Category Archives: Books

Sometimes it pays to listen to your spouse: Dead Cold by Louise Penny

2019 Trip to Southwest United States, Books, Buddhism, expansive religion

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Dead Cold

By Louise Penny

When I first heard about Louise Penny I was very surprised. She had been an unexceptional host on CBC radio in Winnipeg. As a regular CBC listener, I listened to her nearly every day. I heard she had moved to Quebec. Much to my surprise she wrote a book called Still Life. It was a murder mystery that took place in a small fictional village in the eastern townships called 3 Pines.  I found it a little difficult to believe that she could be any good. How could a young woman from Winnipeg be a good mystery writer? That prejudice shows you how stupid I can be. Later I learned she was on the New York Times bestseller list. That did not seem improbable; it seemed impossible.

Sometimes it pays to listen to your spouse. Chris became a Penny  fan and suggested I read her too. It took me a couple of years to follow her suggestions. Funny, how suggestions from a spouse are the last that are followed. And Chris says, “Should be the first to be followed. As a matter of fact, since Chris is a big mystery fan, when I learned this Winnipeg woman was an internationally respected mystery writer, I suggested she read her. Now Chris has conveniently forgotten my suggestion to her! Funny how that happens!

Eventually I read her first novel and concluded Penny is indeed a very good writer. Chris was right. Again I have to admit that.  I have started to read her series now. Chris has read them all. This year I read the second in the series, Dead Cold. This convinced me that Penny is an exceptional writer.

One of the great pleasures of the series is Penny’s description of this small town in Quebec and it’s many fascinating inhabitants. This is how she describes the small town in her second novel:

“Three Pines had what she craved.

It had croissants and café au lait.It had steak fries and the New York Times. It had a bakery, a bistro, a B & B, a general store. It had peace and stillness and laughter. It had great joy and great sadness and the ability to accept both and be content. It had companionship and kindness.”

         There was one outstanding incident in Dead Cold that I want to mention. It involved Clara, a recurring character in the series. Clara is an artist. So far she has toiled without success. She does not know if she is any good or not. Naturally she was insecure. She asked CC, who Clara wrongly thought was a friend, to introduce her art to a Montreal art critic.  Then one day she encountered CC on an escalator in a Montreal department store, and CC, her erstwhile “friend” pretended to be talking to the critic as she was travelling down the escalator and Clara was travelling up.  She led Clara to believe that the critic had dismissed her art as “amateur and banal.”  It was cruel gesture and entirely deflated Clara. Clara was “murdered by words.” She “knew” her art was crap.

A few minutes after this painful incident,  Clara encountered a homeless bum on the streets of Montreal. The bum was lying on the ground covered in vomit and excrement. The bum was an old woman. Clara intended to give her a bag of food. She almost stopped; the smell was so bad. Yet she continued and placed the bag beside the old woman. Amazingly, the old woman turned up to Clara and said, “I always loved your art, Clara.” How could that be?

For some reason, Clara was convinced this bum was God. The shit-covered bag lady was God!  She thought she had met God. In my opinion Clara was wrong. She had not met God; she had become God. By offering food to the bum she became God. The Buddhists say that we must learn to become the Buddha. This is what Clara had done, and in the process she was redeemed. This is what we should do; we should become God. I believed that this is what genuine religion is all about. Religion leads us to the God within.

All of this in a mystery novel. Funny how that happens.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, politics, Truth Seeking

Like the Republic of Imagination that I read last year, this book, Reading Lolita in Tehran that I read this year in Arizona, was brilliant. Both are written by Azar Nafisi. This one is an odd little book. It is written by a young Iranian professor of English literature who now teaches at an American University, but tells us about her first years as a professor in Iran during and after the time of the Iranian Revolution. She started sort of a book club at her home when she felt suffocated by the oppressive regime while teaching  in the University of Tehran. She went home to escape and took some of her female students with her. The professor and her students rebelled. They rebelled not with guns, bombs or conspiracies. They rebelled by reading American and English literature! In their hands that was a revolutionary activity.

All of the women lived in a totalitarian society where officials were wary of the Professor but didn’t really know what to do about her. Some of them learned how to resist. Some of them suffered serious consequences, but that is not really what the book is about. The book is about literature as rebellion.

Nafisi denied that a book was in the ordinary sense moral. She did say this, “it can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.”

