I don’t know how to judge my indifference to this book. Sometimes books are like calf leather gloves in August: sumptuous wonders of craftsmanship and texture that we’d appreciate if only we weren’t too tired, too harried, too dull, too careless, too immature, too hot, at that moment. Sometimes the problem is simply being second act to an indisputable star: I read the astoundingly moving Stoner by John Williams immediately before I read this book. And sometimes books are lauded out of habit – some suitably distinguished person said something wonderful thing about it once and intellectual insecurity have caused people to sing undue praises ever since. Whatever the reasons, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen left me utterly numb.

                Sixteen and orphaned, Portia Quayne is sent to live with her half-brother, Thomas and his socialite wife, Anna, in London. Condemned to wander up and down the Riviera, from back facing rooms to ski chalets in August, it’s the first time Portia will live in a proper house, weighed down by solid furniture and thick draperies, the first time she’ll have a room of her own.  Thomas’s father was a spineless sort, and when it became apparent his affair with Portia’s mother would produce a child, he went groveling to his wife, who promptly donned her mantel of moral sacrifice, putting Thomas’ father on the first train to Portia’s mother.    Ashamed he lost the home he’d loved, Thomas’ father couldn’t bring himself to make a second one, and so he dragged his misfit family around Europe until he died, and Portia’s mother soon followed.  

                Portia’s arrival shocks the bourgeois rhythm of Thomas and Anna’s childless Regent’s Park townhouse, and although Thomas is not a cruel man, Portia reminds him of all that unpleasantness surrounding his father.  Anna, on the other hand, resents Portia’s naivete, and after reading Portia’s diary, can’t shake the moral weight of Portia’s judgment. Aware she’s unwanted, Portia tries to mourn her parents as inconspicuously as possible while learning all she can about her new world.

                With few people to talk to beside Matchett, a maid inherited with Thomas’ mother’s furniture who Portia puts to good use filling in blanks about her father, Portia’s inordinate attachment to Eddie, a shiftless opportunist whose flirtation with Anna lead to his employment at Thomas’s firm, is supposed to be understandable.  As Portia’s new guardians, Thomas and Anna treat their friendship with grudging amusement: Portia can be trusted and Eddie is harmless.

            Unable to accompany Anna and Thomas on their trip to Capri, Portia is sent to the seaside to stay with Anna’s old governess, Mrs. Heccombe. Portia enjoys the seaside and free and easy manner of Mrs. Heccombe’s children, Daphne and Dickie, who let Portia tag along with them even though they’re quite a bit older. However, when Eddie visits her for a weekend, he’s often drunk and inconsiderate, and he hits on Daphne right under Portia’s nose. When Portia confronts him about it, he brushes her off, and she begs him to forgive him.

                Which brings us to my problem with this book: Portia’s inexplicable attraction to Eddie is alienating, so much so that her innocence with respect to  him almost reads as pathological. This is made all apparent when presented against the other moral innocent slinking around Thomas and Anna: Major Brutt.

Major Brutt is an old friend of Anna’s ex-boyfriend, Pidgeon. When she runs into him outside of the cinema, she invites him home with the family for a drink and he accepts with pleasure. Just back from the war, he’s in London looking for work. Comfortably installed in the Quaynes’ drawing room, he’s openly thankful for their invitation. He speaks freely of his loneliness and the difficulty he’s been having securing work, seemingly unaware that for them his troubles are little more than an unwelcome appeal for help. When he takes Anna’s offer to drop in anytime at face value, we blush for him, while hoping he finds his way; when Portia takes Eddie’s half-hearted marriage proposal to heart, we can’t help but shake our heads, baffled.

Eventually all artifice is exposed when Portia learns Anna has been reading her diary and Eddie has known  all along. She runs off to Major Brutt’s hotel, refusing to return until Anna and Thomas make some grand gesture; they send the maid to fetch her.  

