James McClure, The Steam Pig (1971). This series is now being reprinted. They are of their time and place, the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s, replete with institutionalized racism, colour coding of one and all, English-Boer hostility, and casual brutality. Sergeant Tromp Kramer, a Boer, and his Bantu assistant Mickey Zondi get on with the police procedural, leaving the moralizing to the reader.
I do know about underlining title but once again the tools for underlining and hyperlinking are not available.
The World According to Murdoch
News Flash! This just in from Pox TV News:
Rupert Murdoch jets to New York City later today to swear in Mitt Romney as president of the United States. Romney has named his cabinet as Sarah Palin as Secretary of State, Mike Huckabee as Secretary for Regulating Private Life as God Wants, Newt Gringrich as Secretary for Fox, Karl Rove will be Secretary for Truth, and Athena Starwomen Secretary of the Treasury. After the ceremony on Wall Street with a small and select audience of yes-sayers, a random selection of workers’ pension funds will be divided among the guests. Trickle-up is the new administration’s chief policy.
President Romney’s first act will be to visit England and pardon all Murdochs of everything, past, present, and future.
Of course the lackeys of the liberal media have made the usual carping noises, e.g., New York City is not the capital of the United States, pension funds should not stolen, an astrologer might not be the best choice for cabinet, and the US President has no authority in England, which is the United Kingdom. Oh, and the biased allegation that Romney did not win the election. Typical!
The end of the Staggerford Chronicles.
The sad day dawned when I read the last volume of the Staggerford Chronicles. In the sequence of the novels, the final one is The New Woman (2005). But I got them out of order and the last one I read was the Staggerford Flood (2002). 
Recommended for adults.
Miss Agatha McGhee does it again. The waters rise and so does she, rising to the occasion in ways that surprise even her. I am sorry to say that this ends my Hassler reading, having completed all of his eleven novels. I heard Garrison Keillor mention him on the Writer’s Almanac podcast years ago and sought out his work. Found it and loved it.
I have learned a lot about forbearance, patience, pain, charity, purpose, self-edification, and more from Fredrick, Simon, Miles, Larry, Beverly, Janet, Lillian, Leland, Lolly, Imogene, Frank, and of course, most of all, from that new woman, Agatha: never give up, never surrender. By Grapthor’s hammer!
When I read the list of his novels, they come alive with the characters: The sullen grocery store clerk, the lost delinquent, the two hunters, the anti-IRA Irish priest, the zombie dean, the ebullient radio talk show host, the empty alcoholic artist, the would-be novelist, the destructive teenager, the numbed Vietnam veteran, the broken woman … The list goes, on and on. Quite a crew in this world Hassler’s created.
In Hassler’s hands Staggerford is as large as life.
Here are the Staggerford Chronicles.
Staggerford (1977)
Simon’s Night (1979)
The Love Hunter (1981)
A Green Journey (1985)
Grand Opening (1987)
North of Hope (1990)
Dear James (1993)
Rookery Blues (1995)
The Dean’s List (1998)
The Staggerford Flood (2002)
The Staggerford Murders (2004)
The New Woman (2005)
The only one I do not recommend is The Staggerford Murders. They do not have to be read in order. Some characters recur but not all of them, and some titles, like Grand Opening, stand alone.
Tasmania reading
Christopher Koch, The Boys in the Island (1958).
This is a novel set largely in Hobart Tasmania with later chapters in Melbourne. It is a coming of age story about Francis Cullen. His boyish desire to fit in with other boys, his first girlfriend, his efforts to conform to the crowd, his mistakes. It is low key, no great dramas, but many small ones – such is life. The prose is attractive, perhaps forced now and again. But the descriptions of place are effective, and there is truth in the characters.
Francis falls under the spell of Lewie, he of massive self-confidence and little intelligence. Lewie’s ambition is a life of crime, but he is not capable of it. Instead he bullies his friends, steals pound notes from cripples, and dreams of the big time. The game of mutual malicious teasing seemed familiar to me from my boyhood though I left it behind, but not these lads.
Koch calls it ‘The Game:’ Francis ‘found himself, as the weeks passed, drawn into a game, the Melbourne game of double-cross which the girl Keeva had apparently invented, and which Lewie was fast learning, her ardent pupil.…… It was the game, to set traps, to hurt. You did not say what you were thinking. You did not let one another know what you were doing. You found ways of making fools of one another at every opportunity’ (p. 115).
Likewise, Lewie’s philosophy that everyone else is dumb, the proof being that they work, had a familiar ring from fellows I knew, and I am glad I know them no more.
The intrusion of the boy Shane, a much more intelligent and mature peer, seems forced and his final destruction is a distraction from the downward spiral Francis has committed himself to as the only means to escape… Escape what? He always says the Island, hence the title. But is seems that ‘the island’ stands for the small town life that awaits him. Though he never aspires to the life of crime he dutifully, though not always happily, follows Lewie. In Francis we see perhaps the perfect follower.
