Review of M. J. Carter's The Strangler Vine

The Strangler Vine by M. J. Carter

I was intrigued and tantalized by The Strangler Vine, by M. J. Carter (G.P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), which is on the long list for the 2015 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. The reason it caught my eye is that I have been a fan for a long time of grand sweeping sagas that take place long ago in faraway lands.

M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions was my first taste of Indian history in the days of the British Raj. The title refers to a vision of the mighty Himalayas as seen from a distance. This is a romantic tale of exciting adventures in a backdrop that spans almost the entire Indian subcontinent during a time of great unrest. This was in the late 1850s, just after the Sepoy rebellion.

The conflict began as a mutiny of Indian soldiers against the East India Company's army and it led to the final dissolution of the East India Company and to the British reorganization of the army, the financial system and the administration of India. Rumors that the British were out to destroy the religions of the Indian people was the spark that ignited what turned into a blaze of death and destruction.

Ashok Pelham Martin, a boy born in India of British parents, masquerades as a native until he is grown, and then joins the military. He falls in love with a princess and conspires to save her from certain death.

Kaye, who was born in India and spent much of her early life there, tells her stories with authority. Her father, grandfather, brother, and husband all served the British Raj. Another of her novels, Shadow of the Moon, is about a young British heiress who returns to India and meets her protector, a British military man, who tries to help her during the tumultuous war times of World War II, when the empire is about to topple. Kaye, who followed the drum during her marriage, also has a series of murder mysteries in locations such as Kenya, Cyprus, Berlin, and Kashmir. These are all places she lived in for a while.

If you want to lose yourself in another time and place, you couldn't do better than taking a dip into Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. This I did long before it became a television mini-series.

Beginning with The Jewel in the Crown, Scott tells the story of the final years of the British Raj in India. The epic begins in the year 1942, around the time Mahatma Gandhi was calling for the British to cede this particular part of the British Empire, the jewel in the crown as Queen Victoria called it, back to the Indians. These novels look at the many facets of life in India from the points of view of all the players: the British, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Anglo-indians. It is a fascinating series with a wealth of ambience and history.

Carter's The Strangler Vine takes place almost a century before in 1837, during the days when the British East India Company was at the peak of its power. It leads up to the time of the first rebellion of the Indian soldiers.

The East India Company was formed as early as the 1600s in order to promote trade with the East. Over the next two centuries, it built up its own private army and began to rule and control large parts of India. The company gained power and wealth by levying taxes and by creating a monopoly in the opium trade with China.

The narrator of The Strangler Vine is young William Avery, an ensign in the East India military. He has recently come from England to Calcutta and is fiercely homesick on the one hand and getting himself into a life of dissolution and debt on the other. He is quite naïve, believing everything he is told about the great East India Company, despite the evidence of his eyes. He is actually rather thick and very judgmental.

One of his strong points is a love of reading. His favorite author is Xavier Mountstuart, who had been living in and writing about India for some years. Mountstuart's most recent work is raising a lot of official eyebrows, as it suggests that certain important people in the company are leading disgraceful lives. His work in progress is about the cult of the murderous Thugees, ritual mass murderers who worship the Goddess Kali, she of the many arms and necklace of heads around her neck.

The problem is that Mountstuart has disappeared. The military authorities have asked a certain Jeremiah Blake, a former member of the army who has gone native and who shows little respect for the powers that be, to find him. Avery is promoted to Lieutenant and told to accompany Blake and to keep an eye on him. They travel as rapidly as possible to the heart of northern India, where the author was last seen.

Once there, they find a conspiracy of silence. Blake, who is a polyglot as well as a master of disguise, speaks several Indian dialects as well as Persian, so he is able to gather information from all quarters.  He can sense the discontent and the anxiety of the locals and the distrust of the East India Company wallahs, who want the farmers to grow opium and indigo when the fear of famine is all too real. Avery, on the other hand, speaks nothing but English and is oblivious. He is more concerned about Blake's drive to complete his mission in the face of the disapproval of the territories' military commanders.

It becomes clear that Blake, Avery and their small group of five are in danger and the only way to survive is to trust each other. But unless the scales fall from Avery's eyes, they are doomed.

Okay, so more than once I wanted to smack Avery upside his head or shake some horse sense into him. Some critics have suggested that there is a Sherlock/Watson partnership going on here. But Watson was never this slow to see the obvious.

The title of this novel refers to a vine, which grows in among the trees and chokes the life out of them. It is a metaphor in this case for the way the British East India Company infiltrated a country and tried to obliterate customs, religions and behaviors they considered uncivilized by choking them off.

