Is Marriage Outdated?

@HachetteBooks

Just finished this, due out in June in hardcover. A fascinating (and lively) trip through divorce in the U.S. via four at-the-time well-known women.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, South Dakota had the most lenient laws governing divorce. Because of this, women - and men - travelled from the East Coast to legally separate themselves from spouses whose marital transgressions were not recognized as sufficiently heinous (usually, *just* adultery) for such a decision. New York, in particular, had strict and limited divorce laws, and women who fled west included representatives of the Astors, the Blaines, and the Molineuxes. These women's fight to free themselves from abusive and murderous husbands filled the headlines; put Sioux Falls, South Dakota on the map; and made crucial the long discussion regarding marriage equality.

 Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire
by M.R.C. Kasasian
Head of Zeus, Ltd., 2019

     This is an interesting read for fans of British mysteries that take place between the wars.  It is not a "serious" tale; it is a silly one.  However, if one sticks with it past the first three or so chapters, the author settles into the story and the silliness takes on the aspect of classic British quirkiness and eccentricity.
     Told in the first person, Betty Church is a send-up of mysteries akin to Foyle's War, but instead of a soft-spoken, competent, male protagonist, we have an outspoken, scarily competent, one-handed, female protagonist, frustrated by the incompetence of her colleagues and family members.  Her parents are a horror show of indifference and pain (her father is the Sweeney Todd of dentists); a chief inspector who suffers from incapacitating shell shock; a sergeant and twin constables straight out of a pantomime; and away from the job, an avuncular connection with an ex-fiance's father, and a struck-off doctor operating as the de facto M.E. These latter two are the sole source of sanity in DI Church's world.  When the case begins to get interesting, DI Church is assisted by an old family friend: a female pantomime mix of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Sir John Fielding. This character's role is mostly limited to advice and criminal prior history, a comedic deus ex paperwork.
     The story plays out in a series of mistaken identities, rumors gone mad, red herrings, and with a blonde-headed bimbo who is anything but.  Once the author finds his stride, Betty Church and the Suffolk Vampire is an amusing diversion, with a couple of laugh-out-loud moments, but getting to that point could be a challenge for a less-determined reader.

Once upon a time, when you were somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, you were taken to visit an elderly relative, possibly a great-aunt or maybe your grandfather's best boyhood friend, and found yourself bored out of your head by the conversation of the adults around you.   In an act of what you later realized to be complicit sympathy, said elderly person suggested you might enjoy exploring the library.  After your parents were reassured that there was nothing valuable that would break, you were let in under stern warning then left to your own devices, to amuse yourself as best you would.  You poke around a bit, astonished, and not a little worried, by such titles as the Eighteenth Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, when suddenly you find it.  Wedged in, between Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, you pull out a smaller volume: King Solomon's Mines, the Man Who Would Be King, the Lost World.  You open it and are met with that particular "old book" smell; the pages are slightly browned; the text, a little formal, but so descriptive that you soon forget where you are, and you are filled with regret when your parents come to claim you some hours later.

It is this sense of wonder, excitement, and discovery that Jon Baird, ably assisted by Kevin Costner (yes, him), Stephen Meyer, and Rick Ross (illustrations) have sought to rekindle or introduce, depending, with The Explorers Guild, Vol 1: a Passage to Shambhala.

This is an old-fashioned traveler's tale, a ripping yarn, a Saturday-afternoon-at-the-movies story, cinematic in scope, and odyssean in the telling.  Except for the fragance, this volume recreates that literary excavation from tone to typeface, with book and chapter frontispiece illustrations reminiscent of Wyeth, Pyle, and Schooner.  Scenes in which text narration would slow down the story or confuse the reader (simultaneous events on opposite sides of the world or flashbacks, for instance) are told in illustrated form, two-color panels, more closely related to early "Classics Illustrated" or "Little Nemo" than contemporary graphic novels or manga.

I was intrigued by the Explorers Guild because of its presentation; I was captured by the end of its second  paragraph.  Through an old-fashioned visual and textual style it promised Adventure and Romance and did not disappoint.  I loved this book, and eagerly await a Volume Two, if such a thing should come to be.

Penny Dreadful

Timothy Dalton
Eva Green
Josh Hartnett
Reeve Carney
Harry Treadaway
Rory Kinnear
Billie Piper
Danny Sapani


When I was a child, about eleven or so, I was given a Dickens compendium, a collection of excerpts from his works great and small.  There were two that had a big impact on me: one from the Pickwick Papers -- which I had not read -- and one from Oliver Twist -- which at that point I had only read in abbreviated form. The Pickwick excerpt was light and joyous, a celebration of friends and life.  The Twist excerpt, though, was the bludgeoning death by poker of Nancy by Bill Sykes. That episode was, without doubt, the most gruesome thing I had ever read, and it was not an aberration.  Victorian popular culture was filled with the morbid, the grotesque and gruesome, the depraved. From high to low, Victorian society indulged its imagination for nightmare by publishing what came to be known as "penny dreadfuls,": potboiling fictions and true crime, Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd writ large in an arterial spray of ink.  As its title suggests, the Showtime series, Penny Dreadful, takes this sensibility and runs with it.

