What Time the Sexton’s Spade doth Rust (2024) by Alan Bradley.
Good Reads meta-data is 298 pages, rated 4.14 by 4,212 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Little England.
Verdict: Go girl!
Tagline: She’s back!
Tweenage Flavia de Luce is irrepressible and her even younger cousin Undine is worse in 1952. When a longtime but secretive resident of the local village is found dead, it’s murder!
It gets worse. The harmless part-time cook, Mrs Mullet, of Buckshaw, Flavia’s home, is blamed for the death! The only question for plod is whether it was intentional or accidental. Yes, mushrooms.
Alan Bradley
That double whammy propels Flavia on to Gladys, her bicycle, to put things to rights! Again. Good. Hooray! She is aided and abetted by the ever so correct butler cum handyman, Dogger, when he is not suffering a recurrent bout of survivor guilt because of his three years on the Burma railroad.
This is number eleven in the series after a five year hiatus. Any reader is advised to read them in sequence. An unexpected and most welcome return. But no, I cannot explain the title, and I wonder if the author can.
Moonlight Downs (2008) by Adrian Hyland. Diamond Dove.
Good Reads meta-data is 304 pages, rated 3.79 by 742 litizens
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Strine, Abo.
Verdict: Bony revivicus!
Tagline: Whew! Deep, dank, and dark.
The prodigal daughter return to her tribal roots in the Red Centre of Australia populated by aboriginals, miners, graziers, and public servants. They have one thing in common, water. They all need it.
Daughter of miscegenation, a word seldom used these days, she has a Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte foot in both the black and the white worlds. Most of the miners are thugs for whom the meaning of life is a beer can. The graziers aren’t much different. The civil servants are a sorry lot consigned to this purgatory.
A tribal elder who was widely respected for his common sense and ability to navigate and negotiate land rights with the miners, graziers, and civil servants, is murdered. Who dunnit and why?
Daughter sets out to find out, while plod is not much interested in what seems like a black on black murder. Though, credit to the writer, plod is not cardboard.
There is a long overture and then many details of aborigine life in the interior, and some insight into the grazier who is a stereotype until…. There is a great deal of trip and the arrival was a little off centre I thought. I wondered if it complied with the Decalogue in substance.
This is the first of a sequence, though I expect it will be hard to top.
Adrian Hyland
Hmm, I should also have said above that I found the constant accumulation of metaphors to describe the outback and its denizens got to be annoying. A case of trying too hard to be different. It got to be distracting, too, making it hard to distinguish the important from the background colour.
It was originally published by Text in Australia as Diamond Dove. But when SoHo reprinted it for the international (read American) market, the title was changed for reasons that are not apparent to this reader.
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.65 by 426 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
DNA: Brit
Verdict: Who cares.
Tagline: Who dunnit?
A story within a story, as Hamlet has a play within a play. It is 1990 and a middling middle aged civil servant is directed to look into the accidental death of a middling middle aged civil servant in 1974 who had fallen to his death on a Sunday from an upper level of Admiralty House.
Since Victim had no business being in Admiralty House at any time, let alone Sunday, the coroner’s court had recorded an open verdict. Accordingly, an air of mystery surrounded this death, and periodically a lazy journalist in search of a scandal rakes it up. To anticipate the next iteration of that chestnut, Middling is to prepare a briefing. In the best fictional detective tradition he tries to retrace Victim’s steps in his last months when he was seconded to a new unit, established by an incoming government, on the ‘quality of life’ when that phrase was ubiquitous, meaning everything and nothing to any and everyone.
A philosopher was appointed chair the Quality of Life Committee and she and Victim start to prepare the terms of reference…, and never get beyond that. She turns the occasion into a tutorial in which she quizzes Victim on the quality of his, Victim’s, life. This is revealed to Middling in a cache of cassette recordings, which Middling then uses to eavesdrop on their many and extensive conversations. Since neither is adept at using the recorder they record just about everything, and then just about nothing.
As Middling listens he grows to identify with Victim as his professional veneer falls away in the tutorial and he reveals more and more of his self to Chair, and she reciprocates. This illicit affair is consummated in the attic office they are using, and his death is a result of (hard to believe) circumstances that occur there, thanks to a number of coinciding plot devices.