This is a gripping story––no pun intended.  The tension slowly grows and I experienced a desire for the smugly self-righteous to be taken down several pegs. Knowing the  historical outcomes doesn't take away from the drama, dread and fear as it builds to an exciting climax. I read that there is another installment of the Blake and Avery adventures due out this year, so Ill be looking for it.

I'll Take Genre Benders for Wednesday, Alex

Today, we're going to talk about benders. We'll skip our wild drinking sprees and car accidents and look at a couple of recent books that bend the boundaries of historical fiction. Later this week, I'll show you some other genre straddlers.

Let's start with Hermione Eyre's first novel, Viper Wine (Hogarth/Random House, April 14, 2015). The UK cover on the right features van Dyck's portrait of Venetia, Lady Digby, a real woman so famed for her beauty during the reign of Charles I, she inspired Ben Jonson's poetry and caused common folks to run alongside her carriage in the hopes of glimpsing her. If you look closely at the book's cover, you can see that a cellphone has been slipped into Venetia's hand. Some other modern products (I am not kidding when I tell you Spam––the pink, edible variety, not the annoying email––is one of them), famous people (i.e., Groucho Marx and Naomi Campbell), and discoveries show up in Eyre's book. Occasionally, these appearances are somewhat jarring or confusing, but I found most of them amusing. Elements of fantasy, magical realism, and time travel feature in this witty book of historical fiction. The writer herself even steps into the pages.

The US cover

Eyre gives us her take on the lives of Venetia and her husband, the unconventional Sir Kenelm Digby. Kenelm was an alchemist, explorer, and intellectual who collected books and corresponded widely. He was besotted with his wife and crushed by her mysterious death at age 32. In Viper Wine, Kenelm receives messages from the future through a blipping obelisk. While the wheels in Kenelm's head are whirling madly, Venetia spends her time on a hell-bent quest to regain the youthful freshness of her beauty. Kenelm's protestations that she is still beautiful (still!) only make things worse. Maybe I should have been more understanding, but my patience wore thin. I wanted to yank Venetia out of the book and shake her til her teeth rattled. Instead, I gawked as Venetia visited charlatan physicians in Eastcheap, I learned pre-Botox beauty recipes that made me very glad my drugstore stocks Neutrogena, and I witnessed events such as an early submarine excursion under the Thames. This original novel is not for everyone, but is written for readers who appreciate well-researched historical fiction and are looking for something different. I'll be interested to see what Eyre does next.

The death of the beauteous Venetia opens Viper Wine. Benjamin Percy's The Dead Lands (Grand Central Publishing, April 14, 2015) opens this way: "She knows there is something wrong with the baby."

Thus begins a post-apocalyptic tale set 150 years after an airborne flu (H3Ll) killed millions. The flu was so deadly, other countries launched nuclear weapons against the US in futile attempts to try to stop it. The resulting radiation accounts for the wasted Dead Lands inhabited by nightmarish beasts, such as hairless wolves and gigantic spiders, outside the Sanctuary created in what used to be St. Louis, Missouri. The 40,000 Sanctuary inhabitants believe they are the world's last human survivors. They are surrounded by a high wall of plaster, mortared stone, and metal cars.

One of the wall's sentries is Wilhelmina “Mina” Clark, a hot-headed young woman who feels not sheltered, but imprisoned in the Sanctuary. There, society has taken a backward turn, and water is running out. The new mayor, Thomas Lancer, and his sheriff, the genuinely creepy Rickett Slade, have created a society based on fear. One day, something happens to inspire Clark, oddball museum curator Lewis Meriwether, and their small band to escape and head for Oregon. It isn't clear how much the expedition members can trust each other. The Sanctuary's mayor schemes to stop them, but the Dead Lands could kill them first. Meanwhile, back at the Sanctuary, Lewis's museum assistant, Ella, and her friend, Simon, a thief, put their heads together.

All this is told in a very rich prose that you will eventually get caught up in, as I did, or find too much. Here's a sample:

"This morning, as the sun rises and reddens the world so that it appears it might catch flame, Clark stands at her sentry post atop the wall. Around it reaches a burn zone of some seventy yards. Beyond this grows a forest with many broken buildings rising from it, black-windowed, leaning messes of skeletal steel and shattered stone. The remains of the St. Louis Arch, collapsed in the middle, appear like a ragged set of mandibles rising out of the earth. In the near distance, where once the Mississippi flowed, stretches a blond wash of sand."

