THE GOLDENACRE by Philip Miller.  Mr. Miller is a resident of Edinburgh and has long been a newspaperman specializing in the arts. Both backgrounds are brought to play in his fine crime novel about an art deception that leads to a host of vicious murders. This Edinburgh is not the sentimental one conjured up by Andrew McCall Smith’s work.  It is gritty, full of imperfect characters, and a fair amount of suffering.  Specifically, we have an already troubled art expert named Thomas Tallis who has to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain that he has no relation to the far more famous medieval composer. He comes to town to help authenticate a famous painting and runs into a shadowy conspiracy to bilk Scotland out of 12 million pounds. The fair city of Edinburgh (that is sometimes called “the Athens of the North”) is nicely evoked from the broad expanses of Princes Street to the bleak coastline.  Just when the game is winding up, there are some closing plot twists that put this outing solidly into a genre I would label Scottish Noir.  I give it four stars. ****  

Thinking of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II

 Thinking of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II

She was not my queen, but I often felt she was in spite of that revolution against the monarchy that created our country.  I watched her coronation on black and white television.  When my wife and I made our first visit to Great Britain in the summer of 1963, London was entering the “swinging sixties” of Carnaby Street and the Beatles.  It was the real beginning of our love affair with Britain. While on that first visit we saw many plays. According to my still saved journal, we saw Lionel Bart’s Blitz about the second world war, Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War,  a production of The Tempest at Stratford Upon Avon that I called “the best play production I had ever seen, John Gieldud in The Ides of March at the Haymarket Theatre (where you could have tea brought to your seat at the interval and they still played God Save the Queen at the end of the performance with a live orchestra), a performance of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, an RSC production of John Gay’s The Beggars Opera and the straight from the Edinburgh Festival of ­Beyond the Fringe. This was a show that Kenneth Tynan, a budding theatre critic at that time, helped bring to the attention of London audiences. It was my first exposure to Mr. Tynan, whose rise to the pinnacle of the critic world was to become the subject of my doctoral dissertation.

That 1963 visit was followed by thirteen more visits to London. One was for a full year (1972-73) as director of the ACM Arts of London program.  A second long term was in the 1980’s and again for the ACM London program. The other visits were for sabbaticals, escorting London tours for Monmouth College with students, faculty, and townspeople, and taking our daughter’s grandchildren there to introduce them to our love of London and of travel.  

Along the years we got glimpses of the Queen in person. We made the trek to the Mall to join the crowds when she rode out to Parliament or to review the Guards. I got a glimpse of her through a veil of bushes when she visited Holland Park to make an award to children. We saw the coronation coach at the London Museum and toured Buckingham Palace when it was opened to the public. Our visits to London in essence changed or made our career paths. It opened my wife’s eyes to the challenges and excitement of good primary education. It resulted in the major achievement of my academic career as it resulted in the publication with my good English friend John Miller of our book London Theatre Walks. It went through two editions in 1998 and 2002.  So you see the reign of this Queen accompanied most of our lives and the England she ruled was in our blood for 59 of the 70 years she was on the throne.    

I think also of her important chosen title. Elizabeth II. She took the namesake of a great Queen who had an age named after her “The Elizabethan Age (1558-1603)”. Arguably we may see that we have just experienced the second great Elizabethan Age. One fascinating note mentioned on TV, I think by Katty Kay, was she bought her wedding dress in 1952 with ration coupons, but was known along with her quiet imperial presence and her political acumen, as the wearer of magnificently colored outfits and hats. It was also brought out by Michael Beschloss that Elizabeth was an accidental Queen in the sense that she was not in the line of succession until Edward VIII resigned the throne and turned It over to her father in 1936.  

I have only vague memories of Harry Truman though I heard a lot about FDR from my parents in later years, and voted for the first time for Dwight Eisenhower in his second term.  I met (obviously quite briefly) two of the 13 US presidents the Queen met. I shook hands with Ronald Reagan when he visited Monmouth when he was running to become a candidate, and Bush Senior when he appeared at the college to get an honorary degree long after his presidential turn. I saw President Obama when he spoke in the Monmouth Auditorium while he was running for the nomination, but never got close enough to shake his hand.

I cannot leave my memories of the Queen without mentioning a text from my son who now lives in Finland with his wife and our two precious granddaughters.  David reported that his youngest daughter six year old Selma said at bedtime, “It’s the saddest thing that’s happened in my whole life.”   

