Case notes, or, Some disconnected bits on the law and justice

1 When I'm between books, I often turn to John Mortimer's Rumpole stories, through which I've slowly been making my way for the past several years. Usually Rumpole's relationship with and characterization of his wife is a subject of humor verging on whining--he regularly refers to her, in a nod to Rider Haggard, as She Who Must Be Obeyed--but in "Rumpole at Sea," the story I read this morning, he quietly reveals that he has a lot more respect for Hilda than he usually lets on. In telling the story, Rumpole is forced to relate a number of events at which he was not present, but he explains, "I have reconstructed the following pages from [Mrs Rumpole's] evidence which was, as always, completely reliable." Later, he notes:

She Who Must Be Obeyed has a dead eye for detail and would have risen to great heights in the Criminal Investigation Department.

A reliable witness with a dead eye for detail? What higher praise could Rumpole offer?

2 One of the best moments early in Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity--a moment when you begin to realize that you're in the hands of a genius--is on the fifth page, when Casi, the protagonist, informs the reader that there is about to be a digression:

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Said digression ensues, explaining in intense and often hilarious language the case and judicial and legal activity that led up to "the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy" and led to the warning about self-incrimination that TV has made so famous.

With A Naked Singularity on the brain last week, I was surprised to see the following exchange late in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend:

"Don't!" said Mr Inspector. "Why, why argue? It's my duty to inform you that whatever you say, will be used against you."

"I don't think it will."

"But I tell you it will," said Mr Inspector. "Now, having received the caution, do you still say that you foresaw my visit this afternoon?"

So as far back as that, in England, an officer--of a police force that had been in existence for less than forty years--already felt it was his duty to warn a suspect, and it was already known as "the caution"? I had no idea, and neither, it seems, does Wikipedia: the section on similar rights in England and Wales in the entry for Miranda, while noting that the right may have originated there, only traces it as far back as 1912. Any legal scholars want to weigh in?

3 In anticipation of Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (which is one the best books I've read in recent years), I read Ford Madox Ford's treatment of a slightly later period in the career of Thomas Cromwell, The Fifth Queen. Ford, a Catholic, lays his sympathy with Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth queen, and in the process he paints a much darker portrait of Cromwell than Mantel does. Ford's Cromwell isn't the ruthless villain he is forced to play as the foil of the perfectly noble Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, but he is driven much more by self-interest than in Mantel's account, and his mutability is seen less as an emblem of his essential--and laudable--modernity than of an essential ethical slipperiness.

Mantel's Cromwell is so well drawn, so memorable, that he's hard to shake even as you're reading Ford, so when we see him meet the downfall we've known since the first page is inevitable, it's hard not to feel a real pang. The moment in The Fifth Queen when his last-ditch machinations fail and he's confronted by the lords who are his bitterest enemies, stripped of his chancellorship, and named a traitor unites the two characterizations and is vividly arresting:

Then such rage and despair had come into Thomas Cromwell's terrible face that Cranmer's senses had reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

"Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!" and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop's feet.

And now on to Bring Up the Bodies!

4 As seems only right on questions of the law and justice, I'll let Kafka have the last word. This comes from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka (1968):

How often is injustice committed in the name of justice? How often does damnation fly the flag of enlightenment? How often does a fall disguise itself as a rise? We can see it all now quite properly. The war didn't only burn and tear the world, but also lit it up. We can see that it is a labyrinth built by men themselves, an icy machine world, whose comforts and apparent purposefulness increasingly emasculate and dishonour us.

"But how does not believing in them help me?"

In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel uses a startlingly successful description that I recall her using before: she writes that Cromwell's adopted son Richard is "rinsed with relief" on learning that he won't be marrying into the Boleyn family. She had used a variation on that phrase before, in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2003), describing herself as "rinsed with nausea" on seeing a devil, or some force of pure evil, in her backyard as a girl.

I've never encountered that construction in any other writer's work, but it has now become a permanent part of my mental makeup, for it describes the sensation so perfectly--that inescapably liquid release of chemicals that accompanies, and helps us interpret, sudden, overwhelming changes in the world before us. We can feel their very movement as they course through our bodies, a cocktail of complicated feelings and sensations in their wake.

