Dogs aren't quite human: Fifteen Dogs (Alexis 2015)

 

Andre Alexis. Fifteen Dogs. (2015) Apollo and Hermes idly discuss a puzzle: If dogs could be self-aware like humans, would they be just as miserable as humans? Apollo thinks they’ll be even more unhappy, Hermes disagrees, so of course they have to conduct an experiment. They give fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic the gift of self-awareness (mislabelled “human intelligence” by Alexis, who commits the common error of assuming that intelligence requires some kind of sentience). The gods also grant language, which enables the dogs to disagree about the value and purpose of their new abilities. That leads to conflict, murder, banishments and self-exile, politics, and poetry, among other things.
     This story proceeds in a ruthlessly matter-of-fact way. Alexis uses his knowledge of canine psychology to extrapolate plausible behaviours, and adds a few bits of anthropomorphic personality to create something of a plot. The result is a book that I read at almost one sitting. There’s a map of Toronto to help the reader to follow the dogs’ the travels and travails. Highly recommended. ****

Wexford and the secretive corpse: A Sleeping Life (1978)

 

Ruth Rendell. A Sleeping Life. (1978) A woman’s body found on a path isn’t much of a surprise, but one without any identification is an annoyance. Her handbag contains only keys and some cash. However, Wexford discovers her identity fairly quickly. What takes time is filling in the details of her life. Frustrating gaps and inconsistencies prevent a clear idea of who murdered her and why. Wexford stumbles on the solution when he hears a chance remark about eonism (that’s a spoiler). An alert reader will likely not need that clue, however.
     A satisfying Wexford. ***

Ursula Bloom on Stratford (re-read)

 

Ursula Bloom. A Rosemary for Stratford-on-Avon (1966) My copy was given to me by my mother, who received it from my uncle Paul Morgan. They grew up in Stratford–on-Avon, which enabled them both to add marginal notes.
     Ursula Bloom lived near Stratford as a child, and takes a proprietary interest. Much of her book is about Marie Corelli, who moved to Stratford towards the end of her career, apparently believing that she would be welcomed, respected, and lionised in such a literary shrine. She was, at first, but her quarrelsome nature soon antagonised the town.
     Bloom, who had a fair success as a novelist, writes her remembrance like a novel, with much invented dialogue between the worthies of the Town. That makes for amusing reading, but tends to create a rather confusing mix of attitudes and emphases. Bloom also romanticises the country town; this is nothing like the Stratford I remember, which was a determined market town with a hard-nosed attitude towards the tourism business that Shakespeare's Birthplace attracted. (Its other major industry was Flowers Brewery, which made real ale until it was acquired by one of the multi-nationals that now dominate that craft.) There’s no question that Corelli was a difficult person who overestimated both her talent and her eminence. But Bloom’s manner and tone, and the almost complete absence of quotations from contemporary sources, make me suspicious. A note by U.P. states that the book infuriated Uncle Peter (my great-uncle), and I’m not surprised. (Uncle Peter was a for a while assistant librarian at the Memorial Theatre.)
     An oddity, but a keeper because of the family connections. **

People worth knowing: Eleanor Wachtel's Original Minds

Eleanor Wachtel. Original Minds (2003) Sixteen edited interviews originally broadcast on CBC’s Writers and Company. I’ve read writings by most of them, and met Desmond Tutu when he visited the Anglican Diocese of Algoma during his tour of Canada. He was, despite the horrors of apartheid, a cheerful and happy man. All are worth listening to, but I especially enjoyed the interviews with George Steiner, Jonathan Miller, and Oliver Sacks, perhaps because they are among my favourite people.

     Wachtel is a wonderful interviewer. She may begin with a set of questions, and clearly shifts to some questions she wants answers to, but her interviews sound and read like conversations. She prompts her guests with comments and questions directly related to what they’ve just said. She’s also done her homework: one always gets the impression that she’s read at least the two or three most important works by her guests.

     A book worth re-reading. Find the program here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany. ****

Waugh on God, and Kershaw on Hitler.

 

 Alexander Waugh. God (2002) Waugh has assembled all the passages from the Talmud, the Bible, and the Qu’ran in which God speaks for himself, plus a wide range of scriptural and other comments about God. This amounts to a portrait, both incomplete and inconsistent, which is no surprise. By definition, God is beyond human understanding, so any attempt to assemble a coherent description of the Deity is bound to fail.
    Nevertheless, worth reading, if only for the salutary reminder that what one may think the sacred texts and religious authorities said about God isn’t like that at all. ****

