The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley

Until I came to Brandham hall the world of my imagination had been peopled by fictitious beings wo behaved as I wanted them to behave; at Brandham Hall it was inhabited by real people who had the freedom of both worlds; in the flesh they could give my imagination what it needed, and in my solitary musings I endowed them with certain magical qualities but did not otherwise idealize them. I did not need to. Marian was many things to me besides Maid Marian of the greenwood. She was a fairy princess who had taken a fancy to a little boy, clothed him, petted him, turned him from a laughing-stock in to an accepted member of her society, form an ugly duckling into a swan.

At Brandham Hall, thirteen-year-old Leo Colston is out of his element. Recruited for the summer by a friend from school, he finds himself at sea among the upper classes. The temperatures climb, but he has only his one suit, and it's only when his friend's sister, Marian, has the grace to take him shopping for summer clothing that he finally finds himself at ease. His new cool green suit is symbolic of his difference from the others at Brandham Hall, but also Marian's charity toward him, and he quickly falls for her in the half-romantic, half-admiring way that young men fall for adult women. When Marian asks him to take a message to Ted Burgess, a local farmer, he jumps to be of service, but only later does he discover that these messages are ones of love, and he's become embroiled in an illicit love affair between the two.

One thing that interested me about The Go-Between is how deftly it manages the envy that emerges from the class divide. By all rights, Leo should be sympathetic toward the farmer, Ted, who is closer to his own class, and who treats Leo, all-in-all, with a kind of fatherly affection. But Leo finds himself gravitating more strongly toward Lord Trimingham, a nobleman, disfigured from his World War I service, who is, or plans to be, Marian's true fiance. Lord Trimingham is polite but cold, and it's not difficult to see why Marian prefers the humble Ted--so does the reader--but for Leo, Trimingham's nobility seems to emerge from the same distinctions as Marian's grace and charity. Leo is, although he doesn't realize it, and only in his heart, a kind of class traitor. The richness of The Go-Between emerges out of the ambiguous conflict within Leo's heart; he becomes increasingly suspicious of what he's been tasked to do, but not really for the right reasons, although he comes close to a flash of truth when he begins to think that both Marian and Ted have been neglectful in using him for their own ulterior purposes.

There's a comfort-food feeling to The Go-Between: stuffy, British, breezy, bucolic. It shares DNA with the classic boarding school novel, like Brideshead Revisited or A Dance to the Music of Time. I found it a little simple compared to these, a little less complex than it might have been. It felt as if it held perhaps a little too tightly to the three-part love triangle, so clean in its design--lady, lord, farmer. But I was really charmed by it, and I was pleasantly surprised by the ending, which presents at first a seemingly over-simple resolution, which it then complicates by sending the reader hurtling far forward in time to the "present" day. I didn't quite expect that, although I suppose I ought to have expected it form the novel's famous first line: "The past is a different country, they do things differently there." 

Silk by Aarathi Prasad

I have heard it said that scientific study can take away a sense of wonder because science reduces a miraculous organism into mere mechanical parts. I have never found that to be true. Perhaps I find miracles in mechanisms. But however I looked at them--these insects, their metamorphosis, their silken threads--all were still miracula, true "objects of wonder." Over centuries, the transformation of insects through metamorphosis had proved so inexplicable a mystery, and the silks that came of it so extraordinary, that women and men have studied it with the kind of fervor that cost some their eyesight, others their health, and a few their lives. And yet it is an obsession that persists.

Silk is kind of weird when you think about it. That stuff comes from a bug's butt. But there's no arguing with results: few fabrics are as lustrous, or soft, and, as Aarathi Prasad describes in her book about the natural history of silk, strong: for a long time it was even used to stop bullets. Human beings have long known the value of silk, as attested by the fact that the silk moth, Bombyx mori, is one of the earliest known domesticated animals we have, going back thousands upon thousands of years. The humble silk moth lost its ability to fly in the process of domestication, and now exists, like cows and chickens, almost entirely at our service. But there are other silks than moth silk, and the most interesting parts of Prasad's book are actually about the attempts to farm silk from other organisms, most of which met insurmountable challenges: the fine hairs of certain mollusks, and the ultra-strong silk of spiders. (As it turns out, it's harder to farm spider silk at scale because, unlike moths, spiders like to eat each other.)

