Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Though history flatters the kings and warlords, emperors and conquerers, by remembering their names and standing in awe of their deeds, it has forgotten those men who ensured that these luminaries rose to their positions of prominence. History has forgotten the creatures who carried out their wills, brought about their plans and softened their rages. It has forgotten the servants who made sure that the pettiness of tyrants did not destroy the world they knew. For imagine, for a moment, the mind of a king, raised from birth to rule. Would he truly be fair and wise? Or would all his learning merely fall upon a mind already flush with entitlement and power, self-importance and majesty? Where is there any chance to experience that special kind of humility that brings out the best of us? There is none. And so wisdom and moderation must come from elsewhere. And this is a truth winningly captured by Hilary Mantel in this worthy second chapter in the life of a king's minder.

Few who knew Thomas Cromwell as a youth would have ever imagined that he would someday be the second most powerful man in the infamous reign of Henry VIII. Having spent his youth being knocked about by his father, only to fetch up in Italy with only a sharp mind to keep him above water, he would, with good fortune and keen ambition, rise in status and power until, with the death of Cardinal Wolsey, that staunch catholic who was executed on the orders of his king for failing to expeditiously arrange the monarch's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, become the private secretary to the king of England. From this most powerful desk, Cromwell was viewed as the voice of the king, acting with the full measure of his authority, constrained only by the knowledge that,t o overstep himself and displease his monarch, would bring an end as swift as his rise.

Having masterminded the creation of the Anglican church and the taking of the monasteries, Cromwell has cemented himself in the king's inner circle. But as the final years of the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn unfold, his position becomes tenuous. For as the king's inability to beget a male heir upon Anne Boleyn eats away at him, the fortunes of everyone around him are put in flux. Henry must have an heir, for himself and for the realm. And if Anne Boleyn, for all her legendary powers of beguilement, cannot deliver that to him, then someone else must. As fortunes at court shift and churn, Cromwell plays the great game with but three goals in mind, to preserve the reputation of the king, the health of the realm and the fortunes of his son Gregory, the only relation to whom he can bequeath all that he has made. Will his star be dragged down by Anne Boleyn as she has promised him, or will he survive this latest twist in the life of a king?

A worthy, if less luminous, successor to Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies is excellent historical fiction. Ms. Mantel, one of the genre's most decorated figures, rejects the cheap romanticism espoused by many in the field, attempting, instead, to construct a realistic version of the events of Anne Boleyn's fall, as they might have transpired, while infusing the characters in her drama with intelligence, menace and selfishness. For it is this last quality that is so often missing in such chronicles, a substantial oversight given that most humans, then and now, are masters in its practice. Consequently, her players transcend their era to be universally recognizable as people who, though they've been stamped by their time, nonetheless harbor the same flaws of character that we do. This realism does wonders for the relatability of her work.

More than the boldness of portraying Henry as something of a child, and the sharpness of her characterization of Anne Boleyn as a cunning if limited queen, Ms. Mantel's star is unquestionably Cromwell. He has evolved splendidly across this duology, but not in the manner of most characters. For his was not a descent from innocence into cynicism and servitude. Instead, Cromwell becomes what most men must when placed in a precarious position of power and compelled, from that perch, to do the hard things. He surrenders as much of himself as he can to both the king and necessity, while maintaining, for himself, the very core of his being around which he can put up armor against the harshness of his duties. In this way, he does what he must do while preserving some measure of decency for himself, some love for Gregory and his dead wife and children, and some honor for England which he unswervingly serves. It is an exquisite portrait o a man looking necessity in the eye and making with a bargain whose sacrifice is an emotionally fulfilling life but whose gain is the capacity to do what must be done.

Bring Up The Bodies lacks the punch of Wolf Hall, but none of its the tone or class. Anyone who enjoyed the Man-booker-winning predecessor to this novel will certainly enjoy it as well, all while lamenting the end of a rewarding journey between author and character. (4/5 Stars)

True History of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Given sufficient time for a man and his life to pass into legend, to become the stuff of heros and villains, love and tragedy, the truth of a thing becomes virtually impossible to grasp. For too much first-hand knowledge of legends, and the world they unfolded within, have been lost to the rigors of time. Robbed, then, of context and neutrality, we impose our own wishful narrative upon these important, cultural events, viewing them through our own biased lenses and judging them by the standards of our times, not those that birthed them. But what if there were compelling, contemporary accounts of these events, accounts that survived time's erosion to inform our present? Would they change our view? Would they add flesh to bloodless myth? Mr. Carey speculates and demonstrates in his sweeping, epistolary novel.

