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Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 4

Oct29

I said in Part 1 of this series that I would talk about Moby Dick and Gulliver’s Travels in relation to Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos in Part 2. But either the conference itself or reading half of Lost in the Cosmos or something else has made me longwinded and rambling, more so than usual, and I am just now getting to the part in which we consider Melville and Swift and Percy and Kierkegaard and many other arcane and enigmatic writers and subjects.

Bear with me. This post may be even more disjointed and meandering than usual.

One panelist noted that Ishmael in the Bible was exiled to wander in the desert. He drew a parallel to Melville’s character Ishmael who chose self-exile to the sea and Walker Percy’s “self” who is lost in the cosmos. Then he also said that Melville’s detailed and scientific description of the whale does not encompass and define the whale completely. The meaning of Moby Dick is something more than the accurate and exhaustive minutia of whales and whale-hunting that Melville treats us to in his tome, which is really half-novel, half nonfiction treatise on whales and whaling, and half philosophical thought experiment similar to the ones Percy provides in Lost in the Cosmos. Similarly, Percy says that man is more than the sum of his scientific parts:

“The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages.”

Next we move on to Percy and Swift. Did you know that Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, was an Anglican clergyman? I didn’t. Swift and Percy were both fascinated with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, another “lost in the cosmos” kind of guy. The book Lost in the Cosmos is a parody of self-help books in general, a satire of modern culture, and a portrayal of the predicament of man in his lostness. Gulliver’s Travels is a parody of the then-popular travel narrative, a satire on politics and politicians of the time, and a portrayal of the predicament of man in his lostness. My favorite quotation from Gulliver’s Travels (which was not quoted at the conference):

“I am not in the least provoked at the Sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-Master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: But when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience.”

Percy’s goal, as with Swift, was to startle the complacent and present the reader with such dizzying changes in perspective that he is jolted into an awareness of his lost estate.

The presentations I’ve written about so far took place on Friday afternoon. Then, there was a reception and a keynote address by Paul Elie, “author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, a biography of four American Catholic writers: Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy.” (Note the use of colons. Mr. Elie fit right into the overall “theme” of the conference.)

I can’t tell you much about Mr. Elie’s talk because I didn’t take notes, but I did enjoy it. And I would like to read his books, both the one referenced above and his new book called Reinventing Bach. It’s about how new technologies can enhance and even re-invent old art forms and works.

The reception itself was interesting, but I’ll save that, and the performance art that Eldest Daughter and I enacted on Saturday morning, for Part 5.

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 2

Oct27

I forgot to mention, in Part 1 of this series of posts on the Walker Percy conference at Loyola University in New Orleans, that Eldest Daughter was presenting a paper at the conference. I will not tell you which paper she presented, but it was good and it had nothing to do with French medieval poetry, the ostensible subject of her dissertation that she is supposed to be writing. Walker Percy is simply more compelling right now than French medieval poetry, a truth universally acknowledged, is it not?

For those of you who, like me, have never attended an academic conference, the format is quite simple. The presenters, mostly professors of something or another at some university or another, get up in groups of three or four and they read their papers. That’s right, they read to the audience, just as librarians read picture books to first graders in story time, except mostly there are no pictures, and then they take questions. Some of these academics are better storytellers and readers than others, but I will say that I learned something from almost every paper I heard read, except when I got lost in the cosmos of academia and erudition. (I heard and made lots of “lost” jokes at this conference.)

Here are some really, truly, actual sample titles of papers from Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century:

