A Girl and A Boy

Time for my beach read, and this year it is All The Light We Cannot See. It's a story about a girl and a boy. In August of 1944, in the waning days of World War II, the picturesque Breton town of Saint-Malo, occupied by the retreating German army, is being bombed by Allied forces. Alone on the top floor of a tall narrow house, a French sixteen-year-old blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc fears for her life. Five blocks away eighteen-year-old German private Werner Pfennig, a radio specialist stationed in a grand old hotel, is assigned to intercept messages from Allied sympathizers and eliminate them. The two have never met.

Having set them so close together, author Anthony Doerr then jumps backward to 1934, to tell the parallel stories of their childhoods. Hers is the tale of a comfortable life in pre-war Paris near the Jardin des Plantes, with a loving father who teaches his daughter that her blindness is no handicap. His is the harsher existence of an orphan in a coal mining region outside Essen, but he is saved from a life in the mines or on the front lines by his extraordinary talent with radios. In brief chapters, Doerr cuts back and forth between Saint-Malo of 1944 and the paths each took from the start of the war to their current precarious state.

I know, I know. Blind girl, orphan boy, war, danger, love conquers all, sentimental and predictable. Not at all. This beautifully written book is many things – suspenseful, emotional, nuanced, heartbreaking, joyous – but it is resoundingly unsentimental. Yes there are a few coincidences, but none that disturb the flow of this haunting story. An added plus – short chapters! Beach, plane trip, waiting room, DMV line – this book is the perfect choice.

Act Three

How would the story of “Pride and Prejudice” look through Mr. Darcy's eyes? In fiction we're always locked into the view that the narrator chooses. But Jane Gardam, God bless her, has broadened the vista. In “Old Filth” she gives us Edward Feathers - Raj orphan, QC and judge in Hong Kong, husband of Betty, sworn enemy of fellow QC Terry Veneering – looking back on his life from old age. In "The Man in the Wooden Hat" it's Betty's turn, and unsurprisingly much looks different from her perspective, and secrets unknown (or maybe not?) to Edward are revealed. Now the third leg of the triangle is put into place, as Gardem's tells Terry's story in Last Friends.

The novel begins with Old Filth's memorial service, but quickly jumps back to Veneering's humble beginnings in the fishing village Herringfleet, his improbable escape from death during the war, his later success in law, his lifelong passion for Betty. Unfortunately Gardam also spends time with some less interesting characters, but even then her lucid, flowing prose keeps things interesting.

If you've ever been annoyed that the last 50 pages of a novel seem flabby or uninteresting, fear not – Jane Gardam must share your annoyance. She manages to reveal powerful secrets near the end of each of these books, without in any way seeming gimmicky. These novels make great summertime books, since they are best read in quick succession, and they are almost impossible to put down.

Déjà Vu

I've blogged before about the pleasures and pitfalls of “what if” novels. If the premise is too implausible or clunky I lose interest immediately, but if the author makes a persuasive case, like Tom Perrotta's “The Leftovers” or Michael Chabon's “The Yiddish Policemen's Union”, I'm happy to go along for the ride. Kate Atkinson's Life After Life offers a “what if” that is quite a stretch – what if every time main character Ursula Todd dies, some sort of karmic reset button gets hit, and she returns to life. Although she doesn't remember her previous life, a sense of déjà vu causes her to take an alternate path. Confusing? It sounds as if it should be, but once you recognize the rhythm it's surprisingly easy to follow the twisting thread of Ursula's life, from her first cross with death (where she dies at birth) through her childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

This device allows Atkinson to place Ursula in harm's way on both sides in World War II. She sips hot chocolate with Eva Braun, struggles to survive in a bombed out Berlin, but also serves as warden in London during the Blitz. And why didn't this seem like a gimmick? Because I grew more and more fond of Ursula as each new path fleshed out her personality and that of other characters as well. Kate Atkinson's skill kept me following each new narrative with curiosity and affection.

A Boy Named Sue

There are several things to take away from a reading of The Typist by Michael Knight.

One is another reminder, if one is needed, that trying to predict the defining influences in a child's life is a risky business. When our narrator Francis Vancleave "Van" was a child growing up in Alabama in the early years of World War II, his mother, who had been a secretary before she married, would type papers for students at the nearby college to earn extra money. With the typewriter set up on the kitchen table after dinner, it was a natural that she would teach her son to type. No Tiger Mother drama here: he was a willing student. What neither of them anticipated was that when Van enlisted in the military, his typing was considered a "special talent" and he was assigned to the military secretarial pool of General Douglas MacArthur, thereby probably saving his life at the very least. And that assignment sets up the rest of the story in Japan.

Another take-away is admiration for the imagination of a writer. Part of the back story to this novel, as described by Knight in the book's Acknowledgments, is that Knight attended a writer's conference in Florida in 2007 where he met a man who was in fact a typist in MacArthur's command, serving as an enlisted man in Tokyo during the American occupation of Japan after the war. Knight is able to take the life of an ordinary enlisted typist and use it to give us an expanded view into this moment of history - and a very interesting view it is. I am inspired to want to read more about MacArthur himself...and isn't that one mark of a successful story?

And finally, MacArthur named his only child, a son, Arthur. Yes, it was also the name of the boy's grandfather but why perpetuate it? I'm sure it was character building (not unlike "A Boy Named Sue").

Friends and Enemies

CAUTION: The book that I am going to recommend is an historical spy novel The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst. But my comments may be considered “spoilers” so unless you have already read this book or intend never to read it or have a short memory, you may want to return later.

The book is set in Warsaw in 1937, narrated by the French military attaché stationed there. The spies of the title are everywhere – and of many nationalities: French, Russian Jews, Poles, even Germans, all working against Hitler, trying to avoid another war. They had all lived through the previous war 20 years earlier. I guess I never really focused before on just how close in time WWII followed WWI. If the fictional characters are true, there were many people who recognized the evil of Hitler and who in their own ways took great risks and made sacrifices to try to stop his ascent. Some worked for ideological reasons, some for more pragmatic reasons (read: monetary greed) – but the cause was the same.

Didn’t we just recently hear in the context of the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme and of the financial crisis generally that so many people were deceived because they wanted to be deceived? That is not a new idea. There it is on page 225: the Latin proverb Mundus vult decipi, ergo decepiatur. Translation: "The world desires to be deceived; therefore it is." (Attributed to Petronius) Once again we were not paying adequate attention to history - and there is a lot to be learned from reading fiction!

I am not widely read in spy novels but my sense is that much of the detail that is couched as fiction is actually fact. I can only hope that the historical details in this book are fiction because it would be far too depressing to think that the French had sufficient intelligence to have avoided their invasion and initial defeat by the Nazis. This strikes me as very similar to the intelligence situation (what we can know of it from the outside) leading up to our war in Iraq for which the intelligence may have been shaped to fit the desired outcome of those with responsibility.

If you want more, here is a list of spy novels that appears in the Jan. 30, 2009 issue of The Week:
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
The Queen of the South by Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Ghost by Robert Harris
The Magus by John Fowles
The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler