In the Days of the Comet

Posted on April 27, 2016 by smellincoffee

In the Days of the Comet
© 1906 H.G. Wells
276 pages

Have you been cyanogened yet?  Carl Sagan delivered that preposterous line in the original Cosmos, reading the newspaper headlines of a century past. Then, as Halley’s Comet approached the Earth, fear and wonder spread — and some enterprising rascal sold gas masks to people who feared the comet’s toxic fumes. As it turns out, they needn’t have worried; the comet’s fumes are magic!

That’s the setup for In the Days of the Comet, which opens with an old man reminiscing about his youth, set in the last days of Earth before ‘the Change’, when all was foul and dismal.  He spent that week brooding, ignoring his mother, and stalking an ex-girlfriend across the country with the intent of shooting her.  Fortunately for all concerned, as he crashed through the brambles firing his revolver at the girl and her new beau, the fumes of an approaching comet mixed with the atmosphere of Earth and made the world anew.  Every living thing fell into a stupor, wakes up, and — after a contented belly scratch — decide to abolish everything and create The World State.  And we all lived happily ever after.

Aside from a joke about Texas,  very little of In the Days of the Comet made for enjoyable reading. The narrator is from the start a boor, one of those types who has discovered the Secret of Life and is intent on lecturing everyone who will listen, and berating those who won’t for being sheep.  He grows even more tedious after The Change, because now his eyes are open to how much else was wrong with the old world, and since his fellow characters now agree with him, the only audience for his lectures is…the Reader.  Alas.   In the Days has nothing of science fiction in it; it is instead a bit of wish-fulfillment in which Wells writes about what’s wrong with the world: property, marriage,  tradition, and Jews.

Wells’ status as an enlightened man of science takes quite the hit here, and not just because of the antisemitism. His views on society and economics are simplistic, to say the least,  with science depicted as maaaaaagic.   I guess they can’t all be War of the Worlds, eh H.G.?

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Much to Hope from the Flowers

Posted on April 27, 2016 by smellincoffee
(Wild Roses, Rick Hansen)

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

—

The rose’s smell and color are presumably useful to its pollinators, but it’s still a lovely thought. Roses and “Moonlight Sonata” go a long way.

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Teaser Tuesday: Murder on the Moor?

Posted on April 26, 2016 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday bids participants to share a two-sentence excerpt from their current read.  It’s hosted by Books and a Beat.

I stopped dead the other afternoon in my walk across the moor, where once the dismal outskirts of Swathinglea straggled towards Leet, and asked, “Was it here indeed that I crouched among the weeds and refuse and broken crockery and loaded my revolver ready for murder? Did ever such a thing happen in my life?

p. 9, In the Days of the Comet. H.G. Wells

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The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Posted on April 26, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
256 pages
© 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Has it been five years since I read a Holmes collection? I remember picking up Memoirs shortly after reading The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, not nothing that Memoirs was published well before that, but I fell into distraction at some point. More’s the pity, because here collected are eleven classic stories that include both the beginning and the (first) end of Holmes’ career, “The Gloria Scott” and “The Final Problem”.   It contains a few iconic scenes; Holmes stalking about in his cape and seeming to read Watson’s mind, as well as some of his best lines:

“Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
 “That was the curious incident.”

Some Trek author inserted those lines into a novel years ago and it absolutely mystified me. Well, glad to have cleared that up. (On that Trek note, I must say that The Next Generation deceived me in regards to Professor Moriarty. He’s charming onscreen, but decidedly uncharismatic here. Granted ,his only appearance is to threaten Holmes with death if he doesn’t keep plotting the ‘Napoleon of Crime’s” Waterloo.)  Memoirs has the same engaging writing as the previous collections, and adds some interesting aspects to Holmes’ character, namely his eccentric home decor (storing cigars in Persian slippers, using the wall as target practice).