Alienation, Dislocation and Restoration: Percy’s Semiotic Psychology
The Semiotics of Shame and the Christian Meta-narrative in Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos (I can’t tell you about these first two because I refused to attend session or panel in which one of the papers to be presented used the word “semiotics” or meta-narrative”. I have my limits. See Part 1 of this series.)
Falling into Transcendence: Walker Percy’s Demoniac Self, the Erotic and the Lust for God
Walker Percy’s Semiotics of Self: A Case Study: C.S. Peirce and the Problem of Reentry (Two colons! But pardon my ignorance, who is C.S. Peirce, and does he really place the “e” before the “i” in his last name?)
Deceit, Desire, and the Self-Help Book: Rereading Lost in the Cosmos as a novel in light of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory (Ditto Rene Girard?)
The Mishmash Theory of Man
Where are the Hittites? Tracing Walker Percy’s Theology of the Jews
A Moveable Piece: Stefan Zweig and Walker Percy’s Problem of Artist-Writer Reentry (And who is Stefan Zweig? I’m starting to feel like a low-information conference attendee.)
Revealing the Transcendent Third: Walker’s Percy’s Trinitarian Imagination
Starting Over: Amnesia, Escape, and Redemption in Lost in the Cosmos and in Percy’s Novels
Lost in the Cosmos and Gulliver’s Travels: Christian Satire in the Anglo-American Tradition
Walker Percy, Herman Melville, and Moby Dick, the (Second-to) Last Self-Help Book: An Intertextual Study of the Self (Ah, at last, Melville, Moby Dick, and Gulliver I know. I went to these two presentations, wanting to feel as if I had at least something in my brain besides mush, the mishmash theory of me.)
The Dialectic of Belief: Participation and Uncertainty in Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos

'St Ignatius T Shirt Beads' photo (c) 2009, Infrogmation of New Orleans - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/To begin with, I learned from just reading these titles that an academic conference requires colons. Without colons, the professors would find it impossible to give titles to their papers. However, my favorite title of a paper presented at the conference had no colons at all. It was a joke. Really, the paper was titled: “I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.” It may have been my favorite, or at least second favorite, part of the entire conference.

So, the presenting of papers began on Friday afternoon in various conference rooms in the library at Loyola. I like libraries, and it was a very nice library. As we entered, to our left, was a statue of St. Ignatius of Loyola. He was wearing a purple T-shirt.

“Outside the front steps of the Monroe Library stands a life-size bronze statute of St. Ignatius de Loyola, a diminutive ex-soldier, courtier, and our patron saint.
Our students have named the statue Iggy, and occasionally loan him hats and T-shirts to promote various campus events and or decorate him with Mardi Gras beads during carnival season.”

I don’t think the purple shirt had anything to do with Walker Percy, but he might have appreciated the local color. The first panel I attended was transcendence, amnesia, and the paper with the joke title. I took notes. However, my notes may or may not have been recognizable as related to the topics being discussed. In my mind, My Self, the notes I took make perfect sense and are semiotically and integrally related to the papers that I heard. However, an impartial judge, if such a judge were to exist, might beg to differ. Perhaps St. Ignatius in his purple t-shirt will deign to judge in Part 3 of this series, Digression, Catastrophe, and Narcotic Refuge: Are the Existentialists Really Epicurians?

Lost in a Walker Percy Cosmos, Part 1

Oct26

A couple of months ago Eldest Daughter asked if I would like to accompany her to an academic conference in New Orleans in October. New Orleans in October with Eldest Daughter who is one of my favorite persons? Of course, I would love to go. Then, she told me the subject of the conference, “Still Lost in the Cosmos: Walker Percy & the 21st Century.”

Now I am not a fan, really, of Mr. Percy’s fiction. I say that, having read one, maybe two, books by Percy, The Moviegoer and another book long ago that I think was The Thanatos Syndrome. I remember people in trees(?) or sitting on flagpoles and something about poisoning the water supply and a priest and a doctor. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, and unfortunately that’s all I remember of the novel. The Moviegoer I read more recently, and according to Eldest Daughter herself, who is a fan, I just didn’t get it. I concur: I didn’t get it. The main character, Binx Bolling, was the kind of person who, if I were to meet him, I would feel strongly impelled to shake until he spits, as my mother would say. Existentialists (Percy had a thing for Kierkegaard) affect me that way, oddly enough.

Still I am a fan of Eldest Daughter and of a trip to New Orleans, and I like to feel as if I know what people are talking about when I listen to them speak. So in preparation for the conference I began reading Mr. Percy’s book, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Lost in the Cosmos is not a novel, but rather a parody of the myriad of self-help books that tell us that we can categorize our angst and work it out in six easy steps or by repeating one mantra or by listening to the author who will tell us who we really are. The first part of the book is really quite clever as Percy gets the reader first to admit that “it [is] possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life.” Then, through a series of “thought experiments”, Percy leads his readers to recognize the existential lostness that afflicts each of us: we are indeed lost in the cosmos.