The aside when Francis worked in a factory and though but a boy himself took under his wing the deficient Athol was nicely done but contributed nothing to either plot or character that I could see.
It is out of print and I read a library copy.
I read it in anticipation of going to Hobart for the APSA conference 2012. I also read Peter Timms, In Search of Hobart (2009) which is not recommended.
Richard Ford, novelist, Sydney Writers’ Festival
Thanks to the suggestion of a friend I went to Richard Ford’s session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I have read two of his novels: Independence Day and The Sportswriter. I found them easy to read but, for some reason, I was not engaged enough to want to read more. Indeed there was a ten year gap between reading these two.
http://www.swf.org.au/
However I found Ford an engaging character on the stage, and I liked his literal-mindedness: What I mean is what I say; What I say [write] is what I mean. Do not go looking for symbols or signs. Wonderful.
Likewise the host did a fine job in bringing out what Ford had to say, and the talking heads were punctuated with Ford doing some short readings from his most recent novel Canada.
Ford said in passing early in the discussion that, literal though he was, he did write with a ‘higher purpose’ and I was glad that the first question from the floor took him back to that passing aside. He explained that this higher purpose was to renew in the reader emotions and thoughts of the complete person. I have not got his words quite right, for I was not taking notes, but that is the gist. I found that explanation to be both simple and compelling. But imagine what the Derridaistas would make of that. The heavy artillery of cant and ideology, disguised as scholarship, would rumble.
Having never attended a Sydney Writers’ Festival event before I enjoyed it and just might do it again. The only false note came from the host who made a gratuitous and deprecating reference to Des Moines, Iowa. I know people make these kinds of quips without thinking, and indeed that is the point and the problem. It betrays an enduring mindset.
Here is the web description of Ford’s talk:
Richard Ford: – 15 July, City Recital Hall
One of the masters of American fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford comes to Sydney for an exclusive event presented by Sydney Writers’ Festival. Ford visits Australia on the heels of the publication of Canada, hailed by John Banville as “an extraordinary, overwhelming book”.
With one of the most finely tuned ears in contemporary fiction Ford explores the big issues of our time with a disarming use of the vernacular. Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, Richard Ford is the author of six novels and four collections of stories. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first time the same book won both prizes.
He talks to Artistic Director of Sydney Writers’ Festival, Chip Rolley.
Nicholas Nicastro, Antigone’s Wake: A Novel of Imperial Athens (2007).
There is a lot to like about it. The contrast between the public admiration of Sophocles as a playwright and then as a general contrasted to his inner doubts, confusions, and inconsistencies is nicely done, and ironic, because it makes him like a character in a play by his great rival, the upstart Euripides.
Very nice portrayal of Pericles as a wily politician who proceeds by halfs, temporizes, and stalls to see how things go. The author is ingenious in showing the immorality of the war of Greek (Athens) against Greek (Samos) – the weapons that kill women and children, torture of prisoners, treason, etc.
Loved the ending when at the Funeral Oration Sophocles’s daughter very daintily insults Pericles in public for murdering allies. ‘Noble Pericles, you have presented us with many dead citizens today. Not to celebrate the defeat of barbarians, but all to subdue an allied and kindred city [Samos]. Thank you, great general’ (p. 201-202). While Sophocles agrees with her he rebukes and punishes her, such is his inconsistent and confused nature.
Brasidas, the unSpartan Spartan
Jon Edward Martin, The Shade of Artemis: A Novel of Ancient Greece and the Spartan Brasidas (2005). This is an historical novel. I gave it five stars on Amazon USA.
A terse, focussed, well-grounded, imaginative, and at times moving account of the life and times of Brasidas, the most unSpartan of the Spartans. Brasidas emerges from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesean War as larger than life but also obscure. If we know so much about the Athenian Alcibiades, what he drunk (too much), who he screwed (everyone), how he carried on (endlessly), we know next to nothing about Brasidas who nearly won the war single-handed. Martin offers a rounded picture of the complete man, his first love, his difficult relationship with a demanding father, a wife whom he did not love and children whom he did, the interaction with those lesser beings: helots, and the mutual perspective of Athenians and Spartans.
The story is drawn along several fault lines in Brasidas’s personal and political life and offers insights into the inner workings of the Spartan society and oligarchy paralleled to the all too public workings of Athenian democracy. For history buffs, the novel cuts away too soon from some of the major events like Mytilene but that is necessary to keep the focus on Brasidas.
I am going to read another of Jon Edward Martin’s books, and I hope he writes more.