The title is a metaphor for the unusual and exhilarating experience the two have of their sexual liaison.
In the vicarious experience Middling has of their flight he reflected on his own laboured existence which continues. By the way, I never did quite figure out what become of the Chair. Maybe I nodded off on that pages.
It is a nice parody of an Ordinary Language philosophy tutorial. Note to the uninitiated ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophy was ‘ordinary’ to the same degree that ‘Reality television’ is ‘reality.’ It was the dominant mode of English philosophy for two generations after World War II. In it ‘ordinary’ language use was subjected to a pitiless analysis of infinite regress. It dominated my own graduate education.
The Chair is feckless and more than a little naive, and Middling’s reaction to her is very civil service, trying to curb her enthusiasms and manoeuvre her into the safe and sane channels, but, well, the self-analysis she elicits from him crumbles that prim and proper facade.
Michael Frayn haș published many books to much acclaim.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 46m, rated 6.5 by 610 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Amusing.
Tagline: Yes, Virginia.
A television program concerns the paranormal…real or fake! Each week someone claiming paranormal abilities is the guest who demonstrates that ability. Bring on the spoons! Two regulars offer comments, the believer and the skeptic who always prevails.
It sounds as loopy as some of the (un)reality television I have seen here (from the bicycle seat at the gym).
As much fun as it is for the audience to ridicule failed contestants, the ratings are falling and the director is desperate for a boost. Ergo he decides they need to do better than those who volunteer for the show. No, they have to go find some paranormal talent. To that end he dispatches his feckless assistant to get some real abnormals, as he says.
Where to start such a quest? A trip to Wellington (NZ) Paranormal is too expensive so, she settles for reading the National Inquirer, News of the World, Sydney Telegraph, and other credulous tabloids with stories of two-headed cows, UFOs among the garden gnomes in the Imperial Gardens, psychic cooks, miracle cures for stupidity, and the like.
From this research she identifies places where the ley lines must be crossed, and sets out on the train with her roll-abroad kit.
Among the viewers of this terrible television program is a group of genuine but secret paranormals who meet every Monday at showtime in an otherwise closed cafe run by one of their number to watch the latest debunking. Each is sworn to secrecy about their powers and each other. One has X-Ray vision. Another has telekinetic powers. A third can read minds. A fourth, despite appearances, has super strength … There are six of them.
Then by a mischance a seventh appears…and confusion follows, just as the television journalist stumbles into the cafe, exhausted and frustrated from her own recent encounters with individuals who claim such powers but don’t have them. She would be happy for a cup of tea and snack, and she is hard to resist, so the cafe owner obliges.
While the paranormals try not reveal themselves to her for what they are, they would also like to — you know — get closer to her. Hint, hint. That is complicated by the seventh interloper. The original six are so used to concealing their true selves from other people, they just don’t know how to talk to anyone, let alone a good looking young woman with media connections.
There follows a comedy of errors which is good humoured but stretched thin, and it has a denouement that was from a shelved Disney movie. Did I mention it was Christmas eve?
Good Reads meta-data is 455 pages, rated 4.04 by 276 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
DNA: Vermont.
Verdict: Hardscrabble.
Tagline: Odysseus had it easy.
Around 1900 many French Canadians immigrated to New England for work, especially in the woods and lakes, logging, trapping, quarrying, mining, and fishing. One precocious youngster in the migration was Marie. She is smart and spirited but uneducated and naive. Disease, work accidents, a miscarriage, rape, the accidental death of a loving husband on thin ice, the war death of another, beatings by not so loving mates, all of these woes beset her and yet she keeps going: quiet but purposeful at times in -40F temperatures.
There are compensations, while they lasted she was happy with each of those two husbands; she had a sense of purpose in working in the sanatorium after her own recovery; her spirit rose in the north woods on an autumnal day or viewing the stars in the sky on a winter’s eve.
The telling is leavened with the back stories of those, good and bad, she meets on her travels, other wanderers and also residents. But she has no Ithaca. Her recurrent nemesis I found hard to believe but so be it.
