Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" is a Perfect Novel

Le Carre's A Perfect Spy is, I hazard to claim, a perfect novel.  It carries the adult thesis that the crucial shapings of character are emotional rather than rational, and it dramatizes such a range of humanity, such a range of response, in its pages.  I recently reread this novel -- while traveling in Germany, Austria, and Swizterland, very appropriately -- that I heartily endorse and recommend, and for some the trappings of espionage will be a feature, but I hope for others it will only be a mere distraction.

Le Carre's novel is both an excellent spy novel and a classic work of literature precisely because Le Carre is such a good watcher of humanity and such a good reporter of humane responses.  It's a thriller too.

Here's a passage that matters:

As for Pym, he was gazing on the glories of the kingdom he had dreamed of so long.  The German muse had no particular draw for him, then or later, for all his loud enthusiasm.  If she had been Chinese or Polish or Indian, it would have made no earthly odds.  The point was, she supplied Pym with the means, for the first time, to regard himself intellectually as a gentleman.  And for that Pym was eternally grateful to her.

As a first generation college student, I connect with this passage.  Studying English Literature at UC Berkeley enabled me to regard myself, intellectually, as a gentleman.  And that mattered.

Don Winslow's "The Border"

Winslow's new novel The Border picks up the storyline from The Power of the Dog and The Cartel, carrying the reader through the whole War on Drugs in a well-researched and well-imagined fashion.  This is high level novel-writing in the best sense, by which I mean that Winslow creates compelling characters even as he presents very deeply researched truths about human actions and societal developments that speak to the worst and best of humanity, often the worst.  Still, reading The Border has made me wanting to be better, to act better, to speak better about what needs to be said, and to vote better, for voting and holding our elected representives accountable is at the heart of this novel.

Dumas' The Three Musketeers (novel and films)

My favorite version--after reading Alexandre Dumas' classic novel The Three Musketeers--to watch: Richard Lester's version (scripted by the author of the Flashman novels!)--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-LfUtHnEBY

But then you'll also need to watch Richard Lester's sequel (though part of the original French novel):
The Four Musketeers--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMhwGUGNuxI

"The Other Worlds": Life's Largest Riddle

The Other Worlds is an excellent mythopoeic novel by a dear friend, Christoph Greger.  Christoph's own humble way of introducing the book to the world is worth quoting: "Hey all you cystic fibrosis lit fans, Ren fair geeks, and/or mythopoeic/modernist bildungsroman junkies -- here's something that might be of interest."

This fine novel deserves deep interest, presenting classic character-in-crisis; entertaining and evoking in the tradition of Yeats, Morris, Dunsany, de Lint, and Windling; and offering entry into multiple worlds, this one we share and those others 'beyond the fields we know'.  The setting and the style are distinctly contemporary; the themes and dilemmas, definitely timeless.  Life's largest riddle--mortality--met by mystery, measured by memory, and beset--or aided?--by magic waits at the heart of The Other Worlds.

Read this book.

Annotation From The Back Page

Rereading the last section of David Corbett's The Mercy of the Night helped me to realize -- to remember -- the integrity of the reader and of independent / literary thought -- and how THAT was salvation, was refuge, whatever, in the chaos of my home life while growing up.

You have to --you get to -- you must -- figure it all out for yourself, like everyone else, and those absolutes set you free.

Reading properly sets you free. You have to earn it, but who expects freedom to come cheaply?

--Thoughts on finishing The Mercy of the Night -- 1/5/16

Steinbeck's Opening Invocation: Cannery Row

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.  Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing.
. . . .
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive?  When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under touch.  You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water.  And perhaps that might be the way to write this book – to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.

--John Steinbeck
from his novel Cannery Row 
(first and last paragraphs of Ch. 1)

Lindholm's "Wizard of the Pigeons"

Megan Lindholm's 1984 novel Wizard of the Pigeons is a novel that combines street grit and magical realism, urban fantasy and PTSD, with all the respect, wonder, and empathy in the world.

Recommended Reading: Nicola Griffith's "Hild"

A new and quite fine historical novel about 7th-century England and a very remarkable character.

Prepping For Class

Kem Nunn's first novel, Tapping the Source; Bushmills; and the Eelfish.

In between chapters, I'm contemplating Point Molate and a quick kayak-run in the Bay this weekend.

Required Reading, Say I

A Novel Mirror

"The Antiquary was, indeed, uncommonly delighted; for, like many other men who spend their lives in obscure literary research, he had a secret ambition to appear in print, which was checked by cold fits of diffidence, fear of criticism, and habits of indolence and procrastination."

--Sir Walter Scott, from his novel The Antiquary.