One of the most amazing scenes in the book is when her class at the University decides to put the book The Great Gatsbyon trial.  Her students play the roles. The prosecutor is a strict straight-laced Muslim regime supporter. The defense counsel is one of her more radical female students from her book club. It is a remarkable achievement. According to Nafisi, “a great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals , and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” It is a revolt against moral hubris in favor of what I have come to call moral humility or restraint.

The Iranian officials tried to prescribe what all the people should do, how they worship, how they love, what they read, and what they think. It tried to restrain them totally.  The women became revolutionaries not by any overtly political acts, but only by readingand thinking. None of them fired a gun. Yet, the women learned how literature can defeat ideology. This is what Nafisi in her second book called “the Republic of Imagination.” Nafisi sees literature as revolutionary force opening the mind to possibilities. Imagine please, Jane Austen as a revolutionary!

Its books like this we should read when we are forced to confront authoritarianism. Times like now.

In Search of a Better World by Payam Akhavan.

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, politics,

If you read this book it may be the best book you read this year. It is written by a Canadian lawyer, but don’t let that stop you from reading it. Or go to the CBC Radio archive and listen to the CBC’s 2017 Massey Lectures. The book contains those lectures. It is a delightful combination of personal reminiscences of himself and his family and his life as a UN human rights prosecutor and reflections on his experiences.

The book starts out with a wonderful and humorous description of how his family fled Iran as religious exiles fleeing persecution after their revolution. He was a young lad and did not realize why they were leaving the country he loved, but he was excited to go to Canada. His first impression was from 30,000 ft. in a jet.

Sadly, he found that Canada was not the country of unabashed welcoming of refugees. Instead in the schoolyard he was bullied as a “Paki.” Ignorant Canadian school children did not know better. He was different; so he was mocked. He spoke funny, that meant he must be ready to be made fun of. He thought the Hockey Night in Canada song was our national anthem. Maybe he was right.

Later the bigotry of Canadians morphed. He described it this way, “As my school days came to a close, the all-purpose pejorative “Paki” label was given way to a more sophisticated taxonomy of bigotry. Thanks to the simplistic sound bites and sensational images that passed as evening news, Arabs and Iranians were merging in the popular imagination as a barbaric race of crazed terrorists. Instead of getting better the ordeal by association was getting worse. It didn’t matter that we were actually the biggest victims of those same bearded fanatics appearing on their television screens, or that Western leaders had sabotaged secular democracy in our countries. Our story was irrelevant. We were merely a blank screen on which others projected their psychological needs, of either scorn or of pity.

Whether in the schoolyard or in global politics the clash of civilizations is a convenient escape from the visceral fear of embracing others. The bully and the bigot, the tyrant and the terrorist need to inflict pain on others to escape their own pain. Connecting with others renders us vulnerable; accepting differences challenges our way of life. The cowardly way out is to make enemies rather than doing the hard work of learning and growing. Why struggle to discover a deeper identity when hatred is within easy reach?”

In the book Akhavan meanders through many examples of a failure to empathize. Arabs and Israelis. Serbs and Croats. Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda. Western European settlers and North American indigenous peoples. And many more. Invariably he adds value to the discussion of these conflicts. But he always comes back to the central concept of empathy. He quotes Persian philosopher Rumi: “the wound is the place where light enters.”

Here is what he says about the West and Islam,

“For much of history, Islamic civilization has been the enduring “other” of the Western world, and Western civilization the enduring “other” of the Islamic world. But the reality today is that the irresistible forces of globalization, the inexorable expansion of our collective unconscious, is infusing diverse peoples with an ever-broader sense of belonging. That is exactly why the extremists are panicking. In these times of accelerating change, they need each other more than ever. The white crusaders and the wicked jihadists are inseparable dancing partners, entangled in an awkward tango of mutual disgust. Whether they like it or not, identities are not fossils in a museum. They are inherently dynamic constantly shaping and being shaped by others in a never-ending exchange of perspectives. Amidst intensifying interdependence, parochial identities will invariably give way to a wider loyalty. Then better to negotiate the inevitable by dialogue rather than violence. The xenophobic hissy fit of identity warriors is futile avoidance of a shared future.”

Akhavan finds empathy as the basis of human rights. As an immigrant to Canada, during a time when brown people were rare and exotic, he understands from deep personal experience, that “multiculturalism is a messy affair.” It is often difficult and challenging. But is there any reason to believe that we are not up for the challenge? Akhavan points out,

“We each have a unique path, but when our journeys occasionally converge, we may discover that we also have a shared humanity; that we all suffer; whatever our identity may be. The universality of human rights means that despite our differences, we all deserve to be treated with the same dignity. We should not project demeaning stereotypes on others, portraying them as savages to justify our bigotry. But in celebrating diversity, we should also not become apologists for those that abuse others in the name of tradition.”