Portia’s story should be moving, but there is an dissonant airiness to this book; episodes are layered one over the other, like translucencies, without ever generating weight, at least not for this reader. Perhaps one day, when I’m feeling particularly affronted by the cruelty of polite society or nostalgic for a time when I was innocent in the ways of men, I’ll pick it up again and give it a second go. Until then, I won't just it too harshly; just another case of calf leather gloves in August, I suppose.          

Let me ask you ask you a question, who is morally worse: a person who commits an act thinking it will cause hundreds of deaths, but which in fact causes none; or a person who commits an act that inadvertently counts its casualties in the dozens? In other words, what matters more in determining moral culpability –intentions or consequences? How you answer this question will determine how you feel about the fate of the titular character in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.  

Marlow, known to many a college student as the narrator of Heart of Darkness, returns here with yet another tale. Jim, the son of a parson who “possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknownable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions”, is first mate aboard the   Patna, a steamer “as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank”,  a ship charged with transporting 800 Muslims pilgrims across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. The journey promises to be an easy one, and Jim, “penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace” enjoys the privilege of being a white man in the Eastern ports. However, the “great calm of the waters” proves to be misleading, and when the ship strikes something in the middle of the night,  the panicked captain and crew convince themselves a bulkhead has been breached, the Patna doomed to sink. The problem is: there aren’t enough lifeboats for the 800 passengers with their “faith and hopes”, their “affections and memories” and sounding the alarm would surely invoke a stampede that would endanger their lives. Disgusted by what is happening, but unaware of a solution, Jim watches as the captain and a pair of engineers struggle to launch a lifeboat, effectively abandoning the passengers in their charge. Jim stands, steeling himself for death, but at the last moment, with a “strange illusion of passiveness”, he steps over the legs of a dead man and jumps ship to join the other deserters.  

As it turns out, the Patna is rescued and towed into port by a French gunboat, its 800 passengers bewildered, but safe. An inquiry is held, and Jim, the only one brought before the tribunal – the captain has fled, the two engineers have been hospitalized – is forced to give testimony that shames him to the core.

Stripped of his license, and no longer able to work aboard a ship, Jim would have certainly been destitute if Captain Marlow, a man with connections throughout the Eastern ports, hadn’t recognized him as an industrious and affable man, a man whose moral fiber belied his desertion of the Patna.  Through hard work and good sense, not mention a genial manner, Jim manages to excel in whatever position –manager of a rice mill, water-clerk for various ship-chandlers – Marlow manages to secure for him.  However, whenever anything, however slight, threatens to expose his role in  the Patna incident, Jim takes off.  

About ready to give up on Jim, Marlow appeals to his friend, Stein, a merchant with trading posts scattered across the South Pacific. Stein agrees to send Jim to manage a far-flung outpost in Patusan, an inland region plagued by tribal wars. Jim is elated; it’s a fresh start, an opportunity for adventure, to make his own life, to break out of the shackles of shame slapped on his limbs after the Patna incident. Through industry, and diplomatic skill (helping the Bugis people to oust Sharif Ali and his clan, Jim effectively limits Rajah Allang’s, the opium-addicted nephew to the Sultan, power). Jim brings stability to the long-suffering people of Patusan, and he is embraced as a community leader.

                As people once told tales about the Patna, and Jim’s disgrace, the people of Patusan now tell tall tales of Jim’s courage and strength, and where Jim once thrust his chest out to counter his shame, he’s now buoyed with pride at his position, and all that he’s accomplished in this isolated backwater.  When Marlow visits Patusan, many a curious villager inquire what keeps a white man like Jim from his proper home. Marlow is forced to explain how Jim’s character flaws make him ill-suited for his homeland, yet his audience is incredulous. 

But when a pack of pirates, lead by the treacherous Gentleman Brown, arrive in Patusan intent of pillaging the community, Jim, having cornered the pirates, elicits a promise of retreat in exchanges for guaranteed safe passage down the river. On Jim’s honor, the Bugis agree to let the pirates pass, but when the pirates double-cross Jim, at the urging of his long-time rival, Cornelius, the chief’s son, Dain Waris, is killed. Jim is devastated; he failed to protect his community and in doing so, lost a good friend.  Jim pays for this failure with his life.

