#35: Voltaire in Love, by Nancy Mitford

Voltaire falls within the “three fact” range of my knowledge—that is, I knew roughly three things about him before I read this book. Lived near Geneva, wrote Candide, a satire of naïve optimism, and was a defender of human rights. Much of my store of knowledge is in the three-fact category: Alexander the Great: conquered the world from Greece to India in the 3rd century B.C., died young, was gay. Or How about … The Dreyfus Affair: French military officer, anti-semitism, Zola involved (“J’accuse”). I could go on.

I guess I can also admit to also knowing that Voltaire was the personifying genius of the French Enlightenment, much as Samuel Johnson was the personifying genius of the English Enlightenment. But 300 years and a language puts Voltaire at a significant remove, and though I wish I could have learned enough French to explore a bit of 18th century French literature on my own, I’m pretty sure at this point that that’s never going to happen. So, when all else fails: popular history.

Nancy Mitford is a fascinating character in her own right, one of a trio of aristocratic British sisters who all made some sort of mark on the world in the mid 20th century. (Unity Mitford was a devoted Nazi who moved to Germany and had intimate suppers with the Fuhrer.) Nancy was a novelist turned biographer who, while living in France in the 1950s, managed to make a living writing biographies of such luminaries of the Ancien Régime as Louis XIV and Madame Pompadour. The image I had of Voltaire is of a dandy in a shiny powder blue coat with a white periwig and rouged cheeks. Probably I am conflating Voltaire with Candide in this image, but I was surprised to find that Mitford’s Voltaire was a pretty close match with my notions of an 18th century French intellectual: vain, supercilious, given to feuds and disputes, and promiscuous. These people went at it like cats! Voltaire had an assortment of enemies. Who has enemies anymore? Such an extravagance! Voltaire was all about extravagance.

I like biographies, but conventional biographies can be a bit oppressive due to the inevitable arc of an eminent life: obscurity, followed by fame and accomplishment, followed by decline and extinction. I must admit to sometimes flipping to the final pages of biographies when I’m browsing in bookstores to take in the deathbed scene. It’s typically about 10-15 pages from the end. (Has anyone ever anthologized deathbed scenes? Maybe it would be considered bad taste?) So yeah, biographies are like suitcases—you can pack different things into them, but they always have the same shape.

Which is why I like one-off biographies. Partial biographies, group biographies, whatever gets you away from the bell curve. Voltaire in Love is both a partial biography, covering primarily a 15-year swath of Voltaire’s life, and a joint biography, covering as well his sometime lover and close associate, Émilie, the marquise du Châtelet.

They were both geniuses, though not of the exact same type. He was a playwright, poet, and satirist. A very public intellectual. He could not live anyplace for very long without improvising some sort of a theater and producing amateur productions of his own works. This may sound insufferable, but they were usually good plays and it was the 18th century—the alternatives were embroidery and card games.

Émilie had a more mathematical mind. She translated the works of Isaac Newton and championed his theories in France, where they had to compete with an earlier cosmology, formulated by Descartes and based on “vortices.” If you suppose this to have been a slam dunk for Émilie, you would be wrong, especially in light of the fact that the leading minds of the time were skeptical that a woman could teach them anything about such weighty topics.

Which one would you imagine would have a way with money? Turns out it was Voltaire:

Voltaire was now very rich. His fortune came neither from his books, which were too often pirated, nor from his plays, whose royalties he always gave to the actors, but from astute business dealings. He would exert himself to any extent, he would rise from a sick bed and travel across France, if he saw a good profit to be made. He had no wish for money troubles in addition to all his others and used to say that a man should live to work but not work to live. On one occasion, by a simple calculation which others had overlooked, he discovered that whoever bought up a certain percentage of a public lottery would win, in prizes, much more than the money laid out. He raised enough cash to do this. The minister of finance was furious when he realized what had happened, and tried to bring a lawsuit, but he had no case against Voltaire who was perfectly in order. On another occasion he went the whole way to Lorraine from Paris to subscribe to a State loan which seemed very advantageous. When he arrived in Nancy, ill and shaken by the journey, he discovered that only native Lorrainers were eligible. He made such a song and dance that the authorities allowed his subscription on the tenuous grounds that his name, Arouet, was the same as that of the Prince de Beauvau’s castle near Nancy, Haroué. This investment trebled in a few months.