A few of the mysteries:

  • “Silver Blaze”: A prize horse has gone missing. (Okay, granted, it’s not as ambitious as the missing train from Further Adventures, but it’s still very mysterious.)
  • “The Musgrave Ritual”: A brilliant butler vanishes after being caught studying nonsensical couplets used in an initiation ritual. Could it be that he divined some meaning into the lines?
  • “The Gloria Scott”:  What secret does a cranky sailor have over this nervous country squire?
  • “The Greek Interpeter”: A man is driven into the middle of nowhere and used to question a Greek man being held against his will — why?
  • “The Cardboard Box”:  Who ordered two human ears packed in salt? 

I think I’ve gone through all the short stories my library has access to, so when next I visit Baker Street, it will be for a full novel!

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Funny in Farsi

Posted on April 24, 2016 by smellincoffee

Funny in Farsi: Growing up Iranian in America
© 2003 Firoozeh “Julie” Dumas
240 pages

Imagine a time when most Americans had never heard of Iran, when a little girl from a village thereof might as well be from Podunk, Eurasia.   Such was the case of young Firooezeh, whose father was an Iranian petroleum engineer sent to work in the United States for two years.  With little to prepare them, her family took English lessons from The Price is Right and went off to explore America.  Funny in Farsi is a collection of Firoozech’s comic coming of age in the United States, combining both the awkwardness of the immigrant experience and fond recollections of her childhood in Iran.

Though after the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, Iran would take on a sinister charge in the American imagination,  Funny in Farsi isn’t written as a somber reflection on Iranians and the Revolution; virtually all of reminiscences here are written to draw a smile.  They accomplish it regardless of the setting, whether they’re about her uncle taking her halfway across Iran to find his favored brand of ham, or Firooezeh enduring her American classmate’s dearth of geographic knowledge. (“You know China? Iran is on the same continent.”)  Comments on the immigrant experience (why are Americans so enamored of the French? Iranians also eat snails! It’s not fair!) go back and forth with family tales, like her father’s  many attempts to teach her to swim, or  his immense pride in spending as little as possible, as when he obtained lunch by visiting a grocery wholesaler and dining on the free samples.

While these recollections are delightful in their own right — a reassurance that everyone’s family has its odd ducks, regardless of continent — there’s also a useful reminder here that Iran is more than the possession of the reigning ayatollahs, being instead an ancient nation which has endured many a tyrant and will outlast the current breed as well.

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The Quest for Shakespeare

Posted on April 23, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Quest for Shakespeare: the Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome
© 2008 Joseph Pearce
275 pages


Although April 23rd is, historically, the feast of England’s patron saint George,   it is also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s  death.  2016 marks the 400th year since England’s most famous author went to his grave, and in way of honoring him I read Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare. I’ve heard Pearce speak on Shakespeare before, rebutting arguments that other personalities wrote the plays and that Shakespeare is just given credit for them, like Homer.  I’d assume Quest  would follow the same tack, which it does in its introductory chapter, but the real heart of Quest is Pearce’s case for Shakespeare being Catholic.  Although there’s no direct evidence, Pearce argues that the Bard’s loyalties can be inferred from various connections and relationships.

Shakespeare’s religion isn’t just interesting trivia: he lived in the age of Elizabeth, when Henry VIII’s divorce from Rome was visiting the land with terror and blood.  As covered in Come Rack! Come Rope! and Faith and Treason, those who did not attend Anglican services were fined heavily, and Catholic priests were brutally executed. After the Pope’s bull declaring Elizabeth an unlawful monarch, Catholicism had the same ring as treason.   Shakespeare’s father and daughter were both listed and fined as ‘recusants’, establishing the Shakespeare family as Catholic, if not William himself.  His close associations with other Catholics, like a hanged Jesuit priest named Southwell, and the Arden family who were damned in the Somerset plot,  throw a Roman light on him, as does his purchase and maintenance of a house used for hiding priests and performing illegal Masses. That last was compelling for me, especially when combined with the fact that he went out of his way to  engage a crypto-Catholic priest to perform his wedding ceremony.