A key figure in the early history of Australia, Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was a legendary robber of banks and a thief of horses, a lover of women and a giver to the poor. The son of Irish immigrants, his father a convict and his mother a landholder's daughter, he came of age in a brutal period of colonial history in which the unforgiving law listened obsequiously to the rich while deeply ignoring the poor. This pervasive sense of injustice, along with the difficulty of making it in the hard-scrabble world of frontier Australia, combined to limit Ned Kelly's options and set him upon the path of crime that would earn him so much fame.

In boyhood, he was tasked with providing for his family. Having lost his father early, he spent his youth laboring to clear his family's uncultivated land while his mother managed his half-dozen siblings, earning coin for the table through the selling of spirits. Apprenticed, in adolescence, to a bushranger, the young Kelly learned the skills that would one day make him famous. However, in the process, he also earned himself the enmity of the police whose watchful eyes would never long stray from him. Consequently, the authorities would not be far afield when a combination of family disputes and police corruption exposed Kelly, now an adult, as an outlaw. Their subsequent pursuit of him would force Kelly deeper and deeper into banditry and crime until, pushed to his limits, he made one last stand against the men who had hassled, harangued and hobbled his him, his wife, and his family for the whole of his short life.

The winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, True History of The Kelly Gang is an engrossing tale of life in the face of corruption. Narratively driven by a fictionalized, 12-part autobiography of Ned Kelly's life from boyhood to demise, it captures not only the impossible challenges faced by settlers in 19th century Australia, but the extent to which its stratified culture all-but precluded those at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing out of the lawless and soul-crushing poverty into which they'd been sold. And so, as much as Mr. Carey should be commended for authenticating his account with the lively and colorful vernacular of the period, utterly convincing the reader, at times, that this is Ned Kelly's voice, the extent to which he vividly depicts the inescapable degradation of the poor is the virtue that carries his thoughtful, funny, harsh and ultimately tragic novel.

There have been, certainly, more worthy recipients of the Booker. After all, at root, Mr. Carey has simply re-imagined the biography of a real man's life. Yes, he has animated it with relationships and shootouts, glossed it with a sympathetic sheen and packaged it with an outlaw's captivating voice, feats all,but it remains another man's story, not one conceived of by the author's own mind. His is, I'm sure, not the only winner to draw inspiration from history, but surely Mr. Carey's stands alone in the fact that all of its creativity flows from its shaping,not its content.

Notwithstanding the extent to which the work has been cribbed from history, True History of The Kelly Gang is full of colorful cutthroats and crooked cops, legendary feats and tragic calamities, polished by a memorable brogue. This well-spiced stew is more than sufficient to drag over the line Mr. Carey's fascinating and sympathetic re-imagining of one man's life. (3/5 Stars)

Far to Go by Alison Pick

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Though, as a world, we've come some way to restricting state power, it remains a potent force that can easily become pernicious when it is not checked by robust opposition. For with a few, clever manipulations, the state can tap into its people's worst fears, stoke them, inflame them, and then harness and shape the resulting anger into a blowtorch of violence and destruction, a righteous weapon that can be deployed against anyone foolish enough to stand in its way. Not only has this curse of nationalism been extensively discussed in countless works, its results are still visible in the ghost-filled battlefields of western Europe where two such bloody, propagandist wars were fought just in the last hundred years. Less visible, though, are the individual wounds inflicted by such conflicts, the costs, to families and their offspring, that are born in silent misery. It is to these small-scale pains to which we turn in Far to Go, the suffering of a single family who stand in for so many. It is a matter on which Ms. Pick speaks with passion and clarity.

