CORONAVIRUS READING continued. Still the occasional page number gets lost in the untidiness. It’s hard to imagine that ebook page numbers match up with those of a paper book. It’s also a good idea to remember keeping the tablet charged. Jordan Peterson and his rules for living got dumped; that one definitely needs a paper copy for back and forth page-turning scrutiny.
Blogger has changed its format. Good luck to me, trying to sort this out.
Warning: satire content over the top. It’s been a while since I’ve read Lecarré, but his skewering of Brit governing bureaucracies and espionage faculties reached a height here. Jonathan Pine, loyal ex-soldier, is the mole in an intricate plan of months’ and months’ duration. The planner ‒ his control – is Leonard Burr, who reports to Rex Goodhew of a secret agency who reports to the cabinet minister. Rival factions (“espiocrats”) within the system spy on each other for power dominance; not to mention arguing whether their similar American collaborators (“the Cousins”) are trustworthy or not. Lecarré’s use of arch expressions and language in his most savagely satirized characters tempt one to extrapolate onto public figures of the day.
The goal is to seize shipments of illegal arms and drugs arranged by wealthy weasel, Dicky Roper, and put a stop to his trafficking. The devious method for entrapment slowly becomes clear, although flashbacks initially tend to obscure the chronology of Pine’s journey. Burr and Goodhew have to stickhandle the various agencies competing to control or muzzle Pine. Through alias names and faked back stories he lands in Roper’s luxurious household, only to be enthralled by Jemima (“Jeds”) who belongs to “the worst man in the world” ‒ as labelled by a victim. Roper is a superb character, given to rapid-fire non sequiturs, who drinks only champagne (“shampoo”). I couldn’t help but put Hugh Laurie’s face on him, even without having seen the cable series based on this book.
Will Burr lose his planted man? Will Goodhew lose his nerve? Will American support evaporate? Will corrupt politicians investing in illegal arms be exposed? Spies and informants leak, betray, and kill. Suffice to say, villains a-plenty in a travelogue from Cairo to Cornwall to Quebec to Panama and points in between, sometimes on Roper’s mega-yacht, Iron Pasha. Carefully pull your wits together to follow this one.
Jonathan
▪ Willing himself into a calmer state, Jonathan sat to attention on what felt like a cardboard crate and strove with all his might to make order of his life till now, a last tidying before he died: the good times he had had, the lessons he had drawn, the improvements he had wrought on his personality, the good women. There were none. Times, women, lessons. None. (91)
▪ He wished he could be worse-mannered. Bad manners are freedom, she used to say. (203)
▪ You give the air of looking for someone, Sophie had said. But I think the missing person is yourself. (437)
▪ I live my life, Jonathan told himself with deliberation as he jogged down the hill. I am not a puppet. I am nobody’s servant. (478)
Burr
▪ “ ‘Feeding the rat’ ‒ isn’t that the climbers’ expression? The rat that gnaws inside us telling us to take the risk?” (137-8)
▪ “He’s going for the big one. One last bite of the apple. The deal to end all deals.” (157)
▪ “So we give you these little murderer’s lies, to make the untrue murder true.” (200)
Goodhew
▪ “This isn’t an assignment for Enforcement. This isn’t cops and robbers and shooting yourself in the foot. This is geopolitics, Rex.”
▪ “Its directors are British, the men committing the crime are British, the evidence against them was gathered by a British agency under the aegis of your ministry.” (696)
▪ Goodhew has the sensation of being alone in a great empty hall, awaiting some kind of prolonged public execution. (705)
Roper
▪ “Promise to build a chap a house, he won’t believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he’ll do what you tell him. Fact of life.” (447)
▪ “Armed power’s what keeps the peace. Unarmed power doesn’t last five minutes.” (448)
Sarah Sligar. Take Me Apart. 2020. Electronic edition (ebook) 2020, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; download from Toronto Public Library; originally published by Macmillan, 2020.
Mixed feelings here, mixed reaction. I liked the archival angle ‒ a novel element – but not the frequent melodrama playing in the head of our heroine. She is Kate Aitken, hired to sort a vast decaying collection of mixed materials left after the death of celebrated photographer Miranda Brand. Kate’s former employment at a New York newspaper ended badly; what exactly happened there we don’t learn until late in the game. Her Aunt Louise spotted the job near San Francisco and gives her a place to stay. So Kate is working for Theo, Miranda’s son, at the house where Miranda died twenty-four years earlier; Miranda’s husband Jake (now also deceased) had closed and abandoned the house. Theo has opened it up after all that time, staying for the summer with his two young children. Initially, Kate is not impressed with his curt manner.
While Kate systematically catalogues the incredible mess of dusty old correspondence, notes, and photographs, she develops an obsession with Miranda’s life and how she died. In spite of the suicide ruling, Kate becomes convinced that she was murdered. And she’s a snoop. Theo declared the house living quarters to be off-limits, but when he is out picking up his kids from camp, she secretly searches everywhere for extra material that might bolster her theory. Bingo: she finds Miranda’s diary up to the day she died. She has only about fifteen minutes each time to read it, all the while wondering why Theo kept it hidden. Meanwhile the inevitable romance blooms between them and Kate’s feelings alternate between wild girlish sentiments and guilt for her deception. Overblown imagery should have stayed with the photographer’s words.
