise men, into a capable, responsive, and well-moraled whole by going on a two-week trial voyage. Jack will integrate the different groups of men via rigorous gunnery practice. He’s also hoping for a reasonably challenging blow (storm) to further unite the diverse men. Through his intelligence (spy) connections, Stephen is able to inform Jack that the villains responsible for his scandal have escaped to France and that sensitive political considerations will prevent his being reinstated in the navy for a while. But it couldn't hurt his cause if Jack were to capture some prize ships, especially a French or American frigate of equal or greater size and strength to those of the Surprise (the War of 1812 is ongoing). And Stephen would like to score another intelligence coup against the Bonapartists of France. To help him sleep and deal with the pain of his wife Diana having absconded to Sweden with a handsome young officer, Stephen is also still prescribing himself laudanum, figuring that “it's no more injurious than smoking tobacco.” And the way that laudanum and hot air balloons converge in the novel is funny, scary, and moving. As ever in his novels, O’Brian efficiently brings readers new to the series up to speed (without boring veteran readers) by sketching Jack and Stephen’s situations and their contrasting and complementary characters: big Jack is capable “Lucky Jack Aubrey” aboard ship but a gullible financially and legally entangled mark ashore, while small Stephen is a dyslexic seaman, a “perpetual lubber,” aboard ship but a shrewd agent on land. And both men have their respective instruments (violin and cello), love of classical music, and deep friendship, too. (They often refer to one another as “brother” or “dear.”) Like all of O'Brian's novels, this one is a pleasure to read. It features early 19th-century politics, culture, nature, fauna, music, complex and appealing characters, witty and historically appropriate conversation, sudden and suspenseful action, and vivid depiction of being at sea in the age of sail. All of it excellently written. There are many vivid sensual details of sailing on a ship: “... choppy seas smacking against her starboard bow and streaming aft, mixed with the rain.” “It was indeed the sweetest evening, balmy, a golden sky in the west, and a royal blue swell, white along the frigate's side and in her wake.” “Everything looked superficially the same, the familiar sun-filled white curves above, the taught rigging and severe shadows...” “…watching the distant battle as it moved slowly across the western sea in a night all the blacker for the flashes of the guns.” “... The complex aroma, made up of scrubbed planks, fresh sea breeze, stale bilge water, tarred cordage, paint, and damp sailcloth.” O’Brian has a dry sense of humor, too: --“The landlord came back with a satisfied expression of one whose worst fears have been realized.” --“It is a remarkable fact that in all my years at sea, I have never come across an incompetent carpenter.” Unlike the tenth and eleventh novels, this twelfth one ends with a fair amount of closure, which is nice, while still leaving some loose ends to look forward to being tied up in future books. It is a fun, suspenseful, and moving novel. And Ric Jerrom is, as ever, the ideal reader for the audiobook, smoothly donning different accents, singing an infectious sailor-work song, and greatly enhancing the experience. (view spoiler)[Jack had been so unlucky in recent novels in the series that it was a relief to see him run into a big run of luck, both on sea and on land, for a change. And it was good to see Stephen with Diana again. (hide spoiler)] View all my reviews
The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Jack and Stephen Mostly Ashore After the showy towing of a prize (a British whaler that’s been recaptured from the Americans during the ongoing War of 1812) into the West Indies squadron and the exciting chase after an American privateer, the eleventh novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series of Age Napoleon British navy books, The Reverse of the Medal (1986), occurs completely ashore, back in England. The story mostly develops the spy side of O’Brian’s series, with a treasonous “rat” making trouble for British intelligence, Stephen Maturin, and Post-Captain Jack Aubrey. The prime odd couple and best friends Jack and Stephen are entertaining and compelling ashore, where Jack is a gullible mark for every “land shark” and is caught in a tangled web of legal and financial difficulties from which he expects to extricate himself by using his prize money to engage in a little “harmless” stock-purchasing, and where Stephen is much more in command of himself (at sea he is prone to mistaking starboard from larboard, falling down hatches, and drowning). Although it should be said that Stephen has been knocked a