First Sentence: I am a sick man…I am a spiteful man.
Thoughts: You know how sometimes when you’re reading a book you’ll get a song stuck in your head? That happened as I was reading Notes from Underground. As the narrator went on and on about his life and beliefs I kept thinking of this song:
Nobody likes me Everybody hates me I guess I’ll go eat worms
The narrator of this novella hates himself and did his damnedest to make sure everyone else hates him too. The first half of the story is him using this technique on us, the readers. He went on a rant about how much the whole world sucked and how much he hated it before going to a flashback to explain how he ended up scribbling notes in a basement.
Twenty years earlier the narrator was able to go out in public and at least appear to be a functioning member of society. He hated everyone even then, mostly for no reason but a psychologist would detect deep feelings of inadequacy that he was trying (badly) to cover up. I guess that’s why this is called a psychological novel. You’d need years of training that field to uncover all the problems this guy has. National Geographic nothing, The Times of London is in awe of all his issues.
We are treated to a long interlude about a particular soldier Narrator hated. He noticed when the soldier walked down the street, people got out of his way due to his commanding posture and purposeful bearing. Narrator decided to heck with this guy, he wasn’t going to get out of his way anymore. In fact he was going to bump into him in the street on purpose! That’ll show him! Who does he think he is, having confidence like that? Narrator puts his Cunning Plan into action: he goes into debt buying a new fur collar for his coat and a new hat so the soldier, who doesn’t know Narrator from Adam’s house cat, won’t recognize him. Then he bumps into him. The soldier barely notices him and goes on his way. Why that little so-and-so, sputters Narrator.
In another story, he tells about the time he invited himself to a party for a former schoolmate who got a promotion. He didn’t like this schoolmate and vice versa, but since he happened to be in the room when a couple of Schoolmate’s friends were discussing the party he decided that he was going to go too. He showed up an hour early and then spent the rest of the evening pacing back and forth across the room while everyone else ignored him. When they left, Narrator followed them to a House of Ill Repute where he spent the night with a prostitute who really deserved better. The rest of the book is Narrator degrading the prostitute and making her cry.
Clearly Dostoevsky was not in a good place when he wrote this. Fyodor, honey, are you okay? I know your wife was dying when you were working on this story. I know that’s rough. Do you need me to bring over a casserole and a sympathetic ear? Seriously, I’m worried about you a hundred and sixty years in the future.
First Sentence: A young man walks down by the banks of the Blackwater under the full cold moon.
Thoughts: Hey kids, guess what time it is? It’s time for another edition of “I Didn’t Read the Same Book as Everyone Else!” Today’s example is The Essex Serpent, a book that was universally loved by everyone I know who read it. Even the guy who sold it to me at Malaprops said he loved it. What did I think? I did not love it. I was hoping for another supernatural romp like Melmoth and that did not happen. My disappointment, it is palpable.
So what is it about? Cora Seaborne and the people she knows. We first meet Cora after her husband’s death. She’s not mourning too much because he was an abusive bastard, but she does have to keep up appearances so she puts on the widow’s weeds and goes through the motions. Not for long, though. Shortly after the funeral she packs up her stuff, her companion Martha, and her son Francis and moves to Essex. There she indulges her love of archaeology by wandering around looking for fossils, dreaming of becoming the next Mary Anning. Meanwhile Martha tries to keep her out of trouble while also keeping up with the dire state of housing in the London slums while Francis (who has a touch of the autism) counts everything he can get his hands on.
Cora hears rumors that the Essex Serpent, last seen in the 1600s, has returned to the coast. She wonders if it might be a living fossil, possibly an ichthyosaur, and hies off to the town of Aldwinter where most of the sightings have been. There she meets and befriends Rev. William Ransome who spends his days wandering the countryside, his wife Stella who spends her days trying not to die of tuberculosis, and his children, especially the oldest daughter Joanna who is inspired by Cora to study non-feminine subjects like science and math.
Cora also has admirers back in London. Dr. Luke Garrett fell for her when he was tending her husband during his last illness. Even the fact that she calls him “The Imp” doesn’t detract him from mooning over her, although he can be distracted by the latest findings on the human heart. He dreams of performing a successful heart surgery one day. His friend George Spencer is also a doctor, but comes from a rich family so he’s not in danger of starving like Luke is. He accompanies Luke on his Essex holiday and meets Martha who recruits George and his money into her Better Housing for the Poor campaign.