For all his good intentions, Jim’s mistake ultimately costs many lives, and so it seems the morality of the Lord Jim universe is one of consequences. Considering that we can never know another person’s intentions, it isn’t entirely crazy to judge moral culpability by consequences alone; it’s impossible to know another person’s mind, and just as we only know Jim through Marlow’s speculation and anecdote, other people must remain, like Jim, “forever an enigma.” 

However, I found it troubling that Jim was so quick to claim responsibility for consequences that didn’t seem his to claim. The Bugis died not because Jim brokered Gentleman Brown’s peaceful passage, but because of Gentleman Brown and Cornelius’s evil ways. Conversely, it’s hard to mitigate Jim’s responsibility for his desertion, even as he pleads passivity in the act of desertion.

Of course, the question – intentions vs. consequences – stated as such, is too simplistic. Morality is a messy business that doesn’t lend itself well to universally applicable rules or categorical imperatives. We can easily imagine a moral situation where intentions tip the scales, and another where what matters is the result. That is, moral culpability cannot be extracted from context and is essentially socially determined.

 And here we get to the brilliance of this book.

Shame is a social phenomenon. Arguably, one does not feel shame (as opposed to guilt) in the absence of an onlooker, and while it’s Jim’s shame that drives him from job to job, not once does he speak of his guilt, prompting Marlow himself to wonder about the guilt in his heart. And just as his disgrace in the eyes of others sends Jim skulking from job to job in the Eastern ports, it is his approbation in the eyes of others that ultimately revives. And so perhaps it is only fitting that his final act, as judged by the ones so ready to revere him,  is what ultimately does him in. 

           But while I found myself marveling at the entangled intricacy of these themes, I had difficulty losing myself in this book; Jim and his adventures felt like pop-up devices animated solely to serve an exploration of moral philosophy, and while I found myself thinking a lot about the ideas in the book, those same ideas pushed me out of the story; a worthy, thought-provoking read, definitely, but the flatness of characters keep this, in my opinion, from being a truly great book.  

My advice as you open this book (or read this review): go here and crank up some ragtime (and be sure to scroll down to marvel how Jelly Roll Morton takes it all the way to jazz with his Jelly Roll Blues). Ragtime, the melodious offspring of blackface cakewalks and patriotic marches, perfectly captures the optimism and energy of America in the early 1900s, a time of growth and prosperity hitherto unheard of; a time when coal miners took on the capitalists for safer work conditions and fair pay, and won; a time when a single, socially- minded photographer, documenting immigrant ghettos, took pictures powerful enough to move a president and serve as evidence of the necessity of improved housing conditions for the poor; a time when American entrepreneurs amassed more wealth than some European monarchy, through little more than hard work and talent. However, it was also the era of Jim Crow legislation and the venomous prejudice that made it impossible for a black man to materially enjoy his success, say, by driving a shiny new Model T Ford – but more on that later. For now, close your eyes and let the “the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves” of Scott Joplin’s music conjure the jerky movements of early film reels, images of men in boaters disembarking from trolleys, double-time, crowding city streets, or images of half-mad inventors pedaling pumping flying machines, contraptions so bulky and cumbersome, one can’t help but be thankful they never got off the ground.

Although too many people, unprotected by social safety nets or workplace regulations, lived and worked in squalor, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century brought with it a general sense of hope and optimism, and it’s the paradoxes of this period, the progressive enlightenment and conservative barbarism, the frosty rationality and fuzzy superstition, the fervent patriotism and homicidal anarchy, that E.L. Doctorow builds his 1974 masterpiece, Ragtime, around.

