The Victorian Murders: No Bottom, by James D. Brewer; Seven Dials; Long Spoon Lane; Buckingham Palace Gardens, by Anne Perry; The Detective Wore Silk Drawers, by Peter Lovesey; Circus Train Conspiracy, by Edward Marston
As first mate, he was the lowest paid officer on the boat, but Jacob figured his $130 a month made him about the highest paid negro on the river. It had been six years since Luke gave him the job, and some of the passengers still mistook him for a roustabout or a dining room steward, but Jacob took that in stride as he kept Captain Luke's cargo secure and the roustabouts in line.
--from No Bottom
Meanix lasted one round more. his attendants miraculously got him to the vertical position in the half-minute, but he was semiconscious when he lurched out. One eye was closed and the other half blinded with mud and gore. His bloated lips slobbered blood and saliva. In the corner he had spat out two teeth into the slop bucket. One blow finished the fight. A long, low jab in the diaphragm. He doubled forward and plummetted to the mud. The sponge was tossed in beside him.
--from The Detective Wore Silk Drawers
"Is everyone out?", Narraway demanded.
"Yes sir, as far as we can tell--"
the rest of his answer was cut off by a shattering explosion. It came at first like a sharp crack, and then a roar and a tearing and crumbling. A huge chunk of one of the houses lifted in the air and then blew apart. Rubble fell crashing into the street and over other roofs, smashing slates and toppling chimneys. Dust and flames filled the air. People were shouting hysterically. Someone was screaming.
--from Longspoon Lane
The squeals became excited and acted as a guide. Trampling through the undergrowth, Mulryne rushed on with a sense of relief coursing through his body. The monkey was alive, after all. The search was over. When he got close to the area where the sound was coming from, however, he couldn't see the monkey. Instead, to his horror, he saw something that made his blood run cold. Having led a hard life, the Irishman was not easily shocked, but this sight stopped him in his tracks.
Sticking out of the ground, a human hand was waving to him.
--from The Circus Train Conspiracy
I was beginning to miss Miriam Grace Monfredo, but fortunately her series from before and during the US Civil War segues nicely into a whole nother series by James D. Brewer, taking place during the Reconstruction and in which the first, at least, is set among the riverboats of the Mississippi. The main characters are (former Union officer and river pilot) Luke Williamson and (former confederate soldier turned insurance investigator) Masey Baldridge. One of Luke's boats sinks and Baldridge investigates the claim and the two protagonists naturally hate one another, but...well, they come to an understanding as tough guys on opposite sides are wont to do in certain tales that emphasize that they both have a certain kind of cussed honor. Definitely looking forward to others in the series.
Peter Lovesey's Sergeant Cribb series was a decent, somewhat eccentric TV series in the early 80s, featuring crime in unusual subcultures of the era. Unfortunately, my library only has about half the series. The Detective Wore Silk Drawers is about illegal bare-knuckle prize fighting and captures character and atmosphere very well.
Anne Perry's Thomas and Charlotte novels are getting better, but Longspoon Lane is exceptional. It centers around a plot by corrupt police to push a bill through Parliament that would give police chilling and unprecedented surveillance and interrogation authority under the guise of preventing crime...and the book was written in 2005, right at the height of the W Administration's crackdown on civil liberties. Sometimes, I read the sort of popular crime fiction that highlights topical issues, with some hope that they will influence the public. In this case, it is obvious that not enough people listened to Perry, and the results sadden me.
Finally, I reach the last (so far) of Marsdon's Railway Detective series, and I don't mind. It is often only tangentially involved with railways, and the later volumes are full of obvious misdirection in which ALL of the suspects are eliminated and the culprit turns out to be someone barely or not at all mentioned prior to the final chapters.
Christ Syrup: Ben-Hymn, by Lew Wallace
The hand laid kindly upon his shoulder awoke the unfortunate Judah, and, looking up, he saw a face he never forgot--the face of a boy about his own age, shaded by locks of yellowish bright chestnut hair; a face lighted by dark-blue eyes, at the time so soft, so appealing, so full of love and holy purpose, that they had all the power of command and will. The spirit of the Jew, hardened though it was by days and nights of suffering, and so embittered by wrong that its dreams of revenge took in all the world, melted under the stranger's look, and became as a child's. He put his lips to the pitcher, and drank long and deep. Not a word was said to him, nor did he say a word.