So far, so clever. In the middle of the book, however, Percy stops for an extended tour of the science of semiotics, a word I had to look up in my handy, dandy dictionary. Semiotics is “the study of signs and symbols, and their use or interpretation.” (Clear as mud? No? You obviously need to undertake a serious study of semiotics.) This part of the book is called “A Semiotic Primer on the Self.” The print becomes much smaller, and the text much, much more dense. Diagrams are inserted, and footnotes abound. Percy himself writes, “The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences.” I skipped. Not only did I skip, I also skipped out and never managed to finish Lost in the Cosmos before the conference in New Orleans. The consequences were not fatal, but perhaps were an inhibition to my understanding of the presenters at the conference.

So, there you have a synopsis of my preparation for the Walker Percy conference at Loyola University in New Orleans. My preliminary studies were inadequate at best. However, I went with the expectation that I would be enriched and challenged by the conference speakers and satiated and enlivened by the food and sights of New Orleans. And Eldest Daughter is still one of my favorite people, even if she does understand Walker Percy when I do not.

Tomorrow, read part 2, Amnesia, Moby Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Shadow of Catastrophe, or How to Title an Academic Paper on Walker Percy.

The Clear Light of Day by Penelope Wilcock

Sep30

I’m a huge fan of Penelope Wilcock’s series of books called The Hawk and the Dove about a medieval monastery and the lives of the monks of St.Alcuin. So when I spotted The Clear Light of Day, set in present day England, at the used bookstore, I snapped it up. And it was a lovely, but frustrating, read.

The lovely part was an unconventional romance between a middle-aged, divorced Methodist minister, Esme Browne, and an older (much older) country eccentric who repairs bicycles, does odd-jobs, and spins rather unoriginal homespun philosophies. The frustrating part was the Oprah-ish spirituality that was supposed to be oh-so-free-thinking and new and unorthodox. Jabez Ferral and his even older friend Ember are “spiritual but not religious” and the parts of the book in which they told about how they believed in “simplicity” and “thinking globally and acting locally” bored me and made me want to quit reading. Here’s an example:

I’m not sure what deity is, my love; but life is sacred, life is wise. One day, if my smoke finds the way home, and wakes the great Spirit, then the face of life that is death will come speeding silent like a hunting owl, and take the cancer of humanity off this poor, stripped, raped mother Earth, take it silent and quick, no more than a squeak of alarm; and the mountains will have their peace again, and the oceans give back the heavenly blue. The guns and the cars will rust, and the televisions will be quiet at last, and the factories and schools and government buildings will be for the bramble, the rat, and the crow. Is that what you call praying?

I don’t like preachy books, especially when they’re not even preaching the gospel, but rather some kind of spiritual gobbledygook.

So, good story, good characters, too much (bad) philosophy. Stick to Ms. Wilcock’s monks, who sometimes venture into post-modern spirituality but are kept from its worst excesses by the need for historical verisimilitude.

Poetry Friday: Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl

Sep13

In 1846 fifteen year old Emily of Amherst, Massachusetts, meets a mysterious young man whom she nicknames “Mr. Nobody.” Since he refuses to tell Emily his real name, she is regrettably unable to identify him when he turns up dead in her family’s pond. However, Miss Emily Dickinson feels a responsibility not only to find out the name of the deceased but also to determine just how he died.

I was reminded of Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries as I read this murder mystery featuring a fictionalized Emily Dickinson as amateur detective. Emily, as portrayed in Nobody’s Secret, is a sharp, intelligent, and very private young lady who is already scribbling down poems in a secret notebook that she keeps hidden in a very secret place. Like Flavia, Emily is not afraid of dead bodies or possible confrontations with murderers, and she is just as determined and ingenious as that other fictional girl detective.

