Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) & The Wench is Dead (1989)

     Colin Dexter. The Riddle of the Third Mile (1983) Morse must find out whose body was fished out of the canal at Thrupp. At first he thinks it’s a missing Don, but in the end it was the Master of the college. An early Morse, and it displays Dexter’s weakness for the “little did he know” ploy, which becomes more than somewhat irritating. Otherwise, a very workmanlike job. ** (2008)
Update 2013: I reread this book, didn’t change my opinion of it, see the longer review posted 5 October.
     Colin Dexter. The Wench is Dead (1989) Morse, confined to hospital because his bad habits have produced an ulcer, reads a little book, written by a fellow patient who died the first night of Morse’s stay. It tells of a murder perpetrated in 1859, and Morse doesn’t like the feel of the case. He sends Lewis and the daughter of another patient (she works at the Bodleian) to find more information, and works out that the murdered woman was someone else entirely. Satisfactory case, well told, with perhaps too much made of Morse’s inexplicable attraction for the opposite sex. **½ (2008)
Having reread these two books by Colin Dexter, I realise why I haven’t read many more of them. The TV series is much better done. Dexter’s real forte was character, and Morse’s character in particular, which the video producers enlarged, and which John Thaw interpreted so well. Another case of fair-to-middling books providing material for first class movies. However, I shall read the other volumes I’ve collected, I just shan’t keep them.

Three by Shaw: Major Barbara, How He Lied to her Husband, and John Bull’s Other Island

      George Bernard Shaw. Major Barbara (1906) Shaw’s Preface is as outrageously wrongheaded as usual: he loved the sound of his own ideas. His comments on the way the world works are acutely and cynically accurate, but his inferences about how we should deal with it simply miss the mark. He is very good at presenting us with real and lifelike characters, but when he thinks about real people he goes awry. It’s as if his intellect and his imagination don’t know of each other’s existence.
     The play works well, what with Barbara eventually recognising the value of her father’s munitions-derived money. It would be a pleasure to see on stage. I’ve seen it as a movie, not memorable enough for me to recall much besides the “modern” architecture of Undershaft’s factory. The plotting is perhaps a trifle too pat, but that’s GBS for you: he will make his plays demonstrate his ideas, and that’s when the machinery creaks. When he just goes with his imagination, as in the Salvation Army scenes, the results are brilliant, witty, emotionally true, and beautifully paced. You can find more about the play here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_Barbara *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. How He Lied to her Husband (1907) A youthful poet has a (chaste) affair with a well-married and rather silly older woman. He wants her to leave her husband and run away with him. When the husband shows up, he tries to pass off the incriminating letters and poems as being written to someone else, which annoys the husband, who takes the lie as an insult to himself as well as his wife. He wants her to be attractive to other men, to be the subject of passionate love poems, which bolster his pride in having snagged her for himself. So the young lover tells him what he wants to hear, hence playlet’s title. Shaw shows once again that he understands the conventions of romance and courtly love, and the realities of respectable suburban life. I think this play is more successful than many of his more serious efforts. *** (2008)

      George Bernard Shaw. John Bull’s Other Island (1907) I started to read the preface and gave up. GBS was not the best analyst of politics. His notions of how the Irish Question came about, and how it should be resolved, were shown to be wrong-headed by subsequent events. About the only thing he got right was that it would be a protracted and bloody affair if it wasn’t settled quickly.
     The one thing GBS never seems to have fully understood was the lure of power for its own sake. (This leads him to make Undershaft a seeker after profit, which is the only serious flaw in Major Barbara. Profit, i.e. money, is a means and instrument of power, not and end in itself.) Like many idealistic ideologues, he believed that sweet reason would prevail, if it was made clear enough what the benefits would be. He would not recognise the irony of the Canadian toast, “Peace, order, and good government.”
     That sheer bloody-mindedness and paranoid delusions are more potent motives than the desire for peace, prosperity, and lawful order was something he could never see. That’s one reason he (like many other Socialists of the time) kept excusing the excesses of Soviet Russia, for example. He was of course right that the Protestants would have nothing to fear in a Catholic united Ireland, but he couldn’t see, because he couldn’t understand, that religious paranoia would prevent a settlement. He also couldn’t see that the IRA was dominated by psychopaths, who carried on their bloody vendettas not because they expected politically acceptable results but because they liked the murder and mayhem (as well as the loot).
     So I didn’t read the play. I don’t think I missed anything. ** (2008)

Tom Monto. Strathcona: The End-of-Steel (1989)

     Tom Monto. Strathcona: The End-of-Steel (1989) A home-produced, Gestetnered booklet by a publisher who doesn’t use ISBNs, which covers the history of Strathcona from its beginnings as a loosely organised settlement in 1870 (when Hudson’s Bay employees settled there) until amalgamation with Edmonton in 1912. Almost entirely a compilation of direct quotes and paraphrases, with a dozen or so photos, it’s not exactly exciting reading, but it does provide a reasonably detailed timeline. The acknowledgements and sources are worthwhile for anyone who wants to find out more. * (2008)
 

Two entertainments: The Moving Toyshop & Mulliner Nights (book reviews)

