2 1/2 Pillars of Wisdom

The 2 ½ Pillars of Wisdom

Alexander McCall Smith
ISBN 0-349-11850-7
Abacus Fiction
First published in Great Britain by Abacus in 2004
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People read McCall Smith to be elegantly and not too taxingly entertained. They will not be disappointed by this volume. Three risible (and painfully tall) German professors of philology disport in all their pedantic and esoteric glory before us. The book’s being broken up into three easily-digestible and fully connected sections makes the read even more user-friendly. (The sections are ‘Portuguese Irregular Verbs’, ‘The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs’ and ‘At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances’, in case you were wondering.)

The narrative follows Professor von Iglefeld, through attempts to master tennis by reading a book on it, to researching Irish obscenities, attempting and failing in an imaginary romance, giving lectures in more inappropriate situations that you would think possible, fighting off a cruise-ship full of ladies of a certain age, and getting inexplicably entangled in South American political machinations. His two main companions and associates Professor Florianus Prinzel and Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer drift in and out of the narrative but maintain a constant presence within the Professor’s busy and off-track mind.

‘Fluffy’ (or as fluffy as philology can be) as the material is, like most entertaining and easy reading the writing is highly accomplished. As an example of third-person narrative that judges perfectly between authorial slant and superb ‘show-not-tell’ technique, it stands proud as any serious work of literature. Creating sympathy for a moderately obnoxious set of characters and maintaining humour and pace in a purposefully un-humorous setting is a feat of agility most could not hope to emulate. McCall Smith knows what he is doing, and it shows.


There is however a distinct tendency towards farce, particularly towards the end. The aim is obviously to culminate in a sizeable shebang, partly perhaps to give some structure to the book. Personally I found this one of the weaker aspects of the piece. While the reader (or at least this reader) remains enjoyably engaged whilst the action is at least plausible, however farcical, once incredulity reaches a certain peak attention is lost rather than retained. However, this is a minor point and I know many readers would have no trouble in swallowing the more bizarre happenings.

Heartbroken

 

Title: Heartbroken
Author: Lisa Unger ISBN: 978 0 307 46520 7

Published: Crown

Date: 2012


Book quote:

“Sticks and stones can break my bones. But words can break my heart.”

 

Lisa Unger’s 6^th novel showcases her mastery of the art of creating sticky-finger books (that’s what I call the unputdownables). If you’ve got a deadline to meet in the next couple of days, don’t start on this just yet, or you’ll be in trouble.

Heartbroken centres on Heart Island in the Adirondack islands, along with its mysteries and the people drawn to it. Birdie, the owner of the island who has been coming there every summer of her life, guards it and its secrets with a jealous, ugly passion that’s only too believable. Kate, whose existence is finally taking a discernible shape long after anyone expected her to do anything with her life, comes to Heart Island and undergoes a peculiar, forty-something coming-of-age transformation. Finally, the tiny, malleable Emily finds herself coerced into a horrific spiral of misdeeds and, on the run from the police, also ends up at the island. Here the past and the present fuse in a cataclysmic, purging denouement after which none of the protagonists’ lives will ever been the same again.

What makes for the tension? Why is it a ‘sticky-finger’ book? Several reasons. Firstly, and probably most importantly, the character portrayal is totally believable, certainly for the female characters. As if often the case with Unger’s writing, the males lag behind the girls and have nothing of the same 3D weight. Dean is a stereotype with some embellishments, Brad is a cardboard cut-out villain, Birdie’s husband Joe barely deigns to utter a word and Kate’s son Brendan doesn’t get much more of a look-in than to limp occasionally across the stage. Kate’s husband Sean has more of a solid aura, but he is still only a bit-part. The real strength is with the women. The bitchiness, the insecurities, the hopes and misunderstandings of the women are balanced by their individual strengths and preoccupations in a manner that’s completely engrossing. Carefully chosen to mirror and counterfoil each other, the characters Unger has created pull the novel together as much as the plot does.

Which brings us to the next reason it’s difficult to put the book down. It’s perfectly paced. The twists and pieces of information are placed at exactly the right intervals: not too frenetic but enough to keep the action on a moderate to high level. Things speed up towards the end – as they should do, in any decent thriller. It’s all in Goldilocks’s Just Right club.

