The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

This person who walked around wearing another's clothes, parading his features, colouring and manners, was guiltless, he was merely a covering, a facade, as remote from its original as a violin case from the instrument it protects. Emotion should have no part in this. I had never for one moment been so blind as to imagine that any show of warmth coming from these people was due to qualities of my own, springing suddenly to the surface and finding a response: they came alight for him and him only, however misplaced hte glow. What was happening, then, was that I wanted to preserve Jean de Gue from degradation. I could not bear to see him shamed. This man, who was not worth the saving, must be spared. Why? Because he looked like me?

John is an Englishman, a professor of French history, who longs for a life of human connection. He has no wife, no family or friends; he spends most of the time he's not teaching wandering through French towns and gazing wistfully at lighted windows there, yearning to be a part of what he passes. In Le Mans one day he encounters a shocking site: a man who looks exactly like himself. John's doppelganger, a Frenchman named Jean de Gue, draws him into a night of debauchery, and when John awakes from it he finds that de Gue has swapped all of their clothes and possessions. Well, what is he to do but to follow the address he finds on de Gue's effects, and take up residence with his family, pretending to be his own double?

The life John/Jean takes up is a troubled one: de Gue, it turns out, is a provincial Comte who owns a struggling glass foundry, which is managed by his envious brother, Paul. The Comte de Gue has been having an affair with Paul's wife, Renee, while his own wife Francoise suffers from a difficult pregnancy. His mother, Maman, is addicted to morphine, and his daughter Marie-Noel is obsessed with the idea of becoming a saint, and suffering for the satisfaction of God. In this pursuit she is tutored by the Comte's religious sister, Blanche, who has not spoken to him in many years. As John insinuates himself into the family, he begins to piece together the Comte de Gue's dark secrets, including his part in the murder of the foundry's former manager, who may or may not have collaborated during the Nazi occupation of France. Except they aren't secrets: everyone knows all about the Comte's past, it seems, though it isn't spoken about openly. John, in the role of the Comte, is the only one who doesn't know the truth about himself.

The elegant concept of The Scapegoat really seems like something only du Maurier could invent. There's no big secret here a la Rebecca, but John's inherent ignorance, and the impenetrability of his disguise, make for gripping reading. Like John, you long to find out the truth about the de Gue family. Why are they so resentful toward one another, so recriminating? It doesn't matter how scandalous the answer is, because the knowledge seems just beyond the limit of investigation: there's no one, and no way, to ask. But the interest of The Scapegoat lies in the characters as well as the premise, characters who, like in other du Maurier books, seem to have been lifted from the Gothic novels of a hundred years prior: bitter Blanche, imperious Maman, pious Marie-Noel. John, too, becomes drawn into their lives. What seems at first like a lark, a chance to live another man's life without consequences, without being touched, becomes a tangle, like a trap. John finds himself caring for the broken family, eager to fix what the Comte--by all accounts a selfish person--has led to ruin.

Rebecca is du Maurier's masterpiece, but I think The Scapegoat might be my new personal favorite. I really couldn't put it down. Like all good novels about doubling and imitation, the lines become quickly blurred. When John inserts himself into the Comte's life, looking and acting like the Comte, who's to say he is not the Comte? If Marie-Noel breaks her mother's porcelain figurine, what does it matter if she receives a replacement, rather than the original, mended? Is it possible to borrow a man's identity, but not his history? These are interesting questions the novel asks, that give it heft and weight, but they're almost beside the point when it's so gripping.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

"You speak as if that were some kind of general moral imperative." He looked at Orr with his genial, reflective smile, stroking his beard. "But in fact, isn't that man's very purpose on earth--to do things, change things, run things, make a better world?"

"No!"

"What is his purpose, then?"

"I don't know. Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass."

Like most people, George Orr has bad dreams. But unlike most people, George's dreams come true: he imagines the death of his abusive aunt, and suddenly she has died in a car wreck. Not dies, has died: as soon as George emerges from the dream he knows that his aunt has been dead for several weeks; his dreams have literally change not just the future but the past, and no one remembers but him. In George memory has a doubleness; he remembers both what happened in this new timeline and the one from before his dreams. Distraught, he tries to keep himself from dreaming through pharmaceutical means, but his abuse of drugs lands him in the hand of a court-appointed therapist, Dr. Haber, who believes he can use George's abilities to create a better world.