Then, too, if you've read a lot about Lewis and Clark, as I have (in the Pacific Northwest, references to the Expedition are everywhere), you might be taken aback by Percy's eccentric portraits of the Expedition members' namesakes. Along with tamping down these intrusive thoughts, I had to ignore the voice of my scientific knowledge reminding me Percy's Dead Lands creatures are very unlikely results of radiation-caused mutations. If you don't have fixed expectations and can get past the scientific implausibilities, the journey's logical inconsistencies, and the nature of Percy's re-imagined historical characters, you might enjoy this mashup of historical and dystopian fiction, horror, fantasy, sci fi, and adventure thriller. I did, and now I'm amusing myself by mentally casting characters for a potential movie. I can't get a handle on the actors yet, but the Coen brothers would have to direct.

A Quickie: Lin Enger's The High Divide

I'm in that frantic state some of us reach when preparing to hit the road: dashing from room to room, grabbing clothes and stuffing them willy nilly into a duffel bag with one hand, while watering houseplants with the other hand. Whirling around my legs are the dogs, hysterical now that the quilt they use when I take them along has been put in the car.

Before we lay rubber down the driveway, I want to tell you about a book I read last night, Lin Enger's The High Divide (Algonquin Books, September 2014). It's about a man named Ulysses Pope, who disappears from his home on the Wisconsin prairie on a quest for redemption, and the quests of his wife and their two young sons to find him.

Their 1886 journeys are traceable on a sketched map of the State of Minnesota and the Dakota and Montana Territories in the book's front. Ten years earlier, Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment blundered into the Battle of the Little Big Horn in Montana. Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe Indians have been driven onto reservations, where promised provisions from the U.S. government don't always arrive. Buffalo Bill's Wild West show is making annual appearances. Buffalo, which once roamed the West in uncountable herds, have been shot for sport from passing trains and killed by market hunters––and now number in the hundreds.

The disappearance of Ulysses is related to his baptism by an itinerate preacher. Rather than feeling purged, Ulysses feels called to answer for more than his mortal soul. He and his Danish wife, Gretta, love each other, but Ulysses isn't by nature a talker, and Gretta doesn't by nature invite him to confide. While Ulysses feels guilty decades later over the accidental death of a girl's collie, the beautiful and strong-willed Gretta has "a ruthless capacity for self-protection," rarely allowing herself to think about her losses or committing her sympathies beyond a point at which they might cause her damage. Without Ulysses, Gretta looks for more work. Six weeks go by, and then her sons, 16-year-old Eli and his sickly younger brother, Danny, take off without a word. Gretta, abandoned by most of her friends and her men, and hounded for money and favors by the repulsive Mead Fogarty, owner of the title on the Popes' house, has had enough. She heads out to find Ulysses, Eli, and Danny––and discovers how little she knows about the man she calls her husband.

The High Divide is an exploration of guilt and redemption, the corrosive character of terrible secrets, the nature of home, and the costs of racial hatred and traditional gender roles, set against the backdrop of the American West in the 1800s. It casts several historical events in such personal terms that it brought me to tears. There's no mistaking the western nature of this gripping book, but you don't need to love westerns to enjoy it. Its lyrical writing describes a man with a face "like a baked apple, riven and dark, who spent the better part of an hour cleaning his teeth with a length of horsehair and then his toenails with a Bowie knife." A boy reminds Gretta of a muskrat, with a "nose flat against his face and a mouth perennially ajar, as if he lacked the energy to close it." Stars in the western sky are so thick "some giant hand might have skimmed cream from the pail and tossed it up against the firmament."

The High Divide reminded me a bit of Patrick deWitt's Booker-shortlisted novel, The Sisters Brothers (reviewed here), and James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (see review here) in their depictions of how tough life could be in earlier America. It's too bad some folks made it worse than tough.

Why Did the Human Cross the Road?

Recent reading has me contemplating human nature and destiny. Before we get to the actual books that inspired this thinking, we could warm up our minds by looking at Shakespeare for Cassius's ideas about being our own masters versus the fault in our stars or King Henry IV's desire to peek at the book of fate; however, it's Monday, and our heads are already spinning without the stimulus of the Bard. Let's ask instead why the chicken crossed the road. And no, we can't say it's simply to get to the other side.

I love the answers Harvard's David Morin attributes to physicists such as Einstein ("The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the chicken.") and Schrodinger ("The chicken doesn’t cross the road. Rather, it exists simultaneously on both sides . . . just don’t peek."), but those answers are observational. They don't really examine the nature of the chicken and the road or the roles played by the chicken's motivations and choices, as well as fate, in its crossing.

Sorry, Dr. Martin Luther King, but we're grilling these birds.

