One book leads to another: Half-Breed, The One and a Half Men, The Northwest is Our Mother

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people

The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s

Half-Breed by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman

OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).

One book leads to another: Half Breed by Maria Campbell leads to The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin leads to The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet

First I re-read Half Breed.

I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon.  Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend.  Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time.  Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.

What did I think of Half Breed on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication?  First, how the book still resonates in so many ways.  The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s.  Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years.  Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada.  Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.

Campbell overcame.  She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s.  In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.

So, how did this book lead me to One and a Half Men?  When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris.  She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine).  It made me curious.  I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered One and a Half Men, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.

Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine.  But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.

One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin

My initial reaction:  Wow.  What an amazing book.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read One and a Half Men.  It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world.  It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.

But writing One and a Half Men was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta.   Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady.  Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.

This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society.  You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves.  More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.

Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet to see how.  But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would.  

 * The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre.  Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet

In her introduction to One and a Half Men Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story.  

After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction.  

Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people.  

What does this mean?

The Northwest is our Mother is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis.  One example:  the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century.  Why?  This is not a particularly notable event!  But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins.  Another example:  Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche.  She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada.  A final example:  Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta.  In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.

But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking.  She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations.  She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are. 

Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes about Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history.  He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer.   Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human: 

"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"

And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost.  Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember.  They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.

The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).

So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's.  Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember,  her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are.  Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis.  

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

It's absurd to write a critical review of a book that has endured for more than 1500 years.  It's even more absurd to do so without finishing that book, especially given how short it is (163 small pages in the edition I picked up from my closest little free library).

But I just can't.

Meditations is a foundational work of Stoicism, written by the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD.  The very fact that this text still exists after all this time is a testament to the wisdom that generations of readers have found in its words. 

But when Aurelius writes of accepting whatever life gives you with a quiet mind because it is what Nature has allotted to you, I can't help reflecting how much easier it would have been to do so as the adopted son of an emperor, and then emperor yourself than it would have been to do so as one of his own slaves. When Aurelius rates the "womanish" sins of desire (sins that are pleasurable) as worse than the (more manly) sins of passion (involuntary loss of control), I reflect first on the misogyny of calling such sins feminine, and then on how sins of desire primarily hurt the sinner while sins of passion like 'striking out in anger' hurt others.   And then there's the irony of the passages that speak of the futility of seeking lasting fame.  :-)  

This isn't a book that speaks to me, even if I could learn from the Meditations on procrastination, keeping an even keel, and the other lessons that I haven't yet read (and probably never will).

What have I been reading?

I just realized that I haven't blogged in a couple of months. Here's a few of the books I've read recently: 

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

I got this one for Christmas and tackled it mostly to be completist. I'm glad I did. Mantel writes wonderfully well, of course, and there was something satisfying about seeing Cromwell's story to its tragic conclusion. 

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

This book is yet another example of why I should overcome my baseline prejudice against literary fiction.   It's the first person  life story of an unreliable narrator, with a closing twist that makes you want to turn back to the first page to understand everything that went before.  Given that it's a novella, I should probably do that, even though the book definitely falls into my literary novel stereotype of being 'about the boring struggles of boring middle class people'.

The Duke of Uranium by John Barnes

Was there really a market for a Heinlein juvenile in the year 2002?  I was surprised (and disappointed) by this book after reading Barnes' Orbital Resonance, The Sky so Big and Black, and Candle. 

Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham

A surprising number of Golden Age mysteries are well worth reading.  Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Josephine Tey's books are all still entertaining reads. And then there's Margery Allingham.   Maybe she wrote better books than Dancers in Mourning?  This one wouldn't convince me to read more of her back catalogue.

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

 My last entry was about time travel novels.  This book IS time travel.

In 1933, an 18 year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Netherlands to Constantinople, beginning his journey by more-or-less following the Danube River across central Europe.  More than 40 years later, in 1977, he began publishing an account of this journey. A time of gifts is the first volume, telling the story of his journey as far as the border of Hungary.

Although the book was actually written in the 1970s, it takes you immediately back to 1933: the 1933 of inherited privilege, the weight of English and European history, actual Nazis, lost marshes full of birds and frogs, and lost villages surrounded by Romas and occupied by studious Jews, friendly peasants, and faded but welcoming aristocrats.