It is a fundamental theme of the book that we must recognize that other people suffer, just like we do. He knows, as Shakespeare’s Shylock did, that each of us bleeds in the same way. When we recognize that, we empathize. As the original meaning of the word “sympathy” indicates, “we suffer with.”

That is precisely why we have to be skeptical of claims from our leaders that “we” are different from “them”. No matter how much they want it otherwise, this is not a matter of “us” against “them.” This is a matter of “we.” We are in this together. We really are one human race, no matter where we come from, no matter what the color of our skin, and no matter how we worship (or not) our gods. We are fellows.

Akhavan says that our encounters with human rights atrocities have a lot to say about who we actually are, as opposed to who we pretend to be. That is why Akhavan explores how the pursuit of a virtuous self-image affects our perceptions of suffering at the periphery of our society. This is a version of the thought, now often accepted, that a civilization is judged by how it treats the most vulnerable–i.e. those who suffer at the periphery.

Akhavan points out that many of us are no longer able to define the sublime by reference to the divine. Therefore, to many, they are unable to find moral certainty. As Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov said, “If God is dead then all is permitted.” To such thinking Akhavan responds as follows:

“Disabused of the catastrophic illusions of the past, in our post-modern search for transcendence we have embraced human rights as the secular sacred. Having shunned absolute truths, we navigate the stormy seas of moral relativism, weary of foundering on the forbidden rocks of individual autonomy and cultural diversity. In this disenchanted universe, belief in the inherent dignity of humankind is the magical island where we can still find refuge amidst moral uncertainty.”

This book is certainly worth the trip.

Cities of the Plain

Books, religion

 

Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy is the concluding book in a trilogy of books (you might say trinity) that follows All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. It has taken me about 15 years to complete the trilogy. That is because the books are so intense. They contain scenes of excruciating violence. I could not abide the thought that I should quickly go from one to another. The books are dark and skewer all  facile optimism. These are books that make you think and make you feel at the same time. Like Saul Bellow, I do not believe  thinking and feeling are severed from each other. I have the feeling/thought that it is the same with McCarthy. They are one.

The first book, made into a film, was about 2 boys going to Mexico from New Mexico in a search of stolen horse taken after their father died. The boys grow and meander though the 3 novels. Each of the 3 books are powerful. They are not easy reads. McCarthy makes it difficult. But the books are worth the trip. Like Steinbach claims (with much less justification). Read them all.

The books straddle the old and the new like the plains and the cities of the title. They also straddle the border between the US and Mexico–the blood meridian. They also straddle the time of the old west and the new west. The people are tough–incredibly tough.

At the end of the trilogy (I won’t tell you who so as not to ruin the surprise) the one character who has meandered (I love that word again) through the series, is sitting next to a woman whose children have been regaled by his stories of “horses and cattle and the old days” is watched by her. They look at his old weathered (experienced) hands: “ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.”

Each book in the trilogy is dark in its own way, yet each has a vision of light that pokes through the darkness as well. John Grady, the young protagonist, learns a very hard lesson. He learns what Eduardo says, “The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.”  Dreams are important in the book yet they are also not entirely real. Yet at the end we also learn, “This life of yours is not a picture of the world. It is the world itself and it is composed not of bone or dream or time but of worship. Nothing else can contain it. Nothing else be by it contained.” Is that really dark?

Read the series. You will be well rewarded.

Pigs in Heaven

Books, Indigenous Issues

Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to Kingsolver’s Bean Tree her amazing book about a young girl Taylor on the run from a suffocating life in Kentucky where she is scared she is going to get pregnant like all the girls in her small town of Pittman. Instead  on the way to Arizona she stops at service station/restaurant in the middle of nowhere, an Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, where she is “given” a 3-year old child that is a physical and mental wreck after suffering unspecified but obviously serious abuse. The young woman who gives her away had informal custody of the child when her sister, the mother, was unable to take care of the child. To save the young child from further abuse, in desperation she gives her up to a passing young white girl, Taylor. The book describes the strong bond that develops between the mother, Taylor, and her young child, Turtle. She adopts the name Turtle because she holds onto Taylor with a grip as tight as that of a turtle. She has found her safe harbour and won’t let go.

Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle 3 years later. I do not want to give away the plot. I hate reading reviews that do that. The book involves various ethical issues that arise out of the relationship of adoptive mother and child.