For those answers, we'll turn to philosophers. We'll skip Kierkegaard, who would no doubt attribute the chicken's crossing to a leap of faith, and Freud, who would likely blame your mother or your own underlying sexual insecurity for whatever interpretation of the chicken's behavior. I imagine Kant declaring, "The chicken, being an autonomous being, chose to cross the road of his own free will"; but Orwell disagreeing: "Because the government had fooled him into thinking that he was crossing the road of his own free will, when he was really only serving their interests." Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas point to a different inspiration: "The possibility of 'crossing' was encoded into the objects 'chicken'' and 'road,' and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence." Sartre, on the other hand, would observe that in order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Let's interpolate from the philosophers' ideas about a chicken's behavior in crossing the road to the behavior of the characters in books I've recently read.

If David Bowie can look like a Polish chicken,
Sal Cupertine can pass for Rabbi David Cohen.

In Tod Goldberg's Gangsterland (Counterpoint, September 9, 2014), we follow two characters who eventually meet up: One of them is Chicagoan Sal Cupertine, age 35, the younger cousin of a Mob-connected used-car king, Ronnie Cupertine. Sal is the doting father of little William and loving husband to Jennifer, who turns a blind eye to Sal's job as the Chicago Mob's best pro killer. The other character is Jeff Hopper, whose childhood dream was to wear a beautiful suit that concealed a gun, to catch bad guys, and to save America. When Jeff got older, he became more cynical, but he's still one of those guys you'd like to see coach your kid's Little League team. He is working for the FBI when he makes a mistake that leads Sal to kill three FBI agents and their confidential informant.

That sort of thing doesn't just slip unnoticed into the night. Jeff is placed on administrative leave. In the meantime, the Mob hustles Sal out of town for a series of plastic surgeries and quiet time for studying the Talmud (not difficult for Sal, who is known as "the Rain Man" for his memory), and then resurrects him as Rabbi David Cohen in Las Vegas. Las Vegas isn't what it used to be for organized crime, what with the corporatization of gambling and casinos, but there are still ways for connected guys to muscle in on the action in secondary markets, including construction, strip clubs, and drugs not handled by the Bloods and Crips. Believe it or not, there's even a place for a man like Sal at Temple Beth Israel, whose growing complex houses two rabbis, a mortuary, a cemetery, and a private school.

Tod Goldberg

What makes Gangsterland irresistible is its noirish look at the immutability of an individual's nature and the consequences of choices made long ago, as the sequelae of Sal's massacre ripple through the world of criminals, informants, and law enforcement. Writer Goldberg unspools his character-driven tale as if there's no other way it could happen. It's not surprising Sal becomes a killer in the first place: his dad was a gangster who died when he was thrown off a building, and Sal grew up committing crimes for his cousin. What were his options, and how were choices made by and for him? Sal doesn't get any pleasure from murdering people, but his bosses are always finding someone whom they think needs killing. Sal's life motto can be summed up with the words, "Everybody dies," and he knows it will be his turn one of these days.

Currently, he's stuck in Las Vegas, forbidden to call his wife and unable to look in the mirror without surprise, but he has plenty of time to think about who's pulling whose strings, how he got where he is now, and what the Talmud says about starting over. The Temple's members love Sal as David. Does this change him? Does the demonization of Jeff Hopper in the press and the lack of support from his former FBI superiors stop him on his quest to find Sal Cupertine? Everyone in Gangsterland does what he or she has gotta do, or at least what they think they gotta do. Sartre, anyone? They all gotta cross that road.

The Long Island Red symbolizes Achilles and his
lover, Briseis, both of whom have flame-colored hair.

It's a long road in time and space from 1990s Las Vegas to the Trojan War in the 12th century BC. It's also a leap from the noir of Goldberg's Gangsterland to the historical fiction/romance of Judith Starkston's Hand of Fire (Fireship Press, September 10, 2014), but both books tackle human nature, fate, and self-determination.

We can't discuss the humans of Greek mythology without mentioning the gods, who like to venture down from Olympus and meddle in mortals' lives. Favored mortals sometimes become pawns in the gods' Machiavellian games, although as famous Greek warrior and half-god Achilles says, "The gods and goddesses can do many things as suits them, but they cannot alter fate. Goddesses must bow before fate no matter how much it grieves them." Achilles doesn't have far to look for an example: his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, didn't succeed at burning away all his mortality when he was a baby. They are both aware of the prophecy that he will not return from the Trojan War.