I had never known much about this old popular novel, except that I'd heard it was made into a movie, that I haven't seen, known for having an epic chariot race. I was a little taken aback to see it subtitled "A tale of the Christ", but despite the prologue of the Three Wise Men meeting to seek the birth of the King of the Jews, it is not a preachy religious book. Jesus makes a cameo appearance or two, but no more. It is implied that Ben-Hur is favored to escape from harsh fates due to being true to his Jewish roots, while his enemy Messala gains the world and loses his soul, but if you can stand that, you can stand the story.
Instead we have a Monte Cristo style revenge tale, in which Messala takes advantage of an unhappy accident to destroy Ben-Hur's family and get him condemned to a brief life as a galley slave; Ben-Hur later returns having gained what he needs to destroy Messala. Not particularly deep, but entertaining and a quick read.
Humor from Sam the Eagle: People of Hemso, by August Strindberg
The minister stared at Carlsson and seemed to have no idea where he was. Noticing that he was holding something shiny, he remembered that he had given a speech last Christmas with a silver cup, and so he raised the lantern as if it were a goblet and began: "My friends, we are here today to celebrate a joyous occasion!"
At this point, he stared at Carlsson, trying to get some idea of the nature and purpose of the joyous occasion, since he was now completely at a loss--season, place, reason, and purpose had all deserted him. But Carlsson's grinning face offered him no solution to the mystery.
My first Strindberg novel (The Red Room) was billed as satire, and was quite stale. This one, my second, was billed as uncharacteristically humorous, for Strindberg--people who know him from his expressionist or controversialist plays will be surprised.
Yeah, well---Very Serious Swedes who live on an island with a fishing-based economy, and a young man who comes to make a living doing the land-based chores, rises because he (ha-ha) works harder and plans ahead than the others, marries a rich widow, makes some investments, loses through the failure of the investments, and eventually reaches no-longer-young adulthood with prospects of success still before him--this seems didactic, not funny.
The single somewhat-funny passage in the whole book, it seems to me, is the one I quoted above, involving the incompetent preacher about to marry him. Rowan Atkinson did it much better in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Thankfully short, but otherwise not highly recommended.
Why? Because We Like You: The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana
The poet has only to study himself, and the art of expressing his own ideals, to find that he has expressed those of other people. He has but to He has but to enact in himself the part of each of his personages, and if he possesses that pliability and that definiteness of imagination which together make genius, he may express for his fellows those inward tendencies which in them have remained painfully dumb. He will be hailed as the master of the human soul. He may know nothing of men, may have almost no experience, but his creations will pass for models of naturalness, and for types of humanity.
The philosophy of the month is my introduction to Santayana, whose early book here is maybe one of the first American works on aesthetics, maybe one of the first attempts in America to care about something's beauty as opposed to how much it costs.
It talks a lot about the senses and how we know what we know before concluding that, in appreciating beauty, things are good because we like them; they are not liked because they are good. Further, he's not going to challenge others who have a liking for something different from what others like. Differences of opinion are what make for horse races, and all that.
Two by Maupassant: A Woman's life; Pierre and Jean, by Guy de Maupassant
All at once, she became aware of a soft warmth which was making itself felt through her skirts; it was the heat from the tiny being sleeping on her knees, and it moved her strangely. She suddenly drew back the covering from the child she had not yet seen, that she might look at her son's daughter; as the light fell on its face the little creature opened its blue eyes, and moved its lips, and then Jeanne hugged it closely to her, and, raising it in her arms, began to cover it with passionate kisses.
The late nineteenth Century, especially the French, seem to have a LOT of squandered fortunes. From Zola's drunkard to George Eliot's Tulliver family to Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, whether presented as silly or tragic, sinned against or sinning, I've gotten a deluge of cautionary tales about fucking up with money, and the severe pain to be found in not having the means of subsistence. Maupassant's long (for him) tales are more of the same.