We the readers are ahead of Kate in seeing Miranda’s diary to the end. Both women have mental health issues but Kate suffers by comparison, an unsatisfactory character in my opinion. Is it the Harlequin-esque influence or just weak psychology about bipolar disorder? It seems the author is laboriously straining to describe her. Yet Miranda’s terse sentences do a far better job of conveying her more complicated problems. What Sligar totally ignores is the damage done to Theo as a child; can we believe he became this desirable, well-adjusted, emotionally-stable, fully-functioning adult? ... A debut novel always leaves plenty of time for improvement.
Bits and Pieces
▪ “That’s where she died. Shot herself right where you’re standing.” (37)
▪ (re Jake) He had set up a new life miles away and continued selling his paintings, all while his wife’s legacy rotted in the house they had once shared.
Kate
▪ All the little shards that fell off everyone’s life. Kate’s job was to stick the Brands’ shards back together again. (69)
▪ It was as if she had let a tiger into a living room, thinking a bloodbath would ensue, only to discover that the tiger was vegetarian and would happily watch Dancing with the Stars. (264-5)
▪ Her entire body filled with one impossible wish: to be merged with him, to be one person, to never be let go. (359)
▪ It felt like the Brands were a planet and she was some space junk that had been set in orbit around them (380)
▪ The episodes always felt like a streak of luck. Like she was finally in touch with the world. Like a skin had been pushed back and now she could see life’s flex, its flesh. (478)
▪ It felt like someone had reached inside her chest and clasped her heart, her messy heart with all its frantically pumping chambers, and squeezed. (481)
Miranda
▪ He’s horrible. He’s mine, mine, mine, this awful little creature, this mixture of my blood, and I am so full of shame that I can’t bear it. (150-1)
▪ The last year exists for me in bolts and flashes, a club with bad lighting. Memories bouncing off a disco ball. (272)
▪ I must figure out how to be exactly the right level of insane. (370)
▪ Story of my life: missing the warning signs. (495)
▪ Miranda Brand, a feminist! Took a man’s name, took his punches, let him hold her down. (498)
▪ Don’t you see the way Theo looks at us? Don’t you think it’s bad that we forget him so easily. (526)
Rachel Rhys. A Dangerous Crossing. Electronic edition (ebook) 2020 from Simon & Schuster, Inc., download from Toronto Public Library; originally published by Atria Books, 2020.
Lily Shepherd is on assisted passage from London to Australia, bound for domestic service with a few other young women. It’s August 1939, it’s a long voyage on the Orontes, and the passengers’ microcosm world brims with various strains and stresses. First class rarely mixes with tourist class but the extroverted Eliza Campbell consistently seeks out Lily and her new friends, inevitably joined by her apathetic husband Max. Not only class distinction is standard, but also the acceptable attitudes of racism and misogyny. Naturally it takes a little time for true personalities and past revelations to emerge. Some young men appear to be leaving England to evade a possible call to military service.
Lily fast becomes infatuated with Edward, recovering from tuberculosis and travelling with his sister Helena. Off and on, Edward seems to return the feeling although nothing untoward transpires. Lily compares him favourably with Robert, her past love, who shares some bloody secret with her. She’s impressionable and pretty, our Lily; she feels an attraction to more than one man who pays attention to her. But she’s being judged for “inappropriate” friendships that include manic Eliza and Jewish Maria. Lily wants to speak up against prejudice and injustice but words never get past an emotional lump in her throat—silence, instead of acting on her good impulses, which she will regret. The overall tension breaks with two deaths, thus ending the voyage and the book.
Lily’s mooning flirtations strike me as childish and her passive nature is tiresome. Yet the book is written in effortless style, truly evoking the time period.
Bits and Pieces
▪ How frustrating life is sometimes, pasting its own version of events over the top of the one you have already created, like a fresh billboard poster. (52)
▪ “On a boat like this,” she says, “everyone is running away from something.” (84)
▪ Helena wears her suffering wrapped around her like a blanket, buffering her from the world, while Maria’s is like a hair shirt that only she knows to be there. (102)
▪ “The place is teeming with Arabs,” declares Ida. “I, for one, won’t be going ashore.” (144)
▪ “But what do we really know of each other? Only what we choose to share or reveal.”
Lily
▪ “All that hobnobbing with first class, giving yourself airs and graces, and now keeping company with that Jew. People don’t like that kind of thing, Lily. People don’t like it at all.” (135)
▪ The heat where their bodies connected, everything in her liquefying until she felt she must dissolve completely into the burning centre of him. (221)
▪ “You’re a tease. That’s what you are, Lily Shepherd.” (242)
▪ The captain’s voice is grave, and Lily imagines him selecting it that morning from a hanging rail of voices as if he were choosing a shirt, and again she wants to laugh. (384)
Eliza
▪ “You can’t get away with anything on a ship, you know. Someone always finds out.” (54)
▪ “Yes, he hit me. I wanted him to. In fact, I goaded and goaded him until he did.” (356)
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