Fermor was the son of a senior official in the Indian colonial government, expelled from a succession British Public Schools before spending a long year of intensive private tutoring meant to prepare him for entry to Sandhurst (and thus a career in the military).  A time of gifts reflects this privileged background: Latin and French phrases are not translated -- everyone reads Latin and French, surely? -- obscure bits of British history are taken as given (everyone knows the romantic story of Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, no?), and it is only natural that one should be taken up by the smart young set in Vienna, or that the British consul in Munich would spot you 5 pounds when a misfortune deprives you of all of your funds -- your father is Someone after all, and one one does what one can.

In other words, A time of gifts captures in words a world that has vanished, in the style of the era that it describes.  It's a well-loved book that's considered a classic of travel literature, or at least, it's a classic young man's adventure story.

It's not a book that I loved.  In the words of a couple of GoodReads reviews "It’s windy, self-satisfied, lifeless, and dry" or "It was meandering and musing and fascinated, all without actually being interesting". Not for me: witnessed by the fact that I began this review 7 months ago, and then completely forgot to finish.

Northhanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Yes, of course I've read Northanger Abbey before.  But I ran across an omnibus edition of Northanger Abbey that includes Lady Susan and Sanditon, and thought it might be interesting to read Jane Austen's juvenilia and unfinished last work, respectively.

I started with Northanger Abbey.

What struck me on this reading is how much Northanger Abbey reminded me of a Georgette Heyer novel.

Why?  The book focuses on a young heroine making her debut in the world, as so many Heyer books do, and Northanger Abbey takes place in Bath, the scene of so many Heyer novels. But the greatest similarity is that this is a light book, written to provide amusement.  The heroine of Northanger Abbey faces no life-altering stakes.  Her immediate happiness is very often at risk, as is her social comfort.  At one crisis point, she is humiliatingly embarrassed by her own lapse of judgement -- but she learns from it, and becomes closer to the friend who provides her with guidance.  Even the climax of the novel, where she is thrown out of the Tilbury's house and forced to make her own way home, unprotected and uncertain even of how to get there...passes without serious threat.  Catherine Morland makes her way safely back to her family. And just as in a Heyer novel, the climax of Northanger Abbey is quickly succeeded by our heroine's marriage to her worthy and much-loved suitor.

This lack of stakes is in sharp contrast to Austen's more mature works.  When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr. Collins, she is putting both her own future and the future of her sisters and mother at jeopardy. Elizabeth's only hope is a good marriage, but the neighbourhood has a paucity of eligible gentlemen and she and the other girls have only their looks and their characters to recommend them -- which is very little in a world where property is the primary requirement for belonging to the class that they were born into.  In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price lives as an undervalued poor relation -- but in much greater comfort and with much greater gentility than is possible for her mother and younger siblings, who suffer from their mother's improvident marriage.  Not to mention that the book features the utter ruination of Maria Norris, who marries for money but then falls into scandal when she afterwards falls for the fickle and irresponsible Henry Crawford.

Northanger Abbey is the book of a young woman, full of high spirits, who is amusing herself with her writings and aims to amuse her readers too.  The book not infrequently "breaks the fourth wall" when the author speaks directly to her readers with asides about the value of novels, or the happy fate of her protagonist.

Heyer doesn't explicitly do the amusing asides -- although she delights in showing her characters in a charming and yes, amusing light -- but almost all of her books very much feel like this one.

Comparing Austen to Heyer is of course absurd -- Heyer wrote in imitation of Austen.  But after re-reading Northanger Abbey, it seems that in particular Heyer wrote in imitation of Northanger Abbey, as well as in imitation of the types of melodrama that Austen satirizes here.

Summer will show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Pages: 329
Published: 1936

This is an odd novel.

It does some things very well.  I'm not sure I've ever read anything that seems to capture so well the experience of living through momentous events.  As you live your life, you don't necessarily know that you're living through something that history will regard as significant.  And as the experience drags on, day by day, week by week, month by month...well, you have to eat, and get dressed, and be hungry or bored just as you would if History weren't happening. Your friends will still misunderstand you, your ex-husband might still betray you for the most personal of reasons.  And the fact that you're literally part of a Communist plot might not feel as important to you as your lover's life or happiness.