He could have been on CNBC! Émilie by contrast was a gambler who could lose money as fast as Voltaire could make it.

Reading of their 15 years together induces a kind of exhaustion. So many quarrels, affairs, letters, recriminations, reconciliations, and alliances. People come and go, suppers are consumed at all hours, carriages break down, tears are shed, it never stops.

#34: Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

In 1974 I traded a friend my copy of A Canticle for Leibowitz for her recently purchased paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. It was big book with a cool cover and a great blurb from Geoffrey Wolfe of the San Francisco Examiner on the back cover: “I've been turning pages day and night, watching my fingers go ink-black, bleeding from paper cuts, reading Gravity's Rainbow. Forests have gone to the blade to make paper for this novel. Don't mourn the trees; read the book.”

I read Gravity’s Rainbow and found it to be almost as challenging as Ulysses. But like Ulysses it was often funny and profound and thrilling. I became a Pynchon devotee. I read V and The Crying of Lot 49. Then I read them all again. Occasionally I would meet up with another acolyte. Our author, like other mystical beings, could not be photographed or interviewed. No one knew where or how he lived.

Pynchon didn’t publish another book for almost 20 years, but since 1990 he has published a new novel every five years or so. I have bought them all and read them with trepidation—could they possibly live up to my expectations? James Joyce never really came back down to earth after Ulysses—he took 20 years to write a final book that seemed to be just 700 pages of puns and wordplay, and then he died. No retreat there. But Pynchon has plied his trade, writing books that don’t always look like they were intended to be masterpieces, and has forced me to rethink this whole pedestal thing.

Pynchon’s books are not strongly plotted—the characters are full of passionate intensity, but we as readers are never really quite sure what they’re up to or where they’re headed. These books are not aerodynamic, they should not be able to stay in the air, and yet most of them do, because they are weirdly buoyant, filled with a kind of vague mystery, an air of profundity that we can never quite track to its source. This essence is most powerful in early books like V and Gravity’s Rainbow. In the later books it is fainter and sometimes seems to be missing altogether. Against the Day in particular is disappointing, a great zeppelin of a book that never quite gets off the ground—the fact that it is in part about a troupe of balloon aerialists notwithstanding. Or, to use a different metaphor, the monster is stitched together and raised up onto the ramparts, but the vivifying lighting never strikes.

So, then, what of Bleeding Edge? Pynchon is now almost 80, so this may well be his last book (though I wouldn’t bet on it). It is in some ways a typical Pynchon novel: the slangy diction, the way the dialog is actually repartee, where everybody tends to speak in the same sort of hip, knowing way. At the center is Maxine Tarnow, a fraud investigator who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her two sons. Maxine is vivid and likeable, but the large cast of friends, relations, clients, and professional contacts that move through the novel are generally less distinct. They appear and disappear, but by the time they reappear we’ve forgotten who they are. I discovered a wikipedia page that listed the characters and their roles, and for a while I would consult that whenever I encountered a name that I’d forgotten. A more careful reader might have made more of an effort to remember these names, but a more careful writer might have made more of an effort to introduce them in a way that would make them memorable—you know, backstory. Bleeding Edge is conspicuously lacking in chronological perspective.

After a while I stopped consulting the wikipedia list because I began to realize that it didn’t really matter that much where the various characters fit into the plot. The action would continue, hints would be dropped, conspiracies suggested, and the book was no less enjoyable because I couldn’t remember who Heidi was, or how Misha and Grisha were connected to Rocky Slagiatt.

The key thing is that Bleeding Edge *is* enjoyable. Characters may come and go like guests on a talk show, but it’s the best talk show you’ve ever seen—so what if you can’t quite place most of them? The book is set is 2001/2, in the months before and just after the 9/11 disaster. It is positively awash in pop culture references, cemented into its time and place. Just within a few pages I encountered references to Jennifer Aniston, Ace Ventura, and Tiger Woods; Pynchon even essays a Christopher Walken impression:

Maxine is drawn to the spare beroom by a voice from the TV set there, speaking with a graceful derangement of emphasis, almost familiar—“I respect your…experience and intimacy with the course but…I think for this hole a…five-iron would be…inappropriate…” and sure enough, here’s Christopher Walken, starring in The Chi Chi Rodriguez Story.