"Rinsed with fear" would seem a particularly suitable way to imagine an encounter with a ghost: it is as if at the very moment when the sight before us should be calling into question all our assumptions about the inextricable link between the corporeal and the incorporeal self, the body--with its flood of adrenaline, its horripilations, its shivers, the whole mess of reactions that Dickens located in "an agreeable creeping up our back"--is forcing us to acknowledge that for now, at least, we are here in a physical body, and its processes are the movements of our minds and emotions, whatever contrary evidence that thing in the doorway may be offering.

Which is, ultimately, what's so scary about the idea of seeing a ghost: not what it may do, but merely that it is, and the challenge that offers to our daily rationality. Which brings me to Kafka, and a passage from his story "Unhappiness" that I found in D. J. Enright's Oxford Book of the Supernatural (1994):

"What can I do?" I said. "I've just had a ghost in my room."

"You say that with the same sort of distaste as if you'd found a hair in your soup."

"You jest. Mark my words, though: a ghost is a ghost."

"Very true. But what if one doesn't believe in ghosts in the first place?"

"You don't think I believe in ghosts, do you? But how does not believing in them help me?"

"Very simple. You no longer need be frightened when a ghost actually appears."

"Yes, but that's only the incidental fear. The actual fear is fear of what causes the phenomenon. And that fear there's no getting rid of."

And now to crawl under the covers and not emerge for any sound that's not clearly made by a cat. A living, familiar cat, that is.

Man is wolf to man

At the risk of destroying my spooky October vibe, I figure I should tell you that my review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which won the Booker Prize earlier tonight, went up this afternoon at the Second Pass. It's a brilliant, engrossing, moving novel, the work of a writer in full command of her vast talents and her agile, questing mind.

For a fan of deadly power politics, fiction doesn't get any better than this--the sparring and double-dealing and icily loaded conversations outstrip the best moments in such favorites as Ronan Bennett's Havoc, In Its Third Year and Halldor Laxness's Iceland's Bell, let alone Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, which Mantel's novel casually backhands.

And Mantel goes one better, her portrait of Cromwell reminding us why we're drawn to political maneuvering in the first place: because to survive in such deadly waters requires that a person command a range of skills that we think of as virtues--empathy, attention to the needs and desires of others, an eye for small personal detail, ease of manner--but then employ them in ways that may in themselves be the farthest thing from virtue. For a person operating in politics ultimately needs the ability to make people do what he wants them to do--and, in the best circumstances, convince them it's what they want to do, too. When that person is a king, failure is not an option, and the breath is always bated:

The king takes a deep ragged breath. He's been shouting. Now--and it's a narrow thing--he decides to laugh. "You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to princes."

"Fortitude."

"Yes. Cost that out."

"It doesn't mean courage in battle."

"Do you read me a lesson?"

"It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you."

That passage reminds me of another aspect of Mantel's novel that I wasn't able to touch on in my review: the historical present tense she employs. Along with her close third-person focus on Cromwell, it works to keep us forever in the present moment, even as we watch Cromwell working out his next several moves; it is wearing, like Cromwell's life, and it is marvelously effective.*

Buy this book and read it. I've not read a better, more powerful novel in a long while. Congratulations to Ms. Mantel on its quality being recognized.

"It's late October, the sun a coin barely flipped above the horizon."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

From Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:

In the forest, you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. For a moment, before you don't recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.

What better way, as weekend of chilly squalls emphatically ushers in autumn, to close out blogging about Hilary Mantel than to let her carry us tonally into October country. Her Thomas Cromwell, though far from superstitious, finds the dead ever-present to his agile, restless mind, his old patron Cardinal Wolsey or his late wife flitting around the edges of the rooms they once inhabited, reminders of the tenuous grip we all hold on life, even he, Cromwell, that fierce bulldog of a man.

He seems to be alone, but there is a dry scent in the room, a cinnamon warmth, that makes him think that the cardinal must be in the shadows, holding the pithed orange, packed with spices, that he always carried when he was among a press of people. The dead, for sure, would want to ward off the scent of the living.

And outside the thick walls of his house, in the winding and dangerous streets, where the night is nearly as black as in the heart of a forest, Halloween is coming--that's its voice in the chimney, its shrieking 'round the eaves.

Halloween: the world's edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen to the living, who are praying for the dead.