Some parts of the characterizations are also skilful.  The entire first section of the book captures in a very plausible way the interior life of an upper class British woman of the mid-19th century.  Mrs Willoughby of Blandameer is both focused on perfectly meeting the obligations of raising her children and of managing her estate, and is impatient with them.  The doctor's wife is a mouse who is fiercely, secretly opposed to meddling in her neighbour's life. The lime kiln keeper is equally indifferent to the expectations and the griefs of his mistress.

And yet, the novel does some things so badly.  It's disjointed:  there are jumps in time that don't really make sense.  The fatal, compelling attraction of the main character to her ex-husband's mistress Minna isn't well drawn, and the previous mutual attraction between the ex-husband and Minna seems implausible once you meet both characters. It also assumes things you may not be familiar with:  if you don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 you might not realize that the characters are in the midst of them, and the ending of the novel will not have the same resonance if you don't recognize that Sophie is reading the Communist Manifesto.

I picked this up at the library, initially thinking that it was an imprint of the Virago Press. Instead it's a similar 'lost classics' imprint from the New York Review of Books.  It has a similar interest:  in the moment, it is impossible to tell which books will be thought to be important by a later era.  And yet, the books that "don't last", that aren't characterized as "classics", and that don't join the "canon"....can still be interesting reads.  This is one of them.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart is brief, but in 209 pages it brilliantly invokes the traditional village life and spiritual beliefs of the Igbo, then shows their swift unwinding at the hands of missionaries and the colonial administration of Nigeria. 

It's no wonder that this book is considered The classic work of African fiction.  Things Fall Apart was written by an Igbo and is told from an Igbo perspective.  The book centres African experience and challenges the colonial narrative of "exploration", "conquest",  or "savages and civilization" by showing the complex social, political, religious, and cultural traditions that were disrupted by the introduction of alien traditions -- literally at the point of a gun. 

It's hard to imagine how radical it must have felt to read this book when it was published in 1957.   Things Fall Apart helped spark an African literature as one nation after another gained independence through the 1950s and 1960s, and writer after writer starting telling their own stories. 

Ironically, part of the power and influence of the book undoubtedly came from its colonial influences:   Things Fall Apart was written in English, giving it an inherently larger audience.  It also follows a very conventional Western narrative structure -- the novel tells of the rise and fall of an exceptional man (Okonkwe) using an impersonal 3rd person narrator -- making its unfamiliar perspective more approachable for Western audiences and for those educated under colonial systems across Africa.

Both of these decisions make sense: according to Achebe, written Igbo is itself a product of colonialism.  The missionary who decided how to transcribe the language into written form decided that written Igbo should be the 'average' of all of the different dialects -- so written Igbo does not reflect how anyone speaks or understands the language anyway.   And as a student of English literature, it makes sense that Achebe turned to a colonial narrative form to tell a story from the history of his people.

But I wonder what Things Fall Apart might have been like if Achebe had instead followed more closely the model of the stories told at the firesides of his ancestors:  the masculine stories of the land,  full of violence and bloodshed, or the feminine stories like that of the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged the whole world to a wrestling contest, and was finally thrown by the cat.....wait a minute!  In his youth, Okonkwe challenges the whole world to a wrestling contest and triumphs by throwing the reigning champion, Cat.... Maybe there's more going on in this novel than meets the Western eye.

I was out of town for the book club meeting where Things Fall Apart was discussed.  I wish I could have benefited from the insights of my fellow readers.

The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

I found this a challenging book to read.  Not because it was unconventionally written, or had disturbing subject matter, or because it was poorly written.  Rather the contrary, actually.

It is the story of a Sicilian nobleman and his family, as they traverse a few crucial days and weeks of their lives in the 1860s and beyond.  It is a beautifully written and psychologically astute elegy for a lost way of life,  in a society and in a landscape that seemed like it could never change.

My problem with the book? Mostly that I am fundamentally not that interested in elegies to aristocracy.  Unlike the author, the actual last Prince of Lampedusa, I come from solid peasant stock on both sides of my family, and tend to look forward rather than back.

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

Pages: 300
Published: 1949

I've read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Josephine Tey:

• Daughter of Time
• To love and be wise

But not every classic book is worth reading, not even if the author generally amuses. Perhaps it was just my mood, but this book grated. 

I suppose that for a class system to survive, the people who benefit from it need to believe that it's justified.  