My favorite scene in The Lathe of Heaven, I think, is when Dr. Haber, experimenting with his many dream-inducing machines, instructs a hypnotized George to dream of something innocuous: a horse. When George awakes, the mural of Mt. Hood on Haber's wall has become a portrait of a horse. It's a neat little moment of shock, dealt with organically in a way that's almost like a jump cut from a horror movie. Things escalate from there, with each of Haber's attempts at fixing the world having strange and grotesque consequences: by instructing George to make the world less overcrowded, he kills off billions in a plague. By instructing him to make the world peaceful, he conjures up an alien invasion--aliens that turn out to look like giant sea turtles. By instructing him to eliminate racial prejudice, he makes everyone a shade of even gray.

I don't think it was Le Guin's intention, but there's a conservative streak to The Lathe of Heaven: a belief that the best intentions of liberal reformers will always have unintended consequences that are worse than the problems they try to solve. Interestingly, Lathe has mixed success in diagnosing what humanity's problems will be. For 1971, the depiction of a world ravaged by the greenhouse effect is frighteningly prescient. But the belief that the world at seven billion people will be devastatingly overcrowded--she imagines a Portland of three million, with even larger cities emerging in Oregon's interior--looks like awfully silly Malthusian nonsense. Still, there is some wisdom in George's harried warning to Dr. Haber that the ends don't justify the means because "the means are all we have." What Le Guin understands is that the world is an unfolding process with no teleological end; utopian dreams of ending history will always be dreams, and not the kind that become real.

I read in Divine Invasions that Lathe was inspired by the Philip K. Dick novels of the 60's. Le Guin and Dick had a friendly correspondence, and that's not difficult to see here: the spineless subaltern whose dreams become real might have emerged directly from Dick's pages. The love interest, a spidery and abrasive woman named Heather Lalache, seems very "Phildickian" too. But I was struck by the process, outlined in Divine Invasions, by which Dick crafted a novel by smashing two separate ideas together, something that explains the sense of doubling and instability that characterizes his best work. Lathe is a classic, but it suffers in comparison to Dick's work, for me, because it really only has a single layer. And Dick never got caught up in the tedious technobabble that Le Guin writes whenever Dr. Haber starts talking about his dream machine, the Augmentor. I ended up tuning most of that stuff out. Still, Lathe speaks to a modern world that feels constantly on the edge of crisis, when one feels like solutions are simple but elusive.

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick

But let's put aside theories for now and try first to determine just what happened in 2-3-74 and the months that followed. Be forewarned that Phil's experiences during this time simply do not fall into a neat, overarching pattern--to fashion one for them is to distort them irrevocably. They include moments of doubt, panic, and anguish such as to make them seem all too human. But there are also times of startling sublimity, not to mention sheer breathtaking wonder. They neither prove that Phil was crazy, nor do they establish the existence of a Saint Phil. In fact, the 2-3-74 experiences resemble nothing so much as a wayward cosmic plot from a Phil Dick SF novel--which is hardly surprising, given who the experiencer was.

Philip K. Dick was a twin: his sister, Jane, died in her infancy. Dick never quite got over his sister's death, according to Lawrence Sutin, the biographer who writes about Dick in Divine Invasions. For one, he never ceased to blame his mother for his sister's death. But traces of Jane can also be found in the constant doubling and dissociation of Dick's novels. Jane, Sutin writes, was never far from Dick's mind, and his impressions of the person she would have been had she lived--he imagined her, interestingly, as a lesbian--were a more permanent relationship than any Dick had with real "flesh and blood" women.