Set in New Rochelle, NY and New York City, the book centers on an upper-class family known only by their roles in relation to a young male observer: Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather. And while they could stand-in for any of a certain type of family – well-off, white, entrepreneurial – they are remarkable, in all their anonymity, for they ways in which they burst out of type, in spite of themselves: Father, a manufacturer of patriotic paraphernalia, tags along with his flags on Arctic expeditions, something of a hobbyist explorer; Mother, radically progressive without knowing it, befriends Sarah, the black mother of the illegitimate baby Mother finds buried in the garden, and ends up raising the black child as her own; Younger Brother builds bombs to aid a series of rebels after his heart is broken by the infamous Evelyn Nesbit, wife of the morphine-addicted sadist and millionaire, Harry Thaw. In what was billed as ‘The Crime of the Century’, Thaw famously blew off the face of Nesbit’s long-time lover, the architect, Stanford White, in the roof-top garden at Madison Square Gardens.

And it's not just Younger Brother rubbing elbows with celebrities; throughout this book, the whole family has connections of varying importance with historical figures: Mother serves Harry Houdini lemonade when his car breaks down in front of the house; a heartbroken Younger Brother takes to following Emma Goldman and her revolutionaries around; Father helps to end a standoff in J. Pierpont Morgan’s house. And while this anonymous family plays its bit role in history, cultural trends bring the major players together: J. Pierpont Morgan tries to interest Henry Ford in joining his secret society founded on Egyptian-flavoured occultism; Harry Houdini impresses a mistaken Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the inventor of a flying machine; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung happen upon Evelyn Nesbit at a street art stall devoted to silhouette art.

Meticulously researched, this book alludes heavily to historical facts, however, Doctorow’s deft hand keeps the narrative from sagging under the weight of it all, and just as no historical account can ever be free of interpretation, Doctorow’s wonderful prose, however deceptively declarative, is steeped in judgment. For example:

At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams , iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

Or elsewhere:

[Harry Houdini’s] audiences were poor people – carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. … He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail….He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued . . . Today, fifty years after his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

For all the hubris and optimism of the early 20th century, these were far from perfect times, and Doctorow embodies some of the good (the success found by disenfranchised groups in the arts) and the bad (virulent racism) in the character of Coalhouse Walker. Coalhouse, a black musician, doomed by his well-groomed confidence and articulate manner, is the father of the baby Mother found in the garden. When Mother and Father take Sarah and the baby into their home, Coalhouse drives out every Sunday from Harlem, his shiny red Model T Ford glinting through the streets of New Rochelle like a flickering flame. This is too much for the men of the Emerald Isle Engine, a volunteer fire brigade, and when Coalhouse fails to show them the deference they feel due, they destroy his car. After Sarah is killed during her misguided attempt to appeal to the government for help, Coalhouse’s sets out for revenge, bringing New Rochelle to its knees in terror.

The tragedy of Sarah and Coalhouse is the tragedy of that first decade of the 20th century - Lady Justice had yet to be blindfolded -- the era, like its music, a mashup of pride and shame, of patriotic marches and blackface cakewalks, but with war rumbling across Europe, optimism deflated and “the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano.”

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett is a surprisingly dark novel about the anguish and suffering inherent to human life. We live, we love, we suffer, we die. And ultimately, whatever success we manage to achieve is transient, not leaving much more than the shadow of a smudge on the world: it took not even two generations for Mr. Baines’ fabric store to be walled off from his attached home and sold after his death, and a large sign – with his name on it, no less – (something he railed against during his lifetime, considering such ostentatious self-promotion gauche) to be hung out front.

But as the title suggests –taken literally as the tale of two old women, rather than as a piece of unsubstantiated medical superstition –  is the story of the Baines women. More specifically, this is the story of how the particular hardships and disappointments of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, influence their innate character.

The Baines are an upper-middle class family of drapers in a provincial England town at the beginning of the 20^th century. Mrs. Baines laments “deeply on the martyrdom of her life” for although she’s always “endeavoured to be kind, just, patient [and] knew herself to be sagacious and prudent,” fate saddled her with an invalid husband and one willful daughter who elopes to Paris with a scoundrel salesman, and one steady daughter who marries wisely, but beneath her. What Mrs. Baines comes to realize in the twilight of her life, and what Bennett illustrates through the lives of Sophia and Constance, is that while fortunes may be made (and inherited) disappointment and suffering are unavoidable aspects of the world. In Arnold Bennett’s world, frustrated desires are the order the day.