Study Break Is Over

"The Way of the Scholar"

Here's a quick passage from Sarah Caudwell's mystery novel Thus Was Adonis Murdered:

"On my first day in London I made an early start.  Reaching the Public Records Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers needed for my research and settled into my place.  I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time.  When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment."

John Buchan: "A Barndoor Fowl"?

Here are two paragraphs from the very end of the first chapter --"Lost Gods"-- of John Buchan's The Island of Sheep, published in 1936, that I'm finding resonant.  Richard Hannay, of The Thirty-Nine Steps, is our narrator, and he's reached his fifties . . . .


I continued my journey -- I was going down t the Solent to see about laying up my boat, for I had lately taken to a mild sort of yachting -- in an odd frame of mind.  I experienced what was rare with me -- a considerable dissatisfaction with life.  Lombard had been absorbed into the great, solid, complacent middle class which he had once despised, and was apparently happy with it.  The man whom I had thought of as a young eagle was content to be a barndoor fowl.  Well, if he was satisfied, it was no business of mine, but I had a dreary sense of the fragility of hopes and dreams.

It was about myself that I felt most dismally.  Lombard's youth had gone, but so had my own.  Lombard was settled like Moab on his lees, but so was I.  We all make pictures of ourselves that we try to live up to, and mine had always been of somebody hard and taut who could preserve to the last day of life a decent vigour of spirit.  Well, I had kept my body in fair training by exercise, but I realized that my soul was in danger of fatty degeneration.  I was too comfortable.  I had all the blessings a man can have, but I wasn't earning them.  I tried to tell myself that I deserved a little peace and quiet, but I got no good from that reflection, for it meant that I had accepted old age.  What were my hobbies and my easy days but the consolations of senility?  I looked at my face in the mirror in the carriage back, and it disgusted me, for it reminded me of my recent companions who had pattered about golf.  Then I became angry with myself.  'You are a fool,' I said.  'You are becoming soft and elderly, which is the law of life, and you haven't the grit to grow old cheerfully.'  That put a stopper on my complaints, but it left me dejected and only half convinced.

--John Buchan, The Island of Sheep

William Gibson: "A Walking Shadow"

At the moment, there are two particularly resonating pieces in William Gibson's 1999 cyberpunk novel All Tomorrow's Parties that I would like to share.  I'm also thinking -- or feeling, perhaps, as Laney might -- there's an echo of a few famous lines* from Shakespeare's Macbeth in Gibson's title.  Maybe that's just me.

In the first passage that I'd like to quote, I think Gibson provides a somewhat humorous self-portrait in his description of this particular character, a very adept killer.  I haven't done any kind of research to see if such is common knowledge, at least among those who know, but when I look at the author photo from 1999 (and consider Gibson's look over the years), I do see something a bit autobiographical in the passage.  Consider:

     But he does not draw [the knife] now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial, in a goat of grayish green, the color of certain lichens, who blinks behind the fine gold rims of his small round glasses and raises his hand to halt a passing cab.  Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own, and the man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile.  They do not see him smile.


In the second passage, we get what I would consider an apt insight into tools, whether a knife (as in the novel) or in the handouts and prompts I make more or less everyday.   (I'm not eschewing focus or direction or precise utility for the students, not at all; still, the "handles" -- the ways I may manipulate and use those handouts and prompts -- ought to be "simple" to afford "the greatest range of possibilities".)  Imagine the handle of a knife from the kitchen: plain, streamlined, straight in design, I'm guessing.  Now imagine one of those knife handles shaped specifically with finger grooves, shaped to be held in only one way; that second knife affords a very firm grip, but only in one position, yes?  And therefore, the utility of the knife is limited, prescibed, overly-shaped.  Not the kitchen knife, though, as you can shift your grip to suit the particular job at hand.  All that's part of the meaning I find in the passage from Gibson below.

I love finding the truth in as many disparate places as possible. Consider:

     The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. 
     That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

--from William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties


*Those lines from Macbeth, from the character Macbeth himself in the last act just after he hears that his wife, the queen, has died:

She should have died hereafter,
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.  Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more.  It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Why Wouldn't You?

Read, read, read.  

P.S.  The second International Dorothy Dunnett Day will be this November 10, 2012.  For details, consider this link, please.  

Dunnett's Macbeth: Thorfinn of Orkney -- A Favorite Passage

Here's a favorite passage from Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter, a novel about the historical Macbeth: Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney, King of Scotia.  Frankly, Dunnett's King Hereafter is one of my Top Ten Novels of All Time, but that's an idiosyncratic list.  Still.