The year is 1939 and, though Neville Chamberlain believes he has bargained with Hitler for "peace in our time," he has, in reality, purchased a few months of quiet at the cost of millions of souls. For in exchange for this brief respite, England has agreed to look the other way while Nazi Germany gobbles up Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, territories it considers German by dint of the ethnically German populations who live there. Though this is notionally true of at least a portion of the population, these territories consider themselves free actors, imbued with their own traditions and councils, cultures and notions. They are proud to be who and what they are. The prospect of being annexed by a fascist Germany, and having all that they know overturned, is as terrifying as it is inevitable.

Pavel Bauer is a proud Czechoslovakian who, until the coming of the Nazis, never thought much about his Jewish heritage. He filled his days with family and the operation of his successful factory which earned him a comfortable, quiet existence. But as the Third Reich descends upon him and his country, Pavel, for all his wisdom, spirit and kindness, is no more able to defend himself than his country. Abandoned by France and England, Pavel and his country are forced into a succession of humiliating retreats: armies absorbed, factories repurposed, Jews disenfranchised. Eventually, faced with betrayal on all sides, Pavel flees to Prague, attempting to plan an escape for his young family, but doom seems to stalk his every step and not even the love of a good woman can keep the Damoclesian sword from descending upon him and the country he loves so much.

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Far to Go is a stunning novel. Told from the perspective of the Bauer's tender-hearted nanny, it is an exquisitely detailed reconstruction of everyday life in the midst of apocalyptic disaster. For the Bauers are witnessing nothing less than the end of everything they know. Though Ms. Pick succeeds in vividly reconstructing Czechoslovakia during World War II, crafting a cast of believable characters and embedding them in the midst of that nation's tragic circumstances, her genius truly shines in the extent to which she details the individual efforts of the Bauers to fend off the darkness. Holding onto his pride and his decency, Pavel tries to be stoic in the face of Nazi degradations, to endure their fists, their words and their deeds with silent courage that gets him nowhere. Meanwhile, his far more pragmatic wife, Anneliese, while fragile and emotionally remote, yields to the inevitable and tries to bargain with it in hopes of earning leniency. Together, they are the portrait of a marriage in war.

But as much as this is Pavel's story, Marta, the tale's narrator and the nanny to the Bauer's young son, is Ms. Pick's greatest success. Having never known her mother, and having been forced to bear the unwelcome attentions of her father, she is a damaged but lovely creature in a constant but silent search for love. Her life experiences tell her that she is too dirty to be the object of such pure emotion, to be the center of someone else's world, and so she is plagued by doubts that manifest in bouts of destructive self-sabotage. Nonetheless, she tries and in this we are witness to an achingly delicate girl trying to become a loved woman in one of our world's ugliest times. She is as exquisite in her sadness as she is beautiful in her gentle bravery.

Ms. Pick has a painter's eye for detail and a poet's emotional gravitas. Together, they have produced a novel as powerful as it is quiet. Rarely has war's devastation been writ small so well. (5/5 Stars)

The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though many, if not most, attempts to socially engineer a better world have failed, often disastrously, it is difficult, even with the benefit of hindsight, to condemn them. Popular movements are animated by the grievances of the masses who, when ignored, churn and boil until they finally explode in righteous revolution. No matter how bloody the revolt, nor corrupt the regime implemented in its wake, we cannot fault the people for seizing back the power so long denied them. However, if we cannot condemn them for the attempt, we can condemn them for the result, for not recognizing when their experiments have failed. We can condemn them for holding onto power with the same, sad desperation of those they once overthrew, believing so fervently in their dogmas that they cannot admit defeat. This is the potent lesson that underpins Mr. McGuinness' quiet, icy novel.

The year is 1989. Bucharest, once Romania's gleaming jewel, is a befouled and broken city, a sea of concrete seemingly in constant, pointless flux. Far from the worker's paradise promised by Communism, this shattered place with its barren supermarkets, its police checkpoints, and its mandatory rallies, is the personal plaything of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's bloody and brutal dictator. Though he claims to rule at the behest of the people, Ceausescu is little more than an aging tyrant, a man driven to libidinousness and madness by years of ugly, dictatorial deeds. For all of this, he is still dangerous, moreso now that his greatest ally, the Soviet Union is disintegrating before the eyes of the world. For unlike his fellow Communist dictators who are acceding to Western reforms, he will fight to the bitter end, confident in the misguided belief that his people love and worship him.

