Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffe
Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.
John Beyrle, US ambassador in Moscow, confidential State Department cable, November 9, 2009
There is a spectre loose in the world. An all too material force that has been making headway across the planet. The 21st century has seen a spike in the establishment of kleptocratic regimes. These tend to be autocratic governments in which power is centralized in one or at most a few individuals. The power of the state is then turned into a weapon with which the rich and powerful increase both their wealth and control, and intimidate or eliminate challengers. We have seen this in Erdogan’s Turkey, Zuma’s South Africa, Jinping’s China, to a lesser degree in Berlusconi’s Italy, and plenty more. It seems clear that the current (well, current when this was written in 2017) US president, Donald Trump, would like nothing more than to institute the form in the states. It is pretty clear that he is modeling himself on the top kleptocrat on the planet, the richest man in the world, with a worth estimated at over eighty billion dollars. That would be Vladimir Putin, of course. Garry Kasaparov, Russia’s chess legend, has said that if “you really want to understand the Putin regime in depth . . . go directly to the fiction department and take home everything you can find by Mario Puzo.” I have not seen this sort of thing referred to by this term, but if it has been, I apologize for my unintended theft. We are being haunted, night and day by a rising Mafiacrocy.
You walk into your Moscow flat, and something is off. A window you know you closed, the one in your son’s room, in this 10th floor apartment, is ajar. When you watch a videotape you had recently brought home you find that parts have been mysteriously erased. Maybe the door lock has scratch marks that were not there when you left. A book you never bought appears on a coffee table. When you write pieces that are deemed critical of the regime, the frequency of these oddities increases, sometimes with a bit more physical damage being added. You can never know security. At any moment your home can be invaded. You never know what might be waiting when you turn the key in the lock. You never know when you will be prevented from doing your job by hard men in leather jackets, when you will be denied admittance to the country after a few weeks back home in England, when you will be accused of a mythical crime and expelled from the country for doing your job. You also never really know when people might spirit you away to places that are dark, cold and deadly.
[image] Luke Harding - image from Interpreter Magazine
Luke Harding was the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian. He tells us about working in the Russian capital from 2007 to 2011, reporting on the dark goings on there, political killings, a sophisticated form of state-sponsored terror, Russia’s relationships with its near abroad neighbor nations. He interviews some of the oligarchs for which Russia has become famous, visits depopulating rural areas, finds himself in war zones a bit too often, and checks out a market intended exclusively for the uber rich. One core of what Harding describes is the ongoing harassment to which he was subjected by the FSB (KGB 2.0)
Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they are unable to continue their “hostile-negative” activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim’s private life. They would then devise a strategy to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children.
Clearly there are levels in this methodology beyond the prankish disruptions practiced on Harding. He reports on the experience of others who had been subjected to this treatment. A lot can be done to make someone’s life a living hell, and the worst part, for many, is that they are never aware that they have been targeted.
The other, and primary notion of the book, which was originally named Mafia State, is that Vladimir Putin has made himself, essentially, a Russian Czar for life. Having come up in the KGB, he learned well the techniques of state intelligence, and uses them at will on his opponents. Political competitors find themselves arrested and convicted on trumped up charges, if they are lucky. The unlucky face far more permanent downsides. Putin has all but killed off free media, and has allied with oligarchs, who rely on him to protect their assets. But when an oligarch fancies himself powerful enough to oppose Putin, he does not long remain at large. The government of Russia has been filled with Putin loyalists, who are well compensated for their loyalty. As a master manipulator of the media, and with the ability to stifle opposing (fake?) news, he has gained considerable popularity. With the demise of the USSR, and the obvious corruption and incapacity of Yeltsin, a strong man who could get the nation back on a straight path was welcomed. Putin has made the most of this, consolidating personal power, while selling off state assets for a pittance to his allies.
The structure of the book is a stringing together of articles about diverse elements of Russian life, while weaving in his personal tales of Zersetzung and the stunning corruption that pervades the nation. For example, he writes of the murder of Alexander Litvitenko, an FSB officer who had specialized in organized crime. He dared to accuse his superiors of assassinating oligarch Boris Berezovsky, and was subsequently hounded out of the country. Asylum in England was not sufficient, however, as Putin’s people murdered him there. Harding visits relations of Litvitenko, living in Italy, where, one would expect, they would feel free to speak their minds. Turns out not so much, and for surprising reasons.
He reports on Russia engaging in the ethnic cleansing of a piece of Georgia in order to incorporate it into an expandable, Russia-loyal, South Ossetia. While in Georgia he hears reports of atrocities by Russians, also by bands of Ossetian, Chechnyan, and Kossack thugs who follow the Russian troops and engage in widespread murder, kidnappings, rape and looting. He looks into the murders of several human rights activists, and checks out corruption in the lead up to the Sochi Olympic games. In addition he reports on what was probably an FSB atrocity, the false flag bombing of several apartment blocks, killing over 300 people, in order to fan outrage against Chechnyans, and offer justification for military action. There is plenty more.