  Ian Kershaw. The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 (2011). A thorough and thoroughly depressing account of the end of the 3rd Reich. Once again, I’m astonished at the denial of reality by men (and some women) who could or would not understand that their fantasies of Aryan glory were at best mere superstition. There were of course many people who disobeyed Hitler’s order to fight to the death and capitulated rather than suffer the destruction of their towns and villages. But as the Reich went under, many Nazis went on a last murderous and nihilistic spree of revenge and annihilation. On the Eastern Front, much of the fighting continued in a desperate attempt to stave of the vengeance of Russian troops and gain time for evacuation of troops and civilians. Many SS units fought rather than accept what they expected to be a harsh and unforgiving imprisonment.
     Apart from the unnecessary suffering inflicted on soldiers and civilians by Hitler’s refusal to capitulate, three other themes impressed me. First, the fantasy that Nazi heroic resistance to Bolshevism would be recognised and celebrated by future generations. Second, the Reich leadership’s stubborn belief that resistance would buy time during which the Alliance would disintegrate as the Western powers realised that they had a common enemy in Stalin’s Russia. The Alliance did disintegrate, but not until Stalin imposed his rule on Eastern Europe some months after the end of the war. Third, the belief by Doenitz and his rump government that they had some leverage for negotiating peace terms. Overarching the whole is the thesis that Hitler’s intransigence caused the self-destruction of the Reich.
     Kershaw’s account of the end of Hitler’s Reich seems much shorter than its 400 pages (plus 164 pages of notes, bibliography, and index). He manages to present this complex multi-stranded story clearly. For me, it was a page-turner. ****

Lord Peter Wimsey, married and a Visitor to Oxford

 

Jill Paton Walsh. The Late Scholar (2013) This is Walsh’s fourth excursion into emulating Dorothy Sayers. The first was a completion of Sayers’s last novel from her notes. This is a new and pretty good fabrication.
     Lord Peter Wimsey is now the Duke of Denver (not having read #2 and #3, I missed that translation). He is called on to settle a dispute at St Severin’s College, Oxford, in accordance with an ancient rule that the Duke of Denver must be the Visitor that resolves a stalemated dispute among the Fellows. There follows a nicely done pastiche of Sayers’s style and substance. Walsh, herself a Cambridge scholar, knows how universities function, and how disputes among Fellows can lead to murderous hatred, although not nearly as often to murderous action in real life as in fiction.
     I enjoyed Walsh’s version of Wimsey. The plot is fair, the characters are believable, the ambience is Oxford, and Peter and Harriet are comfortably married and parents as we perhaps have come to expect them to be. Recommended. ***

Dalglesh and a Lighthouse

 

P. D James. The Lighthouse. (2005) The victim hangs by the neck from the railing guarding the walk around the lantern of a lighthouse. None of the visitors to the island on which it stands, nor the staff tending to their needs, could have done it. Dalgleish of course shows not only that someone did do it but also who it was. Money, vanity, ancient secrets and grudges, wartime hurts and hatreds, and social class all figure in the tangle of motives that must be unravelled in order to expose the murderer.
     Another well done Dalgleish mystery. James knows how to create believable characters, so that even the most outlandish and puzzling murders make psychological sense. It’s Dalgleish’s understanding of psychology that leads him to the murderer, and the technical problem of how it was done seems almost an afterthought. Another good read. ***½

Winter murder (Innes: There Came Both Mist and Snow)

Michael Innes. There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940) Well-done closed-cast mystery. It’s Christmas, and Appleby is among the guests snowed in at a country house. The murder is done for money, but the method and the misdirections make for a pretty puzzle, neatly solved by means of literary allusions. There’s enough social comedy and melodrama to distract from the fantastic plot. The narrator is Arthur Ferryman, a waspish writer who never misses an opportunity to make a snide remark about social pretensions, moral failures or personal weaknesses. Nevertheless, a pleasant entertainment, better than average for the genre. **½

Suicide or murder? (Engel: The Suicide Murders, 1980)

 

Howard Engel. The Suicide Murders (1980) Engel’s Benny Cooperman series is a pleasure and a treasure. Cooperman is a private investigator working in a time when a PI’s work is less and less valuable. The police do a better job of finding missing persons or fingering violent perps. No-fault divorce has made the PI’s prime source of income practically pointless. But Cooperman still has a few clients, and for reasons of literary necessity, they are mixed up with murders. Engel needed to make some money, and lucky for aficionados of crime fiction, he discovered a talent for laid-back low-key PI stories. This novel was the first in a series of ten.
     This one’s a re-read for me. It begins with a woman wanting to discover her husband’s supposed mistress. But he commits suicide that very afternoon. Or so it seems. As the title hints, the suicide is a screen for murder.
     Cooperman’s inconvenient questions lead him deep into the city’s corrupt links between politicians and various rich men with at best semi-legal projects for making money. There are additional deaths, an uneasy relationship with the cops, an attempt on Benny’s life, and a hint of romance. Engel also builds a nicely done, not-quite-cliche back-story for Cooperman, which adds to the charm of the book. It got me hooked, and I read as many Coopermans as I could find. A couple of them were made into movies, look for them on YouTube.. Recommended. ***½

Murder at Christmas: Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin

 

 

W. J. Burley. Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin (1986) A re-read. A noir plot about family secrets, sexual and other rivalries, obscure and obscured relationships, and determined attempts to bury the truth and the bodies of the people who know it.
     Wycliffe’s Christmas holiday hosts are deeply implicated, which complicates his work. The virgin of the title is a girl who plays the Virgin in the Christmas pageant, and then disappears. That sets the plot in motion. Her discoveries about herself form the core of the puzzle and the motives for the murders.
     I like this series, the writing is competent, and Burley plays fair, with characters are real enough that we care about their fates. The TV series was pretty good, too; many episodes are available on YouTube. Recommended. ***