We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“FRENCH BRAID” by Anne Tyler (Chatto and Windus, $NZ35); “ELIZABETH FINCH” by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, $NZ40; “THE DARKEST SIN” by D.V.Bishop (Macmillan $NZ35)
When you read just the first chapter of Anne Tyler’s French Braid, you know at once that she is digging into familiar territory. As in her A Spool of Blue Thread, the only one of her novels I have previously reviewed on this blog, and as in many of her other 22 novels, the much-acclaimed American novelist is concerned with the nature of family, the way its traditions, attitudes and assumptions are carried on, and the toll that time takes. And of course most of it is set in Baltimore, Tyler’s home town.
In 2010, Serena and James, a cohabiting couple, are returning by train to Baltimore from Philadelphia, where James has been introducing Serena to his family. As they talk, they reveal the different types of families they come from. Serena’s family is small. James is from a large family and has many siblings. Serena feels that those with more children judge negatively those who have few children. Serena feels unhappy that James has made it clear to his family that they are sleeping together. Serena follows a different form of etiquette and prefers to be discreet about such matters. Much as they are in love, they clearly have different scales of value. And then there is James’ astonishment when Serena see a man she thinks might be her cousin, but isn’t sure… leading James to think that Serena’s family must be rather broken if she doesn’t even know her own cousin. For in some ways Serena’s extended family is broken. This leads Serena to think “Oh, what makes a family not work?”
All this is conveyed by Anne Tyler – with her usual close observation of small but important things; with her excellent use of dialogue – in the first 20 pages of the novel. It might lead us to believe we are about to read the story of Serena. But no. She disappears after the first chapter and reappears only towards the very end of French Braid. Instead, Tyler gives us a generational story in the seven following chapters, that begins in 1959, long before Serena was born, and ends in the present – a story covering over six decades. It digs into the family that produced Serena, but does not in any way focus on her. She is simply a minor player in a large cast of characters.
Did the family really “not work”? Not in any drastic way. French Braid is structured to show us that smallish things can alter the course of a family. In 1959, Mercy and her husband Robin take their three children, teenagers Alice and Lily, and 7-year-old David, on a holiday by a lake. Level-headed Alice is upset when 15-year-old Lily, unknown to her parents, loses her virginity to an older boy who then scarpers. More upsetting for the whole family, young David almost drowns when his father tries to “man him up” by making him swim when he obviously can’t.
These events aren’t discussed again, but they clearly influence how members of the family think and react to one another in the years that follow. Alice is a little prim and self-righteous, with a steady marriage. Lily goes through a number of marriages and some affairs. As he grows up, David keeps his own counsel and when he gets to college age he stays away from the family as much as he can. Mercy (what a name!) is the matriarch who steadies the family, sort-of loves her husband and never leaves him. But she nevertheless becomes a little estranged from him, focuses on her painting and prefers to live in her separate studio than in the family house. There’s an implied, but never stated, repugnance to macho behaviour like throwing a kid into a lake.
And so it goes on through the next couple of generations as children and grandchildren appear. Children and grandchildren and in-laws and cousins inherit or modify the type of assumptions and behaviours that have been initiated by the original nuclear family – Mercy, Robin and their three children. Late in the novel, middle-aged David compares families to “French braid”, an old-fashioned women’s hair-do which is crimped and which ripples out when let down. “That’s how families work”, he says, “You think you’re free of them, but you’re never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.”
If I have one small criticism of this novel, it is the profusion of characters that necessarily appear. Frankly, as French Braid moved through the years, I often forgot which named character was the daughter or son or partner or spouse or cousin or friend of whom. There are plenty of them.
Despite that, French Braid is not a takedown of families. As always, Anne Tyler is aware of the inevitability and necessity of families; and on the whole this extended family are a very average bunch – no extremes, no great scandals.
And there is, as a bonus, Tyler’s acute ability to conjure up the small things that made each decade unique – the type of fashions people followed or took for granted in clothes and meals and furniture and house design. She knows her territory thoroughly. Now aged 81, Tyler was born in 1941 which is about when the fictitious Mercy and Robin married. Tyler is not writing an autobiography, but she has lived through the world her characters inhabit.
