The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a novel about loss. It deals with the idea that bereavement changes the living, opens a hole in survivors’ lives that they continuously have to avoid, continually have to accommodate, lest they themselves be consumed by its void. But this gap in life, this emptiness that must always be acknowledged without ever approaching too close to its gathering currents also imposes new directions on continuing lives, demands diversion from paths that previously led directly towards the future. And, if they could see it, what would the deceased make of their continuing, if unintended influence? Would they revel in the power, or feel embarrassed about causing all the fuss? Effectively, this is the scenario that plays out during the entirety of The Lovely Bones.

At the start, Susie Salmon is fourteen years old. And like any pubescent girl, she has crushes, imagines what sexual encounters might be like, has friends, goes to school. She has a younger sister and a much younger brother, plus parents who plod along in their devotion to the family.

We are in Canada, but the place is not important. Suffice it to say that it’s rural and pretty quiet, with vast expanses of cold, snow-fluttered fields. Nothing is revealed about The Lovely Bones by stating that the fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon was murdered on December 6, 1973. The book begins with the crime and we follow the victim as far as heaven. Thus, the complications begin.

There is no body, just the remains of an elbow. There is a suspect, but evidence has been erased. We know everything about the crime, so there is no suspense involved, only consequences. From her rather superior vantage, Susie Salmon observes. She watches how grief rips into the fabric of her family. She watches how her classmates try to cope with the forced realignments of their friendships. She watches as her murderer continues to evade justice. And she learns that this is not the first time he has succeeded. She watches as the police investigate, perhaps not as competently as they might. She watches as all those she has left behind become changed by her absence, as they learn to live with the void she has left.

Now having the victim in an all-seeing heaven allows Alice Sebold to use a standard, god’s-eye-view, third person narrative, as if it is Susie who is describing events. Too often, however, it is the author who is speaking and clearly not her character, who presumably could offer much more in the way of opinion or reflection on events. So, what unfolds is essentially a tale of family disintegration seen from afar. The disintegration happens slowly and, it has to be said, sometimes rather repetitively.

Unfortunately, as well, the end of the book was just too sentimental for this particular reader. In fiction, I am willing to suspend belief or perhaps succumb to it, and for, the purpose of the plot, I am willing to accept that there might be a heaven from which one might observe. But to accomplish what Susie does late in the book was taking myth just a little too far. The Lovely Bones remains worth reading. Its slow development might convince some readers that such forensic analysis of the details of these relationships too often strays into indulgence. But, one supposes, when one has an eternity in which to keep occupied, little things do make a difference.

Mary Swann by Carol Shields

I have just completed four years of thinking through a project. There were several false starts, many rejected, some reworked ideas. What I wanted to achieve was tangible, but I could not grasp it. When I thought I had it held, it would melt away or fly out like squeezed soap. Some six months ago things gelled and I began in earnest to write Eileen McHugh, a life remade. It’s the story of a sculptor who left no work, but who, by accident in this case, had become sufficiently recognized for a biographer to reconstruct her life and remake her lost work.

With the book complete and published, I decided it was time to relax and took up Mary Swann by Carol Shields. I found and bought it in a charity shop bag-full because I knew the author, not the book. I began to read and the experience was uncanny.

Mary Swann concerns of life and work of a poet from rural Canada. The town of Nadeau was both small and insignificant, until, that is, the world discovered a slim volume of a hundred or so poems by one Mary Swann, insignificant herself, until she was murdered - shot, bludgeoned, dismembered - by her husband in 1965.

Born in 1915, the exact date still debatable, she lived out her anonymous, almost hidden life, even from locals, on the farm. Elsewhere in the world this would be called a peasant holding and her life would be characterized as mired in poverty. Mary Swann had no domestic help, no appliances, none of the trappings of modern life. She never drove a car. Isolated, remote, poor, dilapidated are words that applied equally to the setting of the life and the person who lived it. Nothing much is known of her relationship with her husband, who killed himself after murdering his wife. The erasure was complete, except that they had a daughter who is alive, but is unwilling to discuss family matters.

But Mary Swan wrote. She wrote pithy, crunchy verse that inhabits the world this side of the garden gate but seems to dig deep into the infinite internal space of being. Academics, having discovered her work, likened her to Emily Dickinson. Mr. Crozzi who originally accepted her poems for publication and produced a couple of hundred copies of Swann’s Songs, the perhaps appropriately titled slim volume, was the last person to see her alive, apart from her husband. There are estimated to be about 20 extant copies of the collection. But the content has found its admirers and champions. There are even academics whose reputation is built on the critique of Mary Swann’s verse.