The heroines of this piece are a wrongly-accused pair of spinsters: a mother and daughter of good family but limited means.  Their case is taken up by a middle-aged lawyer, who succumbs to the appeal that he should help them, not because of his expertise, but because he's "one of the right sort", that is, of the right class.  The villain comes from a lower class, and is in fact adopted.  Upon investigation, we learn that the villain's mother was of poor character.  It all makes perfect sense: after all, bad blood will out. 

There's more, much more.  Including the interesting fact that you can always tell a murderer, because they inevitably have their eyes set slightly asymmetrically in their sockets.  But I draw a veil over the rest of the book.  I think you get the idea.

The actual mystery is somewhat novel, and is apparently based on an historical event:  it deals with an accusation of kidnapping, and the suspense involved is the attempt of the investigator to clear the afore-mentioned polite spinster and her mother.  The suspense would be greater if there were any suspicion that they weren't -- OF COURSE-- innocent, given their social class.

The only part that made me laugh was the heartfelt question of the struggling spinster, trying to clear her name.  "What do people do who have no money?"  she asks, as she struggles to pay the expenses involved with the investigation.  The question is meant to elicit sympathy. 

But the answer is that they are convicted both by the courts and by public opinion.  No one reaches out to help them, and no one believes them, as the country lawyer believes the spinster.  Those with no money at all are obviously inherently criminal.

Claudine at School by Colette

Started: 12 July
Finished: 25 July
Pages: 187

I first read Colette when took a class in 20th Century French Literature in translation, offered by the French department at the University of Saskatchewan back in the 1980s.  I think that must be why I picked up a second-hand copy of The Claudine Novels at some point, and why I finally pulled it down off the shelf earlier this month when I was looking for something to read.

More or less by coincidence, I also started reading A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollestonecraft and a book of SF short stories by Judith Merrill at almost the same time.  Claudine at School was written in the 1890s, Vindications was written about a hundred years earlier in 1792, while the Judith Merrill short stories were written between the late 1940s and the 1970s. All three are by and about middle class women.

I feel a bit as if I'm starting a "compare and contrast" essay.  But perhaps I'll desist, given that I haven't yet finished Vindications or the Merrill stories, and it's been more than 25 years since I wrote my last literary essay.  I will say that reading the three books together felt a bit like time travel: as I write about the other books perhaps I'll pull a bit of commentary together.

Of the books, Collette's is not self-consciously a commentary on women and women's lives.  This is her first novel, written as a very young married woman, to please a demanding older husband who eventually got the book published under his own name.  Her later novels explore women's lives, but this one simply describes the life of a teenaged girl attending her local village school.

Claudine at School is described as "charming" on Wikipedia and in its introduction.  And so it is.  It's  a slice of a lost time, set in a quiet village where a visit from a local politician is enough to justify an all day program of welcoming songs by schoolchildren dressed in their best clothes and speeches by local dignitaries. It's a time when girls from village families might get an education so that they could train as school teachers, girls from not-so-ambitous families might snatch kisses from boys in the forest, while girls from good families like Claudine might go to school solely to keep themselves amused while waiting for their lives to begin.  The book's not quaint:  the school girls and school teachers leap off the page as real, complicated, squabbling people.  And because the book was originally written as soft porn (Colette's husband kept nagging her to make the contents 'hot'), it reads as surprisingly modern.  (Lesbians, oh my.)

Would I recommend it?  Colette's later books, like The Captive are more interesting.  Claudine feels more like backstory, and a reminder of some of the ways that women's lives have changed (more opportunities), and have not changed (harassing male authority figures) over the last 100 plus years.

To love and be wise by Josephine Tey

June 2013
Pages: 223


This is my second mystery by Josephine Tey.  And like Daughter of Time, this one is hard to discuss without giving spoilers.    But if you enjoy classic British mystery fiction, read this one.  It both exemplifies and violates the conventions of the British country house mystery in an entertaining way.

And be a villain by Rex Stout

Started: Nov. 28, 2012

Finished: Dec. 3rd, 2012

Pages: 247

Rex Stout, like Ellery Queen, began his career during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction during the 1930s.  And be a villian was the 13th in the series that nominally starred the eccentric genius Nero Wolfe as its detective.  I say "nominally" because in fact Wolfe is only the costar: he provides the brains, but his confidential assistant Archie Goodwin provides the charm, brawn, and ingenuity necessary to corral clues for Wolfe.