The overall effect is melodrama. Each episode (spanning 3 – 7 chapters) starts out wth Marie doing well at something somewhere, and we all know the balloon will burst in the next couple of chapters. She marries and is happy. Her husband dies. She likes nursing, and the sanatorium closes. She loves an old horse, and it dies. And so on and on: Lurching from crisis to catastrophe. The result is a soap opera.
Howard Mosher
All told in Mosher’s precise, deadpan prose. As Willa Cather is the novelist of the Great Plains (Nebraska), so Mosher is the novelist of the North Woods (Vermont). That is a comparison which I hope does them both credit.
It is quite a contrast to Delia Falconer, Service of the Clouds which seems trivial and laboured in comparison.
Historical note: The Vermont Republic (1777-1791) abolished slavery, endowed women with the right to own property, and granted universal male suffrage. Some of that spirit lives on in Bernie Sanders it would seem.
Good Reads meta-data is 322 pages, rated 3.49 by 240 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
DNA: Strine.
Verdict: Bloodless.
Tagline: In the mists.
Spoiler: For ten years she waited for him to…do something. Then he did; he married someone else.
It starts about 1907 when the Hydro Majestic Hotel was being built and ends around 1926, detailing aspects of life in the Blue Mountains, particularly Katoomba, in that period. He is a photographer who seeks the face of God in the clouds and hopes that through the aperture of the camera lens he will have a divine experience. She is of a more practical turn on mind, but she aids and abets him for years, and every time their hands touch or one jostles another in setting up or moving a camera she has a mental organism, or so it seems with the profusion of metaphors that follow.
Years (and pages) later, after he marries another, she turns her attention to an older tubercular man and sex rears its head, sort of. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is going on because the prose is slathered so heavily on that the cake disappears under the icing. It is lyrical and poetic, and the effort shows.
The result is elliptical and vague; just the sort of prose favoured by the jaded panelists of literary awards, not by readers who get lost in the undergrowth, darkened by a heavy canopy of words, who lose sight of the main point(s), if there are any. With all of the forced imagery and unusual vocabulary, most readers will never quite connect with the protagonists: Form over content, thy name is post modernity.
Delia Falconer
The intense and relentless imagery is out of proportion to the unrequited love story. Reminded this cynic of some of the multimillion dollars productions from Hollywood like Valerian… (2017). Enormous show, and zero go.
It is resonant with Anne Michaels’s elegiac Fugitive Pieces (1996) but lacks that novel’s moral core.
Got it at the Megalong Bookshop while in Katoomba a time ago. I chose it because it seemed to be centred on Mark Foy’s hotel, the Hydro Majestic where we have stayed several times. My mistake.
Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages, rated 4.11 by 409 cinematizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction; Species: Mountain magic.
DNA: Vermont.
Verdict: More, please.
Tagline: ‘Very little that people do is in any way understandable!’
Adopted orphan boy Frank Bennett grows up in Kingdom Country (Vermont) along the unmarked Canadian border in the household of an acerbic Catholic priest (who does not sexually abuse him despite his dog collar). Father George is the recognised but unofficial historian of the locale and the designated peacemaker among the many ley lines of conflict that riven the village.
Frank’s coming of age is told in episodes in which he participates, often as little more than an observer of the absurdity of life and its satisfactions. The telling is timeless but perhaps the early 1950s.
While the bulk of the small population is steadfastly safe and sane, shopping at the Vermont Country Store and voting for Bernie Sanders, within their ranks are eccentrics like young Molly Murphy and her desperate and eventually successful effort to run away and join the circus where her nerveless dare devilry can thrive. More troublesome is Foster Boy Dufresne, an idiot savant if ever there was one, who seems jinxed starting with that name ‘Foster Boy.’ Then there is the wannabe gypsy fortune teller Louvia de Banville who has a bad word to say for and about everyone and yet is always there to help when help is needed in fire, flood, accident, or worse.
Aside from the Irish and the Canucks, the village is also home to Abel Feinstein, a tailor, who will not take one step back and Sam E. Rong who took the Statue of Liberty’s motto literally.
Frank long wanted to follow Father George into the priesthood, but, well, there is that girl with bluest, dancing eyes who teases him mercilessly and then disappears back to Quebec for months at a time.