I think there are very few of people in the west who do not recognize that Vladimir Putin is a monster. Whatever one may think of the actions of other nations, Russia has, under Putin, become a dictatorship in which human rights are virtually non-existent. Luke Harding has done us all a service to offer an on-the-ground look at what this horror looks like up close. It contains the chill one might have felt visiting Germany when you-know-who was on the rise. His book also offers a large flapping red flag.
Although this was written long before Donald Trump was anything more than an insignificant shade in the American political scene, one can look at the elements of Putin’s Russia and get an idea of what may lie ahead for the United States if enough people do not get wise to what Swamp Thing is all about. He may be doing Putin’s bidding because Puti has justiceable goods on him (almost certainly true). He may be overseeing the dismantling of America because he is smitten with Puti’s power (also probably true) and wants that for himself. Whether or not he can stand alone, once he absorbs enough of government into his control (questionable), it seems likely that the US president is eager to follow the Russian model. Accusing mainstream media, the ones who tell us about his crimes, of propagating fake news, is a step toward muzzling if not eliminating them. Threatening to sue (and suing) smaller media outlets is another step in this direction. Imagine an America in which the primary news outlets are Fox News and Breitbart, and it starts to look more and more like Russia.
In her study [of Zersetzen, Sandra] Pingel-Schliemann concludes: “These days a total dictatorship doesn’t need to use methods of open terror to subdue people for years and make them weak. Moreover, developments in technology and communications offer future dictators ever more subtle possibilities for manipulation.” Her comments strike me as prescient. In Herr J.’s case Stasi operatives had to creep round at night hanging individual notes in his village with the words: “Whore,” “Drunkard,” “Speeder” and “Bigmouth.” Today’s Kremlin bloggers and faceless state patriots have it much easier. They need only reach for their mouse.
When calls are made by Trump surrogates to purge our considerable population of federal employees of those not put in by Trump, we can see the trail being marked from the state as a theoretically disinterested arbiter of public conflicts to the state as a weaponized mechanism for pushing through programs desired by our not so dear leader. When Trump insists that his reality is the only one that matters, he reminds us that Putin has been peddling a lie to his own people about how he has been modernizing the economy. Unfortunately, he really has not. The ruble is in decline and increasingly, people in Russia are more interested in using dollars. It has certainly been no stretch for Trump to build on his considerable base of daily misdirections and total falsehoods to grace us with larger ones. Like maybe how Mexico really will pay for the wall, or that the countries subjected to the Muslim ban are a real danger to our security, or that the proposed health care bill atrocity is better than the ACA. Beware most of all the big lie about our security, probably in the form of a false flag attack, like those committed by the FSB against apartment blocks in Moscow. If he opts to go in that direction, he will use the event as an excuse to eliminate any of the civil rights left unviolated by the Patriot Act. The right-wing minions of the Republican Party (with a few notable exceptions) will happily go along.
Luke Harding has given us not only a picture of Russia as a dark, dangerous place, but has also let us know that this might be what lies in store for the USA if we are not strong enough to push back. Marginalization of legitimate media, staffing government agencies solely with workers loyal to him, accusing all who oppose him of lying, and denying any facts that do not correspond with what he wants us to hear. You may not be afraid of no ghosts, but you should be. There is every possibility that America’s phantoms are becoming more and more corporeal. (Paul Manafort, the erstwhile Trump campaign manager was outed as having been on Putin's payroll, at $10 million per annum, to promote Putin's agenda in the USA. He did not report himself as an agent of a foreign power. Failure to do so is a crime. I guess he was a ghost lobbyist.) It will not be long before it is the spirit of democracy that gets proton-pack-zapped into a gold plated box, and the apparitions declare victory. Putin’s Russia is nothing to aspire to. Heed the warnings. Recognize Putin for the dark force he is. And attend to the signs in the USA. Trump and his allies must be stopped before they make a gulag of America.
First Published – September 29th, 2011 under the title Mafia State
Review first Posted – March 17, 2017
May 2021 - I left the above review as it was written, leaving in place things like references to "current US president Donald Trump." (I changed that in a minor February 2022 edit) Harding’s portrait of Putin’s Russia is a chilling look at what the USA was headed towards under the Swamp Thing presidency. Thank God, and committed Democratic campaigners, Trump is no longer in office. But the madness persists, as the GOP has been busy purging all dissenters from the Trump-uber-alles, stop-the-steal, Big Lie party platform. It will take some time to remove all the hacks Trump installed into our governing apparatus. Hopefully, that process can be completed before further, irreversible damage is done to our economy and our democracy. Unfortunately, insurrectionist-friendly, pro-sedition, voting-rights-hostile elected Republicans, which is most of them, cannot just be fired. But the image of the mafiacrocy that is Russia is the goal of today’s GOP, even without Trump. God help us if they find a charismatic leader with the moral vacuity of Trump, but with some brains to go along with it.