bit off stride by the burning down of his comfortable London lodgings and the absconding of his wife Diana to Sweden with a handsome young Lithuanian hussar. And yet… O’Brian’s novels lose much of their attraction (for this reader) when Jack and Stephen are on land. O’Brian is so good at evoking what it must have been like to be at sea in the early 19th century with sails propelling a ship through every kind of weather over every kind of water in every kind of spot on the globe. He does give us some of that good stuff early in this novel, as in the two following examples: Short and fast: “There was a pure keen delight in this flying speed, the rushing air, and the taste of sea in his mouth.” Long and slow: “There were mornings when the ship would lie there mirrored in a perfectly unmoving glossy sea, her sails drooping, heavy with dew, and he would dive from the rail, shattering the reflection and swimming out and away beyond the incessant necessary din of two hundred men hurrying about their duties or eating their breakfast. There he would float with an infinity of pure sea on either hand and the whole hemisphere of sky above, already full of light; and then the sun would heave up on the eastern rim, turning the sails a brilliant white in quick succession, changing the sea to still another nameless blue, and filling his heart with joy.” Ashore, the novels tend to turn one part comedy of manners and two parts cloak-and-dagger. And since about the eighth book in the series, we’ve known that the alcoholic, gambling blackguard Andrew Wray is in fact the “Judas” in British intelligence selling his country out to Napoleon and hatching schemes against Jack and or Stephen, so it’s increasingly hard to believe that Stephen, who in addition to being a famous naturalist and doctor is a veteran ace spy, never suspects the guy, and it increasingly feels like O’Brian is contriving Stephen’s obtuseness to generate conflict. So as I’ve read on in the series, I’ve been increasingly finding it flawed in this area, and here this book has seven of ten chapters devoted to this plot strand. Moreover, O’Brian is not averse to setting up a fine climax and then cutting it short and ending a novel without any resolution, so the reader is left having to read the start of the next entry in the series to find out what happened at the end of the previous one. This happens at the end of the tenth book, The Far Side of the World, when everything is leading up to a conflict between American and British sailors stuck on an otherwise deserted island in the Pacific, only to have a deus ex machina presumably save the day, but the novel ends so abruptly that we don’t know exactly what was going on with the American ship’s captain and crew, how the Surprise happened to show up at just that moment in the nick of time, and so on and so forth. This eleventh novel pulls a similar disappointing trick: abrupt climax and absent resolution. There are surely many virtues in this book. Plenty of interesting things about Jack’s natural dark-skinned son, the British legal system, about cricket played between two ships’ crews, about how quickly and competently sailors can renovate a cottage, about how to set up as a privateer, and of course about Jack and Stephen’s friendship (e.g., “Brother, I told you I had inherited from my godfather”). And O’Brian is a fine, wise writer, so of course there are nice lines revealing human nature, like “Ever since I had a great deal of money, I have found that I much dislike being parted from it, particularly in a sharp or overbearing manner,” as well as great descriptions of the natural world, like a “living silence” when “the green world and the gentle blue sky might have just been created.” But I’m hoping that the next book will mostly take Jack and Stephen to sea again! View all my reviews
Funeral Games by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Funeral Game of Thrones While the first book of Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great trilogy, Fire from Heaven (1969), depicts Alexander’s youth and ends with the death of his father, and the second, The Persian Boy (1972), recounts Alexander’s Asian conquests and ends with his death, the third, Funeral Games (1981), deals with the aftermath of his death, depicting how his empire, as the priests put it, fragmented like a meteor fallen to earth. Alexander’s final breath at 32 throws his empire into “the uncertainties of the shattered future.” The unique man (endowed with a fire from heaven!) has died after conquering in several years a vast empire, including Greece, Egypt, and much of Asia all the way into parts of India. Before dying, he’d tried to unite his Macedonian men with those they conquered, especially the Persians, by adopting Persian customs, incorporating Persians into his armies, and marrying his generals to Persian noble