As in previous years, this blog will spend October as haunted as I can manage to make it. Better lay in your stock of candles and comforts now, for night falls fast this time of year, and a late knock at the door is better left unanswered.

"The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before," or, More from Wolf Hall

I haven't much time tonight, but as I'm still utterly wrapped up in re-reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, I feel it's my duty to share some more notable passages.

I wrote briefly back in May about how Mantel's prose in this novel rewards close attention; while the book's primary glory is its delineation of ruthless power politics--and of how one might retain one's honor, and one's sense of self, while navigating such deadly shoals--one of its frequent incidental pleasures is the descriptive richness with which Mantel invests the late medieval world of Cromwell and More and their king.

There is the pre-Enlightenment world of mystery and ritual, the calendar that forever whirls round, season to season, feast day to fast day:

This year, there has been no summer plague. Londoners give thanks on their knees. On St John's Eve, the bonfires burn all night. At dawn, white lilies are carried in from the fields. The city daughters with shivering fingers weave them into drooping wreaths, to pin on the city's gates, and on city doors.

Then there's the frightening sounds of the pitch-black nighttime city, in which a smart man with resources does not venture out alone, but relies instead on link-men with torches, and sidekicks with strong right arms:

The damp streets are deserted; the mist is creeping from the river. The stars are stifled in damp and cloud. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odour of yesterday's unrecollected sins. . . . Someone is screaming, down by the quays. The boatmen are singing. There is a faint, faraway splashing; perhaps they are drowning someone.

And then there are the scents, some of them designed to cover up the decay and dirt of that unwashed world, others employed to complete an impression of sumptuous abundance, endless splendor--such as those that emerge from the wardrobe of Cardinal Wolsey when, stripped of royal favor, he must surrender his vestments to the king's men:

The copes were sewn in gold and silver thread, with patterns of golden stars, with birds, fishes, harts, lions, angels, flowers and Catherine wheels. When they were repacked and nailed into their traveling chests, the king's men delved into the boxes that held the albs and cottas, each folded, by an expert touch, into fine pleats. Passed hand to hand, weightless as resting angels, they glowed softly in the light; loose one, a man said, let us see the quality of it. Fingers tugged at the linen bands; here, let me, George Cavedish said. Freed, the cloth drifted against the air, dazzling white, fine as a moth's wing. When the lids of the vestments chests were raised there was the smell of cedar and spices, sombre, distant, desert-dry. But the floating angels had been packed away in lavender; London rain washed against the glass, and the scent of summer flooded the dim afternoon.

As chill Chicago rain washes against the glass, and a procession of newly fallen leaves rattles down the alley, announcing autumn's arrival, what I wouldn't give for one last flood of mid-summer scents.

Instead, I'll sink yet again into Mantel's recreated world of late medieval England, to dream in its cadences and wake with its worries.

Wish fulfillment

In preparation for a review I'll be writing for the Second Pass, I'm currently re-reading Hilary Mantel's brilliant new novel, Wolf Hall, and it's reminded me of an e-mail exchange I had recently with Jenny Davidson of Light Reading about Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--and why I seem to be the only crime novel fan (and maybe the only person, period) who actively dislikes it.*

Jenny nailed it, explaining that I didn't like Larsson's book largely because I'm not into wish-fulfillment novels--and that's what the novel's two leads represent. Mikael and Salander are smarter, more talented, more dramatic, better looking, and sexier versions of ourselves, engaged in more exciting and dramatic adventures than we ever encounter. Jenny's right: it just doesn't appeal to me. I don't buy it, and, more, I don't really even want it: life is fine without approaching perfection, and as someone with generally low ambitions, the few dreams I have are too reasonable to require authorial intervention.

What re-reading Wolf Hall has reminded me is that there is one particular kind of wish-fulfillment to which I am susceptible: that of simple, understated functional hyper-competence. I've written before, in joking fashion, about Mantel's portrayal of Thomas Cromwell's wide range of abilities, and how those help create an aura of fear, even awe, that is a great help in his multifarious activities on behalf of Henry VIII. Without ever bragging, or seeming to place too much importance on the fact, Cromwell demonstrates again and again that in almost any field he knows what he's doing. And even though I know that what I'm reading is fiction--however much the historical Cromwell may underlie Mantel's portrait--I find myself thrilling to that competence every time.