==========In the summer of 2019 GR reduced the allowable review size by 25%, from 20,000 to 15,000 characters. In order to accommodate the text beyond that I have moved it to the comments section directly below.
We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice we discovered we could fly. It you want a rea
We were no different from the doves above us. We could not speak or cry, but when there was no choice we discovered we could fly. It you want a reason, take this: We yearned for our portion of the sky.
Masada, the word summons up images, war, Romans, Zealots, slaughter, mass suicide. A place of national pride for some, historical and archaeological controversy for many, a bit of Python mockery to others. On visiting the place itself Alice Hoffman was inspired to wonder about the experience of the women who had lived and died there. The result is The Dovekeepers. She uses the writings of Jewish historian Flavius Josephus as the foundation for her tale. (The Monty Python crew used Josephus’s writings as well, for a very different purpose, in Life of Brian.)
The four primary characters meet at Masada, where they are assigned to care for the doves. There are those who might consider this a hardship post, regarding doves as dirty, disgusting, filthy, and lice-ridden, or as rats with wings, but they are also a source of fertilizer, meat, eggs, and maybe a bit of hope. No one is designated as the concierge.
[image] Alice Hoffman
The four are Yael, Revka, Aziza, and Shirah. Yael is notable for, among other things, her coloring. Her father, Yosef bar Elhanan, is a notorious assassin, a member of the Sicarii, a blade-minded branch of the Zealot movement. They do unpleasant things to Jews who collaborate with the occupying Romans. He was known not only for his effectiveness with sharp objects, but for his talent at going unnoticed. He did notice, however, that his wife died giving birth to their second child, Yael, and, possessing a mind and heart not nearly as honed as his weapons, he blames her. Thanks, Pop.
All the while I was growing up I wondered what it might be like to have a father who wouldn’t turn away from the sight of me, one who told me I was beautiful, even though my hair flamed a strange red color and my skin was sprinkled with earth-toned flecks as though I’d been splattered with mud. I’d heard my father say to another man that these marks were specks of my mother’s blood.
Their relationship is, shall we say, strained. Big brother, Amram, however, is the apple of papa’s eye, (I know, shocking) even follows him into the family business. That business involves doing in a Roman general, which gains them the attention of the occupying force and the family is forced to beat a hasty exodus from Jerusalem. They team up with another Sicarii family, headed by Jachim ben Simon. Things get complicated. They all endure a trial by heat, sand and misery on their trek, offering witness to others’ tales of sundry Roman atrocities as well. It is a road of self-discovery for Yael, and she arrives at Masada much changed from who she was when she had set out.
[image] Rachel Broshahan as Yael - from CBS
Revka had a nice family. Hubby was a baker. Her daughter was married to a nice studious young man. They had two boys. Romans sacked their town, murdering Revka’s husband while slaughtering anyone within reach. Revka is forced to become a refugee. Further atrocities are visited on her family. While she gets a measure of revenge on the latest evil-doers, she darkens her own soul. Her grandchildren have become mute and her nice-young-man of a son-in-law has become a psycho warrior.
Aziza and her mother were sexually assaulted when Aziza was still a child. Mom decided to raise her as a boy to reduce the likelihood of that happening again. She becomes a bad-ass warrior. Her brother not so much. There is a scene that could have been pulled from Robin Hood in which Aziza demonstrates her proficiency with a bow and arrow. Also gawjuss. Think Xena, at least I did. (you sprouts out there might conjure Katniss)
[image] Kathryn Prescott as Aziza - from CBS
Last and definitely not least is Shirah. A witchy sort, with a book of magic spells, great hair and ravishing beauty. She comes from a line of women in a particular line of work, but her mother sent her away from their home in Alexandria when she was young, as an anti-them pogrom was going on, to stay with relations in Jerusalem. Things do not go well for her there. She meets The One, but there is a mess with him being already married, and not up to standing up to his parents, and her being, oh, twelve. She later finds someone with whom to share a home, pops out a few progeny, but is now a single mom in Masada, doing the odd spell to help female residents with this and that, and still looking up to the goddess Ashtoreth for her main religious sustenance. But what’s the deal with her and the hunky head of the Masada warriors, Eleazar Ben Ya'ir? And what’s up with his seriously creepy wife?
[image] Cote de Pablo as Shirah - from CBS
So that’s the four. We know (you know, right?) that things do not go well for the residents of Club Masada. The story is in tracking the progress of the place’s demise and how the four got there, and how they cope with the stresses that are steadily building. We are also given a bit of a tour, and get a sense of place beyond the stick figure general notion.