Pearce’s underlying argument is that Shakespeare is not some empty vessel to be filled with the values of his critics, but a man in his own flesh whose values shaped his work. He writes that if Shakespeare were Catholic, this would give the plays a certain moral tone, and closes the book with two appending sections which offer a guide to the moral interpretation of Shakespeare, and an example of it in “King Lear”.  Though Pearce flirts with seeing his own desires in Shakespeare himself,  he errs on the side of caution more often than not.  He does have a marked enthusiasm for the central idea, at one point speculating that the lack of information about Shakespeare’s early life in London might indicate that he was living a quiet moral life free of scandal.  Well, perhaps, but presumably Anglicans are just as capable of living quiet, moral lives free of scandal. Even if there were an overt Christian theme in the plays, that wouldn’t necessitate an overt Catholic theme.  At best in “King Lear” there are characters complaining about the times they lived in, but if someone isn’t complaining you’re not in the real world, you’re in the first version of the Matrix, the one that failed because no one believed in it.

Although too little is known about Shakespeare’s life to declare his beliefs or politics with surety — and interpreting plays is tricky, as anyone can read anything into them —  the amount of connections suggests that even if Shakespeare wasn’t an observant Catholic himself, his sense of drama and justice would be influenced by the spectre of his friends being persecuted and even killed by the court…and that is an aspect wholly missed by every teacher on Shakespeare I’ve ever had.

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The Promise

Posted on April 22, 2016 by smellincoffee

The Promise
© 1969 Chaim Potok
336 pages

Growing up is never easy, but for Orthodox boys in the mid-20th century, it’s especially hard. The Jewish people are in turmoil after the horrors of the Holocaust, some pinning their hopes on Israel and others recoiling from it as anathema. The latter is true of Hasidic communities from Eastern Europe, fleeing both European and Soviet persecution, finding safe haven in the United States. The welcome American Jews might have given to their kin, however, is worn thin by the Hasids’ swelling number and their fervent defense of rigid Orthodoxy.   In this setting Danny Saunders and Reuven Malter, two Orthodox boys introduced in the gripping tale of The Chosen, complete their coming of age, united in the treatment of a young boy whose genius is matched by his inexplicable rage.

In The Chosen, Danny chose to depart from his father’s legacy as a Hasidic rabbi, a leader of his community. He chose instead to pursue psychology, while his more mainstream rival-turned-friend Reuven realized a call to the rabbinate.  The Promise opens with both young men engaged in their graduate studies, and both faced with shared difficulties that force them to reconsider the paths they have taken. The first challenge is a boy with a passion for astronomy, the son of a humanistic Jewish scholar who is the object of scorn to the traditionalists governing Hirsch University.  Michael is very sick, possessed by fantasies and given to episodes of rage; he exhausts therapists and seemed doomed to be institutionalized.  Both Danny and Reuven have a personal connection to the stargazer Michael, in being companions of his older cousin Rachel. Danny has an idea for how to treat Michael, but it’s risky: if it fails, it may destroy the boy’s psyche altogether.  Meanwhile, Reuven’s position as a graduate student who must soon defend his grasp and attitude of Talmud study to a panel of elders forces him between more liberal scholars like his father and Michael’s, and the traditionalist Hasids. He recoils against the ‘mental ghetto’ of fundamentalist Talmud studies, but is not satisfied with  answers that reduce Judaism to empty family traditions.