The headstrong and beautiful Sophia longs to see the world outside of Bursley and can’t imagine a life more horrible than following in her mother’s shoes as the matron of the family shop. She wants a career of her own (her mother is scandalized when, for a brief time, Sophia insists she be allowed to train as a teacher), a career that will preferably take her to London. When the widely-travelled Gerald Scales comes to town on business, Sophia can’t see him for the spoiled creep that he is.  To her, Gerald is a cultured sophisticate, the perfect man to teach her the ways – to show her –the world. As it turns out, Gerald is also an unconscionable seducer, and after a secret correspondence, he convinces Sophia to run away with him to Paris. Not completely lost to passion, Sophia insists they marry in London.   

For better or worse, the couple live the hotel -life of restaurants and parties in Paris. That is, until  Gerald’s money runs out and Sophia refuses, by this time aware that her husband’s a scoundrel, to hit up her family for money (whom she’s been ashamed to contact all these years), and Gerald leaves her. For Sophia, this is more of a blessing than a curse, and circumstances find her the proprietress of a boarding house that soon, thanks to her strong character and business sense, prospers.

Constance, on the other hand, lives a life not much different from her mother’s. She marries a reliable, if unadventurous, man: her father’s former assistant, Samuel Povey. Their young love dims to companionship that, while not passionate, is amiable and satisfying. Anyway, both are far too devoted to their only child, Cyril, for romance.When a grown Cyril moves to London to pursue his artistic education, poor Constance is more devastated than she was by her husband’s death, and having already sold the store, she’s left alone in Bursley with nothing to do but fret about her rheumatism and the insolence of her servants.

Although Sophia and Constance live lives as different as their characters, as they’re reunited in middle-age, Bennett shows us how, while materially comfortable, both have led lives unfulfilled. That both Constance(through inheritance) and Sophia (through resourcefulness) are wealthy is key to understanding something particularly striking about this book: Bennett seems to be suggesting that at its source, the inherent disappointment of the human condition is social.   

That is, no one suffer from  unrealized personal ambitions. Mrs. Baines is plagued by her daughters’ disobedience and the loneliness of life married to an invalid. Daniel Povey, the most popular man in town, is shamed by an alcoholic wife who sends him, literally, to the gallows. Sophia’s disappointment comes from the realization that she’s married a scoundrel who deprives her of a family. Constance’s particular regret is that the one love in her life – her son, Cyril—treats her with a casualness and disregard that can only be called cruel.

In fact, Cyril is the only Baines who can properly be called happy, or at the very least, unconcerned . He’s also the only character who hasn’t hung his hopes and expectations on the behavior of others, and while his career as an artist doesn't seem to be going anywhere, he doesn't seem much to care. But then again, perhaps what we mistake for happiness is youth that has not realized what's in store, for as Bennett writes of Sophia as she ponders Gerald’s corpse:

The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that. . .The riddle of life was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow.

  
Much has been written about Bennett’s detailed realism –famously maligned by Virginia Woolf—but I’d argue that there is a delicious irony in Bennett’s inordinate preoccupation with physical details:  Bennett makes as much of a wall, or a window, or a door as we make of inconsequential particulars in our own lives, and the impatience we feel at reading all this description – when used in service of such bleak themes as the disappointment inherent to human existence –brilliantly reminds us of the unimportance of the mundane details we seem to let overrun our own lives.

I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to this book. Arctic adventures. Dog sleds. The struggle for survival. I had flashbacks of required reading from my Canadian childhood: Lost in the Barrens by Farley Mowat. This isn't to knock Mowat; it's been over twenty years since I read him, but at 10 years old, I resented having to read about boys and wolves and snow when I could be reading something lovely, like Anne of Green Gables. Not to mention, I'm a decidedly urban person – I've never been camping, never slept in a tent – and so, it's little wonder, I was less than enthusiastic to read a book about a working dog's life in the Yukon.