Howard Frank Moshere
It is not Lower Rising, Staggerford, Lake Woebegon, or Yoknapatawpha county, and certainly not Mayberry, but it is its very own God’s little acre. Mosher published ten novels set in this cleft between the Green and White Mountains where on some nights the bright lights of Montreal can be seen reflected in low clouds; where the endless forests are dark and primeval; the lakes crystalline; and weather as taxing as the people.
The Year of Blue Snow (2013) editors Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.
Good Reads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.77 by 13 Philly Phanatics.
Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Baseball.
Verdict: It still hurts!
Tagline: Perfect hindsight.
Cold weather came early and a curtain of freezing snow fell on warm summer dreams when Chico Ruiz stole home on 21 September 1964. So the end began, after leading the National League for 150 days, World Series tickets already printed in the city of Brotherly Love (and are now in mint condition on Ebay where I got mine to fulfil a vow I made in 1964), the bottom fell out. This tale of woe is the baseball season of the Philadelphia Phillies, a sect which I followed as devotedly as any believer in miracles. Then came the fall of the curtain and no cognitive dissonance could disguise the crush of reality.
This compendium offers brief and anodyne biographies of every member of this team on the roster even if only for a few days, including coaches, radio announcers, general manager, and owner. The groundskeepers are not included, though one is pictured. These sketches were compiled from the biography project of the Society for American Baseball Research web site, from whence comes the neologism ‘sabermetrics.’ It is a bland biographical reference work in the main. Most of these individuals have Wikipedia entries from the same source, like manager Gene Mauch, Congressman Jim Bunning, Chris Short, Ed Roebuck, Tony Gonzales, Rubén Amaro, Dick Allen, John Herrnstein, John Callison, Art Mahaffey….
At the back it includes several essays second guessing with the unerring perception of fifty years of hindsight every move, starting lineup, call, and choice during the downfall. Management decisions, roster changes, use of relief pitchers, catchers, pitch selections, signals to bunt, rotation, stolen base attempts, steps off the first base bag, and more are considered in a forensic investigation to find fault, apportion blame, and mourn. The result is thoroughgoing but superficial. For even more gruesome detail see John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies (2005). Then there is Greg Glading’s unintelligible 64 Intruder (1995). This latter seems to have been translated from Klingon by a Romulean.
Although the most fatuous assertion, with statistical analyses and diagrams, proves that Ruiz should not have tried to steal home. None go quite so far as to say that he did not steal home, but that will surely come in our world where truth is fiction and fiction truth, as the Post-Modernist of Hollywood have it.
The fact is the St Louis Cardinals had more stamina, and they had Bob Gibson. Enuf said!
Ruiz acted on Fate’s initiative, not the manager’s. A runner on third in the 6th inning of a scoreless game with two outs and the team’s best hitter at bat down two strikes means stay put. According to that same conventional wisdom the pitcher used a windup not a stretch. And yet…. At that moment the Phillies were leading the league by 6 1/2 games. Yet they finished third by losing this one and the next 9 games in a row, ten straight. Two wins in those 10 would have been enough. Even one might have led to a playoff game. At the time it was the longest leading margin that late in the season to fail but fail it did.
Pedant’s corner: ‘Blue snow’ is a rare optical effect of deep and dense snow drift seen in slanting light. In this case the remark is attributed to Gus Triandos, number two catcher for the team. He meant that it was a rarity for a team like the Phillies to do as well as they did, when a number of average players combined to have exceptional seasons. Certainly, it is true that this season was a career best for several of them, hereafter the only way was down.
On the experience of the failure, one of his teammates likened it to swimming in a long, long lake for a long time and then, within sight of the further shore, cramping and drowning. That was Octavio Rojas, outfielder.
That capped a summer in which my first serious girlfriend unexpectedly dumped me, I was fired from my summer job I knew not why, I broke my arm through my own stupidity, my first car bit the dust after two weeks, and there was no joy from Mudville to salve those wounds and woes, but rather it compounded them.
Anni Ultimi (2011) by Allan Scribner and Douglas Marshall, eds.
Good Reads meta-data is 181 pages, rated 3.89 by 18 litizens.
