Dinner at Antoine's by Frances Parkinson Keyes

Oh, dear. I thought the novel was going to be about the famed New Orleans restaurant, or about food in some way. Not so. If you want to find out who murdered the invalid Odile St.-Amant -- was it her estranged husband, Léonce? her sister, Caresse, who is also carrying on with him? -- I'm sorry but you will have to read further than I did. Frances Parkinson Keyes has an atrocious ear for dialogue, despite her prose being good. So atrocious is it that I had to put the thing aside in disgust. And yes, I did struggle manfully past the first chapter, where I had to read things like this (it's Orson Foxworth speaking):

" ...my dear, the fascinating creature clinging to my arm is Amelie Lalande, the envy of all lesser charmers. I see that Odile's already made up for my negligence by introducing herself, and perhaps she's told you which is really her sister and which is really her husband. Yes? Well, I thought so. The Viking-looking chap on the other side of Caresse is Russ Aldridge -- Russell Wainwright Aldridge, Ph.D. -- a fast man with a hieroglyph, a drink, a samba, and a back-to-back pair of Jacks, in the order named! And finally, Dr. Perrault, who painted tonsils for Odile and Caresse when they were only knee-high to a puddle duck. But they don't hold that against him and you needn't either .... Have you had a drink yet? As you see, some of our guests got desperate because we were so late and very wisely started in on Sazeracs." 

And it goes on and on. The worst is when the characters are made to think to themselves, in italics. Parkinson Keyes was very prolific in a time when (and readers of Vellum will recognize a theme) the American publishing industry simply seems to have put out better books than it does now -- so I can only hope that Dinner at Antoine's was an anomaly among her works. If I discover that Blue Camellia or Station Wagon in Spain were any better, I will try to report so as soon as possible.  

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

Very fun fluff from the mistress of intelligent, if somewhat pedestrian, fluff -- just the thing to devour on a day off, when you have decided to try for the first time that old-fashioned egg-and-mayonnaise treatment supposed to be so good for lustrous hair. This experiment entails a lot of sitting around, with your head swathed in plastic wrap and a towel, so why not read? 

It's a tale of a country village murder, just as Agatha Christie invented it. Well done. Certainly we never see the murderer coming. And it's a Miss Marple tale, too, although that delightful lady, frustratingly, does not show up until the story is five-sixths finished. She is much more visible in the short stories that bear her name, rather than in the novels. As for the romance between Jerry and Megan, that is a little stiff. Bravo to Christie for trying to imagine herself into the mind of a man abruptly in love, but her sensibilities just aren't quite in it. Jerry limping on his "sticks" is too elderly and Megan too childlike for them to be convincing as a pair. Effeminate Mr. Pye is far more fun. (He reminds me of Georgie in the Mapp and Lucia novels.) "And then," he gushes the only time we meet him, "the dreadful old woman died, but of course it was far too late then. They just went on living there and talking in hushed voices about what poor Mamma would have wished."

Christie is at her best with old ladies like Mr. Pye or the five elderly spinsters whom he is gossiping about, or indeed with Miss Marple. I've always liked the way she uses sharp-as-a-tack old women to comment upon the twentieth century's mostly direful social changes. Her old ladies always know the routine of a correctly run country house, or what to wear to what occasions, but more importantly they know how to spot an unscrupulous man, or when to sack an unsatisfactory housemaid and never mind compassion for the lower orders, she's a thief who doesn't deserve a good reference which she would then use to prey on her next employer. The old ladies know "wickedness," and that human nature has not changed no matter that we've freed ourselves from corsets, hats, and (we imagine) bigotry and prejudice, not to mention silly old-fashioned inhibitions on our marvelous self-expression. It's all very refreshing. In one of her gentle arguments with her nephew Raymond, who is a very modern and enlightened and compassionate writer, Miss Marple notes what happens when whole generations decide to chuck most of what their ancestors knew about life. "Young people," she sighs, "say things that were never talked about in my day, but their minds are so terribly innocent ...." 

Ride With Me by Thomas Costain

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Thomas Costain was a prolific Canadian journalist and editor of the mid-twentieth century who, at the age of 57, published his first historical novel, and from then on became a prolific historical novelist. You are more than likely to encounter one of his books, or an anthology edited by him, in any library or at a used book sale. The Silver Chalice and The Tontine are two of his better-known works; The Silver Chalice was made into a movie that is notable, now, mostly for having been the late Paul Newman's debut vehicle.