But, that's the great thing about this list: I discovered that I hated books I thought I would've loved (Sophie's Choice, I'm looking at you), and surprisingly enough, I ended up really enjoying The Call of the Wild.

Buck, a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd cross, enjoys a civilized life on Judge Miller's sprawling estate in the sunny Santa Clara Valley. Confined to neither house nor kennel, Buck ruled over all – vineyard, orchard, and house – relishing his status as king of the homestead. That is, until he's cruelly abducted by an insolvent gardener: the gold-hungry hordes streaming north have left a shortage of strong dogs in their wake, and Buck is sold to a trader. 

 

Thrust into a world he's unprepared for, Buck quickly learns staying alive means keeping on the right side of the “law of the club”. But, Buck is a smart dog and he wisely submits after a vicious beating by a “dog breaker”. Other dogs arrive, and Buck watches as some are successfully broken, while others, too stubborn for survival, are just plain beaten to death. He also watches men, both good and bad, arrive with cash and leave with dogs. Eventually, Buck is sold to Canada Post, to run mail to the burgeoning northern settlements. 

 

Buck's new masters, Francois and Perrault, are two French-Canadians, who for some distracting reason speak only broken English to each other. Pedantic, maybe, but every time they tied their tongue in knots speaking English (Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek as anyt'ing), I wanted to shake London down and ask: why, oh why aren't they speaking French?! The simple fix would have been to make one of them English Canadian. 

 

While running with the dog team is grueling, Francois and Perrault are fair masters, wise to the way of dogs, and Buck soon emerges a leader. Although hard, Buck learns to like the work. Unfortunately, the mail must be delivered, and the Canadian government has no time to rest its dogs, so after running 5000 kilometers in five months, in Arctic conditions, Buck is sold to a group of incompetent, ill-equipped prospectors. What they lack in common sense, they make up for in cruelty. They overfeed the dogs, only to leave them to starve to death (literally) in the harness when the food runs out. Baggy skin sacs of bone, too weak to move, the dogs are beaten to death when they collapse from exhaustion. It is from these conditions that John Thornton rescues Buck.

 

As Buck is London's ideal dog, John is London's ideal man, living a life in accord with nature. John knows the language and needs of the animals around him and Buck, for the first time in his life, knows what it is to love a master. John and his companions, Pete and Hans, live in harmony with their environment. They travel light through uncharted territory, eating when they catch something, going hungry when they don't. While they pass many seasons in this uncharted wilderness, Buck dreams the dreams of the canine collective unconscious, huddled around the fire with cavemen, chasing down prey in the woods. Eventually, his instincts lead him to his old brethren, the wolf, and while he disappears from camp for days at a time, as long as John's alive, he can never cut his ties to the humanity: he loves John too much.

Although, at times, London runs the risk of sentimentality, his prose can also be surprisingly beautiful:

And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call still sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what. Sometimes, he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment behind fungus-covered trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved and sounded about him. It might be, lying thus, that he hoped to surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not know why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them, and he did not reason about them at all.

As I read this wonderful story of Buck's progression through civilized, natural  and spiritual/mythical modes of existence, I realized something mildly disturbing about myself: I am deaf to the call of the wild. I couldn't imagine a life more horrible than John's– hunting for food, braving the elements. And, perhaps more significantly, the “kill or be killed” law of the jungle terrifies me. I'd surely share Curly's fate: the happy dog made friendly overtures to a husky who proceeded to rip off her face. Perhaps, my fear of violence is just an indication that I've been successfully socialized (no psychopathic tendencies, here), but I worry about my (lack of) relationship to the natural world, especially if London's to be believed, and it is to be passed through to reach the spiritual/mythical.

