May 21, 2020
A Summer Birdcage, by Margaret Drabble
I started reading Margaret Drabble in 2004 when I bought The Radiant Way from a used bookstore in Kobe, and I don’t remember why I picked up the book, or if I’d known anything about Margaret Drabble before I did, but I became obsessed with that novel, and the wonderful thing about reading Margaret Drabble in 2004 (even in Japan) was that she had 14 other books I could read after that, many of them readily available in tattered paperback. And so I read them, mostly her 1970s’ novels, which I also loved, but which have blended together, stories of single mothers in London, stories that led directly to The Radiant Way where Drabble’s vision moved from the individual to society, which was pressing in the age of Margaret Thatcher, no matter what Margaret Thatcher thought.
The 1970s novels are fat and the books only got fatter (the final book in The Radiant Way trilogy is huge, and Drabble’s vision has expanded so much more that it’s all about Cambodia now). I was not able to read the more recent books (1990s on…) until I’d returned to Canada, and so most of my later Drabbles are not weirdly stained paperbacks, and I’m a little bit sorry about that.
Her 1960s books, however, compared with the next decade’s, are slim, with those distinctive orange Penguin spines (and many of their covers, oddly, feature Drabble’s own face, which is weird for a novel—but more about that in a moment) and they were never my favourite. Some of those reads that were blessedly short, but I don’t recall enjoying them. They didn’t resonate, and the theory I came up with about that was that they were very fashionable and of their time…which meant they were certainly not timeless.
And so when I decided that I was going to reread all the fiction Margaret Drabble had ever published (what better way to measure out these days, I guess?), her earliest books were what I was most intrigued about, the gap in my Drabble knowledge most need of filling. And, blessedly, they were short, at least.
So I started (naturally) with her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, published in 1963, a book whose only detail I could recall was that there was a whole lot about coming down from and going up to Oxford, which I always found confusing. And what I realized upon rereading it again was that a) it still wasn’t really my cup of tea but also b) its use of words I kept having to look up in the dictionary had perhaps kept me from understanding that this book was meant to be relatable.
A young woman, Sarah, just out of school (down from Oxford, natch) who has come back from a sojourn in Paris to be a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding, her sister who is marrying the celebrated novelist Stephen Halifax, and no one really can understand why. Sarah has a boyfriend herself, but he’s away studying in America, and she meets with friends who’d married just out of school, and it’s all gone a bit wrong, Bohemian husbands expecting wives to cook them dinner on a nonexistent grocery budget. 1963: it was such a long time ago. This was even before the Beatles.
But also this story of being single in the city, weddings and bridesmaids: this is chick-lit, Bridget Jones diary, I wrote in a DM to a friend, and I didn’t mean it in a bad way. But I felt guilty too, because this novel is bending over backward to be exceedingly literary, which is partly why it’s so annoying—it never just out and says what it means, instead gestures vaguely, and I had a hard time discerning the point. Whereas the parts that were supposed to be obscure (whatever was going on between the bride and the best man) was obvious at the outset.
What would young Margaret Drabble think—aged twenty four, and married “since 1960,” it reads, curiously, in her author bio—about the comparison to Helen Fielding?
And here I return to the books with Drabble’s not exactly glamorous face on the cover—I think she was a famous young thing, married to her actor husband, and her personality was very much used to market these books, the same way that women authors complain of today. So we’re really not so apart from Bridget et. al after all…
And now I’m doing it too, reading fiction as biography, when I decide the key to the thing is the line where Sarah confesses, “Beyond anything I’d like to write a funny book. I’d like to write a book like Kingsley Amis, I’d like to write a book like Lucky Jim. I’d give the world to be able to write a book like that.”
But Lucky Jim, if Jim were a woman, would be decidedly chick-lit, slight and commercial, and I’ve always thought that—so my comparison to Bridget feels justified. Moreover the mention of Amis suggests that young Ms. Drabble is writing in the shadow of fashionable male authors, instead of firmly in her own vision, which would explain why this book is just slightly out of focus, doesn’t land perfectly, the way her later books do when Drabble isn’t trying to write like anyone but herself.