In 1944 Costain published Ride With Me, a book meant not only to tell a good story but to draw obvious parallels between the dictator Napoleon who threatened England in the early 1800s, and the dictator Hitler who threatened England even as Costain wrote. Though the historic parallels are now many decades out of date, Ride With Me is still a pleasure to read, and that is largely because of its background -- an unusual one for a historical romance. The hero, Frank Ellery, is not a stock, brooding figure but a lame newspaperman in London during these Napoleonic wars. He sees it as his duty to publish articles urging a slothful Regency government to take a firmer stand against "Boney" before it is too late, and French troops and guillotines are already established outside a St. Paul's cathedral transformed into an English Temple of Reason.

Criticizing the government is a dangerous thing to do circa 1810, when even freedom-loving England, aghast at the regicides across the Channel, could still shut down unfriendly, chest-thumping newspapers at home. Frank's life is further complicated by his unrequited love for a beautiful, exiled French aristocrat, and by the machinations of his awful mother, who would prefer that he disappear somewhere and let his handsome younger brother lead the family.

Frank's adventures take him to Spain for a glimpse of Wellington's Peninsular campaign, and then to Russia to see Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. We are in Paris with him after Waterloo, while the city seethes with rage at defeat and occupation. Through minor characters we meet the social problems of the period, like discharged, wounded soldiers begging in London, child labor, prison conditions, and the eternal helplessness of single, impoverished women. The book is also wonderfully rich in those little details about meals and leisure activities which show the author has spent good time in the archives, researching his material.

It's a fine book, and was well-known enough for Costain to be able to bring out, twenty years later, another anthology of fiction -- punningly titled Read With Me.

The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana, 2007

It seems appropriate this summer, while we all either marvel at or are revolted by the return of the 17-year cicadas, to dip into a classic of nature writing that is all about bugs. The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre (translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, compiled by Edwin Way Teale), is the kind of book to be dipped into, not read straight through, and probably not read while eating lunch: descriptions of the parasitic midge larvae Microgaster glomeratus feeding on the yellow blood of the cabbage caterpillar do not lend relish to our own meal.

However, it is always pleasant to contemplate the career of a man who loved what he did. J. Henri Fabre was an impoverished nineteenth-century French schoolteacher who spent his summer vacations studying "my dear insects." He lived on a small piece of barren land in southern France, surrounded by a loving and helpful family but a near-recluse to local villagers. Observing insects in the open air and fields of his property, and not in a lab, Fabre was proud of watching and setting down "the exact narrative of facts observed." His great work was the Souvenirs Entomologiques -- The Insect World is a compendium -- which ran to ten volumes and 850,000 words.

Fabre was no mere backyard enthusiast. Although he did for the most part observe his quarry going about their daily businesses, he interfered with their flights and crawlings, and captured them and brought them indoors, when more controlled experiments were needed to learn the truth about their behavior. His patience and ingenuity were infinite. He was willing to sit all day at a sand bank, watching "my beloved Wasps" hunt grasshoppers and bury them in the sand to feed their young; he tried pinning a dung beetle's precious ball of dung to the ground, to see what the creature would do when it could no longer roll its prize away for safekeeping.

His writing has the leisurely elegance of another era. When he says, "If it is in your power to set up your observatory under a meagre olive tree that pretends to protect you from the rays of a pitiless sun, you may bless the fate that treats you as a sybarite," he means Luckily I worked under a shade tree. And his writing helps create in the reader a new respect for insects. He handled bees, wasps, moths, their prey and eggs and egg cases, without fear, and chronicled the female praying mantis' eating of her mate's head, while mating, with amazement but no disgust.

Fabre perhaps did not know about our 17-year cicadas, but one summer day he had cannon fired under his trees to test ordinary cicadas' hearing. Since the bugs did not stop singing, he concluded they were deaf. Who knows how thrilled he would have been, and what trials he could have invented, for our variety?

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

She captures it indeed. I Capture the Castle is the journal of young Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her eccentric family in an old and dilapidated castle (only rented, and the rent much overdue) in Depression-era England. Her father is a once-famed novelist now suffering from his twelfth year of writer's block; her stepmother is the beautiful twenty-nine-year-old Topaz, who likes to "commune with nature" in the nude; her older sister, Rose, " 'hasn't any clothes or any prospects' " and would just about sell her soul to the devil for a chance at either. There is a younger brother and a shy, good-looking farmhand about the place, but the story centers on the two rapidly maturing sisters, and the prospects that open for them when a wealthy American family, including two eligible young men, arrive in the neighborhood.

