The Discipline of Geography, or, A Little Fry and Parker

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry (HarperCollins, 2008) 313pp.: ill., maps; 25cm.

Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge & the Ordnance Survey by Mike Parker (Collins, 2009) 330pp.: ill., maps; 19.5cm.

Here are two books whose narratives spring from an internal compass rose; narratives that follow their own cardinal points in an organic way in that each comes from a life-long fascination, one with America, and one with maps. Both books are well-written, funny and informative, and both are by residents of the UK who have had their hand in comedy at one time or another. Both authors have also been involved in writing and hosting documentaries on various subjects. Hmm, the plot thickens. Who knows, they may even have shared an elevator. Breathed the same air.

1. Stephen Fry in America:

It might be difficult to find someone who has not heard of Stephen Fry. He's even on the cover of the Video Collectibles catalog where you can order an alarm clock with his mellifluous voice proffering choice phrases to bring you to consciousness. Or you could order the latest DVD of Kingdom in which he portrays the warm and sympathetic solicitor Peter Kingdom ever calming the waters of chaos around him. Yes, from Blackadder to A Little Fry and Laurie, to Jeeves and Wooster and much before and much after, Fry is quite simply a household name. Well, almost.

I realise that Stephen Fry's book is perhaps overshadowed by his BBC film documentary of the same name, and I realise that perhaps more people have viewed the television series than have read the book, and I realise that, unfortunately, I cannot offer comparative insights for I have yet to see the BBC television documentary and therefore I may seem ironically unqualified to mention this book. Well, sod that, I'll give it a go.

If his father had accepted a teaching job at Princeton, Stephen Fry says he could have ended up a Steve instead, hence his early fascination with the United States and his phantom American doppelganger.

Among the many photographs in the book, there is a two page spread of Stephen Fry driving with seemingly unbridled spirit--to borrow a phrase--his iconic London Taxi Cab across the South Dakota Badlands; I can't tell if both hands are on the wheel or whether he was ogling his iPhone for a compass reading, but a London taxi cab in the American wilderness is a lovely juxtaposition.

From the eastern-most point of Eastport Maine to the northern-most point of Barrow, Alaska, all the way to the southern and western-most point of the cooling lava fields of Kilauea in Hawaii, his sympathetic and understandably selective rambling across the vast continent is a delight. It includes the mystery of 'hoosier', the loquacity of Ted Turner, a castle in Kansas and a great deal more. It is a fun book which made me realise how very different and diverse the States truly are. A book which had me dreaming of a road trip myself, albeit one at the helm of one of those luxurious motor homes. (My relatives in California need not worry, the likelihood of such a trip is imminently unforeseeable.) Fry's eloquent wit and writing style is present and there is a genuine interest and fascination with Americans and the American way of life. On a number of occasions, he finds himself in a location where he imagines he could live and be content. This coffee-table sized book is well illustrated and includes additional gazetteer-like facts. A very good companion to the television series. I think.

2. Map Addict: a Tale of Obsession, Fudge & the Ordnance Survey by Mike Parker:

Like most youngsters, I spent a fair amount of time ensconced in an atlas, fascinated by exotic place names, geographical landmarks, and colourful land formations. As for maps, it would have been those taken from my father's collection of National Geographics, large scale maps for specific countries. But maps for directional use were never of interest to me for they were associated with being lost on family holidays with all the stress and angst that went with that scenario. Mike Parker, however, has been a devotee of maps from an early age and his persistent interest has made him somewhat of a specialist in this area.

Map Addict is a well-written and funny book. Parker incorporates memoir, travel narrative, and a basic historical overview of maps in the United Kingdom--specifically the Ordnance Survey Maps. From his early love of the children's books by Malcolm Saville which had maps more realistic than those found in Arthur Ransome, to his ever expanding collection of Ordnance Survey maps, we journey with Mike Parker and share his fascination with all things cartographic.

It is not a dry subject. There is much humour to be found. A requisite chapter all about odd place names and locales that have erotic references is both amusing and informative--chalk landscape figures are involved. There is a wonderfully amusing chapter about maps and religion and specifically interesting is the planned city of Milton Keynes, where Parker has a rather startling interview with a security guard. There is an interesting chapter concerning the power politics of positioning the Prime Meridian. A chapter devoted to the fascination of borders and boundaries such as Baarle in Belgium, and other places in Europe as well as the border problem of certain counties in England, like ones that led to the fate of Rutland. There is of course an excellent chapter on the Ordnance Survey maps, and a great deal more including the portions of travel narrative dealing with his European excursions, mainly his visit to Yugoslavia and Albania. I learned a great deal from this book and an enjoyable time was had.

Now, there is that reference to "Fudge" in his subtitle, and I remember happening across the word only once in the book, and yet, though I could have sworn I made a note of it, it is not to be found. When I checked the index, it was not listed as it might have been between "Fucking, Austria 243--44" and "Fylingdales radar station, Yorkshire 170" but I am pretty sure it was not in reference to an edible sweet.

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón translated by Lucia Graves (Doubleday Canada) 531pp.

In the last pages of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel Sempere, the hero of the story, receives a parcel from Paris enclosing a book entitled The Angel of Mist: he "leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books." It was with just such an 'enchanted scent of promise' that I, and undoubtedly millions of other readers, experienced upon opening Zafón's latest novel, The Angel's Game.