However, in this novel we have the added flavor and pleasure of poetry, and not just any poetry but the verse of Miss Dickinson herself. The author of this YA mystery writes in a note at the end of the book, “Emily’s poems inspired this story, especially ‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,’ which is about how enticing anonymity might be in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog! –

Emily Dickinson’s use of “creative punctuation”–particularly all the dashes– annoyed editors and publishers in the nineteenth century and provoked them to change her punctuation marks to more acceptable ones. That kind of editing, in turn, provoked Emily Dickinson, and as a result she did not allow very many of her poems to be published, or “corrected,” during her lifetime. Her poems also often had several versions. I memorized the one above a long time ago with the words “banish us” instead of “advertise”, and that’s the way I quote it, frequently, to my children.

A good solid mystery woven around immortal poetry: what more could one desire? Nobody’s Secret would be an excellent Cybils nominee in the category of Young Adult Fiction.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jen at Teach Mentor Texts.

Rose Wilder Lane and Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Aug19

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin.

A Wilder Rose: Rose Wilder Lane, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and their Little Houses by Susan Wittig Albert.

This week I serendipitously read both of these biographical novels about two strong women of the early twentieth century: Rose Wilder Lane, who was an author and independent world traveler, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also an author, a mother, and wife to the most famous American man of the 1920’s, aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Both Rose and Anne have been in danger of being overshadowed by their more famous family members and collaborators, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Charles Lindbergh, respectively. Both women wrote under difficult circumstances: Rose while essentially supporting her parents and two adopted “sons” through the years of the Great Depression, and Anne while raising a family of five children almost single-handedly during Charles’ long and frequent absences. Both women have not always received the credit due them for their extraordinary accomplishments.

It was fascinating to read about Rose Wilder Lane and Anne Morrow Lindbergh and realize as I read that these two women could very well have crossed paths during their lifetimes, maybe more than once. Of course, Anne’s life story is dominated by her marriage to Charles Lindbergh and by the tragic kidnapping and death of the couple’s first son, Charlie, when he was only two years old. Anne Morrow knew when she married the famous aviator who had been the first to fly across the Atlantic Ocean that her life would be forever changed and circumscribed by Lindbergh’s overwhelming fame and by the press that hounded him and wrote about every detail of his days. But she had no idea how Charles Lindbergh’s celebrity and popularity would damage her family and transform even her accomplishments.

“Working for months on an account of our trip to the Orient, in the end I still wasn’t satisfied with it; I had found it impossible to capture the innocence of that time before my baby’s death. It had done modestly well, and Charles was proud of it, although I couldn’t help but think that most people bought it out of morbid curiosity. The bereaved mother’s little book—cold you read her tragedy between the lines? I’d imagined people paging feverishly through it, eager to find evidence of a splotch tear, a blurry word, a barely suppressed sob.”

The sad thing is that, if I am honest, back when I first read Anne Lindbergh’s published diaries, and again when I read this novel about her life, I was waiting to get to the part where her son was kidnapped. I wasn’t “paging feverishly”, but I was anxious to see how the tragedy would be written, how the utter horror of the defining event in the Lindberghs’ family life would be handled in print. Well, it’s vey sad and quite moving to read about a family torn apart by journalistic excess and by criminals who fed on that excessive notoriety that made the Lindberghs a target.

It’s very interesting that both of these books are not biographies, but rather fictionalized blends of fact and imagination that both Ms. Benjamin and Ms. Albert felt were more vivid ways to tell the real story of these two women than a straight piece of nonfiction would have been. In A Wilder Rose, Rose Wilder Lane tells her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, several times that her books (Little House on the Prairie and its companions and sequels) can’t be told as the exact history of her family’s travels and travails as they really happened. The family stories must be turned into fiction, shaped and reworked as stories that hang together and have a beginning, a middle and an end. And somehow in doing that reshaping, the story become more true than it would be if it were a simple recitation of the dry facts. The fiction gives the stories a context and a theme and tells more about the feelings and drama behind the history than could be done without the framework and freedom of fiction.