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I’ll begin this review with a funny story – or at least still funny to me.
About 35 years ago, my wife and I decided to take a holiday, with some of our youngsters, in Papamoa. The only accommodation we could find at a reasonable price was a motel, which happened to be run by Evangelical Protestants and was often used for Christian gatherings. In their advertisements, they said specifically that alcohol was not to be consumed on their premises. Nothing daunted, we smuggled in two bottles of wine and had the pleasure of consuming them surreptitiously in our room, against their rules. What made it funnier was that the book I read on that holiday was Gore Vidal’s novel Julian, about the Roman emperor known to Christians as “Julian the Apostate”. He was the emperor who, in his brief reign in the mid-4th century (the 360s), tried to revert the Roman empire to paganism after Christianity had been legalised and was rapidly becoming the empire’s dominant religion. So I was being offensive to our hosts on two fronts.
Anyway, the patrician-born Vidal’s novel didn’t change my views in any way. Vidal presented Julian as a sane, philosophical chap who was pitted against fanatics. With only one or two exceptions, Christians were presented as uncouth, lower-class, superstitious yobbos; pagans as broad-minded, well-read, tolerant and level-headed. In effect, Christians were a bad lot because they came from the lower classes, unlike those sophisticated upper-class pagans. To me it sounded awfully like Bloomsbury snobbery, even if the author was American.
Now what has this to do with Elizabeth Finch, latest novel by prolific novelist, essayist and one time Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes?
Simple. Elizabeth Finch is basically a polemic thinly disguised as a novel, where Julian Barnes is more essayist than novelist. And its centre-piece is an account of the emperor Julian. The basic thesis – a somewhat fashionable theory at the moment – is that polytheistic religions are more tolerant than monotheistic religions, because polytheism allows for the worship of many separate gods; whereas monotheism insists on a very specific definition of one god, and in the process takes to persecuting those who refuse to adhere to this one god. I do wonder if this theory is more inspired by the current aggression of much of monotheistic Islam rather than by the historical crimes of Christians – persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, crusades etc. I also find it hard to believe that polytheism is all that peaceable.
The nearest we now have to a large polytheistic religion is Hinduism, although – and I say this with a close, personal knowledge, given that there are Hindus in my extended family – most Hindus I know are likely to say that what we Westerners regard as their “gods” are really different manifestations of the one Godhead. As for polytheistic tolerance, consider Hinduism’s continuing caste system, severely limiting paths of life for millions of people, not to mention the many wars that have been fought over the centuries among Indians. More to the point, was ancient pagan Rome really all that tolerant of other faiths? Ask the Jews who died at Masada. Consider how long the gods of Carthage were tolerated once Carthage was crushed. And do note that the empire was made by sword, spear and slaughter, often involving the extermination of whole nations. None of which gets Christianity off the hook (I do detest tu quoque arguments) but which does show that polytheism doesn’t necessarily mean tolerance and peace. Basically, I think a theory about the tolerance of polytheism is really a stick with which to beat Christians, administered by people who believe in no gods anyway.
But to get back to Julian Barnes’s essay-novel.
It is told in the first person by a chap identified only as Neil. In his thirties, he takes a course of lectures on Culture and Civilisation. The lectures are given by an older woman called Elizabeth Finch, whom the narrator admires intensely. For him, she is the perfect teacher, getting her students to think for themselves, challenging their suppositions, and steering them towards open-mindedness and tolerance. In some respects, though, as Barnes presents her, she’s a bit of a fantasy figure. Too perfect, I’d say, always (as Neil says on Page 176) “speaking almost in written prose, having no perceptible gap between brain and tongue”. And it sounds it. The supposedly extempore utterances in her lectures are more like prepared and rehearsed scripts. To make matters worse, the only student we are told challenges her is clearly a philistine dolt, easily put in his place. Frankly I don’t believe in her.