Hoffman definitely has an inclination towards incorporating history into her work, whether of the maritime sort in Blackbird House or a bit of Transcendentalism in The Red Garden. She is also fond of incorporating dollops of magic into her tales, sometimes more than a little. She usually tells tales of women who are forced to cope with challenging circumstances. And she is quite fond of fairy tales. It will come as no shock that this novel is very much in keeping with her previous work. What makes it different is its ambition, scope, and length. It is not a huge book, at 500 pages or so, but is bulkier than her previous work.
First, and probably most important, it is an engaging read. Her main characters are interesting, all strong in their way, and worth finding out about. The story moves along at a decent pace, most of the time. Place is of obviously central import and is given star treatment. I would not say that you could matter-transmit yourself to the fort and know your way around, but you might see places that look familiar and wonder how you knew about them. Hoffman mixes martial material of different flavors, blending some warriors in combat with the more appalling laying waste of defenseless civilians by armed sorts from both sides. There is romantic entanglement aplenty, but my guy-genes did not feel much inclination to generate spew. It all worked pretty well.
She may have overdone it a bit with her imagery, IMHO. Yael, in particular, is associated with, among other things, a Flaming Tree image. Red hair, get it? There are other bits of significance associated with this, but it seemed to me that it was popping up like one of those birthday candles that won’t go out. Yael is also associated with lions, in various guises, a love interest, an encounter with a feline or two in the desert, a kittie held captive by the occupying army. As a host to six of the creatures, I know that, however much we may love and be fascinated by them, sometimes you need to step back a bit. Maybe it is just that in a longer book there are more mentions than one is used to from Hoffman, who knows her way around imagery. I do not recall feeling bugged by other such strands. Watch for image streams relating to serpents and boids, sorry, birds (I am from Brooklyn, after all) Hoffman associates some elemental aspects with her characters, which seemed very fairy-tale-ish and ok. Shirah is associated with water, for example, and that aspect was used in moderation and worked quite well.
Magic most definitely plays a part here. Spells are cast and have the expected impact. Of course some of what works is an expert’s knowledge of science, and that seems like magic at times. It is suggested that one character’s cloak has a feature may make it a likely ancestor of a similar garment used in Hogwarts. One expects magic in AH’s novels. This is all good.
For her historical basis, Hoffman relies on the writings of Flavius Josephus. Here we get into a bit of controversy. The tale of mass suicide that is Masada appears not to have a particularly strong foundation in archaeological research. It was fluffed at a time when it served well as a symbol of Israeli determination and nationhood. Evidence that proves that the events Josephus describes actually occurred is less than entirely persuasive. While there are certainly elements of Josephus’s tale that have a basis in reality, others might constitute a bit of playing to his audience. We all have our national myths. Think George Washington and the Cherry Tree, Paul Revere’s ride, WMDs in Iraq. I do not fault Hoffman for centering her tale around a historical event that is less than universally accepted. Myth is what she does. And she has done an outstanding job with this one. Whether one sees the source material as ancient history or a mythologization of a less exceptional reality, the story she spins around that core is a compelling one.
I have only read a handful of Alice Hoffman’s adult books, so cannot claim a deep knowledge of her oeuvre. But I would put my shekels on The Dovekeepers being the crowning achievement of her career. (One might say it is the feather in her literary cap. I wouldn’t, but some might.)
CBS aired a two-part mini-series of the novel. It was not particularly well received. The series makes do with three of the four primary characters, (sorry Revka) and Josephus is not a character in the book.
Oy, there are so many unfamiliar words used in this story that it would be a useful thing to have kept track of them. Sorry, kids, I did not. However, AH does collect some of those in a glossary on her site. It is not comprehensive, though. There are plenty more in the book.
And then there is Monty Python, noted at the top. Here is a site that not only links to the infamous Python suicide scene from Life of Brian, but offers a look at a scene, cut from the film, that had been intended to set it up.
My grandfather had described it a hundred times, but in his stories the house was always a bright, happy place—big and rambling, yes, but full of l
My grandfather had described it a hundred times, but in his stories the house was always a bright, happy place—big and rambling, yes, but full of light and laughter. What stood before me now was no refuge from monsters, but a monster itself, staring down from its perch on the hill with vacant hunger. Trees burst forth from broken windows and skins of scabrous vine gnawed at the walls like antibodies attacking a virus—as if nature itself had waged war against it—but the house seemed unkillable, resolutely upright despite the wrongness of its angles and the jagged teeth of sky visible through sections of collapsed roof.
