Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***

I'm an old man now (A poem)

 A Poem

I’m an old man now.
The weight of my memories
bears down on my days.
The truck there carries freight,
I carry my thoughts.
They pool like a lake.
The wind fractures the past.

The news showed a broken building
sliding into the street like water.
Gravity pulls the water over the edge;
a missile nudged the wall into silence.

I don’t hear much these days, cunning devices
in my ears catch the sound as it passes,
add and subtract. The words gleam
like crystals. But it’s not the light
of insight that dazzles.
The years have carried me
past too much indifference.

I’m granted nonsense,
cool and joyful, foam on the lake,
nudged by the wind
towards the silent stony shore.

I hold the coffee cup
and gaze at the garden.
Daylilies gleam like words.
They will fade before nightfall.
They will not know the dark.

2023-06-23 & 08-04/2024-03-21

 © W. Kirchmeir

The Cure For All Diseases (Reginald Hill, 2008)

 Reginald Hill. The Cure For All Diseases. (2008) Dalziel is recuperating at Sandytown from a near-lethal injury. The local patroness of the healing arts has teamed up with the local promoter of holistic healing to create a health-spa that will rejuvenate the town’s economy and add a considerable chunk to the patroness’s not inconsiderable fortune. She’s had two husbands, and is working on acquiring a third. Unfortunately, she’s murdered and rather grotesquely encaged in a contraption designed to roast the pig that’s the center piece of a commemoration of her first husband’s source of wealth. That’s not the only grotesquerie, but you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who done what to whom and what for.
      Another nicely plotted, wonderfully convoluted and narrated police procedural. Hill has taken Austen as his inspiration this time, labelling the book’s sections as “volumes”, and basing the cast loosely on Austen’s Sanditon. Pascoe is in charge while his boss recuperates, Wield steadies his new boss as skilfully as he’s steadied Dalziel. An assortment of Yorkshire eccentrics (are there any other kind?) tangle and untangle their relationships and the skein of clues that eventually lead to a satisfying solution. Recommended. ****

There's No History Here (poem)

There’s No History Here
Above Kama Bay

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows
who believe they can rebuild the past.

Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
who ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that hold
the coverlet together.

These tales made up
of memories, misremembered
names and half-remembered facts –
they don’t make a history,
they say.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.

Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true,
as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back
is as far as memory
and memories of memories may reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote, muted
by the space enfolding it.

The ghosts of those who came before us
do not speak in the wind,
their language does not echo
in the water-filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck.
Something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

The heat feels loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

©WEK:2005-2020

Murder Being Once Done (Rendell, 1972)

Ruth Rendell. Murder Being Once Done. (1972) A re-read. I also vaguely recall the video version. Dr Crocker has ordered Reg to take a break from work, with a complete change of scene. He and Dora visit Reg’s nephew Howard and his wife Denise in London. Dora and Denise get on very well supervising Reg’s diet and exercise, but Reg is bored.
     Howard happens to be a Detective Superintendent.  He avoids talking shop with his uncle, under the impression that it would excite his heart into sudden failure. A corpse turns up in a graveyard in an insalubrious quarter of London. When Howard finds Reg at the crime scene, obviously intent on finding out what he can, he asks Reg to help him. There follows the typical Rendell plot, with red herrings, errors in judgement and interpretation, with-holding of respectability-damaging evidence, and the final revelation that rearranges everything into a psychologically plausible story.
     Rendell understands the dark places of the human heart, and the fears and jealousies that fester there. Here, she also sketches the cruel effects of pleasure-denying religionism. Recommended. ***½

Remember Me (Weldon 1976)

 Fay Weldon. Remember Me (1976) Madeleine, Jarvis’s ex-wife, wants revenge. She’s obsesses about him and his new wife Lily, who is a self-centred horror. Their circle includes Philip, a doctor (somewhat of a cold fish) and Margot his wife, who once many years ago made love with Jarvis, on the coats stacked in the spare bedroom during a party when Madeleine was still married to him. That’s the setup. Weldon tells their interlaced stories with a mix of universal and character points of view. About halfway through the story, Madeleine dies in car crash, and her ghost hangs around making trouble. Eventually loose ends are nicely knotted, some poetic justice dishes appropriate retribution, loves are rekindled, and ghostly Madeleine rests in peace.