women and himself to Persian princesses. His death threatens all that fragile cross-culturalism, for in their “victor’s pride and xenophobia” most of the Macedonians hated Alexander’s adoption of the “barbarians” and their customs. Furthermore, Alexander died before he could name a successor and before his two mutually hostile pregnant wives (Bactrian chieftain’s daughter Roxane and Persian princess Stateira) could give birth. He did apparently give his ring to one of his generals, Perdikkas, to act as a regent, but the ambitious man is not well liked. Another general, Ptolemy, who was Alexander’s bastard half-brother and trusted blood-brother, is setting his sights on Egypt and Alexander’s divine corpse. Some think that Alexander wanted Krateros, another general he trusted, to succeed him, but before the king fell ill, he sent the man with some veterans back to Macedon to replace the regent there, Antipatros. Antipatros’ vile son Kassandros, who has enviously hated Alexander all his life, has seemingly played a role in facilitating Alexander’s death and is eager to rule Macedonia. And then there is Alexander’s half-brother Arridaios, simple and epileptic: good puppet king material. Still more. Whenever Renault is depicting events in one arena, Asia in the first half of the novel or in Macedonia in the second half, related developments in the other arena are brewing offstage. Alexander’s “gorgon” mother Olympias has been intriguing against Antipatros while Alexander has been off in Asia, and his younger sister Kleopatra wants to become the queen of a new king like, for instance, Perdikkas. And Alexander’s amazon-like half-sister Kynna and her amazon-like daughter Eurydike have been tossing their javelins and planning to go to Asia so Eurydike may become queen by marrying Arridaios. The complex and volatile situation makes Renault’s novel suspenseful. And all of the intrigue and infighting shows how special Alexander was to have been able to keep it all together for so long. As one character put it, “Alexander contained us all.” Renault narrates from the points of view of multiple characters, including all of the above-mentioned players in the funeral games (except for Krateros), as well as Babylonian priests, Alexander’s secretary Eumenes, the mother of Darius Sisygambis, a phalanx captain, a harem eunuch, a Persianized Macedonian satrap, and even briefly the Persian boy Bagoas who narrated the second book. All the many points of view are compelling. Although many of her characters, like Roxane, Olympias, and Kassandros, do atrocious things, they all have human motivations: there are no cardboard villains. Renault does make us root for Ptolemy, who is strong, practical, and loyal and knows that no one can slip into Alexander’s shoes. She even gets us to sympathize with Roxane remembering Alexander: “After, he had fallen asleep; she remembered the fair boyish skin with the deep dimpled scars, the soft margins of his strong hair. She had wanted to feel and smell him as if he were good to eat, like fresh-baked bread. When she buried her face in him, he half-woke and held her comfortably, and slept again. The sense of his physical presence came back to her like life. At last, alone, in silence, she shed real tears.” As in her other two Alexander books, Renault writes great historical fiction. She writes psychologically complex and historically convincing characters. She makes history seem contingent and suspenseful. She writes striking similes (e.g., “She knew moderation no more than a hunting leopardess,” and “Tears ran from his eyes in silence like blood from an open wound”). She writes lines of wisdom for any era (e.g., “It was well to know that war was not all flags and trumpets,” and “Like other men who have indulged a long, rancorous hate, he blamed all adversity upon its object, never considering that his hatred, not his enemy had created his predicament”). She writes vivid descriptions that insert the reader into the era of her history and into the scenes of her story, as in the opening paragraph: “The ziggurat of Bel-Marduk had been half-ruinous for a century and a half, ever since Xerxes had humbled the gods of rebellious Babylon. The edges of its terraces had crumbled in landslides of bitumen and baked brick; storks nested on its ragged top, which had once held the god’s golden bedchamber and his sacred concubine in his golden bed. But this was the only defacement; the ziggurat’s huge bulk had defied destruction. The walls of the inner city by the Marduk Gate were three hundred feet high, but the ziggurat still towered over them.” It’s not a perfectly satisfying novel. Renault gives some figures and developments short shrift. Kleopatra disappears without explanation, and the actual ultimate division of the empire is left unexplained. Although we learn the fates of many of the funeral games players, especially the early losers, we do not learn much if anything about what happened to Alexander’s generals who went on to found new dynasties in different parts of his empire, like Seleucus, Antigonus, and Lysimachus. The first chapter, 323 BC, in which Alexander dies, is the longest and strongest in the novel, because it fully captures the chaotic vacuum he left. In any case, the book is an impressive, immersive conclusion to her Alexander trilogy, and the audiobook is finely read by Brian May. View all my reviews
