Summer of Jest: Post the First: Chapters 1 and 2

Already, as these first chapters get going, David Foster Wallace is indulging in a bit of reader annoyance, but also quite cleverly confounding a common habit of a certain type of science fiction reader I call a Prediction Sniffer.*We don't know where the Year of Glad is supposed to fit in our timeline so it sort of hangs there in a literary timelessness that encourages us to let it go, nerd. Maybe O.N.A.N. doesn't exist for us yet in whatever year it's actually supposed to be, but that's not to say it mightn't someday, you know?

Furthermore, only re-readers like me who have paid attention to the chronology presented somewhere in the middle of the book and bothered to remember it know immediately that Chapter Two, which is set in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.), is actually taking place the year before the events described in Chapter One, though again, so far, that doesn't seem to matter much, as there is really nothing more timeless than a closet stoner getting anxious about how his next big marijuana binge needs to be his absolute last even as he is self-consciously and anxiously repeating almost exactly his time-honored rituals established in previous absolute last marijuana binges.

But so, back to Chapter One, in the Year of Glad (and don't we love Subsidized Time? Can't we just imagine our governments choosing to make an extra buck or two by selling the naming rights to a calendar year as they might to a football stadium? And doesn't it just scare us to death that someday this might actually seem like a reasonable idea? DFW would have lost his mind watching our current Congress and POTUS and SCOTUS in action. It's hard to say which branch would have driven him craziest), in which our hero, Hal Incandenza, is juking his way through his college admissions interview with the help of an influential alumnus from his prep school and his uncle. The tension in this chapter is marvelous: we are sharing Hal's internal monologues in which his dazzling precocity and erudition are in full evidence, the kid is near genius level and quite marvelously level-headed about it, and that he is also an awesome "balletic" tennis player just makes him seem like even more the kind of kid every school would be chasing after with scholarship offers and letters of intent even though he plays a minor sport, but there is a creeping sense that something is very strange, even very wrong. We re-readers know what has happened to him -- there is a positive "Dick Click" type revelation that finally explains this scene at the end and makes it even more terrible than it is on first reading -- but even knowing why and how it happened, we're riveted a the results on display here. Something has come profoundly unstuck in Hal's mind, something has created a vast gulf between his mental processes and his outward aspect. The erudite and articulate thoughts to which we have been privy are not translated to his speech: he gibbers and makes animal sounds and twitches and we-don't-know-what-all but whatever he does, it terrifies his interviewers to the point where one tells Hal's uncle that his sleep will be forever disturbed by what he has witnessed.

As far as setting up mysteries go, that's pretty original, and first rate, I'd say.

Then we go back in time to sit and wait with Ken Erdedy, who has started up his marijuana binge machine again and is caught in brain loop after brain loop of pothead anxiety, waiting for the girl who said she would show up at a certain time with a good quantity of high quality weed and worried that his attempts to make it seem casual were maybe too successful, worried, too, about all the other kinds of self-versus-other, reputation-obsessed, relationship analyzing, self-flagellating habits of mind that all humans, really, get caught up in but that potheads like Ken seem to be especially, acutely, painfully conscious of to the point of minute over-analysis of their own aspects, thrown in with more than a little magical thinking. All of this is exhausting and exquisitely uncomfortable to read, and it's the kind of thing David Foster Wallace did better than just about anybody, and thus even more uncomfortable to read now, knowing how things ended for Wallace. Honestly, at one point re-reading this chapter, which is only a taste of the kind of stuff that is to come, I doubted whether my going on to read the whole book again was such a good idea. I might have even cried a little. But then Wallace made me laugh again.

And so, I say to the book and to all of you other SoJ types out there, well, okay. Bring it on.

*When a book is set in the future, but that future is now the reader's past, a reader who is a Prediction Sniffer spends a lot of time and energy going over the text to see what the author correctly and incorrectly predicted, whether to herald the author as a prophet or to indulge in Nelson Muntz laughter, doesn't matter which, really.