As we know from Homer's Iliad, the Trojan War was prompted by Aphrodite's promise that Trojan prince Paris could have the world's most beautiful woman. Thus, Paris abducted––or eloped with––Queen Helen of Sparta. Her husband's brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, led forces gathered from around the Hellenic world to lay siege to Troy and get her back. While the Greeks are waiting, Agamemnon orders Achilles to pillage some nearby cities for treasure and women captives. While sacking Lyrnessos, Achilles meets Briseis, a beautiful young healing priestess and wife of Prince Mynes, when she tries to kill him. Of course, they fall in love.

Judith Starkston

While Hand of Fire may be too heavy on the romance for some readers, it is a carefully researched and beautifully written portrait of Briseis, one of the Iliad's minor characters, beginning with the death of her mother and her growth as a healing priestess to her life as a captive and Achilles' lover. It's been a while since I've read Ovid and Homer, but Starkston makes Briseis and Achilles and their world come alive. The ending invites a promised sequel, although classicist Starkston plans a novel about Queen Puduhepa of the Hittites as "sleuth" first.

Oh, and so why would Starkston's characters cross the road? For Achilles, I'll go with Emily Dickinson's reasoning for a chicken's crossing, "Because it could not stop for death." Through dying, Achilles achieves immortality in legends. As for the independent-minded Briseis, I think Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise has her number: "To boldly go where no chicken has gone before."

Note: If you love chickens, as I do, you might be interested in Stephen Green-Armytage's Extraordinary Chickens, a book of gorgeous photographs of unusual chicken breeds from around the world.

Review of Bee Ridgway's The River of No Return

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

Many crime fiction fans love books involving time travel and I'm no exception. This weekend I found time capable of manipulation in Bee Ridgway's debut, The River of No Return (Dutton, 2013). It's a mash-up of time travel, historical fiction, mystery and Regency romance that begins during the Battle of Salamanca in 1812.

Twenty-three-year-old Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, is about to be skewered by a French dragoon when suddenly the world goes black. The next thing he knows, he's waking up in a London hospital. The man at his bedside says, "You are in the care of the Guild. The year is 2003." Apparently, during moments of terrible stress, some people jump into the river of time. The man himself was a butcher in Aachen who leaped in 810 and landed in 1965. The Guild, organized by other time travelers, has strict rules: (1) There is no return, either in time or place. (2) No one must be told. (3) There is no breaking of the rules. After a year of living in the Guild's compound in Brazil to prepare for modern life, the Guild picked a new country for Nicholas and gave him money and property. Thus did the English marquess become Nick Davenant, owner of a cheese-producing farm in Vermont, with only his ancestral ring to remind him of home two centuries ago. Nick is mostly happy, although he's troubled by dreams and the recurrent thoughts of a beautiful brown-eyed girl.

That beautiful brown-eyed girl is Julia Percy, who's back in 1815, grieving over the death of her grandfather, the Earl of Darchester. The heir to the title is her cousin, the hateful Eamon. Now, Eamon is at Castle Dar in Devon, making Julia's life miserable with his obsession about finding the talisman that enabled their grandfather to do some weird things with time. Julia was kept mostly in the dark about it, but her grandfather whispered, "Pretend" to her as he died, so Julia is trying to pretend she knows absolutely nothing.

There things stand, Nick pretty happy in Vermont in the 2000s and Julia completely unhappy in England in the 1800s, when Nick gets a summons from the Guild's Alderwoman, Alice Gracoki. A rival group of time jumpers, Ofan, may have screwed up the river of time and the world faces serious future danger. The Guild wants Nick to break the rules by returning to 1815 Devon. Nick will claim he's spent the past three years with amnesia in Spain. Because Nick has no experience time traveling, he will be accompanied by a Russian Guild official named Arkady. They'll be looking for the talisman and Ofan. After their mission is concluded, Arkady and Nick will return to the present. In the meantime, Nick will try to avoid drowning in time, which may be harder than Arkady and Nick think.

The England of 1815 is undergoing change, and writer Ridgway, a professor of English at Bryn Mawr, makes the most of the marquess's return to show how it affects his sisters' financial plans and their social status. Nick's fellow aristocratic land owners are trying to postpone the inevitable end to their current way of life. Factories in London and the promise of a new life in America are enticing the lower classes off the old English estates. The Corn Bill is coming up for a vote in the House of Lords. Nick––who has seen England's future––and Arkady have quite a time in London and Devon.