One thing I found curious was that this isn’t a very ‘writerly’ book, despite the obvious skill across many sectors. It’s stuffed full of ‘tell-not-show’ writing and the sentence structure is (quite possibly entirely intentionally) simple and uncomplicated. The tell-not-show incidence is much more pronounced at the start of the novel, where Unger gives the impression that she doesn’t care to beat about the bush in getting the characters sketched out for us and doesn’t rely on or trust the reader to make inferences from actions until they’ve been firmly sat down and told what exactly is going on with the protagonists. What does this all lead to? A book that slips down very easily.  The reader isn’t called on to make informed judgments, leaps of understanding or deep psychological analysis. It’s pretty much laid out for them, with a napkin at the side and a toothpick for later. Sometimes, it’s pretty pleasant to sit down to fare like that, and one could easily overeat. I imagine Heartbroken will appeal to a very wide female audience.

Fall by Colin McAdam

FALL by Colin McAdam

Book Quote:

“Like most private schools it was part fantasy, part reality, and therefore all reality. (…) We were boys who wore suits, monkeys with manners. We didn’t have parents but were treated like babies. We were left on our own but had hundreds of rules to abide by.”

I’d seen Fall described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.

The two main narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking, not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be good-natured.

By contrast Noel’s prose is highly structured – more so than would be possible for the age group. This is excused by the account being written retrospectively from an adult standpoint. Within the novel, it’s only Noel that is examined in detail and whose changes are viewed. Most of the other characters are almost static emotionally. There’s also a nominal contribution from William, Julius’s father’s driver.

The “Fall” of the title is the name of one of the few girls in the predominantly male school, and is short for “Fallon.” Fall is dating Julius: they’re the ideal couple, both popular and attractive. Noel is obsessed with Fall as well, though he never declares it to her, but instead continues to state in the narrative that his turn with her will come later. The plot (such as it is) revolves around the disappearance of Fallon from the campus grounds, with both Julius and Noel being questioned about it.

What the novel is concerned with is the development of Noel from a weedy sixteen year old who won’t retaliate if pushed down in a corridor, to a seemingly self-confident, possibly self-knowing sociopath, prone to explosive violence at rare moments. When he visits his family in Sydney near the outset of the book, he describes himself:

“One day I came out of the pool and saw myself reflected in our sliding door. I was a pale and skinny sixteen-year-old who had forgotten to put sunblock on one of his shoulders. My lazy eye was swollen shut, my face was ugly and drained, my shoulder was livid, and I was still unformed.”

It’s the “unformed” that McAdam is concerned with. The environment the teenagers are put into is portrayed as artificial, unhealthy. Despite being highly supervised, there are effectively no adults in the children’s lives. It’s noticeable that Julius’s mother is dead (she committed suicide), Fallon’s father is absent (her parents are divorced) and Noel’s family is supposedly intact but they’re as far away as they can be, in Australia.

The implication is that growing up in this unnatural environment, the children inevitably miss out on vital components of life. Like plants deprived of isolated nutrients, they’re prone to becoming emotionally stunted – lop-sided, etiolated.  In Sydney, as Noel prepares to leave his parents’ house for school at the end of the holidays, his mother says to him:

“I don’t like seeing how much you’re changing. … I’m missing all your changes.”

When adults don’t keep a watch on the changes children go through, undesirable developments multiply unnoticed. There are key incidents that serve as markers along the road to Noel’s increasingly antisocial tendencies. The first is an incident in 9th grade, mainly described by Chuck, a close associate of Julius and Noel’s. The incident involves Noel (still in his “unformed” state) being bullied by a larger boy, and after a fair period of non-retaliation suddenly turning and biting his tormentor’s arm. Chuck says it wasn’t even the fact that he physically bit a piece out of a fellow student’s arm, but that afterwards Noel was absolutely unaffected by it. “…like it was all normal for him. Like he just forgot about it.” It’s not the incident itself that the stolid Chuck finds disturbing, but the separation from a workaday mentality.

Nuances and hints are brushed in lightly but deliberately. In the corridor of a quiet Friday afternoon when not many other people are about, Noel passes Mr Staples:

“who taught Algebra and Functions, nodded at me and said, ‘Mr Reece.’ His lips were tight and there was a look in his eyes that had developed a few years earlier whenever he saw me. Distrust or caution or just that squint of a half-formed opinion. I never liked him.”

