October 15, 2006
One Good Turn
I’ve raved about Kate Atkinson before, when I read Case Histories last summer and when I reread Behind The Scenes at the Museum in August. She writes with the social and historical awareness of Margaret Drabble, but with the dark edge of Hilary Mantel, though of course her works are also startlingly original (and challenge genres). Kate Atkinson has yet to fail me, and in her new novel One Good Turn, she has truly crafted what her subtitle suggests: “a jolly good mystery”.
Yes, indeed, a mystery. I have spoken to fans of early-Atkinson who’ve gone off her a bit since her characters took up sleuthing, but none of them had actually read the books in question (Case Histories, and now its companion One Good Turn [though the two books both stand up alone]). I am no mystery fan (my interest sort of waned with Nate the Great) but I’ll read anything by Kate Atkinson, and moreover Behind the Scenes… really had a mystery at its heart. The genre suits Atkinson well, and she writes with her signature wit and brilliance.
In One Good Turn, Atkinson expects her readers to hang on tight, because the ride goes so fast. Jackson Brodie from Case Histories has stumbled onto a whole new batch of mystery at the Edinburgh Festival, but he is just one character in an excellent ensemble which includes a suburban housewife with a trick up her sleeve, a ruthless Russian call-girl, a fourteen year-old shoplifter and has-been comedian. Atkinson’s tongue-in-cheek depiction of the publishing world is particularly humourous, as seen by a writer of a particularly bad mystery series, and the book’s subtle CSI references indicate that Atkinson is very aware of the world she’s writing in. The story itself is so tight, admirable considering how many pieces had to be tied together in the end. The pace is quick, twists are so surprising, the end was a stunner. One Good Turn was simply a delight.
October 13, 2006
Freaky
Got a terrible case of the lurgy; we’ve had snowstorms already and last night the power was out for six hours, so we went out to Mexitaco at Bloor and Shaw, which was fun, and then we came home and I had to read by candlelight, re-rereading actually- Away by Jane Urquhart (pour l’ecole).
Ne pas pour l’ecole, I just finished reading Blue Angel by Francine Prose, and it was incredible. Written in third-person, Prose gives an illusion of objectivity that duped me at times, and once I realized I’d been taken in, I felt sort of dirty. The narrative voice was an absolute feat, but moreover the book was funny, smart and twisted, and the writing workshop was priceless. The satire was complicated and many-edged, and left me feeling uneasy, which, coming from a bundle of paper, is a powerful impact.
October 6, 2006
The Creation
I suppose my interest in scientific literature had something to do with my husband’s B.Sc., but I mark the start of its development with the story “Miss Ormerod” by Virginia Woolf, from The Common Reader Vol. 1.. “Miss Ormerod” was 19th Century British entomologist Eleanor Ormerod and Woolf’s fictionalized biography demonstrated to me how well a passion for science translates into good literature. Fortuitously, I was signed up for a course called “Literature and the Environment” the next term, and I went on to read such works as Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Servants of the Map, and last summer I read The Selfish Gene and Silent Spring. Last night I finished reading The Creation* by Edward O Wilson and it’s my favourite piece of SciLit yet.
The Creation is written as a letter to Southern Baptist Preacher, pleading not for common ground, but for a common cause: The Stewardship of Creation. The situation is dire, Wilson admits in gorgeous prose, but it is not too late, and he goes on to state his case in chapters including “Ascending to Nature”, “Exploration of a Little-Known Planet”, “How to Learn Biology and How to Teach it”, “How to Raise a Naturalist” and finally, “An Alliance for Life”.
Like Ormerod, Wilson is an entomologist and magnifies the amazing world of insects, this “microwilderness”. All living ants (there may be 10 thousand trillion) weigh as much as the Earth’s population of human beings. That there are more bacteria cells in our bodies than our own cells, and by some perspectives we could be seen as solely their vessals. He writes, “Each species is a small universe in itself, from its genetic code to its anatomy, behaviour, life cycle, and environmental role, and a self-perpetuating system created during an almost unimaginably complicated evolutionary history. Each species merits careers of scientific study and celebration by historians and poets. Nothing of that kind could be said for each proton or hydrogen atom. That, in a nutshell Pastor, is the compelling moral argument from science for saving Creation”. (123)
*Wilson is listed as “E Wilson” on the amazon listing, which means he is not linked to his myriad other works, which appear as authored by “Edward O Wilson”
