"A Very English Scandal, " by John Preston

    The sub-title of this book is "Sex, Lies, and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment." It covers a prolonged period in which two friends of Jeremy Thorpe--the leader of the Liberal party in the 'sixties and 'seventies--attempted to deal with a young man whom Thorpe had seduced and who seemed to be poised to blackmail him by producing a set of love letters that Thorpe had written to him. At that time, male homosexual relations were illegal, and a significant number of men were serving prison sentences for their homosexual activities.
    Two of Thorpe's friends--Peter Bessell, a serial womanizer who seemed in thrall to Thorpe, and David Holmes, a lover of Thorpe--kept the young man, Norman Scott, at bay in a variety of ways. But as time went on, Thorpe became convinced that Scott had to be killed, and he urged Bessell and Thorpe to arrange it. There was a lot of stalling on their part, but Holmes seems to have been the one who set a murder plot in train. It ended in a ludicrous outcome, with Scott and a large dog being driven out onto Exmoor by the hit-man, who first shot the dog, but when he turned to shoot Scott, the gun jammed, Scott escaped, and the police were called. The hit-man was found guilty of assault with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to two years in prison. Subsequently, the various details of the plot became known to the authorities and Thorpe and three others, including the hit-man, were prosecuted for 'conspiracy to murder.'
    The main witnesses for the prosecution were Peter Bessell and Norman Scott. Both were subjected to withering cross-examinations that painted them as serial liars. The summing-up by the judge, Sir Joseph Cantley, was notorious for its bias and its characterization of Bessell and Scott as wholly unreliable. (Peter Cooke did a famous take-off of the summing up; find it on You-Tube)
    Thorpe and the others were acquitted by the jury, but this was certainly not the view of the public at large, and Thorpe's career was effectively over. He stood again in his constituency at the next General Election but lost by a substantial majority.
     One critic has summed the book up as follows:
"What can be said, however, is that this is probably the most forensic, elegantly written and compelling account of one of the 20th century’s great political scandals and it could not have been told in its entirety while Thorpe, who died in December 2014, was alive. It’s a real page-turner. An entertaining mix of tragedy and farce, involving people in high and low places, amply justifying its subtitle, “Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment”
    I certainly turned the pages, finishing it in the course of a day when I had little else to do .

"The Story of the World in 100 Species" by Christopher Lloyd

    I encountered this book accidentally in the public library.
Not a book you settle down to read from cover to cover--all 400 pages of it in a largish format on heavy glossy paper. But a book you might give as present to an intelligent teenager or keep on your bookshelf, dip into from time to time, and absorb a few fascinating facts
    The aim is to look at the species that have made great contributions to the modern world, starting with the most primitive forms of life, and moving through prehistoric creatures, the vast forests of trees that we now use as oil and coal, the rise of Homo Sapiens, wheat, maize, cotton, silk, rice, cows, cats, dogs, horses, foxes, crows, mosquitos, rats, grapes--there are a hundred species that are examined, and each gives rise to an interesting essay, usually relating the effects on world history and on the environment that the species have engendered.
     Just thought I would mention it--as I say, a good present for a teenager.