Jacob Porter (I leave out his middle name, which you can enjoy discovering on your own) had been enthralled by his grandfather Abe’s magical, if frightening, tales of his past, horrifying monsters in pursuit and a safe haven of a special school in Wales for those fortunate enough to escape. When being the brunt of derision at school was too much, Jacob cast aside his faith in his grandfather’s stories, and assumed the consensus view that Gramps had been speaking metaphorically, about having been chased out of Poland by the Nazis. But when Jacob is a teen, and his grandfather is brutally murdered, he has cause to reconsider.
[image] Ransom Riggs - from The Columbus Dispatch
There is something both appealing and frightening about old photographs. In our apartment when I was a kid we had a book with photos from the Civil War. The pages were in less than pristine shape, but there were occasional pages that were well preserved, and on which the images were clear. It seemed impossible that people who had lived almost a hundred years before could seem so real, even in black and white, as if they might step out of the pages into our living room. It was similar in seeing photographs of my parents and their seldom, if ever, seen relations. I only knew my parents as middle-aged or elderly. Photos of them as young seemed, somehow, unreal. Nah, they never looked like that. I often wondered who the imposter was in a photo that was supposed to be my father, in full work gear, in front of a locomotive, sans moustache. Was he really my father, and if he was, who was that guy falling asleep in the recliner in the living room?
[image] Emma Bloom from The Peculiar Children Wikia
The offbeat collection of fascinating photographs included in the book, are one of the things that makes this book stand out. Ransom Riggs, the author of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, has a peculiar affinity for old photographs. He had originally intended to collect them into a picture book, but was encouraged to expand on what he had and make a novel out of them. He did, amassing quite the collection, trolling estate and yard sales broadening his scope and finding unexpected notions and plot direction from the new collections. He particularly enjoyed spotting photos that were odd. One appears to show a girl floating above the ground, another an invisible person in a suit, another a young man covered in bees. The book contains about fifty of these images. They lend both a sense of antiquity and strangeness. Many are downright creepy. And that is a good, sometimes a wonderful thing, particularly when the images relate to the darker elements in the story. Riggs selected a lineup of these oddities and from them constructed a tale, an explanation for what the photos purport to show. The result is magical, a triumph of imagination, and a rip-roaring read.
It was just a casual hobby, nothing serious, but I noticed that among the photos I found, the strangest and most intriguing ones were always of children. I began to wonder who some of these strange-looking children had been—what their stories were—but the photos were old and anonymous and there was no way to know. So I thought: If I can’t know their real stories, I’ll make them up…Sometimes I’d find a new photo that just demanded to be included in the story, and I’d find a way to work it in; other times I’d look for a certain type of photo to fit a story idea.
When he begins to dig into the meaning behind a letter his grandfather had left him, Jacob begins on the road to discovery. He must figure out what the words in grandfather’s letter mean. His quest leads him, accompanied by his amateur ornithologist father, to an island off the coast of Wales. I am not giving anything away by letting you know that on this island he finds a very special place and some very special people.
[image] Miss Peregrine from The Peculiar Children Wikia
I had inconsistent reactions to the book. At first, I was smitten. What a great idea! How beautifully realized! It offered the same sort of tingle I had when reading the first Harry Potter. Later, I felt that the story-telling relied on too many tropes. Oddities-thrown-together-to-cope-in-a-hostile-world, for example. It is no stretch to see close links to, say, X-men, or The Harry Potter series, or even, in a more adult realm, the sideshow performers of Geek Love. There is the portal to another place. Think the wardrobe of Narnia fame or John Carter finding a magical route to Barsoom. Stargates and wormholes are rampant in sci-fi, as are parallel dimension tales, (The Matrix series pops to mind) and there is always the familiar story of one Dorothy Gale to show the way as well. So, a well-worn path.
On the other hand, writers use tropes because they serve a story-telling purpose. What matters more is whether they use well the familiar tools at hand. And they are handled pretty well here. Jacob is a sympathetic lead. Peregrine is a familiar person in charge, the type who is courageous and caring, despite what can seem a severe façade. The crew of peculiars is perfectly fine. And Riggs has come up with a particularly nifty explanation and form for his other world.
[image] What Jacob finds
Stepping from one world into another, particularly for teens, is usually about leaving the nest and seeing the real world for the first time, whether this is about sexuality, fairness, conflict, truth, or all of the above. Growing up, coming of age. Jacob’s hormones are stretched a bit here, so we can check that box. Also he gets to see some of the reality of what his life pre-Peregrine featured. What were the adults in his life really like when seen through his newly acquired perspective? Can our character grow sufficiently to take on adult responsibilities, make adult decisions? You betcha.
In A Conversation with Ransom Riggs, an extra section at the back of my Peregrine volume, Riggs says
One of the themes of Miss Peregrine, and I think of any novel that involves the discovery of a secret world, is awakening—the protagonist’s awakening to an awesome and wonderful and, in some ways, terrible reality he scarcely could have imagined before, but that was right under his nose all along. At the end of Miss Peregrine, Jacob writes that his life was never ordinary, but he “had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.” Noticing the extraordinariness of the world is one of Emerson’s major themes. Again, from Nature: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.