Meanwhile the specter of the Essex Serpent looms over them all. Strange things begin to happen. Cora gives a lecture on fossils at the local girl’s school and a laughing epidemic breaks out. Naomi, one of Joanna’s friends, disappears. William gets frustrated by the superstitions in his congregation and chisels off the carving of the Essex Serpent from one of his pews.
All of this goes absolutely nowhere. The story meanders around and around, never really going anywhere except down the drain. There’s hope at the end that something might happen, but it falls flat, leaving me annoyed.
I think what really bothered me about this book was Cora herself. Why on earth did every man she meet fall for her? She was not a good person at all. She was completely selfish, although she did her best to hide it. The more I think about it, the more I dislike Cora.
First Sentence: It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet.
Thoughts:The Last of the Mohicans is an exciting, action-packed tale and if Cooper could write, it would be even better. Unfortunately he could not. I’m currently alerting The Hague that he needs to be put on trial for war crimes against the English language. Never have I seen so many tortured sentences in one paragraph. Witness the first sentence for a relatively mild example.
If you strip away all the words, though, the story is actually pretty good. It begins when two sisters, Cora and Alice Munro, embark on a trip to visit their father who is commanding Fort William Henry in what we now call upstate New York. They’re escorted by officer Duncan Heyward and David Gamut, a musician who plays the pitch pipe and comic relief. Since the forests of upstate NY are still unmapped wilderness at the time of the story (1750s), they have a native guide, a Huron named Magua. Magua leads them astray because he is the villain of the piece.
The captives are rescued by two Mohegans (here called Mohicans because spelling was iffy back then) and a white scout called Hawk-Eye. He’s also known as Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, Le Longue Carabine, and Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo when he’s at home. The Mohicans (or Delawares, because the name of the tribes depended on who you were talking to back then) are named Chingachgook, pronounced “huh?”, and Uncas, pronounced “Hero of the Piece,” and they are the last of their tribe. Hence the title.
Our Heroes and Our Captives wander through the woods for a while until they find a cave near a waterfall. Magua gets a few of his Huron buddies together and they attack the cave in what would be a thrilling battle if Cooper weren’t the one describing it. Then, for some reason, Hawk-Eye and the Mohicans abandon their charges. As expected, Magua & Co. sneak in through a secret back entrance and recapture their captives. More fighting ensues, the captives exchange hands a few more times, and eventually they end up at Fort William Henry.
Unfortunately they get there just in time for the latest battle in the current war between the French and English. The French win, someone gets stupid, and most of the English are massacred. Except Our Captives who are re-recaptured by Magua for the seventh or eighth time and herded across the Canadian border, pursued by the Mohicans, Hawk-Eye, Heyward, and Pops Munro.
Eventually they track down Alice and David at a Huron camp. Uncas shakes off the cloak of silence he’s been wearing up until now and reveals himself to be the real hero. Hawk-Eye assists by wearing a bearskin and being an idiot while Heyward comes along to pick up Alice and carry her to safety. David, realizing that now is not the time for a comic relief, suddenly does something noble. They find Cora hidden away with the Lenapes nearby and rescue her by talking nonstop for an entire chapter. Then another battle breaks out, tragedy ensues, and the book ends in tears because this is Literature, Dammit.
Now for all the words obscuring the story. Mark Twain discussed all of Cooper’s crimes in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which I can confirm is much, much funnier if you read it after reading one of Cooper’s books. The man knew that of which he spoke. For example, Twain says:
[The rules of literary art] require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the “Deerslayer” tale.
I present random bit of dialogue spoken by Hawk-Eye I found by opening The Last of the Mohicans to a random page:
“If death can be a surprise to men who are thinking only of the cravings of their appetites! We gave them but little breathing time, for they had borne hard upon us in the fight of the morning, and there were few in our party who had not lost friend or relative by their hands. When all was over, the dead, and some say the dying, were cast into that little pond. These eyes have seen its waters coloured with blood, as natural water never yet flowed from the bowels of the ‘arth.”
Remember, folks, that is dialogue. Someone was supposed to actually speak those excruciating sentences.
Twain also points out the stupidest bit of “woodscraft” in the novel.
…one of his acute Indian experts, Chingachgook (pronounced Chicago, I think), has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running stream out of its course, and there, in the slush in its old bed, were that person’s moccasin tracks. The current did not wash them away, as it would have done in all other like cases — no, even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader.
It’s just as stupid in the book. The words “the hell?” escaped my lips when I got to that part. Apparently mud was stronger than water back then.