And I think this book actually is funny, but the humour doesn’t land right either, because of the way she so particularly captures a moment—between the 1950s and the 1960s, with the advent of feminism—that really was only a moment, before a cultural revolution came along and reshaped the landscape, in a way that Drabble would document in her later novels. So that what she captured here is hard for me to understand so many years after the fact, plus, yes, she is also writing about a very specific social milieu, and maybe she nailed it, but all these years later it’s hard to tell.
May 20, 2020
Finding Our Way
I noticed a chart on social media last week, a list that ranked one’s level of caution and care in terms of exposure to Covid-19, and a few of my friends seemed to find a great deal of appeal in this chart. The idea being that you could determine how you ranked and then find friends with similar rankings to associate with as we slowly expand our social bubbles after two months of quarantine, which makes sense, because you probably don’t want the person you hang out with when all this is over to be Buddy who was over at the Michigan legislature protesting with his machine gun the other week. Not just because Buddy is an asshole, but also because he’s been congregating in large groups without a mask on and likely doesn’t wash his hands.
Of course, there was a level of smugness to it too— I mean, no one who scored “VERY OPEN LEVEL 5” was sharing this chart on Facebook. And I mean no judgment with that either, because I can be as smug as they come, and if you’ve been depriving yourself of human company and good groceries for coming on 70 days now, you have every reason to feel superior to that woman down the street whose kids never stopped having playdates and whose boyfriend sleeps over every Saturday.
But still, it didn’t sit well with me, that list. It was the narrowness, I think—and I would consider possibly because I can’t declare myself a “VERY STRICT 0.” I have not worn masks while walking outdoors, I go shopping more than once a week, I’ve likely been within six feet of somebody while passing on the sidewalk. Although the shops I’ve visited have been small and not crowded, better than grocery stores. But also I live in a unit with shared space with other households. Which doesn’t require riding an elevator and my door knobs are my own, but I am also really not attentive enough at disinfecting doorknobs. Though since people have stopped coming over, I’ve decided not to get worked up over this. But what I mean by all this is what I mean most of the time when writing a blog post, which is that it’s complicated.
Has the pandemic made everyone more annoying, or has it made me irritable, or both, is another complicated question, and the answer is probably yes. (And don’t think I don’t acknowledge that I fall under the category of “everyone” who is more annoying too.)
But I really have struggled these last few months with people’s demands for certainty and clarity in a situation that no one really understands. The week before this all shook down, way back in March we cancelled our trip to England because it was becoming clear that travelling right now would be a really bad idea. Prior to this, I’d been watching government travel advisories and assuming these were gospel, and then had a revelation, which was that just because the government said we could go didn’t necessarily mean that they thought we should. That we live in a country where citizens are free to make their own choices for the most part, and don’t need to be told what to do. I found everyone that first week even extra annoying, because everyone on social media had an opinion about banning flights from certain places, shutting down the borders, etc—when it was clear to me that all this was going to happen, but the government was rolling out measures slowly because they have to. And yet I understand where the complaining people were coming from because there still were people departing on vacation in mid-March, when it was demonstrably clear that this was a terrible idea. But tragically, really (and even literally, sometimes), sometimes freedom of choice means that people are going to make appalling ones.
Or at least ones that are different than yours, ones that you just can’t understand—why that man isn’t wearing a mask, and why that woman brought her toddler to the grocery store, the person standing on the street corner audibly hacking up a lung. For me, much more innocuously, the big one is people who wash their fruits and vegetables in soapy water. I don’t get it—and also, it makes me terribly anxious because I’m just not doing that, and these people doing something different makes me afraid I’ve made bad choices, instead of underlining my virtue and my safety—which is what we all want anyway.
Also: okay. You’re washing your bananas. Great. But why do you have to document it on Instagram?
But my husband has a good point (he is one of the few individuals alive who has NOT been made more annoying by the pandemic) which was that washing fruits and vegetables, and Instagramming them, no less, made those people feel good.
“You know how you liked ordering from the bookstore?” he asked, because this was the week I’d ordered more than fifteen books to be delivered from stores across the city, and he really was bringing this home with an analogy that was so on my level. “Because it made you feel happy, and normal, and like you had some element of control over the world?”