This is the first really fascinating thing about Philip K. Dick, and it forms a kind of tentpole with the other thing: a series of visions that occurred in February and March 1974, and which Dick called "2-3-74." Details of these visions were known to me, as they are to anyone who has read VALIS and The Divine Invasion, the novels that deal most directly with these experiences: a belief that time stopped during the Roman Empire, that the modern world is an illusion, that this information was beamed down to Dick in the form of a beam of pink light from a kindly alien divinity somewhere in the vicinity of the star Fomalhaut. But the actual visions were much more complex and varied, and never cohered into a single understanding, as much as Dick wanted them to. The last years of his life Dick spent coldly and rationally dissecting his visions, an effort that produced the 1000-page religious tome published as The Exegesis. They sound like the visions of a mentally ill man--and they almost certainly were--but Dick was well and sober often enough to look at them with a kind of skepticism that resembled the patterns of his books: the humdrum suburbanite who must decide whether his reality is really real. And in the visions, as Sutin describes, with their doublings, their sense of a realer reality that lies inaccessibility, there are intimations of the lost Jane.

Divine Invasions is as thorough a biography as I've ever read. Dick's life between Jane's death and the 2-3-74 visions is, if I'm being honest, not all that fascinating, dominated as it was by scrounging for royalties and a tawdry series of doomed marriages. (If anyone out there decides Dick needs to be canceled, there's plenty of material in here.) But Sutin has gone through it all with a fine-toothed comb, stocking it with commentary from all of Dick's wives, friends, and acquaintances, as well as important passages from Dick's letters and the Exegesis. Sutin has done his homework: he even informs us that, when he played Monopoly, Dick would always choose to the old shoe. But more importantly, Sutin illuminates how the threads of Dick's life become woven into the books themselves. And it ends, as every authorial biography should, with a chronological assessment of all of Dick's writings, each with a ranking out of 10. (Among other things, the ranking of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Dick's best book, is scandalously low at 7.) The overall impression is of a prolific madman--Dick could write a whole book in a couple weeks, apparently, working through the day and night--but also a genius who produced 10 to 15 books of outstanding innovation, and about twice as many that are merely good.

What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

So you stood by him to the end, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

--The end is not yet. Though he sometimes defied me, I obey my orders still, said the Daimon Maimas.

--Your orders were to make him a great, or at least a remarkable man?

--Yes, and posthumously he will be seen as both great and remarkable. Oh, he was a great man, my Francis. He didn't die stupid.

--You had your work cut out for you.

--It is always so. People are such muddlers and meddlers. Father Devlin and Aunt Mary-Ben with their drippings of holy water, and their single-barrelled compassion. Victoria Cameron with her terrible stoicism masked as religion. the Doctor with his shallow science. All ignorant people determined that their notions were absolutes.

--Yet I suppose you would say they were bred in the bone.

--They! How can you talk so, brother? Of course, we know it was all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh. And my task is not yet finished.

What's Bred in the Bone is the second in Robertson Davies' "Cornish Trilogy," coming after The Rebel Angels, which deals with the aftermath of the death of Francis Cornish, a wealthy patron of the arts, and his estate. Rebel Angels always seemed a bit funny, the way it establishes a central character who never appears; What's Bred in the Bone is the novel that fills in Cornish's life: how he went from an upper-crust but provincial childhood in the small Ontario town of Blairlogie to become a world-renowned art expert, as well as--something no one in The Rebel Angels seems to know--a British spy.

Young Francis is a tormented child: tormented by the moralistic pictures that dominate his childhood bedroom, tormented by his peers, who see him as weak and strange (and what's worse, rich), tormented by the surprising revelation that his older brother, a mentally disabled boy also named Francis, has been kept secreted away in the attic for many years, while a nearby grave lets the world believe that he's dead. Francis learns to draw from a book, and his early talent is given room to practice when he's allowed to accompany the local mortician and sketch the bodies. After an Oxford education and a disastrous marriage to a reckless but sexy cousin (!), Francis becomes the assistant to Tancred Saraceni, a world-famous art restorer who recruits Francis into a scheme to fake old German paintings so they might be traded to the Nazis for legitimate world treasures. Saraceni's education is technical--and in true Davies style, the art of a restorer and forger is intimately and convincingly detailed--but also spiritual, and as a final project for his master, Francis produces an original painting in the style of the German masters that is so convincing it becomes the talk of the art world. Funnily, it's this painting that destroys Francis' ambition to be a painter: to paint in this style, the only style he really can, would be to out himself as the forger.

