Book Review: The Ninth Child

The Ninth Child, by Sally Magnusson

     This book about a Scottish faery tale is so readable because it is based on a true story.

     There really was a Scots minister by the name of Robert Kirke. He really did die under mysterious circumstances in 1692. He really was the first person to translate the Bible into Scots Gaelic, and he really did hand-cut the epitaph for his wife's gravestone, which still stands in the cemetery in Aberfoyle, Scotland.

 

     More importantly for this story, though, is that Kirke was a folklorist, who collected and wrote down the tales of the Good People. It was this work that got Kirke into trouble with the faeries. The tale is that when Kirke died, the faeries stole away his body, replacing it with one of their own. They kept him from his heaven until he performed a task in repentance.

      It is this legend -- which the great Scots author Walter Scott had a hand in spreading -- that Magnusson imagines is true, and she writes the conclusion. 

       Fast forward to 1856. Isabel Aird is a doctor's wife, a lady of leisure and fashion, a city woman. Her husband, bored and looking to expand his medical knowledge, takes a position out in the country, as the Scots attempt to blast through the rocky highlands to bring fresh water to Glasgow.

    She is frustrated as she tries to adjust to life as a country wife. She misses the luxuries of an urbane society, but she comes to enjoy the trails and fields around her home. She manages to accept the country people, and some of them enjoy her, but they can never quite put aside their suspicions of her. 

   Of course, at some point, Mrs. Aird and Rev. Kirke meet and develop a relationship. It's an uneasy one, full of missteps and mistrusts. Each is unsure of the future and the social acceptance of their friendship.

    The tale is mostly theirs, but it brings in various subplots that tie into the story. There is Mrs. Aird's inability to give birth, as she has had eight miscarriages -- and during the book, she again becomes pregnant. Her desire to have a child is strong, and her society's judgment troubles her. She attempts to branch out, and expresses a wish to learn medicine and help her husband, who too often responds with a patriarchal flippancy.

    Yet, she is surrounded by strong women: There's Kirsty McEchern, a co-narrator who provides the voice of the Highlanders whose culture Mrs. Aird moves in with. Florence Nightingale is making her own waves in the world of medicine, and Mrs. Aird sees her as a living example of what women are capable of. Victoria is the queen, a mother and a sovereign, and her strength and equal personal relationship with  her husband, Prince Albert, is a strong contrast to the lifestyles of  Mrs. Aird and most of the women of their time. 

    It's a multi-faceted book, one that will leave you thinking about it long after you've read the last page.

Book Review: The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

    The six-word summation of this book is: "Rich man makes bad life decisions."

    I mostly enjoyed this book, although it is perhaps the whitest book I have ever read. Imagine, if you will, this synopsis: The father of a young teenage child deserts his family. Later, the boy and his mother are the victims of a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mother dies; the child grabs a famous painting and escapes.

   

It's a lot of book

      Picture that happening to a black child. Now, as in this book, imagine the child is white. Yep. Two different stories, never meeting nor crossing paths. 

    This story is the white one.

    Simply put, it's about a child with an obsession about the stolen painting. Or more accurately, it's about a child cum man with an obsession about his obsession about his stolen painting.

    It did win a Pulitzer Prize, and it's not hard to see why: It's a grand, overarching book about family, love, desire, hope, and hopelessness. It's a sprawling book that moves from New York to Las Vegas, back to New York, and then to Europe. It's about the lifestyles of the wealthy, and the privileged way they walk through life.

    But it's also overwritten, meandering on for 771 pages. Just about every experience is overdone, every scene over-described. For someone who prefers tight writing, as I do, it's a slog to get through. At the end, Tartt grows increasingly philosophical, and you wonder if she is furiously adding on pages as you read. You fear the book might never end.

    That all said, however, it is a good story, with a handful of interesting characters; albeit none very likeable. It's no doubt a good book for the times we are in -- something that will remain with you through the long, shut-in days of quarantine.     

Book Review: The Good People

The Good People, by Hannah Kent

    Although she was born and lives in Australia, Hannah Kent deserves at least an honorary place in the pantheon of great Irish novelists.

    She brings all five senses to her writing.

    She uses her eyes for the intricacies of the Irish language, her ear for the turn of a phrase, her smell for the land, the animals, and the bog, her taste for the medicinal herbs, and her touch with a sensitivity for the rural Irish culture.

    The Good People is set in Ireland of the 1820s, when the fairies battled with the Catholic Church over truth and morality, and a close knit people battled with themselves over much the same things. Kent explains that The Good People were what the Irish natives called their fairies and their stories.