We’re all trying to hard to find our way through this unknown situation. And the people who don’t seem to be trying are trying for the rest of us, and those who are struggling mirror all the ways that I am, and those who seem to know everything only underline just how much I don’t, and I suppose it doesn’t help that my relations with nearly everybody these days are enacted on social media where we are all performing, and sorting our feelings, and showing our best selves and/or our worst ones, and how are the rest of us supposed to tell which is which?
We’re doing it though. By trusting the science, and using our imaginations, we are, no matter how restless and impatient we feel. And that’s the amazing thing, even though nobody really knows what’s what, and it’s never been more apparent what has always been true, which is that we’re all trying to find our way in the dark. But we’re finding it. Day by day.
May 19, 2020
Gleanings
- In one of those ironies you might not even notice if you were swimming three times a week and driving to Edmonton, flying to Ottawa, the flowers have never been lovelier.
- As we speak, my mother is dying.
- What is even better than regular mail you ask? Why, book mail of course!
- What is going to happen to our whole lexicon of (germ-infested) interpersonal body language and gesture?
- What did you think? That a weeded garlic bed would somehow act as a charm against the dark?
- The novel worked for me as a reader, even if, when I sat back to think more about it, it hasn’t proved quite so satisfactory for me as a critic.
- My views are drastically altered, but I must accept it. Gradually, I will. I’m embracing the brightness and the new things out my window.
- In a world that’s on its head, it’s reassuring when we can count on a season to send an evening that is beautiful, and wholly familiar.
- I think we owe it to men to start telling them the truth.
- She wrote about women writing, living in the suburbs, having small children, in a way that gave me hope and acted in some ways as caution.
Do you like reading good things online and want to make sure you don’t miss a “Gleanings” post? Then sign up to receive “Gleanings” delivered to your inbox each week(ish). And if you’ve read something excellent that you think we ought to check out, share the link in a comment below.
May 14, 2020
Rereading Jackson Brodie in the Spring of 2020
“‘Life’s random,’ he said, The best you can do is pick up the pieces.'” —When Will There Be Good News?
There are several ways a reader comes to Kate Atkinson: as the award-winning author of historical novels including Life After Life and A God in Ruins; as author of the Jackson Brodie detective novels, which were made into a celebrated television series; or as the quirky literary superstar who won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1995 for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, an event celebrated with news headlines referring to Atkinson as “an unknown hotel chambermaid.”
The third route was my own path to Kate Atkinson’s work, though I didn’t encounter it for another decade, reading a copy of a library book I’d borrowed from a friend, which seems like the least intimate literary encounter I’ve ever experienced, but it changed everything for me, the unforgettable first line marking Ruby Lennox’s conception: “I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock on the mantelpiece in the room across the hall…”
I wasn’t fond of detective fiction when I picked Atkinson’s Case Histories, presumably around the same time, but it occurred to me when I did that all literary fiction is about mystery in a sense, and indeed Behind the Scenes at the Museum was, structurally at least, a work of detective fiction, except the sleuth was the reader, because it’s a puzzle of a novel with a solution I didn’t see coming.
But I read Case Histories, because Kate Atkinson was now on my list of fundamental authors, authors whose work I will buy the day of release. Even if I wasn’t as crazy about Jackson Brodie as other readers were, perhaps distrusting of genre—although these books would prove to be my gateway to detective fiction proper, and fifteen years later, I’m absolutely a devotee.
And maybe it was because these books weren’t my favourite, or maybe it was the reason why they weren’t: the plots of the novels didn’t stay with me. Except for the first book, vaguely, the story of the Land sisters and their pile-on of tragedies. When I sat down to reread Case Histories this year in March, it was remarkable that I remembered nothing at all about the story except who had dunnit.
Part of it was that I’m not sure detective fiction necessarily lends itself to rereading for the average reader (and I am also talking about the average work of detective fiction, of which the Jackson Brodie novels, I think, are not). Also because this is a series of novels that have come out over fifteen years—it’s been ten years between Started Early, Took My Dog and the latest, Big Sky. Which I read last June on my 40th birthday, and I remembered nothing of the books that came before. Which is fine—each of these novels stands up fine on their own. But to miss anything of Atkinson’s keen sense of story and detail would be thoroughly a waste, and I thought how much I’d appreciate the chance to reread the Jackson Brodie books from start to finish.