All this we are told in Part 1. When Elizabeth Finch dies, Neil inherits her papers, and it is in Part 2 that we get the whole thesis about Julian the Apostate, who was much admired by Elizabeth Finch and who is therefore admired by the narrator Neil. In fairness to Julian Barnes, though, I have to note that Barnes’s interpretation of the emperor is far more nuanced than Gore Vidal’s version was. He says all the admiring things about Julian’s tolerance and culture, but he also notes the brutal way in which Julian waged war, his own superstitions and his proclivity for sacrificing thousands of bulls and other beasts in his pagan rituals. On Page 95, Neil gives an alternative history about how wonderful European culture and enlightenment might have been if Christianity had been stifled. But then on the next page (Page 96) Neil remembers Elizabeth Finch’s warning that you never can trust human impulses (greed, lust, aggression etc.) and a non-Christian Europe might also have been dismal.
The final Part 3 has the narrator trying to plumb what exactly the true nature of the late, wonderful Elizabeth Finch was – What sort of person was she? What sort of life did she lead? – as she kept very much to herself and gave little away.
I make it clear that Elizabeth Finch reads well, its prose is urbane and sometimes witty and the disputes and polemic are engaging. But do remember that it is as much essay as novel.
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Mere months ago, I introduced you to D.V. Bishop’s Renaissance Florentine detective Cesare Aldo in his first novel City of Vengeance , which was first published last year. Now hot on its heels comes the second in what is clearly going to be a series, The Darkest Sin. D.V. (David) Bishop is a very industrious guy. Not only does he write expeditiously but he writes at length. Both his detective novels so far are complex, multi-character tales running to about 400 pages.
To recap. Cesare Aldo is an officer of the court in 16th. century Medici Florence – in other words, a police detective. He is a robust and hardy man, a former mercenary soldier, but he has one awkward secret. He is homosexual in an age when his orientation is both illegal and severely punished, so he has to be incredibly discreet on that front. Cesare is not quite a superman – he often has to take hard knocks – but he is incredibly perceptive about people’s motives and, like most detective heroes I guess (Sherlock Holmes, Jules Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolf) he is, in the end, always right. We’d be damned annoyed if he didn’t eventually work out who the guilty party is. Fear not. He does.
Here’s the set-up of a story which takes place in one week in 1537. The naked corpse of a man is found in a convent. He has apparently been stabbed to death, with multiple wounds and a surrounding pool of blood. How was there a dead man in a convent in the first place? Why was he naked? And who could possibly have killed him there? It gradually dawns that one of the nuns must be guilty. The abbess? The prioress? The apothecary? The almoner? The sacristan? Or any one of the novices or the women seeking shelter in the convent? There’s a power-play going on between the abbess, who wants her convent to remain open to the world and still administering charity to the poor of the city; and her deputy the severe prioress, who wants the convent to be “enclosed”, meaning shut off from the world and becoming a place of prayer and contemplation only. Oh yes, and there are also the matters of powerful men in the city who have little interest in religion, but much interest in compromising documents that may be hidden in the convent; and the woman hiding in the convent to avoid an arranged marriage; and the prioress’s mentally-unbalanced younger sister.
This is the major thread of plot in The Darkest Sin, but D.V.Bishop once again introduces a second plot. A junior constable of the court, Carlo Strocchi, is trying to track down the man who stabbed to death a known extortionist at dead of night, and then threw him off the Ponte Vecchio into the Arno. Inevitably, Cesare Aldo gets involved in this mystery too. For the record, Carlo Strocchi is a very likeable young man, and I hope he appears in future Cesare Aldo books.
So far, dear reader, my synopsis has taken you much less than halfway through The Darkest Sin, and obviously I will finish synopsising here. Blowed if I’ll be the killjoy who spoils a good detective story by giving away too much. There are many twists to the tale, including sudden revelations about who is related to whom and who is being blackmailed by whom and they are there for you to find.
David Bishop once again shows great skill in reproducing the realities of the Renaissance city in both its power but even more in its sordor, with a supporting cast of bullying police officers, a domineering and largely corrupt bishop, habitues of a bordello and a dirty low-life winery. He is very precise in delineating the norms of a 16th century convent and – very creditably – he does not resort to caricature. Something sinful or sensational has happened in the convent, but [most of] the nuns are presented as credible people, with many level-headed and thoughtful women among them. And the nuances of Cesare Aldo’s homosexuality are presented with fitting care. On the whole, I found the more complex tale that is The Darkest Sin even more engaging than City of Vengeance.