Book review: Bel-Ami

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant, 1885, is the tale of a young man "making good"; although the good is very much in the way-of-the-world rather than moral sense. He achieves this mostly by the graces of various women, to which he is recommended by his looks and affable manners. And yet he is not worthless: he is determined and canny. And his immorality or amorality hardly stands out in the times. I am reading the Pengiun translation.

Paris was an exciting place: plans are being made for the first Metro; the govt is planning to invade Morocco; fortunes are being made in various ways; and Georges Duroy, ex-cavalry sergeant, is a railway clerk. One night on the boulevards eking out his meals he meets his old chum Forestier, now in newspapers, and his rise begins. Whilst his own hard work plays some part, the bit we see is the help he gets from various women: Forestier's wife helps him write articles; and so on through a chain ending with him marrying the young daughter of his proprietor.

The author, with the carelessness of literary folk, sees all the economic activity as corrupt, and fails to see that real things are happening; naturally, this affects the story.

How should we judge Our Protagonist? Not harshly, I think. Whilst hardly a shining paragon of virtue he is not harmful¹; more a stick carried on the stream. Indeed we probably shouldn't be judging him: I rather doubt that is the point of the book, which is just using him as an illustration of the times. Of those times the book offers us a glimpse. I, rather spoilt by Proust, feel somehow that the glimpses are rather brief, rushed; pale

Notes

1. True, he does beat Mme de Marelle once; but not it would seem too badly, and by the end she has forgiven him.

Book review: Taken at the Flood

Aka There is a Tide. Our Ag again, and once again decent, but despite a good start not her best: the ending does not resolve as smoothly as it should.

The plot driver is as ever money; this time we're just-post-WWII, money is tight amongst formerly gentlefolk, rationing is still in force, and some people back from the war no longer fit into the pleasant Olde Englishe countryside as they once did. All of this is quite nicely sketched. That the characters are somewhat stock is no great flaw.

Wiki will tell you the plot, so I won't bother. Spoilers ahead.

I managed to guess that Major Porter was lying about the body being Underhay. But this part doesn't quite work properly. Rowley contacts Poirot, who then conveniently finds Porter, but Rowley doesn't know that Poirot knows Porter: Rowley knows about the wartime scene in the club from Jeremy, but Jeremy wouldn't know that Poirot was present. Also Aunt Katie visiting Poirot becomes rather pointless (and makes no sense, because Underhay is supposedly not a spirit, so can't have communicated). Having Porter then top himself is plot-device rather than plausible (and having a service revolver result in a nice round hole rather than blowing his head messily off isn't plausible either).

The swap of Rosaleen for Eileen is fun and I give her that; it also adds the delightful comedy of both sides of the blackmail unsure who the other is.

Enoch Arden's death turns out to be accident. But it occurs when he is struck hard enough on the chin to be knocked over and hit the marble mantlepiece; this would definitely leave traces on the corpse, and whilst that is said initially, it is carefully never mentioned again and this is not reasonable. The happy ending at the end of the book depends on the police accepting Eileen's death as murder, and Enoch's as unexplained; yet really, would they be ready to so quietly drop the inquiry?

All the stuff with the various phone calls was messy and over-complicated and I think should have been better; perhaps just omitted.

The final scene with Lynn telling Rowley she realised she really loved him when he started to strangle her and is now his woman is tasteless to modern sensibilities, even mine; reading reactions to it on Goodreads is amusing.

Book review: The Body in the Library

The Body in the Library is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in 1942, sez wiki, but don't read that, or indeed this, unless you want spoilers. I enjoyed it; it is pleasingly baffling but in the end nicely resolved.

We start with a dead girl, or rather woman, Ruby a dancer, found in the library of Colonel Mustard. Eventually it turns out that it is even in the wrong library, which is witty but I think not quite plausible. After some investigation occurs we have a second dead body, in a burnt-out car in a quarry, this one a schoolgirl. Eventually - I think I realised this just a little before Miss Marple reveals it - we discover that the two bodies have been swapped; this neatly links the two apparently unrelated deaths, as well as invalidating all the carefully contrived alibis since the time of death is no longer what it was.