And there’s another offense that Twain didn’t mention because it passed unnoticed in his day: the racism. Bless his heart, Cooper tried his best to make the American Indians (at least the non-Hurons) heroic, but he was a product of his time and still thought of them as savages. It’s apparent in every description of every Indian in the book. Bumppo himself doesn’t help, because every three pages he has to announce that he’s a “man without a cross.” It took me several chapters to figure out that he was talking about blood, not religion. Hawk-Eye wants everyone in the entire solar system to know that while he might be hanging around with the First Peoples, he’s whiter than white. Snow looks dark next to him. Yep, he’s just a pasty white European. Ol’ Whitey McWhiteface, that’s him. We GET IT, Nat. Now SHUT UP about it already!
I’ve heard the 1992 movie is better. It can’t possibly be worse. I’m definitely going to watch it now just to get the taste of Cooper’s tortured prose out of my mouth. Also because Hickory Nut Falls at Chimney Rock State Park plays a pivotal role, which is why there used to be a wall of Last of the Mohican DVDs at the gift shop there before streaming services took over. I’m sure I’ll recognize it, I visit the falls regularly.
First Sentence: This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch.
Thoughts: Whoo boy, this is peak Mid-Twentieth-Century White Male Literature. I’m sure in 1962 it was Deep and Profound and All That but sixty years later it’s just so much navel-gazing.
It’s the story of Jack “Binx” Bolling, a 29-year-old stockbroker living in New Orleans. Why he is called Binx is a mystery that will never be solved. Binx has a comfortable middle-class life: he has a house in a nice middle-class neighborhood, he has a housekeeper, he has an MG sports car, he has a convenient set of wealthy aunts and uncles, and he has a habit of having affairs with his secretaries to hide the fact that he’s in love with his cousin because of course he is, he’s Southern.
When we meet Binx he’s at the cusp of his extremely tepid existential crisis. His last secretary-mistress has quit for greener pastures (and hopefully a less gropy boss) and he’s wondering how to get up his new secretary’s skirt. He realizes he might want to consider beginning to think about dealing with his past traumas, namely his father’s death in WWII and his own experiences in Korea in the 1950s.
So what does he do? He goes to the movies. He visits his aunts. He visits his mom and stepdad and hangs out with his disabled half-brother. He flirts with his cousin Kate because we’re not squicked out enough by his attitude towards women.
Speaking of Kate, she got on my last nerve. She has a touch of the PTSD after he fiance was killed in a car accident. She was in the car at the time and ever since her cheese has been dangerously close to losing all contact with her cracker. Everyone in her family lives in perpetual fear that she’s going to kill herself, so Aunt Emily keeps throwing Binx and Kate together in the misguided belief that he’s a steadying influence on her. He is not. Instead of helping Kate, he takes her with him when he goes on a business trip to Chicago and has sex with her on the train because we must never forget that Louisiana is in the southernmost part of the United States.
Stereotypes are bad, mmkay?
And of course, Aunt Emily finds out so now Kate and Binx get married and it’s exactly as co-dependent and unhealthy as you’d think. The story ends with Binx visiting his half-brother’s deathbed (of course the best character has to die) and sending Kate off to run some errands. He has to tell her exactly how to sit in the streetcar before she has the courage to leave his presence. I guess that’s the most one could expect from early 1960s psychology. This was the era where a psychologist would call his patient’s husband and straight up tell him every single thing she said during their session.
In conclusion, HIPAA laws exist for a reason. Also, we of the American South would like to remind you that one’s family tree should not be a telephone pole.
First Sentence: The first time Caesar approached Cora about running north, she said no.
Thoughts: There was a good story in this. Unfortunately it kept insisting upon itself.
What does that mean, you ask? I’ll let Peter Griffin explain it for me:
Yeah. This book never for one minute let you forget that it was Important and had Things to Say and Perspectives on Historical Injustices. Not. For. One. Minute.
It started off well as historical fiction. After Cora turns Caesar’s first escape offer down we flash back to her grandmother Ajarry. We get the whole story on how she was kidnapped in Africa and brought to the slave auctions in the United States will all the horrors of slave ships on full view. Well, almost all. There weren’t any sharks eating the dead bodies thrown overboard. Surprised those weren’t included, actually.
Anyway, Ajarry is brought to Georgia and bought by Mr. Randall the Elder who brings her to his plantation. He’s a forward-thinking man who switched to planting cotton before the rest of his neighbors. Ajarry has a daughter named Mabel and dies. Mabel has a daughter named Cora and runs away. All Cora has left is three yards of land for a kitchen garden that everyone else keeps trying to take from her. After she chops up a doghouse with an axe, she’s sent to Hob, the house for troublesome slaves.
