Reading this thriller is like reading an action film – an experience filled with non-stop drama, several different plot lines, quick changes of scene, numerous exotic settings, characters ranging from sick sociopaths to innocent children, and enough torture and gore to make one wretch. Opening with the point of view of Amy Boxer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of former investigator Charles Boxer and Detective Inspector Mercy Danquah, British author Robert Wilson brings the reader directly into the action. Amy, anxious to escape the boredom of her life and her parents expectations, has completely cleared all her belongings from her mother’s London apartment, a few things at a time, and has come up with what she regards as a fool-proof plan to run away and not be caught. She must be particularly careful to make no missteps. Her mother Mercy works with the Specialist Crime Directorate – the kidnap unit – and Amy not only wants to escape her life and vanish but, even more importantly, to embarrass her parents in the process.
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A View of the Harbour (1947), author Elizabeth Taylor’s third novel, employs the broadest focus of the four novels I have read by Taylor. Whereas the last and most famous novel published in her lifetime, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont(1971) concentrates on the relationship of one elderly woman, Mrs. Palfrey, who, nearing the end of her life befriends a callow young man who does not understand love, this much earlier novel reconstructs an entire community, the author’s goal being the depiction of its citizens and the values they celebrate. This creates challenges for the reader, initially, since s/he must try to remember the specific identities of a wide variety of townspeople, along with the relationships among them. Once the reader becomes familiar with this large cast of characters, the action devolves into an unusual kind of farce in which the author is more interested in illustrating the society and the people who must live in it as they search for love and connection, than in laughs for the sake of laughs. In fact, the humor involved in this farce is often bittersweet, more ironic than overt, with characters facing unhappiness and dashed hopes in their searches for happiness as often as they may find some kind of minimal happiness. The conclusion comes as a total surprise and provides the final irony.
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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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Published in Germany in 1932, when author Irmgard Keun was only twenty-two, The Artificial Silk Girl, a bestselling novel of its day, is said to be for pre-Nazi Germany what Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) is for Jazz Age America. Both novels capture the frantic spirit, the eat-drink-and-be-merry ambiance, and the materialism of young people like Doris – and Lorelei Lee in the Loos book – who haunt the urban clubs as they try to work their way into a lifestyle much grander and more vibrant than anything their mothers could ever have hoped for. Doris, the “artificial silk girl,” has no politics, focusing almost completely on her own ambitions – finding wealthy men who will improve her life by financing a better lifestyle for her. She cadges a desired wristwatch from one potential suitor, extols the virtues of chocolates and fine clothing to others (and is sometimes rewarded), but fastens her clothing with rusty safety pins in case someone too unattractive gets too carried away. By the age of seventeen, she has already had a year-long affair with Hubert, her first and most lasting love, but when he ignores her birthday after she’s saved up for a new dress, and fails to produce a present, she retaliates. The authorities in Germany were not pleased with Keun’s published depiction of Berlin life as Hitler and the Nazis, preparing to take power, envisioned it. Within a year, Keun’s books were confiscated and all known copies were destroyed. Though she continued writing after World War II, it is this novel, rediscovered and republished in 1979, for which she is best known. Fun and funny and very important for its depiction of women in pre-Nazi society.
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Set in Dublin in 2003, during the height of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, Dubliner Rob Doyle’s debut novel focuses on four young men who have just finished secondary school, none of them with any idea of what they want to do with their lives, and even less motivation. Most have been ignoring the academic demands of their school, preferring to float rootlessly within the social atmosphere of their peers, an atmosphere in which drugs and alcohol have been the primary driving force. Main character Matthew Connelly, a punk teenage Everyman, does not know whether he has passed his Leaving Certification, and he does want to think about it. He and three friends grow for the reader in their own chapters here, and the comparisons and contrasts in their lives are vividly depicted. The author’s insightful scenes of teen life, related in unambiguous language, draw the reader into the boys’ inner worlds, however foreign those worlds might be to the reader’s own experiences. Their conversations and behavior, while often bizarre, somehow inspire empathy, since most seem to have some residual sense of what is “right.” As the novel evolves, and the boys’ own issues become increasingly dramatic, however, the novel becomes darker, more frightening, and eventually violent. Few readers who are drawn in by the action and themes of this novel will forget it quickly, and parents of teens may become particularly alarmed at the unambiguous depiction of their teens’ secret lives.
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