Emerson (Ralph Waldo, not Keith) is referenced several times here. In fact Emerson was much more in the book in earlier versions, according to the afterward in the volume I read. Riggs says
Emerson often speaks of the possibility of fantastic things that exist just out of view, and many of his most famous quotes almost seem to refer directly to the peculiar children.
He offers a mystery, and the clues that Jacob and the reader are challenged to interpret in order to figure out what is going on. And there is magic. The powers of the peculiar children are certainly fun, but not spectacular, overall. A bit of fire control, levitation, super strength, invisibility. A few stand out. One boy has a close relationship with the apian world. Another has a gift for animating the inanimate. A girl can make plants grow very, very fast. One girl has an unexpected way of eating. And, of course, Peregrine has a few nifty tricks up her wing.
The underlying conflict, mirroring the war in the world when the school was founded, (WW II) offers some pretty scary baddies, wights and hollowgasts, the origin story of which called to mind Tolkien’s Gollum. The ongoing fear, chase, and battle loop is fun, generating the needed tension and keeping things moving along.
[image] Peculiars - from the film
I did not like that dad was portrayed as a dimwit. Not that he needed to be heroic, but he seemed far too lacking in strength and perception for my taste. And then, there are the changes made for the film. This review was posted before the film was released, so I can refer only to what I have read, and not to what I have actually seen. I reserve the right to modify once I have seen the movie. I am not thrilled that the film conflates two girls into one. I do understand that changes are typically made when translating a book to the medium of film. My objection is a small one. And while I expect to quite enjoy the otherworldly looking and compelling Eva Green as Peregrine, I imagined an older bird in the role. Getting Tim Burton as director is an amazing coup. Whatever changes have been made, I expect the film to be enchanting and wonderfully entertaining.
The author writes that this book, like the first Harry Potter, is meant to introduce his characters and his world to readers. It is in the second book in the series, Hollow City, that we can expect to enter that world and experience it more fully. I cannot speak to that one, as I have not yet read it. But I very much want to be kept in the loop for how this series unfolds. Peculiar may not have quite the rich dazzle of the Harry Potter books, but that is a pretty high bar by which to measure any YA series. It is enough that the first one had a particularly fun hook, and was a very enjoyable read, with engaging characters, a good bit action, some mystery, some surpises and a lot of human, and maybe not-so-human connection. I suppose the only thing that would really be peculiar would be if anyone was not interested in checking this out.
Riggs made the trailer for this, his first novel, after traveling to Belgium and Luxembourg looking for the ruined house of his imagination. The house he selected (shown in the review) is in Belgium.
What happens when one’s foundations crumble? What if the things you believed all your life turn out to have been, well, questionable?
The setting is 2What happens when one’s foundations crumble? What if the things you believed all your life turn out to have been, well, questionable?
The setting is 2002 in Boston, at the height of the terrible revelations about the Church. Sheila McGann is the younger, half-sister of Arthur Breen, a popular priest who is accused of inappropriate contact with an eight-year-old boy. As narrator, Sheila tells us what she gathered from talking with everyone involved in the events. Mom fears the worst and just does not want to know. Sheila’s other brother, Mike, believes that Art is guilty. The Church just wants it all to go away. And Arthur seems unwilling to mount a real defense.
[image] Jenifer Haigh - image from Patch.c0m
The primary event of the book is a mystery. Unraveling the threads of that mystery gives the book its forward motion, did-he-or-didn’t-he? Faith offers the fast pace, the feel of a whodunit. You will keep turning the pages and not want to put it down until you know all there is to know. But there is more to Faith than the details of what happened, when, to and by whom.
Haigh presents a portrait of growing up Irish Catholic in working-class Boston, and poses questions that go beyond the experience of any ethnic or religious group. The way she goes about her story-telling is to examine a family, and related characters, person by person, peeling back the layers. In an interview for her prior book, The Condition, on her web site, jennifer-haigh.com, she said,
Every story is a family story: we all come from somewhere, and it’s impossible to write well-developed characters without giving a great deal of thought to their childhood environments, their early experiences, whose genetic material they’re carrying around. Novels are all about causality—how one thing leads to another. Characters choices have consequences that affect the next generation and even the next.
She applies that methodology here. As in her previous book, The Condition, we get to see events from varying points of view until the entire truth is revealed.