Here Noel is narrating, but he doesn’t refer to the biting incident specifically, but simply as “a few years earlier.” In the lop-sided world of the semi-abandoned school, even the teacher’s opinion is possibly “half-formed.”

There’s also an ambiguous encounter with a girl at the gym in Sydney, where Noel first starts working out. Meg is a no-nonsense girl and is pointedly stronger than Noel at the time, but after an encounter at a midnight beach suddenly stops turning up at the gym. Noel writes her a letter of apology for “frightening” her, but as far as Noel’s own account relates, there has been nothing to justify this apology. One is left to wonder what happened after Noel’s pen stopped writing.

This is the case throughout Noel’s account. How self-aware is he? Although it’s deliberately left unanswered, the fact that he’s writing after (what is obviously) extensive discussion and analysis, as well as brief pointers, suggest that Noel is quite aware of his own nature. When he’s sitting in a café with Fallon, he narrates:

“I’ve often tried to see the world through her eyes. I know that café looked different to her than it did to me.”

This brings us to the issue of lack of empathy. Critics of the book have pointed out that characters are not rounded, they’re cut-outs. Particularly Fall, the prime object of desire. We’re not at all clear  what she looks like, or anything about her other than she’s a reasonably attractive, decent girl with a slightly troubled family background. The point about Fall is, however, not why she is desirable, but that she is. In the two-dimensional mind of an underdeveloped human with an insufficient intake of adult stability, the fact that she is desirable is much more important than what she actually is. As readers, we need know no more. In a world reduced to symbols and arbitrary black-and-white areas, protagonists are unable to function when they collide with real life or emotion – the “grey” areas, within themselves and in the external world.

The premature separation from parents caused by boarding school is juxtaposed with the infantilisation of physically mature boys. The school imposes rules, often ineffectual and seemingly arbitrary. Julius says:

“Chuck’s bed is here and Ant’s bed is there and I’m wondering why I’m eighteen years old and sleeping in a bunk bed.”

These two aspects of the evils inflicted by the school seem to combine to create a small vortex strong enough to suck susceptible minds into an emotional limbo. McAdam himself went to a similar boarding school, and there is without doubt a great deal of catharsis and self-healing within the volume. This does not make it less worthwhile a read.

Once again, on hearing the novel was a “literary whodunit” with the title of Fall, I expected perhaps a detective’s journey into the abyss of a killer’s mind, which drags the detective into a biblical “Fall” in the process. In the first analysis, one might be disappointed going in with these expectations. However, in retrospect, this is precisely what it is – except that the detective is the reader, and McAdam tries his best to share the “fall” in a manner that will be participated in, also by the reader. Here, though, the state before the fall is not some prelapsarian innocence. It’s more mere ignorance, unformedness. The protagonists lurch from being unformed to being malformed, no pause inbetween. It’s perhaps more chilling for this, as for all their two-dimensionality, they are in their own way entirely believable.

(Book Review originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, Dec 2010)

WHILE THE WOMEN ARE SLEEPING by Javier Marias

WHILE THE WOMEN ARE SLEEPING by Javier Marias

Book Quote:

“Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered of conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. […] He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave.”

This collection of short stories is intriguing and memorable, firstly for its peculiar themes and obsessions, secondly (contrary to what one might expect) because the earlier pieces seem far “better” than the later.

Let’s qualify “better.” The title story “While the Women Are Sleeping” is by far the longest and most self-indulgent of all the pieces, as well as being a relatively “late” piece. Pages of almost-monologue punctuated only by random, unnecessary actions do not constitute a well-crafted short story, in my view. The observations and tension do keep one reading, but in a sitting-back-with-eyebrows-slightly-raised sort of way. Arguably, the feat of retaining reader attention through the obstacle of such a construct is more impressive than if the story were crafted in a manner more conducive to the short story format. However, the bottom line is that it rambles. It’s introspective and ultimately inconclusive.