Although, at times, dialog stalls the plot's action in this 450-page book, it's an excellent debut, especially for readers who love a good Regency romance. Nick is a sweetie and a hottie and Julia is feisty, and Ridgway has a deft hand with romantic scenes. She also has interesting takes on the hows and whys of time travel. Good time-travel books must contain a unique way of initiating travel, whether it's the Doctor's 1960s-era London police box or Dorothy clicking her heels and chanting "There's no place like home," and I like the simple grab hands and jump approach of The River of No Return. The ending is satisfying, but it leaves the door open for sequels. That makes me happy. It might be time for a jump to get your hands on it for a read over the winter holidays.

Review of Yangsze Choo's The Ghost Bride

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

"One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride."

Thus begins 17-year-old Pan Li Lan's charming and unlikely narration in Yangsze Choo's The Ghost Bride (Morrow/HarperCollins, August 6, 2013). The British rule Malaya in 1893, but Li Lan's family still follows Chinese traditions. The Chinese practice of arranging marriage between the dead is uncommon and usually done to placate their lonely spirits and create ties between living families who will give them offerings in the afterlife. To marry a living person to the dead is rare, and, in Li Lan's opinion, a horrible idea.

The Lim family, one of the wealthiest households in the port city of Malacca, Malaya, had put the idea to Li Lan's father. Their only son, Lim Tian Ching, had died unexpectedly several months earlier. Li Lan's family used to be quite rich but now they are barely clinging to middle-class respectability. The smallpox that killed Li Lan's mother badly scarred her father. He withdrew into his books and opium and let outsiders run his business into the ground. His apathy now threatens to squander his lovely daughter's future. If Li Lan doesn't marry, she'll fall into poverty, without even the respect that motherhood brings. This marriage to the dead Lim Tian Ching could be a solution.

Offerings are burned for the dead in the Ghost Festival

Li Lan receives an invitation to play mahjong at the Lims' opulent home and she goes accompanied by her amah. There, Li Lan is smitten by Tian Bai, Lim Tian Ching's cousin and the rightful heir to the Lim family fortune. Tian Bai seems to return her interest, though Li Lan later hears rumors that his marriage has been arranged.

That night, Lim Tian Ching, whose death has done nothing to make him more attractive, begins haunting Li Lan in her dreams. Like his family, Lim Tian Ching becomes increasingly insistent that she become his bride. He also tells her that Tian Bai murdered him.

Malacca buildings in the Plains of the
Dead are either gaudy or missing completely

After Li Lan becomes ill, she wanders through Malacca unaccompanied and mostly unseen, and enters the Plains of the Dead, an interim place between the world of the living and the strictly governed Courts of Hell. It's a spellbinding place with odd characters and peculiar parallels to life on earth, designed by writer Choo with elements of Buddhism (to tie it to reincarnation), Taoism, ancestor worship and folk beliefs. With the help of a mysterious guide, Er Land, Li Lan seeks to learn the truth about Lim Tian Ching and her own family, before it's too late to return to the world of the living.

Li Lan in the Plains of the Dead

Her spunk and persistence are a credit to her hero, Ming Dynasty explorer Cheng Ho. In colonial Malacca, Li Lan is admired because she's kind and as beautiful as a butterfly but she chafes at her restricted world as a young Chinese woman. I was enchanted by Li Lan's suspenseful journey, in which she also learns her own mind.

Yangsze Choo (photo by James Cham)

Choo's Malacca and Plains of the Dead are a feast for the senses in their details of food, clothing, history, customs and folklore. The characters are fascinating in their familial hierarchies (multiple wives and concubines, amahs and servants) and their beliefs. Li Lan's father holds Confucian ideas about man's place in the universe, while Amah and Old Wong, the cook, believe in immortality, shape-changing and magic potions.

People who can see ghosts are tainted and don't fit in. Superstitions about ghosts leave many people unwilling to visit Bukit China, the largest cemetery outside China, except during the Festival of the Dead, Qing Ming. Then, offerings are burned to ward off evil spirits and to offer aid to the dead, lest they become hungry ghosts, without the means to navigate through the Courts of Hell on their way to rebirth, doomed to wander forever.

