Angels and Free Men

Flower.

I have an issue. My issue is if a novel is about a war between angels and humans isn't that a super natural novel or horror or fantasy novel? It certainly isn't a regular boy meets girl or family builds business or pioneers settle in Kansas or parent loses child or spy verses cabal or allies verses Nazis fiction, correct? The fantastical element of angels on Earth takes this novel away from the realistic wouldn't you say? I would and I do and yet there is no mention of this description in any of the information coming from the publisher. Why I wonder? Is this another instance of Atwood-itis? We aren't supposed to acknowledge that Margret Atwood writes science fiction occasionally because that wouldn't be literary. The snobby side of this is off my chest and that makes me feel better and ready to discuss Angelology by Danielle Trussoni.

Angelology is not about good angels. Don't read this title and imagine Raphael's adorable cherubs pondering the world  or picture those cute little Fiorucci angels--with or without the sun glasses. Neither of them is going to show up in this read.

  Genesis 6:5 it says "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bore children to them." That seems to be the spiritual starting point for what we are asked to believe in Angelology. That there are angels that mated with humans (and are still doing so) creating a race of Nephilim. For centuries these creatures have sought to dominate mankind and perpetuate war. Now however their numbers are dwindling and the commitment to the goals of their ancestors is weakening One family among them is determined to reignite the Nephilim's power over man and regain the purity of their race.

The Nepilim have been hunted by angelologists desperate to stop them for as long as they have existed. Into the fray comes Sister Evangeline. She is a convent raised (having unknown to her lost her parents in this struggel) 23 year old nun at St. Rose convent in upstate New York. Tusssomi spends a lot of time establishing the maturity, devotion and trustworthiness of Sister Evangeline but despite all that It happens. Evangeline, upon finding an intruder in the convent, experiences the not very inspired but classic Out Of Character Moment to which many thrillers fall pray. She does nothing to stop the intruder. Rather she helps him by giving him the vital information he seeks and that she promised a much respected elderly nun mere pages before not to reveal. ~~~Insert organ music here~~~Now the bond between hero and heroine is established and said heroine can join the fight. Despite this one lackluster moment for Evangeline and the author, Evangeline is an intelligent and compelling heroine worthy of our loyalty and reading devotion.

Trussoni does an terrific job in creating a complete mythology for Angelology. The writing is assured and controlled. The good guys and bad guys have fully realized histories, understandable motives and a great deal of charisma. The plot runs steadily along in spite of frequent stops for the back stories that add richness to the novel. Angelology is an exceptionally strong super natural thriller wrapped up in a very interesting epic. It has the ancient secrets of Catholic Church interest of The Name of the Rose and Da Vinci Code, the determination of the Innocent to understand her parents and family as in The Historian and the suspense of La Carre but it is no weak sister to those creations. Angeloloy has an inventiveness and attitude all it's own. DanielleTrussoni can write beautifully whether describing the life within a convent or a battle between titans. Bravo!
 
Happy

Ta-Da!

What Flower?

What's that you hear? Oh I know. It's more accolades for my girl Hilary! Wolf Hall ~~contented sigh~~ has won the National Book Critics Cricle Prize for Fiction. Another award? How boring---for all the non-winners! Congrats to my Hilary!

And? I just visited her U.S. publisher's website and what do you think? No mention of her having won the award. Shocking. Yet another reason she needs to change publishers. I would hope that the sales reps for that publisher (Henry Holt by the way distributed by Macmillan) are reaching out to their stores with the good news. I know my old rep Ellen would be, but sometimes or most of the time publishers just cannot get out of their own way.

Happy for Hilary

P.S. I still don't think much of this cover. We'll see how they do with the paperback cover.

What A Wonderful, Wonderful Book

Flower, my old chum.

Are you a re-reader? I am and I'm not. I do periodically re-read classics with a capitol C novels, but books written in the last one hundred years? Not so much. Maybe one or two titles? One of them recentlywas AYear of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. I read Year when it first came out in 2002 but not since. I have been pairing down on my books recently dividing my home into keepers and library fair donations. So when I found Year in between a book on tapestry weaving (keeper) and Barbara Walkers Treasury of Knitted Stitches volume 2 (Keeper!) my first instinct was to keep it but I decided to have a re-read to be sure.

Insert loud and heart felt DUH here. How could I have doubted?

Year is magnificent. Simple as that. It's based on a true story. At the height of the Bubonic Plague an English village lead by a charismatic minister quarantine's itself in an effort to keep the plague from spreading to other villages. Brooks tells the story from the point of view of the maid to that minister, Anna. Anna is an eighteen year old widow with two sons. When she takes in a tailor as a lodger it is his flea infected fabrics that begins the infection in the village. At first a follower through education from the Minister's wife and her own bravery Anna becomes a savior for the village when others have abandoned the ideals of the quarantine. What starts out as a kind of act of heroism by creating the quarantine ends as an extraordinary test of self will and sacrifice.

