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bukes #50-#51
Aug. 27th, 2009 12:04 pmLife's a bit helterskelter at the moment, and so I've been getting 'way behind in my self-imposed task (raison d'etre now long forgotten) of making notes here about books I've been reading. Here comes, though, a couple off the top of the heap:
book #50: The Chalk Circle Man (1996; trans 2009 by Sian Reynolds) by Fred Vargas
I hadn't heard of Fred Vargas or her Commissaire Adamsberg novels until I read that this one had won the International Dagger, and that indeed Vargas had won it several times before with other Adamsberg novels. Which was pretty perplexing, as this is the first in the series . . .
The Daggers are awarded for the year of English-language appearance, it transpires. The mystery remains, unsolved by me, of why the books' UK and US publishers chose to translate later volumes before getting round to the first. Answers on a postcard, please.
Anyway: the police detective Commissaire Adamsberg has recently arrived in Paris from the sticks to head up the 5th arrondissement. His subordinates are still at the uneasy stage of not knowing quite how everything is going to fit together under the new boss -- all except one, his alcoholic single-parent sidekick Danglard. They make an likely pair, since Adamsberg seems to decline to do anything so crass as actual detection while Danglard has, as it were, only narrow windows of opportunity between hangover and renewed insobriety. Clearly, though, they're effective, as they prove in this case. Mysterious blue chalked circles have been turning up during the night on the Paris sidewalks, each circle with a random object placed in its centre -- as if some crazed artist were presenting objets trouvés for the world to admire. The work of a madman but, everyone except Adamsberg assumes, a harmless madman. Then this first chalk-circumscribed body turns up . . .
People have been hailing Vargas as a genius, which is not so much overegging the pudding as turning it into a souffle, but this book is certainly a joy to read and I'll be keeping an eye out for its fellows. It took me a little while to work out what its atmosphere reminded me of: imagine, if you will, the result if James Branch Cabell had written Georges Simenon's novels. Here's an example of the near-surreality popping briefly into view that for the most part seems to lurk somewhere just to the edge of the words themselves:
Danglard would say to himself [about his boss, Adamsberg]: "If I were to announce to him now that a giant fungus was about to engulf the Earth and squeeze it to the size of a grapefruit, he wouldn't give a damn. And that would be a pretty serious matter -- not room for many people on a grapefruit. As anyone can see."
You'll gather that The Chalk Circle Man in no way accords with the templates anglophone publishers tend to impose on the crime/mystery novel. There's nothing really wrong with those templates, of course, except for the fact that they are templates: finding a mystery that follows such a bubblingly different pattern is like finding a glass of cold, refreshing water where all others are lukewarm. Thank heaven the current fashion for translated European detective fiction is bringing us a far wider range of voices than we could have found just a few years ago.
book #51: Drood (2009) by Dan Simmons
With his career at the height of its success, Charles Dickens is travelling on a train with his paramour Ellen Ternan and her mother when there's a horrific accident. The three companions survive, but many do not. As Dickens moves among the scattered bodies of the dead and wounded, doing his best to help, he encounters for the first time the sinister figure of Edwin Drood, a seemingly semi-supernatural creature of unsurpassed ugliness and perhaps evil. Dickens become obsessed by the figure, and remains so through a series of wild and often terrifying adventures until the end of his life.
At least, so we are told by the narrator of this enormous and complexly plotted novel, Dickens's friend and colleague Wilkie Collins. As time goes on, though, we begin to realize that not only is this book not so much about Dickens as about Collins himself but also that Collins is an extraordinarily unreliable narrator. In part this is because of the opium addiction that's slowly but surely destroying him -- not only can he misinterpret reality but even when sober his view of life is coloured by petty fancies and paranoias -- and in significant other part it's because the stress of having to conduct a literary career that's forever in the shadow of his supposed mentor, a giant of world literature, can all too easily lead him to cast a light upon events that need not be the true one. In the early adventures involving Dickens and Drood, the most powerfully atmospheric of which involves an Orpheus-like foray into a subterranean underworld -- a network of caves and abandoned ossuaries beneath London -- Collins is the Watson to Dickens's Holmes, yet he's a Watson whose loyalty is singularly fragile, being crossed all too often by lightning-flashes of sheer envious hatred. By all accounts Dickens actually was an overweening pain in the ass to be around, so much of Collins's transient loathing is quite understandable; the rest, of course, seems largely to come out of a laudanum bottle.
Simmons's conceit is that this is a supposed Collins memoir written as a Collins novel, and he makes an astonishingly good fist of it. It's at least five or six years since last I read a Collins novel (I read most of them in my early 20s, and have since occasionally filled in a gap or reread one), but this seems to be his voice speaking from the pages. From time to time there are lapses, and they're all the more jarring because of the success the illusion has the vast majority of the time. I did wonder if some of the glitches might have been done in conscious imitation of Collins's style, but I can't remember Collins being guilty of such sins as endemic word/phrase repetitions, spelling errors (e.g., "honourary", seemingly a US attempt at anglicization) and grammatical errors (e.g., "from whence"). And I don't remember him committing such textual uglinesses as page 141, para 2. There also seem to me to be some anachronisms, some in usage -- like "wog" and (in this sense) "knackered" -- and some in portrayed fact: I may be wrong, but I believe the carriages in British passenger trains at the time were split up into discrete compartments rather than filled with airliner-style seats like their modern counterparts.
I seem to be making a big deal out of what are, even taken all together, just trivial irritations. Drood is really a quite remarkable feat, and I'd recommend it without hesitation. Although it is as noted a gigantic book, I never once felt tempted to abandon it. Nuff said.