Summer of Jest - You Have Been Warned

And but so, if you can't tell from the prose style into which I tend to drift on this blog, I'm kind of a fan of David Foster Wallace.* I like his fiction and his nonfiction (though I do tend to be somewhat partial to his fiction insomuch as I enjoy its autobiographical character in that it reminds me a lot of my own thought processes because our backgrounds, David's and mine, are not as dissimilar as some might think) and his in-between, but first and foremost, I like his weird blend of the two that is Infinite Jest. I am one of those first generation readers of same who spoke, as I staggered around Boston with a first edition hardcover copy of same in my ubiquitous backpack, of my "Infinite Jest cramp" and who enjoyed poring over the novel's minutiae with other Boston friends solely for the purpose of elucidating how Wallace wasn't entirely accurate as regards the street map of various areas of Alston and Cambridge and other bits of the Greater Boston Area but also agreed with them that the errors we found only made the book more endearing. Mostly.

So here's the point in the post wherein I refer you to Summer of Jest, an organized group read/re-read of my hero**'s breakout novel that kicked off today but which I only learned existed a scant two days ago.

But of course one of the participants is my beloved friend SJ, whose literary dumbassery I am generally somewhat powerless to resist. Witness last summer's non-stop sojourn through The Dark Tower, from which I am still recovering. But really, I love this book. I'd probably be up for doing this even if she weren't. Because David Foster Wallace. And all the rest.

So, if you haven't read this book, I will counsel you to ignore all my upcoming posts with "Summer of Jest" in their title, because they will probably be spoilery -- although really, of all the books I've loved this one is the least capable of being "spoiled" by a mere plot revelation or two, because the plot is only the smallest tiniest element of what is on offer here in this ridiculous, impossible, ponderous doorstop of awesome of a novel/stream of consciousness/meditation composed by a man I'd long dreamed of meeting someday and whose suicide on Sept 12, 2008 is a terrible, wrenching, horrible, soul-destroying milestone in my own dear personal life that dwarfs, say, Sept 11, 2001 and make of that what you will. I still cry like a baby every year now on that anniversary, and have yet to finish reading his posthumously published The Pale King because I can't bring myself to finally complete my first reading of his last bits of fiction. Instead I just read his nonfiction collections over and over and over again to the point where I have most of the essays by heart (and completely freaked out my Simpsons-loving little sister last summer when I hilariously overreacted to an episode I was seeing at her house for the first time ever, based on his famous cruise ship indictment*** "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again"****). And about once every year or so, and yes, during the summer, I pull out my giant herniating hardcover of Infinite Jest and read it again, just to enjoy, just to admire. And yes, just to  be annoyed all over again.

Now, of course, with my completely ruined elbow tendons (all four of them, in each arm now!) I am reading it in ebook form again. How different will it be, I wonder? Stay tuned, true believers.

Stay tuned.

*And, more importantly, a frequent and not wholly conscious imitator of his style inasmuch as certain quirks of his have drifted into my own prose style, namely lots of footnotes in works of so informal and loose a character as being not wholly but almost entirely not the sort of thing that would normally employ footnotes, but hey, at least so far I've mostly managed to confine my footnotes to the length readers of modern Standard Written English generally consider to be normal footnote length, i.e. not a printed page long or longer, so far. So far.

**So okay, I have a lot of heroes. I am a child of my age. Deal.

***Oh dude. Every bit of poop cruise type news that hits my feeds, I wish he was around to hoot at in his erudite, eloquent, pathetic way.

****One of my friends from my Boston days, who may Tweet at present under the username of @Hoover_Dam, once seized the opportunity after a talk of his to thrust a Celebrity Cruise brochure under his nose to sign, only to be told with a sigh "I thought I was done with these." Poor guy.

Andre Norton's WITCH WORLD

You know, I actually had a paperback copy of Witch World when I was a kid, but somehow I never got around to reading it, and I couldn't begin to tell you why. I think it even had this exact same cover -- it was very old. And, well, just look at it! What's not to like? But so it languished in the teen Kate's TBR pile, ever getting buried under new Michael Moorcock and Jack Chalker and Piers Anthony and Stephen R. Donaldson Isaac Asimov and all those Star Trek novels Pocket/Timescape kept cranking out. Really, it just never made it to the top.

Time to see what I've been missing out on, eh wot?