     Edmund Crispin The Moving Toyshop (1946) Crispin had a reputation as the “one of the last great exponents of the classic crime mystery.” (Wikipedia). One can see why: The focus is almost entirely on the plot, with the characters little more than collections of tics, with an occasional literary reference or Oxford inside joke to provide a bit of intellectual icing on the puzzle biscuit.
     I enjoyed this book, but wasn’t engaged by it.  An inheritance amounting to over $20 million in today’s money prompts the murder of the primary legatee so that the secondary ones can inherit the whole pile. In order to mislead the police, the plotters have disguised the crime scene as a toyshop. Cadogan, the Watson character blunders into it, enlists the help of Gervase, the Holmes, and the subsequent investigation blunders here, there, and everywhere, eventually fetching up on the shores of a far too complex solution. A mildly entertaining confection, which kept me reading over several days. **

     P. G. Wodehouse Mulliner Nights (1933) A collection of short stories framed as tales told in the Angler’s Rest public bar by Mr Mulliner, who enjoys a wide range of relatives, all of whom., it appears, are prone to the kind of minor embarrassments and spots of bother that tend to interfere with the smooth progress of love, life, and career. Not as wildly surreal in style as the Wooster stories, but covering the same ground, and just as entertaining. **½

Alice Munro Dear Life (2012)

     Alice Munro Dear Life (2012) The latest, and I suspect the last, of Munro’s story collections. She demonstrates the same ruthless powers of observation as in her other books, and the same ability to show us the moment of revelation, of self-discovery, of the momentous decision. But the decisions that change the course of a life are rarely known as such. In Munro’s world, as in real life, people choose what seems to them a minor expedience. Its effects redirect the course of a life, but that’s not seen for months or even years, when a chance glimpse of the past overlays the present with unrealised and unrealisable possibilities.
     Munro shows us the bones of a life, the topography of desire and need and fear and pleasure that underlies the roads and fields and woodlands of the everyday busyness and chores that we believe is the defining landscape of our lives. But this power of seeing below the surface is not enough to make art. Munro’s style wastes no words. In a few words, a single phrase, she can show us the essential detail, the unexpected insight that tilts the world into focus, the one remark that clarifies forever the relationship between two people who would otherwise never know what roles they play in each other’s lives, that one memory that shows what could have been. Her stories are not only life-like, but like life.
     Reading Munro stories, we are able to imagine our own lives as random patterns of our own and other people’s choices. She suffuses that randomness with significance. Not meaning or purpose, for meaning and purpose imply predictability and planning and successful progress towards a goal. In a random universe prediction is impossible. But we may explain the random sequence that links the past to the present. Munro shows how a life’s pattern came to be. She makes us believe that it’s enough to know how it happened, and leaves the why unanswered and unanswerable. Munro has the skill to leave us satisfied with this minimal explication of a life.. She leaves us accepting that the how is all we’ll ever know, and that it’s enough. **** (2012)

Alice Munro. Away From Her (2001, 2007)

     Alice Munro. Away From Her (2001, 2007) Retitled from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, one of Munro’s best collections. Munro has the ability to make us see and care about people, from the most ordinary to most strange. She displays how her character’s lives are shaped not merely by the accidental meetings and events, but by the follies and weaknesses that control the responses to those accidents. Munro does this with neither pity nor cruelty; the lives she shows are simply what they are. She leaves it up to us to make sense of them.
     The occasional first-person narrator ends the story with some summing up, but we know it’s not the final word, it’s just another fragment in the puzzle that is a person. It marks the end of an episode, but it doesn’t explain a life. Sometimes the story ends with a character’s reaction to what has just happened, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, whatever revelation was vouchsafed to the character, it’s not a solution to a mystery, nor is it a sign of what`s to come. What will happen next is as imponderable, as inevitable, and as contingent as everything that went before. The events of the story appear as part of a life, yet the contain the whole life. In this, Munro’s stories have the depth and resonance of a novel.
     It’s difficult to summarise an Alice Munro story. Describing one of the central events is not enough. In Away From Her a woman develops Alzheimer’s. In Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage a woman marries an apparently unsuitable man. In Floating Bridge, a woman kisses a young man, almost a boy, who has taken her on a drive in the country to show her a floating bridge while her husband negotiates some business with his father. In Comfort an undertaker tells a widow, whom he kissed many years before, how he has prepared her husband’s body for burial. In Nettles a woman meets her childhood sweetheart many years later. What is Remembered tells of a single but very satisfying sexual encounter between a young wife and a man who drives her to the ferry that will take her home after a funeral.
     In all these stories, people remain mysterious to each other, their relationships made incomplete by the limits of language, the constraints of social expectations, the wounds that make us fearful of suffering another injury. And yet. And yet. There are glimpses and hints of happiness and joy. Moments when some barrier is breached, some separateness transcended. Recognition that the only morality is to be with each other, and not to use each other. **** (2012)

M. Allen Gibson. Train Time (1973)

     M. Allen Gibson. Train Time (1973) An odd but pleasant little book of reminiscences about the trains in Wolfville, N. S., where Gibson grew up and went to school. The Dominion Atlantic Railway serviced the town, and Gibson gives us a neat account of the trains and some of the locomotives he saw. The style is a little formal and self-consciously literary. Gibson obviously likes trains and people. Photographs appear on alternate pages, but there’s no attempt to arrange them to link to the text they face.
     Gibson was a Baptist minister in Chester, N. S. and was known locally for his columns in The Chronicle Herald of Halifax. I googled him, and found four titles listed in the N. S. archives. There was no other hit. Then I went to the Chronicle Herald site, and searched, found pages of references. Apparently, one has to pay to read the articles, so I didn’t see any, but the headlines indicate a well-known and well-respected, decent man. ** (2008)