We are back in Barcelona, and our hero, David Martín, born in 1900, is recalling his life as a young man making his way in the world of the scribbler's trade. The first two words of the novel, "A writer," provide us with the touchstone for this work, for, told from David's point of view, these 531 pages are his autobiographical revelations.

A single child of poverty, his mother having abandoned him to his illiterate, troubled, and at times abusive father, David manages to improve his life by being good at school, by finding solace in the written word, and by finding refuge in the Sempere and Sons Bookshop where he is allowed to read what he pleases. At one point he is given by old Sempere, a special copy of Great Expectations which becomes a key text to his life--his sympathetic imagination identifying with Pip.

His father was the night watchman at the newspaper The Voice of Industry, and David would accompany him to work and squirrel himself away there to read. But after his father was brutally murdered before his eyes, David, in shock, hides in the Newspaper printing department only to be found incoherent and lost. The wealthy and influential Pedro Vidal, a writer of true crime stories for the paper, becomes his benefactor by insisting David be given a job as a runner and allowed to sleep in the basement of the building. Weaned on lurid newspaper stories, he graduates from carrying cigarettes and coffee around the offices to being Vidal's assistant after showing promise of being a writer himself.

Like Dickens' Great Expectations, the story begins at Christmas as David recalls his being given the chance to write a story for the back page of the Sunday paper. It leads to more fiction being accepted and he creates a serial called The Mysteries of Barcelona, stories of Barcelona low-life told with exuberant Gothic excess, stories which ultimately establish his fertile career as a writer. His main character, a femme fatale called Chloé Permanyer, is much like Rodolphe, the character in The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue, a character who prowls the dark dangerous streets, meting out justice to evil doers and helping the virtuous. One of many precursors to a character-type that continues to show up in various forms over the ages, perhaps most popularly in Batman and in graphic novels--"V" for instance in V is for Vendetta.

The supernatural thread, a spiral of Luciferian artifice, begins early on when his stories bring him to the attention of an obscure Parisian publisher by the name of Andreas Corelli. Corelli eventually offers David a commission to write a new religion for him, a fable for the times. (This Faustian pact reminded me of Balzac's Lost Illusions where the young writer, Lucien de Rubempré is saved from death by Vautrin, a Mephistophelian character who promises Lucien wealth, power, and fame if he follows his directions. It is a book that also deals with writers, journalism and publishing. Vautrin but another precursor to Corelli.) Though David is already busy churning out penny dreadful Gothic monthlies infused with Grand Guignol, The City of the Damned, using the pseudonym Ignatius B. Samson, for a publisher whose practices reveal a shady side to the business to say the least, he accepts this Faustian pact, and we follow David down this spiral into the dark wet shadows of Barcelona, a spiral that leads him, in the end, to discover he has not been alone in his endeavour.

Our initial sympathy with David is challenged by the decisions he makes and we witness his life crumbling before him while others prosper. The thread of romance is a major one and his first love, Christina has abandoned him for his mentor, Pedro Vidal. Alongside the literary, the supernatural and the romance, a new narrative thread develops as David begins to investigate the history of his newly acquired Tower House, a crumbling pile with a past and a previous owner with his own initials. We follow David into a realm of violence and death, the book taking on a semblance of a noir detective novel as a body count rises and a possibly corrupt police investigator and his two thuggish assistants shadow his every move.

This is a richly mirrored narrative, full of stories within stories and interesting characters such as Isabella, a bright resilient young Jane Eyre-like character who becomes David's writing assistant. There are amusing minor characters such as an all knowing librarian, a recalcitrant archivist, a stiff-lipped lawyer, and avaricious publishers among many others. The character of Isaac, the keeper of the Cemetery of Forgotten books returns and his usually laconic manner gives way to a bit of storytelling himself. The setting of Barcelona is a wonderful character in itself, from the cemeteries to the parks, from the libraries and archives to the bookshops, from the mansions to the slum dwellings, from the baroque old quarter to the recently abandoned buildings of the Great Exhibition and its cable car over the city.

The Angel's Game is a good read and it is a novel that can be enjoyed at different contextual levels. The narrative threads of suspense, crime, romance and the supernatural are intertwined with skill, but they are all bound by the subject of storytelling and writing which surround and permeate them. This literary thread is perhaps the most important thread we as readers should follow though this land of shadows.

A link to music the author composed around the novel can be found here

A link to a video interview with the author can be found here.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (McClelland & Stewart) black/white photographs by Richard Baker, 327pp.

My initial impression of this book was its weight. This Canadian edition is a smaller format book, so it is surprising to the senses when one first picks it up. It is due to the selection of heavier weight paper which has been used to accommodate the black and white photographs which accompany the text, photographs taken by Richard Baker. Holding the book made me think that weight is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for work itself. Images of Atlas or Sisyphus came to mind, representative precursors of the daily grind.

Alain de Botton writes that he was inspired to embark on this book by his observation of shipspotters on a pier in London. Perhaps there is a source of irony there, for the casual passerby, noticing strange individuals hanging about a pier with binoculars, would probably think they were jobless and had time on their hands. Either that, or eccentric retired folks with time on their hands. Perhaps the more imaginative would wonder if they were sailors waiting for a ship, and think wistfully of sails and the open sea. But Alain de Botton was truly inspired by their fascination with what most of us ignore.

