In this fascinating and beautifully developed novel, Victor Maskell takes us step by (often debauched) step through what passes for his life. He is seventy-two and has just been unmasked as a spy. “Public disgrace is a strange thing,” he muses as he begins a journal. Maskell, a thinly disguised substitute for Anthony Blunt, is one of several by now well-known young British intellectuals who became spies for the Soviet Union during the thirties and forties, providing them with secret information during World War II and into the 1950s. Booker Prize-winning author John Banville vividly recreates not only the political and social turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s but also the intellectual experimentation and the search for values spawned by these turbulent times. Banville sweeps away the fustiness of previous journalistic accounts of the Cambridge spies and creates flawed, breathing humans in a vibrantly decadent atmosphere.
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This weekend I was struck by the statement of a Presidential candidate that the constitutional separation of church and state was not intended to be absolute, that in his opinion, lawmakers should be allowed to pass national legislation based on their religious faith. Almost four hundred years ago, England faced the same contentious issues regarding the relationship of church, state, and individual freedom. The result was havoc. Ronan Bennett has described this tumultuous time in England in a well-documented, carefully researched, and stimulating novel set in the 1630s, Havoc in the Third Year, which was published to rave reviews in 2004. Bringing the period to life on every level of society, the author illustrates in realistic detail the kinds of gruesome punishments meted out for “sins,” the harshness of life for the homeless poor, the dependence of farmers on luck and weather, the fragility of life, the excesses of religious extremism, and the abiding power of love. The realistically presented motivations for some of the extreme behavior in the novel make the Puritan characters come alive, despite their excesses, while John Brigge, a man who sees more than one side to each issue, becomes a protagonist for whom the reader develops much sympathy.
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Many readers will find How It All Began the best novel Lively has written so far, primarily because the characters and their issues sound so familiar. With characters who comment insightfully and often ironically about their lives while dealing with their latest crises, the novel also features graceful prose and sparkling dialogue to give this novel a thematic heft which is rare in current fiction. The novel opens with the mugging of Charlotte Rainsford, age seventy-eight. Her subsequent recovery from a broken hip at the home of her daughter and son-in-law begins the cycle of change from which ripples radiate for the rest of the novel. Charlotte’s daughter Rose works part-time as a personal assistant to Lord Peters, an elderly former history professor who spends his time doing obscure historical research. Rose’s need to stay home with Charlotte at the beginning of her recuperation leads to the arrival of Lord Henry Peters’s niece, Marion Clark, who comes to Lord Peters’s estate to fill in. Marion, a successful interior designer, is having an affair with the married Jeremy Dalton, who feels no qualms about betraying his wife. When Jeremy’s wife Stella discovers a revealing text message from Marion on Jeremy’s cellphone, “The Dalton’s marriage broke up, [all] because Charlotte Rainsford was mugged.” Rippling out, the novel studies how one random event can permanently affect the lives of dozens of people.
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In this readable, exciting, and historically enlightening novel with two separate plots, Audrey Schulman accomplishes an incredible task. She makes the individual plots totally compelling and uniquely character-driven as they shift back and forth in alternating chapters, always leaving the reader panting for more and anxious to keep reading toward a conclusion. What is most seductive about the novel is that the plots take place in two different time periods and settings—one, in the area of what is now Kenya in 1899, and the other, in Virunga National Park, on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, in 2000. In the first plot a man from Bangor, Maine, responsible for building a railroad from Mombasa to Kisumu, through Amboseli, must deal with two large and bloodthirsty lions, reportedly over nine feet in length, as they lie waiting to pick off railroad workers; in the second, a young scientist with Asperger’s Syndrome is charged with finding a vine that is consumed by mountain gorillas and which dramatically reduces the incidence of both stroke and heart disease in their species. If Max, the researcher is able to obtain samples of the vine, a pharmaceutical company will, among other benefits, provide armed security to ensure the survival of the gorilla population in Virunga National Park, ad infinitum. Somehow Schulman manages to connect these two disparate plots in the conclusion, leaving the reader wholly satisfied on all levels.
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Setting her novel at the end of the twentieth century, Penelope Lively begins Spiderweb (1998) by presenting a sociological picture of the west of England and the once-remote counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, which are now attracting new residents from “outside.” A letter from Richard Faraday to Stella Brentwood regarding a property in Kingston Florey in Somerset, inserted in the midst of this picture, describes a cottage for sale and its pluses and minuses, and indicates that he has been helping her find such a property to purchase. Gradually, the reader learns more about Stella, a sixty-five-year-old, newly retired social anthropologist and teacher, who filters all the impressions one gains about the village and its people through her own eyes. When she buys this cottage, she approaches her new village not as a new member of the community, but as an academic and specialist in social structures. Stella has never married, not because she did not have opportunities but because she has been completely driven by her interests in other cultures and her desire to stay on the move, professionally. Stella has squandered her chance to experience a full life, at least by the standards of most of the rest of the world, and whether she is or can be truly happy and adjust to this small town is the big question.
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