 

I think a camping trip is in order. I'm off to tell my boyfriend: we need to buy a tent. I'm sure he will (or won't he?) be thrilled.

Henry Green's Loving is an honest, hard to classify, tale about the relativity of privilege, set among a group of British servants in the middle of WWII. In keeping her Irish castle open and staffed, Mrs. Tennant does her part to preserve an endangered lifestyle. When her old butler Eldon dies the rascally footman, Charley Raunce, takes over. While Raunce lacks the solicitude and discretion to be a worthy successor to Eldon, the war has left Mrs. Tennant with a poverty of choice. When not chasing the pretty maids, Kate and Edith, around, Raunce is busy working out ways to nickel-and-dime the accounts. Raunce is objectionable enough to be banned from both nursery and kitchen by nanny and cook, Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Welch, respectively. Unfortunately, the head housekeeper, Mrs. Burch, doesn't have her own domain to ban him from, and so her life is one long sigh of endurance. Not that Raunce is bothered by any of this. The less he has to do with the elder women, the better; they confirm what he's always suspected – women sour like milk. Especially unmarried ones. And amid much ado about aristocratic infidelities, imminent invasion, and a missing sapphire ring, the plot centers around the coupling off of the still-marriageable Edith and Kate. 

Green has been called a writer's writer's writer; whatever that means, it seems to imply undue difficulty, but I loved his style. Green's prose, while not exactly crisp, is concentrated, even cold, and his point-of-view almost objective. That is, he rarely delves into the minds of his characters, never allows them interior monologue. That his characters live and breathe is a testament to Green's wonderful gift for dialogue. 

 

At its best, Loving falls the way of a farce. From the servants' paranoia that Mrs. Tennant has fled Ireland abandoning them on the cusp of invasion, to the lisping insurance agent who visits the house, to Raunce's ridiculous treatment of him, to the even more ridiculous way he handles the whole business when Mrs. Tennant finally comes home: it's all just absurd enough to be hilarious. 

But, for all the laughing and loving, Green has avoided romanticising his servant class by endowing them with a realistic perspective of their own. Romanticism is a luxury of the aristocracy. It's for the rich to exclaim over the beauty of daffodils (while Raunce kicks one down a passage in the servant's hall), to guild animal heads as fixtures, to furnish a drawing room like a cow byre, walls draped with silk, the furniture painted gold. Saved from industrial servitude and the assembly line, spared the certain death of war, these aren't the Romantic's idealized peasants, spiritually rich and at one with the land. Rather, they're just as engrossed as their employers with affairs of the wallet and heart. 

 

Positioned in an wealthy house, eating meat and milk while others starve, with a supply of silk stockings and scarves, the servants are too privileged for the peasant's peace without a classical education to compensate. In other words, they've given up the natural nobility of the peasant, without gaining the cultural nobility of the gentry. For them, the nature is neither spiritual nor guilded. It's just another aspect of the world to contend with or exploit. While the Tennants bring jewelled representations of nature inside, the chef's little nephew, Arthur, knows the truth worth of an eggshell in a field is as a hiding place for the missing sapphire cluster. In one of my favourite scenes, the nanny, Mrs. Swift, tells the Tennant girls a fairy tale about birds while in the dovecote in front of them (as little Arthur points out) real doves fornicate and murder. 

 

However, petty and ridiculous, one can't help but sympathesize with the servants, just as one can't help but feel for Mrs. Tennant by the end of the book; in her own way, she's just as appealing as Edith, and perhaps more so than Raunce. And whether the ending is actually happy or sad – for it is startlingly ambiguous – Mrs. Tennant will suffer. I couldn't help but feel bad about that. But perhaps that's just my sentimental longing for a Romantic world.