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Eunuch Who Loved Alexander, or From Culture Shock to Cross-Cultural Intercourse Whereas Fire from Heaven (1969) tells the story of Alexander’s youth via a variety of third-person narration point of view characters, many of whom, like Alexander, Philip, and Hephaistion are martial men of violent action, The Persian Boy (1972) is the first-person story of Bagoas, an aristocratic Persian scion who was sold into slavery and gelded at age ten and then trained in the arts of giving pleasure to serve the Persian king Darius. Needless to say, although he is referred to as “the Persian boy,” his experiences rob him of his boyhood and leave him mature beyond his years. Bagoas follows the rumors and reports about Alexander, who, after his father Philip’s assassination, came to Asia with his army and began conquering the Persian empire. As the story develops, Bagoas, who says that “When we serve the great, they become our destiny,” finds himself serving Alexander. By having a eunuch from the culture the great conqueror is conquering tell Alexander’s story, Renault focuses her novel on cross-cultural intercourse. This is sexual, as in the relationship between Alexander and Bagoas, Alexander and his Bactrian wife Roxane, Alexander’s generals and the Persian noblewomen they married, and Alexander’s soldiers and the Persian (and Sogdian and Indian etc.) women they had kids with, and so on. But it is also general, as in the fusion of Macedonian and Grecian elements with Asian (especially Persian) elements. This was not an easy marriage of differences, as many old school Macedonians scorned the Persians as effete, gawdy barbarians and hated Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs (especially prostrating oneself before the king but also including his relationship with the eunuch Bagoas). Alexander faces more than one assassination attempt or mutiny. For his part, Bagoas at first finds many Macedonian customs barbaric or unseemly (e.g., their casual nudity, their use of rivers to wash bodies and clothes, their privies without privacy, their coarse food and manners, their lack of respect for officers and rulers). Although much of the novel deals with culture shock, however, still more of it deals with cross-cultural communication and mutual influences: “Two good wines blended to make a better.” There are scenes featuring interpreters and language learning, conflation of different cultures’ deities (e.g., Dionysius and Krishna or Zeus and Zoraster), and Alexander modeling his rule on that of the famous former Persian king/conqueror/unifier/hero Cyrus, or adopting Persian royal dress, or recruiting Persians into his bodyguard and even into the elite unit of Companions, or having an army of 30,000 Persian boys trained in Macedonian tactics and weapons, or taking under his wing boys born to Macedonian soldiers and Persian and other Asian women after their fathers returned to Macedonia. Renault’s Alexander is no bigot, saying things like, “To hate excellence is to hate the gods. One must salute it everywhere” (no matter in what person or culture or race it is found). At one point Bagoas thinks to Alexander, “You have brought more life than death into the world,” and for Renault Alexander’s conquests (which did of course result in many deaths, especially when a city or satrap rebelled against him after having surrendered to and allied with him) were not products of blood or power lust or racism, xenophobia, or nationalism, but more of a curiosity to see the whole world and a desire to unify its peoples into a single harmonious culture drawing on their best parts. Though she writes no graphic sex scenes, one strong element of her Alexander trilogy is the way in which Renault depicts natural and deep homosexual love, particularly that between Hephaistion and Alexander in the first book and between Bagoas and Alexander in the second. Bagoas thinks heartfelt things, like “There is nothing like giving joy to the one you love,” and “What can compare to giving comfort to the one you love?” Bagoas is telling the story from decades in the future when he’s living in Alexandria and Alexander is long dead. This recalls Count Belisarius (1938) by Robert Graves, in which a eunuch first-person narrator tells the story of a military man of action. In