A similar feeling draws me to Richard Stark's Parker. Though he is clearly not a character Stark wants us to emulate, or even like, at the same time his relentless drive for perfection is hard not to admire. He is the best at what he does, and while he doesn't make me want to rob banks, he does make me want to be that capable.

Of course, to remain convincing such functional competence has to stay just this side of perfection. Parker does make mistakes, and even Cromwell can't retain the king's favor forever. On the other hand--to take an example that's been in the news lately, Robert Langdon, hero of Dan Brown's novels, is so endlessly, flawlessly skilled that his perfection quickly becomes risible, smacking far more of cack-handed authorial grant than of a lifetime of dedication.

But in the hands of a skilled author--like when Mantel shows us Thomas Cromwell casually calculating the value of Thomas More's carpet, then filing the answer away to use later against his rival--such demonstrated skill calls up some long-dormant childhood definition of masculinity, a belief that a real man is one who can do things. I know better, know the many ways in which such a definition is limited, complicated, even ridiculous . . . but reading about Cromwell I suddenly find myself wondering again about the skills I don't have, thinking maybe I should take boxing lessons, or brush up my Spanish, or improve my dismal swimming skills.

Nah. More likely I'll just continue with my autumn project of trying to re-learn how to play the piano. Surely a man who can make a strong martini and play "One for My Baby" can count on folks cutting him some slack in other areas, right? {Of course, first I have to manage the much simpler "Swanee River." Baby steps, baby steps.}

The manly arts, or, James Bond's got nothing on this guy.

Being a short, bookish herbivore, I don't tend to think of myself as embodying many of the more stereotypical manly qualities. I'm far from the first person you'd pick to have at your side in a fight, and should the zombie apocalypse occur on my watch, I would likely be of little help in the more mechanical aspects of rebuilding society (though I suspect I could run a mean quartermaster's office if pressed); when reading one of Richard Stark's Parker novels, I never find myself thinking, "Oh, right--I could totally do that." While I know how to dance with a lady, and I can mix a mean martini, I'm hopeless with a gun, at least so far as hitting a pre-agreed target goes.

Most days, none of that bothers me. I'm fortunate enough to live in a society that allows me the quiet to read, the wherewithal to cook, and the safety not to worry about the rest of it. But then I come across something like this description of Thomas Cromwell, from Hilary Mantel's thus-far excellent new novel Wolf Hall (2009), and, well, can you blame me for feeling inadequate?

It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt---ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.

And that's not the half of it, at least so far as rumor would have it:

"Thomas Cromwell?" people say. "That is an ingenious man. Do you know he has the whole of the New Testament by heart?" He is the very man if an argument about God breaks out; he is the very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons why their rents are fair. He is the man to cut through some legal entanglement that's ensnared you for three generations, or talk you sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make. With animals, women, and timid litigants, his manner is gentle and easy; but he makes your creditors weep. He can converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. Nobody can out-talk him, if he wants to talk. Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit.

Sheesh. Faced with Cromwell, even Edmond Dantès would feel compelled to up his game.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make a martini and do some push-ups. Like a million of them. While memorizing Ephesians.

Sentences inspire me, or, The quickest of posts

I'll have more to say about Hilary Mantel's new novel about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall (2009) in the coming days, but right now I feel it's worth sharing the following couple of sentences. As you read, pretend they're poetry--listen to them:

He reads. Clerke and Sumner are dead. The cardinal should be told, the writer says. Having no other secure place, the Dean saw fit to shut them in the college cellars, the deep cold cellars intended for storing fish. Even in that silent place, secret, icy, the summer plague sought them out. They died in the dark and without a priest.

Each of those sentences moves along as if dancing on the verge of being truly metrical, its beats--"the Dean saw fit to shut"--falling just right; their consonance and assonance only adding to the achievement, those "deep cold cellars intended for storing fish". {Though now that I think of it, "designed" would fit far better than "intended," wouldn't it?}

Mantel, though never shedding the basic structure of what we generally accept as the prose of the realist novel, again and again in Wolf Hall raises her language to this sort of pitch; I'm 150 pages in, and it's hard to imagine that she could go so wrong from here as to keep this from being the crowning achievement of her career thus far.