A Woman's Life follows a woman from youth to old age as she is betrayed first by her parents, then by her husband, then by her son, and a substantial family fortune turns to nothing. She has cause to be thankful that she'd been nice to her peasant servant in youth, because the servant is who ends up rescuing her.
Pierre and Jean are brothers who make their friendship and what should be a blessing into a curse, when one of the brothers receives a substantial inheritance from a distant friend of the family. The other brother can't handle the slight, and ends up wrecking things needlessly.
Maupassant writes very well. This stuff is painful to read. So...let's not be like that, eh?
The Zero Balloons: Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne
"This very evening," returned Phileas Fogg. He took out and consulted a pocket almanac, and added, "As today is Wednesday, the 2nd of October, I shall be due in London in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the 21st of December, at a quarter before nine p.m.; or else the twenty thousand pounds, now deposited in my name at Baring's, will belong to you, in fact and in right, gentlemen. Here is a cheque for the amount."
A memorandum of the wager was at once drawn up and signed by the six parties, during which Phileas Fogg preserved a stoical composure. He certainly did not bet to win, and had only staked the twenty thousand pounds, half of his fortune, because he foresaw that he might have to expend the other half to carry out this difficult, not to say unattainable, project. As for his antagonists, they seemed much agitated; not so much by the value of their stake, as because they had some scruples about betting under conditions so difficult to their friend.
Yeah....Verne pioneered in sci-fi, but he was never one of my favorites, and he hasn't lasted as well as Wells, for all that the steampunk subculture owes to people feeding their imaginations off him.
As with Ben-Hur, I thought I'd known more of this than I did because of references to movie versions. I'd always assumed a good deal of the round the world travel involved balloons or zeppelins or some kind of air travel.
No balloons. In fact, the singularly colorless main character, Fogg, decides on a whim to place a large wager that he can go around the world in 80 days....and he does it. At about five pages per major line of longitude, on average. and spending pretty much the amount of the wager to do it. He goes by train and boat mostly, paying great sums of money to the engineers and captains to make them go fast enough to make it in time to catch the next train or boat, and so they make it. Except when they don't, in which case Fogg pays some more to get a substitute conveyance. There's a brief trip in a sledge, and another episode with an elephant, but...really, trains and boats.
And the effort to make comic relief out of the clumsy sidekick and the foolish, stubborn detective who follows them the whole way thinking they're escaping robbers, is just pathetic.
Life in a Northern Town: Middlemarch, by George Eliot
She would not have asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory? Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian. And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself. Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness. Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
I'm not sure if I have a "Greatest Novel of the 19th Century" firmly in place, but I'll definitely put Middlemarch in my top three; top one on a good day. It has so very, very much. There's Dorothea Brooke, who marries for wisdom rather than for love, and who finds neither; Doctor Lydgate, whose equal and opposite bad marriage to a wife who goes behind his back to spend him into oblivion; Fred Vincy going through a bildungsroman under the guidance of a kindly manager of manorial estates; Bulstrode the banker, who several readings has convinced me actually means well as he wrestles temptation two falls out of three; Uncle Brooke and his comic disaster of a run for Parliament; and above it all, the village gossiping and commenting about the principal characters like a Greek chorus, alternating between having a sense of country wisdom and just being shallow, petty jerks.
I find that each time I read it, I find myself concentrating on different sets of characters and getting different insights on those I had concentrated on before. And I would love to be an evesdropper on a hypothetical conversation between Eliot and that other great lady of letters from the other end of the century, Jane Austen, as they discussed great shifts in morals, manners, and social skills and expectations across the intervening 80 years or so, and whether they had been for the better, or not so much.
Very highest recommendations.
Forest Hardy: The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy
She opened the casement instantly, and put out her hand to him, though she could only just perceive his outline. He clasped her fingers, and she noticed the heat of his palm, and its shakiness. "He has been walking fast in order to get here quickly", she thought. how could she know that he had just crawled out from the straw of the shelter hard by, and that the heat of his hand was feverishness?