Crammed with detail and intelligent writing, Year is also a page turner and moving. re-reading it I was reminded of how much I loved the first time I read it. It's definatley a Keeper until I find someone to force it on to. Year of Wonders is too good not to share.

Happy

Major League

Flower

I am boring. Not boring as in when H pointed to the local hospital and told his twin S that he was "boring there". To which S replied, "I know. I was boring there too and I saw you." I mean staid boring. I like convention. I like good storytelling written in words not in pictures. I like good writing that allows me to discover and doesn't tell me everything. Sometimes this means that a large, big questions kind of novel like The Surrendered is what I am reading and adoring and sometimes it is a small scale slice of a kind of life that never really was charmer like Major Pettigrew's Last Stand.

Major Pettigrew has retired to Edgecombe St. Mary. He is an upright, do the right thing, lover of literature and widower. To the village he is all that is good about the green and pleasant land incarnate and he's a catch. In a vulnerable moment after the sudden death of his younger brother Bertie he receives the help of Mrs Ali. She is the owner of the local food shop, a lover of literature and a widow. Their friendship starts to bloom into love. Alas there are problems. Problems with relatives, inheritances and the village. Although the Major was born in Pakistan and Mrs Ali was born in Cambridge the village sees color and class and a romance just isn't going to fly. between their Major and the outsider.

This book is convention from end to end and I loved it. Major is packed to the gills with charm, doing the right thing, humor and wonderful storytelling. First time author Helen Simonson has written a fresh as a daisy old fashioned novel. Fans of Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Pym, John Mortimer and The Sweetness At The Bottom of the Pie will delight in  The Major's Last Stand. I want Ms Simon's next book to be done tomorrow and in my hands the next day.

Happy

Long Song Is Not Long Enough

Flower, do you know that Andrea Levy's novel Small Island has been dramatized for Masterpiece Theater? It will be on, check your local listings, in April. How great is that? Did you further know that not only did Small Island win the Orange Prize but it was also the book voted the best book to ever win the Orange Prize. The old Double Whammy.

Levy's new book is Long Song. It's out already out in the UK--where my copy came from via friend Simon--and it's due out here in April. I am predicting that it will outsell Small Island and why shouldn't it? It's an even better book. This is Levy's fourth novel and with each one her writing gets more powerful and more assured. Her imagery is stronger and her plots tighter.

According to the foreword Long Song is the story of the Mother of the book's editor. That touch of fiction creates a faux authenticity to the novel that works perfectly. Long Song is set in early nineteenth century Jamaica in the years just before and after slavery was abolished. July is a slave on the sugar cane plantation, Amity. She was born to work herself to an early grave in the sugar fields, one of anonymous hundreds of thousands doomed to the same fate. That fate is thwarted by the plantation owner's deceptively dizzy sister, Caroline. She is given July and makes her a part of the upper crust of slavery, a house slave. This promotion does not mean that July is no longer in a brutal and merciless environment with no hope of escape. She is treated how ever the whims of her owners dictate. One day she's a pet the next day she's a victim but she is always human and far from a saint When Caroline marries a charismatic English abolitionist long on looks and short on ideals the dynamic between July and Caroline becomes even more interesting.

Levy is traveling on well worn ground with a slavery story. There are gargantuan shoes to fill or at least get measured up against. There is Beloved, Roots, Gone With The Wind, Jubilee and Sacred Hunger to name just a few. More often novels about slavery are salacious, exploitative cheese fests.  Long Song has the commanding literary power of the best slavery fiction but it also has Levy's humor. She is able (especially in July's scenes with her son the "editor" of this book) to give her characters a sense of humor without trivializing their experiences or minimizing the relationships between slave and master. In fact the moments of life affirming levity underscore the sufferings of the slaves.

Long Song could not be more impressive. The daily life, the blight of slavery, the caprice and cruelty of the slave owners, the tiny seconds of happiness, the Baptist War and the incredibly solid characterizations-- everything is pitch perfect. Andrea Levy will be short listed for everything this year and have the grattitude of any reader who steps into her remarkable novel.

Happy

P.S. The cover of the UK edition of Long Song is very similar to the US edition. The both have an Art Nouveau feel to them that is attracktive, but doesn't tie into the time period of the novel. The UK edition was released jacket-less which I like.a great deal.

And! Don't forget that Small Island is available now and Long Song will be available in April and you can get both at your local and serving the community independent bookstore.

Losing Nelson

Flower.