addition to exploring love and gender, etc., Renault uses the narrative strategy to avoid describing Alexander’s famous battles like Issus in first-hand eye-witness real time, because Bagoas is no soldier and isn’t present at most of them. Instead, he hears what happened from various sources and then relays the information to us. Bagoas happens to be in Babylon when the second big battle between Alexander and Darius is fought nearby, so he is able to tell us first hand about the preparations, the soldiers and armies and support staff and so on, and the post-battle chaos in the city, and much later he describes part of Alexander’s siege of a fortified town in India, but that’s about it. In short, readers who want detailed and exciting accounts of Alexander’s battles in Asia will be disappointed. Readers who want vivid and moving accounts of Alexander in his prime from the point of view of the Persian pleasure eunuch who became his lover will be engrossed. And audiobook reader Brian May's voice and manner enhance the novel. Renault wrote vivid historical novels that transport the reader to the distant past through vivid details and empathetic imagination for how people in any time think and feel. Her descriptive writing is concise and vivid: “The dead lay everywhere, like some strange fruit of the land, darkened with ripeness against the pale withered grass and scrub. A faint sweet stench was starting. It was hot.” “The room smelled of sex and sandalwood, with a tang of salt from the sea.” “Nothing could have made her anything but hideous, yet even a clay lamp is beautiful when its light shines at dusk.” “…smiling and showing teeth like peeled almonds.” There is appalling cruelty in the novel, as when Bagoas’ father’s nose, ears, and then head are cut off, or as when Bagoas is castrated. But Bagoas is a gentle, thoughtful, and empathic person. If, as the magi say, “There is the light and the dark, and all things that live have the power to choose,” Bagoas and his Alexander choose the light (and love and life). Thus, Alexander says, “One must live as if it would be forever and as if each day were the last.” Thus, the last line of the novel reads, “the embalmers filled him with everlasting myrrh.” View all my reviews
Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Young Alexander, or A Dysfunctional Family Tragedy In Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven (1969), King Philip and Queen Olympias of Macedon have the mother of all toxic marriages, permanently scarring their young son Alexander with their scorched earth warfare: “a pain he had been born with.” While at first one’s sympathy is with Olympias, Philip appearing drunken, brutish, and ugly and flinging four-year-old Alexander out of her bedroom and down the stairs, in time one begins sympathizing with the King, who seems to act with ironic restraint in the face of his wife’s hatred and curses (invoking the gods) and witchcraft (piercing the penis of a doll figure of the king with a needle), not to mention her provocative exaggerations, treasonous intrigues, and emotional blackmailing of her son when Alexander tries to be independent. True, Philip marries a series of teenage girls and has affairs with his young male squires (“minions”), but one suspects that had Olympias been more loving, Philip might have been more faithful. Another compelling thread through the novel is the relationship between Alexander and Hephaistion--“Alexander’s shadow.” Although the novel demonstrates a general acceptance of homosexuality or bisexuality, Alexander is mostly beyond things like sex and mainly just wants to unburden himself to Hephaistion as they sleep together, while Hephaistion tries to convince himself that he’s blessed by the gods to be so close to Alexander and to refrain from wanting more than pillow talk. Renault depicts their love and friendship as natural and deep: “Without you I should go mad.” “I, too, without you.” The story begins with four-year-old Alexander waking up with a snake wound round his waist and sneaking into his mother’s bedroom to return it, he thinks, to the Queen. Renault proceeds to depict landmark events from the future conqueror’s youth that reveal his personality, historical context, and destiny, including having his growth stunted by an overly zealous pedagogue admirer of Spartan severity, learning about Achilles and Patroclus, meeting Hephaistion for the first time, making Ptolemy his blood brother, killing his first man in his first violent action (at age twelve), meeting Demosthenes, winning and naming his beloved horse Bucephalus, receiving an education from Aristotle, successfully leading an army in battle for the first time, becoming regent at sixteen and cavalry general at eighteen, protecting his father during a mutiny, and so on. Renault renders such things suspenseful and compelling. Interestingly, the