There is to be a symposium on the poet and her work and Carol Shields follows the lives, testimonies and experience of a group of interested parties. There are academic researchers, who cooperate by competing. There is Rose, the Nadeau town librarian, timid, self-effacing and suffering. There is Crozzi, perhaps a little crazy, the publisher and a long-standing journalist in the local press, though himself an immigrant. He is an eccentric, opinionated type who dearly misses his deceased wife. He also likes a drink or two. There are Sarah and Morton, academics with their own lives to live who have championed Mary Swann’s work.  And there are others. Via the experiences of these characters and others, we piece together something of the life and work of Mary Swann, though, like everyone else involved, we never know her and her work remains enigmatic.

What for me was utterly uncanny, was that this was the exact form I had chosen for Eileen McHugh. Exactly what makes an artist? Why do we try to express ourselves in these arcane, often esoteric forms? What is authorship? What constitutes recognition? Who controls that process? How does life influence art, or vice versa? How do we recall our interactions from the past with someone we never thought we would remember? At eighty per cent through Mary Swann, I felt like I was reading a different version of my own book and I concluded I was very glad I had not read Carol Shields’s book before inventing my own.

But eventually, things diverged. Carol Shields’ Mary Swann concludes with the symposium on the poet’s work, a meeting that brings together the characters we have been following and constructed in the form of a screenplay. A particular thread of the plot begins to dominate. Competition surfaces, insults are perceived, and offense is taken. Difficult to explain events coalesce to identify and conclude what really has been going on in the background throughout the book. By the end of this superbly crafted and constructed novel, we are intimately involved in considerable slices of the contemporary characters’ lives.  Mary Swann, however, lingers in a continued, enigmatic anonymity that remains entirely her own, just as, thankfully, does that of my own Eileen McHugh.

The Republic Of Love by Carol Shields

Republics do not have kings or queens, nor princes or princesses, so, we must assume, fairytales are out. Winnipeg is not exactly a republic, and, at least in terms of their love lives, two residents of the city, Fay and Tom, seem to inhabit a world where fairytales are inconceivable. But that place might not be Winnipeg: it might be closer in to themselves.

Despite – or perhaps because of - having had a multitude of mothers, Tom has been married three times, each attempt turning success into apparent and mildly painful failure, with or sometimes without associated acrimony.

For her part, Fay, at thirty-five, has had several relationships of varied length, but none has led to wedding bells, a fact that seems to trouble her, sometimes. Tom is a radio presenter. He hosts one of those late night phone-ins aimed at insomniacs, but usually attracting the opinionated.

His mood, his history, his takes on where life has taken him clearly influence his style. Rises or dips in his personal life are immediately apparent, communicated without trying. But do not assume that anything offers even influence to what the contributors say. Rest assured, they will offer precisely what they want, perhaps precisely what they have been fed, if only because they are all as self-absorbed as everyone else. Fay works more regular hours.

She is an ethnologist and works in a folklore centre. She is heavily into mermaids, and perhaps they are also into her. She researches the mermaid myth, catalogues sightings, interviews people who have seem them, travels the world giving papers on our social and psychological need to invent these creatures. Mermaids, though overtly sexual and obviously female, are eventually sexless, unless they have exaggerated tails. They are both alluring and inviting, but, being half fish, they are cold-blooded and cold. They tempt, but cannot satisfy. Obviously Tom and Fay are going to meet.

They, along with their accumulated baggage, join forces and, as a consequence, begin to see life differently. But each is still influenced by relatives, acquaintances, ex-partners, ex-in-laws, new partners, parents and anyone else who might have an opinion. They all count. They all influence, especially when stiffness of apparent resolve can be easily bent by contradiction, shock or surprise. And so Fay and Tom’s relationship develops to what Carol Shields deems it should become.

Throughout The Republic Of Love is beautifully written. Carol Shields’s prose is often witty, elegant, telling, funny, incisive or provocative all in one. A single sentence can turn on itself to frighten or mock its own beginning. This is a book worth reading for its style alone. But it offers more than elegance of expression. These characters have all the confused confident complexity, the undirected and variable resolve we would expect from non-ideological adults in the last decade of the twentieth century. It would be interesting to revisit them twenty years on to see where they are now, to know if anything might have lasted. In The Republic Of Love they certainly come to life.