One of the running jokes in the book is the offerings of a cable channel that shows only ridiculous and implausible biopics, including The Anton Chekhov Story, starring Edward Norton, with Peter Sarsgaard as Stanislavski, or Leonardo Di Caprio in The Fatty Arbuckle Story. Pynchon has always had a zany sense of humor, but it’s intriguiging to see it aimed at our zeitgeist—or rather at the 2001 edition of our zeitgeist. Strange that an author who works so hard to stay out of the glare of popular culture should be so utterly familiar with it. It’s as though he is taunting us in some way—“You can’t see me, but I can sure see you.”

Pynchon directs assorted satirical barbs at the cultural pretentions of upper-middle class New Yorkers. But he also paints the landscape in loving detail—if Maxine visits a restaurant, we read in a digression that is is a vestige of a grittier, 1970s New York, and then get to read about several other establishments of similar vintage that are no longer around. As a one-time New Yorker, I loved these details—yes, 72nd and Broadway is indeed the most dangerous intersection in the city. Pynchon may not be making himself available in the flesh to answer our questions, but Bleeding Edge is a kind of confession of love for the city where he has lived for the past couple of decades. It memorializes the place, even as it deplores its surrender to money and corporate homogenization.

Somewhat less persuasive is Pynchon’s depiction of the software industry. This is not for lack of effort:

According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonmous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.

“Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.”

Uh, OK. Whatever. There is much in a similar vein about cryptography, and I would not dare to challenge the author’s ability to grasp the nuances of this field. As someone who has made his living as a technical writer for the past couple of decades, I tend to see the software industry from a less glamorous perspective—keeping a mundane piece of business software working correctly requires endless hours of tedious labor by hundreds of people. I can’t blame Pynchon for trying to make software seem more glamorous, but nor can I feel the same jolt of recognition and surprise that I feel when I read his descriptions of life in NYC.

Pynchon depicts “the deep web” as some sort of alternate universe, a dreamspace of infinite possibilities. It’s “cyberspace” circa 1992, a hypothetical utopia that you don’t really hear that much about anymore. The web most of us know in 2014 is a alternately a realm of commerce and the place where privacy dies. One name that does not appear anywhere in Bleeding Edge is google—the book is set in the instant before that transformation occurred. So perhaps this is an historical novel after all.

I don’t imaging anyone would ever call Bleeding Edge a great book—I wouldn’t in any case. But it’s a convivial book and a warm one. To bring Ulysses into the discussion again, it’s a bit reminiscent of the last three chapters of that book, the Nostos, which is Greek for homecoming. At the center of both books is a family reunited—in Bleeding Edge, Maxine’s wandering husband Horst is gradually moving back into her home during the course of the novel. We know, somehow, that we are closer to the author than we have ever been before. We feel his contentedness along with his rage and his despair. In spite of all the darker forces at work, Bleeding Edge is a celebration.

#33: Light Years, by James Salter

James Salter is 85, and just published his first novel in 30 years. The reviews were intriguing, so I found a used copy of earlier work: Light Years, published in 1975.

It begins with a very lyrical bird’s-eye description of a river on a winter’s day:

We dash the black river, its flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

I love a book that begins with a gorgeous invocation. To this day I can almost quote the first sentence of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, which I first read 40 years ago:

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Like Wolfe’s book, Salter’s scopes down to the story of a family. The camera zooms in, we see a stone house on the river’s bank, and a family living in the house: a father, a mother, and two daughters. It is 1958. They entertain, they shop, they celebrate holidays. We watch, as though through a window. They are stylish, educated, sophisticated, successful. The woman is alluring:

One wants to enter the aura surrounding her, to be accepted, to see her smile, to have her exercise that deep, imputed tendency to love.

She is a woman whose cool remark forms the mood of a dinner; the man seated next to her smiles. She knows what she is doing, that is the core of it; still, how could she know? Her acts are unrepeated. She does not perform. Her face is a face that electrifies—that sudden, exploding smile—and yet, she somehow gives nothing.

The narrator of this book would seem to be in love with this woman. We grow wary—it’s a bit over the top, like a high-gloss real-estate supplement. Also a bit sententious, like a Terence Malick movie. But the writing is glorious and even as we see Viri, the husband, and Nedra, the wife, moving elegantly through their lives, we see their secret discontents, too. Viri, an architect, makes a good living, but wants something more:

He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous. He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope? Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming.

And yet:

There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands. And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams…one must be unthinking, like a tortoise. One must be resolute, blind. For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.