Into this painful and existential morass sinks a young man from Britain. The story's narrator, he describes how the sad dissolution of his family precipitated his going abroad. Working at a university in Bucharest, he quickly falls in with the great city's anarchists and revolutionaries, looking on laconically while, in their own ways, they try to preserve what they can of the past while agitating for the revolution of tomorrow, for a time when, no longer able to sustain itself, Ceausescu's decrepit regime collapses under the weight of its own shameless lies. Though the narrator imagines himself to be at the heart of an earnest if smalltime conspiracy, he soon discovers that matters are not as they seem and that, in a security state, where informers outnumber the honest by ten to one, nothing is ever achieved without the notice or the consent of powerful, corrupted interests.

Long listed for the 2011 Man Booker, Mr. McGuinness' sharp and insightful examination of the death throws of the Romanian dictatorship is as cold and surgical as a scalpel. The unnamed narrator, beset by his own troubled childhood, expresses little in the way of emotion as he endures the daily grind of living and working in one of the world's last Communist strongholds. As he watches everyone around him fight, bargain, scheme and conform in hopes of advancing their own ends, he's the perfect, opinionless lens through which the reader can view and experience life at the end of a failed experiment. For make no mistake; the Ceausescu regime, in the winter of 1989, is a dying animal, a creature in desperate need of being put out of its misery, a demon that, nonetheless, continues to fight on and cling to power because this is all that it knows.

The Last Hundred Days rewards the reader with plots and counter plots, with keen observations and thinly veiled criticism. But for as ably as Mr. McGuinness captures the feel of 1989, his metaphors are his most effective weapons here. As he recounts the various ways in which humans try futilely to escape a machine that refuses to release them, the deathly cold of winter hangs over everything; the universal freeze of entropy to which all must inevitably decay. It's powerful work that more than compensates for the quiet isolationism of its narrator, a man who seems only halfway present in the story of his own, muted life.

A grim tale of end times and how, inevitably, they are nothing more than the beginning of the next chapter of the same, tired story. (3/5 Stars)

Sea Of Poppies: The Ibis Trilogy 01 by Amitav Ghosh

From The Week of November 28, 2011

Though life is far from fair, with some among us blessed at birth with advantages of privilege and talent others are not, there can be no doubt that the average human has far more access to the halls of power than he did at any other time in the history of our species. Yes, many formidable barriers remain, barriers that must eventually be destroyed, but these impediments are, for the most part, surmountable and certainly bear few similarities to the soul-crushing nature of the rigid hierarchies that characterized societies only a century ago. Where we largely have access to the ladder of social mobility which allows us to dream of climbing to a better tomorrow, for ourselves and our children, our predecessors were often locked, by dint of birth and race, into roles they could not escape until death. They could not rise to lead their nations, or even to hold some sway over them. That was not within their cast. It is into this world of fixed outcomes and ceaseless toil that Mr. Ghosh plunges us. It is a world he has drawn exquisitely well.

The year is 1838 and India is firmly under the sway of the British Empire. English merchants and the sea-captains in their hire, command, in the name of their monarch, the fidelity of half the world. Like the ancient Romans from whom they are in part descended, their noteworthy citizens have the power to elevate or dash the fortunes of their colonial subjects enchained to them by imperial bands that will not be broken for at least a century. But though the British hold more sway over the world than any other single, contemporary power, their empire is not without problems. For while they can force vast nations like India and China to heel, they cannot always compel them to trade.

Though this is less of a problem with the thoroughly suborned India, whose leading citizens have been mostly co-opted by British coin, China remains a persistent thorn in the side of the English. Dismissed as inferior upstarts by the self-sufficient Chinese, mercantile Britain finds itself at a loss. For while they desire all the tea and silk China has to offer, they have nothing to offer China in turn, a sobering and humiliating reality which compels an increasingly desperate Britania to force upon the Chinese people large quantities of Indian opium in hopes of addicting them. If they are successful in transforming China into a nation of addicts, they will have created for themselves a market for a good that they have in abundance, a good that can complete the circuit of trade that threatened to deprive them of their cherished oriental delights.