Vermeer´s Hat by Timothy Brook

Vermeer’s Hat by Timothy Brook is not really about Vermeer, or hats, or art for that matter. It’s a book about globalization sixteenth century-style. Using elements from a few of the Dutchman’s paintings – plus some others from the period – the author identifies evidence of global trade, of the economic history of a century that saw the opening up of commerce on a scale the world had previously not known. And unlike the more academic studies of Wallerstein or Gunder Frank, Timothy Brook’s book is accessible even to the casual reader.

Its approach is highly original; its style is lucid and clear; its scholarship is nothing less than phenomenal. Early on in the text the author reminds us of the fundamental difference between the passing image and the narrative of art. ‘Paintings are not “taken”, like photographs;’ Timothy Brook writes, ‘they are “made”, carefully and deliberately and not to show an objective reality so much as to present a particular scenario.’ Objects in a painting are there for a reason. They are part of a narrative or comment that the artist chooses to relate, perhaps consciously. Our tasks as observers are partly to interpret as well as respond, as well as merely see. And make no mistake, the process is intellectual, not just aesthetic.

With an admirable eye for detail, Timothy Brook thus analyses seventeenth century paintings for evidence of international trade. But this is only a starting point for a truly global tour. A beaver hat, for instance, leads him to relate the story of how French expeditions into Canada sought pelts to feed demand for high fashion in Europe. It was the beaver’s fortune – or perhaps misfortune – to be born with a fur that, when transformed into felt, remained waterproof, and hence kept its shape in the rain. 

The consequences of this trade – apart from the obvious ones for the beavers – included conflicts with indigenous people, followed by subjugation and, in some cases, annihilation. A Chinese vase, a Turkish carpet and other artefacts around the house lead to the history of trade with the east and thus into how China developed into a manufacturing centre that sucked in Spanish colonial silver from South America to pay for its wares. A discussion of the galleon trade leads to Spain’s annexation of Manila and later the whole of the Philippines. In order to compete the Portuguese establish in Macau and the Dutch colonise the spiced islands.

What impresses the reader of Vermeer’s Hat is Timothy Brook’s skill – an artist’s skill, no less – in assembling potentially disparate scenes into an engaging and ultimately convincing narrative. Economic history thus becomes an engaging story that makes perfect sense. By the end of the century the British were also on the scene, having taken advantage of victories over the competition. We follow the spice trade, the spread of tobacco, trade in silk and ceramics and, of course, the lives of people who pursued and controlled the commerce. We learn how administrators and rulers reaped their own rewards, how illicit goods were smuggled in the same holds as declared cargoes. We see fortunes made and lost, ships sailed and sunk, reputations created and destroyed. And certainly we recognise the world as we know it, a modern world where only the technology is different. Vermeer’s Hat is a must for anyone who thinks that globalization might be a recent phenomenon.

Another Side of the Slave Trade - Rough Crossings by Simon Schama

No short review of Rough Crossings by Simon Schama could begin to do it justice. It is far too big a project, far too significant an achievement for any simple summary. It presents a momentous story, highly relevant to our own times, of partial emancipation for the enslaved.

The book is not for the faint hearted. For a start there’s almost five hundred pages of detailed historical narrative, several distinctly prickly characters to meet and many direct quotes from contemporary documents, complete with the writers’ inconsistencies of spelling and grammar. And then there is the raw suffering that it describes. There is real human suffering here, real people who were wronged by others who perpetrated a crime for which they will remain forever unpunished.

Balancing this, however, is optimism engendered by the idealism of those who campaigned and worked for freedom and justice, against the convenient populist bigotry of their time. But rising above all others are those whose personal histories are described. These are people who devoted their lives to the undoing of the wrongs that were done to them, who never lost faith in life’s eventual ability to deliver justice, despite the repeated contradiction of experience. In the end, it’s the enduring human spirit that seems to triumph, despite the lack of any obvious lasting victories.

For all concerned, it’s a struggle, has always been so and will probably remain so in the future. Rough Crossings chronicles the politics, warfare, commerce and human experience surrounding the practical application of the campaign to abolish the slave trade. It was Gore Vidal who described several of the founding fathers of the United States as dedicated slave owners, eager to protect their investments. He thus questions their commitment to their own declarations on freedom and equality.