Prasad's book is organized by personality, rather than chronology. Each chapter highlights, more or less, an important personage in the production or understanding of silk. There's Maria Sibylla Merian, whose artistic renderings of silk moth cocoons helped us understand the transformation process of silk moths for the first time. There's René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, whose experiments with farming spider silk were so popular they were translated into Chinese for the emperor. And then, toward the end of the book, there are the modern researchers who are using the technology of silk to build stronger fabrics and materials for the modern age, including those using gene-splicing technology to produce spider silk in goats. What this organizing strategy lacks in chronological sense--I had a hard time separating out the where and when, because the chapters jump around in time as well as place--it makes up in human interest. For Prasad, the story of silk is the story of human beings, and specifically those obsessive scientists and naturalists who advanced our knowledge of the production and nature of silk--as opposed to, perhaps, a broader sense of the larger social dynamics of the silk trade.

What I enjoyed most about Silk is the way that it sits at the nexus of several different types of book: it's a history book as well as a natural history book, and it balances history and science well. Prasad is a skilled writer, and the book felt breezy and readable--for the layman. And it left me wanting to get my hands on a pair of spider-silk socks.

An Earthquake is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth by Anna Moschovakis

I want what Tala has. I'm not ashamed to say it. I want her bony ankles and her wedge-heeled boots. I want the skin of her smooth forehead--dewy, there's no other word--and I want her dates and her friends. I want that high-pitched laugh that peals, even when there isn't much to laugh about. I don't care that it sounds fake sometimes, I don't care if it's a mask or a manipulation, if she's crying inside. It makes anyone who hears it happy: I want that.

The narrator of Anna Moschovakis' An Earthquake is the Shaking of the Surface of the Earth is a disgraced actor who's been out of work since becoming rattled by a protestor during a performance. She lives in a world that has been unsettled by some kind of geological disaster, and where earthquakes are frequent: she literally does not know where to put her feet. Amid this global and personal disaster, she has developed a fixation on her younger, more beautiful roommate Tala. She decides that she must hunt down Tala--who is out, somewhere, in the city, and never actually seems to be at home--and kill her.

The afterword to the novel suggests that much of it is about method acting, that process by which one comes to inhabit a character by channeling true emotions, rather than just performing them. Method acting, perhaps, requires a conscious splitting of the self as much as it requires the unification of such a split, a strategy that the narrator is no longer able to pull off. Tala, by comparison, is wholly herself; she has no need for performances, or to decide what are her true feelings and act upon them. That's why she walks more easily upon the shaking ground than our narrator.

To be honest, this novel really didn't hit for me. Moschovakis is a poet and translator as well as a narrator, and it reads to me a like a poet's novel. By that I don't mean what I think many would expect--that it's filled with beautiful or flowery language, or strong images. It struck me as the opposite, actually, preoccupied with the word and phrase to the point of abstraction: "Strange how language encapsulates time. And power, and relation." A recurring motif is the purposeful reconsideration and alienation of stock phrases and cliches. But I didn't believe in the world, and I didn't believe in Tala, and I didn't really feel persuaded by the anxiety and torment of the narrator. Worse, I didn't believe in the earthquakes. I think a certain kind of reader might get quite a bit out of An Earthquake is the Shaking of the Surface of the Earth--but that reader isn't me.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in for hours while we lay staring out at my father's crippled monkey perched on a flaking parapet, or telling stories, one bed to another, with soundless gestures.

Gene Wolf's The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a collection of three sort-of-linked novellas that take place on the twin planets of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix. The first is narrated by an unnamed boy who discovers that he is the genetic clone of his father, destined--unlike his brother--to carry on his father's devious experiments. The second is a story purporting to be written by a minor character from the first, an anthropologist from Earth named Marsch, who comes to the planets to investigate the theories that Sainte Anne, when it was first colonized (by the French, lol) was actually populated by an aboriginal species of shapeshifters who either disappeared or learned to mimic their human colonizers so well that they actually took their place. Marsch's story is about two brothers who end up in different, hostile tribes, and the intervention of the mysterious "Shadow Children," who might be the remnants of a previous wave of human colonization. The third depicts Marsch in a jail cell, writing in his journal about the experience of exploring Sainte Anne with the help of a young peasant boy who claims, like his father, to actually be a shape-shifting "abo." Marsch has been jailed on suspicion of killing the boy, but as the novella goes on, we begin to suspect that the opposite is true: that the boy has killed Marsch, and taken his body and identity.