Review of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird

Abolitionist John Brown

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The mistake central to McBride's The Good Lord Bird (August 2013, Riverhead) happens like this: It's 1856, and white abolitionist John Brown has his rifle trained on angry Pro Slavers (people who are pro-slavery) inside Dutch Henry's Tavern in Kansas Territory. All the blacks have hauled ass home, except for our narrator, then 10-year-old mulatto Henry Shackleford, and his pa, both slaves. Henry, like other black boys his age, wears a potato sack. "You and your daughter is now free," Brown says. Pa only manages, "Henry ain't a," before he is killed accidentally. Brown grabs Henry and runs, and thus begins Henry's—or Henrietta's—17 years as a black woman and the story of how he came to be the only black survivor of Brown's ill-fated raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

Missouri, a slave state, shares a border with Kansas Territory

Before continuing with Henry's story, a little history is in order. When Kansas Territory was created by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the question of slavery in Kansas was left up to popular sovereignty. Unfortunately, pro-slavery Border Ruffians from the neighboring slave state of Missouri took this as an invitation to force the acceptance of slavery onto Kansans through terrorism and fraud. Most whites in Missouri were too poor to own slaves, but they hated Yankees and abolitionists and feared more free blacks living nearby. In addition, they knew that if Kansas were admitted to the Union as a free state, the balance of anti- and pro-slavery representation in the U.S. Senate would be disrupted.

Between 1854 and 1861, when free-state Kansas gained admission to the Union, there were so many violent confrontations in Kansas Territory that spilled over into western Missouri, the Territory was called "Bleeding Kansas." Most Kansas Free Staters weren't abolitionists, but they were forced to fight back against Pro Slavers.

Abolitionist John Brown had several adult sons living in Kansas Territory, and he left his wife and other children (of 22 children, 12 were still living) in upstate New York to join them. Several events in 1856 helped persuade Brown that he "couldn't have a sit-down committee meeting with the Pro Slavers and nag and commingle and jingle with 'em over punch and lemonade and go bobbing for apples with 'em" to eradicate slavery: Pro Slavers sacked Lawrence, Kansas, and South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks was proclaimed a hero in the South after he caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner for delivering a U.S. Senate speech in which he likened Border Ruffian violence in Kansas Territory to the rape of virgins.

Enough background history. The Good Lord Bird is rollicking tragicomedy/historical fiction that follows Old John Brown, narrator Henry (AKA "the Onion" after "she" unthinkingly ingests Brown's lucky onion and becomes Brown's walking good luck charm), and Brown's ragtag band of sons and assorted followers from their murderous attack on a Pro Slaver's homestead to battles at Black Jack and Osawatomie before the Onion is left at a Pikesville, Missouri whorehouse while Brown heads back East to fundraise, and his men disperse. After surviving several years working for whorehouse madam/businesswoman Miss Abby and the budding of understandable adolescent boy yearnings for a beautiful prostitute named Pie, Onion is back on the trail with Brown.

They head to Boston, where Brown introduces fundraising speeches with "I'm John Brown from Kansas, and I's fighting slavery." Onion hates speechifying without "joy juice," but she tells stories about how hungry and miserable she was as a slave, which are lies, since the only starving she's ever done has been in the company of Brown, who never seems to eat, and his dozen men, who sometimes dine on one measly squirrel while listening to Brown bark and pray and howl at his Holy Redeemer for hours until his son Owen, the only one who dares, stops him with a "Pa! The Pro Slavers posse (or U.S. cavalry) is coming!" Raising funds is very difficult for Brown, because white Northerners sympathetic to his anti-slavery cause want to know exactly what he plans to do with their money, and Brown, fearing U.S. government spies, refuses to divulge his plans.

Old John Brown was feared and hated by Pro Slavers
and revered by blacks and fellow abolitionists

From Boston, Onion and Brown head to Rochester, New York, for a stay with famous ex-slave and speaker Frederick Douglass, with whom Onion is hardly impressed. After that, there's a convention for black people in Canada (where they meet Harriet Tubman and Brown attempts to pick up recruits for his war against slavery), before they're back in Iowa with Brown's men, making plans for the fiasco at Harpers Ferry.

Author James McBride

As Onion relates it,  Brown's seemingly lunatic plan to capture the nation's largest arsenal of weapons and to arm an insurrection against slavery isn't surprising, given Brown's character and the bad luck that seems to follow him around (I don't mean to insinuate that Onion, his good luck charm, has a bad twin). Writer McBride's Brown is an incredibly complex man, a loving father who leaves his young ones back East while risking his own life and those of his sons in a war against slavery that he believes is ordained by God. He suffers from believing what he wants to believe. Brown never really understands many slaves would rather run from slavery than take up arms against it —although there are some tragically brave black people in this story—and his supreme confidence in God's protection no matter what the odds make him a compelling and heartbreaking figure. It's no wonder Onion can't bring herself (or himself, oh, you know what I mean) to leave him, despite several half-hearted attempts. As a boy with dark skin, Onion feels passing as a girl is only doing what all black people do in front of whites—creating a disguise in order to survive.