As the title suggests, the big theme of What's Bred in the Bone is how one becomes the person they are meant to be. Davies intersperses scenes from Francis' life with a conversation between his guardian angel and the animating "daimon" who guided Francis' development. The daimon explains to the angel how the qualities that already existed in Francis had to be brought out by the external influences in his life: his luckless brother, the kindly mortician, the wily forger. Like Dunstan Ramsay of The Fifth Business, who makes a cameo appearance here, Francis must be content with being something other than great, or great in a way that is different than how he conceives it. Francis can never be a painter, never an old master, but in his capacities as a forger, a restorer, a critic, a benefactor, he can become something else. If that something else is not quite what one dreams of, still it is something the world needs, and which represents the fulfillment of his capabilities. (Of course, self-actualization takes a lot of money, something that Davies never seems to want to interrogate that closely.)

What stands out to me, though, is the way that Francis is presented as something of an old soul: he might have been one of those German masters, if he had been born in the right time and place. Nearly all of Davies' protagonists are anachronisms, people who live by moral and aesthetic codes that have been sent to the rubbish bin by modern life. Davies has this kind of quality, too, I think, but his models aren't really Renaissance painters, or even the pre-Raphaelites that Francis loves, or even the medieval thinkers that preoccupy Dunstan Ramsay. Instead, they strike me as callbacks to a kind of early 20th century Oxford don: fussy, cloistered, small-c conservative. Like Francis, Davies is an old soul working in a modern medium, searching for greatness in a genre that no longer allows for it.

Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill

I felt locked out of my own fat body, as if I were a disembodied set of impulses and electrical discharges, disconnected rage and fear, something like what real humans feel in abandoned houses and call "ghosts." I remembered my father on top of me, mashing my lungs, making my breath smaller and tighter until it barely existed, opening my body with his fingers, infecting me with his smells, his sounds, grinding his skin on mine until it came off as a powder and and filtered into m pores, spewing his deepest poison onto my skin where it was subtly absorbed into my blood and cells and came out in my sweat, my urine and shit, even my voice and words. I felt so saturated by his liquid stench, I didn't even think to wash it off when he left.

Dorothy Never is a fat woman in her middle age. Justine Shade is young and thin, and beginning a career in independent journalism. Both of them are victims of sexual abuse--Dorothy in particular, at the hands of her father, for many years--and the kind of sexual bullying that, while it might not rise to the level of rape, women are subjected to from the earliest moments of their childhood. They are radically different women, both physically and temperamentally, but they are drawn together when Justine decides to write an article about Anna Granite, a semi-Randian novelist and philosopher in whose inner circle Dorothy once moved. 

One of the most interesting things about Two Girls, Fat and Thin is the way that it writes about Granite's philosophy,  Definitism, without ever really defining or outlining it. Gaitskill gives the impression of a total philosophy without really having to write one: it's a belief that centers the individual, and the sanctity of their will; power and self-gratification are lionized; squishy modernist ideas about subjectivity are loathed. Though Dorothy denies it to Justine, it is certainly a right-wing philosophy, but one which clearly appeals to the abused and the victimized. "Every loneliness," Granite writes in one of her books, in a line that appeals deeply to the tortured Dorothy, "is a pinnacle." For Dorothy, Definitism gives her the confidence to cut her abusive father out of her life, and to forge a life of her own.

Justine takes what might seem to be an opposite tack: sexual masochism. As she works on the Anna Granite story, she meets a serpentine young bruiser at a bar who invites her deeper and deeper into fantasies of domination: being tied up, whipped, urinated on. In a way, the two women represent different responses to being victimized: a flight toward power and a flight toward submission. But these are more malleable categories than they might seem. As Justine notes, the strong heroines of Granite's books often find themselves yearning to be controlled and dominated. And it is Justine who, in her childhood, reacted to the unwelcome prodding of young boys by abusing a young girl herself.

