Priest or Pagan

This forgotten 1933 novel by John Rathbone Oliver, published by Knopf, mixes Dickensian elements of hidden identity with a dash of the occult as two men -- one a priest, the other a pagan -- fight for the soul of a young man orphaned at birth by the death of his mother. It is a long, twisted tale with a full cast of characters and a good amount of suspense and drama. Oliver (1872-1943) was a psychiatrist who studied under Freud, later a criminologist, and also took religious training. This novel, considered his most successful, is entertaining and worthwhile.

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

This is a review of mine published in the July 25 St. Petersburg Times:

The exotic has its appeal, but the people in William Nicholson's domestic novel don't need to buy a Tuscan farmhouse or wade into the Ganges to find a higher existence. It's right there at the breakfast table or on the train to work.

Set in a southern English village over six days in 2000, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life introduces a large cast of ordinary, middle class characters in short chapters, then connects them in a widening circle that, to the author's credit, seems as natural and weightless as a spider's web.

At the center are 40-somethings Henry and Laura Broad, parents of two children. They are comfortable, mostly happy, yet vaguely unsatisfied. A letter to Laura at breakfast one morning arrives like a thunderbolt: Her first love, Nick, unseen since college, has flown in from California. Their intense affair, along with the crushing pain he caused by walking away, is seared in her memory, making the return both unsettling and a little thrilling. Laura asks herself, "I have security, loyalty, kindness. Am I allowed excitement? Am I allowed ecstasy?"

Nicholson, also a playwright and screenwriter with Shadowlands and The Retreat from Moscow to his credit, has a fine ear for dialogue. His lucid, transparent style gives the reader easy access to the characters. In just a few deft strokes he captures the essence of the summer Laura and Nick spent together 20 years before: "The early evenings were the best time, better even than the nights. The farmhouse was set in a hollow, with only limited views from its deep windows, so they had dragged two armchairs out of the back parlor and up the grassy slope to the edge of a small wood. Here beneath the shade of an oak they sat and watched the sun descend over the hummocky hills and drank vermouth and talked in a drifting inconsequential sort of way. The chairs were side by side, close enough to reach out and touch each other. The evenings were warm. No one else ever passed down the long unmade track that led to their hidden valley."

The return of the old flame and Laura's response is one of several suspenseful strands that Nicholson teases out slowly and cinematically as the characters intersect and confront life-altering decisions. The narrative gathers momentum with nothing more extraordinary to sustain it than the death of dog, a trip to the opera, a parent-teacher conference or an outing to buy a dress. One character's simple possession of a button is made, for example, into something hauntingly sad.

"Beauty lies not in the thing seen but in the quality of the seeing and that comes rarely," Henry Broad muses. Open your eyes to everyday life, the story suggests, and you may be startled, even exhilarated, perhaps devastated.

In this novel Nicholson puts everything plainly on the table: doubts, motivations, desires. You will search in vain for irony or a single smirk. You will find instead a tremendous sincerity. If that comes off as a little old-fashioned, it is also more than a little refreshing.

The Loved One

Coming back to Evelyn Waugh after an absence is always rewarding. This short novel about the death industry in the United States sprouted from a visit Waugh made to Hollywood. It offers sharp insights into American culture that still stand up. For example, a British expatriate observes about Americans: "They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."

There was a film made of the book shortly before Waugh's death, directed by Tony Richardson. It is appropriately weird, but the author was said to have hated it. By 1965, however, Waugh was in an advanced state of decrepitude (despite being only in his early 60s), so his judgment is not necessarily to be trusted.

The Handmaid's Tale

This is the first Margaret Atwood I've read. I have nothing against Canadians: One of my favorite writers is the late great Mordecai Richler. Picking this one up by accident (it was in a stack from a friend to be given away or sold), I plunged into it quite easily. As dystopian novels go, it has all the creepiness and plausibility required. It is skillfully constucted in overlapping flashbacks that slowly reveal the whole horrifying picture. Yet somewhere about page 200, the droning tone and heavy moral sledding brought me to, "All right, enough -- I get it." Seems like it would have made a perfect 30-page story.

A good poem

Late-Flowering Lust
by John Betjeman


My head is bald, my breath is bad,
Unshaven is my chin,
I have not now the joys I had
When I was young in sin.

I run my fingers down your dress
With brandy-certain aim
And you respond to my caress
And maybe feel the same.

But I've a picture of my own
On this reunion night,
Wherein two skeletons are shewn
To hold each other tight;

Dark sockets look on emptiness
Which once was loving-eyed,
The mouth that opens for a kiss
Has got no tongue inside.

I cling to you inflamed with fear
As now you cling to me,
I feel how frail you are my dear
And wonder what will be --

A week? or twenty years remain?
And then -- what kind of death?
A losing fight with frightful pain
Or a gasping fight for breath?

Too long we let our bodies cling,
We cannot hide disgust
At all the thoughts that in us spring
From this late-flowering lust.

The Tango Singer

Tomas Eloy Martinez's novel sends a New York student into the labyrinth of Buenos Aires in the troubled summer of 2001 to find a mythical, and yet real, tango singer whose rare and apparently random appearances may form a pattern worth unlocking. It is a wild ride of politics, history, music and film, magically told. This novel will send me scurrying to two others by Martinez, Santa Evita and The Peron Novel.