Blame it on Chang-Rae Lee. If I hadn't read the perfection that is The Surrendered my reading choices would have been more varied. If Surrendered was less than it was I could have picked and started anything after finishing it, but was that good and you can't follow a future prize winning novel with just any old thing. If you do you get caught up in the nothing-is-as-good-so-let's-not-finish-this-book-and-try-another-instead cycle. You do not bust out of that one until you get another pearl beyond price and how can you count on that happening any time soon? You can't. The odds are against it happening.

So what's a reader to do? Fall back on a book by a beloved author that you have not read yet. This is the kind of problem solving that I do Flower. What author saved the day? Barry (my secret crush) Unsworth. The author of my dreams to my rescue. I had saved Losing Nelson for just such an occasion. When an author reaches the If He/She Re-Wrote The Phone Book I Would Buy It And Read status I have to save one of their books, unread, for an emergency or their death reading purposes. In this case it was an emergency but the in case of death situation is something I plan for. There is also the author is already dead so keep one of their titles virginity intact for later reading. A good example of this for me is Charles Dickens. He's been dead for longer than I've been reading so when I went full on into Dickens in my teens I saved Barnaby Rudge as my un-read Dickens. It is still ready for me to read when I get to the point that I cannot stand not having read a new novel by Charles Dickens to read. So far I'm ok since I re-read the other novels of Charles so often.

In Losing Nelson, Charles Cleasby leads a completely orderly life. It is a life where "...habit is safety, without habit we would all just flop around and die". His most constant habit is Lord Horatio Nelson. Cleasby is a knowledgeable but loony wanna be Nelson biographer. Everyday Cleasby relives Nelson's life. The battles, events and non-events of Nelson's history govern his own. He has constructed a calendar of Nelson's life and follows it, even takes holidays on the days of Nelson's greatest victories, religiously.

There are, occasionally, intrusions on Cleasby's obsession. Miss Lily, Cleasby's assistant, refuses to see Nelson as the perfect hero.Then there are the members of the Nelson Club who are more interested in drinks and two hundred year old gossip than the perfect man. There is fabulous humor in the Club scenes and in Charles' imaginings of Emma Hamilton. Cleasby himself cannot get past a particularly savage moment in Nelson's history. This has stymied the progress of his glorious biography. The biography where suddenly references to Nelson are becoming "I" and "we" instead of Nelson or him. This is were you realize that Losing Nelson is a part historical fiction part intense thriller.

Barry Unsworth has a shelf of brilliant novels behind him. In all of them history, static already written history is what will undo the living. Immersed headlong into intelligent writing you're never allowed to be sure whether or not it will be Cleasby's undoing. This is another exceptionally impressive novel by Unsworth. He is a gift.

Happy

An All Ready High Bar Has Been Raised

Hello Flower.

I think I have read one of the novels that will be on everyone's top ten list next fall,  The Surrendered by Chang-Rae Lee. Are you thinking that given Lee's track record: Native Speaker, A Gesture Life and Aloft that I am going out on a tiny, tiny limb? Well I would agree with you if The Surrendered was the spare, wonderful portraits that those novels were, but it is not. Surrenderd is a Grand Scale novel. It is a quest for redemption, a search for survivors looking for forgiveness..

The novel is told in flashback and that works perfectly for this book. As you meet the characters you are charmed by their imperfections. You fall in love and dread the revelations to come. June is a Korean War survivor. At age 11 she and her family were forced by the War to abandon their home. They struggled to make it to safety at a relatives house but along the way June lost her family one by one Hector is also a survivor of the Korean War. He was an American GI immersed in the carnage until discharged. Blaming himself for the death of his Father back home and not having anywhere to go he stayed in Korea. June and Hector's lives intersect for the first time at a Korean orphanage. There they meet Sylvie. She and her minister husband run the orphanage. Sylvie has her own tortured past having witnessed the Japanese kill her missionary parents in 1934 Manchuria. All three people have already survived horrendous experiences leaving them more damaged then they realize. This leads to a time bomb relationship between the three characters.

I am not going to go beyond this small explanation of plot. This has given you the most basic of starting points. I could go on to describe more of the storyline but that list would do nothing to convey the vivid intensity of those same events written by Lee's elegant pen and broad range. My list would come off as melodrama whereas that kind of storytelling is completely removed from this novel.

I have been a fan of Chang-Rae Lee for years and from the moment I heard he had a new book coming out I was excited (thank you Penguin USA for the reader's copy!) to read it. The Surrendered is a whole new start to Lee's already accolade filled career. He has produced something with all the masterful control of his earlier introspective novels and added the complex and universal themes of survival, heroism and the psychological destruction's of war. Lee has taken his character's 30 year heartbreaking road to redemption and created an engrossing and affecting book. The Surrendered is a big, ambitious and triumphantly well written novel.

Happy