book stops before Alexander is king of Macedon, before he’s set foot in Asia, and before he’s known as Alexander the Great--although at sixteen he does defeat a Thracian tribe, displace them from their land, and found a city in his name there, earning the nickname Basilicus, or Little King. The novel, then, is about Alexander’s youthful potential. It does not even relate what happens in the aftermath of Philip’s death, ending, in a way, with a shocking cliffhanger. And the second novel in the Alexander trilogy, The Persian Boy (1972), will begin several years later with the point of view of the orphaned, enslaved, and castrated son of a Persian noble in the middle of the Persian Empire, while the third, Funeral Games (1981), begins with Alexander’s death. Mary Renault is impressive in her refusal to pander to readers. Another impressive feature of Fire from Heaven is the psychological complexity of her central characters, Alexander, Philip, and Hephaistion. Especially interesting is Alexander’s relationship with Philip: “Each eyed the other with curiosity, resentment, suspicion, regret, and a half-hope which each hid too well.” Philip loves Alexander and is proud of him but can’t help but see Olympias in the boy’s features and mannerisms, while Alexander is often too quick to believe his mother’s worst interpretations of Philip’s actions, even when it means ignoring his beloved Hephaistion’s more balanced ones. The King is at times reduced to wondering, “What did I do to deserve this?” Alexander is superb in Renault’s hands: beautiful, brave, loyal, loving, poised, reckless, clever, curious, unpretentious, charismatic, and destined for glory and fated to die early: “Shining and calm at the center of his mystery, the godlike freedom of killing fear.” Renault narrates by switching from among multiple points of views in third person, doing things like telling us what Alexander was up to on an early campaign by showing Philip reading a letter from the boy telling him what he accomplished (instead of showing Alexander accomplishing it in real time), and efficiently making events lead up to Philip’s death, the tragic core and climax of the novel. En route, she works in plenty of matter from Greek myths and The Iliad, Greek, Macedonian, and Persian history, and cultural contrasts, like Greek-Macedonian, Thebes-Athens, Attic-Sparta, Greek-Persia, etc. The novel is vivid, believable, transporting, moving, exotic, lean, fierce. It does what the best historical fiction does, transporting us to another time and place with details and imagination while making the characters relatable, as in the following lines: “In the midst of it, dwarfing shrines and altars like toys, a vast oak lifted its bare black labyrinth above the snow.” “She gave him with dropped lashes a little smile, fragile, mysterious like a hamadryad slipping out briefly from her tree.” “The smell of its sweat and breath and leather bathed him in its steam.” “He walked over, put out his hand, and touched Hephaistion as a man might touch a sacred object for luck or a good omen, while deeply concerned with something else.” Brian May reads the novel professionally and engagingly. View all my reviews
A Heart Divided by Jin Yong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Being a hero can't save your life" Yay! I finally got to finish Jin Yong’s influential and wonderful Legends of the Condor Heroes (1957-59), as the fourth and final volume of the classic wuxia epic, A Heart Divided, capably translated into English for the first time by Gigi Chang and Shelly Bryant (2020), recently became available on Audible. The last volume starts where the third left off: the young soulmates Guo Jing and Lotus Huang are escaping from the Iron Palm Gang, when Guo Jing carries his terribly wounded lover into a black swamp, desperate to find help for her. There they find a bizarre woman, Madam Ying the Supreme Reckoner, prematurely aged after ten years in the swamp spent mastering her own Weatherfish Slip kung fu technique and trying to solve abstruse mathematical problems, all in her effort to get revenge. “For more than a decade, Madame Yang had been curdling in shattered dreams of lost love, growing ever more bitter and spiteful.” Thus, when she sees the earnest young lovers, she wavers between helping them and relishing their plight. How should Guo Jing and Lotus interpret her recited poem about love prematurely turning the hair white like the white plumes on mandarin ducks who mate for life? Or her saying things like, “It’s human nature to stand by and do nothing. Any fool can beg.” Should Guo Jing and Lotus believe her assertion that Lotus has but three days to live and that the only person who can save her is three days’ distance? Many other questions are raised in this last volume of the epic: What will Guo Jing and Lotus do about his