Nedra has a different discontent: she wants to be free, wants to blow up the whole arrangement and strike out on her own.

The sun was at its apogee. She was conscious, as if it were a moment of weightlessness, that her life, too, was at its apex; it was sacred, floating, ready to change direction for the final time.

“You know, I think about divorce,” she said. “and Viri is such a good father. He loves his children, so, but that isn’t what stops me. It isn’t all the legal business and argument, the arrangements that have to be made. The really depressing thing is the optimism of it all.”

And so we have this paradox: the narrator, not to mention all the other characters in the novel, look at Viri and Nedra as the perfect couple living the perfect life. But they do not see themselves from this perspective—they look out to the world for gratification. Each has an affair. For Viri it is an obsession with a younger woman, for Nedra an adventure, a matter of the senses.

But they are devoted parents, and the descriptions of what it feels like to be a parent are striking. Here is one:

[H]e reads to them, as he does every night, as if watering them, as if turning the earth at their feet. There are stories he has never heard of, and others he has known as a child, these stepping stones that are there for everyone. What is the real meaning of these stories, he wonders, of creatures that no longer exist, even in the imagination: princes, woodcutters, honest fishermen who live in hovels. He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past, that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, the habit which gives us shape. He wants them to know both degradation and sainthood, the one without humiliation, the other without ignorance. He is preparing them for this voyage.

Over 307 pages we follow Viri and Nedra, and also their friends. The travel, they divorce. Their children grow up and marry. Salter slips comfortably into their minds and then back out again, so we see what they see, but also what they don’t. In the process, he accomplishes what few writers can: he makes the ordinary seem remarkable.

They are in their late 20s when the book begins, and only in their late 40s when it ends. Yet by the end they seem ancient, exhausted, and they look back at their former lives, their heyday, just as their friends always have, and as we have, with envy and a kind of despair. They have lost the Eden that they never fully appreciated in the first place. That's how it is with Edens.

Salter has the reputation as a writer of ‘erotic” fiction because he is good at describing physical intimacy. But he also writes of death with the same skill—patiently, carefully, sensuously. There are three extended descriptions of death in Light Years. Each runs for about 10 pages. They are rather soft focus, I suppose, without agony or terror. We watch the characters fade and expire, in possession of themselves and more or less at peace, with a wistful appreciation of all that life has meant to them.

She died like her father, suddenly, in the fall of the year. As if leaving a concert during a passage she loved, as if giving up an hour before the light. Or so it seemed. She loved the autumn, she was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of their nights immense and clear. As if smiling and acting quickly, as if off to a country, a room, an evening finer than ours.

It’s a lovely description. I could never quite surrender my reservations about Light Years, the suspicion that I was being seduced by all the gloss and glamour. But that won’t stop me from reading more James Salter books.

#32: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

In 1416, somewhere in southern Germany, an Italian scholar found a manuscript in the library of a monastery. Stephen Greenblatt makes a case that this find was a major inflection point (or “swerve”) in the history of western civilization. It’s a provocative claim, and for all I know it may be true. The scholar was Poggio Bracciolini, and he had come north with his employer, Pope John XXIII, to a church conference to decide who deserved to be Pope—there were three contenders. Poggio’s guy lost, which gave this busy administrator some free time to indulge his hobby—looking for ancient manuscripts in monastic libraries.

The “lost masterpiece” trope is irresistable—well, it is to me, and I suspect it is to a lot of people. I remember an episode from the novel Lost Horizon where someone plays an unknown work by Chopin on the piano. I remember Henry James’ The Aspern Papers where the protagonist is trying to lay hands on a lost manuscript by a famous deceased author. I avidly consume news about actual lost or withheld manuscripts by the likes of Kafka and Salinger.

In the case of The Swerve, not only is a manuscript found after being lost for over a thousand years, that manuscript turns out to be the wedge that drives open the Renaissance. Or at least one of the wedges. The manuscript is De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius was an adherent of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurean philosophy starts with an hypothesis about the natural world:

[E]verything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructable building blocks, irreduceably small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

From this hypothesis come some rather radical notions: if the universe is made out of physical stuff, then where are the gods who control the affairs of men, and where exactly do we go after we die? (Lucretius didn’t actually deny the existence of gods, he just denied that they had any interest in or influence on the affairs of men.) Epicurean philosophy is materialist—there is no point in accumulating karma points during our time on earth, because there is no heaven or hell where our account can be told. To quote Peggy Lee, “if that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing/Let’s break out booze and have a ball.“ The highest good is pleasure, not in the sense of indulgence, but in the sense of avoiding pain: both for ourselves and for others.