“‘I want to tell the true story,’ she said firmly. Her blue eyes darkened and her mouth set in that hard, stubborn line that I knew very well. ‘I’m sorry if it’s not exciting enough to suit those editors in New York, but I’m not going to make up lies to make it more exciting.’
‘Nobody’s suggesting that you tell lies,’ I replied cautiously.’But sometimes we need to use fiction to tell the truth. Sometimes fiction tells a truer story than facts.'”

It’s an odd truth, but it works in both of these books and in the Little House books. I very much enjoyed reading about Rose Wilder Lane and Ann Morrow Lindbergh, and I feel as if I know them both in a way. I must say, however, that I don’t think I would have liked Ms. Lane very much, too prickly and independent, and I’m sure I would have wanted to slap Charles Lindbergh up the side of the head, if he really did what the book says he did and if I knew anything about it.

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin has been quite the popular beach read this summer and is available in bookstores, libraries, and from Amazon. A Wilder Rose by mystery writer Susan Wittig Albert is due to be published in October, 2013, but is not yet available for pre-order, as far as I can tell.

Buried in a Bog by Sheila Connolly

Jul25

Bostonian Maura Donovan is determined to honor her recently deceased grandmother’s wishes and visit the small Irish village of Leap in County Cork where Gran was born. But she gets more than a tourist’s introduction to Ireland, with friendly Irish people who may or may not be related to her grandmother, an Irish pub that could have been lifted from the nineteenth century, a job offer at that same pub, and unfortunately, death, possibly murder, in the sleepy Irish village where Maura just wanted to visit and lay to rest her grandmother’s memory.

Sheila Connolly has written two other mystery series: the Orchard Mysteries, set in western Massachusetts, and the Museum Mysteries, which take place in and among the museums of Philadelphia. Buried in a Bog, published in February 2013, is the beginning of a new series, called the County Cork Mysteries. Ms. Connolly has done her research, so anyone who’s interested in Ireland, its history and contemporary culture, would probably enjoy Buried in a Bog and its sequels when they come out.

I found the protagonist, Maura, a little sharp and prickly and prone to jump to conclusions. She’s trying to be an independent woman and prove that she can take care of herself, but the attitude feels unnecessarily confrontational in contrast to the ore easy-going Irishmen and women she meets in Leap. Maybe it’s an “ugly AMerican ” thing. I did like the fact that Maura is from the lower middle class in Boston. She doesn’t take her financial situation for granted; she worries about money enough to pay for basics, food and clothes and a place to live. I found this refreshingly realistic in contrast to most amateur gumshoes in books and on TV who seem to be able to finance most any journey or whim without any visible means of support. Or else they’re independently wealthy. Maura is able to go to Ireland because of a small sum of money that her grandmother saved for that purpose, and when she gets there she is careful with her funds and aware of the necessity of making plans for her future self-support.

Anyway, it’s a good story, and the series promises to be a hit for fans of everything Irish.

No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner

Jul21

Jamie Langston Turner is one of my “go-to” authors for Christian-themed fiction. So when I saw a copy of a novel by Ms. Turner that I hadn’t yet read while I was perusing the shelves at Half-Price Books, I bought it without a second thought. And I’m glad I did.

No Dark Valley is a little more “religious” than some of Ms. Turner’s other novels, although all of them are about how ordinary people find redemption and strength through faith in Jesus. Nevertheless, just like the characters in her other books, the characters in No Dark Valley are real. I can imagine meeting these people, talking to them, understanding them. There are no pasteboard saints in this story, although Ms. Turner does indulge in a meta-fiction thread that runs through the novel about how Celia, the protagonist, imagines that her life and the people in it would never be believable as fiction:

“Another reason her life would make a bad novel, Celia had decided, was that the characters would seem so stereotyped. Nobody would believe that one person could have so many rigidly religious relatives, all stuck in the rut of such predictable, countrified ways of viewing life, all trekking to church several times a week, all so unaware that the twentieth century had come and gone. You could get by with one or two characters like that in a book, for quirky splashes of color, but not dozens and dozens of them. The whole thing would turn into a farce.”