I think also of Charles III. The first Charles was beheaded in London in 1649 and the 2^nd Charles, known as the “Merry Monarch,” brought the monarchy back from a long period of war and had a mountain of repairs--politically, socially, and artistically facing him. Charles III probably will not be known as “merry” but he will have as many problems facing him as did the second.  And I probably won’t come close to thinking of him as my sovereign. Yet I do wish for him success and the chance to earn his own place in history. God rest the soul of a great Queen and

GOD SAVE THE KING!       Jim De Young 9/8/22

LESSONS by Ian McEwan--Book review

 

LESSONS by Ian McEwan

Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan’s 18^th novel, Lessons , is long (over 450 pages), and like many of his other works begins simply and grows more complex as it develops. The opening makes the novel look like a reverse Lolita in which an adult woman is obsessed by her 11 year old boy piano student (and he by her). Their sexual relation lasts for five years and only breaks up when he becomes 16 and she wants to spirit him off to Scotland to marry him. To some extent the lesson of that early experience is still hanging around at the finish, but it is only a fragment of the sad life of Roland Baines, whose given name might encourage some to remember the great French epic by that name.  

This Roland is a man who never seems to put sufficient postage on the letter of life. After he is abused by his piano teacher, we meander through sixty years of lost promise. A gifted classical pianist as a youth, Roland winds up as a tea-time piano player at a London Hotel. He yearns for an artistic life yet finds only idle travel, political futility, and failed liaisons. His other temporary jobs range from tennis coach to writer of incidental puff pieces for small magazines.  All of this is played out against the end of WWII and the historic changes brought about by Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev, Suez, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Covid, and even January 6^th. 

Finally, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, Roland Baines burns his books and settles into an old age fueled by something called The Multiple Worlds Theory.  This concept promotes the idea that “The world divides at every conceivable moment into an infinitude of invisible possibilities.”  Your fate may have been controlled by unconscious choices and it lowers your chance of having any real impact on the affairs of the world at large. You are also left in suspense as to what will come next.  It is better, as you reach your “hinge of life,” to settle back and leave the future to your grandchildren.   

The early publicity for the book asks this question. “How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past? ”  If you want a profound illustration of these topics, this may be the book for you. If not, McEwen may not be your cup of tea. 

Jim De Young  8-28-22 

London Bridge is Falling Down by Christopher Fowler

 

“London bridge was made for wise men to go over and fools to go under." An old proverb

This is the 18^th book featuring the exploits of two geriatric detectives named Arthur Bryant and John May.  I have read and enjoyed a number of them. John May goes a bit more by the book and dresses stylishly.  Bryant is the perfect foil as he does almost nothing by the book and is an archetypal curmudgeon who dresses like a walking Salvation Army Store. He wears an old overcoat, a rumpled hat, and wraps himself in a variety of moth- eaten long scarves.  His pockets are full of candy wrappers, paper scraps, fruit drops, and pipe tobacco. The pair are the chief investigators in what is called the Peculiar Crimes Unit and they have a covey of assistants who are also the kind of folks who would not fit easily into a regular Scotland Yard unit.

Let me note first that if complicated plots, a certain amount of looniness, and some degree of  acquaintance with London and its history don’t intrigue you, I would recommend a pass on Fowler. Second, if does intrigue you, I would recommend getting started with a few of his earlier offerings. That way you can get some familiarity with the characters and their bizarre investigations before you approach number 18, which starts out at least as a kind of swan song for the series.  

If you remain committed to start with London Bridge is Falling Down, you will still get enough basic information to enter Bryant and May’s world. You will find that the Peculiar Crimes Unit is finally being closed down after many previous unsuccessful efforts to eliminate it. Arthur Bryant tries one final ploy to keep everyone’s jobs. He finds a cold case and then convinces the upper echelons that there is new information that must be investigated.  Ultimately, the case proves to be not so cold. It turns out to be the tiny tip of a multi-year plot. The strange death of an old woman who once worked with the Bletchley codebreakers explodes into multiple murders and the involvement of the current CIA and MI 5. The key to the mystery resides in the ability to decipher clues which deal with the romantic and real history of London Bridge and a cadre of the offbeat denizens of London.  