The early Church fathers found Epicureanism much more threatening than pagan religions, because they feared that without the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, people would be inclined to dispense with order and authority:

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his principal Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparably made over.

But it was not enough to blacken the reputations of Epicurus and Lucretius, to repeat endlessly that they were stupid, swinishly self-indulgent, insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was not enough even, by this means, to suppress the reading of their works, to humiliate anyone who might express interest in them, to discourage copies from ever being made. Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

This is why today the word “Epicure” today connotes “a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.” Give the early Church fathers their due—they understood PR.

But this single acorn that Poggio Bracciolini planted in the fertile soil of early 15th-century Florence grew into a stout and flourishing tree. Among its fruits were Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne, among others. I’m reminded of Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson, only instead of charting an inspired course through the geography of a particular region, Greenblatt charts his course through time. It’s his talent to make the people and events that he connects to Lucretius seem essential and inevitable, a central narrative of western civilization. The skeptic in me wonders whether other, equally talented writers might not be able to detect other such sequences and make equivalent claims for them. But Greenblatt has an ace in the hole, that singular lynchpin, the last suriviving copy of a masterwork lost for a thousand years.

#31: The Bayou Trilogy, by Daniel Woodrell

This volume contains three early Daniel Woodrell novels, featuring police inspector Rene Shade contending with the criminal goings on in his home town of Saint Bruno. Saint Bruno is a made-up town—a medium-sized city on the lower Mississippi. The closest real-world analog might be Baton Rouge.

Shade has deep roots in Saint Bruno:

Shade had lived in this same building for most of his life, here at the corner of Lafitte and Perry, and learned the hard lessons of the world on these hard bricked streets, within spitting distance of home. This was Frogtown, where the sideburns were longer, the fuses shorter, the skirts higher, and the expectations lower, and he loved it.

All the cops and criminals in St. Bruno grew up together. It’s like a thirties crime melodrama, where the priest and the hoodlum are brothers. How did Rene come out on the right side of the law? Shade is too modest and Woodrell too subtle to claim that it was an ethical choice. Which somehow just makes it all seem that much more noble. It’s a Bogart thing—you don’t ever say why you’re doing the right thing, you just do it.

The outcomes of all three novels are foregone—a crime is committed, and a chain of events is set in motion, with retribution at the end of the chain. In the first two novels, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, Shade is the agent of retribution. In the third, The Ones You Do, Shade’s father, Francis X. Shade, is the one who reluctantly sets things in motion after his wife runs off with a mobster’s money. Francis X. understands that he will be held responsible no matter what he does, so he whacks the mobster upside the head with a bottle of Maker’s Mark just as he’s about to open his safe and discover the missing money, and heads for Saint Bruno. We know how it will end, but what’s pretty cool about everything that comes before is that neither Francis X. nor the mobster, one Lunch Pumphrey, really seems to worry much about that denouement. (“Lunch Pumphrey was called Lunch because if he had a chance to he’d eat yours for you.”) Instead, we see how they live and think, and what we as readers feel is not so much suspense as just a sense of time ticking down. Pumprey is a stone cold killer but his malevolence is just one side of his personality, which has evolved over time into a kind of dispassionate professionalism, and his three-day journey to follow Francis X. to Saint Bruno is actually kind of comical, in an Elmore Leonard sort of way. While stranded overnight in Natchez waiting for his car to be repaired, he meets up with a couple from Iowa, who, as it turns out, are casing him while he is casing them. They are one step too slow and wind up in the trunk of their car at the bottom of the Mississippi.

Daniel Woodrell is my first repeat author in this blog; The Bayou Trilogy is less remarkable than Winter’s Bone, but pretty damn entertaining nevertheless. Since Woodrell has been called a “back-country Shakespeare,” we can see the short novels in The Bayou Trilogy as his answer to the bard’s Henry VI plays—a trio of early works that show the author mastering his craft, each a little bit better than the one before.