Even from that summary, you can see the themes that emerge: The Fifth Head of Cerberus is crowded with doubles, dopplegangers, and fakes. The first narrator's tutor, a suspiciously familiar robot named "Mr. Million," turns out to be his own genetic "great-grandfather," the first cloned copy, whose mind has been downloaded into the hard drive. The narrator tries to rebel against his father, killing him, but only ends up following his genetic destiny, repeating his father's work, and his father's before him. These doubles and doppelgangers are symbolized by the twin planets themselves, one which is believed to have had an aboriginal presence, and another which is believed to have been empty--but since the "abos" may have taken over their human colonizers, who can tell which is which?

But I was interested, too, in the book's image of colonization. In Marsch's story (which, of course, mustn't be taken as truth), the names of the pre-contact abos resemble those of Native Americans: "Cedar Branches Waving," etc. And the French colonial elements are pretty pointed. People on both planets are quick to make hard delineations between who is and isn't human: the lobotomized slaves in the market are "not people," and thus one can do whatever one wants with them, even though, as we learn, the slave markets are where the discarded clones of the narrators' father end up. The abos, if they exist, aren't "people" either, and the French descendants of Sainte Anne find easy justification in the prospect of their elimination. But there's something interesting and sneaky in the possibility that the abos have replaced the humans. It's easy to accept that the colonized are affected by the colonizers, but to what extent does the process happen in reverse? To what extent do Americans, for instance, deny the ways in which they are the inheritors of Indigenous culture rather than a European one? (We're not used to asking these questions, which are much more apparent in Mexico and Central America.)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus can be a frustrating read; nothing really is resolved or revealed. What revelations are to be found are unfolded slowly, and perhaps "revealed" only after they become obvious, but a larger truth about the existence of the abos, either in history or in the present, never really emerges. I felt the same way about The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe is a messy writer, full of digressions, and one who refuses to tie all his threads together in a way that a modern reader raised on HBO puzzle box shows will find satisfying. But that's what's most interesting and thrilling about his writing, too.

Radio Treason by Rebecca West

It is undignified for a human being to the be the victim of a historical predicament. It is a confession that one has been worsted, not by a conspiracy of enemies, nor by the hostility of nature, but by one's environment, by the medium in which one's genius, had one possessed such a thing, should have expressed itself. As harsh as it is for an actor to admit hat he cannot speak on a stage, for an artist to admit he cannot put paint on canvas, so the victims of historical predicaments are tempted to pretend that they sacrificed themselves for an eternal principle which their contemporaries had forgotten, instead of owning that one of time's gables was in the way of their window and barred their view of eternity. But William Joyce pretended nothing at his trials. His faint smile said simply, 'I am what I am.'

William Joyce was better known among the British public as "Lord Haw-Haw," so named for the affected poshness of the voice by which he broadcast radio propaganda from Germany. Author Rebecca West, after the war's end, was dispatched to report on Joyce's trial, which ended pretty much as one might expect: Joyce was found to have been a traitor, and became the last person in Britain to be hanged for treason. For a minute, it looked as if Joyce might get off on what might be seen as a technicality: born to an Irish father in the United States, he may never have owed true allegiance to the crown, making his propaganda not technically treason. The prosecution argued that Joyce affirmed his allegiance when he took out a British passport, but the complicated nature of the argument--on both sides--seems to have generated more than a little public sympathy for Joyce, whose pathetic stature, along with the silliness with which Britons regarded the broadcasts, made his ultimate death sentence seem, perhaps, disproportionate.

West structures her book on Joyce in an interesting way: the trial and execution comes first, and only afterward does she back up to detail Joyce's life from the beginning. (This probably has something to do with the fact that, as the foreword describes, West wrote and published the account of trial first before continuing the book.) Joyce's life seems to have been unremarkable, but telling: the son of well-to-do Irish unionists, unable to find a place for himself in the world, or reproduce the success of his parents. A failed marriage, a scuttled military career. Joyce was attracted to fascism at an early age, and rose to a high position with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Yet, even there, it seems he was largely disliked. How familiar does this sound? A man who may have grown up to believe that the world owed him success and prestige, and when these failed to materialize, turned toward a fascism that allowed him to punish and control others. A curdled patriotism, perverted to justify an attack on the very nation he professed to love--sound familiar? All he needs is the facepaint and the horned helmet, and Joyce is a January 6er.

