Bestsellers – Week of January 30th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:11 AM - 0 Comments

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EXCERPT: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The New York Times Photo Archives/Redux

Vancouver-born and now resident in Washington as the National Geographic Society’s Explorer-in-Residence, Wade Davis, 58, is one of the most celebrated Canadian scientists and authors of his generation. The ethnobotanist, anthropologist and historian has written 15 books, none closer to his heart than his newest, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize. Davis loves the wild places of the world and has always been fascinated by the social and cultural upheavals wrought by the First World War, still a living memory in his childhood. “Both my grandfathers were in the war, and the headmaster of my school had been at the Somme,” he recalls. “When I was in Nepal I heard the stories of the postwar expeditions—the Englishmen reading Shakespeare to each other in the snow—and I knew by their ages that they too must have been in the war.”

The result is a book Davis calls “the best I’ve ever written,” a beautifully evocative exploration of the inchoate motives of a group of British climbers who attempted to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. There was patriotism, of course, but also a desire for cleansing redemption. That ascending the world’s tallest peak was of no practical use added immensely to its appeal; privation and the very real possibility of death, to men who had survived the trenches, was scarcely worth mentioning.

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REVIEW: Guilt

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

For more than half a century, the words “German” and “guilt” have had a relationship inescapably entangled in history. That legacy of Nazi crime—and postwar repentance—subtly but unmistakably resonates right through von Schirach’s exquisite short stories, and not only because he is a grandson of Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth and a Nuremberg-convicted war criminal. Even though the setting for Guilt is present day, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the past when a woman is asked, long after a child is raped, why she did and said nothing when she saw the girl being forced into a neighbour’s apartment. “It wasn’t my business,” Frau Halbert replies to every question. “It was nothing to do with me.”

Yet the real shadow of Nazism lying over the 15 stories is cast, paradoxically enough, by its absence. The unnamed narrator is a criminal defence lawyer (von Shirach’s former job) who represents or advises clients who have come into some contact with the postwar German legal code, which in vehement reaction to the past, now bends over backwards to protect the rights of the accused. The crimes involved range from the prosaic to the bizarre, the understandable to the horrifying. Some clients emerge scot-free, some go to jail; the narrator, no Perry Mason but a competent and compassionate professional, does his best by them all.

One story—involving psychotic but bumbling career criminals and a laxative-stuffed mastiff trapped in a luxury Maserati—is both appalling and very funny. But the rest, all told in a detached and utterly engrossing manner that plays on the opening quote from Aristotle—“Things are as they are”—leave a reader not amused but wonderstruck. There is guilt aplenty to go around. Two teenaged runaways are invited in from the cold by a friendly seeming older man. He turns out to be a pedophile and in the subsequent struggle the boy and girl kill him, half accidentally, half-deliberately. They get away clean and turn their lives around; 19 years later, solid citizens with two children of their own, they open the door to find cold-case cops with new DNA evidence. They kill themselves. Pin the guilt in that.

That’s more easily done in the jewel of the collection, “Funfair.” There, police and medical personnel must face the fact it was their haphazard handling of the evidence that will allow the perpetrators of a vicious crime to walk free. The narrator, coolly leveraging that incompetence for the sake of his clients, scarcely feels better about himself. But he gets over it, as does almost but not everyone else in Guilt, von Shirach’s ultimate theme.

Bestsellers – Week of January 23th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the iconic gun of our times. More American cops and more American spree killers carry a Glock than any other handgun. It’s the weapon Seung-Hui Cho used to murder 32 people at Virginia Tech; the gun Saddam Hussein had in his hidey-hole; the gun that football player Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg with; the gun Jared Loughner fired at Gabrielle Giffords and many others a year ago. And the gun Giffords herself owned. How a weapon made by an unknown curtain-rod manufacturer in Austria in 1980 reached these heights is part wild business story—the true interest of the author, an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek—and part cultural history.

When Gaston Glock learned the Austrian army was seeking a new handgun, he went to work unhampered by any firm opinion as to how a gun should look or what it should be made of. He emerged with the Glock 17. Crafted in part of lightweight plastic, with a large magazine (17 bullets) and only 36 parts, the pistol would still fire after being dropped from a helicopter or lying in snow overnight. Its preference for efficiency over style was nicely captured by novelist David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest: “one ugly and all-business-looking piece of self-defence hardware.”