Of course, the funny thing about No Dark Valley was that I found the characters to be quite plausible and true to life–my life in the South, in the Bible Belt. I’m not sure if Ms. Turner was actually worried that readers would find her Christian characters stereotypical and so wrote her concerns into the book, or if she was simply having fun with Celia and her own rigid ways of thinking. (Celia is a champion at projecting her own rigidity and prejudice onto her relatives and others.) Either way, Celia’s interior monologue, and later in the novel when the point of view switches to Celia’s neighbor, Bruce Healy, his thoughts, are both relatable and authentic.

No Dark Valley is both a romance story and a conversion story. Jamie Langston Turner’s prose is intelligent, vivid, and sometimes crosses over into the poetic. I really enjoy Ms. Turner’s novels. If they can be classified as “Christian chicklit”, it’s excellent, smart Christian chick lit.

Jamie Langston Turner’s other books:
Suncatchers
Some Wildflower in My Heart (1998)
By the Light of a Thousand Stars (1999)
A Garden to Keep (2001)
Winter Birds (2006)
Sometimes a Light Surprises (2009)

And if you like a series of novels with recurring and overlapping characters, Ms Turner’s novels, like those of another of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, have characters from one novel that reappear in later books. In No Dark Valley, Eldeen Rafferty from Suncatchers makes a (loud) appearance. Margaret Tuttle, from Some Wildflower in My Heart, is the friend of a friend. And Elizabeth Landis from A Garden to Keep becomes a friend and mentor to Celia as the two women play on a tennis team together.

And now I have to admit that Ms. Turner and I have a little bit of a mutual admiration society going here, and I am pleased to read that she has a new novel coming out in 2014.

Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley

Jul2

This latest entry in the series about 11 year old Flavia deLuce, girl chemist and intrepid solver of mysteries, features a satisfying story and a surprising ending. These books should definitely be read in order:

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag
A Red Herring Without Mustard
I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
Speaking From Among the Bones
The Dead In Their Vaulted Arches (due out January, 2014)

However, I think I missed the fourth book somehow, and I still enjoyed this fifth one. In Speaking from Among the Bones, Flavia is determined to make her presence known when the authorities unearth the bones of Bishop Lacey’s resident saint, St. Tancred, who’s been dead for 500 years. But before the assembled company get to the bones of St. Tancred, there’s another, more modern, corpse to be disinterred. And Flavia is off on another investigation into chemistry and death in the 1950’s village near her ancestral home of Buckshaw where Flavia performs experiments in her great-uncle Tarquin DeLuce’s marvelous and well-stocked laboratory.

As the series continues, we realize more and more that our first impressions of Flavia’s family of her village friends, seen exclusively through Flavia’s own peculiar 11 year old filter, may not be entirely accurate. It’s a voyage of discovery, as Flavia realizes that perhaps her father has depths that are beyond her understanding and that perhaps her sisters Daffy and Feely do love her in their own ways, and that perhaps the other village people, both friends and enemies, are more multi-dimensional than she may have led us to believe initially. I really like this aspect of gradually opening up relationships and characters through the eyes of a very opinionated and somewhat precocious child. It’s a lovely way to show characters in all their messiness, especially with the added dimension of murder and mayhem to solve and resolve in each of the books.

Good series, and I was totally blindsided by the ending of this installment in the series–not the solution of the murder mystery, but rather an astonishing and unexpected development in Flavia’s own personal family life that sets us up for an interesting sixth book, due out in January 2014.

The Rosemary Tree by Elizabeth Goudge

Jun20

I have read very few authors with as much insight into the feelings and thought processes of men, women, and children as Elizabeth Goudge. The Rosemary Tree is remarkable in its treatment of characters who are all somewhat broken (as are we all), but who fall on a continuum from repentant to ineffectual to struggling to wise to completely evil. And the character who is represented as utterly irredeemable, because she doesn’t want to be forgiven or changed, might be the character you least suspect.

It all seems very true to life. (By the way that’s an awful cover, but the others I saw at Amazon weren’t any better. I don’t know why the people are wearing what looks like Elizabethan or Edwardian costumes. The story takes place in the twentieth century, after World War II.) The main characters in this little vignette of village life are:

John Wentworth, a bumbling and diffident country parson who sees himself as a weak man and a failure who can never get anything quite right.

