Library Limelights 223

CORONAVIRUS TIMES, continued. With the ebooks, some page numbers may be approximate. Never mind, getting the hang of it. And whether they match up with page numbers in the paper book, I’ve no idea.

Barbara Vine. No Night Is Too Long. 1994. Toronto: Viking/Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 1995.

Not one of my better (paper) grabs. The memoir of a twenty-ish, egotistical, tiresome student called Tim who is writing in his mother’s dilapidated house by the English seaside. We could call it anatomy of an affair. In excruciating detail. The object of his passion is Ivo, a university lecturer in biology. The two have little in common aside from unbounded lust, but Ivo succumbs. Eventually Tim notices that Ivo regularly treats him with intellectual disdain and sarcasm. The joy of Tim’s initial pursuit begins to wane; the balance of desire has shifted. He drinks a lot, dreading their upcoming trip to Alaska where Ivo has a contract to lecture on a small expedition ship. But Tim lacks the courage to break off the relationship. Because of a ticket screw-up, Tim is obliged to wait alone for two weeks in Juneau before he can board Ivo’s ship. Fine: the thought of cruising from one glacier to another, studying rocks and birds, totally bores him.

At the hotel, Tim falls wildly, helplessly in love with Isabel, a visitor from Seattle. The feeling is mutual when they must part after two weeks; Isabel is given no clue that Tim’s “previous” relationship has been with a man. Nor does he reveal his new love interest to Ivo. Off the two men go on the ship for another two weeks, discreetly in separate cabins. It takes that long for Tim to end the relationship. Or so he thinks. No spoilers, but he believes Ivo died on the ship’s last day. And his hunt for Isabel in Seattle is unsuccessful. Writing of the events two years later, he is haunted by both of them, endlessly reflecting on his every thought, reaction, and so many lies. Author Vine (actually Ruth Rendell) then inserts an implausible (to me) device to conclude a mystery; together with a coda from Isabel, they only beg the question: how did two different mature people find this wretched, perennial adolescent charming or fascinating?

One-liners:

▪ This was Ivo, typical of him, very much the way he always was, a restless man, a man of devouring curiosity who noticed every new thing and had to examine it, read it or speculate about it. (36)

▪ I’m only saying that a lover must be a little hard to get, to a degree capricious, holding back always something of himself, reserved, not invariably to be found at home waiting. (47)

▪ Hating myself for it, I made my eyes big and round, I made my expression winsome, and said that if I really meant anything to him (note that the word ‘love’ had not at that time ever been used between us), if I meant anything to him he wouldn’t go away like this and leave me alone. (70)

▪ He watched me all the time, and although I could never prove this I know he set someone else to watch me too. (83)

▪ No, I said, no, no, you can’t. I held her tight. No, you can’t go, you mustn’t, no, no. (135)

Multi-liners:

▪ “I have no business to expect more from you than you can give,” he writes.“You have given me and still give me so much. I am only now beginning to see how bigoted and censorious I have been and I know I must love you without reproaches.” (116)

▪ I’ve found detachment without looking for it. I’ve found that living is one dimension, thinking another and writing a third. (166)

▪ “Isn’t that permitted in someone older than you who loves you, to try to set you right? You could say I’m trying to make the perfect partner for myself.” (172)

Girls or not?

Emily said, “If you write the way you talk don’t be surprised if Penny sends you down.” 

Those words of hers had a strange effect on me. She’d meant to hurt, they would have hurt her, but they almost pleased me. They were a distraction, weren’t they, from what was really bothering me, my feeble sexuality? And they served to show me, in the space of a few seconds, that I was never going to commit myself to writing. I didn’t care enough. I cared far more about my sexual orientation. What was it? What was I? (22)

After the conquest:

Is it something in me or are plenty of people like this? Am I alone or is it just part of the human condition? He diminished himself in my eyes by saying he loved me. Contempt is too strong a word, I didn’t despise him for it, but I pitied him a little, and that’s the next thing. (77)

Isabel:

By then I was obsessed with her. Not sexually, if that isn’t too hard to believe. At that time what I wanted was to talk to her and be talked to by her, to sit somewhere with her and have a drink. I imagined the two of us having coffee together in the morning, sitting on a terrace overlooking the water. Drinking champagne on a balcony in the long light evening. I’d got so used to champagne with Ivo that it was almost the only alcohol I ever thought of. (104)

On the cruise:

He lifted his head. “At a loose end?” 

I knew that tone. He often used it, implying that I was such a slave to bright lights, drink and entertainment as to be impatient with the natural world after about five minutes. 

“I want to talk to you,” I said, though I hadn’t thought I wanted to a moment before, I hadn’t seen what purpose talking to him would serve. 

“About what? Please don’t say ‘us’ in that coy way you favour, putting your head on one side like Princess Diana. I don’t think I could bear it.” 

I was used to taunts of that kind. You can get used to any verbal abuse. Coquettish behaviour was always being attributed to me when he was angry, though I don’t think I’m ever coy or effeminate. Ivo used to say, sneering at me, that if he wanted femininity he’d go after women. (206)

Peter Robinson. Many Rivers to Cross. 2019. Electronic edition (ebook), download from Toronto Public Library. Originally published by McClelland & Stewart, 2019.