And when the world fell apart in March, and I cycled into despair along with it, finding myself unable to read, the chance appeared, and I took it. Case Histories: An absorbing novel rife with plot, perfect for escaping. But also undeniably dark, brutal, violent, in a way that resonated with the world around me. A book that was an escape, but that was not completely a disconnect either. Why do bad things happen? Why is life so unfair? How do we keep going when people die? How do people survive trauma and tragedy? What kind of life is possible after that?
I was still pretty shattered when I reread Case Histories, during that very bad week I spent unable to eat, barely sleeping, having panic attacks, and finding it exhausting to walk upstairs. But the act of reading, of finding joy and solace again in a book, which is my usual practice, helped me to find my centre again, to find my feet, and feel at home inside myself even at this very strange time.
I don’t know that I properly understand these books’ notion of justice until I read them again in 2020. Jackson Brodie as an outlaw—he used to be a policeman. But the sense that justice proper lives outside the law, which continues to benefit the powerful, which continues to undermine the safety of girls and women. Jackson’s origin story lies in the murder of his older sister, a murder that was was never solved, and it’s a need to right what happened somehow that drives Jackson in these novels, which portray a world, very similar to our own, which is a dangerous case for girls and women.
That murders go unsolved, crimes unavenged. Clues don’t add up, villains get away with it, the banality of so much of this. Reality is a different kind of narrative, is what these books are saying, and yet, somehow, within the confines of a narrative, and there is the possibility of redemption in that. For the world, I mean. The possibility of hope.
One Good Turn takes place two years after Case Histories, Jackson in Edinburgh where his girlfriend Julia has a show at the summer festival. “A Jolly Good Murder Mystery” is the novel’s subtitle, and there is a rollickingness to the novel, whose characters include a writer of middling detective fiction. One Good Turn is self-aware, possibly winking. And its many strands are slightly absurd, but their weaving is masterful, a much richer tapestry than Case Histories. The confident way it all holds together.
And then When Will There Be Good News?, which is a literary masterpiece, I think, the best book of them all, and they’re all extraordinarily good. Featuring Reggie Chase, who appears again in Big Sky—but I didn’t remember her. Unfathomable too, because she’s basically unforgettable. A teenage genius from the wrong side of the tracks, almost no one to guide her. A devastating train crash, and it’s Reggie who saves Jackson’s life, forever in his debt—and doubly, because he writes her a cheque that bounces when his wife disappears with his entire fortune. And we meet Louise Monroe again, the police inspector from the previous book, and this all is a book about trauma, and violence, everyday brutality, domestic violence—and Atkinson even makes it funny, like all the books, which still doesn’t undermine the enormity of the message. Humour is how you make it bearable, I guess, and it helps that life is so absurd.
To reread a series of books so concerned with history is interesting, and the series also shows the changes occurring during the years they were written and take place. I will never forget my first trip to the UK post 2008 economic crash, how different it was, all the holes in the streets where the Woolworths had been—and Started Early, Took My Dog is situated in the wreckage of that moment, another kind of trauma. “The world was going to hell in a handcart…” The sex workers who used to do the job because of poverty, but now it’s because of addiction. Started Early… moves between the 1970s and 2010, and it’s a strange kind of nostalgia. It wasn’t that things were better then, but they were different, that’s all. This is a novel that’s about the fraying of the social fabric, but that’s not necessarily a contemporary story, and might be classic after all. There also have always been bad guys, and some things never change, which is why Jackson Brodie knows as much as as he does—when he’s not walking headlong into disaster.
(This novel is also the way I discovered Betty‘s, and made our first visit to the one in Ilkley in 2011, on the recommendation of Jackson Brodie himself… “If Britain had been run by Betty’s, it would never have succombed to economic Armageddon.”)
And then last week I reread Big Sky, not even a year after the first time, and I knew Reggie Chase this time, now a police inspector herself. And I loved it, just like I loved all of them—its furious, unabashed politics and strong sense of justice. And I loved too the way a few strands in the book that do not quite get tied up, which could suggest that perhaps there are more Jackson Brodie novels to come. A reader can hope…
Or else it’s just that these books, while precise in their composition, are also meant to mimic reality—rough, ragged, and untidy, but sometimes so sublime.