Into this despicable business sails the Ibis, a schooner of American construction which comes to India for a refit at the lowest ebb of the opium trade. Its British owner, Mr. Burnham, has decided to recommission the ship for use as a ferry for indentured workers, the first shipment of which he soon dispatches to the nearby island of Mauritius. As the ship braves the seas, on route to its destination, its crew and its passengers are confronted with all manner of plights, both internal and external, which have the power to snatch away their meager lives. This is the Ibis. This is the Sea of Poppies.

It is difficult to imagine a novel being imbued with greater elegance of language and epicness of plot than Mr. Ghosh's sprawling and majisterial Sea of Poppies. Constructed around four well-drawn, primary characters, an American sailor, an indentured Indian woman, a disgraced rajah and a runaway house girl, the author manages to both flesh out a dozen secondary characters and inject each of them with grace and menace. More over, he accomplishes this while firmly establishing the novel's greatest virtue, the immersive world of 19th century India which, here, is rendered in shockingly glorious detail. The research necessary to properly enliven such a rich and exotic environment boggles the mind. This is, for a literary epicure, a rare delicacy.

For all its vividness, however, Sea of Poppies is nearly stillborn. Mr. Ghosh risks losing the patience of his readers by asking them to bear with him as he devotes more than half of his 550 pages to establishing his leading lights, both their pains and their personalities. And while this meandering meticulousness is wonderfully paid off at the novel's conclusion, arriving there is somewhat arduous.

Nonetheless, Mr. Ghosh's novel is a delight to the senses such as comes along once in a great while. It, like the opium that saturates it, must be savored when smoked. For who knows when next such a quality product will come. (4/5 Stars)

Snowdrops by A. D. Miller

From The Week of October 17, 2011

When we discuss the Good Life and all the elements that constitute it, a loving partner, an engaging job and healthy children are often cited as its most vital components. But while these are undoubtedly stabilizing influences which sustain the Good Life, the bulk of the credit for maintaining true north on our moral compasses should go to the roots that we put down in our chosen communities. After all, these attachments to family, to friends, and to country and its laws, are what shackle our worst excesses, keeping our temptations from transitioning from fantasy to reality. Uproot a man from these normalizing influences and he is morally adrift, willing, with time, to sample any desire. And as Snowdrops so vividly demonstrates, there are parts of the world brimming with destructive delicacies.

Upon the occasion of his engagement to his future wife, Nicholas Platt, a British lawyer, pens a long letter to his fiance, full of confessions and revelations, concerning his years spent in hedonistic, tempestuous Moscow during the first decade of the 21st century. A contracts man for a European bank doing business in the new Russia, Platt recounts how, over a calendar year, his relationship with a young, seductive Russian woman drew him down into the amoral embrace of a country which, since its birth from the ashes of the Soviet Union, has been shaped and run by a cabal of oligarchs and autocrats intent upon turning Russia into a Mafia state. I'll equipped to handle these neon-soaked, vodka-laden, gangster-infused streets with which his British upbringing has not familiarized him, Platt describes how, with the passing of only seasons, he lost focus on his work, his future, and his scruples, forsaking all for sweat-soaked nights with Masha and a world she knows intimately well.

Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Snowdrops is a gripping work of philosophical fiction which was unlucky to have not taken out the award. Mr. Miller, an author and a Moscow-based correspondent for the Economist, skillfully portrays one man's quiet descent into the temptations of life in powerful, corrupted states. Russia, which thanks to its history has never had a strong, pervasive respect for the rule of law, has discarded even the veneer of communist equality to welcome in the unrestrained, unregulated vices of extraordinary wealth. In this, it has created the perfect playground for entitled oligarchs and opportunistic peasants to succeed in a world which has enthusiastically embraced the fast-paced lawlessness that characterized the Wild West. All of this is too much for Nicholas Platt, a decent, British bloke who, here, feels hopelessly overmatched by the hard-bitten reality of the rapidly developing, non-western world.