Not expecting this one so soon, but it popped onto my electronic bookshelf, jumping the waiting queue. Indeed, Zelda’s story is continued from Careless Love (LL222). There’s almost too much description of the brutalities she suffered during the days she’d been trapped by sex traffickers. While she is puzzling over the sudden death of her secret-agency supervisor in a house fire, Banks must investigate the sad murder of a thirteen-year-old boy. It takes time to identify him as Samir, an immigrant smuggled from war-torn Syria, who may have been caught up in the illegal drug trade. None of this is a heartening picture of Britain in the present day—anti-immigrant sentiment, sex trafficking, and drug dealing controlled by foreign thugs. It’s tough for cops to get enough evidence to charge well-organized criminals, what with cutbacks in budget and manpower.

On the upside, there’s less of Banks with a lonely dark cloud on his head. For those who kvetched, there’s even slightly less verbiage about his music preferences. With the assistance of detectives Annie and Gerry, he can slowly piece together what actually happened to Samir. An abandoned council housing estate was the host for a county line of drugs, unbeknownst to the nearby, self-righteous Neighbourhood Watch. Zelda manages to achieve one of her private goals without being caught. So far. The arch-villain Phil Keane is still on the sidelines. To be continued again?

Banks and company

▪ “Old folks don’t need as much sleep, they say. Which is just as well, as we can’t seem to get any.” (42)

▪ “Send in a kid to distribute phone orders out of someone’s house. Take over his nest, like a cuckoo.” (223)

▪ The bobby on the beat was a thing of the past, as the patrol car was quickly becoming, too. The money and the manpower just weren’t there. (286)

▪ “I’m sorry, you’ve lost me. A ‘cuckoo’? Is that slang for something?” (419)

▪ Here he was, sitting across from one of the most beautiful women he had ever met in his life, and she was asking if she could stay the night. (467)

Zelda

▪ Keane for her was only a means to an end, perhaps one she didn’t need. (135)

▪ She felt a chill run through her, as if she had inadvertently awoken a sleeping snake or crocodile, some sort of reptilian beast that operated on instinct alone. (314)

▪ She might trust Alan, but he was one small cog in a large machine, and she didn’t trust that machine one bit. (334)

▪ ... they had taken everything from her before she even got it herself. (492)

Liza Marklund. Lifetime. 2007. Electronic edition (ebook), download from Toronto Public Library. Published by Vintage Canada/Random House, 2013.

This is the precursor to The Long Shadow that I’d recently read (LL211). And there are three more books following in the series about Annika Bengtzon, Stockholm journalist. In some ways this book was disappointing and seemed rather disorganized, things left up in the air. For example, it opens with Annika wandering in a daze, with her children, after her house had been bombed and burnt to the ground. Surely there was endless commotion around the incident with firemen, police, and so on. Not a mention. Simply Annika arriving for help at the home of her best friend, who shockingly tells her to get lost (it’s counter-intuitive to me that Annika takes up with this friend again later on). The story more or less picks up from there with Julia, a policewoman accused of murdering David, her policeman-hero husband, and their little boy, although the latter’s body has not been found.

Julia’s partner in the police force was Nina Hoffman; Annika is acquainted with both. The media and her fellow cops are crucifying Julia; when she’s finally allowed psychiatric assessment, it ultimately conflicts with the truth. Absolutely no one believes her that someone else – a woman – did the killing and abducted her son. No one, that is, until Annika begins to peel some protective layers off David’s shining reputation. He was a secret wife-abuser among other shady practices. And because of her investigations, Annika’s being threatened. Not only that, her press colleagues think she torched her own house. So does her husband Thomas, who’d been absent for the disaster—safe with his mistress. They are sharing custody of the children as they pursue emotionally-charged divorce proceedings. We get much background about the failing state of newspapers of the time, with union intervention, and bureaucratic struggles with criminal justice sentencing.

Annika

▪ The week without the children had been a period of freefall, without any frame of reference, minutes and hours of shrieking emptiness. (345)

▪ “What was important to David?” she asked. “What meant so much to him that he would keep quiet about a mass-murderer?” (419)

▪ I’ve got to learn to live with myself. (516)

▪ “Thomas is right. I shape my view of the world so that it fits me and my criteria. And I completely ignore everything else.” (543)

Nina

▪ She’d practically grown up with Julia and her parents. They had probably saved her from the life her two siblings had ended up with.

▪ “David often treated Julia very badly, and the rest of the force are no better.” (192)

▪ “Please, take a seat,” Nina said, pulling out a chair for her, using the voice she usually reserved for difficult drunks and cocky boys on mopeds. (?)

Julia

▪ “You don’t understand at all. She was there, and she took Alexander away with her.” (288)

▪ The news presenter managed to call Julia a “double-murderer” and “police-killer” in her short introduction to the piece. (506)

Thomas

▪ All those years with Annika already felt like a long dusty trek through the desert, a drawn-out ceasefire with regular skirmishes and protracted negotiations. (82)

▪ “You’re completely out of control,” he said, taking a step back. (?)