In his essay on Accountancy, he shadows an accountant rising from their home in the Berkshires and catching the commuter train to London, and follows them through a day at the office of one of the world's major accountancy firms. He writes:

The headquarters on the bank of the Thames is the setting for a range of behaviours at least as peculiar as anything that an ethnographer might uncover among the clans of Samoa. (p. 231)

This is perhaps the thought that governs his work, for everything we do as humans, whether we are a tribe of accountants in an air-conditioned tower, tuna fishermen off the coast of the Maldives, or a single artist in a field wielding a paint brush, human endeavour is rich in consideration.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is a book with wonderful writing, sharp insights, wry humour, and thoughtful philosophical musings. Whether it is about biscuit manufacture, pylon towers, accountancy, career counselling, or the craft of painting a single 250 year old oak tree over and over, Alain de Botton uses his wonderfully lucid mind and masterly writing skills to make us see life about us in a fresh and invigorating way, and makes us mindful of the interconnectedness of humans. There is a tinge of stoic melancholy about his conclusions of the necessity and importance of work, and a poignancy that for most of us, fulfillment and happiness are not to be found in our working lives.

Alain de Botton is travelling the world promoting the book. If that's not work, I don't know what is. Here is a link to a video of one of his lectures.

And here is a shorter video of a conversation with Will Hearst.

And for the curious, the room where some of the work gets done, Alain de Botton's room.

Concord of Sweet Sounds

Concord of Sweet Sounds: Musical Instruments in Shakespeare / Gerard Brender à Brandis; F. David Hoeniger (The Porcupine's Quill)

This is the second collaboration of master wood engraver and bookwright Gerard Brender à Brandis, with F. David Hoeniger, distinguished professor emeritus of the University of Toronto. The first was A Gathering of Flowers from Shakespeare (1997), a very special limited edition folio production, printed and bound by Brender à Brandis. A selection from this initial collaboration was featured in The Devil's Artisan/DA, 50 (Spring/Summer 2002), and then a commercial edition was issued by The Porcupine's Quill Press in 2006.

This new work presents a very handsome cover and title page which leads us to superb wood engravings accompanied by the textual references to Shakespeare, selected and interpreted by F. David Hoeniger. As always, The Porcupine's Quill Press maintains a consistent quality of production with fine paper, coloured endpapers and pleasing type faces.

The Devil's Artisan/DA, 64 (Spring/Summer 2009)

The latest issue of The Devil's Artisan/DA is devoted to master wood engraver and bookwright, Gerard Brender à Brandis, and is guest edited by Marianne Brandis who provides an excellent biographical essay on his career. The work includes very helpful bibliographical checklists of Gerard's works and shows, and is illustrated with samples of his wood engravings and images of his productions. This is a must have for any follower of Gerard's work. And for anyone interested in wood engraving, Canadian small press history, and bibliography, this issue will also be of great interest.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nocturnes : Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, May 2009) 221pp.

Kazuo Ishigruo's latest work of fiction, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, arrived while I was in the midst of re-reading and reading the short stories of Vladimir Nabokov. (In a timely thematic wink, I had just completed Nabokov's story, Music, with its wonderful descriptions of the pianist's hands reflected in the piano.) The contrast of styles was therefore more pronounced. Moving from the richly detailed reflections of Nabokov's narratives to the clear and precise prose of Ishiguro was certainly a shift. As the spectral reflections of the pianist's hands lingered in my mind, I thought that Ishiguro's short stories were finely crafted, but perhaps slight. But after having finished the stories and having returned to Nabokov, I kept thinking about them. And the more I thought about them, the more I came to appreciate the subtle triangular dynamic between the author's intentions, the motivations and perceptions of the characters, and the suppositions and anticipations of us the readers.

This triadic concern revolves around the--for the most part-- first-person narratives of Ishigruo's protagonists, protagonists who do share something with Nabokovian characters: they are displaced in the world. This triadic pattern is also paralleled in the relationships of the characters, usually the displaced protagonist is involved with two other people, generally a married couple. These open-ended stories may seem light, but the characters stay with you. They left me thinking that most people are displaced in some form or other. The imagination has room to conjure possibilities.

In the first story, Crooner, a young man, Janeck, originally from an eastern bloc country, is working in Venice as a musician in the outdoor cafés. The musicians have to pander to the tastes of the tourists and the 'Godfather' theme music is a common piece in their repertoire. This musical piece is referred to in the final story, Cellists, and acts much like a musical motif in bringing the five stories to their conclusion, rounding off the five movements with a rondo to this initial allegro ma non troppo. Janeck is an outsider to the locals, and yet is a masked player to the tourists. He recognizes a famous older American singer sitting in the café, a singer whose records Janeck's mother found solace and comfort with back in the old communist days of his upbringing. He introduces himself and the plot develops whereby Tony Gardner, the singer, asks Janeck to accompany him while he sings to his wife from a gondola. Janeck's perceptions of what state this older couple's marriage is in, is coupled with our anticipations of possible outcomes. But Janeck, and we the readers, discover that our expectations are blind and the cool truth is down a shadier lagoon.

In the second story, Come Rain or Come Shine, the displaced protagonist is Ray, a Brit who lives in Spain teaching English. He has come back to England at the behest of his friend Charlie whose marriage to Emily is in the rough. Ray and Emily had been close when in University where they shared a mutual love of the music of certain women singers like Shirley Bassie and Sarah Vaughn. Both Charlie and Emily believe that Ray is frittering away his life and that he should really settle himself and get a decent job, a marriage, a house. This is a strange dance of a story and we find Charlie trying to use Ray to help with his troubled marriage. Ray seems rather pathetic and lets himself be manipulated, and it seems it is due to his very displacement, his lack of roots, that he can be so easily used.