Although I have no direct experience with clerics in the family, I am Irish-American and was raised Catholic, spent twelve years in Bronx Catholic schools and carry the impact of my upbringing with me to this day, for good or ill. (No nasty experiences with clerics, not sexual ones anyway) The way people interact in this story has the deafening ring of truth. Perhaps not all Irish families are so secretive, so unwilling or unable to communicate on an emotional level. But plenty of us are, and Haigh has captured that characteristic to a tee. Why talk about something when you can disapprove in silence? Why confront when you can avoid? There are so many sleeping dogs lying in our families that we should probably be in the kennel business. Maybe this book hits a bit too close to home sometimes. But aside from the personal recognition quotient, there is so much going on here.
How do we define ourselves? Are we solely the product of our environment? Can we escape the influences of our past, the crimes committed by our parents, the crimes committed against us? Where does free choice enter in? How are people changed? What are the dangers of removing the blinders and seeking out the truth?
At one point Sheila says,
“Sorry, Mike, but sooner or later you have to decide what you believe.” It was a thing I’d always known but until recently had forgotten: that faith is a decision. In its most basic form, it is a choice.
Is it? Is faith a choice? This is not a trivial question in a nation so divided on issues like abortion and separation of Church and State.
Not only will Haigh entertain you with an un-put-downable mystery, but she will engage you with rich, real characters, offer a look at a piece of American experience, and stimulate actual thought as well. Faith is a truly outstanding novel. Believe it.
Philip Connors tried his hand at a number of jobs and did pretty well. But his true love was the outdoors, particularly the remote outdoors. So, when Philip Connors tried his hand at a number of jobs and did pretty well. But his true love was the outdoors, particularly the remote outdoors. So, when an opportunity presented itself for him to spend half a year in a fire tower in remotest New Mexico, he dropped his reportorial gig at the Wall Street Journal and headed southwest. He knew a fair bit about the outdoors before beginning, from his Minnesota upbringing, and learned even more on the job. He kept on learning as he kept on re-upping for one more season, then another and another, amassing a lifetime’s worth of insight, contemplation and appreciation.
[image] Philip Connors has spent 17 summers as a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest. Lookouts are the eyes in the forest, even as the forests they watch have changed, shaped by developers, shifting land management policies and climate change – image and text from NPR - pic by Nathan Rott
In addition to the poetry of his language when writing of the natural world, Connors takes on policy issues as well, looking, for example, into the effect of publicly subsidized cattle grazing on public land, and on the impact of years of uninformed fire suppression-at-all-costs. Some fire is good, indeed is essential for the well-being of some environments. Smokey the Bear need not apply.
[image] Cabin and Fire Tower – from Connors’ site
Connors is a gifted story teller and peppers his narrative with welcome side-trips. For those of you who remember Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, there is a wonderful story here about Marlon Perkins. When Connors tells of retrieving Jack Kerouac’s unpublished fire-watcher logs from the New York Public Library, it is like opening Tut’s burial site for the first time. There are enough southwest characters here to fill a good sized bar, each with an attached tale.
[image] Railroad Fire – from Connors’ site
Fire Season is a work of deep love. Connors brings a poetical sensibility to his descriptions of the natural world he experienced. To be unmoved by his nature prose is to be unmovable. He also offers information and insight into issues relevant not only to our national forest and national parks, but to our land as a whole. Hopefully, Fire Season will spark greater interest in our national forests and support for the people who take care of them.
Originally posted - October 2010
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Fire Season was named the best 2011 Nature book by Amazon
Caribou Island is a masterpiece. Set in the remote bleakness of water-soaked, small town Alaska, this is a tale of desperation, failure, of man-versuCaribou Island is a masterpiece. Set in the remote bleakness of water-soaked, small town Alaska, this is a tale of desperation, failure, of man-versus-nature but also of man so arrogant and self-involved, so removed from reality that he does not bother to properly prepare for the battle. Some hope is gleaned, some battles are won, but the war seen here is a dark, suffocating presence.
Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.
Whereas most fiction floats atop a watery base of prose, Vann’s characters and story sit amidst a thick stew of imagery. His writing has the density, the economy of a short story. No event occurs that does not contribute to the underlying momentum, or to enhancing our understanding of the characters or their actions. Salmon thrashing about on the deck of a boat echo how his characters struggle to survive the travails of their lives. One even dreams of himself underwater with the hooked fish. The Alaskan environment is as much a character as the characters themselves. While it can be a beautiful landscape, and that is noted more than once, it is mostly harsh here, offering chill wind, rain, snow, cold, the harshness of the venue reflecting the harshness of the characters’ emotional states.
The water was no longer turquoise. A dark, dark blue today, with blackness in it, a clarity, no glacial silt suspended. Irene didn't know it could change so completely in even a day. A different lake now. Another metaphor for itself, each new version refuting all previous.
Vann’s language is as unadorned as a block of Hubbard ice, reminding me of Cormac McCarthy, particularly in his frequent verb-free sentence constructions.