One of the characters in the book is a Native American woman with the ominous name of Annawake Fourkiller. Ominous name or not, Fourkiller, is smart and not without empathy. As she says, “I want to do the best for the most people.” That is a simple, but noble goal. Unfortunately life is not always simple, for she has a problem. It is a complicated problem. She thinks that like Shakespeare said, “I have to be cruel in order to be kind.”

The problem arises out of the deep gulf between Native American and American world views. Jax (named after the beer), Taylor’s loveable rogue boyfriend, a member of a band called appropriately, Irascible Children, explains the American ethos this way: “I heard the usual American thing. If you’re industrious and have clean thoughts you will grow up to be vice president of Motorola.” Annawake astutely diagnoses Jax’s attitude as typically American–individualistic. “Do right by yourself,” she says.

She contrasts that view with her own arising out of her Cherokee heritage. She said, “I had a hundred and one childhood myths and they all added more or less up to ‘Do right by your people.” She asks Jax if that is so bad. It’s clearly not bad, but its not the same as Jax’s myth. And there arises the conflict. It is a fascinating conflict. Annawake Fourkiller says “Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it’s losing yourself in a crowd.”Jax can’t understand how that is possible. She says you lose yourself in a crowd at a dance. “Not like American Bandstand, not recreational dancing, it’s ceremonial. A group thing. It’s church for us.”

Of course part of the problem is Taylor. She is impetuous; she is a rebel. We knew that from the first book. We know that more deeply after reading the second. As her mother, Alice, says, “She’s independent as a hog on ice.” The relationship between Taylor and her mother also informs this book. Two tenacious mother/daughter relationships. As Alice says, “When you are given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine. The universe makes allowances.”But it also delivers powerful challenges.

At the end (which I don’t want to give away) the characters get a rare chance–“one of those rare chances life gives us to try and be the very best we are.” The book is about what they do with those chances. This is a wonderful book. I recommend it to one and all. Kingsolver is a great novelist. I am not sure she has got all the credit she deserves.

Reading and Travelling: A poor soldier of culture

Books, Philosophy/Ideas, ,

 

I love reading–always have, always will. I love my family, my friends too–always have always will. In Arizona all our family and friends from back home are back home. Too far to see. So we have lots of time on our hands. Much of that time is spent reading.

At home I have lots of books. In the fourteenth century the largest library in Europe, the Sorbonne, had about 1700 books, about the same size as my library. I take pride in that. Sadly I can’t take those with me, but I sure can take some.

Traveling and reading is not always easy. Even ebooks are not without their challenges. Lewis Lapham the former editor of Harpers Magazine once wrote, “it pleases me to learn that Abdul Kassem Ismael, grand vizier of Persia in the tenth century A.D., never travelled without his library of 117, 000 volumes, carried by a caravan of 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. Well I did not bring that many books, for I did not have a caravan of camels. But I have brought some outstanding books here to Arizona.

Besides the books though we have been blessed by time. One without the other is sterile. Because we have so much time it is possible to engage in deep reading. Harold Bloom, following Shelley, said that deep reading is giving up easier pleasures for more difficult pleasures. The only reading that matters is close and deep re-reading. Democracy can only survive if we learn to think well and powerfully. He also likes the quote from Wallace Stevens: “the reader becomes the book, summer was like the conscious being of the book.” Sometimes I get that feeling. Especially in Arizona where I have more time to read.

That does not mean all the books we read are deep books. Far from it. I am what Saul Bellow called “a poor soldier of culture.” Pulp fiction can be good too. Good pulp that is. For example, I love James Lee Burke. He writes great pulp. I have already one of his books on this trip.

Saul Bellow one of the best American novelists of the 20th century knew the value of good books. He also realized that modern readers had many distractions. As he said, “Well there is a violent uproar, but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher, activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense. Not yet. Books continue to be written and read. It may be more difficult to cut through the whirling mind of a modern reader, but it is still possible to reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone , we novelists may find that he is devoutly waiting for us. When complications increase, the desire for essentials increases too.”

I have definitely experienced complications this trip. Mainly brought on by braying hounds of American politics. I needed to get back to essentials, and reading has allowed me to do exactly that.

So reading here in Arizona has been a great pleasure perhaps more than at home because here, away from the hurly burly, it is easier to find what Bellow called that “quiet zone” where reader and writer meet.