Irish fairy lore was (and remains) a deeply complex, ambiguous system of folk belief -- there is little that is twee or childish about it. ... In writing this work of fiction, I have tried to portray fairy and folk belief as part of the fabric of everyday rural nineteenth-century life, rather than as anomalous.

    In her novel, Kent addresses issues of poverty, rural life, gossip, religious power and hypocrisy, and female empowerment. Her characters include a teenage girl brought into a strange situation in a new community that involves an old woman wildly considered to be a witch, a widowed woman grieving over the death of her husband, her daughter, and the loss of her grandson to illness, and that boy, who may be a changling.

    Having a changling -- someone stolen and replaced by the fairies -- brings in additional issues of belief, magic, and superstition.

    Resolving them involves some truth -- the novel is based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1826 in County Kerry, Ireland. But of course, it includes literary license, all written in a fine style that causes one to stop to appreciate the writer's grace and talent.

Book Review: Queenie

Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

Much like its protagonist, this novel is bi-polar. Some of it -- especially the final couple of chapters -- is extraordinary. 

But too much of it is mundane or head-scratching. It's meant to portray a woman going through a tough period in her life, but sometimes you want to be like her grandmother and figuratively smack her upside the head and tell her to get her act together.

OK, perhaps that is cruel thought when discussing a book about a potential mental illness, an issue the book handles quite well. But you often see where Queenie is headed, and want to beg her to avoid the poor choices you know she is going to make. It's going to turn out badly -- you know it, she knows it; hell, all of England knows it -- yet she's going to play it through.

And yes, I recognize I am a man critiquing a woman's perspective, with all the limitations that entails. 

Queenie Jenkins is a young black woman of Jamacian heritage growing up in south London. A lot is changing in her life -- she's starting a new job, her white boyfriend is on the edge of dumping her -- taking a break, he calls it -- and her traditional Caribbean neighborhood of Brixton is undergoing gentrification. So she tries to muddle through by overreacting, underreacting, and looking to fill her loneliness with sex.

Queenie also tries to be a politcal activist. She expresses both sadness and anger at the number of black men and women in the United States and the United Kingdom who are being harassed and attacked by police. She tries, without success, to get her editor to give her assigments on the issue. She is an avid supporter of Black Lives Matter.

The book includes some decent arguments on these issue. But not near enough, and when they occur, they seem like afterthoughts.  They are few and far between, being overtaken by her chatter with her girlfriends, her poor decisions about men, her roommates, and her family problems. 

Perhaps I wanted and expected a more political book about dealing with what it's like to grow up as a black woman in London. Because I did get some of that. But I got more pesonal matters -- if you enjoy reading about those, go ahead and grab this book. It does have its strong points.

Overall, it just isn't -- to overuse a British phrase -- my cup of tea.

Book Review: Little Red Chairs

The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien

A foreigner, handsome and debonair, moves to small-town Ireland.

Now, Dr. Vlad is a bit strange, who portrays himself as a philosopher, a poet, and a sage. He seems eager to open the natives up to a new world. Soon -- to at least one lonely woman -- he becomes a companion and, eventually, a lover.

But then he is outed as a monster. For Dr. Vlad is not the refugee from Eastern Europe that he claims. He is not a victim but a war criminal, who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of his people.

None of the preceeding is a spoiler -- it's all there in the blurbs for the book. Indeed, the title relates to a piece of performance art that lined up 11,541 little red chairs to symbolize the 11,541 people who were killed in the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992. (Indeed, Dr. Vlad closely resembles Radovan Karadzic -- the Serbian president during the Bosnian war, who was convicted of war crimes.)

During his own war-crimes trial, there is this passage about Dr. Vlad and his delusions:

Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved, and every shell that fell there hurt him personally, As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

This is quite a confounding book. On the one hand, it is lovely -- exquisitely written, capturing the voices of the meglomaniac and his enablers, along with the fears and dreams of the Irish villagers. O'Brien shows how hatred and division can be both universal and invisible. Despair and hope co-exist. Compassion, madness, and evil make their appearances.

But some parts literally make you cringe. She describes some brutally gruesome scenes of horror from both the past -- and the present -- as the result of Dr. Vlad's followers and henchmen. These descriptions are so explicit that I cannot imagine how she wrote them.

I do not think they are needed to provide one with the horror of the war and its atrocities, and including them make the book almost unreadable. Indeed, in two places, I saw what was coming and managed to skip over them.