"Vinegar Girl" by Anne Tyler

    This is a charming short novel--set where?--in the leafy streets of Baltimore, of course, close to Johns Hopkins, where--in a lab that seems to have been forgotten by the university--Louis Battista, an expert on auto-immunity, is working on his research with cages full of mice and his research assistant, a Russian called Pyotr, whose visa is close to running out.
    At home--with a rather strained back-story--Battista' twenty-nine year old daughter, Kate, keeps house for him and her teenage sister, Bunny. After giving birth to Kate, her mother lapsed into on-and- off depression for some fourteen years, when a new drug cheered her up sufficiently to have another child. But not long after, the drug created a heart condition from which she died. After some years with a live-in housekeeper and child-minder,  Kate dropped out of college and took over the running of the household.
     The novel is written from the point of view of Kate. She is the Vinegar Girl, the Shrew, an assistant at a nursery school, who speaks her mind frankly and undiplomatically and rarely sets out to please. In order to provide Pyotr with a visa, Battista proposes that Kate should marry him--not a real marriage, but just one to get Pyotr a green card. Nevertheless, much has to be done to be able to assure the immigration authorities that the marriage is genuinely based on love and affection, and is intended to last. After initially scorning the idea, Kate agrees to go along with it, but continues to keep Pyotr at arms length. Battista envisages Pyotr and Kate living in the family house, where Kate would continue to be the housekeeper. But Pyotr is insistent that she come to live with him--not to share a bed but to live together as friends, and Kate sees this as a way of breaking away from her unsatisfactory life as a housekeeper for her father and maybe starting a new life--back to school to study biology, perhaps.
    This novel is one in a series, commissioned by a publisher whose name I forget, that modernize Shakespeare's plays. And since you know already that the novel is bound to end with "Kiss me, Katya,"
you are not really on tenterhooks as to what will happen. It does--but getting there is a lot of fun, and Anne Tyler's strengths as a novelist of the domestic scene keeps the story bubbling along until the final kiss. The shrew is tamed.

"The Girls" by Emma Cline

First novel by a 25 year-old, who seems to have landed a $2 million deal with a publisher, "The Girls" is a coming-of-age story, with 14 year-old Evie falling in with a Charles Manson-like cult, having occasional casual sex with its leader, Russell, but constantly fascinated by Suzannne--one of three girls in the cult who mirror the three girls in the Manson cult who were responsible for the Sharon Tate  murders at the Polanski home in August 1969. The review of the book in the New York Times showed a picture of the three Manson girl murderers and it was clear that one of them had the magnetism that translates into the Suzanne of the novel. The viewpoint throughout is that of Evie, and it is framed by her looking back in middle age to that summer, when she was involved with the cult.
From the New York Times review: "A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences so finely wrought they could be almost worn as jewelry." (Rather an odd metaphor...)
Joan was particularly taken by it (could not put it down, as the cliché has it). I was, perhaps, a bit less 'taken,' but certainly very impressed by the talent of the author.

"Enough Said" by Mark Thompson

I do not read much non-fiction, but I had read the reviews, and when I saw the book in the library, I could not resist Mark Thompson's book "Enough Said--What's Wrong With The Language of Politics."  A timely subject after the horrors of the presidential campaign. Mark Thompson was director general of the BBC for eight years, from 2004 to 2012, when he became president and CEO of the New York Times Company. His experience in both positions is often drawn on to enliven his text.  He stresses the importance of words in the political context--"days when the right words are all that count and it is the speaker who can find them who determines what happens next." The book is discursive and covers a wide range of topics from Sarah Palin's "death panels" to Trump's anti-scientific views on vaccinations, Churchill's and Blair's war speeches, and controversies over 'hate speech' and freedom of speech. He gets into the three phases of rhetoric--ethos, pathos, and logos, and traces the influence of Madison Avenue marketing and consumer research on electioneering. Altogether a fascinating read...maybe a bit on the long side, and occasionally I was tempted to skip a little, but certainly a timely book in the year of Trump and Brexit. And, I am afraid--long on the problems, but short on the solutions...as we all are, hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

The Mysteries of Overdrive and E-Books

     I have made the connection with my DC Public Library by using the app "Overdrive." This enables me to put a hold on books and get them down-loaded to my I-Pad when they become available. It seems to work very well, although sometimes the wait for a book seems endless. Recently they have introduced a change that is very illuminating and gives a better idea why the waits are so long.
     Up until recently, you could simply check where you stood in line for a book. It was a bit disconcerting because, for example, I could see that for "Nutshell" by Ian McEwan I was 66th in line...or for "Hillbilly Elegy" I was 236th in line, which makes one think "forget it: cancel the hold." Or go into my account and put a hold on the print copy, which is--after all--more conducive to reading in bed than an I-Pad screen, which is supposed to make sleep more elusive.
     Suddenly they have started to add how many copies of the 
e-book are available, and the results are quite interesting. For one novel that was very well reviewed, there are three copies available. For another novel that was on the NYTimes 100 best for 2016, there only two copies available. For "Nutshell" there are 12 copies. For "Hillbilly Elegy" there are 51 copies. For Ann  Patchett's novel "Commonwealth" there are 42 copies but I am #664 (!!!!) in line. And for "The Association of Small Bombs," where I am 139th in line, there are 11 copies. 
     I am intrigued by the variation in the number of copies. Is it what the publisher allows? Or is the Library's judgement on potential demand?