It's a pleasant read for midsummer, if you enjoy reading books that have something to say about the season you are in now. Cassandra and Rose are romantic girls who always celebrate, on Midsummer Night, what they call "the rites" -- " 'I got it from a book on folklore when I was nine,' " Cassandra explains. They go to the top of an ancient mound where the oldest tower of the castle still stands, and there they build a bonfire, wear flower-garlands, eat cake and sip port, and dance, in imitation of what they imagine were pagan saeasonal rituals. They close the ceremonies by shouting the vowels, an act which, strangely enough, other authors besides Dodie Smith agreed was appropriate. (The poet and historian Robert Graves made a case for the significance of the vowels in pagan European myth. His book, The White Goddess, was published the same year as I Capture the Castle.)

Smith's spinning and interweaving of the stories of the Mortmain girls' romantic adventures, the father's recovery from writer's block, and the culture clash between English and American sensibilities is deftly done, if sometimes a bit wordy. Religion slips in, and not just on Midsummer Day: during a long talk the Vicar laughs at Cassandra's grimly facing God " 'as if he were a long wet week.' " The American woman reader will enjoy seeing herself as Mrs. Cotton, mother of the two eligible bachelors. " 'Amazing, their energy,' " Mr. Mortmain says. " 'They're perfectly capable of having three or four children, running a house, keeping abreast of art, literature, and music -- superficially of course, but good Lord that's something -- and holding down a job into the bargain. Some of them get through two or three husbands as well, just to avoid stagnation.' "

And anyone will be struck by what the book becomes on a second reading. Dodie Smith was most competent, and this novel is the only non-mystery I can recall whose ending explains scenes which were so well done to begin with that the reader had not recognized any mystery in them.

Come Tell Me How You Lived by Agatha Christie Mallowan

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

This Agatha Christie Mallowan is indeed the Agatha Christie of billion-selling, mystery novel fame. Married to the British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she was, in her other life, Lady Mallowan, assistant and recorder of his work in the Near East. In Come, Tell Me How You Lived -- "this meandering chronicle," she puts it -- she describes several years' worth of experiences aiding her husband in his excavations, circa 1940, in the border lands where northern Syria, southern Turkey, and northwestern Iraq meet. The book is therefore much relevant today. I read it, and learned from it about the Iraqi religious sect called Yezidis, in the same week that the horrifying murder by stoning of a Yezidi girl was laid across the front page of national newspapers.

Agatha Christie was an intrepid traveler to say the least. In the book she copes with desert heat and winds, flooded wadis turned to car-engulfing mud in a few hours, with mice- and roach- infested village homes, and with illness. Meanwhile Max and his team take their pick of the Tells dotting the landscape, each one the remains of an ancient busy city from five thousand years ago. They dig for beads and clay fragments with the help of local workmen. When the work is over for the season, the finds are divided into two groups, and representatives of the Syrian government come and choose which group is to remain in the country and which can be released to British museums and universities. Christie then goes thankfully to Aleppo for "a shampoo!"

Christie's eyewitness portraits of local people remain the most intriguing parts of the book. These men and women are mostly Moslem Kurds, Moslem Arabs, and Armenian Christians, mostly all convinced it is their duty to persecute one another (and the Yezidis). Local sheikhs govern local matters, under titular French rule. Poverty does not begin to describe conditions, and to poverty Christie adds a general fatalism, an observation that to "the Oriental mind" neither life nor death matter very much. Since all will happen as God wills, there is no hurry, say, for a sheikh to get his wife to a doctor for her blood poisoning. The sheikh will consider it. Yet Christie claims that because these people own almost nothing and do not fear death, they also live free of Western anxieties and the Western work ethic. They know, she says, a simple joy in life.

Although she is an eyewitness, the reader can't help but wonder if she really guessed what the natives were thinking all around her. Joy in life did not prevent workmen from planting forgeries in the Tells, so they could show them to Max for a cash bonus. One day a fatal accident on a dig so inflamed tempers everywhere that the English had to flee for their lives on the spot. The "season," and the book, ends there. " 'It was,' " she writes, " 'a very happy way to live ....' "