Simon Schama provides much detail to support this theme. He describes black soldiers fighting for the British, ex-slaves, escapees, collaborators and supporters who sided with the colonial forces. We follow some of these people to the not very hospitable but at least relatively vacant lands of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. And then, via the campaigns and vision of Granville Sharp and the active management of John Clarkson, we follow the development and enactment of a truly magnificent project.

The abolitionists, not for any convenience associated with the idea of merely “shipping them back home”, but born of a sincere pursuit of freedom and autonomy for human kind, suggest that freed slaves might settle in Sierra Leone and there establish an autonomous, modern and self-supporting state. Not all goes to plan, of course, but then whatever does when idealism is realised? But the plan comes to fruition and communities sail the ocean to establish themselves in warmer climes on West Africa’s shore.

An observation offered late in the book will be permanently etched in this reader’s memory. The first women ever to participate in electing the government of a modern state were black women in Sierra Leone in the 1790s. Rough Crossings is worth reading for that revelation alone, for it is not the fact itself but the assumptions of the protagonists that led to it that is truly fascinating. How things came about, the motives of those involved and the energy with which they pursued their ideals is the real story, the enduring fascination.

There is far too much in Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings to review. There are finely drawn biographies, moving stories of human interest, political posturing and analysis, and a complete history of a commercial enterprise based on idealism. The only advice is to read the book, but also to take time along the way to reflect on what is described, to imagine what issue of our own time would be as politically risky as the applied idealism of these eighteenth century anti-slavery campaigners. And then follow that with any attempt to empathise with the experience of the cargo, whatever the direction of or motive for its transport.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer – weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes – rarely, in fact – one reads a big book and becomes lost in its size, lost in the sense that one ceases to notice the hundreds passing by, as the work creates its own time, defines its own experience, shares its own world. Even then, reaching the end can often be merely trite, just a running out of steam, the process thoroughly engaging, the product, however, something of a let down. Rarely, very rarely indeed, one reads a big book that actually needs its size, justifies itself, continues to surprise as well as enchant and then, finally, stuns. Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin is such a book, a giant in every sense, a masterpiece beyond question. 

Blind Assassin was awarded the Booker Prize in 2000 and charts intersecting histories of two well-to-do Canadian families, Chase and Griffen. The two Chase sisters, Iris and Laura, are quite different people. Born into the relative opulence of a Canadian manufacturing family, they have a private education of sorts, experienced throughout and yet alongside something vaguely like a childhood. Various aspects of twentieth century history impinge upon their lives and eventually force their family to reassess its status. Economic downturn, war and family tragedy take their toll on the father, who becomes less able to manage either his own life or his business. Something has to give. Ways of coping must be found. 

Iris, the elder sister, is the first person narrator of about half of the book, the other half being devoted to a book within a book, a novel in the name of Laura, the younger sister. This novel, entitled The Blind Assassin, is an eclectic mix of experience, sex, fantasy and politics. It has made a name for Laura and retains a significant cult following many years after its publication. Laura, herself, died in a car accident. She drove off a bridge into a ravine. The car belonged to Iris. 

There was never any real explanation for the event. Iris, meanwhile, has been married off to an older man, a Griffen, who seems to treat her like so much chattel. But then he is an industrialist with the wherewithal, not to mention capital, to assist the bride’s family business in its time of need. Iris, therefore, experiences the Canadian equivalent of an arranged marriage. 

Perhaps the word marriage is a little overstated. The partnership could be better described as a merger, or a union, if that were not a dirty word because of its political connotation. And so the octogenarian Iris, clearly anticipating the end of her days, embarks upon a cathartic outpouring of personal and family history in the hope that an estranged granddaughter might just understand a little about other peoples’ motives. 

The book takes us through Canada and north America, across to Europe, via an imagined universe, to political commitment, direct action and its inevitable reaction. Iris needs to write it all down. And so she works her story out, constructing it, perhaps reconstructing it, maybe inventing it from memory and relived experience against a backdrop of contemporary Canada and her own failing health. Her vulnerability, in the end, is our debt, our penance, perhaps. She is a wise old woman with much to hide, but her acerbic wit is undiminished by age, her observations of others stunningly perspicacious. It is not often that a novel, a mere flight of another’s fancy, achieves the subtle, stunning and surely enduring power of the Blind Assassin. 

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