The rewards of reading area also deep. I want it to be like Saul Bellow said in It All Adds Up, “Literature in my early days was still something you lived by; you absorbed it, you took it into your system. Not as a connoisseur, aesthete. Lover of literature. No it was something on which you formed your life, which you ingested, so that it became part of your substance, your path to liberation and full freedom.”[3]

Jonathan Franzen is another writer who appreciates reading. He compared it to watching television, “in reading, unlike watching TV one reflects and one gains much…”instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.” [4] Franzen acknowledges that this is elitist. “The elitism of modern literature is, undeniably, a peculiar one– an aristocracy of alienation, a fraternity of the doubting and wondering… The first lesson reading teaches us how to be alone.” [5] That’s why I always say, the reader will never be bored, provided he has a book or magazine near at hand. Then life is always good. I try to teach that to my grandchildren. I hope they learn it.

I also cherish the fact that in modern life, with the decline of reading, the reader is also the rebel. Franzen quoted Don DeLillo from a Paris Review article in 1993 who pointed out that everything in modern culture argues against the novel and that this required a writer who was opposed to power to be a rebel, i.e. one who is opposed to assimilation. Sort of like Karl Kraus the Austrian satirist who said after World War I that there was the “hopeless contrary” of the nexus of technology, media, and capital. The reader and the writer as rebel!

How did we get into this Mess?

Books, politics, Social democracy

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George Monbiot is one of my favorite writers. He writes regularly for The Guardian a paper I subscribe to. I find his writing invariably thought-provoking. He often takes positions that are contrary to received opinion from left or right, though he has a serious left wing bent. His latest book is called How did we get into this Mess?

Like me, Monbiot is deeply opposed to plutocratic government. That is government for the rich, not government for the people. It is often nominally democratic. It appears democratic, but the institutions of democracy have been corrupted or usurped by rich people for their own advantage.

It is interesting how some rich and privileged get ordinary people to vote for politicians who so obviously serve their rich masters, rather than ordinary people. How do they do? That is part of what has got us into this mess that we are in?

Monbiot puts it this way,

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money away from the poor. 

Since there are vastly more poor people than rich people, one would think it would be very difficult for rich people to convince enough poor people to vote for politicians who support the interests of the rich over the interests of the poor, but that is exactly what has been happening in the west for at least the past 30 years. Ever since Saint Ronald Reagan came riding on his horse out of the west. In fact they have been remarkably successful. As Monbiot said,

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99 per cent to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

After Reagan these policies in the US were continued by all Presidents, even the Democrats. As a result taxation of wealthy people is at its lowest in 100 years. As a direct result inequality in the west in general and in the United States in particular has increased astoundingly. As former Republican senator Alan Simpson said, “The little guy is going to get cremated.”

A lot of the work in getting ordinary people to vote against what is good for them and for what is bad, was done by an organization called Americans for Prosperity (‘AFP’). This is one of those organizations supported by Charles and David Koch two of the richest men in America. They have spent hundreds of millions supporting lobby groups that urge politicians to lower taxes on the rich and remove government regulations that they see as interfering with their right to do business as they want, no matter who is harmed in the process. They have been big supporters of Donald Trump among many other right-wing politicians in the US.

Monbiot described their work this way, “AFP mobilised the anger of people who found their condition of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse.”

The Founding Fathers of the American constitution were worried about mob rule. That’s why they built into the constitution an elaborate system of checks and balances. By and large that system has worked fairly well. But there are new challenges the framers of the constitution were never aware of. As Monbiot said, “The primary threat to the democratic state and its functions comes not from mob rule or leftwing insurrection, but from the very rich and the corporations they run.

The rich in America have created a plutocracy. That is a government designed to work for the benefit of the rich at the expense of everyone else. I am not saying that all rich people have done. Some rich people have done this. And they have been extremely effective at doing precisely that. As Monbiot said, they have done that by

promoting the same dreary agenda of less tax for the rich, less help for the poor and less regulation for business…I see these people as rightwing vanguardists, mobilising first to break and then to capture the political system that is meant to belong to all of us. Like Marxists insurrectionaries, they often talk about smashing things, about ‘creative destruction’, about the breaking of chains and slipping of leashes. But in this case they appear to be trying to free the rich from the constraints of democracy. And at the moment they are winning.

Their crowning achievement came after Monbiot’s book was published–the ascension of King Donald. Now look at what we have got!