Of course right away I could see why it never sucked me in and attained OMG GOTTA READ IT MEOW status, because the first chapter or two is not the sort of stuff that grabbed me back then. Simon Tregarth is some kind of mobster, crossed his boss, gotta hide, blah blah blah. And someone is hung up on his surname, which is an ancient Cornish one, and that someone happens to know some ancient Cornish-type magic buh buh blear. I mean, at least Thomas Covenant was dealing with something seriously unusual and dramatic in his real world, know what I mean? And angsty! But mobsters on the run? Meh.

Of course all of that has changed. I have discovered the joys of crime fiction and spy fiction and Cornwall and now those same opening chapters that put me off as a teen sucked me right in, this time, only to then quickly dump me into this other world to which the Siege Perilous sent our Mr. Tregarth when he accepted his new friend's sorcerous help out of sheer desperation (apparently Sammy, the man hunting Tregarth, is an unstoppable killing machine but I guess I'll never know firsthand, le sigh). I would probably, at this stage of life, preferred the Crime Fiction version of Tregarth's tale, alas.

Because, and truly I hate to say this, Witch World kind of bored me. I found the characters flat (and yes, that includes Loyse, who was indistinguishable from dozens of plucky young female semi-heroines I've encountered before/since), the action predictable, and the predicaments a bit old hat. Noting that none of the above would have applied had I read this at the right time of life, that being when I was about 14 and all of this would have been astonishingly new and different for me. But now, being an avid reader of real military/spy fiction, not to mention harder core fantasy fiction, not to mention science fiction in which there is actual science, well, meh.

We're just ships that passed nowhere near each other in the night wherein/at we should have met, Andre Norton and I, I think. Oh well. Onward.

Patrick O'Brian's MASTER AND COMMANDER #ReReads2013

Caveat lector: this is another re-read, of one of my favorite series ever, so 'ware gushing ahead.

Much as I love the Sharpe novels -- and it should be pretty obvious that I do by now -- there is as yet no danger that they shall supplant Patrick O'Brian's magnificent Aubrey/Maturin series in my heart, even though by all rights, as a landlubber, I should probably have more sympathy for the proper bastard infantryman than for this naval captain his best friend and ship's surgeon and their little wooden world. But there is more to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin than their offical roles in Admiral Nelson's navy. Oh so much more.

The pair's meeting at a concert in Port Mahon has to be one of the greatest literary meetings of all time. For much of the first scene they seem likely to come to blows, but both were brought up better than that; both have been taught that manners and courtesy are most especially due where there is dislike, and it is manners and courtesy, ultimately, that triumph and let them see one another's better qualities very quickly. Well, manners and courtesy and a stroke of well-deserved good fortune on Jack's part, for I doubt much beyond a nice dinner could have come of this meeting had not Jack "gotten his step" -- promotion to Master & Commander, and command of a vessel, and the impulse to invite his new acquaintance along on his first cruise.

What follows does not so much have a grand overall plot as a series of smaller plots enacted in succession: after the Meeting there is the Shakedown Cruise on Jack's first command, the Sophie; then there are their Early Successes; then the Taking of the Shore Battery; the famous action with the wonderfully named Spanish frigate Cacafuego*; the Encounter Where Too Much Is Bitten Off to Chew:, etc. This makes this first in the series a bit of an unfortunate leader, and I see that many readers have been sufficiently put off by its odd structure so as not to want to continue with the other books and to be baffled by the enthusiasm of people like me. But come on, think of it as a cheese course: Lots of little samples that give a taste of what's to come!

But so far there is little in my description to indicate why these novels stand out from the pack of novels set during the Napoleonic wars, set in Nelson's navy, set on the high seas (though really, the relationship between Jack and Stephen is key; they are Kirk and Spock in saltwater-stained canvas, these two). For me a lot of the fun is the language, though I must confess to being at times bewildered by it, having constantly to refer to the diagram towards the front to keep all the different sails and yards straight in my head, to say nothing of the differences between a sloop and a snow and a poleacre and a... but that's not really what I mean about the language, which shines most in the dialogue; even in life-or-death situations where terseness and clarity are of the utmost importance, their speech is still highly mannered, even formal. I'm not sure anyone in Nelson's navy ever really spoke that way, but I'm not sure they didn't, either. I am separated from that world by so very, very much that I cannot be sure, but it does not matter. I simply enjoy.