The plot:  clever, as is usual in Golden Age fiction, and especially as is usual for a Nero Wolfe tale.  After all, why write a novel about a reclusive genius detective unless you're going to come up with a puzzler?   In this case Wolfe is prodded by Archie and the state of his finances to approach a radio star who has just had a dramatic on-air murder occur on her show.  Contrary to logic and fairness, the guest was NOT killed by the execrable beverage that they were drinking as a promotion...but by someone who managed to introduce poison into a single glass poured from a just-opened bottle in front of the host, several guests, and a studio audience.  Who did it?  How did they do it?  And did they mean to kill the seemingly innocuous guest at all or perhaps the host?

Read And be a villian to find out.  And see if you spot the same plot hole that troubled me.  :-)

Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian

Started: 16 Oct. 2012
Finished: 26 Oct. 2012
Pages:496

You do know Patrick O'Brian don't you?  The pull quote on the cover reads "The best historical novels ever written".   I suppose Hillary Mantel might quibble, but the quote dates from long before Wolf Hall or even Sandra Gulland's The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B, so we can allow The New York Times to be a little more definitive than later writers might choose to be.

This is book 2 of a 20 book series set during the Napoleonic Wars.  They're widely praised as the best naval adventures ever written, not the least because although our hero Jack Aubrey and his physician friend Stephen Maturin are entirely fictional, every battle is based on a real encounter as recorded in British naval records. And the battles are thrilling, even if your average reader can't understand the fine points of sailing and all the many details of ship's rigging that you encounter in a blow by blow account of battle.

But that's not what makes the books great.  You watch Jack being forced to dodge tipstaffs to prevent being thrown into debtor's prison.  You ride beside Stephen and Jack as they choose to overnight at an inn rather than travel roads plagued by out of work soldiers who've turned to highway robbery.   You read the letters rapidly dictated by a naval official resisting entreaties for ship assignments or promotions made by various nobles for their relatives and proteges.

O'Brian published the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the 1970s and 80s, but he makes you feel that he lived at the turn of the 19th century.  And that he's bringing you along for the ride.

The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

Begun: 27 June 2012
Finished: 14 July 2012
Pages: 462

I first read The Diviners as a teenager. At that time, there were two Margarets in Canadian literature, and Laurence seemed somehow the wiser and more eternal. It still feels that way.  Maybe because Laurence gets me in the gut every time.

The Diviners says something new to me every time I read it. As a teenager it was about the need to get away. In my twenties, the story of Morag and Jules spoke to me of the importance of enduring connection. Today I see the cost of all of the choices, the story of Canada told through the person of Pique (Scots and Metis), the power of story to shape our lives, and how where you are from makes you who you are.

And somehow that feels like just the start.

I wonder what I'll think when I reread it 10 years from now?

The French Powder Mystery by Ellery Queen

Started May 31
Finished June 3
Pages 316

Not all popular fiction ages well.   Ellery Queen isn't awful, but you can't help being aware that you're reading a book written in 1930. And, alas, not in a good way. Want your medical examiner to remove a bullet from the victim's heart at the actual crime scene, while simultaneously determining the bullet's angle of entry? Want a know-it-all detective hero who doesn't for a moment wonder about the guilt of one of the possible suspects because, after all, the fellow is the right sort and went to the same school as him?

If you're interested in classic American detective fiction, you're probably best off with Noir: Dashiell Hammet or Philip Chandler. If you're not in the mood for darkness, you can't beat Nero Wolfe.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Started: Feb. 13
Completed: Feb. 22nd
ebook
Pages: ~160

I've read Huckleberry Finn before, of course, but it would have been more than 30 years ago.  A couple of things brought the book back to mind and back on the mental "list":  the recent publication of Twain's unexpurgated autobiography, and the recent controversy about publishing a version of Huck Finn that doesn't contain the word "n*****".

Huckleberry Finn didn't make a big impression on me when I read it as a kid.  For one thing, I've never been fond of books written in dialect. For another, it's a very "boyish" book on the surface, full of picaresque adventures that I found difficult to identify with.

But on rereading, the satire that was invisible to my childhood self is the most notable part of the book.  And the slave narratives I've read since then (most recently the Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill) gives a poignancy and urgency to Jim's plight that I couldn't understand in the same way back then.

Okay, now I get it.