When you think of Thomas Hardy, odds are good you remember his poetry, or such novels as Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, or The Return of the Native. The Woodlanders is not among his best known works for a reason.
It struck me as a dress rehearsal for some of his better known plots, except that he wrote it after everything but Jude the Obscure. and instead of a small town full of bigots or a gloomy endless heath, the community lives in the forest. And the characters get wrongly paired off, have affairs, and some of them die tragically while others surrender to loveless, gloomy fate. If you've read the other books, it lacks the full catharsis you've come to expect and merely makes you feel moderately depressed. I can get that from the real world.
Stately Essays: The English constitution, by Walter Bagehot
People dread to be thought unsafe in proportion as they get their living by being thought to be safe. 'Literary men', it has been said, 'are outcasts, and they are eminent in a certain way notwithstanding. They can say strong things of their age, for no one expects that they will go out and act on them.' they are a kind of ticket-of-leave lunatics, from whom no harm is for the moment expected, who seem quiet, but on whose vagaries a practical public must have its eye. For statesmen, it is different--they must be thought men of judgment. The most morbidly agricultural counties were aggrieved when Mr. disraeli was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. They could not believe that he was a man of solidity, and they could not comprehend taxes by the author of Coningsby, or sums by an adherent of the Caucasus.
A book of political essays, mostly comparing the American and English forms of government as they existed in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, recommended by Jacques Barzun as an example of literary political writing. Contains many a clever turn of phrase and many a highlight of the aspirations and pitfalls of experiments in self-rule. I found it especially poignant when Bagehot underscored the need for experienced political professionals to steer the ship of state, at a time when the masses of my nation are keen to vote for incompetents at government, on the grounds that "he's not a professional politician", as if that was a virtue; and the results have been what Bagehot would have predicted.
Farewell to Nietzche: The Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzche
What a tremendous amount can be accomplished by that intoxication which is called "love" but which is yet something other than love!--But everyone has his own knowledge of this. The muscular strength of a girl INCREASES as soon as a man comes into her vicinity; there are instruments to measure this. When the sexes are in yet closer contact, as, e.g., at dances and other social events, this strength is augmented to a degree that real feats of strength are possible; in the end one scarcely believes one's own eyes--or one's watch. In such cases, to be sure, we must reckon with the fact that dancing in itself, like every other swift movement, brings with it a kind of intoxication of the whole vascular, nervous, and muscular system. So one has to reckon with the combined effects of a twofold intoxication. And how wise it is at times to be a little tipsy!
I have never seen reference elsewhere to the idea of women hulking out from the mere presence of a man, and I suspect Nietzche made it up...but if such a thing were actually a phenomenon of nature, I would put it down, not to amorousness, but to the need of women to defend themselves from male sexual aggression.
The last of four Nietzche books from my summer reading list was put together after his death by his sister, who I'm told was a Nazi sympathizer who went out of her way to arrange them so as to appear to support Teutonic master race spin. Honestly, outside of the same old "ubermen should not be constrained by rules, and morality sucks the strength out of people" (which focuses on individuals, not classes of racial "superiors"), I didn't see much of this. I did see plenty of condemnation of those Neros and Caligulas who commit atrocities from high up in government while believing themselves to be above the law; and I especially see references to the tendency of Trumpish dictators to foster in the people nihilism and doubt in the existence of objective truth, the better to herd the masses like sheep for their own ends (which is exactly what today's "fake news" Republican Party is doing, and what Goebbels did before his soulmates the American Republicans). So it would seem that Nietzche was not as Nazi-like as his detractors make him out to be. His eternal celebration of great men (and it's always men, not people) as entitled to gratify their desires at the expense of the weak, does still reek of toxic masculinity.
And thus ends my review of Nietzche, who with Mill remains the most enduring philosopher of those on this year's reading list. I see considerable poison in him, and considerable (if ironically forced into limiting definitions) zest for living well by removing limits. And it seems to me that power can be defined simply as the removal of limits.
Until next month.