Part of the fun of re-reading this series from the beginning is getting my first glimpses of various characters in their, as it were, larval stages. I know what's in store for them and marvel at the journey they'll take. It's like getting a chance to see your best friends as little children. Little children firing four-pounders and scrubbing the deck with holystones and climbing precariously high into the air and slashing at enemies with cutlasses and sabers and getting their skulls trephined, but little children all the same. And through it all, there are Jack and Stephen, here still feeling each other out, in awe of each other, not sure how much trust they may extend to one another (but needing to extend much; Stephen is a complete lubber constantly in danger of committing horrible breaches of naval etiquette when he's not in danger of getting a clout on the head or falling down a hatch or getting blown overboard; Jack newly in command and discovering for the first time that it's even lonelier than he'd always suspected), playing the violin and cello in the captain's quarters of an evening and eating ridiculously named food together: soused hog's face, lobscouse and spotted dog (the latter two dishes featuring in the title of a cookbook by which you, too, could eat like an O'Brian sailor, though I suspect these recipes are light on mold and weevils).

Then again, the other thing that really makes these novels work is the other characters, those outside or apart from Jack and Stephen's core crew. Here the two most important ones are doozies: Molly Harte and James Dillon. Molly is the wife of Port Mahon's commandant, a lovely woman, a harp player, and already Jack's paramour as the novel opens. Their liaison causes most of the troubles that follow in this first outing; the cuckholded husband holds just enough power to make life very difficult for Jack and his crew. Meanwhile, James Dillon, Jack's new lieutenant on his first command, is a figure from the Irish/Spanish Stephen's past among the rebels of Ireland. James and Stephen spend the first part of the novel avoiding each other, afraid each of being denounced; later it's Jack who has problems with James, whose guilty conscience and high dudgeon keep them from becoming friends until it's almost too late.

And now permit me a happy sigh, for I get to read all the rest of the books again now, as easy as kiss-my-hand, joy. Bring on Post Captain! Again! Again!

*I dare you not to mentally translate that as referring to burning excrement.

John Brunner's STAND ON ZANZIBAR

Simultaneously reading like a deadly earnest Illuminatus! Trilogy scrubbed of all the conspiracy nuttiness*, a fictionalized parable of Toffler's classic Future Shock, a finger-wagging sermon about the evils of overpopulation, and a whacked-out Jeff Noon media scramble, Stand on Zanzibar is one of the coolest bits of New Wave science fiction a reader could pick up.

A lot of people who pick up a John Brunner novel -- or indeed any older science fiction novel --  in the 21st century get hung up on either the eerie prescience the author seems to have had about our contemporary world (the book was written in 1968 but set in 2010) or on what the author got wrong about it, but to do either is to miss the point here. Good fiction is good fiction, whether or not someone guessed there would be smart phones; ditto good social criticism. Stand on Zanzibar is both.

The title comes from an observation made by a wag/sage of the novel's world that the world's current population of 7 billion (yes, one of things he got right; we hit that number pretty close to the same time he projected) if stood together in one place shoulder-to-shoulder, would take up the area of the island of Zanzibar (when the book was written, the world's population could fit on the Isle of Man, a much smaller bit of land). The world he depicts will remind fans a bit of that in Soylent Green**; its be-domed New York might also make one think of the be-domed city-as-spaceship New York in Cities in Flight. And as I suggested above, I kept thinking of Jeff Noon's fiction, particularly Channel Sk1n.