dilemma, knowing that they are soulmates but that he promised to marry Genghis Kahn’s daughter Khojin? What will happen when Genghis Kahn sets his sights on Guo Jing’s Song Empire in the south? Which martial master will win the twenty-year reunion competition on Mount Hua? Will everyone’s worst nemesis Viper Ouyang ever get his just deserts? Will the love triangle between Soul Light, the Hoary Urchin, and Madam Ying get resolved? Will Guo Jing return his scheming and lying blood brother Yang Kang back to “the path of righteousness”? Will he finally get revenge on the slimy Jin prince Wanyang Honlie for the murder of his parents or reunite with his first martial mentors, the Six Freaks of the South? Will he find a way to live in the world with kung fu when fearing that his pursuit of martial excellence has only brought harm to other people? The way such questions are answered is satisfying but sad, and the tone of this last volume is darker than that of the first three, because the entire epic depicts the maturing of Guo Jing and Lotus Huang from innocent teenagers full of the joy of life into more seasoned twenty-year-olds who have experienced soul damaging personal loss and hardship as well as the suffering that war wreaks on common people. Though it is a darker book than the previous three, it still contains plenty of pleasures. For example, the love between the good, optimistic, and blockheaded Guo Jing and the reckless, brilliant, and scheming Lotus is, as ever, sweet and moving (“I’d rather know no kung fu than see you hurt again”), though it does turn sad (“The more adventures we have together the more memories we'll have to share when we're apart”) and even becomes a little scary (“He wondered at the havoc that love could wreak on the heart”). There are many colorful kung fu repertoires (e.g., Dog Beating Cane, Dragon Subduing Palm, Cascading Peach Blossom Palms, Exploding Toad) and moves (e.g., Crunch Frost as Ice Freezes, Strike Grass Startle Snake, Flip the Mangey Dog Away). Many lines like, “He then let fly with a Dragon in the Field,” “He aimed at the Great Sun pressure point at the temple,” and “He launched a Hearty Laughter, hooking a finger in the corner of Viper’s mouth.” A panoply of weapons, from the expected (hands, feet, swords, spears etc.) to the exotic (metal fans, iron flutes, scribe brushes, exorcist staffs, martial phlegm, etc.). Needless to say, there’s a lot of imaginative, varied, and suspenseful action, from one-on-one kung fu duels to sieges of great cities. There are many beautiful and vivid descriptions, like “it [a finger] was as lithe and agile as a dragonfly dipping its tail into water,” and “Perched on the very brink above the jagged rocks below, she resembled a white camellia shivering in a storm.” There are many memorable aphorisms, such as “Emperors and generals are the bane of the people,” “It is in the nature of cruel and evil men to hate anyone who is their opposite,” “Virtue, loyalty, and integrity are more important than martial or literary prowess,” and “In victory or defeat, to earth we return.” There is plenty of Jin Yong’s entertainingly outrageous “sheer coincidence,” impossible chance meetings that feel perfectly inevitable. The audiobook reader Daniel York Loh reads the lines of the large and varied cast of characters with enthusiasm and distinctive personalities and moods and agendas without over-dramatizing and reads the base narration with perfect understanding, pacing, and emphasizing. His readings of all four volumes enhance and unify the texts of their three different translators. An Appendix: Notes on the Text closes the audiobook, concisely explaining things like lyric poetry, the kingdom of Dali, “rice” paper, jade, a famous translator from Sanskrit into Chinese, spirits in Hinduism and Buddhism, Genghis Kahn, Samarkand, the Confucian canon, and the author Jin Yong (1924-2018) and his works (300 million in legal sales, 1 billion in pirated). A Heart Divided is a complex novel of many genres: bildungsroman, love story, murder mystery, martial arts novel, historical novel, military novel. Perhaps most affectingly it’s an anti-war novel. The romance of Genghis Kahn unifying the Mongols and conquering a vast empire in the first volume is here starkly revealed to be a vast atrocity, as Guo Jing and Lotus travel past abandoned villages on roads lined with human skeletons. Lotus says, “I know what soldiers are like. You feast on common people.” A Heart Divided concludes Legends of the Condor Heroes (which has been called the Chinese Lord of the Rings but which is a very different classic) with a somber poem: Embers in the flames of war, Few homes left in villages poor. No rush to cross the river at dawn, The flawed moon sinks into cold sand. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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