Timothy Dalton, in an intense yet understatedly carpet-chewing role, portrays Sir Malcolm Murray, father of Mina, she who married one Jonathan Harker.  And now that our literary antennae are up, we also meet Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Mr. Dorian Gray, and an American, Ethan Chandler, whose Gothic literary persona is hinted but never revealed until the last episode of Season One.  The three men are pulled, in ways both direct and subtle, into Sir Malcolm's search for his daughter and the creature who holds her in thrall.  Each has his own terrible secret, crimes of ego, depravity, and monstrousness, which they attempt to subsume into what they believe to be the rescue of an innocent soul from perdition. 

The series, though, is far from a simple rehash of familiar monsters.  There is nothing remotely attractive or Romantically Byronic here; these are not the monsters of the Saturday matinee.  Quite the contrary; Penny Dreadful has managed to return characters which over the last 100 years have become teenaged fantasies to their full psychological and moral horror.  And, in spite of the horror, this is a surprisingly moral show.  Sin and the wages thereof and the quest for salvation and redemption are the driving forces in this story.  Damnation and salvation are real, and it is a fight by imperfect and flawed protagonists against the former for the latter.

Set design and camera-work reinforce this bleak milieu, giving us a London by way of Dante.  Daylight is a blue-grey twilight, and the nights are defined by the theatre Grand Guignol; death and corruption are an intimate part of everyday life.  Our three young men, each in his own way, are attempting to outwit death: one by attempting to create life; one by sustaining life beyond its natural time; one by running away.  Consequences, however, cannot be avoided, and their decisions catch up with them in poetic and literal fashion.  

Set against the men are the three women: Vanessa Ives, as relentlessly driven to find Mina Harker as Sir Malcolm, with secrets of her own; Bronagh Croft, embodying the physical corruption Dorian Gray seeks to avoid, and whose name is the sorrow Ethan Chandler embraces; and Mina herself, damnation with an angelic face.  In true Victorian fashion, the women in some manner represent the perceived feminine virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. None of which, of course, are true.  One is, it seems, possessed by a demon; one is a prostitute; one is the minion of corruption.

There are times Penny Dreadful is difficult to watch, disturbing, jolting you out of your complacency.  It will make you think -- and rethink -- what you thought you knew. It will make you hope that these sinful, sorrowful people find their salvation.

The One Thing Needful

Empire Girls
Suzanne Hayes and Loretta Nyhan
Harlequin MIRA
June 2014

"And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving."  Luke 10:39-40, ESV


     In two very short verses, the Biblical writer has summed up a relationship so well that merely to invoke the names of the women two thousand years later is to sum up and categorize personalities, relationships, and mindsets.  When we meet the protagonists of Empire Girls, their dual (and dueling) voices reaffirm our impressions: Rose is domestic, house-proud, concerned with appearance and doing the proper thing; Ivy is her father's disciple and playmate, less concerned with propriety, in search of experience, and perfectly content to let her older sister shoulder the practical burdens of living.  And then their father dies, leaving them an unordinary bequest: a long-lost brother, a Lazarus to the sisters' Mary and Martha.  In their search to restore life to their brother, Rose and Ivy are forced to reevaluate what they think they know about themselves as well as each other.   Rose blooms in thrilling and romantic fashion; Ivy finds support and steadiness in unexpected places.
     This is the second outing for Nyhan and Hayes; their first, I'll Be Seeing You, is an epistolary novel in two voices, highlighting friendship forged between strangers.  It is a lovely and tender novel, full of courage and the small, repeated graces that make bearable a life full of uncertainty.  Empire Girls, while still a story of different voices and multiple viewpoints, is a very different novel, stronger and deeper than its predecessor.
     The secondary voices in Empire Girls are as fully personalities as Rose and Ivy: intense and poetic Santino; Jimmy, unwilling to be pinned down; John-the-Wonder, who reveals surprising capabilities; Cat, who embodies her nickname.  These characters help drive the sisters' growth and have their own motivations rather than being simply mirrors for Rose and Ivy.  The authors clearly trust one another more and are more familiar with one another; the tone of writing is sharper and faster, befitting the novel's setting in New York city.
     Hayes and Nyhan are a welcome pair among the sometimes overheated voices of "women's fiction."  I look forward to future collaborations.

Review of and some thoughts on Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls

To the Government of Aleppo.  It was first communicated to you that the Government, by order of Jemiet, had decided to destroy completely all the Armenians living in Turkey... An end must be put to their existence, however criminal the measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex nor to conscious scruples.
-- Talat Pasha, Minister of the Interior, September 16, 1916

I came to the work of Chris Bohjalian via a friend:  she pressed Midwives into my hands declaring that I must read it, and that if I did not like it she didn't want to hear about it.  Several years and several volumes later I am still reading him, and have become the person urging him on others.  While I have enjoyed all of his work that I've read, Night Strangers has been, by far, my favorite.  Until last week.  Last week I had the great good fortune to read Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls, due to be released in July.  My first reaction could be summed up in three words:  intense, immediate, surreal.  And that was just Part One.