Though Snowdrops succeeds in depicting the menace of new Russia and the hedonism it espouses, the novel's greatest virtue is the extent to which it portrays this world without resorting to a single gunshot, fist-fight, or act of brutality. Platt's descent is neither characterized by Hollywood violence nor soviet-era blackmail. Instead, Platt's morality is killed by that human desire which is unleashed any time opportunity intersects with a man unconstrained by the obligations of family life. In this, the author has published a work which feels as authentic in spirit as it is in detail.

However, Snowdrops is not without flaws, foremost of these being that the author fails to convince us of Platt's original innocence. Snowdrops rests on the notion that the new Russia is a seductive place that tempts ex-pats to sample its many vices. But if Platt is an ass to begin with, then it becomes difficult to make the novel's central argument, that his descent is caused by Russia and not by his own flimsy character. That the author failed to sell us on Platt's prima facie goodness robs the novel's conclusion of some of its formidable power.

Nonetheless, this is wonderful and thoughtful work which is no less potent for its gradual development and its quiet but pervasive melancholy. (4/5 Stars)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

From The Week of October 17, 2011

Though it is frequently marred by both bias and error, memory is the primary tool by which we navigate our lives. After all, without it, we would not know ourselves, what we've endured in the past, what we stand for in the present, and what we wish to accomplish in the future. Life's narrative does not exist without it. And so its deep and systemic flaws can and do profoundly impact and reshape our lives. Though The Sense of an Ending harbors mystery and philosophy, expresses revenge and regret, it is, at root, a rumination and an expose of memory and the ways in which it is a malleable record of what we consider a concrete past.

Tony Webster is an aging Englishman largely content with his life. Though he's been divorced now for nearly 20 years, he is on amicable terms with both his ex-wife and his grown-up daughter who now has children of her own. He has long since put to rest any hopes or aspirations of being extraordinary. And so, when a letter arrives from the mother (Sarah) of his adolescent girlfriend (Veronica), bequeathing him $500 and the diary of a high school friend who committed suicide some 30 years earlier, Tony is stirred from his settled life to both make sense of this puzzling development and to delve into his past to revisit the events which lead to it.

While Tony reaches out to the difficult and uncooperative Veronica to ask that she hand over the diary, he recounts the story of his life, ruminating on the desires and the vicissitudes of his ordinary adolescence. He details how, in his schoolboy years, he and his friends added Adrian, an intelligent boy and the author of the diary, to their clique. Though Adrian dates Veronica just after she and tony break up, and though he commits suicide a short time later, Tony sustains his appreciation for Adrian, envying both his clarity of his thought and the force of his moral vision. Now, decades have come and gone, careers forged and retired from, families raised and released into the world. And Veronica has returned to both bemuse and trouble him. For she refuses to cooperate with her mother's request and Tony must find out why if he is to understand what happened, to himself, to Adrian and to Veronica, all those years ago.

The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this slim novel from Mr. Barnes, a British author of more than a dozen works of fiction, is, in the main, a reflection upon the fallibility of memory. Though Tony's geniality entices us to like him, to feel sympathy for him, and to believe his account of events which depict him as having been a gentleman to Veronica, we swiftly learn that Tony's version of events cannot be trusted. As the novel unfolds, the reader and Tony together are presented with proof that Tony was far from accepting of Adrian and Veronica's relationship, that, in fact, he did his best to poison it by revealing to Adrian his suspicions about Veronica and her odd family, and that his harshness may well have contributed to the challenges both friends later on. This revelation forces Tony to re-evaluate his life and causes the reader to re-evaluate Tony, feeding every new fact he tells us through the lens of suspicion and doubt.