May 12, 2020
Gleanings
- Thrilling (read: meaningful, brave, productive) conversations between friends don’t require mountaintops or war zones—they thrive in deceptively placid settings, where restless hands brush aside crumbs while the worst of life’s torments are explored.
- Though the mulberry is technically invasive, and sometimes I resent the way it’s shaded out part of my garden, I still see the tree as a gift.
- This virus is teaching us a whole new vocabulary. Social distancing. Self isolation. Presumptive. COVID-19. I even had to dictate this new word into the dictionary of the voice recognition software I use to write. (New blog alert! By a BLOG SCHOOL GRAD, no less!)
- While we all remain a little concerned individually that our reading enthusiasm and tempo is not quite what it was (but hey, it’s never been a competition), our aggregate book list is still rich, formidable and gorgeous.
- When the pool re-opens, I’m not sure how I’ll feel.
- What matters even more for me is a cookbook about eating and sharing as much as it is about cooking.
- It’s been ten years since my mother died but I think of her daily.
- You are one great dame and each time I think of you I’m reminded that there is really no higher aspiration for a woman.
- Homemade tater tots, huh. Huh. I would not bother, personally.
- As this shut-in time wears on and wears me down, it helps to imagine doing a little more ‘square haunting’ of my own some day.
- One of the things I’m most grateful for in this life is the innocence, security and endless love of my childhood.
- This is one instance of a more general dilemma which radical political movements have often grappled with: should we choose our terms to reflect the world as it currently is, or the world as we would like it to become?
- You’ll have to write a new Covid edition of your book called The Artist’s Way: Watching The Great Canadian Baking Show Counts as Art when the Alternative is a Mental Breakdown.
- ‘I think I have forgotten what a street fully lit and all the other things that go with peace look like…’
- It felt like hope. The world was showing off and waking up and maybe that was the sign that she would, too.
- If you’re lucky, like me, and live near a forest full of shagbark hickory trees, it’s easy to make this wonderful, velvety, smoky, sweet syrup – a gift from the forest.
May 11, 2020
Starred Review for The Abortion Caravan
One thing I miss about those days in which we used to sit in cafes is the opportunity to flagrantly display the word “abortion” in public. A small act of resistance, but even better, I was reading an extraordinary book and my (starrred) review is now online at Quill & Quire.
Karin Wells’ book is a rich and vivid record of an event in Canadian history we all need to know better (where IS that Heritage Minute?) when a ragtag group of women travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa and shut down parliament in their protest against Canada’s unjust abortion laws, literally CHAINING THEMSELVES TO THE SEATS. (Women who worked in MPs’ offices forged them passes to the House of Commons.) It’s an incredible story and Wells tells it so well, tying the event to other activism sweeping North America at the time. (Wells speculates that the women weren’t arrested for their disruption because police were hyper conscious of optics, the Kent State killings having taken place the week before.) It’s such a good book! Read my review, and then read the book yourself. Buy a copy for your mom!
May 8, 2020
18 Ways That Living Through A Pandemic is ALSO Just Like Having a Baby
It’s been eleven years since the first time I had a baby, and in years since then, I have found that almost nothing is truly analogous to the experience. Until 2020, that is, notable for being the year I discovered not one but two analogies that were absolutely perfect. The first was when I got a sourdough starter back at the beginning of February, and I really wasn’t being facetious when I made the comparison—thought my approach was lighthearted, of course. But if I thought I was serious then, I’m really serious now, when we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s exactly the same, and now I am going to tell you why.
- The universe as we know it is shattered. Farewell to the distinctions between day and night, possible and not, our worst nightmares and reality. Between each day. There is grief and loss, and letting go of plans you made, the life you recognize, and the expectation of ground beneath your feet.
- There are no real answers, but in lieu of a world we recognize, and because we feel so vulnerable, we cling to dogma, signal virtue, and make up rituals to feel exempt from bad things ever happening to us.
- These rituals and signals become performative and are insufferably dull, and yet we share them on social media because we’re desperate for human connection.
- …but we’re also desperate for validation, to have all our biases and points of view confirmed, because anything otherwise only reminds us that the universe is shattered and that we’re all just clinging to life as we know it by the skin of our teeth,
- (Shhhh!)