Here, we get a crucial insight into the "secret of [Thorfinn's] success", but even as Dunnett provides Thorkel Fostri's bitter assessment, she also provides Tuathal's reflections on what Thorkel says, making a simple statement complex in the best ways.  I end up appreciating the insight into the main character, even as I feel for Thorkel's frustration year after year.  (And yet Thorkel deserves some of that frustration . . . and if you've read the novel, I'll bet you'd agree.  "Year after year" refers both to Thorkel's relationship over time with Thorfinn and to my yearly rereadings.)  There are worthy ponderings possible here: about leadership, about problem-solving, and about reciprocity and the mysteries of connection and admiration.

I'm putting Dunnett's passage below the photo of knife and novel.  (The point of view, here, is that of Tuathal, Prior of St. Serf's, as the POV shifts throughout the novel, usefully so.)

Did [Earl Siward of York] regret his exile?  Had he envied Kalv, turning his coat so adroitly over and over, and at least buying back some years at Egge?

'Envy?  He despised Kalv.  Kalv was a fool,' Thorkel had said.  'There was only one man he envied.'

'He hated Thorfinn?  Always?  I suppose he must have done,' Tuathal had said, thinking aloud.  'Or the Lady Emma would never have risked making Siward her buffer between the rest of England and Scotia.  But then, what if Siward had tried to take over Scotia?'

'Twelve years ago?  Against Thorfinn's manpower, and his money, and his fleet?  Even with England and Denmark behind him,' had said Thorkel Fostri with scorn, 'I doubt if he would have got a levy over the Forth.  And England wouldn't have backed him.  Magnus had Norway then, remember, and half a foot in Orkney already through Thorfinn's nephew Rognvald.  England would rather have had Thorfinn in Scotia, I can tell you, than Siward or Norway.'

And that, thought Tuathal, was still true.  Despite Thorfinn's present weakness, it was still, thank God, true.  He had said, 'And Thorfinn?  He's used to dealing with princes these days.  Does he resent being forced to barter with someone . . . '

He had paused, having caught Eochaid's eye, to rephrase the question, but Thorkel Fostri's voice, at its most sardonic, had taken him up.  'Someone like me, from the barbarous north?  Haven't you noticed yet that Thorfinn is prouder of being Earl of Orkney than he is of ruling Scotia?  He fought for Orkney and won it, against men just like Siward.  His own kind.  He knows them too well to despise them.'

His own kind?  Thorfinn was three-quarters Celt.  They were not his own kind.  Tuathal had said, 'So it's just another negotiation?  Thorfinn neither likes nor dislikes Kalv's nephew?  I find it hard to believe.'

To which Thorkel Fostri had answered in a way he had not expected.  'When did you ever know whether Thorfinn likes or dislikes a man?  He takes them for what they are, and deals with them accordingly.  It's the secret of his success.  You don't fight the sea by getting angry at it, or persuade it to be kinder by loving it.'

The bitterness was plain to all to hear.  Eochaid had got up and left, and he, Tuathal, had asked only one or two questions more.

He was not embarrassed.  It merely appeared to him a paradox worth someone's attention: how a man such as Thorkel described could inspire what Thorkel undoubtedly felt for him.

"My Aim Is True": Novel Navigation?

Or, By Bluff and Blunder?
Or, Compassion As Compass?
Or, Pin The Tale On The Donkey?

I'll stop with the subtitles, the alternative guides, and move to my central concern.  Here are three quotations that I've probably offered before, but the last few days I've found them resonating alongside a certain ambition to craft a full-length narrative of mystery and adventure.

1.  "But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."
--James Lee Burke, "Heaven's Prisoners"

Here I am quoting from memory, but this is a quotation that sticks with me, that offers a rather pitiless ideal, which draws me in even as I want to bring or find more compassion than those words offer. "Resolution" in the first part of the sentence definitely means "completion" or "finishing," not merely "deciding upon" or "resolving to do." I think this quotation will help me to set up the conflicts in the "novel" I'm attempting to outline/frame.

2.  Let's listen to my second-favorite ancient Greek poet:


I over-reached
And another
Bears the bother.

--Archilochos
trans. Davenport

I take that short poetic fragment with ruefulness, with regret in the tone, not triumph, though I can see the psychology that would exult in that way. I can see such, but save me and all of us from such, I say.


3.  And the last of the triad, for now:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou

Fourth?  Frankly, on reflection, I can see how all three of the quotations above spiral around each other, twining thematically into one threefold strand, and so further sayings may be called for.  Somehow, the supposed opening line of my absolute favorite ancient Greek poet's lost comic-epic also horns in . . . .

"He knew many things, and all of them badly."
Homer, from his lost Margites . . . .


I'm quoting from memory again here, but I think you can see I don't plan to tell a tale overburdened by seriousness.  And a fallible, flawed, but well-meaning character?  Who wouldn't like a bit of that?  I mean, aren't we constructed in that way ourselves, however we may aspire and resolve to do better?

And, that fourth selection just may be another way to say "Pin the tale on the donkey."