The book consists of the two editors’ introduction and commentary on Seneca (4BCE – 65AD) the Roman Stoic thinker, imperial advisor, speech writer, exile, essayist, satirist, together with a selection of Seneca’s letters concerning old age, retirement, and death. Born from Seneca the Elder in Cordoba Spain where I once saw a statue of him, he lived most of his adult life in Rome.
Seneca knew how to talk a good game: the letters selected are replete with insights, pearls of wisdom, and sound reasoning. Seneca sees nothing to fear in death since it extinguishes consciousness just as we were before birth. We knew no pain, suffering, or fear before we were born, so there will be none in death.
Old age has its infirmities, and if we dwell on them, they are magnified. Ergo, best to soldier on as though on campaign. (Truly the voice of a man who was never a soldier.)
Retirement signals a state of equilibrium. One is no longer striving for things. Ergo, now one wants nothing. (Was his retirement funded by a defined benefits superannuation scheme as mine is?) Each day of life is a celebration of the senses. In retirement keep learning, observe the world around, appreciate the skills of others, and put things in perspective.
This is the same Seneca who was complicit is several of Nero’s murders, like that of his mother Agrippinna, nor did Seneca scruple to amass enormous wealth during Nero’s reign.
If anyone wonders about the connection between this person and the Great Hill People of Western New York, there is none. The Dutch called then Sinnekars and when the English arrived that became Seneca. So says Wikipedia.
Scribner has published a series of krimis set in the Rome of Marcus Aurelisius and I have read at least one with satisfaction.
Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages, rated 3.38 by 184 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Gourmet.
DNA: Gallic.
Verdict: Erudite, witty, and insightful.
Tagline: What, where, and when you eat reveals your identify.
Across the panorama of La Comédie humaine, Balzac uses food to evoke character, to establish atmosphere, to reveal social class, to suggest conventions, and more. He is credited in these pages with being the first author to bring food and eating into fiction.
The timing was right for this excavator of humanity to do so. Prior to the French Revolution there were no restaurants (in our sense of the word). Dining was done at home, but the Revolution rendered unemployed ranks of chefs, pastry cooks, soup specialists, providores, butchers, gardeners, and the like who had ladened the tables of aristocracy, nobility, and royalty. From these ranks a couple of enterprising souls opened an eatery. Prior to that coffee houses, which occasionally offered bread or biscuits, table d’hôte, inns, or street vendors were the only meals available to someone away from home.*
The talkfest that the aftermath of the Revolution unleashed in Paris brought thousands of men to the capital, and they had to eat. There was the demand to be supplied by all those unemployed caterers.
The word ‘restaurant’ comes from restore, and originally the nascent restaurants offered restoratives, that is, light meals to tide one over until the evening meal. But unlike the establishments mentioned above in a restaurant, one could eat at a time of choice and select what to order and only pay for what was consumed (not a fixed price), while sitting down inside. It was a culinary revolution that quickly developed.
Balzac often describes meals but he seldom includes the menu, but rather concentrates on the manners and mores, the spectacle, the tableware, the candles, the ostentation or humility, the occasions, the aftermath, the subtexts, the verbal sparring, that is, he treats the meal as a mis-en-scene. He himself had a vexed relation with food (like everything else), while in the throes of composition to generate income to defray creditors and buy food and wine, and, oh, pay some of the arrears in rent, he did but drink coffee. He said it was fifty (50) cups a day, and ate very little, or nothing.
Then when the cheque came in he would bust loose with a gigantic feast, inviting all and sundry, and a barrel of the best Bordeaux to mark his achievement. The result of this manner of living was the corpulent character we know from cartoons, though he despised his own fat he made no systemic effort to reduce his weight except for that coffee. There is a strain of self-hatred in him that shows in his novels.
No sooner would he recover from such an excess than the knock of the bailiff would drive him into another composition.
*A table d’hôte at the time referred to to a boarding house meal, where a stranger might enter, and if a place was free, take a meal plonked down. In such a case this stranger ate what was put on the table. Paid for it whether he ate it all or not and left. The term today means a menu fixé for a fixed price. In an inn one ate at a fixed time, for a fixed price, and took what was offered. No choice. Inevitably stew of some kind.
P.S. Street food — the crèpe — was more varied and available at all hours, but of course there was nowhere to sit, and one was exposed to the elements.