The short story is an unforgiving mistress. It has certain criteria, one of which is to swallow the reader instantly into its own specific setting and situation. This is the aim of all stories, of whatever length, but the demands made of a short story within a collection like this are far greater than those made of a novel with 300 pages to wallow in. All the stories in this collection do meet this criterion. Each one is vivid and memorable – sometimes unpleasantly so, as in the title story (it leaves one with a kind of “icky” feeling, which is undoubtedly entirely intentional).

The short story demands something else, though. It has to have thrust. If the tale drifts along in a nightmarish river of introspection, possibilities and hypotheticals, before leaving one stranded on a muddy shore with nothing more than a queasy stomach and uncertainty as to what just happened, it can never aspire to being more than mediocre. It is in this respect that the earlier stories outclass the later. They may be gawkier, but their undisguised obsessions have an energy that loses its way in the more convoluted sentences and oblique references in the later works. Though, having said “later” the latest piece in the collection is from 1998, so they are all relatively early works. There’s a certain breathless audacity needed to be able to write of a main character: “Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past” and still expect your reader to stay with you.

The other intriguing aspect of the collection (from an English reader’s point of view) is the seemingly near-stereotypically Spanish preoccupation with death and mortality. Eight of the ten stories deal directly with death, from a bewildering multitude of viewpoints. Add to this that the majority of the pieces are in the first person and you will get the (correct) impression that overall the collection is a head-on confrontation with issues surrounding mortality.

These issues are of a curiously philosophical nature. Mortality as connected with identity is a recurring theme, and the book is crawling with doppelgangers, mirrors, transfigurations and shadows. The self is lost, stolen, misplaced, and unknown in myriad variations. Generation and ancestry is a theme closely linked here, as ancestors and progenitors occur as echoes of the younger generations, haunting and forever directing them, even if unwittingly.

Yet these echoes, though fateful and often baleful, somehow seem to be taken as part of a natural process. Many of the outcomes in the stories are pretty dismal, but there’s a certain satisfaction of a destined, if not a just, end met: as if the Weird sisters were writing a report on the day’s activities.

This brings me back to the title story. One of the central characters is an entirely self-absorbed 23-year-old female. She has abandoned her parents and is currently seemingly content to be the idolatrous object of worship of an older man. She lies on the beach, staring into a hand-mirror, examining her perfect skin for any tiny blemishes. She says not a single word throughout the story. Such progenitor-less self-absorption is seen as a full-stop in the continuum of the general struggle of existence, and as such, more to be pitied than idolised. Perhaps this is the core paradox between Marías’ writing and his philosophy: a short story must be complete of itself, like the Midgard Serpent. His personal philosophy (as it appears in this collection) indicates that this would be the worst of all possible fates, so how could he reconcile the demands of the form to the thrust of the content? With difficulty, it seems.

I enjoyed this book, and will be carrying its images around with me for a long while, I suspect. I would recommend it to anyone interested in short stories.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2011)

FRAGILE by Lisa Unger

Book Quote:

“It didn’t take long for tensions to build. The three of them – the pretty cheerleader, the sexy burnout too old, too knowing for her age, the geek with gothic leanings – they were all there, these representative of the perennial high school subcultures. Squirming and pink beneath the shells of their adulthoods. Maggie thought that childhood things would be left behind, these silly groupings would fade and become meaningless, but they never were. Not in a town like this. Those teenage girls, each awkward and unsure in her own way, never left the Hollows.”

Fragile is set in a small town 100 miles from New York City, called “The Hollows.” The dynamics between family clusters, over the generations within the sometimes stifling small-town boundaries, form the emotional backbone of this well-crafted thriller.

The central group is the Cooper family. With Jones (the father) being the chief detective in the Hollows police force and Maggie (the mother) being a psychologist, they are strategically placed to know what’s going on in town when something out of the ordinary happens. Their son Ricky is a high school student, and the disappearance of his girlfriend Charlene is the signal for the mystery to begin in earnest.

There are two other main family groups. The first group is that of the Murrays: with moody Melody the mother, Charlene the disappearing would-be rock star, and Graham the stepfather with dubious intentions. The second is the Crosbys: the family with a strong current of violence and intimidation, which includes the mostly absent mother Angie, Travis the bully policeman father, and Marshall their deeply troubled son.