Though I can understand why The Sense of an Ending has earned its acclaim -- rarely has the Unreliable Narrator been used more skillfully and to profounder effect than it has been here --, the work is less than satisfying. Despite many hints, from the author and from Tony, we learn next to nothing about the lives of Veronica and Adrian, characters vital to the story's plot. What's more, the author is elss than convincing with the novel's central conceit, that a settled Tony would lift himself out of his comfortable retirement to pursue a 0-year-old mystery. Yes, most novels rely upon conceits to drive the core drama, but this one is surprisingly clumsy for a novel of such repute. When stacked up against prior winners of the prize, The Sense of an Ending does not measure up to works like Wolf Hall or The God of Small Things, pieces which both moved and educated. For all its supreme cleverness, this is, in the end, a story about a bored Englishman,his unspectacular life and his glitchy memory. Well-done, yes, but revelatory or provocative? Sadly, no. (3/5 Stars)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though many novels have been written about India's emergence into the modern world, few are as potent as The God of Small Things, the 1997 winner of the Man Booker Prize. For Ms. Roy has reached beyond a simple snapshot of Indian life, as seen through the eyes of a middleclass family, and, ambitiously, sought to contextualize modern India by connecting it to its recent past. In this, she exposes the social, political and economic forces that have been at work in India and the extent to which those forces contort and cripple the lives they touch.

Cycling between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, The God of Small Things patiently and devastatingly details the harrowing lives of twins, Estha and Rahel. Born to a witty but world-weary mother, Ammu, who is the regular and stoic victim of her husband's violent, alcohol-fuelled abuse, brother and sister experience life with openness and curiosity, embracing their extended family with innocence and grace. But when, aged seven years, they find themselves at the center of two deaths, one accidental and the other quite purposeful, their lives are forever changed. In the wake of these terrible crimes, the twins are ordered to tell lies for the sake of the family, blamed for its misfortunes, and then finally separated, with Estha banished abroad and Rahel jailed at home. When, 24 years on, they are reunited in India, Estha is a shadow of a man who has sworn himself to silence and Rahel is a haunted failure who has ventured to and returned from the United States with little to show for her years. Together, they attempt to piece together their sundered pasts and heal what was so cruelly broken.

Devoting most of her energy to the 1960s timeline, Ms. Roy couples her lyrical prose with vivid descriptions of mid-century India to produce a near-tangible recreation of a place in time. Through Rahel and Estha, one can feel the chaos of an airport, the terror of a movie theatre, the beauty of their family estate, and the fear of a police station and the extent to which all of these places hold life-altering significance for the fate-battered twins. But as much as one can admire her striking scenery, Ms. Roy's animated characters, and her willingness to throw all of life's cruelties at them, imbue her work with vitality. From the twins who are crushed by fate's bootheel, to their great aunt's selfish cruelty, to their mother's grim endurance, to their uncle's hopeless self-absorption, each member of the family, and the creatures who act for and against them, have distinct personalities that run the gamut from sweetness to cruelty.

The God of Small Things is far from a perfect read. It is, at times, needlessly dense and opaque, indulging in numerous and pointless digressions into a spiritualism that offers little to the story's central plot. However, Ms. Roy's ability to, with artistry and subtlety, demonstrate the extent to which human lives are molded by external influences they cannot control, by bitternesses they cannot suppress, and by desires they cannot ignore, elevates The God of Small Things into rarified air. Tragic and thoughtful work. (4/5 Stars)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

From The Week of April 10, 2011

Western nations needed centuries to develop civil states strong enough to beat back the authoritarian ambitions of monarchs and magnates. Wars were fought, royals overthrown, to complete a gradual transformation from tyranny to democratic liberty. By contrast, other parts of the world have captured their freedom swiftly and suddenly, so much so that the civil states Western nations rely upon to provide integrity and honor to society are, in these newly freed countries, embryonic, incapable of withstanding the corruption that is so endemic to nations in flux. Mr. Adiga, an Indian-born author, has beautifully captured the societal and personal fallout when a rapid economic expansion modernizes a nation far too quickly, resulting in an absurdly uneven distribution of the newly created wealth.

The White Tiger is the story of Balram, a once-impoverished Indian man who, after growing up in a countryside devoid of opportunities, has largely escaped his family and relocated to the big city in an attempt to move up in the world. He narrates his adventures through a series of sardonic letters addressed to the Prime Minister of China, writing them while seemingly keeping close eye on a crime in which he may have some personal stake. He narrates in detail how he came to work for a wealthy family, starting out as a lowly driver and gradually working his way up, at least among the servants. The family barely takes heed of Balram until, one night, they are put into their servant's debt. But will Balram be able to capitalize on his opportunity? He has come so far to escape the darkness of rural India. Can he take the fateful, final steps to complete his transformation into a modern man, with modern powers and modern wealth?