Cora agrees to run away with Caesar after a party gone bad. The slaves were celebrating an arbitrary birthday when the Brothers Randall (sons of Mr. Randall the Elder) show up half drunk and demand the slaves perform for their entertainment. When one of them wasn’t able to sing and dance to their satisfaction, the mean one grabs his cane to beat him. Cora jumps on the boy and takes the whipping herself. Then Mean Brother Randall decides that Cora will be his bedslave. She isn’t having any of that so she runs off with Caesar.
They decide to run away through the swamp. At first everything seems to be going all right despite the fact that another slave, Lovey, decided to join them at the last minute. Then they ran across a hunting party. Lovey is recaptured, but Caesar and Cora fight back. Cora ends up killing one of the hunters so now they’re in real trouble. Fortunately they’ve gotten to the first station on the Underground Railroad. The conductor takes them to the basement and puts them on a train.
Yes, while we weren’t looking we were suddenly transported to the Land of Obvious Metaphor. It’s easy to lose your way in a swamp at night.
Caesar and Cora ride the rails to South Carolina where they learn about how Black women were forced to get hysterectomies so they wouldn’t have too many babies. Then Cora goes to North Carolina and learns about Sundown Towns. Then she goes to Tennessee which has burned down with nary a Dolly Parton in sight. Then she makes her way to a farm in Indiana where escaped slaves and free Blacks plan a new community. Which is soon destroyed by white racists because of course it is.
So what was the point of this 306-page trip into the Land of Obvious Metaphor? You cannot half-ass magical realism. If you’re going to make your realism fantasism you can’t just put in one bizarre setpiece and expect it to carry the rest of the story.
First Sentence: Manfred, prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda.
Thoughts: I was really hoping for another trip into Gothic weirdness a la The Monk but, alas, t’was not to be. Despite the ridiculous opening, it never really descended into Bizarro Land and sideswiped me with a lame romance.
There was much promise in the beginning. In the first couple of pages Conrad, the son of Manfred, prince of Otranto, is killed on the eve of his wedding by a giant helmet that appeared out of nowhere. Really. Thing just popped into the middle of the courtyard and crushed the groom to death. Everyone is shocked and horrified, as one would expect, but no one more shocked and horrified as Manfred who recognizes this as an omen that The Prophecy is about to be fulfilled. The Prophecy foretells that Manfred’s line will fail when the original owner of the castle (who Manfred’s grandfather drove out) grows too big for his house.
See what I mean? It makes absolutely zero sense. I was getting into this. We were going straight into The Monk territory. Walpole is a better writer than Lewis, true, but his story was just as trippy.
Manfred then calls Conrad’s almost-bride, Isabella, to his chambers where he tells her to dry her tears because she is still a bride. His bride. But don’t you already have a wife, says Isabella who just came from that wife’s chambers. Yeah, but I’m tired of her, Manfred says. Just then his grandfather climbs down out of his portrait on the wall as Isabella runs down to the basement to escape from the creepy almost father-in-law. In the basement she meets Alfonso, a peasant who mouthed off to Manfred earlier and was supposedly imprisoned under the giant helmet as punishment. Alfonso helps Isabella escape and then distracts Manfred from finding her. Then Manfred is distracted from punishing Alfonso a second time when the servants come running in with a story of a giant gauntleted hand appearing on the main staircase.
Then Alfonso meets Manfred’s daughter Matilda and all my hopes for the story were dashed. The rest of the book is about how she loves him and he loves her but events keep conspiring to keep them apart. Isabella’s father shows up to pick up his daughter but decides he’s going to stick around to marry Matilda instead. Manfred asks him if it’s okay for him to marry Isabella and it is. He tells his current wife Hippolita to pack up and leave. Matilda and Isabella and Alfonso get together to be incredibly dull. Then it turns out that the monk Jerome who’s been hanging around in the background is actually Alfonso’s father. Then it turns out that Jerome and Alfonso are descendants of the original owner of Otranto. Then Matilda dies and the story mercifully dies with her.
You know what? Let’s go back to the giant pieces of armor showing up randomly all over the castle. That was fun. The romance was not fun. I came here for a crappy Hammer horror film and got tricked into a crappy Harlequin romance. That is bait-and-switch, Mr. Walpole. You suck as much as your dad and I bet your eyebrows weren’t as nice.