The third story, Malvern Hills, the first-person narrator is a young, immature man who is trying to be a singer-songwriter and has opted to help, in a most casual way, his sister and brother-in-law who run a restaurant in the Malvern Hills catering to tourists during the summer months. He has yet to make a way for himself in the world and suffers from that late adolescent light-headedness or self-centeredness which is a type of blindness to reality. He meets a Swiss couple who happen to be musicians. They play popular tunes in restaurants in Austria and Switzerland, although they prefer Swiss folk music. This is a soft gentle story, an adagio if you will, and I was left wondering if the young man's perceptions of the world were altered after meeting the older couple, but concluded that perhaps only on an unconscious level. He was still the unsettled youth with his unknown future before him like the clouds above, floating towards the distant Worcestershire Beacon.

With the fourth story, Nocturne, the first-person narrator is Steve, a jazz sax player whose wife, Helen, has left him for a wealthy businessman. Wealthy enough to offer to pay for plastic surgery for Steve so he can reestablish his career with a fresh face. This is a bizarre story-line and it has Steve staying at a fancy hotel in order to recover from his surgery. Next-door, also recovering from surgery, is the celebrity wife of Tony Gardner the singer in the first story, Crooner. It is a rather a sad story of how individuals are willing to change their external appearance rather than work on their inner self. Both Steve and Lindy Gardner are displaced and single, and seemingly without direction. My expectations of their mutual support floundered and like life, people, unchanged, go their separate ways.

In the final story, Cellists, we have the first-person narrator, a sax player, in an unnamed Italian tourist center playing in a group much like the group in the first story. He spots a cellist out in the café who used to play with his band seven years ago, a young man named Tibor. The sax player then tells the story of Tibor, the highly trained Hungarian cellist in exile, now playing popular tunes like the theme to the 'Godfather' in tourist cafés. Tibor is befriended by an American woman, Eloise McCormack, who wants to be his teacher and mentor. She recognized his talent, his 'potential.' The narration shifts into a third-person objective view point to encompass the breadth of Tibor's story and then shifts back into the voice of the sax player. Tibor's life is altered by this encounter with its interesting twist and yet we are left wondering exactly in what way. What really became of his career and life. The sax player with a laissez-faire attitude is reluctant, or too laid-back to enquire. Life flows on; people go their separate ways and we are left wondering.

Overall, Nocturnes is an interesting deceptively light group of lyric pieces and any fan of Ishiguro would want to check them out.

Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay by Robert Carver (Harper Perennial) 2007. 376pp. map.

Being more of an arm-chair traveller, there are better odds of my winning a major lottery than ever setting foot in Paraguay. After reading Paradise with Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay, I imagine that could be said for the majority of the world's population. A troubled country which bewilders, saddens, and makes one shake one's head in disbelief.

Paraguay: Shaped like an internal organ of an indeterminate mammal, landlocked and located in the nether region of South America. That about summed up my knowledge of Paraguay prior to my having read Robert Carver's entertaining and perceptive travel narrative. I couldn't even recall the name of the capital. (Deceptione kept coming to mind, but that was obviously wrong.) My knowledge of the rest of South America is fairly sound in a basic sort of way: countries, capitals, history, landscape, music, literature, people, culture, but for some reason Paraguay had not entered my realm of knowledge. I felt less self-conscious about this ignorance when I read of Carver's experience while waiting in Sao Paulo for the flight into Paraguay: he noticed that, though there were newspapers and magazines from the U.S., Mexico, and numerous South American countries, there was nothing about Paraguay to be found in them. In addition, there were no periodicals from this isolated country to be found, and he comments that his "destination was as invisible as it had been in England."

Carver has done his research and, like most travel narratives, there is a mixture of information and experience. He actually begins the book with an autobiographical tale of a distant relative whose extraordinary life and disappearance in the wilds of South America is indeed stranger than fiction. This relative is one of the reasons he had wanted to visit Paraguay. It seems Robert Carver is the type of travel writer looking for the unusual experience. His first book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania, lays the groundwork for his visit to the equally uninviting destination of Paraguay, a dangerous and disagreeable country, and therefore a desirable spot for such a writer. Carver's travel narrative is in the English tradition of the individualist adventurer seeking the unusual, the anomalous. Most of Paraguay seems rather anomalous. Then again, perhaps anomalies are relative, for he finds that Paraguayans are shocked at how many laws, orders and strictures European countries experience. (It would be interesting to read a travel narrative of a true Paraguayan who experienced Europe.) The humour, at times dark, is generally evoked by the absurdity of the extreme situations he learns of, or witnesses, and the rather stressful situations in which he finds himself, which often involve either nature: vampire bats, piranhas, crocodiles, mosquitoes--night-time and day-time-- and the dreaded candiru fish.; or humans: police, thieves, muggers, smugglers, murderous drunks swinging machetes, and mad gun-waving Nazis.

But he does meet various interesting people who are the sources of much general and detailed social and historical information on the culture and history of the country, such as the youthful Welsh Patagonian Argentinian, Alejandro Caradoc Evans--the name clues us in to his character--a type of youthful remittance man exiled in Ascuncion, critical of everything Paraguayan, and eventually, everything South American. We learn of the maté addicted male population, the failure of the banking systems, the general corruption and criminality of the political elite, and the utter hopelessness that faces the average Paraguayan every day. Firearms are as common and visible as cell-phones in our world--perhaps even more common. Along with present day realities, Carver weaves into the narrative interesting historical information about Paraguay's past, such as the horrors and atrocities of the past regimes, the British involvement in the country, the Jesuits attempts to convert the Guarani indians, and the Australian attempts to build Utopian communities. His ventures into the interior lead him to many encounters with smugglers and odd characters but also with positive encounters such as with the Mennonite community of Filadelphia where the prosperous nature of their town and area make him feel as if he was in another country altogether.