The plot Brunner chooses from among the billions of possible stories on that/this overcrowded world concerns a mega-corporation that is getting ready to buy a country, the men chosen to spearhead the project (which takes a long view of a Third World nation's economic development into a new kind of global economic powerhouse as just another opportunity to increase shareholder value -- eerily, kind of the way our modern private prison industry works!), and some of their friends. Because the nation in question is in Africa, the company's single African-American (abbreviated "Afram") vice president, Norman Niblock House, gets the nod, along with the U.S.'s equally Afram ambassador to that little nation, Elihu Masters, who's been best friends with the country's president-for-life for some twenty years. Said president*** being a tired old man now, who has been pretty much single-handedly holding his little nation together since the British abandoned the whole colonialism thing and more or less forced him into the role of someone to whom they could hand off all their problems. But there is no  good prospect for a successor, so why not bring in a corporation? The project is not viewed as the president selling out so much as a father with hundreds of thousands of helpless dependents trying to secure a future for them. Believe me, it sort of works.

This is largely because there is so much else going on in this novel, which is apparently modeled on John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy ****, at least structurally, for the narrative, plot forwarding chapters are interspersed with all sorts of non-narrative interludes of pure, hypermediated texture, including extended excerpts from the works of one Chad Mulligan, sociologist, who is this novel's Austin Train figure (see The Sheep Look Up), a wise man who has gone ignored but may now be called somewhat resurgent, but only because drinking himself to death in disgust is taking too long and is actually kind of boring.

But wait, there's more!

Because Norman has a white roommate, Don, a guy with a freak gift for pattern recognition who has spent the last ten years in deep cover as a member of the U.S. Army's "Dilettante Corps" in which his job is basically being a sort of Cayce Pollard for the government. In the course of the story, Don gets called up and has to go overseas to help out with an international problem involving a fictional Pacific Rim nation with whom the U.S. is in a seemingly endless and bitter Vietnamesque war. Said country having made an announcement regarding a Great Leap Forward in eugenics and genetic engineering that holds incredible possibility and also, of course, incredible threat to the rest of the world.

For the reaction of the First World to the planet's overwhelming population problem is to plunge into eugenics with all enthusiasm. Laws governing who may have children and how many children they may have get stricter and stricter all the time -- and in the United States, differ from state to state, so, for example, Nevada is close to a free-for-all whereas Louisiana is flirting with the idea of not allowing anyone to breed who can prove three generations of residency in that state in addition to the standard prohibitions on anyone with genetic defects of any kind reproducing. As the novel opens, the latest trait under fire is color-blindness. But what everyone is really afraid of is that someday producing too much melanin is going to be a prohibiting factor.

Which is to say that racism -- and sexism, which I'll get to later -- are prevalent elements throughout the text. As the U.S. is at war with an Asian power, plenty of anti-Asian sentiment and offensive slang gets slung about (which, about the slang, get ready for that. The slang in Stand on Zanzibar could be the subject of a whole big and fascinating paper, to be pored over like that in A Clockwork Orange, but unlike Burgess' novel, all of Brunner's slang is derived from English), and blacks don't get any better treatment. It's all presented very matter-of-factly, even casually, which can be shocking but which is part and parcel of the societies we're examining. Kinship and tribalism and associated inter-group violence, sociologists tell us, tend to come very much to the fore in cases of crowding.

As is, apparently, a very casual, even cavalier, attitude towards women, the young and attractive variety of which are referred to in this world as "shiggies" and are passed around like party favors, traded like Magic the Gathering cards, apparently happy with this state of affairs and the nomadic, uncertain life they lead on the "shiggy circuit." Older women are only ever noticed if they happen by some freak of affairs to have somehow achieved serious corporate power, with a depressing few exceptions, and even the one younger-than-the-alpha female executive type who crosses our path is at first dismissed as on the scene just because her boss got tired of sleeping with her. To the slight credit of the man making this internalized observation about her, he does eventually include that she might be there on her own actual merits as well, perhaps. Partly. Ugh.

The only other reason a woman might matter, of course, is as breeding stock. But only if she's genetically OK. But hey, at least the potential father has to pass genetic muster as well. So I guess there's parity somewhere. Ugh.

But hey, all of literature has taught me how it sure do suck to be female, so I can hardly single out this book for special castigation. Especially in a year in which I have taken on Robert Silverberg. I do not cry out for a fan-edit of Stand on Zanzibar from which my gender has been removed, but, you know, yuck.