Its timing was impeccable too. The Glock arrived in America in the late ’80s, just as law enforcement agencies were in a panic about being outgunned by drug gangs. Hollywood and hip hop helped glamorize it: “As we groove down the block, Dre, pass the Glock,” rapped Snoop Dogg in 1992. Then there was the eye-popping business story. Marketing campaigns involving Gold Club strippers, money laundering, tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions are not exactly unheard of in the arms industry. But the company’s brief history also includes a crooked financial adviser who attempted to assassinate—with a mallet, not a pistol—Gaston Glock, now a billionaire. For an Austrian gun, it’s a very American story.

REVIEW: Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

For all the author’s slides into academic speak—she calls the Arabian Nights “a polyvocal anthology”—her subject, the world’s best-known and, probably, best-loved story cycle, is enchanting enough to overcome anything. There can scarcely be a soul in the Western or Islamic worlds who doesn’t know the framing tale of 1001 Nights: how Sultan Shahriyar, betrayed in love, takes a virgin bride every night and beheads her in the morning, until he weds Shahrazad, who compels him to issue interminable stays of execution so he can hear the endings of the stories she tells him. In short, the most profound affirmation of the literally life-affirming essence of stories and storytelling ever put to pen.

The tales she tells have sources stretching from Persia (as the names of the sultan and his bride indicate) across the Arab world to as far as India. Their themes are eternal: the wiles of women (Shahrazad herself), the caprices of tyrants (her sultan), and, above all, the twists of fate: beggars become kings, princes are turned to stone. And as soon as they came west in the early Enlightenment, the stories became one of the very few foreign jewels ensconced in the Western literary tradition.

Warner’s own framing story—the Western reception of the Arabian Nights—has tales within tales too. Mozart, given a copy by his Italian landlady, developed themes for The Abduction from the Seraglio; Coleridge read them before he wrote “Kubla Khan”; Dickens had Scrooge try to catch the Ghost of Christmas Past with a candle snuffer, an update of enticing a genie back into his lamp. Then there’s the most important Westerner of all, Antoine Galland, who brought the stories back from the Ottoman Empire in 1704. Modern scholars have concluded that he actually wrote two of the most popular tales, “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba.” And why not? There’s always time and space for another story.

The end of illness?

By Brian Bethune - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

A. Bello/Getty Images

Take statins if you’re over 50, and baby Aspirin, too. Drop the vitamin supplements like they were a lit cigarette. Junk the juicer. If the vegetables at the supermarket aren’t today-fresh, opt for fresh frozen. Wear sensible shoes. Eat lunch and go to bed at the same time every day. Get your flu shot. Move around a lot, even when you aren’t exercising. Digitize your medical records, family history and genetic profile, and store this information on a USB stick. Carry it with you always. Share it, anonymously, with the world.

Think of yourself as a system: cancer is not something the body gets and health is not something it has—both are states, dynamic processes really, that the body undergoes. And your system is not the same as anyone else’s: the daily glass of red wine that does wonders for your friend may be killing you. Take note of the specific, unchanging details of your system. Is your ring finger longer than your index finger? That ups the risk of prostate cancer for a man, and of osteoarthritis for a woman. (No one knows quite why, but the marker is well-established.) Keep an eye on your more changeable fine points. Check your nails: yellowish hue bad (go for a diabetes check); white crescent at the base good (iron levels are sufficient). Check your ankles: indentation marks from your socks or loss of hair could mean circulatory problems and increased risk of blood clot.

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Bestsellers – Week of January 16th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: The Fat Years

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Still banned in China proper, this wonderfully subversive novel was first published in Hong Kong in 2009, when its 2013 setting made it a safely near-future tale. That’s a bit of a problem now, since the plot turns on events from two years earlier—that is, 2011—that Chan’s new Western readers know never happened. Even so, the sly conceit at the heart of his story remains not just metaphorically, but in a very real sense, literally true: a fat and happy China basking in its new-found prosperity, barely aware of a past month almost entirely excised from collective memory.

Something horrible scarred that missing month, but the ruling Communist party has managed to keep it out of public discussion and, somewhat to its own surprise, practically out of mind. The main character, Lao Chen, an inhabitant of Happiness Village Number Two, is as content as anyone with life in a nation that dominates the globe economically. The financial crisis that wobbled the Western world in 2008 took a drastic (fictional) turn three years later, destroying it economically. Only China has managed to thrive, to such an extent that Starbucks is now Chinese-owned.