It is very well written, no superfluous asides to pad the pages, no convoluted passages that cry out for that vanishing breed – the sub-editor, no unusual word choices that bespeak dictionary English rather than spoken English. It is certainly the equal of Nicholas Nicastro, Isle of Stone (2005) and Peter Carnahan, Pharnabazus sits on the ground with the Spartan Captains (2002). These two cover some of the same historical events. It fleshes out some of the information from Timothy Shutt’s A History of Ancient Sparta (Audible 2009) without the ponderous didacticism.
Medical deviance, structure, and agency. The bad news has good news in it.
Stoner (1965) by John Williams.
The genre is the academic novel. That category might make one think of Tom Sharpe, David Lodge, Malcom Bradbury, Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis, C. P. Snow, or the ineffable Willa Cather. But John Williams is in a class nearly by himself in Stoner (1965).
Williams’s prose is windowpane clear. The emotions of his principle character Stoner are deep but nearly silent and all the more elemental. Stoner is surrounded by people who do not understand him, and lives his life entirely in their company.
http://www.amazon.com/Stoner-York-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590171993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339811528&sr=8-1&keywords=stoner
What is incomprehensible and mysterious about Stoner is that he loves the worlds that words make in books. In the English Department at the University of Missouri between 1920 and 1960, where he passes his days, this love is neither well-known nor highly regarded. That he lives only to read, to write, and to talk about literature makes him an academic failure in the company of career-makers who care nothing for words and ideas.
The accounts of Stoner’s several transformations from boy to student to scholar are marvellous. The best of these transformations is perhaps the last when his hand brushes a book and its pages quiver with life. That is the moment he dies forgotten, unlamented, and unmissed.
I did find the plot mechanical. Edith, the wife, and Lomax, the Head of Department, were ciphers there to bedevil Stoner, but who were otherwise empty of meaning. Nor did I find it creditable that the dean, Finch, would be so staunch. But each of these three characters provides a mirror for Stoner’s reaction and that is enough.
I said that Williams is in a class nearly by himself. Together with him I would assign Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (1925), a seat. She, too, captures something of the wonder and awe of learning that the other scribes listed at the outset are too jaded to realize and probably incapable of portraying.
My thanks to Trevor Cook for mentioning this book.
The Passage of Power, The Years of Lyndon Johnson
Wow! Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson is a magnum opus, a stupendous achievement, the most vivid biography imaginable, an insightful study of political power, a tragedy of Shakespearean depth…The Passage of Power is the fourth volume in The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and in some ways it is the best so far.
It is the best because it covers the best of its subject – Lyndon Baines Johnson. That best emerged in the crucible of a seven-week period between 22 November 1963 and 8 January 1964. For informed readers the dates pulse with meaning. No explanation is required.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Passage-Power-Lyndon-Johnson/dp/0679405070/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339646548&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+caro+the+passage+of+power
Caro offers in-depth studies of the characters in this drama and places them in the context of the times. The ego and alter-ego relationship between John and Robert Kennedy is particularly compelling. In the sunshine there is the charming Dr Jekyll of John Kennedy and in the shadows there is the deadly Mr. Hyde of Robert Kennedy. Those who were not won over by the former had to deal with the latter. ‘Ruthless’ is the only word that applies to Robert Kennedy.
Though Caro implies that John Kennedy’s decision to put Lyndon Johnson on the ticket as vice-presidential candidate was the one thing John did not tell Robert and it is the one thing that Robert did not know by the telepathy with which these two brothers usually communicated. Ever the realist, John Kennedy knew he had to win the south to win and that he could not win the south alone or with any other running mate but Johnson and that Johnson alone could deliver the south. John did not tell Robert because Robert hated Johnson from the first time they met, a feeling the Johnson came to return in full measure, and Robert would have objected, as only he could object, to his brother, so to avoid that confrontation John did not tell Robert, John just did it himself and once it was done then it was done, and not even Robert could undo it, though undo it he tried several times, thus ensuring Johnson’s continued enmity.
Fascinating as this part of the story may be, it is but preliminary. The focus of the book is Johnson’s presidency from the moment John Kennedy was declared dead at Parkland Hospital on 22 November 1963 to the State of Union address on 8 January 1964 which launched the so-called War on Poverty. In between those dates Johnson performed miracles.
He calmed panic. He quelled hysteria. He stayed the hands that held the sabers. Stability, continuity, and order, these he created from fear, confusion, and anger and he did this nearly from the first moments and he showed a self-discipline that no one, least of all those who knew him best, thought he had. That alone caused one of Robert Kennedy’s delegated haters to refer to Johnson at this time as ‘masterful.’ By ‘delegated haters’ I mean one of Robert Kennedy’s aides who hated Johnson, it seems, because his boss hated him. The aide certainly hated Johnson before the assassination and in time he returned to hating him, but even he admitted that in the crisis Johnson was …’masterful.’ Others who disliked Johnson also acknowledged that this seven week period was …’magnificent.’