     IOW, this is a romance, but with sharp elbows. Weldon is very good at skewering moral failings, and acute in observing how people avoid painful but healing insights. An enjoyable read that raises questions that most of us need to ask about ourselves and our relationships.
     Recommended. ***

The Present is the Child of the Past: Elizabeth George, A Banquet of Consequences (2015)

 Elizabeth George. A Banquet of Consequences (2015). DS Havers misbehaved in a prior case, and is under threat of transfer to Berwick on Tweed. DCI Lynley has promised to keep her inside the lines. She goes to a lecture by Clare Abbot, a famous feminist who later turns up dead of sodium azide poisoning. An appallingly dysfunctional family swirling around Abbot’s assistant Caroline Goldacres, and the usual bystanders keeping secrets, add to the strain of keeping strictly to the rules, but Havers, Lynley and DS Winston eventually solve the case. Arlo, a charming Personal Aid Dog supplies some sentimental relief. A fairly clued but nevertheless surprising twist at the end upends expectations, but you’ll have to read the book to find out, ‘cuz I’m not telling.
     I borrowed this book from our library after watching the first two episodes in the DCI Lynley TV series. It’s the 19th Lynley book. And it looks like George’s reputation has persuaded her publishers to let her write as much as she wants. The result is a book that’s too long as a crime mystery, and undefined in focus.
     We read dated chapters and sub-headed segments or scenes. Any one of them works very well as character or plot development, but there are simply too many of them. George is excellent at showing self-delusion, and deliberate or unwitting evil. The dialogue is nearly flawless. She understands the conundrums of human relationships, especially when people are unable or unwilling to express unspoken or unadmitted desires and fears. She knows how to use the trivial detail to shift our perceptions of character, to control ambience, and to lay a trail of clues. The book is a pleasure to read.
     This is a novel about a crime, about how it originated and how it affects everyone touched by it. We also learn more about the private and professional lives of Havers and Lynley. The cumulative effect is that of a soap opera, whose characters just happen to caught up in a crime.
     Do I like this book? Well, I’d prefer a more swiftly told tale. On the other hand, the characters are memorable. George can make you care even about the monsters she creates. Every character is damaged in some way. They differ only in their ability to heal from the hurts inflicted on them. Most achieve a resolution of their immediate problems, but they don’t escape into a romantic happy-ever-after fantasy.
     Intriguing enough to make me borrow another Lynley book. As a police procedural, ** As a novel of character, ***

Mini-mysteries: bet you can't read just one (!00 Malicious Little Mystreies, Asimove et al, 1981)

 Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. 100 Malicious Little Mysteries (1981) A re-read, and just as much fun as the first time. For one thing, I’d forgotten most of the stories, so they felt new. The few that I recognised provided the pleasure of observing how the plot was sprung on the unsuspecting reader. A short-short story works like a joke: it directs attention in one direction, then shows that another direction makes perfect sense. The joke trades on absurdity, the mini-mystery on poetic justice, reversal, and reinterpretation. Asimov’s introduction calls these tales “snacks”, and the trouble with snacks is that it’s hard to stop with just one.

     One of the tales solves the puzzle of Jack the Ripper. Several deal out poetic justice. Several others make a nice distinction between the moral and the criminal law. A good wide range of motifs and themes.

     Recommended. I was thinking about donating my copy to the food bank yard sale, but I’ve decided it’s a keeper. *** to ****

A Disappearance but No Body: Pictures of Perfection (R Hill, 1994)