Given McBride's entertaining and insightful portraits of fictional blacks like Onion, Pie, and a slave named Sibonia; and the real-life Brown, his sons, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, I wasn't surprised when The Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award this year. I strongly suggest it to people who enjoy historical fiction like John Barth's romp, The Sot-Weed Factor, in which failed English poet Ebeneezer Cooke, his sister, and their tutor travel to Maryland in the 1700s; E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, in which we meet historical figures such as Harry Houdini in turn-of-the-century New York City; and Dennis Lehane's atmospheric The Given Day, which centers around a Boston cop's family in early 20th-century Boston.

Note: McBride's Good Lord bird, whose feathers John Brown's son Frederick claims bring good luck and "understanding all your life," might be the ivory-billed woodpecker, although Kansas Territory might have been a bit northwest for one. People lucky enough to spot this large woodpecker reportedly cried, "Lord God!," and that gave it its nickname, the Lord God bird.

Hunting and overlogging drove this species near extinction in the late 1930s. For sixty years, it was feared extinct. In 2004, a sighting and sounds (characteristic tin-horn cries and double-knock pounding) were reported in the Big Woods of Arkansas, but extensive searching by ornithologists has produced no definitive evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker still exists in America. That's very unlucky for us.

Review of Fannie Flagg's The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion

The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion by Fannie Flagg (November 2013, Random House)

Sookie Poole is exhausted. She's just finished putting on the third wedding of a child in a year, she is losing her battle to get the bluejays to leave some birdseed for the little birds, and then there's her mother, Lenore Krackenberry.

Lenore is 88––or is that the speed of all her plans and demands? She is a domineering mother; queen bee of all Point Clear, Alabama, social life; and pretty close to certifiably crazy. Sookie and her husband, Earle, have only just finished paying off the legal bills from the most recent time Lenore decided to let 'er rip in a letter to the editor about one of Point Clear's local luminaries. So the very last thing that Sookie needs right now is to receive a certified letter that will turn everything in her life upside down.

In alternating chapters, Fannie Flagg turns from Sookie's story in 2005 to that of Fritzi Jurdabralinski, of Pulaski, Wisconsin.  Fritzi is the oldest of four daughters and one son of Stan and Linka, a couple of hard-working Polish immigrants who epitomize the American dream. It was a proud day for Stan when he was able to buy a house for his family, and he was filled with joy each time one of his children was born.

In 1928, with so many Americans starting to own cars, the big oil companies offered training and support to anybody who wanted to open a garage. Always game for a challenge, Stan opened up a Phillips 66 station behind the house and slept there on a cot so that they could stay open 24 hours a day. Linka made Polish sausages and baked delicacies to sell in the service station. Even the kids worked there.

Fritzi is a firecracker who becomes a stunt flyer and wing walker in the 1930s. In World War II, she is one of the women who became WASPs (members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots program), ferrying planes around the country, training male pilots and hauling targets for antiaircraft practice. We follow Fritzi's story forward through the years until we learn the connection between her and Sookie.

WASPs Frances Green, Margaret Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn

The World War II story of the WASPs was such a pleasure to read. The idea was that men who were trained to fly should be freed up for duty overseas. Women who had flying experience were invited to apply for the WASP program, and 1,074 were chosen from over 25,000 applicants for this tough duty. Most of the training took place in Texas, in grueling conditions. The women had to put in hundreds of hours of classroom study and flight training, and lived in rudimentary barracks.

25 former WASPs attended a "Fly Girls of WW2" event in 2008

WASPs were trained like male flyer cadets, but the similarities ended there. They were not in the military and received no military benefits or recognition whatsoever––not even any kind of death benefits for the 38 women who were killed during their service. When they ferried planes to their destination, they were usually on their own to find food, lodging and even a way back to base. They were under strict orders not to fraternize with any locals or servicemen. Those in charge of the WASPs seemed to want them to be like pants-wearing nuns, right down to the vows of poverty and chastity.

Of course, whatever the powers that be might have wanted, women who flew planes in the 1940s weren't very likely to act like they were in a convent. Fannie Flagg depicts the WASPs the way they really were. Fritzi might not even be the wildest girl in her squadron. This part of the book reminded me of the movie A League of Their Own (Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donnell), and I started daydreaming about a movie being made of this book. (Remember, Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café was made into a hit movie, so maybe my daydream will come true.)

As with all Fannie Flagg books, this story is all about women finding their own identities–––but in a way filled with humor and love. I could wish for more about Fritzi and the other WASPs in this story, but maybe Flagg will be inspired to do that in a future book.

As we honor our veterans today, let's include the WASPs in our thanks.

Note: I received a free review copy of The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion, published on November 5, by Random House. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.