Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday September 2, 2010
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THE GREAT LOVER Jill Dawson
Harper Perennial
ISBN 978 0 06 192436 1
310 pages
$13.99
Reviewed by Thomas Mallon, the author, most recently, of "Yours Ever: People and Their Letters." He directs the creative-writing program at George Washington University.
Yeats called Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) "the handsomest young man in England," and Henry James was only one of many -- old and young, male and female, writer and nonwriter -- to go into a flutter over the poet's looks and surface charm. Brooke became briefly immortal -- the term seems somehow right -- in 1915, when, as part of Britain's Royal Naval Division, he died of blood poisoning just before the catastrophic Gallipoli invasion. His war sonnets ("If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England") rallied the nation and were deemed by Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, to be "true" and "thrilling." Brooke himself, Churchill assured readers of his obituary, had been "joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed ... ruled by high undoubting purpose."
He was also one colossally screwed-up young man, who left behind a baffled assortment of indulgent and exasperated friends.
Ah, but that face. Jill Dawson, an English novelist who has in "The Great Lover" fictionalized Brooke between the ages of 22 and 27, tells of looking at his picture several years ago: "He had a beautiful jawline, yes, and a broad brow, yes, and a floppy Hugh Grant quality to his fringe. But it was the gaze that hooked me. Direct. Staring down a hundred years and challenging me. OK then. Write about me, if you dare." (If novelists are going to append such silly statements to their books, they can't expect them not to be quoted.) Dawson does pay a great deal of attention to Brooke's neuroses and hesitations and lurchings, but she's rather fallen for her subject. In "The Great Lover" she invents one more romance for him, a stunted but sweet affair with a servant girl, Nell Golightly, whose surname should probably be retired from the list available to literary heroines.
In the summer of 1909, Brooke has taken lodgings at the Orchard House in the village of Grantchester, outside Cambridge, where he's just finished cutting a figure at King's College. He is hoping to be "splendid," as a person and poet, but soon fears having to take his just-deceased father's place as a schoolmaster, which would put him back under the thumb of his terrifyingly formidable mother. Worried about a family tendency to depression, he is on his way toward a nervous breakdown, one brought on chiefly by too much of what D.H. Lawrence called "sex in the head." For all that he needs to shed his virginity and have some genuine adventures, the Brooke of Dawson's novel, like the one in real life, regards sex as "fundamentally filthy." His experiments with a variety of young women are disappointing -- or downright degrading -- to both parties. The novel's most fully described sexual episode involves Brooke and Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of a friend. Russell-Smith has a smashing good time, while Brooke frets about what the sheets will look like to poor Nell Golightly, who's heard the squeak of the bedsprings after having "to finish the washing-up and put away all the plates."
Nell has gone to work for Brooke's landlady after the death of her father, a beekeeper from Prickwillow, a village in the Fens. The novel conveys her solid nature largely through her own assessments of it: "Well, I'm not one of his Cambridge girls who only knows her books and bicycles; he needn't think he can take liberties with me! ... (Nell Golightly) can face facts and she won't be anybody's fool." Actually, Nell is not so in control of her feelings for Mr. Brooke as she likes to think; the reader will see this a couple of hundred pages before she does.
Nell and Rupert swim naked together (Virginia Woolf is believed to have done the same with him), and he laughs at her untutored appreciation of his poetry. She gets upset when he treats her thoughtlessly in front of a young woman more his educational and class equal. Needless to say, Brooke finds Nell cute when she's angry, and he becomes jealous of the attentions she's paid by a fine working-class lad named, with Kiplingesque inevitability, Tommy.
Most of the novel is told in quick, lockstep alternations of Nell's voice and Brooke's. Neither is wholly convincing, and Nell's is sometimes a real stretch: "Perhaps that is the secret of the 'impression' he creates of extraordinary loveliness, the sort of loveliness you'd more often see in a girl than a young man." The levels of diction and spelling here seem rather high to be coming up from the kitchen.