The childhood histories of the generation now in their prime are insolubly linked. As their past actions seem to have become part of the silent fabric of the Hollows, a unique dread, like a recurring nightmare, stalks the story as the plot unfolds. Unspoken terror of retributive karma lends the narrative a tinge of ghost-like fear.

Two entwined themes weave through the novel with the intensity of obsession. The first of these is the theme of the lost girl.

No fewer than three lost girls wander through the pages of Fragile. Charlene Murray, the current missing girl, is the novel’s immediate raison d’être. Sarah Myer, from a generation back, brings the weight of the past to the narrative. Charlie the pest-control guy’s Lily brings a resonating chord from the world outside the Hollows.

As Unger states in a note on the text, the core idea for the narrative evolved from an incident in her childhood, where a student went missing from her own high-school. One is left with a distinct impression that the distance of the memory, its initial emotional impact and the diverse aspects in which it has reflected on in the author’s own life have a strong bearing on the general tone of the novel. How memory both changes the future and shapes our perception of what we now are is the subject of the other main theme of the novel: change.

In the most concrete sense, change and the lack of it are built up through family portrayals, in shards of continuity or broken lines. Maggie would like to paint but she’s too busy – meanwhile her mother’s attic is full of her father’s old paintings. Charlie would like to write, and eventually finds out that his father used to write. Charlie’s colleague Wanda knows all about cars because her daddy worked for Ford. The Crosby family are all policemen and bullies– “the gene gets stronger every generation.” Jones hates his mother for dominating his life, but dominates his son and disbelieves him in turn, reflecting his own fears onto Ricky without bothering to think about who the new generation really is.

Which links can or should be broken? What kind of change is possible? Through exploration of these relationships, so circumscribed by location and custom, the novel eventually posits that only by admitting the past – both our own deeds and those of our forbears – and incorporating it into our existence, can we “grow up.”  The crystallisation that hidden fear forces onto a character is a type of stagnation, a decomposition.

Through the pages of carefully-constructed prose one clearly sees a diligent writer taking enviable care in their craft: a writer who hates sloppiness and unintentional ambiguity. This preciseness for a long time seemed to sit at odds with a certain out-of-focus quality to the tenor of the narrative.

Initially I put this characteristic down to lack of immediate “need to write;”  it seemed to suggest meticulous but slightly mechanical work without a great deal of emotional force behind it. This conclusion was somewhat spurred on by the fact that character portrayal in Fragile is extremely female-heavy, and empathy for any character is late in coming. Not to say that we don’t know how the male characters look, behave or think – it’s that we don’t feel what it’s like to be inside them. Not even Jones, who is heavily analysed.

However, as the story progressed it started to become apparent that the emotional freeze imposed on the writing was precisely mirroring that which the characters suffered from. The thaw descends on the structure of the language, the plot, and the characters simultaneously. Such a demonstration of union between language, emotion and story is truly impressive.

I went in a sceptic, and came out a fan. Unger’s Beautiful Lies is already sitting on my shelf, waiting.

(First published in Mostly Fiction Book Review, 2011)

NATION by Terry Pratchett

NATION by Terry Pratchett

Book Quote:

“It is too lonely. It has too many memories! It has too much silenced laughter, too many unheard footsteps, too many soundless echoes since they died!”

In interviews, Terry Pratchett has said that he had to write Nation. He pushed aside earlier scheduled work to accomplish this. The momentum of this need translates itself into a headlong rush which the reader experiences quite shortly after picking up the volume… until the end.

Well. This is not to overlook the consummate skill with which Pratchett  prunes his work for ever-smoother reading. It’s easy for a reader to consume this 400 page book in a day, if not a sitting. After this we waddle off, fulfilled and glowing, thinking “what a wonderful story, and my what a fast reader I must be” while Pratchett sits in his customary shadow, snickering under his hat. Undoubtedly entirely pleased with the result.

The setting is not Discworld. It’s the equivalent of the 19th century, and the settings are a South Sea island and Britain (the latter but briefly). It’s a parallel universe, where (for example) Darwin exists but events and monarchs are slightly adjusted.