Carver winds the story up to high suspense as the impending political unrest and stress drive him to the extreme feelings of panic, wondering why he ever set foot in the country, and we are also glad to be with him on the plane fleeing the country, and thinking, with a shake of the head, a book is about as close as one would want to get to Paraguay.

The Private Patient by P. D. James

The Private Patient by P. D. James (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2008) 395pp.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mystery author in the possession of a very good story, is rarely in want of readers--especially if that writer is P. D. James.

Phyllis Dorothy James, born in Oxford in 1920, began writing fiction in the cold war era of the mid-1950s while raising a family and working at a London hospital in administration. Her first book, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962 by the venerable publishing house of Faber & Faber which at the time was perhaps more known for its distinguished list of poets and literary authors. It was an ideal marriage. P. D. James's detective, Adam Dalgliesh, wrote poetry, slim volumes to be published by Faber & Faber. James has remained with the firm for the past 46 years in what appears to be a happy marriage for all concerned.

Faber recently reported that over a specific Christmas holiday period, ebook sales of her latest mystery, The Private Patient, reached 750 copies ( 1,200 copies total when sales of her other titles were included) only challenged by Faber's ebook sales of the popular British QI books, The Book of General Ignorance and Advanced Banter at 800 copies. ( Canadians and American are perhaps less familiar with the popular British QI comedy quiz show created by John Lloyd and hosted by the wonderfully convivial and erudite Stephen Fry--who, by the way, has recently become the presiding genius in the land of Twitter--but P. D. James is certainly a household name across North America. ) Much has certainly changed in the publishing world since her initial cloth bound début: talking books on cassettes and cds, downloads to ipods and now the more recent and significantly important ebooks which, it seems, alters the very nature of publishing.

Her literary output of 20 books over 46 years is respectable and she has had a steady and loyal readership. Her latest book, The Private Patient, shows no sign of diminished power due to her age. Her prose is as finely crafted and acutely perceptive as ever, her formal diction and construction is detailed and sharp and she slips in echoes and quotes from one of her favourite authors, Jane Austen. In P. D. James's richly descriptive prose there is a delicate balance between the inner psychological life of the characters and the exterior world and setting in which they move. The settings of London and Dorset are evocative but do not dominate. As well, her stalwart detective, now Commander Adam Dalgliesh, does not dominate the book either, for his assistants, Detective Inspector Kate Miskin and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith form a triadic balance of inquiry, and each are given stage presence.

Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47 year old investigative journalist, a private, rather enigmatic person, has decided to have plastic surgery to remove a facial scar she has had for 34 years. This scar has shaped her life. The natural reaction of adults was to look away from the scar, and so this enabled her to observe people, and she became an astute and perceptive student of human behavior. It also shaped her life's interest which was "in finding out what others kept hidden." [p.8] She has decided on an exclusive clinic at Cheverell Manor in Dorset--complete with a neolithic stone circle, the Cheverell Stones--owned and operated by a renowned plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell, and it is here that she meets with her mysterious death. The dozen or so characters whose lives intersect with Rhoda Gradwyn and Cheverell Manor are all given their back stories with detailed yet succinct brushstrokes and each has us wondering if they could be responsible.

With Commander Dalgliesh's appearance, there is a very natural unfolding of information, and we come to learn of stories within stories, and occasional red herrings, but it all is gradually revealed in an organic way. In the last quarter of the novel, there is a concentration on letters and wills and this has a very Charles Dickens/Wilkie Collins feel, providing a resonance with the past.

When Commander Dalgliesh makes his appearance in the second section, he is in a very Jane Austen/Oscar Wilde position of being interviewed by his future father-in-law over the offer of marriage to his daughter Emma Lavenham, a character introduced in Death in Holy Orders. Marriage is a theme in the book--perhaps a nod to Austen. Although each marriage is different in nature--much like Austen again--they involve older couples which perhaps reflects modern society. Commander Dalgliesh, often referred to as AD, is also in for possible career changes as bureaucratic machinations may bring an end to the Special Investigative Squad he heads up. We are left wondering what may become of Commander Dalgliesh, and P. D. James provides us with a few rumours to think about. Dalgliesh muses that a job in the upper echelons of bureaucracy would not offer much inspiration for his poetry.

Will this be the last mystery novel by P. D. James? I hope not.

God's Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery

Douglas Hunter - God's Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery (Anchor Canada, 2008) {416pp.: maps.}

The talented writer, Douglas Hunter, is not only an author of many books on sport, business, and the environment, but he is also a trained visual artist and graphic designer with a passion for sailing and yacht design. As a reader I wondered why he ventured into the area of early Canadian history and exploration, and concluded that it must have been another true interest. He spent three years working on the book and ended up with enough material for two more. He has produced, with editorial grace, a wonderfully readable, suspenseful and dramatic work of historical investigation and synthesis. By employing various narrative techniques, and by placing all source notes and bibliographic information at the end of the book, he has crafted an historical narrative which flows along with a storyteller's artistry.