I don't know if Two Girls, Fat and Thin totally worked. It sets up a relationship, even a collision, between the two women, that it can't really deliver on, choosing instead to keep the pair siloed in long life histories until the very end. The Granite stuff is dealt with obliquely, in a way that feels skilled but sort of hollow. Shadows of Veronica are here--there's something in the way that Dorothy, like Veronica, works in NYC at night, like a ghost of a person--but the book is fuller, more florid, more satirical, without any of Veronica's chilly cool. But I did find a lot to admire in how boldly and plainly it deals with abuse.

Six Walks by Ben Shattuck

The idea to follow Henry David Thoreau's walks came while I was standing in the shower at dawn one May morning, listening to the water drill my skull and lap my ears, wondering what I could do to stop the dreams of my past girlfriend. This was years ago, in my early thirties, when I couldn't find a way out of the doubt, fear, shame, and sadness that had arranged a constellation of grief around me. In this last dream, the one that got me into the shower at sunrise, she was in labor. I dreamt that she had a husband--dark-haired, wearing a red shit with sleeves rolled to his elbows--show stood bedside, gripping her hand while she breathed. I stood against the wall, touching a white handkerchief I wanted to offer them.

My wife and I went to Cape Cod last weekend, her first time, my second. It stretches out in the shape of an flexed arm, with the long sand beaches of the Outer Cape running from the knuckle to the elbow. They are beautiful beaches, cream-colored running beneath tall ochre cliffs, looking out on an eternal sea dotted with gulls and eiders and kittiwakes as white and numerous as the little caps of the waves. You're guaranteed to see a seal, and if you're a little lucky, a whale. But only someone who is deeply strange, or deeply damaged, could imagine walking the entire stretch of the Outer Cape, someone like Henry David Thoreau, with a touch of the misanthrope. For Ben Shattuck, who sets out to trace Thoreau's footsteps, the walk offers a way to step out of oneself, out of the sleeplessness of a bad breakup and the chronic misery of Lyme disease. Shattuck is in a bad place when he starts his walk: at the Truro cliffs he eats a bar of clay like a hunk of chocolate.

The Cape Cod walk will become the first in a series of six walks that Shattuck takes, each in the footsteps of Thoreau, who recorded his walks in his journals. The second is a hike up Mt. Katahdin, the towering axe-head in Maine that lies at the terminus of the Appalachian trail. The third is an MDMA-laced trip to the top of Massachusetts' Wachusett Mountain, now a ski resort. The fourth is a walk from Shattuck's Massachusetts' home across the Rhode Island border, in the spirit of a walk that Thoreau took due southwest from his house, not knowing what he'll find. The fifth is a paddle up the Allagash River in far north Maine to a place where Henry camped, one of the few spots that seems to remain true wilderness, and the final one is a return to Cape Cod.

By the time Shattuck makes his return, his life is changed. The first three walks are records of misery, desperate attempts to outrun fatigue and depression. They seem often recklessly unplanned: Shattuck ends up spending the night with a pair of gracious Cape Codders who live near Thoreau's old property, but only by luck and happenstance. The MDMA on Wachusett mountain fails to bring the required transcendence, but it does lead to a moment of détente with a porcupine. But years pass between the first three walks and the second, and in the meantime Shattuck has conquered his Lyme disease and gotten a new girlfriend, an actress named Jenny who, as I was forced to curiously Google, turns out to be SNL alum Jenny Slate. (Honestly: Good work, Ben.) As Shattuck's life improves, the tone of the essays changes; the walks go from being flights from human life to deep engagements with the natural world.

Shattuck is a visual artist, and the essays are dotted with evocative black-and-white charcoal drawings of his walks. He brings an artist's visual sense to the landscapes he and Thoreau share: imagining the heart "the size of a chestnut" in the porcupine: "There's a heart at the center of all animals. Everything is soft underneath." In Henry's words: "A very suitable small fruit." There's the "black wedge" of a whale's mouth, and the way sunlight "raked across" the tops of Wellfleet houses. A coastline is "crenellated." And often Shattuck's language works in service of profound meditations on loss and grief: the most successful of the essays might be the Allagash one, in which Shattuck ties together an alien abduction reported in the area in the 1970's and Henry's loss of his own brother. Henry's guide, a Penobscot Indian named Joe for which Thoreau has little respect, also lost a brother, probably at the hands of whites, and agrees to serve as guide so he can go looking for him, but Thoreau is unable to cross the boundary of race to see a common kinship. These threads, along with Shattuck's own griefs and losses--chief among them the loss of a fingertip on his writing and painting hand--become a strong rope.