London Bridge is Falling is Falling Down will have you laughing out loud at the quirky characters. Witness when someone says to Arthur Bryant “your eyes are red” and asks if he has had enough sleep. Arthur replies, “You should see them from my side.” There will be gems of wisdom along the way like “The older you get the less noticed you become.” You will also be delighted by the descriptions of everything from old churches to the changing aspects of London weather.  You may even be shedding a tear or two when you arrive at the beautifully crafted finish.  I am an Anglophile and love Mr. Fowler's books. I am counting on the fact that you will too, no matter where in the series you start.

Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words

 

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words  2020

This fascinating book by the Australian novelist, Pip Williams, is a tour de force in the sense that she has managed to write an entire book about creating a dictionary without once becoming a pedantic bore.  It is a feminist tract without question. On the other hand, it is surrounded by a compelling and imaginative story of a woman who has become conscious in the late 19^th century that dictionaries have always been written by men and as a result many of the words used by or about women have been relegated to the dustbin or given negative meanings.

Esme, the heroine, has grown up in the Scriptorium, a drafty potting shed,  where a corps of scholars are assembling  The OED or (The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language.)  Initially, she is a child whose mother has died, crawling about beneath a sorting table and beginning to collect stray slips carrying words or definitions that have been discarded or carelessly dropped. As she matures, she becomes one of the few female employees working on the dictionary and a conscious collector of words dealing with women. Her maturation then encapsulates the thematic issues by integrating her story into the decline of the servant class and the rise of suffrage in England. 

Esme literally worship words-- their meanings, their derivations, and discussions of why certain words survive in print and others do not. She says: “Words are our tools of resurrections.”  It’s how you bring things back.   We won’t stop speaking them if they aren’t in the dictionary.”

The deep hurt and longing experienced by women of all classes is one of the stronger features of the book and it is nowhere communicated  so poignantly as when Esme’s life-long servant, Lizzie, says:  “I guess I like to keep my hands busy. . . . it proves I exist. . . .” I clean, I help with the cooking, I set the fires. Everything I do gets eaten or dirtied or burned—at the end of the day there’s no proof I’ve been here at all.”

Esme and Lizzie are afforded plenty of pragmatic experiences that highlight the task before them. Some of them are triumphant and some sad, but in total it makes one last quote from the book stand out to me. “We can’t always make the choices we’d like, but we can try to make the best of what we must settle for.”

Read this for its message, its inventive story, for the people it brings alive, or for your love of language, but do put it on your reading list.   

Jim De Young,  July, 2022

 

 

A Banquet of Consequences

 

A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George  

 

Ms. George,  in this once again far too long novel, sets up a tragic family situation in which a young man’s suicide triggers a series of sordid, unimaginable horrors from the past. One problem is that the characters in this family from hell seem so perverted, twisted, unsavory, and sex driven that I could not help thinking that the world would be a better place if they were all eliminated instead of just one of them.

Even though this is billed as a Lynley novel, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley is stuck  with doing minor London legwork and dealing with the always impatient upper echelon as represented by Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery.  The real main characters are DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Ngata who move and shake the plot  in the Dorset countryside where most of the real action occurs. Both of them are as different from Lynley as night and day, but his absence as a driving force may disappoint some readers.

The plot is, as usual in detective novels, complex, is full of twists right down to the last pages. Ms. George has done her research on poison and Agatha Christie would be proud of her. What excites me less is that there are a few too many coincidences driving the story. This starts with Barbara Havers accidental contact in London with the murder victim and her entourage and then the assignment of the case to Lynley's team. The discovery of records hidden in the boot of the murdered woman’s car, that surely would have been searched long before Barbara finds them, is another example.  She also finds them because of some strange procedural decisions.  Why are Barbara and Winston staying in the murder victim's home for instance?  And how could it be reasonable for Barbara to use the victim’s car to go to an interview?  To top it off she then finds a valuable document trove in the boot when the car has a convenient flat tire.  In another lucky discovery, she finds a third tract on a tape recorder by accidently pressing a button rather than through knowledgeable detection.  

Although by the ending all the characters appear to have reaped their full “Banquet of Consequences,”  there is a kind of sordidness about the whole affair.  “You’re only as sick as your secrets,” says one character and this family is clearly right at death’s door.  

Jim De Young  7/9/22

Wildlife Out In Force This AM

A pleasant sunny morning was amenable to see one of our deer and the big old turkey from our balcony at Grant Living at Indian Creek.