- A person might wonder how a world could shrink so small.
- The ordinary world is rife with dangers we’d never considered before.
- If you look hard enough, you can find a doctor telling you what you want to hear. You will find that online community.
- Other people’s rituals and signals are anxiety-inducing and only underline that nobody really knows how to do this and we’re all making it up as we go.
- Everybody is getting snippy in Facebook threads.
- Obviously, there is not a lot a whole lot going on where you are.
- Nobody is getting enough sleep.
- Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like?
- I don’t remember signing up for this.
- But there are moments of light in the darkness, of grace. We’ve never had so much food dropped off on the porch, or received so many cards in the mail. We feel cut off from the world, and yet connected.
- We consider how the people with real problems must be faring, as we’ve been overwhelmed with fear and anxiety while sheltering safe at home.
- There are some days, sometimes, that seem almost normal.
- But that we’re still inside the storm makes it difficult to know whether or when it will ever be over.
And a hopeful addendum from my own experience, relevant if the analogy holds: one day it was.
May 7, 2020
Writers & Lovers, by Lily King
I was a bit wary of Writers & Lovers, by Lily King. I’d read her previous book, Euphoria, and I remember finding it a bit wanting (I am in the minority in this assessment), but then Maria Semple recommended this new novel on Instagram, and Maria Semple is a person I trust. I started reading it though, and thought: this is a novel that I’ve read before. The young woman who can’t get her life together, hold her liquor and whole makes terrible choices (see The Dud Avocado, Bridget Jones Diary) meets Lucky Jim, but for girls (and it’s different for girls) meets the MFA novel (any work of fiction that references Breadloaf, except for Ducks, Newburyport). “I just find it extraordinary that you think you have something to say,” our narrator is told on the second page, by the man who owns the property where Casey rents a potting shed that stinks of mould. She bakes cookies in a toaster oven, and almost everyone she ever knew who was a writer has gotten married and/or gone to law school. Casey is 31.
But I haven’t actually read this book before, unless you count Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse where Lily Briscoe realizes her vision. Is Casey a fool or not to believe that she can make it as a writer, that the struggle is worth it, six whole years on a novel that maybe nobody will ever read? She makes money waiting tables at a restaurant in Harvard Square, she’s up to her eyeballs in debt and regret and heartache, and desperately mourning the death of her mother. An older writer (a widow with two young children) invites her into his orbit, clearly with domestic intentions, and maybe this is the answer to all her problems, but there is also the other guy, the one with whom the spark is undeniable—but right before their first date, he took off across the country on his motorcycle.
I am unaccustomed to reading about a woman who is flawed and who takes her art seriously, and I am unaccustomed to art that treats such a woman seriously, instead of as the butt of a joke. The book begins in familiar territory but then takes its reader to unexpected places, to previously unexplored terrain. How do you know you’re going to make it, until you make it, and it reminded me of reading Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, the two of them starting out in their careers, writing to save their own lives. And there’s a lightness to the tone that is possibly deceptive, that any story that’s such a delight to behold must necessarily be less than profound. That any woman who fails to be a perfect candidate must necessarily fail to triumph.
I loved this book, set in 1997, back you had to look up literary agents in guides at the library, and spend your last dollars mailing out your manuscript to the lot of them. A book that, as I said, begins in familiar territory, the usual tropes—the douchebag writer guy who’ll break your heart, the writer waiting tables, the possibly creepy mentor, the writer friend with whom one is in unspoken competition. But this portrait of the artist as a no-longer-young woman does something different and novel with all of these pieces, which is why the story so comes alive on the page.
May 5, 2020
A Match Made for Murder, by Iona Whishaw
If you’ve ever wondered just how much they have to pay me to love the Lane Winslow mystery series as much as I do…the answer is nothing. And never has there been a series quite so easy to love, a series of books that has done wonders for my reputation as a person with good literary instincts, because everyone I recommend the series to loves them too, and that I get to receive a tiny bit of credit for that is marvellous luck. To have any kind of proximity to Lane Winslow is really a wondrous thing.