I really enjoyed Six Walks. I love reading books set in the places I travel to, and sometimes there is a resonance, but often not. Six Walks made me look at the Cape Cod landscape a little differently: I saw, standing on the thin fringe of beach, how someone might feel at the edge of their life there. I saw the cliffs at Truro, but I didn't stop to eat any of the clay. And I also saw how, standing with my wife and watching a seal roll around in the surf, how different it might be to be at that edge with someone loved.

The Wedding by Dorothy West

When she got lost, she was lost altogether, her identity deserting her, her name on doubting tongues, and her wholeness hanging by a tug of hair. There was no one to help her orient herself, and she could not communicate her need for help. In a world where everyone was adult and articulate, she was overwhelmed by the handicap of having to be a child. That she would ever coalesce into something concrete, with more sense than lack of it, seemed beyond the promise of prayer. She was still bits and pieces of other people: a frown she had no use for, a phrase stuck in a senseless sentence, a grunt like Gram's when the weather tied a knot in her back, walking like Gram when she had to place her hand on her hip to ease the pain of a rainy day, and echoing Liz's yeas and nays when half the time she felt just the opposite. Like most children, Shelby spent her days and hours trying on the most transparent parts of other personalities, gradually growing aware of their insufficiencies. Then slowly, at a snail's pace, and with a snail's patience, she would thread her frailties and fears, her courage and strength, her hopes and doubts, into the warp and woof that would cloak her naked innocence in a soul of her own.

The Oval is a community of black vacationers on Martha's Vineyard, proud and exclusive, named for the oval shape of the ring of inward-facing houses that compose it. Many of these "Ovalites" are descending on the island to attend the wedding of one of their daughters, Shelby Coles, to a white jazz musician named Meade. The marriage sets off old racial anxieties: could it be that, as Shelby's father and sister suspect, Shelby's upbringing among the light-skinned Ovalites has taught her to hate her own race? A neighboring interloper, a dark-skinned man named Lute whose presence on the Oval is suspect, decides he will get revenge on the Ovalites who spurn him by making a conquest of Shelby on the week of her wedding. Will Shelby, testing her own deep-seeded racial feelings, use Lute to conquer her own suspicions about herself?

I'm reading Passing right now with my juniors; I was struck by what a companion piece The Wedding makes. The Wedding is a late work by Dorothy West, one of the last surviving doyennes of the Harlem Renaissance, and it takes up many of the same questions about race, color, and class that Passing does. West keeps Meade--and the wedding--off stage, instead using it as a pretext to comb through the family history of the branches that have come together to make Shelby: Gram, the disappointed white matriarch; her desperate and sickly daughter who marries the self-made Hannibal; on the other side, the kindly doctor Isaac and his charity-crusader wife. And of course, Shelby's parents, including her father, who married a light-skinned woman like himself, though he has kept a darker mistress for decades. Like Passing, The Wedding understands the intimate relationship between colorism and racism: "passing" is, for the black upper class, a mark of unparalleled distinction. But chasing it requires a tightrope act: you can marry another light-skinned person for it, but to marry white threatens a wholesale dilution of the family's blackness. Ironically, perhaps, such distinctions are predicated on the same kind of one-drop blood quantum laws that kept white families' whiteness intact.

The strongest and most interesting part of The Wedding was, I thought, an extended flashback in which the young golden-haired Shelby chases off after a stray dog and becomes lost. The Ovalites are alerted, and then the larger Vineyard community, but even when Shelby is found, wearing the outfit in which she was reported missing, her rescuers assume that she must be a different lost child, a white one. Shelby herself is unable to make sense of this mystery, because she herself doesn't know if she's black or white. She knows she has a white grandmother, and black family, but how to cobble an identity out of these parts, no one has ever told her. This formative experience is an early wound in Shelby's identity, and reveals the shakiness at the heart of the racial logic that serves to keep the boundaries of the Oval tight. While each of the parts of the novel--which at times resembles a collection of stories, linked only in the sense that they are each about a member of the family--is good, I found myself wanting more of that central presence, Shelby's, to anchor the book more soundly.