In The Chosen, Potok impressed me by having Danny and Reuven both embroiled in an intense and challenging relationship with Danny’s father, Reb Saunders, who despaired both of Danny’s interest in the outside world, and of Reuven’s own father’s modernist approach to Talmudic study. Although they began as antagonists, however, ultimately they arrived at mutual understanding. No one is defeated,  their differences do not cease, but they break through the arguments to re-embrace the people making them. Potok accomplishes something very like that here, in the person of Rev Kalman. Kalman survived the death camps of the Nazi state, but lost nearly everyone he knew, and when confronted with American Jews he sees challengers that threaten to complete by sophistry what Hitler began with direct industrial  murder.    Kalman stands between Reuven and ordination, and is an especially difficult antagonist given that he rails against Reuven’s father in the press.  Yet Potok does not resolve the tension by having Reuven choose a prescripted side. Instead, he makes his own choice, and Kalman proves to be much like Reb Saunders:  the enmity is defeated, but not his person.

Though initially appealing for being the further story of Danny and Reuven, Potok’s skill at rendering intense debate that results in mutual understanding rather than one-sided triumphs impressed me. I imagine as a rabbi himself, Potok has spent long hours having similar heated conversations with his colleagues and academics, attempting to reconcile an ancient faith with modernity without losing the power of those values and practices to endue lives with direction and meaning.
—-

I know this is English Literature month, so er…consider this a salute to Benjamin Disraeli, former Jewish prime minister of Great Britain. (It’s also Passover, so..chag sameach!)

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Waterloo

Posted on April 20, 2016 by smellincoffee

Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles
© 2015 Bernard Cornwell
352 pages

Bang upon the big drum, crash upon the cymbals
We’ll sing as we go marching along boys, along
And although on this campaign
There’s no whiskey or champagne
Still we’ll keep our spirits going with a song, boys!
(“Songs and Music of the Redcoats”)

Bernard Cornwell’s most famous work is his Sharpe’s series, well over a dozen novels following a rifleman all around the Napoleonic world — over the hills and far away, through Flanders, Portugal, and Spain, with India and France as bookends.  In Waterloo: the Story of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles, he attempts to parlay his considerable research into the Napoleonic wars to a work of nonfiction.  He introduces his latest with a question: why write another book on one of the most studied and famous battles in Western history?   Indeed, while Waterloo succeeds as popular history, considering the lavish visual detail it’s practically more of a tribute than a study.

For me, Waterloo is a welcome arrival. Not only do I enjoy Cornwell enormously, but my knowledge of the Napoleonic period is fairly dismal; what little I possess is what I’ve gleaned from novels like Cornwell’s and C.S. Forester’s, not to mention the odd computer game. By way of background: following the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France,  Europe’s tyrannical spectre for well over a decade, was sentenced to rule the little island of Elba. Frustrated by his island kingdom’s lack of funds, Napoleon returned to Paris and the Allies’ war against him renewed.  Hoping to deal with his enemies (England, Holland, Prussia, and Russia) piecemeal, Napoleon marched north to confront the Anglo-Dutch in Holland.  Rout them, and the other Allies might just call the whole thing off.  Thus did Bonaparte finally meet the Duke of Wellington, the man who had helped drive France’s armies from Spain.

Like Gettysburg, Waterloo was less one battle than a campaign. Cornwell’s tale unfolds across several days. Napoleon has to strike before the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian armies can meet, and fights two simultaneous battles at Quatre Bras and nearby Ligny in the hopes of pushing the Allies away from one another. While this isn’t a roaring success for France, it does strain communications and gives Napoleon a day to push at the Anglo-Dutch.  Waterloo is that day of battle, the longest day of the year in which the bullets were still flying at nearly nine o’clock.   In addition to reporting on the campaign’s development as the French pushed steadily toward the English lines, Cornwell explains  the nuances of  Napoleonic warfare to the reader.  Key to understanding this kind of war is the relationship between infantry, cavalry, and artillery; Cornwell describes it as a paper, rock, and scissors game.  Infantry moving in a line were effective offensively, but woefully exposed to cavalry charges; if they formed into a square,   they were deadly obstacles to cavalry but inviting targets to the artillery.  The armies involved are constantly attempting to out-manipulate the others and press an advantage.