“He took off his coat, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, lifted up to Almighty God the magnitude of his failure and the triviality of his task, and applied himself to the latter. The hot water warmed his cold hands and the pile of cleansed china grew satisfactorily on the draining-board. There was a pleasure in getting things clean. Small beauties slid one by one into his consciousness, quietly and unobtrusively, like growing light. The sinuous curves of Orlando the marmalade cat, washing himself on the window-sill, the comfortable sound of ash settling in the stove, a thrush singing somewhere, the scent of Daphne’s geraniums, the gold of the crocuses that were growing round the trunk of the apple tree outside the kitchen window.”

Others see him as Don Quixote, the Man of la Mancha.

Daphne Wentworth, John’s wife, is much more competent than her husband, but also full of pride and thwarted ambitions from her youth.

The couple have three children: Pat, who is like her mother, competent and intelligent and sharp, Margary, who is more like John, dreamy and vulnerable, and Winkle, who is the baby of the family, but wise with the innocence of childhood.

Harriet lives upstairs in the Wentworth parsonage, and she is wise with the wisdom of many years of experience, first as John’s nanny, then as the parsonage housekeeper, and now as a retired pray-er and watcher over the entire household.

“They all said they could not do without her. In the paradoxical nature of things if she could have believed them she would have been a much happier woman, but not the same woman whom they could not do without.”

Maria Wentworth, John’s great-aunt, lives in Belmaray Manor and keeps pigs.

Young Mary O’Hara, Irish and full of vitality, and Miss Giles, middle-aged, bitter, and full of frustrations, both teach school at the small private school that the Wentworth girls attend. Mary’s aunt, Mrs. Belling, “was a very sweet woman and had been a very beautiful one.” She is headmistress of the little school, where all three girls are quite unhappy, each in her own way.

Into this mix comes a stranger, Michael Stone, who is weighed down by many, many real failures and sins and who comes to Devonshire where the story takes place not so much for redemption as simply for a place to go, perhaps to hide from the world. Michael will find more than he’s looking for, and the other characters in this novel will change and grow as a result of Michael’s presence and the truth he brings into their lives.

Elizabeth Goudge really has written a lovely novel. Apparently, The Times criticized its “slight plot” and “sentimentally ecstatic” approach when the book was first published in 1956. I’ll admit the story is a bit short on action, but the descriptions of how and what people think and feel more than makes up for any deficiency in fictional exploits.

Sidenote/detour: While looking for more information about Elizabeth Goudge, I found this article about an Indian author, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, who plagiarized from The Rosemary Tree in her 1993 Cranes’ Morning. In fact, aside from changing the setting to India, the names of the characters to Indian ones, and the religion to Hinduism, Ms. Aikath-Gyaltsen copied much of Goudge’s novel word-for-word. It took about a year for the plagiarism to be noticed and confirmed, and in the meantime Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen died, probably committing suicide. Sad story.

I wonder what Elizabeth Goudge, who died in 1984, would have thought about it all?

Not to end this review of and homage to Ms. Goudge’s agreeable novel on such a sad note, I’ll leave you with one more quote:

“The way God squandered Himself had always hurt her; and annoyed her, too. The sky full of wings and only the shepherds awake. That golden voice speaking and only a few fishermen there to hear; and perhaps some of the words He spoke carried away on the wind or lost in the sound of the waves lapping against the side of the boat. A thousand blossoms shimmering over the orchard, each a world of wonder all to itself, and then the whole thing blown away on a south-west gale as though the delicate little worlds were of no value at all. Well, of all the spendthrifts, she would think, and then pull herself up. It was not for her to criticize the ways of Almighty God; if He liked to go to all that trouble over the snowflakes, millions and millions of them, their intricate patterns too small to be seen by human eyes, and melting as soon as made, that was His affair and not hers.”

I like the idea of God as a spendthrift, creating beauty for the sheer joy of it all whether there’s anyone there to perceive it or not. Isn’t there a poem based on that idea? Maybe Emily Dickinson?