#30: No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo, by Redmond O’Hanlon

Just what was Redmond O’Hanlon doing in the Congo? He’s not an explorer—the missionaries and the corporate resource scouts had been all over the remote northern jungles of the Republic of the Congo well before him. He’s not a scientist, though he feels duty bound to ID just about every bird species he encounters, infallibly giving us a couple of sentences describing plumage and behavior. (The hammerkop, with and its huge ungainly nest did make an impression.) In fact, O’Hanlon is curiously lax when it comes to justifying his expedition. He claims to be searching for a dinosaur that has been sighted in a remote lake—a kind of African Loch Ness monster. But he never really does anything with this pretext—neither exploits its farcical potential nor pretends to take it seriously. The lake in question, we later find, is essentially a wide, shallow pond which is in the process of drying up.

If nothing else, of course, he’s gathering material for this book, and the result is a strange mixture of ignorance and incompetence on the one hand, and empathy and insight on the other. There’s a kind of brinksmanship at work, as though O’Hanlon were flaunting his amateurism, demonstrating that the purest motive is no motive at all. How terribly British.

No Mercy is the third book O’Hanlon has written of this type—the first was Into the Heart of Borneo, the second, In Trouble Again, about an expedition to the Amazon jungle. After No Mercy, he wrote one more book—about spending time on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic—and has been silent since. His modus operandi is to recruit a fellow academic as a companion and then set off for the most inhospitable place possible. I read the Borneo book almost 20 years ago and liked it—I don’t remember a great deal, except that his companion was the poet James Fenton, and that Fenton was reading Anna Karenina as they waded through the swamps of Borneo. This time his companion is an American zoologist named Lary Shaffer. Shaffer is reading Martin Chuzzlewit as they wade through the swamps of Africa. Hmm…

O’Hanlon essentially disregards the history, anthropology, and politics of central Africa. Everything we learn from this book is anecdotal, incidental. Fortunately, the incidents are often astonishing, and O’Hanlon is a good enough writer to capture them in their profound weirdness. O’Hanlon is sort of a myopic writer—he’s good on things that happen within 10 feet of him, not so good on the larger context.

He hires a sort of entourage to squire him around the jungle. The main guide is a man named Marcellin Agnagna, who is both a biologist with an advanced degree (obtained in Cuba) and a native son of the remote country that O’Hanlon and his party traverse. The rest of the posse is composed mostly of Marcellin’s siblings, cousins, and associates (all men). O’Hanlon is a big, rich fish that Marcellin has landed, and it’s appropriate that he share this bounty with his kin.

O’Hanlon devotes many pages to his observations of Marcellin and family. As they make their way first up river from the capital and then through remote outposts and into the jungle, we read about how the members of this crew are constantly searching for young women to have sex with. There may be some insights into the ways and means of Africa in these observations, but mostly they read like a letter home from a shy young university freshman describing dormitory shenanigans. He is also fascinated by the Africans’ obsession with sorcery—he is at times amazed by their superstitiousness, but then manages to acquire his own “fetish” at one point and keeps it on his person at all times. This fetish is a small fur pouch containing what O’Hanlon assumes is part of a human finger.

O’Hanlon writes about his companions as though they were characters in a novel—because he is not in Africa to accomplish or discover anything, his companions are his work, and he depicts them with a novelist’s eye: there is Nze, the great lover, and Manou the sensitive lad with self-esteem issues. But most of all there is Marcellin who is by turns erudite, haughty, whimsical, frightened, and angry. It’s amazing to consider that this is a real person and not just a character in a book—I can even google him and see what he looks like. (He is only ever mentioned online in connection with the mythical dinosaur, the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.) I wonder what kind of book Marcellin himself would write about the months he spent squiring Redmond O’Hanlon around the jungle? Marcellin would seem to have much more at stake than O’Hanlon. O’Hanlon has to worry about keeping good notes, and not running out of supplies or money. Marcellin has to worry about keeping his extended family employed and fed, about his career as a government official and academic, and about keeping the crazy white man alive.

O’Hanlon adopts a baby gorilla in the final part of the book, and in his role as surrogate momma he lets the gorilla cling to him 24 hours a day. O’Hanlon’s clothes are perpetually soiled with gorilla shit as he makes his way back out to the outposts of civilization. Clearly, O’Hanlon is as close to losing his mind by this point as are most of his companions.