The cost of this is to make the evil culprits able to murder a perfectly innocent schoolgirl - for no reason but alibi -, on top of the dancer-come-golddigger Ruby, who is more plausibly murderable. That seems quite a lot to ask. Note that by the use of language we are lead to think of one as a woman and another as a girl, which makes it less likely in our minds that they could be swapped.

Once Miss M has worked out the swap, it would be natural to get the girl's parents to ID "Ruby"s body; this inexplicably isn't done, but would have made all the police work a good deal simpler. Ditto, I think, re the bitten fingernails; it was remiss of Miss M not to share this earlier.

Oh, and also: Josie, staring at the body of "Ruby", radiates anger. But - as she well knows - it isn't Ruby, it is Pamela, so there is no cause for anger, only sadness.

Book review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

By E. M. "Howard" Forster. His first book. Has vague echoes (errm, or presentiments) of "A Room With a View" in that it is about the English in Italy; but unlike that, where the respectable English abroad meet the English lower classes - the horror - here the respectable but silly Lilia meets a charming young Italian of no family.

For reasons unclear to me the respectable folk inhabit Sawston, an unremarkable town on the railway line from Cambridge to London; closer to Cambridge than Stevenage; which may perhaps explain the connection. The book is probably better if you know none of that.

The book contrasts the suffocatingly dull but respectable life of Sawston with the beauty freedom and dirt of Italy. I would interpret it as another novel about the English, as Howard's End is, and A Passage to India arguably is. Except my edition contains an afterword, an exchange of letters between Forster and Trevelyan, which tells me it is really about the growth of Philip. Oh well; I really think my interpretation is better.

English society does not come off well from the book. The Herritons are by construction unlovely; Philip's Italiophilia appears shallow; no-one gets to lead a natural life.

But considered as a novel, the book is interesting and enjoyable to read, and well constructed. The "reception" section on wiki is worth reading. I wonder if the "charitable" comment influced India, which does look kindly on its characters.

Aside: to me, the most remarkable element of the story is that the folk of Sawston can afford to send Lilia off on a year-long tour of Italy with a companion, and Harriet on a whim for six weeks in the Tirol. But perhaps that is how it was in the days of the Empire.

Book review: Massif

By Garth "Sabriel" Nix; which I enjoyed. Though I see I would consider my standards of a review in the old days to be intolerably brief now.

I enjoyed this book; it is a fun easy read. There is the odd "bad" person in it, but they don't get in the way and are quickly resolved out, thereby removing digressions that in other works would distract us for hundreds of pages. This one is relatively brief and to the point, and indeed at the end it does have a point, or at least a conclusion, again beating many another book. The lightness of tone, the lack of depth, gives it a YA-ish flavour; as does the humdrum language. But this is the best actual scifi I've read for a while.

I think I won't trouble you with the plot or the reveal; suffice to say that everything moves along nicely. I can raise a few quibbles though without spoiling things: the most obvious is the DB doesn't need to give Our Heroes a spacehip and has no motive for doing so (except as a backup? And yet, why be so rushed, in a species nominally trillions of years old. Although "trillions" is careless, being older than the universe, and unnecessary; billions would have been harmless); and had he not done so, his dastardly plot would have come to fruition.

I noticed a thing at the end, which in retrospect I guess is often used, but I haven't consciously remarked it before: the "reveal" is intertwined with "rescuing a comrade who needs urgent medical or might die", so that in getting carried away with how the rescue goes, we get dragged rapidly over the reveal part, and are less likely to trouble ourselves with its sanity.

Book review: The Odyssey

Or, The Odyssey by Homer, rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original, by Samuel Butler. Although in fact SB's brilliant theory is that it was written by a young woman. But as far as I can tell - not very far - that theory doesn't affect his translation, beyond the addition of a few snarky footnotes that keep pointing out the author(ess)'s interest in womens' matters.