Though the enduring theme of the two India's is the foundation that puts Mr. Adiga's delightful and clever book on firm, award-winning ground, Balram gives this piece its soul. The reader watches the playful child become the frustrated man as a boy's simple life gives way to a man's need to make something of himself, a dream that is ruthlessly and obliviously stomped on by both his impoverished relatives and the wealthy family he's hired into. We're aware, throughout, that Balram is intelligent. What isn't clear is how far he's willing to go to earn the freedom that his privileged patrons take entirely for granted. In this way, The White Tiger is Balram's long, slow tumble towards his own kind of ruthlessness, as circumstance burns the sympathy out of him, replacing it with a determined hardness that will not permit him to take less than his due. It is a credit to Mr. Adiga that he can make a man falling from the innocence of grace and into the self-interest of merciless criminality seem compellingly sympathetic.

This is first-class fiction, a thick coating of dark comedy wrapped around a hard core of grim reality in a world moving so fast that many are being left behind. (4/5 Stars)

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

From The Week of March 07, 2010

There has been, it seems to me, a significant upswell in interest in the Tudor dynasty: their rulers, their women, and their attendants. Surely no other hundred-year patch of history has been so obsessively tilled, so speculated upon, than that which starred Henry VIII and his daughters. Unquestionably, the Tudor dynasty has some fascinating figures deserved of this loving attention, but surely other stretches of time, with equally interesting characters, have been forsaken in favor of another portrait of the century of Shakespeare. Could it be that the world's best historians are British and British historians can only get off on the Tudors? Perhaps. And yet Wolf Hall throws all this out the window, making a bonfire for my antipathy as it steals my heart and earns my admiration.

In Wolf Hall, Ms. Mantel wastes little time distinguishing herself from Philippa Gregory. Her prose is peerless. It's economy of phrasing nods respectfully to Hemingwayian minimalism, but it's the emotion she's able to generate from her fairly stoic subject that truly impresses. Thomas Cromwell, henchman-in-chief to a rather childlike Henry VIII, is, outwardly, the essence of stoic, relentless determination. But Ms. Mantel's skill grants her hero an internal personality just as dynamic as the external one Cromwell shows to the world. And this is where the novel succeeds so well for Ms. Mantel has clearly set herself the task of imagining the psyche of a man who has been, for the most part, cruelled by history. Someone had to be the mastermind of Henry VIII's bloody reign. And given that the king's propensity for violence largely corresponds to the period after Cromwell replaced the executed Thomas Moore as his chief minister, fitting Cromwell for the black hat made sense. And yet, this is a man who raised himself up from remarkably -- for his time -- modest means to become a statesman, a thinker and an advocate for the powers of the state over the dominion of religion. Can such a visionary of the future, democratic state be such a villain?

Ms. Mantel's ministerial novel covers the first half of Cromwell's life: his struggles, his family, and his rise to prominence. But even as he attains fame and fortune, the enormity of which surely outstrip even his wildest dreams, sorrow stalks his every step. For the order of the world cannot be overturned, not without exacting its price in blood. While Cromwell is the shining jewel of this novel, Ms. Mantel's deftness with dialogue doesn't desert her when it comes to the historical giants within Cromwell's orbit. The pompous and petty Cardinal Wolsey puts in a potent appearance, as does a wonderfully conceited Thomas Moore who comes off here as a rather savage soul. My favorite satellite, however, is king Henry who is oddly innocent in Ms. Mantel's tale. But then if there had never been anyone to thwart your will, if you were surrounded by sycophants who praised your deeds and forgave your sins, if you were so isolated from the world that your only contact with the people is through their representatives and not the people themselves, would you not also be childishly innocent? It's a fascinating choice, but one that rings true.

This is an outstanding piece of literature. Yes, it is historical fiction; but for the research Ms. Mantel conducted, this story is entirely conjecture. But the quality of the work is measure by the sound of its authenticity and, in Wolf Hall, the sound is as sweet as angel song. (5/5 Stars)