It never disappoints, this series, whose seventh installment is A Match Made For Murder, and Iona Whishaw has taken her heroine and her new husband on honeymoon to Tucson, Arizona. But first I’ll catch you up a bit, if you’re new to King’s Cove, the small village outside of Nelson, BC, where Lane Winslow—young, brilliant, beautiful, looking for a quiet life after spending WW2 spying for the British—retires in search of a quieter life, but she’s just got this knack for stumbling over bodies. Which brings her close to the handsome Inspector Darling—although in the first book, he’s arresting her on suspicion of murder. All that’s sorted out now, however, and the wedding has finally happened. On her honeymoon, at least, will Lane finally get the rest and relaxation she’s been seeking for the past two years?
But just while Lane is settled onto a lounge chair by the pool, reading a book (Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers, naturally!), a shot rings out, and it won’t be the last one fired before the book is over. It turns out that Lane and Darling are surrounded by couples with complicated arrangements, mob connections, and possibly murderous intentions. Meanwhile, back in King’s Cove, Ames is left to unravel a curious case involving a dead man whose reputation for interfering with teenage girls goes back at least a decade, and when the woman he fancies turns out to have a connection to him, he struggles to retain his impartiality.
As always with Whishaw’s books, the novel is a delight, charming and funny, cozy and enveloping—by page 7, there are already scones. It’s also a wonderful literary homage to the classics of detective fiction, and I love that Nelson, BC, comes with its very own Baker Street. But coziness is not even the half of it—the series takes on race and racism (in this latest book, Nelson has its first Black police officer and Ames comes to understand that he gets to be regarded as an individual, while his colleague is forever representing an entire race), and misogyny, rape and spousal abuse all factor in this story, which is strongly concerned with the enormous power that men had at the time (and still have now) to control the women in their lives, and also with their sense of entitlement to that control. It’s an idea that is present in both Lane and Darling’s minds as they contemplate how their relationship might be different now that they are married—but then neither of them has ever had much taste for convention.
Lane Winslow, of course, will be keeping her name.
And here is Iona Whishaw reading from her new novel as part of 49thShelfLAUNCHPAD.
May 5, 2020
Gleanings
- We’re adapting. We didn’t want to. I’d rather be swimming…
- At this threshold, in this, our most vulnerable moment yet, can we find in our heart, our soul the empathy, the compassion and the kindness that is needed so badly?
- The pandemic might turn us all into birders.
- Pandemics actually “unfold in slow motion,” he says, and “there’s no event that changes the whole landscape on a dime.” But it feels that way, because of how relentlessly we quest for updates.
- We are living through unusual circumstances, and you are not obligated to do anything extra right now. But if a complete dinner on a single pan appeals, this one is pretty easy, and easy to adapt.
- I kinda want to say, “this week’s cake is…” but it is only Tuesday and there are five of us so half the cake is already gone.
- I’m not yet mourning or grieving the closure of the library. I guess I’m busy looking to the future of libraries.
- walking where no one walks
- From the very beginning, This Ain’t was familiar and it was all Hamilton.
- There, the sum of my sourdough expertise–it’s honestly not very much but has allowed me to cruise through many years of bread-making with much pleasure and little stress.
- I don’t want to leave my characters on the brink — maybe one or two, if they deserve it, but for at least some of them, I want church bells, or trumpets, or the Rocky theme song.
- The clouds have blown on, the sun is shining, it is 18°C and, at long last, it does seem as if we are in the opening stretch of an Ontario springtime in a year when optimism is utterly essential.
- However, if we can exercise our imagination and envision possibilities for the future, if we can live in a better future for even a few minutes in our minds, it is far likelier that we will experience hope and a belief in a better world.
- She gave me my love of reading which I treasure above most things in my life.
- Now I know, I know, you’re really not supposed to pick them but we have to cut ourselves some slack right now and I think the hedgerows can cope.
- I’m not sure they’ll function as vases. Or anything, for that matter. But I plan on glazing and firing them, anyway. We’ve come so far.
- Where on the map’s contours is the place where a woman paused to consider the beauty of the morning?
- She’s too smart and too artful a novelist to have left in anything that didn’t serve her purpose as she understood it, and she’s the kind of writer (meticulous, deliberate) who has earned my trust. That, arguably, shifts the burden to me: if the novel seemed too long to me, what was I missing?