     

'Mr. Monkey' by Francine Prose

     I have always been a fan of Francine Prose and I have read a lot of her stuff, fiction and non-fiction, over the years. We heard her recently talk about her new book in our near-by bookstore, and certainly the bits she read encouraged both Joan and me to read it.
     "Mr. Monkey: The Musical" is a rather tacky off-off-Broadway production of the musical version of the famous children's book called "Mr. Monkey." I assume that the book and the musical are actually inventions and are not based on any actual children's book, though "Curious George" does come to mind.
     In some respects the book is a series of short stories, each one dealing with a character involved in the production of Mr. Monkey and exploring the various links--coincidental?--between some of the actors and the author of the original children's book, a grandfather who takes his grandson to see the musical, the grandson's school-teacher, a waiter who serves the author at a restaurant and who gets free tickets to see the musical, and the producer of the show. Each 'story' or chapter focusses on one individual, and--frankly--there are quite some differences in the level of interest provided by each of the characters: some are more interesting than others, or one might say that Ms. Prose is more successful in some chapters than in others.
     But...I recommend reading it.

Magda Szabo: "The Door"

     No--I had never heard of her either.


      Magda Szabo (1917--20007) was a prize-winning Hungarian writer, starting with two volumes of poetry in 1947, and moving on to write a series of novels, short stories, children's stories, plays, and non-fiction, including a tribute to her husband, Tibor Szobotka who translated Tolkien and Galsworthy.
     "The Door", which is published by The New York Review of Books, has been translated by Len Rix, and he received the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation prize for his translation. There is an introduction by Ali Smith, in which she notes that, "after finishing this compelling, funny, and horrifying novel the reader will want to find every one of her other novels." I expect that is impossible as I doubt if they have all been translated.
      The novel--is it autobiographical?--has a first person narrator, a writer, and I believe it is only well near the end of the book that we learn her name is Magda.  The novel is about her intense but very rocky relationship with Emerence, an elderly woman who does domestic work for her and other neighbors on the street. She sweeps the snow and the leaves. She brings food to the sick. No-one has ever seen the inside of her apartment. If she entertains neighbors, or her nephew, or the police chief, she does so on her porch. She always wears a headscarf. She is contemptuous of religion for what seems an absurd and petty reason. (Like the author, the narrator is a devout Christian, for which Emerence mocks her) The narrator sees her as a noble and mythological figure, and slowly she begins to find out bits about her past--but what should she believe? Did she steal from a jewish family who fled, or did she rescue them? Did she have an illegitimate child or did she adopt one? She hid and nursed both German and Russian soldiers and informers under different regimes. She gave help where needed, no matter who it was that needed help.
The crisis that leads to the final, agonizing ending is when Emerence falls sick and refuses to open her door, and the neighbors have to figure out a way to rescue her.
There was a glowing review in the New York Times.
Fascinating novel... though it may be a bit difficult to get your hands on a copy. The DC Public Library had one, and I expect other libraries will have it too.

Elena Ferrante: "The Days of Abandonment"

Continuing my catch-up with Ferrante. This is her second novel.

Olga is thirty-eight, married to Mario, lives in Turin, and has two young children, Ilaria and Gianni. “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” There are the usual emotional reactions: anger, loathing of her husband, self-loathing, jealousy, despair. And she sees her life falling apart.