I really enjoyed West's writing. I can think of many similar figures one might write a book about today, but it would be impossible to write them outside of a narrow journalistic style, overloaded with facts, figures, footnotes, quotes. And there'd be no space for the kind of thoughtful extemporizing of the kind that West makes so eloquently in the quoted passage, or the critical but forthright judgments that West passes on Joyce and his motives. The foreword (by Katie Roiphe) describes her as a kind of proto-non-fiction writer of the kind whose books we devour today, but I think there's something here that we've lost the ability to do. I probably would never have picked this book up on my own, but I got it in the first shipment of a subscription to McNally Press Editions my wife got me for my birthday, and I'm glad I did.

Basti by Intizar Husain

Where did the bomb fall? The various lanes of the city rise up in my imagination. I try to guess from which direction the sound of the explosion came, and which neighborhoods are located in that direction. Abba Jan is entirely absorbed in reciting from the Quran, and my mind is wandering through the various lanes of the city. In Shamnagar I suddenly pause. That house in Shamnagar where we camped when we first came to Pakistan rises up in my imagination. Has the bomb fallen there? No, it shouldn't fall there. I have no emotional relationship with that house. The moment we left it, the house slipped out of my memory without leaving any imprint on my heart and mind. But suddenly now that house rises up in my imagination. Before my eyes I see the room in which I spent my first night after coming to Pakistan. No, the bomb shouldn't fall on that neighborhood. The house ought to stay safe, the whole house and the room which holds in trust the tears of my first night in Pakistan.

Intizar Husain's Basti details the life of one Zakir, as he grows up amid the birth and first crises of the new nation of Pakistan. Sometimes a third person protagonist, sometimes a narrator, Zakir begins as a small child in the town of Rupnagar, pestering both the Muslim and Hindu sages of his town with a child's questions and receiving different kinds of wisdom in return. This flashback turns out to be just that, a vision of a former life that vanished with the Partition that separated, with great violence, a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan. Zakir's small town seems to be emerging into the twentieth century--there's a great bit about the monkeys who can't seem to learn that the new electric wires mean certain death--but then they're whisked away, to a new city, and then to another, into a Pakistan where Zakir never seems to be able to find certainty or stability.

Basti isn't really a book about the Partition, but another great crisis of Pakistan: the war that led to the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Zakir and his friends are largely aloof from the war and from the political upheavals that rock Pakistan; they spend most of their time at a tea bar called the Shiraz, while huge demonstrations swell and bombs fall outside the windows. Going to visit his father's grave, Zakir finds himself caught up in one such demonstration, caught in the forward movement of the crowd, and threatened by the Indian soldiers who seek to put down such demonstrations on behalf of Bangladesh. I'm only partly sure I'm describing any of this correctly; Basti is a book deeply steeped in Muslim and Middle Eastern history and literature, and many of the minutiae and the multitudinous references, to the Quran, to various ghazal poets, to historical figures of India and Pakistan, were obscure to me, even with the generous appendix. But the overall arch of the book is clear: a man who leaves a childhood of promise and emerges into the false promise of a nationalism that leaves him adrift, endangered, and alienated.

The best parts of Basti, I thought, were the dreamlike passages in which Zakir walks through the city to find it destroyed or deserted. Sometimes these really are dreams, sometimes they only resemble dreams, but in each case Husain writes in a kind of modernist style that seems familiar in the wake of other moments of 20th century crisis throughout the world. Zakir's alienation is so deep that, as he walks around the city, he wonders how it is that people can even go on walking, and if he, too, can walk: "When he observed his own non-human walk, the strange thought came to him that it was not he who was walking, but someone else in his place. But who? He fell into perplexity." Far from giving him a sense of nationalist identity and homeland, the birth pangs of modern Pakistan have ruptured Zakir's identity. He spends much of the novel trying to contact his cousin and former crush, Subirah, who is in Delhi, beyond the border that now separates them forever. What kind of life might Zakir have had if the forces of nationalism and political upheaval and not separated them? Or had not separated him from himself?

With the addition of Pakistan, my "Countries Read" list is up to 108!