I read the text from Gutenberg on my Kindle whilst wandering in the mountains, since it was all de rage then; a month later all interest has naturally faded, since we are goldfish. Speaking of goldfish, I read it a month ago, so the details have naturally faded.

Odysseus lies shamelessly to everyone he meets, including his wife and father, frequently for no obvious reason, and generally after saying "I will tell you true". This is one of the ways to tell he is not a modern hero. Is he even the Hero? He is definitely the protagonist; I naturally assume he is the hero, because that's what I was told as a child, but maybe he isn't.

He also keeps losing his men, who routinely die horribly in one way or another; they even do this in the lies he tells, when it wasn't even necessary for made-up strangers to die. But he has clearly got so used to the pattern that it even appears in his fantasies. And so after a while one begins to wonder if their deaths are really all their own fault, as his stories alwys make out, or is it perhaps possible he was just a crap leader of men?

The bit about shooting through the axes at the end really doesn't make sense and has "obviously" been hopelessly garbled; or perhaps it is the kind of weird thing a young woman might invent as an archerly feat, who had no knowledge of archery? I also think that a wooden bow that had been left in a storeroom for twenty years would be useless. It is also a bit odd that only he is strong enough to bend the bow; his super power is wiliness, not crude raw strength.

Speaking of wiliness: although - perhaps mostly towards the end - we see Odysseus racking his mind, sleepless, trying to think up stratagems, he fails totally and has to be spoodfed by Minerva, repeatedly.

But enough carping, what of the good bits? The multi-layered-ness of the story is kinda fun, and not at all what I would expect from the rustic simplicity of the antients compared to our modern sophistication; yet another reminder that people have been intelligent for quite a while now (there is another possible explanation, that the text started as scattered myths and fragments of stories and was woven together into a whole with the funny shape that comes down to us). The various components of the story are interesting, but suffer from me having known them since childhood, so they lack novelty. The bit at the end - when Big O is slowly oh so slowly winding himself up to finally do something about the suitors - reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Cleese the knight is attacking the castle with the wedding celebrations, and we see him running towards the gate - then cut away to the guards squinting into the distance - then back to Cleese, who is no closer; and so repeat a few times before he turns up and slaughters a pile of people, pointlessly.

Book review: The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The story is set in the Lincolnshire Fens, and revolves around a group of bell-ringers at the local parish church. The book has been described as Sayers' finest literary achievement, although not all critics were convinced by the mode of death, nor by the amount of technical campanology detail included says wiki.

As for the literary style, that does seem to be present, to some detriment of the detective aspects, but I'm happy with that.

We live in Cambridge, on the edge of the fens, and have visited places named in the text, and have seen the landscape; so that helps with sympathy to the novel.

The "mode of death" is frankly a disappointment. I think you can make a case for it fitting the gloomy flooded bell-ringing style, but denouement-wise it is a distinct let-down; after all the excitment the book is suddenly over, with no release. Unless you like the idea of Deacon being effectively tortured to death, which some might; he was a bad person, after all.

I guessed the Deacon-is-not-dead twist; that was not hard and really the evidence for his death so weak that you wonder he was considered dead at all. DLS doesn't even throw in a "it was wartime; people were busy" type excuse, because I think she is aware of how weak it is and doesn't want to draw attention.

But I failed to think through the implications of DinD, even though they are - in retrospect - obvious, so that's deffo a score for her.

Some things seem too convenient: recalling sailor Jim from the far side of the world; the French police tracking down a woman with laughably inadequate information. But other things are rather nice: the two brothers unshakeably protecting as they think each other for example. I don't think that killing Will at the end was necessary or nice, though.

The cipher is strange though: it is not really decodable (though Our Hero of course does) so how is it distinguishable from random text? If it is intended as proof that there is a secret, I don't see how it can be. You can't prove it until you decode it, at which point it might just as well be plaintext. But the link to the emeralds placement up in the rafters with the high-church rector's renovations, is lovely; the character of the church is well told.