In the first half of the book, the author brings to the foredeck, Henry Hudson. We find Hudson working for the Dutch in an effort to discover the North-East Passage, but instead he finds his way to North America and the eventual discovery of the Hudson River. Already we sense a bit of a rogue individualist. In returning to Europe, he just makes landfall on the English coast and later finagles his way into a Captaincy of the English vessel, The Discovery, with the goal to discover the North-West Passage--that mythic short-cut to the silks and spices of the Orient--a goal that had drawn English explorers on a quest for over thirty years. Douglas Hunter fleshes out the characters of the crew and we get a good sense of the intrigue and uncertainty that could develop. It is a story of Hudson's obsession with finding the passage, an idealist's vision versus the more limited views of the crew whose discontent, discomfort, hunger, sickness, fear and shifting allegiances, ultimately lead to mutiny after wintering over in James Bay--the bay of god's mercies. The author weaves in stories of previous mutinies such as the one against Edward Maria Wingfield in Jamestown in 1602, and against Captain George Waymooth in 1607, and how these stories would have been known to Hudson's crew, providing context and structure in how they should proceed with theirs.

Hudson's obsession is driven by fragmentary knowledge, conjecture and the misreading in a translation of a text by Samuel de Champlain. It is a story of the influence of exploration narratives and the charts and maps of cartographers. Hudson believed in the 1599 navigational chart by Edward Wright which had a vast Lake Tadouac, a lake which he hoped would lead out to the far east:

"His perspective was burdened by the arcana of the efforts of earlier explorers, these figures and their accomplishments a mix of real and imagined, and by almost hallucinatory visions of cosmographers and cartographers of the shape and nature of northern lands and seas." [p. 94]

After setting Hudson, his son and other crew members adrift in the summer of 1611, we follow the mutineers and their pathetic way back to England, and Douglas Hunter fills in the story of the voyages to find Hudson, and then the legal ramifications for the remnant mutinous crew members--all with detail and great interest.

The second half of the book follows Samuel de Champlain and his particular vision of discovering the passage to the far east. Nicolas de Vignau, one of Champlain's men, had spent a year with the Algonquins and had learnt of a story of an English survivor from the far north held by the Nebicerini, held as a gift for Champlain. With this story we find ourselves in a narrative that is filled with anticipation and suspense. The author provides us with the backcloth of Champlain's extraordinary career to date, his writings, his struggles with the fickle nature of politics, financial backers, Royal Monopolies and regional competitors such as the mariners of St. Malo and the Basques, and of course his diplomatic relations with the native tribes.

Drawn by the possibility of an English survivor of a northern expedition who could hold important information as to a salt water passage to the orient, Samuel de Champlain held the broader vision rather than the more immediate view of the profits from the fur trade. We learn of Champlain's relations with the various tribes on his arduous trek up the Ottawa River to the Algonquins and the difficulties in his search for the English survivor--and ultimately, his discovery of truths and lies.

Addendum: Douglas Hunter has completed a new book on Henry Hudson to be published in the fall of 2009 by Bloomsbury.

In Spite of Myself by Christopher Plummer

In Spite of Myself: a Memoir by Christopher Plummer (Knopf Canada)

Christopher Plummer's recently published memoir, In Spite of Myself, clocks in at 648 pages. I can't think of how he could have found the time to take notes having lived such a full life, so he must, then, have a prodigious memory. A prodigious memory for a prodigious life. If he wrote about every detail of his life it could easily have been a three volume affair, but as it is, this hefty volume, written with idiosyncratic flair and panache is a substantial tell-all of one of the very greatest actors of our time.

He has worked with so many people in his long career, and experienced so much, and has so many stories to tell, that as a quiet introverted reader, I had to put the book down from time to time to gather strength. His style is flamboyant and richly textured which captures the energy and passion of his life, and he has framed the memoir with a novel's structure, and neatly brings us full-circle in the final pages.

This will be a must-read for any theatre and movie fan for it is also a compendium of theatrical and movie lore. One of those substantial books ideal as Christmas gifts.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Paul Theroux - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar (2008) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) (McClelland and Stewart).

Beyond the Oxus
In the autumn of 1934, the 27 year old Peter Fleming, adventurer, journalist, travel writer--and elder brother of the yet to be famous Ian--embarked on a trip from Krasnovodsk on the Caspian Sea coast, to Samarkand: a three or four day journey through the deserts of Central Asia aboard the Trans-Caspian Railway--the "express" train. His brief account of this rough trip through parts of the Soviet world--old Transoxiana--was later given as a BBC radio piece and collected in his With the Guards to Mexico! (1957). His descriptions of the conditions of this train and his co-travellers is strangely parallel to the experiences of Paul Theroux as he travelled the Bukhara Express to Samarkand in the year 2006, recounted in his latest travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: on the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar. Certainly there have been many historical changes over the 70 years, but it seems the conditions of the trains--possibly the same rolling stock--and the conditions of the co-passengers have changed very little. Considering that Paul Theroux ended up having nine people crammed into a four-person compartment for the over-nighter is perhaps a sign that conditions have actually deteriorated. But, as he has said, "luxury is the enemy of observation." I have to tip my imaginary Tilly to Paul. He was 65 years old, and this section of his trip was but a fraction of the journey which had him retracing the steps of his 1973 adventure by train through Asia and back, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), in an effort to revisit the ghost of his younger self, and to see what has changed, and what has remained the same.