"The Great Lover" is conscientious and good-hearted, but for all its class-crossing improbability, still rather timid. Dawson finishes with Brooke before he goes off to war and gets killed, even though his literary life was at that point really just beginning. The hero-author that Churchill pressed into posthumous service would soon enough be scorned for failing to produce the kind of searing, horrified work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon -- what we now think of as the truest poetry of the Great War. Brooke's grave has been, in its way, as unquiet as his troubled mind. His long afterlife might be a more interesting subject for fiction than his brief existence.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BROKEN
Karin Fossum. Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 15 101366 1
265 pages
$25
Reviewed by Richard Lipez, who writes the Don Strachey PI novels under the name Richard Stevenson. The new one, "Cockeyed," will be published in September.
In this haunting psychological suspense novel, the acclaimed Norwegian crime novelist Karin Fossum performs a stunt that other mystery writers are sure to get a kick out of. The "I" in alternating chapters -- apparently Fossum herself -- doesn't just have her main character rattling around inside her head for the year it takes to write "Broken." Alvar Eide, an eccentric loner who works in an art gallery, shows up on Fossum's doorstep and pleads with her to treat him sensitively. Trying to buck him up, Fossum promises to do so. Just "as long as," she warns Alvar, "you don't wish for a happy ending."
Fossum is having some fun here with the old saw that, during the writing of a book, a novelist's characters will take on lives of their own and lead the author through the narrative to a satisfactory conclusion. On a good day, there's some truth to this. But just as often characters tell their creators, Sorry, Bud, you're going to have to figure this out on your own. The "I" in "Broken" wrestles so anxiously with her characters, is so determined to understand them and make them and their stories plausible and compelling, that on a couple of his visits Alvar chastises the author for her apparent dependence on wine and pills.
The most involving sections of "Broken," at any rate, are the third-person chapters in which the author's narrative skills are on dazzling display, minus the buttinski "I." Alvar is a sad case, hard for the reader to warm up to. He's socially inept, incapable of intimacy and neurotically weak-willed. Yet Fossum gets inside Alvar's head with such sympathetic exactitude that when a manipulative female heroin addict shows up in his life and begins unleashing his emotions even as she drains his bank account, good-hearted readers will want to befriend Alvar, too. You want to help him develop some backbone -- or even just survive.
Alvar is a mess, but a fascinating mess. At one point, he starts obsessing about death. He was not "scared of dying," Fossum tells us. "But on one occasion he had articulated the following thought to himself: The last thing you lose is your hearing. So it was possible that he could be lying in a bed and someone would be sitting by his side checking that his breathing and heartbeat had ceased, someone who would then say: He's gone. That he might, in fact, lie there for several seconds knowing that he had just died. What would that be like?"
Fossum is best known for her Inspector Sejer series, superb police procedurals in the classic mold. In one sense, "Broken" isn't even a mystery. The only crime committed comes late in the story; it's almost anticlimactic. Yet Fossum builds suspense almost entirely through the ongoing collision of Alvar -- who considers himself emotionally dead and then discovers that in fact he is emotionally needy -- and young Lindys, a damaged wraith of a girl who constantly tests him with her crude demands. Every day, she dares him to show her the generosity and tenderness she's never known. She steals his money and his keys. She moves in on his relationship with his cat. Alvar feels that "she spreads like a disease, she grows like a tumor, she makes me want to scream."
You know that all this is bound to end badly -- for Alvar, for Lindys, maybe even for the author. When "I" wonders if suicide might be the outcome for Alvar, she recalls her own brush with self-obliteration. She methodically rigged up her car, planning to asphyxiate herself. It was only a chance phone call from a friend that kept her from going through with the suicide. It's the powerful memory of the bright resonance of the next morning, when she surprised herself by waking up alive, that helps "I" determine to keep Alvar going.
The "broken" of the title refers to a painting of a collapsed bridge that Alvar had yearned to buy before Lindys barged in and ran through nearly all his money. It's an obvious but apt metaphor for the kinds of injured lives that Karin Fossum evokes so brilliantly in her Inspector Sejer mysteries and now in this odd, memorable book.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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CROSSFIRE
Dick Francis and Felix Francis
Putnam
ISBN 978 0 399 15681 6
336 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who regularly reviews books for The Washington Post
I had never read any of the famous Dick Francis novels and looked forward to reading his latest, a collaboration with his son Felix. Dick Francis died recently at the age of 89, having written more than 40 books, most of them mysteries about horse racing and the racetrack scene. It seemed that, no matter what, I would learn something about the world of horse racing in England (because there was that familiar logo, so incredibly cool, of a slick racing horse and a tiny, elegant jockey riding it across the cover).