She struggles to hold on to reality, to look after the children, walk the dog, and pay the bills. One day, she sees her husband with Carla, his new lover, a girl of twenty whom her husband had tutored. She attacks her husband, and knocks him down in the street. At home, a myriad of problems confront her. There are ants all over the apartment; a child has a fever; the phone bill hasn’t been paid; the dog is sick; the lock on the front door doesn’t work; everything seems to go wrong. And, later, there are the problems of the relationships of her children with Carla—do they like her more than their mother?

The novel certainly provides a very convincing view of a mind that is coming apart, struggling between reason and insanity, at the limits of coherence and decency, a mind that is desperate to survive…but how?  A love-hate relationship develops with Carrano, a neighbor, a shy grey-haired professional musician, with whom Olga has an extraordinarily squalid sexual encounter, although later he seems to become the means by which, eventually, she may be able to survive.

It is clearly a literary achievement, but sneaking into one’s mind from time to time is the thought—why doesn’t she pull herself together? Get a grip?  But clearly that is the last thing one should actually say to her…

 

Anthony Morra again..."The Tsar of Love and Techno"

I thought the 'Constellations' novel of Anthony Morra was very striking and I immediately ordered his other book, "The Tsar of Love and Techno" from the Library. I was again impressed by the quality of the writing, although I should add that there were times in reading the book when I began to feel that the development was somewhat tedious.
     The book is almost a novel, but the title page says "Stories." There are nine stories, with different first person narrators, and they are loosely linked together by an 1843 painting--"Empty Pasture in Afternoon"--by an obscure Russian painter. In a rather cutesy fashion the first four stories are labeled 'Side A,' the last four 'Side B,' and the fifth 'Intermission.' The settings of the stories range from Leningrad 1937, Kirovsk--a mining centre inside the Arctic circle 1937 to 2013, Grozny in Chechnya in 2003, the Chechen Highlands 2000, and St. Petersburg 2011-2013. The final chapter, 'The End' is set in outer space, year unknown, and--frankly--it did very little for me.
      In many respects the construction of the book--with its time shifting--resembles the technique Morra uses in 'Constellations.' And it also reflects his intense interest in events in Chechnya.
In the initial story a failed portrait painter is engaged by the Stalin regime to erase political dissidents from official images and art works, beginning with his disgraced brother. When an antique painting of a field with a dacha appears on his desk he begins to draw his brother in the pictures he censors. This picture is then one of the threads that join together the cast of characters in the other stories--a legendary ballerina, her granddaughter, a retired gangster, a soldier imprisoned in a well in Chechnya--and a mix-tape of techno music also plays a role in more than one story.
As with 'Constellations' there is a long list of background sources (Morra mentions ten books) and it is clear that a great deal of research went into the writing of these stories.
     The New York Times reviewer  mentioned a number of what he called 'missteps' but goes on to say:
" ....these missteps barely register in the wake of a book this ambitious and fearless, one that offers so much to enjoy and admire." My view too... 

Anthony Marra: "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"

     I have already mentioned that I had started reading "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" by Anthony Marra, and I indicated how impressed I was by the novel.
     The 29 or so chapters, each of which is headed by the year in which the action of that chapter takes place, are spread over a ten year period, from 1994 to 2004, and the reader is taken back and forward in time from chapter to chapter. This period covered the wretched history and suffering of Chechnya over two wars. The novel focusses on the intertwined relationships and back stories of a few characters from the small village of Eldar. And also, central to the plot development, there is an ethnic Russian surgeon (Sonja, not Sonya: the reason is given) who struggles to cope with the savagely wounded casualties of war in a run-down and damaged hospital in the nearby town of Volchansk. Sonja's sister, Natasha, is missing--a constant source of anxiety for Sonja--and Natasha's story is also taken backwards and forwards over the years.
     If you are squeamish, or just not into gruesome, you may find some of the material hard to take. But book critics have been ecstatic--for example this from The Washington Post:
 "A flash in the heavens that makes you believe in miracles...here in graceful prose is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly, about lives in a remote land...I haven't been so overwhelmed by a novel in years...I have to say you simply must read this book."
     I am going to try to check if it has been published outside the USA.