Beyond South London
Paul Theroux was born in 1941 and grew up with his large family in Medford, Massachussetts. By the 1960s, a well-informed, intelligent young man, he had joined the Peace Corps and was off to teach in Africa and later in South East Asia, taking opportunities to travel when he could. By 1973, in his early thirties, he was living the exile's life in London with his wife, a BBC producer, and their two young children. He was a seasoned professional writer by this time, with six published novels under his belt, one more set for the printers, and one in the making, plus a book of criticism, many "pieces" of journalism, and many, many book reviews. What possessed him to leave this professional existence behind for a four months journey of adventure and discomfort? (Sitting in a room for most of the day writing sentences may have had something to do with it.) Perhaps he had reached a point in his life, an arrival if you will, which rubbed up against a need for a grand departure: a need to abandon the static position in favour of one of locomotion; a need for reality in lieu of imagination; a need for conversation rather than soliloquy; a need to throw himself into the world and let the depths of possibility help keep him afloat. A romantic suggestion. Akin, perhaps, to Stein's dictum in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. However, he has written that he wanted to make more money--a refrain amongst writers--and he received his first advance for what would become The Great Railway Bazaar, a book that became a best seller. It was a pivotal time in his life. He succeeded in forging an innovative template for travel writing--which others were to follow--and he used this template creatively to write further books based on further travels such as The Old Patagonian Express, The Kingdom by the Sea, Sailing Through China, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Happy Isles of Oceania, The Pillars of Hercules and Dark Star Safari, experiences that also helped fuel his prolific output of novels, novellas and short stories.

With Theroux's revisitation in 2006, his retracing the route of his youthful journey, he offers revelations of his personal life concerning not only the present, but of the past as well. Seeing memory itself as a ghost train, he fills in the backcloth to the first journey with the personal context he did not reveal the first time round. The ghost theme plays throughout the book, rather like a musical leitmotif. Many of the train trips are night trains to dream-like destinations: Night Train to Baku: the Trans-Caucasian, Ghost Train to Mandalay, or Night Train to Kyoto: the Twilight Express, and Theroux often muses philosophical about travel itself, what he refers to as his Tao of Travel. The archetypal structure to his trip, the hero's circular journey, is lightly played upon in his present book, his wife playing the part of Penelope, knitting while she worries over her husband's return, while he, an older Odysseus, always travelling alone, benefits from the openess of strangers. As a reader, I felt like a ghost hovering over his shoulder, listening in on conversations with multi-charactered humanity, and attentively following his observations and gleanings on the overland route.

With this contrast between youth and age, between the first and second journey, we have the comparitive contrasts of countries and cultures--the historical context. In the first railway trip, he travelled through Iran and Afghanistan, but for this trip he had to follow a northern route through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan and we see such a striking contrast of these countries and their oppressive governments, with India where every rickshaw driver has a cell-phone and there is a positive and polite work ethic, though one challenged by over-population and poverty. Theroux provides us with glimpses of the "dystopia of Turkmenistan, melancholy rural India, the open prison of Burma, the social laboratory of Singapore", and a great deal more. And he has his requisite meetings with fellow authors, this time Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka--an aged oddity--Haruki Murakami in Japan--a fascinating outsider and observer of his own society--and his good friend Pico Iyer in Japan as well. And there are the many characters he encounters such as Mr. Karpoorchand on the train to Jaipur with his unusual retirement plan, Mr. Kumara on the train to Kandy who reads Theroux's palm, Oo-Nawng, the rickshaw driver in Mandalay who Theroux befriends and reaches out to, and the Bernard family at Candacraig, a small hotel in Maymyo, Burma, the relatives of the Mr. Bernard he had written about in the first book and many, many more. Theroux has a keen eye for interesting characters, and this is one of the great strengths of his travel narratives, the interesting characters he discovers and brings to the page. His well-burnished ability for "casting strangers for roles in my narrative" as he puts it in his most recent book, seems almost an innate talent for observing human nature.

The opening of his first travel narrative The Great Railway Bazaar, reads very much like a novel due to his observations of character. Leaving London in 1973, he finds himself bunked together on the delapidated Orient Express with a Mr. R. Duffill, a rather odd man who reminded me immediately of Anthony Burgess's creation, Enderby, the oh so idiosyncratic poet. Poor old Duffill, with his essence of Enderby, his name becoming a verb, duffilled in Domodossola, watching in stilted horror as the train left the station without him. And of course there was Molesworth and his mineral water. Theroux reveals the true name of the man who was Molesworth in his latest book. One could do worse than be cast by Theroux. If one made it to the page, one could dine out on it for quite some time.

Though he mentions it is common to hear of young upstarts trying to make a name for themselves by retracing the footsteps of famous journeys made in the past, it is not common for writers to retrace their own footsteps. It seems Paul Theroux has managed, once again, to find his way home in an original way.

New Note: from Bill Thompson's Eye On Books: an audio interview with Paul Theroux:

Further audio interviews can be found here.

Sail on the Horizon: Reading Virgil Burnett's Scarbo Edge: a Romaunt

Scarbo Edge: a Romaunt by Virgil Burnett / with illustrations by the author (Blaurock Press, 2008).

About six pages into Scarbo Edge: a romaunt, an intuitive presumption of familiarity stilled my reading eyes. . . first chapter called 'The Golden Ampersand' . . . night train from Paris to Venice . . . a passionate tryst . . . . . . Venice . . . an erotic assignation. In a visual sense, these would be the first shadowy crosshatchings of my interaction with the text--one reading over another, a memory rising up from the shadows--from the past.