That aside, this is a pretty fantastic read, a worthy companion to Brunner's other blisteringly awful masterpiece, The Sheep Look Up. But where we could sort of, kind of, desperately cling to the idea that The Sheep Look Up was a self-denying prophecy, Stand on Zanzibar still feels like it could happen, is happening.

But we already knew that, didn't we?

Sing it, Pete.


*Which, I hasten to assure you, is still a very entertaining, if somewhat depressing, thing.

**Itself based on a novel by Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! that came out two years before Stand on Zanzibar.

***Whose name is Zadkiel Obomi, and I'll refer you to the rest of the internet for points of view on that amazing coincidence/prediction. Yawn.

****Which I haven't read but now really want to.

John le Carre's A MURDER OF QUALITY

Quite possibly my favorite George Orwell essay is "Such, Such Were the Joys" in which our man Eric Blair recalls his days as a sort of charity case at a posh English boarding school that thought it was even posher than it actually was. He was miserable there, of course; one can see the beginnings of the great man whose every work is in some way or another a crie de couer against the banal (and not so banal) evils of collectivism. It's also, because Orwell was a prose stylist and a storyteller so close to perfect as makes no odds, a fascinating read, descriptive and honest and sort of bleakly lovely. His Crossgates was a place one survived, rather than graduated from.

It's hard, then, for someone like me, so in love with that essay, not to keep thinking of it as our man George Smiley, ex-intelligence man whose life is still very much shaped by his experiences plying his then still unofficial trade during World War II, finds himself in the role of cozy mystery detective again as he comes to a posh English boarding school, Carnes, to help figure out who killed a schoolmaster's wife in a bloody, gruesome and bizarre fashion. I always thought Bingo and Sim had more going on than poor little Eric Blair realized, don't you know, and I feel the little boy who would be come my hero sort of peeking around corners and watching Smiley at work throughout the book.* I wish he could have seen someone like Smiley, at any rate, to see that not all grown-ups are perfidious jerks. But of course, he wouldn't have grown up to be the hero he was if he'd had an easy, trusting childhood, would he?

But that's neither here nor there. Except in that it takes place at an English public school (like so many other novels and plays and films and whatnot, hmm? But as Orwell observed, for many people, their school days were the most eventful and dramatic and interesting of all their days. Poor benighted souls, they, hmm?) at which Secrets Are Being Kept. But of course, where in Orwell's essay, those secrets are largely socio-economic and class-based, in A Murder of Quality, well, there are elements of socio-economic and class struggle there, too, no doubt, and these elements are thwarting the murder investigation in true Town vs. Gown fashion, but... this is Smiley, dammit. Smiley! Come on, bust out the spy stuff!

News flash: there isn't much spy stuff, except in Smiley's back story and insomuch as it has formed his character as a careful thinker and observer and analyst -- who has a tremendous loyalty to his circle of colleagues from the War. One of whom edits and writes an advice column for a journal, and who received an alarming letter from the murder victim just before her death, a letter that may be a Giant Freaking Clue or an equally Giant Red Herring. And since the victim is very much Gown and the police are very much Town, the investigation could use someone like George, sometime academic, mild-mannered, unpretentious but trustworthy and obviously intelligent, to cut through the bulldung and figure out what happened.

Look, murder mysteries really aren't my thing. I always get a little depressed about how a person can be and usually is regarded as Only Interesting After She's Dead and only because someone Did A Bad Thing by killing her (or him). And yes, I know, a life only really takes shape when it's complete, i.e. over, and all that, but mostly I like watching lives in progress, decisions being made, actions taken or not taken, conversations had or suppressed, etc. There is plenty of this in a murder mystery, of course, but it's generally on the part of the detective, to whom the victim is usually a stranger; the detective is not, therefore, showing us the victim/stranger so much as leading us through a careful examination of the hole she has left and who might have wanted to make that hole happen. We're not really interested in the victim, but in the detective; the victim is just a means to the detective's end. See? Depressing. But lots of people like that stuff, and they're free to. It's just not usually for me.