When most people think of Turkey in 1915, they think of Gallipoli and World War I.  Most of us have forgotten that at the beginning of the 20th century there was no "Turkey" as such:  it was still the Ottoman Empire.  In Sandcastle Girls, Bohjalian sets us squarely in the last days of that dying  behemoth at the beginning of, his narrator tells us, "the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About."  Bohjalian writes the events of 1915 in the present tense, giving them an eyewitness immediacy and intensity that a more common third-person, past tense narrative would have missed.  The matter-of-factness of tone, too, gives the relating of genocidal horrors the surreality that makes them that much more terrible.  For example,

He stares more closely out the window at a massive pile of tree limbs -- a messy pyramid -- no more than thirty or forty meters from the tracks.  The branches have been bleached white by the sun on one half of the mound, but are blackened on the other side, as if someone stared to burn them but the fire never quite spread and eventually burned itself out.  He is wondering briefly why someone cleared the few trees in this stretch of land and chose this spot to incinerate them when he realizes they are not tree limbs at all and his gaze grows transfixed... In the end, it was the skulls that gave it away... He can't imagine how many bodies it took to make the hillock.  Hundreds?  A thousand?  More?

And then there is this mystery:  why here?

In a moment the train is beyond them and the bones have disappeared into the landscape.  Across the train carriage his lieutenant snores.  The businessmen do, too.

There and gone, a Boschian nightmare that the mind cannot quite convince itself occurred.  Except that it did.  Deliberately and calculatedly, to be exceeded only in scale some twenty-five years later.  Several times while reading the Sandcastle Girls I realized I was looking at the genesis of all the horrors of the 20th century; Aleppo and Der-el-Zor are the direct progenitors of Dachau and Auschwitz, and the things they've spawned.

Within this larger tragedy plays a more intimate one of love, loss, secrets never told, and the echoes of that decision.  When so much is lost and so many agonies felt, what is left to sacrifice?  Mr. Bohjalian is a keen and sympathetic observer of women; his female characters have agency and are fully human, and never "types."  The four women at the center of the Sandcastle Girls -- Elizabeth, Nevart, Hatoun, and Karine (above, around, within all, Karine) -- collectively and singularly engender the repercussions of the Genocide on generations removed in time and space.

In his acknowledgments, Mr. Bohjalian lists several titles as being of particular help in understanding the Armenian Genocide, and names three novels specifically.  With the Sandcastle Girls, I believe, for the rest of us, he has added a fourth.

Publishers Weekly: The Sandcastle Girls
Barnes & Noble
Chris Bohjalian

From March 29, 2012

've read two pre-pubs this week: The Taken by Vicki Pettersson and Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers. The first is a bit of a fluff, light urban fantasy, but the romance (thankfully) is secondary to the action, and has an interesting view of the afterlife.

Grave Mercy is a YA novel, taking place in medieval France, when the French are attempting to take over Brittany, and Christianity and its New Gods are edging out the Old ones who have been turned into saints. Political machinations abound -- though nothing on the scale of Game of Thrones, say -- enough to give the reader a feel for the unstable ground on which the protagonist walks.

The tagline for this novel sums it up, "Why be the sheep when you can be the wolf?" The protagonist, Ismae, after escaping an arranged marriage to a turnip farmer at the age of 13, has been raised in a convent whose initiates have been trained in the arts of Death. The course of the novel charts Ismae's journey from unquestioning obedience and use as a political tool to a dawning recognition of the more complex nature of the saint she serves.

Grave Mercy is out now in hard cover; the Taken comes out in June.

Every Person as Part of a Ripple Effect

Was able to attend an author dinner last week, courtesy of the publisher, Little, Brown.  The dinner was very good (One Market, Bradley Ogden), but meeting the author, Holly Goldberg Sloan, was the obvious highlight of the evening.  She is a charming woman, about my age, and this is her first novel.

The book is titled I'll Be There and was a delight to read.  For a young adult non-fantasy/action novel, it is unique -- there is no melodrama.  What a relief to read something not emotionally fraught!  This is not to say that there is not a strong emotional element -- there is -- it is simply subtle.  Ms Goldberg Sloan's life before this was as a successful screenwriter and director, and this mastery of storytelling craft is apparent.  In the first lines, she sets up the entire story; everything that follows is the fulfillment of that promise.

The characters are well-drawn; the use of first-person POV for each character is used to great, and, in one instance, humorous, effect, saving each from being caricatures or cut-outs.  Except for the one, there is no one in this novel who can be viewed as "bad."  Clueless, definitely; well-meaning but oblivious, certainly; but evil? No.  Even parents and other authority figures here, frequently portrayed in YA fiction as obstacles at best (when present at all) or active antagonists at worst, act in the best interests of those for whom they are responsible.  Even the villain, while frightening, is someone who can be viewed with pity. 

There are several scenes of humor, placed perfectly to keep the mood of the story from devolving into despair.  The lead-up to Prom made me laugh out loud; a run-in with a black bear managed to be funny and terrifying at the same time.

The ending fulfills the promise of the beginning, bringing the reader full circle in a satisfactory manner.  This is a hopeful book, with smart characters, something I will be eager to recommend.