“I do not like the spring, its antics and agitations; I fear that anguished seething in the heart, what it might make me do. What it might have made me do: one has to be scrupulous with tenses at my age.”
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n 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.
Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and Donald Maclean, who became members of the Communist Party while at University, were thought to have been recruited by Blunt. Much later, a Russian KGB colonel testified that a fifth member, John Cairncross, also participated in the spy ring.
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. The atmosphere of decadence, drunkenness, sexual depravity, and social snobbery, combined with the characters’ intellectual arrogance and political naivete, all show the reader how a young person could have been seduced into becoming a willing spy under the “right” set of circumstances, though the issue of why Maskell was not publicly unmasked till 1979 (judging from his stated age at the time he begins his narrative) remains a larger question.
Though it is difficult to feel any real sympathy for Maskell, one can understand his need for significance–for something bigger in his life—both as a student and as a young man. One can also understand his regret for his actions, though that it is more than a little self-serving, tinged, as it is, by the obvious fact of his being caught. In prose that is astonishing in its facility and virtuosity, Booker Prize-winning author John 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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ALSO by John Banville: THE SEA (his Booker Prize-winner), THE INFINITIES, SHROUD, APRIL IN SPAIN
Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.tv3.ie
The photo of Anthony Blunt is from http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com
The Cambridge Spies have been the subject of a well-reviewed BBC film, pictured here.
If ever there were someone who had a right to be angry and bitter about the fate of Iraq and its intellectuals, Mahmoud Saeed has that right. Arrested and jailed for a year and a day in 1963, when he was twenty-four, and again five more times after that, through 1980, he was never again to see any of his books published in Iraq, and two of his manuscripts were burned by authorities. Yet even through his imprisonment, described in 
Even stronger feelings are evoked in The World Through the Eyes of Angels. Obviously autobiographical, at least in part, the novel examines the various kinds of love which a young boy from Mosul discovers as a youth, sweeping the reader along on a tide of empathy and making him/her feel at one with the main character. Providing wonderful insights into the lives and cultures of the main characters – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – many of whom are friends of the young boy and his family, The World Through the Eyes of Angels is aimed directly at the heart without a shred of easy sentimentality. The interactions and emotions the characters share are so universal that the novel feels as if the characters are people we know, or would like to know, despite the differences of time, culture, and tragic history. Politics plays no role here. Best of all, the novel possesses that rare ability to connect with the reader so directly that it provides insights into the heart and mind of the author, too, and when one reaches the end of the novel, it is impossible not to want to offer comfort.
Divided into twelve parts, the novel is set in Mosul in the 1940s and 1950s, “when the people lived as brothers in total harmony as if they were one family,” despite their varied cultures. The boy, named once in the novel as “Saleh,” lives in poverty but, from the age of four, does errands for his much older brother, a sadistic egotist whom the boy privately calls Ahmad the Mad Dog. Often beaten and tormented by this brother, he runs barefoot all day long throughout the city, even when the temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Gradually, the reader comes to know the boy, his family, and his friends, especially Sami, a Jewish boy, who loves to tell the boy stories from the movies which the boy does not see.
The first love story takes place when the boy discovers Selam, a little girl whose mother is dying, and who is so poor they have absolutely nothing in the “house” where they live. Though poor himself, the boy surprises her with little presents from the tiny amounts he earns and teaches her reading and numbers in his spare time. Later, the older Madeleine, “a treasure that enriched my spirit,” teases him outrageously, teaching him about sexuality, though he is not sure what it all means. Through Mary, he enters a church for the first time, and later still, Sami’s sister Sumaya shows him a new side of family life and love.
he stories and their aftermaths continue. The love stories involve a young boy, but they are real love stories, complicated by the times and circumstances in which they all live. Some have no endings, something the speaker (and, one cannot help thinking, the author) mourns at the end of the book, and some have endings that are not happy.
nd the sense of loss, as people from various groups, once integrated into the city, move out of Mosul, leaves the reader with a feeling of gratitude to the author for preserving, historically, everything he remembers of the past through his characters here. Though the author/speaker expresses regrets for some aspects of his life, those of us of a similar age will understand and empathize with these all-too-human regrets.