Thoughts: It’s Bradbury’s classic tale of how television will rot your mind. Some people are very committed to the brilliance of this novel but I personally felt like I was being attacked by a blunt Message throughout. I still have the bruises weeks later.
Guy Montag is a fireman. Instead of putting fires out, he starts them. Specifically he starts them at the homes of people who own books which have been outlawed in this dystopia. And because I can’t resist….
Instead of reading, everyone now has floor-to-ceiling television screens in their homes that they watch all day. Guy’s wife Mildred is one of the thousands of people addicted to TV. She considers the people on the screen to be her real family, although she does seem to have quite a few real-life friends. She calls them up to talk about television and they gather in each other’s living rooms to watch the screens so maybe they’re enablers instead of friends. All this TV has clearly rotted Mildred’s brain to the point where she has no short-term memory. She can’t remember where she and her husband met, how long they’ve been married, or whether or not she took a sleeping pill two seconds ago and that’s why she’s holding the bottle right now.
That last part is why Mildred is dying of an overdose when we first meet her. Fortunately Guy gets home from work in time to call the paramedics to pump her stomach in a scene that is truly creepy. Guy seems to believe that Mildred tried to commit suicide but I’m not sure where he got that from. Maybe it’s because my head still hurts from where the Message hit me. I should call Reader Protective Services, shouldn’t I?
When Guy meets Clarisse, he begins questioning everything he’s ever done. Clarisse is the Girl Next Door who likes to go for walks by herself instead of driving her car as fast as she can and talking with her family instead of watching TV all night. She’s too good for this book so she’s killed by a hit-and-run driver halfway through, leaving Guy in despair. He pulls out the books he’s stolen and tries to get Mildred interested in reading. She calls Guy’s boss on him, instead, and Guy has to burn his own house down. He runs away into the country where he meets a group of people who keep books alive by memorizing them. Suddenly a war breaks out and all the cities are bombed. Guy and the others walk back to the ruins to rebuild civilization.
Yes, you can draw parallels to modern times where everyone is online most of the time and staring at their phones. Some claim this is what makes this story one of the most classic of classics. Me, I couldn’t get over the feeling that there was an old man behind the pages telling me to get off his damn lawn.
I did like how the story managed to be pre-, post-, and current-apocalyptic at the same time. You don’t see someone hit that trifecta very often.
First Sentence: This is the story of the world’s most famous drawing: Leonardo da Vinci’s man in a circle and a square.
Thoughts: Who is the man in a circle and a square, you ask? It’s the guy with four arms and four legs, aka The Vitruvian Man. It’s not just a picture of a man doing jumping jacks, but a symbol of the perfect proportions of the cosmos.
Don’t ask me what that means because I read this entire book and still can’t tell you. I think that’s because it was stretched out to make 50 pages of information fill 200+ pages.
I can tell you that he’s called Vitruvian Man because he’s based on the writings of Vitruvius, an architect who lived in Rome during Augustan times. He wrote a book on architecture in which he described the proportions of the human body that architectural proportions must then be based on. This, somehow, ties into the perfect harmony of the universe. Again, don’t ask me how because the explanations all went right past me. They made a nice “whooshing” sound as they went by.
The rest of the book is more interesting in that it’s a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. He was, as we all know, a true Renaissance man who worked in art, architecture, engineering, anatomy, and anything else that sparked his interest. He wanted to know everything about everything and had lists in his notebooks of things to look up that proved it. He first encountered Vitruvius through his architectural work, but when he became interested in anatomy he realized that Vitruvius’ proportions were all off. Eventually he drew Vitruvius Man, possibly as part of a planned-but-never-finished book on anatomy, to show the real and correct proportions and so our story screeches to a halt.
Well, there is some braking distance. There’s a final chapter that supposedly ties everything up and explains the significance of Vitruvius Man in modern times, but other than some parody images and repeating the myth that it was put on the Golden Record in Voyager II (it is not), there’s not much there there. The pictures were nice, though, but I expect no less from da Vinci.
First Sentence: Once upon a time, as all stories of this type must begin, a lovely woman traveled to a far-off demon-haunted land of magnificent jeweled cities, cast adrift in a sea of wind-tossed desert.
Thoughts: If you like your retold fairy tales grimdark then boy howdy do I have a book for you. These fairy tales are like the gritty superhero movie remakes that were all the rage a while back. (Or are they still all the rage? I don’t know. I don’t keep up with superhero movies anymore and I don’t have the time to catch up with the fifteen thousand I’ve missed.)