It was masterful because after the initial shock, Johnson took charge in a calm and purposeful way. It was magnificent because in those seven weeks Johnson did things John Kennedy did not do in the preceding three years and could not have done.
What things are these?
1. He defeated a threat to presidential power in an obscure Senate bill that had enormous implications which implications he realized immediately and which he averted.
2. He cut the defense budget more than it has ever been cut before or since, and this at near the height of the Cold War, only a little more than a year since the nuclear brink in Cuba.
3. He caused the House of Representatives and Senate to vote for tax cuts which legislation had been lost in committee by its opponents for eighteen months before he put he hand to it and it was lost no more.
4. He caused the Senate to pass a civil rights bill that had all but disappeared from the legislative calendar and which was opposed by a majority of Senators, but one-by-one he won over a majority giving a Master Class on how to count votes.
5. He started the War on Poverty with the monies saved from defense.
It is a breath-taking list, one that would make a four-year term admirable, and these things he did in seven weeks, while doing much else besides. It is exhausting to read the nearly hour-by-hour account that Caro offers of this titan at work. Did he ever sleep? Did he ever sit quietly and eat a meal? Did he ever zone out with fatigue? Evidently not during these weeks.
He appealed to the ego of egoists, to the patriotism of patriots, to the intellect of intellectuals, to image to the Narcissists, to the Kennedy legacy to those that clung to that, to favors for those who would trade favors, to duty to the dutiful, to honour to the honourable, and each time he got the equation right in this seemingly endless human calculation. Meanwhile, to the nation and world of television viewers he projected a sorrowful calm and a deliberate determination.
Counting the votes for the civil rights act, Johnson insisted that every Republican in every forum be addressed as ‘a representative of the party of Abraham Lincoln who had freed the slaves.’ He insisted that every Republican from Illinois be addressed, in addition, as ‘from the land of Lincoln who freed the slaves.’ In private conversations with Republicans who opposed the bill, Johnson kept asking them to live up to their great founder, Abraham Lincoln. In the end about half of them did. Without Johnson’s incessant pressure no more than one or two would have. He made it happen.
If John Kennedy’s beautiful words made us think, Lyndon Johnson’s earthy prose made us act, so said one of those whom Johnson moved to action.
Some of the most touching parts of the books are the descriptions of Mr. Hyde in mourning for his other half. Robert Kennedy was stunned by John Kennedy’s murder and he remained stunned for weeks, for months afterward. Jacqueline Kennedy showed courage and self-control enough for several, but Robert was utterly bereft. In private Robert took to wearing some of John’s clothes, an old tweed jacket that had been left at Robert’s house by accident months before, a navy coat that was in a car. It is almost, but not quite enough, to make me feel sorry for Robert Kennedy.
Caro’s work, this book especially, sets the standard for research, everything has been done, everything, and this book sets the standard for judicious and balanced judgements for there are judgements aplenty. The book is not merely a recitation of information. Like Thucydides, and likening an historian to Thucydides is the highest praise, Caro has arranged the material to lead readers to the points he has drawn from his study. PhD students would do well to examine the method in this study. When Caro quotes the findings of another, earlier author, he then affirms the truth of those words by saying he has interviewed those same subjects and got the same answers, he too has read the same boxes of files and found that same material in them, he too has been to the spot and measured the distances, he too has stood in setting sun on the stretch of land and felt warmth on his face at that same time of year and can confirm the accuracy of those earlier reports. And if he cannot confirm the assertions of others, it is because he has found something they missed. He takes nothing for granted, assumes nothing is settled and tests everything for himself and for his readers.
Is it any wonder that The Years of Lyndon Johnson is consuming its author? At one point Caro sold his house to finance this research. His wife, put aside her own career, first became his research assistant and then went to work as a school teacher to fund his research. When he claims, by implication, to have read 5,000 documents in one archive, I believe he did. I said ‘by implication’ because Caro does not boast of his research for to him, doubtless, it seems natural, like breathing.
This book cross-references the first three volumes extensively, more than I have ever seen before in a multi-volume biography and I have read at least three of those. Caro says that The Years of Lyndon Johnson is not a biography but a study of the years of Lyndon Johnson. In making this claim, Caro seems to be explaining both the lack of chronological order and the cross-referencing to earlier volumes that the omission of chronological order requires. To this reader that seems a distinction without a difference, and one of the very few false notes in The Passage of Power.
This book refers to the following volume, one that I anticipate eagerly whether it covers seven weeks or more. Though I expect a subsequent volume will return to the negative side of Johnson that dominates much of the earlier volumes, and Caro says as much in the last words of this volume.