The Return of History

Books, History, politics, violence, War

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One of the best things about an extended stay vacation is that it offers time for things it is harder to do at home–such as reading.  Reading is one of my greatest pleasures.  I will comment on a few of the books I have read on this vacation. Here is the first

Today I am recommending not just a book, but a series of books. I am talking about the Massey Lectures a series of outstanding books by great thinkers co-sponsored by CBC, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. Oddly, I have actually brought the two most recent books in this series on this trip.

The book I just finished is The Return of History by Jennifer Welsh. Welsh’s book is a rethink of an earlier very famous article by American political commentator Frances Fukuyama entitled “The End of History,” in which he argued that the demise of confrontation of East and West epitomized by the apparent end of the Cold War in 1989, was actually much more than that. Fukuyama argued this was the end of humanity’s ideological evolution as it entailed the “universalization of Western liberal democracy.” In other words it was the final form of government and this would lead to a waning of traditional power politics and large-scale conflict and the emergence of a much more peaceful world. Optimistic wasn’t he? Welsh definitively puts an end to this thesis, based on historical events that occurred since then.

What I really liked about the book (and there were many things) was the way she knitted together a broad collection of international historical events into a rational narrative without over-simplifying them. She makes sense of history in other words.

Too many of us (me clearly included) catch only a glimpse of current events, particularly on the international stage, by reading newspapers and magazines, or watching news stories on television, or, horrors, listening to our opinionated buddies at the coffee shop. Naturally we miss parts of each story. Often we miss large parts of the story without realizing it. It is difficult to understand what is going on in the world that way.

It is really nice for someone like Welsh to put them together in a comprehensive and rational way and look at them that way. It makes us feel briefly smarter. Sadly, that feeling soon passes with each new overtaking event.

When we look at places like Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and closer to home like the United States Germany and Great Britain, among many others, complacency is hardly justified by the facts. Dread is a much more rational response. It is not the triumph of the west that we can reasonably look forward to, the decline of the west seems much more likely.

Welsh points out that liberal democracy has overcome many crises in its short history during which it has flourished, but this has lulled both its leaders and its citizens into a false sense of complacency that is rapidly crumbling. As she says, “Our relative success in the past has created blind spots that now threaten to take us into a decade or more of great political, as well as economic turmoil. History is back with a vengeance.”[1]

This is a very good book.

[1] Jennifer Welsh, The Return of History, (2016) p. 46

Two for Texas

Books,

Two for Texas by James Lee Burke

 

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. Until now, nearly all of his books which I have read were detective novels. The only exception was a short story collection. The latest book of his that I have read was also out of the ordinary for Burke.

This book is a work of historical fiction. By that I mean it takes place in a specific time and place. In this book that was the so-called revolution of Texas in 1835 to 1836. Secondary characters in the novel include Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crocket.

I was struck by the similarity of this book to the best American novel, The Adventurers of Huckleberry Finn. Both novels are about 2 males making a burst for freedom. In Two for Texas, the two protagonists escape prison after killing their prison guard. The guard was not a sympathetic figure, yet I found his murder shocking. The good guys don’t often commit murder. Here they did.

The book is a classic about freedom and the refusal to buckle under to tyranny. First the tyranny of the French prison is resisted. Then the tyranny of the Mexican soldiers.

The revolutionary war leads to massive violence and death. At the end the violence is over, but there is no clear sense of redemption. Here is how With his typical mastery of metaphor and imagery Burke describes the end of the battle through the instrument of an image of a young boy, Son Holland, greedily drinking water from a canteen. He call is this way,

 

Son pulled the wood plug from the canteen and drank until the water poured down from his lips.

“You drink like that was whiskey,” the soldier said.

The water ran down his chin and neck and over his dusty chest, and as he lifted the canteen higher he thought he could see the whole landscape, the breastworks, the blackened crater where the Mexican cannon had been, the ground strewn with dead men and horses, the violent green of the trees in the distance tilt upward into the shimmering sky, as though it all were being pulled over the earth’s edge.

 

I particularly took note of the “violent green of the trees.” There is no idyllic regeneration here, often symbolized by the colour green. There is no comfort to be had. Son, a young boy, has been throw a violent battle, but perhaps he too has been “pulled over the earth’s edge.”

When Son Holland and his partner, the much older wizened and sprinkled with cynicism Hugh Allison and the Tonkawa woman Sana leave the territory by crossing the Red River, Burke describes the scene this way,

 

The sky was so blue and hard that it looked like it would crack if a rifle ball were fired against it.

 

The war is over. At least until the next one. And there is no reconciliation. There is only the enduring stubbornness of men and women.