Anyway. In this volume of the Fables series, Snow White goes to the Arabian Nights fairy tale world to convince the sultan to join the European characters (called fables) in their battle against the Adversary. This is apparently an ongoing conflict in the rest of the graphic novel series which I don’t know anything about. That’s okay, though, because this is the prequel volume so you don’t need to know the backstory to know what’s going on. This is the backstory; as Willingham says in the introduction if this is your first Fables then you’re all caught up.
Snow White takes over Scheherazade’s role in telling the sultan a story every night so he won’t kill her in the morning. Instead of the Arabian Nights stories you might have expected these are all stories about the European Fables and their battles agains the Adversary and his goblin hordes. She’s hoping that this will convince him to join her people but he doesn’t. At the same time he also lets her live so six of one, half dozen of the other.
Each story is illustrated by a different artist which I liked. It helped break up the endless train of despair that all the stories seemed to hitch a ride on. My favorite stories in terms of the art were “The Fencing Lesson” and “Diaspora.” These were also the two Snow White tales, which was a bit of a let down. I don’t like Snow White as a character but she was well-drawn.
Word of warning offered for “Frog’s Eye View.” It’s a retelling of “The Princess and the Frog” that tricks you by starting off as a humorous tale but then takes a sharp left into absolute misery. Nothing good happens in this chapter.
Ultimately I’m glad I’m caught up on the Fables series with this book because I’m not looking for any of the others. Maybe when I was in my twenties and took myself way too seriously I’d have read the whole thing but I’ve moved past the point where I want fantasy with a side of extra grimdark. There’s enough of that nonsense in the real world. My mental health is better served by lighthearted romps like The Rivers of London series.
First Sentence: Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying in the market square.
Thoughts: Before we begin, a moment of silence for the late, great John Le Carré, aka David John Moore Cornwell, who went to the Great Library in the Sky on December 12. Rest in peace, Mr. Le Carré. Despite the rating I gave this book, I’m a big fan of your work.
<respectful silence>
On to the review: Leo Harting, a clerk in the British Foreign Service, has disappeared from his posting in Bonn, Germany with a sheaf of confidential files. No one in the office seems to be too much concerned until they learn a certain top-secret file has disappeared as well. Enter Alan Turner, professional spy-catcher and all-around disliked guy.
Turner starts his investigation by hitting a brick wall everywhere he turns. No one wants to talk about Harting and especially not about the top-secret file. Turner tries to find out if the rumors he’s heard about Harting are true, especially about a fight he had in Cologne, but everyone clams up as soon as he gets too personal. He does manage to pry enough information out to pique his interest but he soon realizes that if he’s going to solve this case he’s going to have to do all the work himself.
One of the shreds of information he pries out is the strange relationship between the Foreign Office and the head of the Bonn police department, Siebzehn. That’s not his actual name. It was Sieb-something but I kept wanting to read it as Siebzehn so that’s what’s stuck in my head. Mr. 17 has put the entire British population of Bonn on lockdown with passes and curfews and everything. He claims he’s concerned about their safety after some unfortunate violence against the British Library at a recent political rally, but Turner’s not so sure.
Although it is true that foreigners are on edge in Germany at this moment in history. There are currently negotiations in Brussels between Germany and the European Common Market since it’s been twenty years since WWII and Germany is trying to convince Europe that it’s been a Very Good Country since then and should be allowed to join their crappy club for jerks. However not everyone in Germany wants to join with Europe. A significant portion of the population, led by popular politician Karfeld, want to join up with the USSR instead. It was at Karfeld’s rally where the mob attacked the British Library and the next stop on the tour is Bonn.
Turner’s investigation brings him face-to-face with Germany’s reaction to WWII twenty years later. They keep trying to sweep it under the rug, move forward, and forget about the past, but the past won’t let itself be forgotten. It always seems to pop up at the worst possible time.
I think I would have liked this novel better if it had been a little less frustrating. I got tired of everyone stymieing Turner’s investigation. I appreciate a good slow burn, but this was ridiculous. Especially since most of the book was Turner’s Q-and-A sessions among the people in the Foreign Office. Le Carré can usually write a gripping interrogation scene but he was seriously off his game here. (He mentioned in the author’s note that he was going through a rough patch personally as he was writing this. It shows.)
However, I did like how all the little details tied together at the end. All of the missing objects mentioned in the first chapter were found by the end and they all were integral to the Big Reveal of Harting’s motives. I still don’t get the obsession with hair dryers, though.
The Eclectic Reviewer 