But every once in a while, I like to take a look at a genre that I usually avoid, just to make sure that I'm avoiding it for good reasons and not just out of habit or of intellectual (or pretend anti-intellectual) posturing. And sometimes I do find that I've been unfair; witness my great enjoyment of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels, "frontier tales" which, while not precisely westerns, are still more like westerns than most other kinds of stories, and thus are generally chucked into my mental "avoid" bin. I'm terribly, terribly glad I grew up to give those another chance.**

And so, A Murder of Quality, which basically seduced me into reading a straight up mystery novel, just out of love for its hero. Tsk tsk, Mr. le Carre. Now my guard is up, you!

That being said, there's still a lot to recommend this novel. As one could expect from a novel taking place largely at an upper-class school, there are a lot of moments in which the class-consciousness of certain elements of the community gets wickedly skewered. The best bits of these happen whenever a minor character, a teacher's wife named Shane, speaks, to wit:

"I'm never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlor."

And:

"Baptists are the people who don't like private pews, aren't they?"

Oh, is she ever quotable, is Mrs. Shane Hecht. And everything that comes out of her mouth will make you want to slap her.

Strangely enough, Shane is not the murder victim, or really anyone of any importance at all, except as a mouthpiece for the gentry, struggling to reassert their dominance over English life after the great social leveling of two world wars and not coming off well at all. No apologia for the ruling class, here (another quality, one might say, that this book shares a bit with Orwell's work, no?)! No, the murder victim is another teacher's wife, who comes off as a bit of a paragon of humility and independent thought for most of the novel, until [REDACTED] is discovered.

Through it all, Smiley is Smiley. Utterly forgettable, unprepossessing, mild, hard even to notice, but with a mind tuned by years of unglamorous spy work for uncovering secrets that makes him a perfect amateur detective. We only occasionally get a hint of what he's thinking, which I appreciate, not being a fan of the omni-omniscient narrator who knows all characters' thoughts anyway. Even when a nasty so-and-so like Shane teases him about his "unfortunate" marriage to a woman far above his social station (and who just happened to have grown up in the neighborhood of the Posh School in Question), he keeps his cool and just calmly lets her think she's gotten the better of him. She can sneer all she wants; in the end she has to keep being nasty old Shane Hecht (who, now that I think of it, reminds me rather a lot of Bingo from "Such, Such Were the Joys") and Smiley gets to keep being Smiley, knower of things he doesn't tell, friend of people of actual quality versus upper-crust Quality.

I know with whom I'd choose to pass an evening, at any rate.

*This is of course odd because Orwell/Blair was a little student many, many years before the period in which this novel is set, but those English Public Schools do have a sort of timeless quality to them, don't they? One would almost think it an effect for which they strive deliberately!

**I still avoid romance novels, though. Like the plague. Unless they're written by close and dear friends to whom I can't say no and find entertaining no matter what they're doing.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S HAVOC

Starting with a desperate evacuation of a town as an invading French army completes its conquest of northern Portugal and a pontoon bridge fails and sends hundreds of civilians to their crushed, watery deaths and ending with a freakily similar battle at another bridge in which the French receive more than a little poetic justice, Sharpe's Havoc is a hell of a fine read, like all of these books are.

It's a funny old thing, though, reading a series like Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe books. But then again, the Sharpe books are rather a funny old series. For originally, there were just a few of these, and they were all set during and in the midst of the Peninsular War. Then they got very popular, so popular that they were adapted for television. The TV show, featuring the awesome likes of Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite and David Troughton, was very popular as well, so popular that there grew to be demand for more Sharpe books and TV adaptations of those books and somewhere in the middle of all of this came the notion that perhaps some prequel novels detailing Sharpe's pre-Napoleonic adventures might go over well and...

The result is a great heap of prose books that may be likened unto a long and convoluted run of a Big Two superhero comic book, rich with minutia and ret-conning and related geek-bait (the geeks in question this time being military history buffs, and damned if Cornwell isn't turning me into one of those. I found myself doting over the details of how Baker rifles work and the finer points of using case shot [and learning where the term "shrapnel" came from]), daunting in the extreme for the newcomer, who has two basic choices in how to approach this mass of material:* in publication order, or in chronological order. Choose publication order and you're going to be all over the place, historically speaking, starting out on the Peninsula in the middle of the Talavera Campaign in 1809, proceeding more or less chronologically for a while, but pretty soon you're lurching back and forth in time as though you had a TARDIS, not coming to, say, our man's adventures in India in  1799 until you've read a whole lot of novels. The thought of that makes my brain hurt a little, so I opted to read the novels in chronological order. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the fact that said order begins in India made that choice even more appealing.