But you never get to see a single horse in this book, not to mention an actual race. A few horses are mentioned -- they get to have blended-up sprouted potatoes slid down their throats so that they'll get stomachaches and not win some of their races, but all that happens offstage. Characters watch television to see how certain races turn out, but that's not exactly inside information.
"Crossfire" is about a returning British war vet, Capt. Thomas Forsyth, who has lost his foot in a roadside bombing in Afghanistan. His estranged mother is, indeed, a horse trainer, but mainly she's just a highly disagreeable lady who prefers horses to humans. Tom ran away from home at the age of 17 to join the army and has rarely seen his mother or stepfather in the last 15 years. Now, however, he has nowhere else to go, and, with considerable bitterness, he returns to the only home he has. His mother and stepfather are far from welcoming.
But no wonder Tom's mother is in a bad mood! Her horses have been losing lately -- you would, too, on a diet of blended-up sprouted potatoes -- and she's being blackmailed by a villain who happens to know that she's been fudging on her taxes for the last few years, investing in dodgy hedge funds, and also avoiding the VAT. Now she pays 2,000 pounds every couple of weeks to the blackmailer, plus she's fallen hopelessly behind on all sorts of tax payments, plus her horses are losing all their races. (The stepfather, who presumably should have been looking after things, has been absolutely inert during these trying times.)
Capt. Tom, of course, has his own troubles. His phantom limb is acting up and hurts like hell, his prosthetic limb clicks unnervingly when he walks, but mostly he frets that he won't be able to return to combat because of his physical limitations. His mother's troubles give him a bit of a new lease on life. Since the family can't come clean to the tax man until they can lay hands on enough money to pay down those taxes, Tom decides to pursue the blackmailer, using the combat skills that (presumably) worked so well for him in Afghanistan.
When Tom was still at Sandhurst military academy, his sergeant drilled it into him: "You can never be too careful ... never assume anything; always check." Similar advice is referred to at least seven more times as Tom turns himself into a one-man commando unit -- dressing in black, daubing his cheeks with shoe polish, fitting out a bag with plastic garbage bag ties, toting a roll of duct tape and his old ceremonial army sword.
But before Tom gets to go out on any raids, he has to find out where the blackmail demands are coming from, where the purloined money might be, and who the lowlife is who tempted his mother into this mess in the first place. This involves things like checking the Internet, but looking in the village next to his mother's stable, he runs into his old childhood sweetheart, Isabella. A few more pages into the narrative, she invites him to dinner at the village manor house. All the guests at this dinner turn out to be either predators or victims of this financial scam, and Tom proceeds to investigate them.
Then, on page 179, Tom finds himself in a tight spot. He's been kidnapped and left to die in an abandoned stable, standing on just one leg, chained to a wall, his hands tied behind him, his head covered in a filthy hood (not unlike an Afghan prisoner, when you come to think about it). It takes 18 action-packed pages for him to escape, and by the time he does, you wonder why the coalition forces aren't doing better in Afghanistan.
"Crossfire" then continues in an orderly noir manner, but I have to say that, outside his remarkable physical dexterity, Capt. Tom Forsyth seems a little slow on the uptake. I base this on the following dialogue, about his mother. Tom's stepfather announces:
"'She's been kidnapped.'
"'What?' I said in disbelief.
"'She's been kidnapped,' he repeated.
"It sounded so unlikely. 'Who by?' I asked."
For heaven's sake! The guy just spent 18 pages escaping from his own kidnapping situation; it shouldn't be unlikely at all. But of course, once the information penetrates, we can count on Tom to save the day.