Reginald Hill. Pictures of Perfection. (1994) A young cop, assigned to the small village of Enscombe to have his officiousness rubbed off, goes missing a few days before the Day of Reckoning, once the day the tenants paid their rents and now an excuse for a party. Ancient traditions crumble, new and old relationships weaken or strengthen as the case may be, people admit secrets to themselves and others, a couple of villains get their poetic comeuppance, and in general there’s a major rearrangement of the village’s social life. Because of the missing PC, Dalziel, Pasco, and Wield are sent to into this vortex of all too human lives. The PC turns up and resigns from the force, and all the other loose ends are nicely tied up. For the moment, it looks like a happily ever after state has been achieved by everyone in the village, but we know it won’t last. Hill didn’t write a follow-up book, so we’ll never know.
     A good read, with Hill experimenting in multiple points of view, including excerpts from several memoirs. Recommended. ***½

Dangerous Rails: Murder on the Railways (Haining, 1996)

  Peter Haining. Murder On The Railways. (1996) An anthology in four themed parts, making a fat book that’s ergonomically awkward. The contents make the bother worthwhile. Haining provides a potted publishing bio for each author, including references to film and video adaptations. Very useful.
     The selections are all very good or better. Railways from the beginning were a romantic as well as a convenient way to travel. A long-distance sleeper train provides a closed setting, a limited cast of suspects, and a limited time to solve the crime. Just right for a detective story.
Trains are also targets for crime. The largest heist ever was a train robbery in the UK in 1963. The thieves took £2.61 million, about £45 million ($77 million) in today’s money.
     Section one deals with crime on the express trains. Section two introduces railway detectives. Section three shows that crime on subways forms a subgenre. The last section extends suburban, mostly domestic, crime to the commuter trains. All in all, a good spread of goodies
     Recommended. *** to ****

Murder on The Basle Express (Coles, 1956)

Manning Coles. The Basle Express (1956) A cloak and dagger spy thriller, very much of its time. Characters, setting, plot, ambience etc are just interesting enough to keep you reading, mostly to find out how the writer will get his hero out of the scrapes prepared for him. No romantic interest, though; that was added a few years later to the James Bond stories. But like them, essentially an adventure romance aimed at male adolescents of all ages.
    The McGuffin is a set of missile plans, the hero is Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon (“British Intelligence Service”) travelling on the “Anglo-Swiss” express to Basle and then on to Innsbruck for a hiking holiday. Unfortunately, his sleeping compartment co-passenger, Edouard Bastien, is murdered.
    So we get anicely devised story of disguises, just barely believable escapes, cross-purposes, and a final reveal that ties up a poorly clued loose end. Never mind, the book would make a neat little B movie. As written, it’s already about 70% film script. An easy read. Mildly funny, Coles tries hard to lighten the style. There is no "romantic interest", which suggests the book was aimed at schoolboys. I found my copy at a yard sale with no dust cover, and the illustration online, It’s part of my collection of railway set or themed fiction. Coles wrote a series of Hambledon tales. I won’t be searching for other titles though.  **

Reporter or influencer? (Hillerman, The Fly on the Wall, 1971)

 Tony Hillerman. The Fly On The Wall (1971) My copy is a well-read 1979 paperback reissue of this novel, reprinted about 1982, when The Dark Wind (No. 5 in the Navajo Police series) was published. The hero is John Cotton, political reporter for the afternoon Tribune in Capitol City. MacDaniels, a colleague elated that he’s uncovered a story that will cap his career, dies a few minutes after telling Cotton he‘s looking for his notebook. Cotton finds the notebook (of course), and begins to decipher a story of political corruption. He nearly becomes a murder victim himself, pieces the story together, and goes to see Korolenko, a former State Governor, to tell him what he’s found.
     But if the story is published, a corrupt opportunist will win the next election. Should Cotton withhold the story? Should he publish? Is he really the fly on the wall, seeing all, feeling nothing, utterly objective? Read the book to find out.
     By bibliography dating, this is Hillerman’s second novel. In style and pacing not up to his later standard, it’s still a very good read. The descriptions of political shenanigans and calculations show that politics hasn’t changed much since the 1970s. It’s maybe more openly vicious than it was back then. As a story about journalism, it’s become a historical novel with the ring of truth. Hillerman was a reporter for several years before he became an academic and a novelist. It took me a while to read this book. It’s a must for the Hillerman fan, a good read for anyone who likes crime stories, and a nostalgia-inducing experience for anyone who remembers when newspapers mattered more than any other medium.
     Recommended ***