Mixing the supernatural with dramatic and horrifying realism, this generational novel contains all the ingredients necessary to become a huge popular success. Spanning the years between the 1920s and the present, author Bernice L. McFadden focuses on three generations of the Hilson family as they interact with each other, with others in their segregated neighborhood, and with the white world beyond. Using the town of Money, Mississippi, itself as the “narrator,” the author creates lively scenes involving Reverend August Hilson, new pastor of the only black church, and his family, who have escaped the violence of Tulsa to settle in this small town near Greenwood, Mississippi, along the Tallahatchee River.
ways believed that the evil spirit of her mother, a murdered prostitute named Esther Gold, had taken over Doll’s body, and though, as a child, Doll was duly exorcised by a local witch, that expert in herbs and potions proved to be no match for the voracious, single-minded Doll. By the time she arrives in Money, she and August have been married six years and are the parents of a daughter, Hemmingway, and a son, Paris. In Money, Doll continues to do just what she wants, and everyone else better watch out.
n lush and often lyrical language, author Gail Jones creates a consummately literary novel which takes place on Circular Quay, surrounding the Opera House, during one hot summer day in Sydney. Four major characters are dealing with personal losses and memories of the past which make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to participate fully in the present. Deaths haunt them all, and as they gravitate individually towards the Opera House, they relive events from their lives. Time is relative as the novel moves forward and then swirls backward during each character’s reminiscences. Only Ellie and James know each other. The other characters lead independent lives, and any connection among them will be just a glancing blow, a random event – one of the minor acts of fate. A mysterious fifth character, who materializes without warning in the conclusion, serves as a catalyst to bring the novel to its thematic conclusion.
ound her, and she sees the Opera House as “moon-white and [holding] within it a great, serious stillness. The fan of its chambers leant together, inclining to the water. An unfolding thing, shutters, a sequence of sorts…And that shape of supplication, like a body bending into the abstraction of a low bow or a theological gesture.” She and James had been innocent teenagers exploring their bodies in a secret hideout for an entire year, until James went away to school, and she is excited about seeing him again. As Ellie remembers the past, she also remembers being a kind of anchor for James, whose family life was a disaster.
Catherine Healy, from Ballymun, Ireland, has been in Sydney only two weeks. A journalist who has come to Sydney from Paris to find work, Catherine has left her lover Luc behind in Paris. The ghost of her much-loved brother Brendan has prevented her from fully participating in life since his death in an accident several years ago. Veronica Guerin, the iconic Irish reporter who was gunned down by drug lords in Dublin in 1996, has always been her idol, and it was Guerin’s death which led Catherine to leave Ireland for Paris. There, she met Luc, a translator from Russian to French, whose love she cannot fully return because of her obsessive love of family, especially of her brother. Her trip to Australia is a test of her independence.
Though some will find this novel a literary treat, others may question its structure. With four separate characters, three of whose lives do not intersect in any significant way, the novel is somewhat fragmented, and all the characters are not equally well developed. Ellie and Catherine are not very thoughtful, and we learn little about life from spending time with them. Why Catherine is in Sydney at all is an open question, and how much Ellie will learn about life remains in doubt. Sometimes the prose is weighed down by the elaborate imagery. Still the novel offers much of interest to those who enjoy highly literary novels, and the thematic focus and the setting are unusual and intriguing.
Australian author Gail Jones, who has won major recognition and prizes in Australia for every book she has written over the past twenty years, achieved another notable milestone with Sorry, which was shortlisted for no fewer than six major prizes in the UK and Australia in 2008. Set in remote and sparsely populated Western Australia in the early 1940s, the novel recreates the life of Perdita Keene, a ten-year-old child not wanted by her British expatriate parents, who had hoped she would die at birth. Perdita, whose childhood is formed by the aborigine women who nursed her in infancy, develops a strong friendship with Mary, an aborigine girl five years older, and Billy, the deaf-mute son of the Trevors, white people who run a local cattle station. All three children are outcasts for various reasons, and their bonds with each other are total and life-affirming.
Perdita, “the lost one,” appropriately named for a character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, finds a sense of self with the aborigines, who value the continuum of life, not merely a set of static principles, like the whites who have driven them from their ancestral lands and forcibly removed their children. Aborigine children, warehoused in dormitories and schooled to remove all traces of their own culture, learn trades so that they can wait on those “civilized” inhabitants who have taken their lands. Perdita is, on some level, aware of the injustices, having observed the rape of young aborigine girls (which she does not comprehend), and she finds solace and a sense of order in aborigine culture which she does not see in her own. She understands and loves the sense of kinship and sharing which govern their lives, as opposed to the cult of the individual which she sees in her own society.
