Girl Detective

The last issue, #60, of Brian K. Vaughan’s series Y the Last Man was just released, so I thought I’d go back to the beginning with Volume 1: Unmanned and read through to the end. Y is Yorick, literally the last man on Earth when a mysterious plague wipes out every male mammal with a Y chromosome. Yorick, along with his last monkey, the male Ampersand, go undercover to track down his mother and sister. He meets up with Agent 355, a member of the covert group The Culper Ring, and she is reluctantly pressed into protecting him. Unmanned sets the stage for the series with strong characters and a good mystery.

For other books I’ve read, and for the ridiculously long list of books I think I’d like to read, visit my library at Gurulib.

Rucka’s Queen and Country comic-book and novel series is at a temporary stopping point, so I thought I’d go back to Whiteout, the excellent graphic novel that contains the first appearance of British intelligence officer, Tara Chace. Chace is undercover, helping out U. S. Marshall Carrie Stetko, who’s been exiled to Antarctica because a former assignment went wrong. Members of a science expedition team keep turning up dead, and the investigation is slowed by the brutal weather, and sabotage. Stetko is a powerful heroine, and Chace (aka Lily Sharpe, in this book) is a good complement. Whiteout is a good story, well told in words and pictures, that will please fans of mystery and spy fiction.

For other books I’ve read, and that I hope to read, visit my library at Gurulib.

The ice is the windiest place on earth. Katabic winds blowing from the Polar plateau down to the ocean. Fast.

320 an hour kilometers fast, sometimes. With that sort of windchill, the temp plummets into the triple-digits.

Wind kicks up snow that’s lain on the Ice for thousands of years, tosses it through the air. Destroys visitbility, you can’t see six inches in front of you, can’t tell the ground from the sky.

That’s called a whiteout.

Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt, a selection of my book group, is not one I would have picked up on my own. I’m glad to have read it, though, especially in the current political season. Eminently readable, ER the book carefully documents Roosevelt’s life up till FDR was elected president. It ends with a huge list of notes and sources; only a few notes interrupt the text.

ER the person is a fascinating companion for the 500+ pages. Born into an aristocratic family plagued by alcoholism and depression, she goes on to become one of the most influential women in politics, though her work was frequently behind the scenes. She was a tireless and diplomatic supporter of both her husband and of women’s causes, even when these sometimes (and they often did) diverged. It was a good reminder that many of the things we take for granted–forty-hour work weeks, 8-hour workdays, maternity healthcare and leave, among many other things–were things other women worked to bring into law.

Much that’s been written on the lives of ER and FDR focuses on their extramarital relationships. I found that Cooke carefully detailed the evidence for these, while also showing that the two had a supportive, loving marriage in other ways, and one that enabled each of them to go on to significant personal success and accomplishment. Their marriage, like ER as a person, was complicated.

The narrative sometimes jumped around in time, and Cooke so often listed the many upper-class companions of the Roosevelt’s lives that I skimmed them. Further, family trees or an index of people along with their nicknames would have been very helpful. Many people had more than one nickname; it was hard to follow, and I wished also for some explanation of where the panoply of alternate names came from. But the book overall was so thorough and so engaging, like its subject, that these are minor complaints about a work I enjoyed and learned from.

My old book group had Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys on their “to read” list for ages, and it never was selected. I’ve been meaning to read it since I first read Jane Eyre a couple years ago, and finally have. Rhys has imagined the backstory for the character of the first Mrs. Rochester. It’s a slim, deceptively difficult novel to read. Set in Jamaica, the narrative has the vagueness and heat of a fever dream. Many things are mentioned as matter of fact, and I had a continued unease that I didn’t understand the text, or they wouldn’t be explained, though nearly all of them were further into the book.

Antoinette is the daughter of a former slave owner and his beautiful Creole (white West Indian) second wife. The unrest in the islands leads to early tragedy in her family that never loses its hold. She is the narrator of the first section.

Seeking security, her family marries her off to young Mr. Rochester, new to the islands and barely recovered from fever. He narrates most, but not all, of the second section–though I haven’t seen this noted in most analyses, there is one departure that is told from Antoinette’s point of view. He is the second son of a wealthy English family, so he has no prospects of fortune of his own. He receives a large dowry, and the marriage starts off well enough. Rochester is young and paranoid, though, and the gossip about his wife and her family history make an impression on him. The marriage falters through several ugly incidents, until Rochester plans to leave.

The third section is narrated again by Antoinette, who Rochester now calls Bertha, because he likes the name. She is a prisoner in his home, and drifts in and out of lucidity as she moves toward her place in the narrative of Jane Eyre.

This is not an easy, or enjoyable, read. It is often hard to follow and understand. It is haunting, though, as well as provocative, disturbing and tragic. It looks at unpleasant truths about family, slavery, sexism, and racism. I will read this book again; I feel certain that it will yield more the second time around. Next time, I will read the annotated Norton Critical edition. I’d like to find out more about the history and world politics of the time.

Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White is another link in my book chain that’s followed The Thirteenth Tale. Along with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Woman in White is mentioned several times. Like T13T, WiW is a fun, engaging thriller, with many odd and humorous characters. A young art teacher helps a woman one night, and finds himself tangled up in her destiny, which has a wide reach. There’s thwarted love, mistaken identity, dire secrets, and one of the best, most entertaining villains I’ve encountered in a long while, and he doesn’t even appear until 200+ pages in. Count Fosco, as he would undoubtedly tell you himself, is an astonishing character. Villainous, hilarious, and so fascinating to imagine that I wouldn’t want him to be dramatized in a movie–a real actor could not do justice to the many descriptions and characteristics of this vain, vile, large and tall man.

The tale is told in sequential narratives by different characters. This is done very well–events are not repeated, but expanded on from the point of view of another character when they overlap. The narratives are all well distinguished in the voice of their character. The mystery and its resolution unfold up to the very end, and I was happily engaged with this book for its 600+ pages.

At some passages, I raised my eyebrows:

The rod of iron with which he rules [his wife] never appears in company–it is a private rod, and is always kept upstairs.

Indeed. Ahem.

Other passages, especially ones by villains or lesser characters, made me laugh out loud:

Creaking shoes invariably upset me for the day. I was resigned to see the Young Person, but I was NOT resigned to let the Young Person’s shoes upset me. There is a limit to my endurance.

By the end, in fact, I was rather bored with the two main characters; they were comparatively dull, and largely overshadowed by the larger, more complex and entertaining cast. I think, though, this was intentional. In all, it was a “thumping good read.” I tried and failed to confirm the origin of this phrase (is it the book award?), but it means a book that is enjoyable for its story more than for its literary art, much as I felt about The Thirteenth Tale.

Queen and Country vol. 8 Operation Red Panda collects issues 29 to 32 of the Oni Press comic-book series, which is taking a break while author Rucka focuses on other projects.

Tara Chace is Minder 1 for Britain’s S.I.S., or MI6, which deals with international affairs. She’s a tough, smart, savvy spy who has seen far too much tragedy in her years of service. Operation: Red Panda finds her returned after a mission gone wrong, and pressed back to service quickly, without time to recover mentally, emotionally, and physically. The new mission is an unauthorized one, so even if it succeeds, it will cause trouble. In an interesting twist, though, Chace and her partner encounter trouble that could not have been anticipated.

Rucka has written two Queen and Country prose novels as part of this series. If you like international spy novels, and enjoyed the television series MI5 or the Jason Bourne movies, this is a good series to check out.

The best place to start is with the Whiteout graphic novels, where Chace is introduced. They’re good stories, told well in words and art.

Henry James’s Turn of the Screw was the first thing I wanted to read when I finished The Thirteenth Tale.

…the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am afraid that in it, Mr. James exposes the extent of his ignorance. He knows little about children and nothing at all about governesses. –Hester Barrow, The Thirteenth Tale

I’ve seen Turn of the Screw referenced many times, but had not yet read it. It’s a short novella, with a strange introduction, in which nameless people tell tales at a house party. The story becomes the read-aloud narrative of a governess with two children in her care. She believes they see ghosts, but her reliability as a narrator is continually underscored. Most analyses say that the intrigue of the novel lies in its tension between whether the governess is imagining things or the children are seeing ghosts. I prefer to think it’s not either/or, and instead is both. The governess uses vocabulary that implies an excited state–”erect” and “intercourse” among them. Further, I think there is the potential for an implied impropriety between the “boy” (whose age is never named) and the governess, in whose arms he dies. It’s a short novel that’s packed with possible interpretations–an intriguing read.

For other books I’ve read, see my library at Gurulib.com

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. –Vida Winter

The Thirteenth Tale is a great story. This is not the same as great literature. It’s an homage to the love of reading, specifically gothic novels of the 1800s including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Woman in White, all of which get multiple shout outs in the text. I found The Thirteenth Tale hard to put down, and a joy to re-read. It has a significant reveal that makes re-reading a particular pleasure, since I knew from the get go of this read what the secret was, and could note the hints of it as I read.

The book has heavily influenced the next books I hope to read. Check out my TBR shelf in my library at Gurulib.com to see where it’s leading me.

For 2008, I will simply be chronicling the books, not counting them here. M, the author at Mental Multivitamin, kindly christened me a chronicler, as well as several other authors of site I admire. Check them all out.

The first book I finished in the new year was Epileptic by David B., a graphic memoir of a boy’s experience with his brother’s epilepsy. This sat on the shelf for over a year. Midway through, I would have said it was a masterwork, and one of the best graphic narratives I’d read. By the end, though, my opinion was less enthusiastic. This a stunningly illustrated personal story, rich with emotional insight and pictorial allusion. It falls prey, though, to the limits of personal narrative; it does not end so much as it fades and fizzles into several transcriptions of the author’s dreams. The book would have been better served had the author ended it at a point in the past. His insight on the past was strong and clear. While real lives have no clear ending, stories about them can, especially if told with the distance and insight of some years. I am in the minority opinion of this book; most have hailed it as a masterpiece.

This year’s and last year’s books are cataloged in my library at Gurulib.com