Mau is a South Sea Island boy undertaking his adulthood-initiation trial on a nearby deserted island, when a Tsunami strikes. In his canoe, he survives and makes it back home to his own island, but meanwhile his village has been wiped away. Apart from the harrowing remains of his tribespeople laced through the branches of trees (which he somehow manages to dispose of properly) there are no humans left. The one exception is a solitary aristocratic English girl (calling herself “Daphne” because she doesn’t like the name “Ermintrude”) who has washed up on the wings of the wave and is stranded in the middle of the jungle island, in her wrecked ship, with all her Victorian ideas of propriety intact. The coming together of these two characters is mesmerising, inventive and bizarre to the point of utter believability, chest-emptyingly funny and soberingly poignant.

Since Mau was interrupted in his adult initiation ceremony, he officially has no soul. He floats between the childhood and adult world, unable to finish the transition he started before the catastrophe. In the nightmare of disposing of the dead and wandering about the wrecked island on his own, he talks to the entities of  “the Grandfathers’” and “Locaha,”  the god of death. The Grandfathers are the spirit voices of the islander’s ancestors, accustomed to being placated with fresh beer, honoured, and having the “god anchors” in their proper place. Locaha, like so many devils, plays a constant game of intimidation with Mau.

“Would it hurt to stop now? To slide back down into the dark and let the current take him? It would be the end of all grief, a blanketing of all bad memories.”

“Does not happen!”  is Mau’s assertion of life to this sibilation of Locaha’s as he slips into the depth of the sea while rescuing the ‘”ghost girl’” (Daphne).  The pain of self-discipline and the subjugation of the needs of the self to the needs of others are two central themes within this reverberating coming-of-age novel.

Like any good piece of this genre, it has its work cut out for it, as it has to encompass nothing less than the Whole of Life. No problem. Disillusionment with (and respect for) parents and ancestors, self-reliance, loss of the known ground, sacrifice of self, acceptance of responsibility, human understanding that transcends cultural differences, madness and the struggle with death, questions as to the very nature of time, surviving the uprooting of the most fundamental beliefs. All of these and more are easily ensconced within the masterful cocoon of the narrative, and the reader swings from thread to thread without any knowledge of how carefully he’s being handled. Or would do, if he kept his eyes shut and just enjoyed the ride.

This is why the novel is so adeptly written for the young adult market. Pratchett wishes the ride to be easy, but also for you to admire the view, and learn. The themes and continuity are not meant to be ignored: he carefully positions mirroring passages (typically regarding Daphne’s life and Mau’s life) sequentially. If Daphne thinks about her problems with her ancestors, Mau think of his mirror issues. If Mau wonders why so much responsibility is suddenly thrust on him, Daphne considers her case too. Nature echoes it, other protagonists support it. This description may make it sound overly simplistic in structure: this is utterly untrue. It is merely guiding younger readers on a smooth path of fine literary mastery.

As the days and weeks pass, more stragglers accumulate on the island (good and bad) and Mau finds that despite his “demon” status with his lack of an official soul, his youth, inexperience, recent exile from state of dependence on his parents, his spiritual confusion and paralysing doubts as to the state of the universe (in short, his state of being a teenager), despite all of these he is being nudged irrevocably into a role of leadership. Daphne travels her own mirror road, roughly in the same direction. A climax of pirates and cannibals is resolved before a ship from Britain turns up bearing Daphne’s father and much more.

At this point it might be wise to glance at another novel of the same genre, Lord of the Flies. The parallels (and differences) between the two are certainly no coincidence. Nation is perhaps the diametric opposite of the earlier book. Nation’s bereft islanders deal with their own climax of barbarism (inflicted on them, not produced by them) before the British arrive in their shiny uniforms. When they arrive, they do not rescue the stranded before being rescued (spiritually) by the “savages.” The demon of Death is no flapping parachutist on the mountain but a vivid confrontation of the darkest forces within ourselves – and is overcome conclusively, not run away from. If Lord of the Flies leaves the reader with grief and believable horror, Nation leaves only hope in the regenerative, not the destructive power nascent within the human psyche. It is no coincidence that the last chapter is entitled “The World Turned Upside Down.” In an age crammed with post-apocalyptic foreboding and doom, it is a radical statement of belief in the possibility of fundamental triumph of positive over negative.

I cannot think of any age-group or social group I would not recommend Nation to. It has material enough for absolutely everybody.

(Originally published in Mostly Fiction Book Reviews, 2010)