This evocative novel's first chapter appeared--I finally remembered--in a literary journal, an issue devoted to Venice. Not able to remember the specific journal, I did remember the cover image, a rather distinctive animal-faced Venetian door-knocker, and it was by this remembered image that I was able to trace the journal among my wife's collection: Descant, 128, Spring 2005. Looking at it now, I am fascinated by the eyes of this creature which seem almost alive with a sad resignation, as if weary of but another visitor wishing to gain entry, but another soul announcing their arrival. Within this same issue, there is a portfolio of photographs taken by the author when he was in Venice in the late 1950s--France and Italy being an annual pilgrimage for this artist/author. These photographs reveal a city of locals going about their business, a city that had yet to see the inundation of 'tourists' much bemoaned by present day writers such as Javier Marias in a fairly recent article. Perhaps the eyes of this creature reflect the present rise of landfalls and departures--the weight of the worlds' footsteps vibrating through the lagoons.

It is a city in which we find our idealistic hero Eber and his singular love, Isa, secretly celebrating their relationship. Eber, many years ago, met Isa when they were in architecture school, he three years her senior. They began an affair which was casual, non-possessive, modern. When Eber took a position with Marcus Associates he travelled widely and yet he always returned to renew his love with Isa. Disillusioned with Marcus' emphasis on making money and developing properties rather than creating innovative architecture, Eber resigned and travelled the world in an attempt to realign his life. Being an excellent draughtsman, he found work with archaeologists on Iron-age Celtic sites from Malta to Brittany to Cornwall. Years pass. He discovers that Isa has married Marcus, a loveless marriage of convenience. After their tryst in Venice and some attempts to cure his singular obsession, Eber returns to Canada, renting a somewhat run-down Victorian pile called Scarbo Edge on the rough coast of Lake Huron not far from Falaise, Marcus' mansion where Eber has discovered Isa resides. And so their relationship is renewed, fraught with dangers from the present, and possibly mirrored in the past.

Scarbo Edge is not only a variation on the Tristan and Isolde legend--the eternal love triangle, that triadic template for much of the Western narrative tradition from the Iliad on--but it incorporates a variation of the suspense genre as well. It is both an old story and a new one. It is a story of passionate physical love, of eroticism, of singular desire. A narrative richly veined with allusions and ambiguities, dualities and duplicities, ghostly parallels, existential wanderings, and mythic ordeals.

Virgil Burnett, artist and author, is a master of the line--'proportion, anatomy, and composition'-- and this mastery, informed by a wealth of experience and knowledge, finds its equivalence in his written word . His style is one of a born story-teller, both simply told and beautifully written. His descriptions of the physical relationship of a man and a woman is both exquisitely poetic, and vigorously real. A rich addition to Virgil Burnett's diverse oeuvre.

Two from the Porcupine's Quill

A Wood Engraver's Alphabet by G. Brender à Brandis (Porcupine's Quill, 2008).

Prompted by Tim Inkster of Porcupine's Quill Press, Gerard Brender à Brandis, master engraver and print maker, has produced another wondrous book of wood-cut engravings, a flower for each letter of the alphabet.

The engravings are so rich, so densely cut, that looking closely at the engravings one feels drawn into the pictures as if entering a forest, a forest of detail. Coming to the Foxglove, I felt as if I had entered a clearing and there stood the flower, totemic in its beauty.

In his introduction, the artist reveals something of the process of engraving--conceptions and methods--much like he so affably does when one visits his "Artist At Work" open gallery and workshop in Stratford, Ontario, during the Shakespeare Theatre season.

Although a book of silent images, he reminds us of how flowers were used as messengers of unspoken meanings, and so the alphabet, the text--sub rosa-- can be woven within these images for each of us, with our own associations.

A volume to sit alongside the other finely produced books of this artist issued by the Porcupine's Quill, and a book, by all means, for the gardener's or horticulturist's collection. An ideal gift in fact.

Off the Wall drawings by Tony Urquhart with Captions Courageous by Michael B. Phillips (Porcupine's Quill Press, 2008).

Though admittedly not thoroughly familiar with the work of this artist--only vaguely so in the shadows of my knowledge--I found this most unusual book to be most entertainingly amusing. I was surprised in a most pleasant way for I had approached this volume in all seriousness, thinking I should first look closely at all of Urquhart's images before embarking upon the textual commentary by Michael B. Phillips, realising that I may be entering the rather dubious territory of tertiary discourse: the artist's work, the associate's commentary on that work, and then my observations of the work and reactions to the commentaries, a rather dour academic endeavour fit for the post-graduate in art history. . . .

I guess I should have clued in to the title: "Off the Wall" and "Captions Courageous."

The commentaries, or rightly so, 'captions', are as imaginative, absurd, humourous and surreal as some of the drawings, prints and sculptures that grace the pages of this finely produced volume.

My initial observations evoked images of pedestalled personal altars, cosmological or climatological devices, strange reliquaries, bizarre, surreal--à la Remedios Varo--objects with organic links between the terrestrial and the cosmological space-time continuum. . . So how refreshing to come across Phillips's courageous captions such as this one on page 52:

A box inspired by the Spanish puppeteer Senor Sergiao Wenches, a frequent guest on the Ed Sullivan Show. Any resemblance of the head-like object within the box to a former Prime Minister of Canada, or to Ed Sullivan himself, is probably a coincidence.

The image itself is listed in the index as: A forgotten trip. Pen & ink, white gouache, 1977-1983. 14.8cm x 11.4 cm.

I am in awe of their dual imaginations seemingly open to all wave lengths. A very interesting book.