It’s been a while since I updated all of you on what I’ve been reading and there has been no clamor for me to tell you more. But I am not one to bend to the will of the masses, so I’m going to tell you anyway. Here are a few recent books that I’ve liked.
There’s been a lot written about Joan of Arc and I’m sure this is not the last. This Joan is not some saint with mystic abilities and holy aspirations to restore the Dauphin to the throne of France. This is Joan – Action Hero. This is not the story of some holy virgin with visions. This is a human Joan – an illiterate teenager abused by her father who is angry. The Joan we meet here is not a saint. She’s a savant, and her genius is for violence.
Earlier attempts to portray Joan have, in my opinion at least, failed because they don’t seem to add up. Part of it is the uniqueness of her life – there’s been nothing like her before or after. But part of it, surely, is the way history paternalistically portrays Joan, focusing on a question that befuddled popes, poets and playwrights: How did an illiterate peasant girl — emphasis on the word girl — come from nowhere to inspire and lead the French in victorious battle against the English, turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War?
Chen’s solution is elegant and timely. Her Joan is just plain tougher than all those knights and noblemen, a born fighter who, as a child, recreates Agincourt with rocks, gets a bull’s-eye with her very first attempt at a longbow and is a preternatural genius at military planning. As Chen’s Dauphin (the embattled heir to the French crown) puts it, “You are neither a scholar nor a philosopher nor an ambassador. … So, I ask again, what is it that you can do for us?”
Joan’s answer could come from an action movie: “‘Majesty,’ Joan says quietly, ‘I can fight.’”
Joan’s motivation is not prophetic but personal: a violent father and the brutal rape of her sister by raiding English soldiers. “I have thought to myself,” Joan tells the Dauphin, “What choices does a woman have for vengeance, for justice. … So when I spoke to God that morning, I decided, if I am to scream, let it be in battle.”
Eventually captured by the English and awaiting her death by fire she reflects on her career at the ripe age of 19: “I have become more than just myself. … I am the battle cry, the roar of spears, pikes and poleaxes rattling. I am the sound of a hundred horses thundering down a hill and the wind that ripples through banners, the swing of a catapult, the deafening blast and explosion of cannonry. … Before each battle, the foot soldiers, artillerymen and sappers will bend their heads and call my name.”
If every generation gets the Joan it deserves, ours could do worse than an ass-kicking, avenging angel fighting simply for the right to fight.
Read this book, you will enjoy it; I did.
Saying that this is Ondaatje’s best work since ‘The English Patient’ is a good introduction, but actually I think this one is better. It reads more to me like a John le Carré novel – moody and mysterious with suspicious figures lurking around.
It’s set in post-war London with bombed out buildings all around. This book’s resonant first sentence puts the situation this way: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.”
Nathaniel and his older sister, Rachel, try to puzzle out what’s going on and who these people are who are trying to ‘protect’ them. One of these two men is Walter, whom the kids nickname “The Moth” because he is said to be “moth-like in his shy movements.” He has a large nose, keeps curious hours and knows disreputable characters.
The other man, Norman, is nicknamed the Pimlico Darter. He uses a mussel boat to smuggle greyhounds at night into London for racing, and Nathaniel becomes a willing accomplice. These men’s friends begin appearing in the house as well, all of them eccentric and accomplished in unpredictable ways.
Left to their own devices, it’s not long before Nathaniel and Rachel forge their independence. Unhappy at a boarding school where Nathaniel is nearly expelled for urinating in a sink, they engineer a “midweek day escape” and negotiate a deal with The Moth to be day students. This leaves them free to explore the shadowy streets of London hunting for clues to their circumstances.
When the teenagers find that Rose, their mother, has left her steamer trunk behind — she had ostentatiously packed it in front of them — they become suspicious about her whereabouts.
It slowly leaks out that she’s not in Singapore but apparently doing dangerous postwar intelligence work. The men in the house are men she trusts, having worked beside them during the war.
While Nathaniel is living a life of lesser expectations, he navigates “hidden locations along the Thames” in a mussel boat, helping The Moth and The Darter smuggle greyhounds for illegal dog racing. As a dishwasher in a hotel, he encounters 46-year-old “fabulist” Harry Nkoma, “a remarkable man who had a scar on his cheek,” who plays the piano, and, during lunch breaks, regales him with stories of youthful sex.
In that “borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood,” Nathaniel meets an enigmatic, pseudonymously named 17-year-old, Agnes Street. She seduces him and they cavort naked, on “worn carpet[s]” in various abandoned houses in London, “invisible to each other in the dark.”
The teenagers’ lives may be in danger. There’s a kidnapping scene. People will try to kill Rose as well. Later in life, Nathaniel will work in intelligence himself, in part to try to tease out Rose’s many wartime secrets, what he calls “the obscure rigging of our mother’s life.”
The second part picks up 14 years later, when Nathaniel is 28. It zigzags back and forth, filling in the gaps of his mother’s past. Nathaniel is working for an intelligence agency himself and exploring connections that lead him finally to the mystery of his mother and her relationship to all these people.
I like the way new clues gradually surface to make us see what we have already read in a different light. Ondaatje relishes a turn of phrase and some of the writing feels a bit over the top but it’s a great read. Give it a shot!
More next week (I hope)!
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