Cornwell’s extensive experience as a novelist is clearly present here: he frequently shifts between past and present tense, and employs the same kind of sentence combinations he uses for dramatic effect in the novels. (It’s a one-two literary punch; a series of sentences leading the reader in one direction is suddenly reversed by a following and much shorter second sentence.)  The narrative thus brings to mind a novel, but there’s no denying Cornwell’s ability to communicate the sheer drama of these armies maneuvers as well as the horrendous cost the chaos of the battle was inflicting on the participants. I mentioned the lavish detail earlier, but it bears more comment. I have never seen a work of history this extravagantly illustrated.  There are two-page spreads of paintings depicting moments in the action, and not just one but interspersed throughout the text. Even the maps are indulgent, abounding and presented in full-color.   It’s this kind of loving attention that makes Waterloo seem like something rendered more to honor and remember than merely to inform. While it sometimes seemed he wanted to write a novel, Waterloo is a fantastic first offering of nonfiction from Cornwell’s pen.

Related:
Sharpe’s Series, Bernard Cornwell.

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Dawn of Battle

Posted on April 19, 2016 by smellincoffee

Four hundred years before, near a village called Azincourt, an English army had waited to do battle with the French, and on that October night it had rained and rained and the sky had echoed with thunder. It had been a drenching rain and next morning, as the rain at last ended, the field where the field where the English offered battle was a quagmire of mud. It was that mud, more than the English arrows or English valour, which defeated the French men-at-arms who, laden with fifty or sixty pounds of plate armour, had to wade through knee-deep mud to reach their opponents. The thick mud tired them so that when they reached Henry V’s line they were hacked down in a merciless display of butchery. 

And on Sunday, 18 June 1815, the ground in the valley south of Waterloo would be muddy. It was an omen. 

The Emperor either did not know the history, or else had decided that rain on the eve of a battle was no omen at all.

118 – 119, Waterloo:  the History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell.

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Murder on the Orient Express

Posted on April 16, 2016 by smellincoffee

Murder on the Orient Express
© 1934 Agatha Christie
256 pages

“Why does everyone on this train tell lies?!”



A dark and snowy night; the Orient Express, rolling from Istanbul to Paris, slows to a stop in the wilderness, trapped by the growing piles of snow as its passengers sleep. But the slumber of the travelers is disturbed by a sudden cry, the sighting of a figure in a red kimono, and — the discovery of a dead passenger, stabbed in his sleep.  Murder has been committed — murder most foul!

..or not. Quickly enough, an officer of the train line enlists his friend, Hercule Poirot, to sort out whodunit, and in the course of their investigation they realize the dead man was a notorious child-killer from America. If anyone deserved to run into a knife several times, it was this fellow. Still, train lines can’t have passengers being stabbed willy-nilly; the culprit must be found out. So, with the train still stranded in the wilderness, and no escape available for any suspects, the passengers are summoned to the dining coach one by one and interviewed by the famed detective. The story grows ever more complex; the evidence is contradictory, and everyone seems to have an alibi.  The deceased didn’t encounter some malicious vanishing wizard’s casting of sectum sempra  — someone on board must have plotted and committed the deed.

Murder on the Orient Express is my second Christie novel, the first being And Then There Were None, read during the Clinton years. Like that one, the ending here is a terrific twist.  Murder is a story of conversation and deduction, a classic locked-room mystery in which the room is a train cabin. Although the alias of the murdered man leads Poirot to suspect the stabbing had something to do with his notorious villainy in America, the presence of suspects with links to the devastated family confirms it. Only hitch: virtually everyone on the train proves to have some connection to that family.  Unlike the train itself, Poirot’s investigation flies  along, with one confusing clue after another baffling the train officials and physician, but giving Poirot some insight into what they are being led to believe happened.   The ultimate resolution is a twist, as mentioned, but not improbable. It is, after all the other alternatives were exhausted, the only possible solution.

Christie definitely lives up to her reputation, and I’ll warrant Poirot will appear here again..

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