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he climbed the stairs. A phrase of Johns's came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and the Tatlers.

It's a classic noir set-up, the wrong man: Arthur Rowe has his fortune read at a local festival. The fortune teller, one member of a spy network working in service of the Axis, tells him the winning number for a guess-the-weight game, and he goes home with the prize cake. But inside the cake somewhere is a bit of microfilm for which England's enemies are willing to intimidate, even kill. A German raid saves Arthur from his pursuers, but they're dogged: first, they try to pin a murder on him, then they try to explode him. Neither of these works, but the bomb gives him a spell of amnesia, and Arthur finds himself committed to a sinister mental ward, under a false name he doesn't know is not his.

It's a shaggy dog story, all right. On top of all this, Arthur carries around with him a horrible guilt: he really is a murderer. Years before, Arthur poisoned his ailing wife in an act of mercy. It's this act, actually, that makes Arthur difficult to blackmail or chase underground. Having done the most horrible thing he can imagine, Arthur has little to lose, and no conception of himself as either too good or too vulnerable. At the same time, Arthur's deed lies in contrast to the murders and machinations of the spy network that make up the title "Ministry of Fear." "You think you are so bad," an Austrian refugee named Anna tells him--not exactly a femme fatale, but a recognizable noir figure just the same--"But they can bear pain--other people's pain--endlessly. They are the people who don't care."

The amnesia thing is very silly. Perhaps in 1943, when Greene wrote the novel, it seemed a little less hoary. But it works here because, while Arthur slowly regains his memories, the memory of his wife's murder is the one thing he fails to recover. By forgetting the deed, he is renewed, equally determined as before, but with a fresh and much-needed conscience. The "new" Arthur is no murderer, but an avenger.

The Ministry of Fear actually struck me as one of the stronger of Greene's espionage books. It's more complex, less tawdry, than This Gun for Hire, more interesting that Stamboul Train, two of the books packaged with it in my four-book omnibus. The fourth, Our Man in Havana, illustrates how Greene's later books, even as they kept their spy themes, moved outward into the "Greeneland" of MI6; but The Ministry of Fear alone captures something worthwhile about the homefront. The constant air raids of the Blitz are a physical analog of the "Ministry of Fear," who look like ordinary doctors and tailors but who whose mission, whether by coercion or bribery, is to batter at the integrity of British domestic life. One way to read Arthur is as a symbol for the United Kingdom: no innocent, but one whose crimes cannot compare to the true evil that wages war against him.

Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell

A severe hurricane early in the twentieth century, and several smaller storms since that time had helped to give parts of the town the appearance of a temporary camp. But this was misleading, for Belizeans loved their town which lay below the level of the sea and only through force of circumstances, moved to other parts of the country. It was a town, not unlike small towns everywhere perhaps, where each person, within his neighbourhood, was an individual with well known circumstances. Indeed, a Belizean without a known legend was the most talked about character of all.

Beka Lamb is a young girl living in the small Central American nation of Belize. Her parents have gone to great lengths to provide her the kind of education few Belizean girls have, but she's squandered it, failing all of her classes. She must labor to convince them to send her back for the next year so that she might prove herself again. Meanwhile, her best friend Toycie is a straight-A student, but she has begun to have problems of her own: Toycie's boyfriend Emilio has abandoned her just as Toycie has begun to suspect she is pregnant. Beka struggles to keep up with her urgent studies and be there for her friend at the same time; while Beka re-commits herself and grows, Toycie begins to fall irrevocably apart.