The primary actors in Caribou Island are a late-middle-aged couple, Gary and Irene. Gary is impulsive, controlling, a bully and a coward, who cannot ever see himself as being in the wrong. He wants to test his mettle by constructing a cabin on the shore of remote Caribou Island. Another character thinks about sailing a ship around the world, thus conjuring Robert Stone and Outerbridge Reach. Gary’s wife, Irene, desperately trying to save her marriage, reluctantly agrees to help, despite knowing that constructing this cabin is only another in a long history of follies. Their daughter, Rhoda, is a veterinarian’s assistant. She lives with, and expects to marry Jim, a dentist, who is going through a mid-life crisis. A sociopathic man-user rips through the scenery, leaving a trail of destruction, and a few minor characters are given lines. But their actions serve primarily to highlight the larger issues. Looming over all is Irene’s memory from age ten, when she found her mother, hanging.
What effect must that have had on such a young person? Vann ought to know. His own father took his life when Vann was thirteen. Irene carries that memory on her back like Jesus stumbling toward Calvary. Given Vann’s prior work, one must wonder if one or more of his characters will find their way to a similar a dark end.
But there is a route. There are reasons, challenges, revelations, lies, contemplations. Abandonment and isolation are prime here. Vann casts a laser light on how people manage to see past each other, how they miss chances to connect. He looks at how fear, whether of failure, or of being alone, can help cause the very things we most want to avoid. Even the sociopath is running from something. Vann shows how people can make each other invisible, whether consciously or not, and do so at their peril, and how their externalizing of internal issues and images impacts those around them. Are we doomed to repeat the crimes of our parents? Of our parents’ parents? Of forebears beyond counting?
The subject matter may be tough, but the journey is incredibly rich, the main characters well realized, the craft impressive. You will find yourself thinking about scenes from this book long after you have moved on to your next read. Vann is the real deal, and this is top notch literature. Climb into your leaky boat, brave the icy wind and squall-driven waves slapping at the sides of your craft and head over to Caribou Island . It is a memorable sojourn. And if this is not recognized as one of the best books of 2011, I will eat my copy.
When late-twenty-something Conor Grennan felt guilty about spending an entire year travelling the world, he decided to dedicate three months of this tWhen late-twenty-something Conor Grennan felt guilty about spending an entire year travelling the world, he decided to dedicate three months of this time to volunteering at a Kathmandu orphanage named “Little Princes.” His experience would be a life altering one for him. The children in this orphanage had arrived mostly because of traffickers. Unscrupulous men promise desperately poor rural parents that their children will be well looked-after, well educated, and will be safe from being taken by Maoist insurgents. They then charge these poor people enormous sums but do not deliver on their promises. Some of the children are sold into slavery, some are used as professional beggars for Fagin-like masters, some are dumped on families no better able to raise and protect them than their own families, and some are dropped off at orphanages. The “orphans” Grennan encountered were often children who still had living families. He made it his mission to try to reconnect the children with their loved ones.
I was reminded of Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson’s tale of building schools for education-deprived kids in Pakistan. There is plenty of observation of the surrounding physical and political environment, but Grennan’s tale hews more closely than Mortenson’s to his personal story, and so far as we know, to the truth.
In fact, it reads like a novel, with a bit of something for everyone. There is suspense. Grennan must fear for his life as Dickensian evil-doers, such as politically connected human traffickers and Maoist rebels who do not appreciate his interefence with their theft of children, pose a constant threat. There is adventure, as Grennan, who is injured at the beginning of the journey, and a team, trek the Himalayas trying desperately to find the families of his lost children before winter sets in. There is a tale of moral uplift as this young middle-class westerner finds a calling to help children in need in a remote, impoverished land. This is accompanied by an understated exploration of spirituality. But most of all, this is a love story. For it is his love for the children he encounters that sets Grennan on his life's new path, love for the corps of new friends with whom he shares his work and finally, love for a woman he meets via e-mail while he is in Nepal, a woman he believes will be the love of his life. (I always enjoy hearing of people who have met this way, having met my wife-of-twelve-years on-line myself) He describes their impending meeting: "man walks twenty-seven hours in two days to get out of the mountains to meet girl who has just flown nine thousand miles for a visit." Not your typical first date.
At times, I was racing through the pages as if I were reading a Stieg Larsson, eager to see what happens next, and at others, I had to put the book down to wipe my eyes. You will be engaged, moved and uplifted. There really are good things happening in this world. There really are good people. And it is really good to be reminded of that.
I stumbled across a video re Grennan and the book. It is a promotional piece, but captures well what the book is about. There are more vids on Connor's site.
PS – The copy I read was an ARE, so lacked some items that I hope will make it into the production version. Maps would help situate one in the geography here, and I really wanted to see photos of the places and people Grennan writes about.
PPS - The author graciously posted a comment about this. Maps and photos were indeed in the hard cover.
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