But reading chronologically is not without its perils, too. While I'm sure the publication order readers just see an ever ascending level of quality in the writing, the characterizations, the battle scenes, etc. as they move on in the series, we chronological readers must weather lots of unexpected peaks and valleys, not to mention what seem like glaring omissions (for instance, last novel, Sharpe's Rifles, contained no references to Lady Grace, whom Sharpe wooed and won in the middle of the battle of Trafalgar, because when SR was written she had not yet been written into existence and readers are presented with a Sharpe that seems to have little experience with women except as casual whores, which is jarring for those of us who have read our man's Indian adventures and seen him happily, if still somewhat temporarily, paired with many lovely ladies). But we weather them happily, because Sharpe is awesome.

But so, Sharpe's Havoc is very much a case in point. It takes place not long after the events chronicled in SR, but while SR is a very early book (though still not the very first; the very first Sharpe novel is... the next one after SH in the chronological list), presenting Sharpe as greener and less confident than we've gotten used to seeing him, SH was written some 20 odd years later, after Cornwell had written many more novels, including the Indian prequels, and developed his firm and masterful command of the art of writing a Sharpe story.

Which is to say that from my perspective, SH looks to be one of the best, if not the best, of the Sharpe novels, and certainly my favorite since Sharpe's Fortress, the best of the three India books. Sharpe is 100% Sharpe, smart, capable, cunning, sometimes cruel, stubborn and devastatingly creative, qualities he desperately needs as he struggles not only against the French, against the deprivations and duties of wartime abroad, but also against the machinations of yet another turncoat superior officer. His main foe this time around, Colonel Christopher, can't hold a candle to Major Dodd in the scary-danger department being more of a political schemer and a misguided idealist, but that makes him all the more actually dangerous to Sharpe**, who can handle any jerk on the battlefield or in skirmishes of all sorts, but who is still pretty rough and clueless when it comes to society and the way it works -- or is supposed to work.

And of course, Christopher is far from Sharpe's only problem. His men are still cut off from the rest of their regiment and sort of juking their way through the war at Arthur Wellesley's whim. The Iberian peninsula is crawling with French soldiers. The ordinary people are unreliable; many passionately committed to maintaining their independence from Napoleon's empire but ill-trained and ill-equipped and looking to people like Sharpe to make up for their deficiencies. Generals and other superiors have high expectations for him, too, but are a bit out of touch with what he's dealing with, sometimes by nature, sometimes due to circumstances, and sometimes because of Christopher's machinations. And then there's the novel's Girl, this time the pretty young heiress to a British wine dynasty who has grown up in Portugal and refuses to leave it despite the danger. Thank goodness Sharpe is too busy to do the predictable by her, this time around, at least.

Does SH feel at times a bit formulaic? Yes, yes it does at times. Cornwell is going back to the same wells - turncoat officers, pretty women in need of rescue but not entirely helpless (thus even more attractive to Sharpe), natives/partisans of both kinds: noble/proud and gutless/scheming, big sweeping battle scenes and expertly presented representations of the ordinary soldier's life - but they're good wells to go back to, yielding high quality stuff every time. It's still mostly fresh, here, but as I read, part of me sort of longed to go back to the unevenness and occasional roughness of the earlier books as being more likely to have actual surprises in store for me. Here, everybody seems just a little embalmed. Consummately embalmed, but embalmed all the same.

Despite that, SH is a fantastic read, amusing, emotional, bloody and thrilling. If I haven't convinced you to give Sharpe a try by now, seven books into the series, I despair of you. I really do. It's everything most of my people read books for and then some.

*Well, perhaps three, if you want to count just reading them in any random order. Or many more than three if you want to treat every possible reading order as a separate choice. But come on.

**Though dude, do not make off with Sharpe's telescope, a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley he has cherished since receiving it (and his battlefield commission) on saving the future Iron Duke's life back in India.