You sense the horses out there somewhere, like extras in some mega-fabulous movie, but they're just equine faces on the cutting room floor in this one. It's not that "Crossfire" isn't a nice mystery, but horses are scarcer than a hen's teeth in this narrative.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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I'D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE
Laura Lippman
Morrow
ISBN 978 0 06 170655 4
373 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
The highest compliment I can pay Laura Lippman's new novel, "I'd Know You Anywhere," is to say it measures up to "What the Dead Know," which three years ago marked an artistic and commercial breakthrough for the Baltimore-based writer. Both novels, although ultimately quite different, concern the abduction of young women and the decades-long aftermaths of that horror. And while both are thrillers in a basic sense, both transcend that genre, thanks to Lippman's ability to take us into the lives and hearts of women who have been wronged and of the families that suffer with them.
We meet Eliza Benedict when she is 38 and living with her family a few blocks off Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda (Md.). It's a good life. Her husband is smart, loving and successful. Eliza likes being a stay-at-home mom for Isobel (called Iso), who's 13, precocious and difficult, and Albie, who's 8 and a sweetheart. But Eliza has a terrible secret in her past, and one day, when she and the kids return home after soccer practice, she finds an unexpected, unwelcome letter awaiting her.
The letter is from Walter Bowman, who kidnapped Eliza (Elizabeth, she was then) when she was 15, kept her prisoner for nearly six weeks and raped her. He had killed other girls but spared Eliza. After two decades of appeals and retrials, Walter is on death row in Virginia and within weeks of execution. He wants to see Eliza. To apologize, he says.
It seems unthinkable that she'd have any dealings with this monster. But it's not that simple. She's curious: She wants to know why he let her live. He tempts her with hints that he might confess to other killings and thus ease the pain of families with long-missing daughters. Finally, Eliza is afraid. She has built a new life in a new city where almost no one knows her secret. She's not ready for her children to learn it, and she fears that Walter, if rejected, might rip away her privacy for revenge. The cunning psychopath still has power over her -- and, we learn, has an agenda she cannot perceive.
As Eliza agonizes over a possible meeting with Walter, the story flashes back to her weeks of captivity. The scenes portraying the interplay between a terrified but perceptive teenager, fighting to survive, and the pretentious misfit who holds her captive are beautifully handled. In present-day scenes, we meet other players in the drama. One is a grotesque woman who has become Walter's emissary to Eliza. Another is the embittered mother of one of the girls Walter killed, who still blames Eliza for not saving her daughter.
Most of all, we come to know Eliza -- in all her decency and pain -- and those closest to her. Lippman once told an interviewer, "I thought I was going to be a tough, gritty dame. But when I sat down to write I realized that I'm not that type: I'm really interested in people and their relationships." Probably less than half of this novel concerns Walter and the abduction. The rest is about Eliza and her family. Her brilliant, overbearing sister Vonnie "was a good sister, in her way, and her way was all she had." On Eliza's lovable son and demanding daughter: "They had been close, if only because Albie worshipped Iso, and Iso enjoyed being worshipped." Walter, murderer, rapist and master of self-justification, writes from death row: "I think I am a different man from the one you knew. More educated. I have read quite a bit. I have thought about the person I was and I am no longer that person." Throughout the novel, Lippman displays an exceptional blend of tough-mindedness and sensitivity.
Lippman was a Baltimore Sun reporter in her late 30s when she published her first Tess Monaghan mystery in 1997. Six more prize-winning Monaghan books followed before she wrote her first stand-alone. Like Dennis Lehane after he'd published five Kenzie-Gennaro private-eye novels, she must have decided she could do better, and like Lehane (who proceeded to write "Mystic River"), she was right. I've read hundreds of thrillers in the past 10 years, and some have been excellent, but only a handful -- thanks to their insights, their characterizations and the quality of their writing -- could equal the best of today's literary fiction. Those few certainly include "What the Dead Know" and "I'd Know You Anywhere." In both cases, Lippman began with a real crime and then used the magic of her imagination to produce novels that are not only hypnotic reading but serious meditations on the sorrows and dangers of this world. Some people would segregate Lippman as a crime or thriller writer. That's a shame. She's one of the best novelists around, period.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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