No Mercy reminds me of one of those documentaries about a project gone off the tracks—Lost in La Mancha, for example. Except that Redmond O’Hanlon is both the perpetrator of the disaster that we are witnessing, and the witness who is capturing this disaster for us. Depending on which Redmond O’Hanlon you are talking about, the book is either a fiasco or a skillful depiction of a fiasco. Either way, I was ready for this book to end well before it did.

#29: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by George Meredith

The past is another country, and after stepping off the train in England in 1859, it took me about 150 pages to get my bearings in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Dickens is easier, because his writing is so visual, and he gives us a careful portrait of each character. Meredith is ironic and allusive; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is almost more Milton than Dickens—metaphors and allusion are frequently extended and elliptical:

You are amazons, ladies, at Saragossa, and a thousand citadels—wherever there is strife, and Time is to be taken by the throat. Then shall few men match your sublime fury. But what if you see a vulture, visible only to yourselves, hovering over the house you are gaily led by the torch to inhabit? Will you not crouch and be cowards?

Without context, I realize, this is incomprehensible. With context—that is, in the course of reading this book, it was pretty close to incomprehensible. Amazons? Saragossa? He’s saying that sometimes women are bold, and sometimes not. There may be more to it than that—I’m not sure. It’s a kind of “mock epic,” where the trials and tribulations of modern men and women are presented as through in a Homeric epic—the contrast is supposed to be humorous. You can still amuse modern audiences by presenting mundane affairs in exalted language, provided your epic is one that is familiar to your readers, such as the Bible. Shakespeare would probably work too. Beyond that, you wouldn't have much of an audience.

Anyway, after 100 pages or so I was able to tune in the signal more or less, and found the book somewhat engaging. Richard Feverel is the son of Sir Austin Feverel, a wealthy landowner. Soon after Richard is born, Sir Austin’s best friend and wife take up together:

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

A rather disdainful appraisal. The reference is to a David Rizzio, a presumed lover of Mary, Queen of Scots (thank you, wikipedia). Sir Austin banishes the pair, and raises his son alone, according to a strict educational program. Richard thrives, but eventually falls in love with a young girl of the neighborhood without family or money, and marries her without consulting his father. Sir Austin reacts as he did to the earlier betrayal—he adopts a mask of indifference, neither reproaching his son nor cutting off his generous allowance, but refusing to see either his son or his new daughter-in-law.

Richard comes to London without his wife to seek an audience with his father. Months pass during which Richard sees neither his father nor his wife. Meredith’s true subject is the relations between people, how when we are offended or hurt, we isolate ourselves, thereby weakening ourselves and leaving ourselves vulnerable to intrigue and misunderstanding.

To me, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel seemed very uneven. There was much that I found tiresome—like the exalted rhetoric, or the extended passages featuring a wise but uneducated older woman who spouts homely wisdom in dialect (“Ha! ha! say that little women ain’t got art ekal to the cuningest of ‘em.”). But other parts were terrific—my favorite was a long chapter in which Richard, hanging out in London waiting for something to happen, is made the victim of a plot intent on shipwrecking his marriage before Sir Austin can make up his mind whether to give it his blessing. Richard is introduced to a courtesan who has been instructed to seduce him. Richard is under the impression that he is helping to rehabilitate her. She lets him believe this, of course, but she also begins to half believe it herself. One of the themes running through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is masks—how we become the role that we play. For Sir Austin Feverel, the mask of aloof indifference he assumes when his son hurts his feelings proves damaging for both himself and his son. For the courtesan it is the reverse—her mask of repentance brings her to a kind of moral rebirth, even as her prey ultimately falls into her hands.

The long chapter that culminates with Richard’s seduction begins “Was ever hero in this fashion wooed”? Twenty pages later, when the deed has been accomplished, the chapter ends with the line “Was ever hero in this fashion won?” While I don’t really have the education Meredith would like his audience to have, I have read Shakespeare, and upon reading that line I remembered Richard III, and the scene where that earlier Richard exulted after seducing (verbally) his brother’s widow just days after murdering that very brother:

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

Still, it is a very different kind of seduction, with none of the sardonic cunning of the earlier work. In fact, it is a rather weepy affair for both parties.

In the end, all parties are reconciled after all possible anguish is wrung out of them.

This is the third Victorian novel I have written about in this blog—the first two were The Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch. I have not really been completely won over by any of them. Perhaps I have yet to find the Victorian novelist that I can really relate to. or maybe this period just isn’t my period, period.