 
 

Salman Rushdie's magical masterpiece, Midnight's Children is a bumping, bouncing allegory – not unlike a ride on a first generation Tata bus – of India's first 30 years of independence. Intelligent and intense, it is also a playfully funny book. However the prose, much like the zippy zing of India herself, can be overwhelming for the Western reader. I find the best way to approach Rushdie is to take a deep breath and plunge right in. It might be a struggle at first, but once you stop fighting the foreign rhythms, the language washes over you, and bobbing to the surface, there's just time enough to catch your breath before you're rip-roaring along in the white-water rapids of Rushdie's storytelling, exhilarated. In short: this is one hell of a book.

It's midnight on August 15, 1947: India emerges an independent nation and in that first hour, 581 children are born. Born amid the hopes and dreams of their newborn nation, these 581 are as diverse – Muslim, Hindu, Jainist, Sikh, Christian – as they are magical. Time travel. Alchemy. Shapeshifting. Mirror-travel. Dynamic hermaphrodism. Strewn across the country, these pint-sized superheros are connected in the mind of a telepathic boy, a boy born on the stroke of midnight, Saleem Sinai. 

 

Saleem believes his midnight-birth ties him to India's future. He also believes it gives him the right to lead their magical coalition – The Midnight's Children Conference. Problem is, no one can agree on their obligations to their country. Should they isolate themselves from political concerns and live together, in peace, in a magical commune? Or are they bound to direct India into a bright and prosperous future? And is this bright and prosperous future Communist? Socialist? Capitalist? Hindu? Muslim? Sikh? 

 

There's also another problem: Saleem isn't the only baby born on midnight. In the same Mumbai hospital, a well-to-do Muslim woman gave birth to a son, Shiva, at the same moment that a Hindu woman from the slums gave birth to Saleem (and died for her effort). But, a radically-minded, love-stricken nurse, Mary Pereira, switched the babies, and so the well-to-do Muslim woman took home Saleem, while Shiva was sent off to the slums with his freshly widowed father. 

 

Shiva scorns Saleem and his Midnight's Children Conference. He scorns Saleem's optimism, his Western sympathies, his democratic tendencies, and where Saleem is diplomatic and impotent, Shiva is war-mongering and fertile. They are the two sides of India's newly minted coins, and although Saleem starts out life in Lord Methwold's British estate, complete with cocktail hour and caged budgies, while Shiva fights for his life in the slums, as India's fledgling democracy falters and Indira Gandhi desperately struggles to maintain her rule, the fortunes of India's midnight sons reverse, and Saleem slips into a destitute life in magician's ghetto while Shiva rises in status, a gentleman soldier. 

 

As Indira Gandhi circumvents the democratic process, issuing what will be a 2-year State of Emergency, granting herself sweeping powers and the right to rule by decree, Shiva's son, Aadam is born, and Saleem, his effective guardian, realizes that the era of the India's midnight chidren just about over.

We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already he is harder, stronger, more resolute than I: when he sleeps his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.

As Saleem's 31^st birthday approaches, he stews that last of his story into 30 chutney jars. Preserving the story of the midnight children like pickles, Saleem is preparing to step aside, to hand over history-making to the next generation, to children like Aadam, and Shiva's many anonymous children. But Saleem's wise enough to leave one empty jar – the future chutney– because he knows that tomorrow's story is one he cannot tell. Subsequent generations of midnight children will be the ones who determine how it all turns out.

Reading Midnight's Children I was reminded of the many Englishes in the world. Not that I needed much reminding: as a Canadian I speak an English that is neither American nor British, while owing much to both. And the English spoken in Jamaica is not the English spoken in Ireland is not the English spoken in Singapore is not the English spoken in Nigeria is not the English spoken in South Africa is not the English spoken in Australia and so on. However, these differences of grammar, idiom, vocabulary, and rhythm mostly disappear in literature. Considering language alone (while ignoring setting for example), J.M Coetzee and Peter Carey and John Banville could all be neighbours. Get them in a room together and the rhythm of their language (to say nothing of their accents) places them. There is a case to be made for a greater reflection of these diverse Englishes in the literary establishment. Perhaps the greatest legacy of this book --  with two Bookers and a James Tait Memorial Prize -  is that it gave Indian English literary voice.