I've been doing this project, in which I am trying to read a book from each country, for about a year now. Beka Lamb is just the kind of book you hope will appear when searching among small and less developed countries like Belize. Not because it's especially good--it is, but nothing earth-shattering--but because it captures something indelible about the country, its land and customs, its palpable essence. If you stop to reflect, you might begin to suspect that a book like this one is written consciously for outsiders, in the way it scrupulously records the cuisine, the rituals, the music and dance, of Belize, but when such things are done with expertise, it hardly bothers you. Beka Lamb is set at a time of great tumult for this small country: many are advocating for full independence from their British rulers, and others are fretting that an independent Belize will be gobbled up by its neighbor Guatemala. (Among other things, it is odd from an American perspective, which sees it as a relatively small and poor country, to think of Guatemala as a predatory power.) But of the country's vibrancy and pride Edgell leaves no doubt.

Beka Lamb is a tragedy: Toycie's child dies in childbirth, and Toycie becomes mentally unwell. She spends some time at an asylum, but her grandmother chooses to take her into "the bush" where she can rest, but a sudden hurricane ends Toycie's life. These final consequences are spelled out at the beginning of the book, as Beka holds a mental "wake" for her fallen friend; it's suggested that, through her struggle to support Toycie, Beka is finally allowed to grow. The symbol of this growth is that she wins an essay prize at school, claiming victory over older--and non-black--girls. Such tradeoffs, Toycie for an essay prize, are difficult to swallow. But in the end, Edgell suggests that to grow and prosper as a young girl in a proud but beleaguered country is no easy thing.

With the addition of Belize, my "countries read" list is up to 73!

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

"Today is the eight day" (wrote Cincinnatus with the pencil, which had lost more than a third of its length) "and not only am I still alive, that is, the sphere of my own self still limits and eclipses my being, but, like any other mortal, I do not know my mortal hour and can apply to myself a formula that holds for everyone: the probability of a future decreases in inverse proportion to its theoretical remoteness. Of course in my case discretion requires that I think in term of very small numbers--but that is all right, that is all right--I am alive."

Cincinnatus C. has been sentenced to death for a vague crime specified only as "gnostical turpitude." He sits in jail, tortured not by the certainty of his sentence but its uncertainty: he has no idea when the hour of his execution will come; no one will tell him. Maybe nobody knows. In the meantime, he shares his cell with a persistent spider and a zealous jailor, and soon a cell mate, a noxious little snob named M'sieur Pierre. He has time enough for visits, each one with its own cryptic refusal to provide any closure: his absent mother, his unfaithful wife, her large and vituperative family. He orders books from the library, and reads the newspaper, though references to himself are cut out of it. And he writes.

In the passage above, Nabokov makes explicit a central fact that underpins Invitation to a Beheading: Cincinnatus is basically in the same position as all of us. We all know we must die, but none of us knows the hour. Cincinnatus' life is lived on a contracted scale, but in its nature, he's like everyone else. Understanding this, his scribbling becomes especially poignant: over and over, in his writings, Cincinnatus expresses the desire to be able to express himself clearly, but he always feels that he has not quite said what it is he means to say. The desire, made urgent by the ticking clock, is a kind of manifesto about writing: the desire to say something real, and the understanding that there is limited time in which to say it.

Invitation to a Beheading is one of those capital-L Literature books about the Human Condition: the certainty of death, and what we do with it. Nabokov claims in the introduction that he had never read Kafka's The Trial when he wrote Beheading, and though the surface similarities are the same, there's nothing in the novel about authoritarians or autocrats. Cincinnatus is not degraded by his sentence, not tortured or physically punished; in fact, his jailors seem eager to treat him as some kind of honored guest, much to his annoyance. It's funny, actually; after having been chased out of Russia by the revolution, Nabokov would have had reason to imbue his prison story with such flavors, but he reaches for something much more universal.

Invitation to a Beheading is very funny, more Beckett than Kafka. It even has a kind of Vaudevillian flair to it, with Cincinnatus acting as the straight man to an increasingly mad world. Its best parts, I think, are actually the stream-of-consciousness writings that Cincinnatus pours out onto the page--though he may be dissatisfied with them, the pathos of their insufficiency really only makes them more touching. I was also taken with the novel's final scenes, which resolve the dreary questions of foreshadowing and climax--what will happen to Cincinnatus?--with a dreamy flare of imagination.