But not everyone is enjoying the fat years. Chen keeps encountering such people, some marginalized in the new China (a former lover, now an Internet dissident; a former slave worker), some prospering (a real estate wheeler-dealer, a high-price prostitute). None can ignore the pull of the nagging, foggy past. Together they kidnap a senior government official and learn the surprising truth.

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REVIEW: How to Think Like a Neandertal

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

The main point of this absorbing account of our closest-ever relatives, dead now these 30,000 years, is that we already do. Think like Neanderthals, that is. What we know of Neanderthal technology is derived primarily from their stoneworking procedures, because that’s the evidence that has survived. It reveals the very same learning techniques that create modern artisans, musicians and athletes: what’s called embodied cognition (muscle and procedural memory), and practice, practice, practice. Even driving a car, the authors argue, means “thinking like a Neanderthal.” That assertion is vital to Wynn (an anthropologist) and Coolidge (a psychiatrist), who wish to make it clear that Neanderthals are us, and not some sort of hyper-intelligent chimps.

But not entirely us. Our essential kinship established, the authors go on to discuss the behavioural differences clearly revealed by the archaeological record and the far more speculative cognitive capacities that could explain—or result from—those differences. The sexual division of labour universal among modern hunters (males) and gatherers (females) seems absent from Neanderthal life, partly because they consumed so little plant food. Does that mean the sex-linked difference in spatial cognition among moderns—men consistently score better in tests—which some evolutionary psychologists trace to males having to track game across a shifting landscape (while females specialized in memorizing specific, plant-rich locations), didn’t exist among Neanderthals?

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Obama family ties

By Brian Bethune - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 7:50 AM - 0 Comments

Pete Souza

“Behind every successful man, there stands a surprised woman,” Maryon Pearson, wife of Canada’s 14th prime minister, once said. Pearson was the very model of the unhappy political spouse: caustic, dissatisfied, and inexorably driven into a single, confining role—humanizing her elected husband—while putting her own life on hold. Michelle Obama can be fairly described as another, according to New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor’s sympathetic portrait in The Obamas. But it’s doubtful whether Obama, on election night in 2008, would have echoed Pearson’s remark.

If there was one thing Michelle Obama believed in, it was her husband. It was the rest of the package that left her deeply mistrustful: life in the fishbowl of the White House, with its possible effects on their daughters, Malia and Sasha (then aged 10 and seven); taking a backseat in a marriage of equals; and even whether anything worthwhile could be accomplished through politics, with all its sordid horse-trading and backscratching. The Obamas’ shock at their new lives and their missteps in coming to terms with them subtly but profoundly affected the presidency and thus the lives of their fellow Americans, Kantor argues. “Barack and Michelle have been married to each other since 1992,” she writes, “but for at least another year and possibly longer, they are married to us too.”

There never was a first couple like the Obamas, and not just because of their skin colour, remarkable as that is in a White House built in part by African slaves. Barack is the first president since Gerald Ford in 1974 not to have previously lived in a gubernatorial or vice-presidential official house, something that might have warned him that life in what is at once a home, an office and the nation’s symbolic centre—a place where the chief inhabitants frequently receive requests for official portraits of their dog—could not approach normality.

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Bestsellers – Week of January 9th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 2:42 PM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Heinrich Himmler

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

As head of the SS, chief of police, “Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germanness,” and deputy führer, Heinrich Himmler—failed chicken farmer, occult believer, homophobe and anti-Semite—managed to achieve power in Nazi Germany second only to Hitler’s. He was as responsible for repressing domestic dissent as he was for the Holocaust. Despite his key role, however, Himmler has never been the focus of a comprehensive biography before this massive effort by Longerich, a distinguished German historian.

That has its upside, of course. A few decades ago, a psychoanalytic approach would surely have grounded Himmler’s destructive life in childhood trauma. Longerich, despite an appropriately keen interest in his subject’s personality, is having none of that. Yes, Himmler was emotionally inhibited and socially backward, especially with women, and that did make the all-male paramilitary world of the Nazis all the more appealing. But his real interest in military life and in violence as the first, best response to any issue stemmed from the fact that—like many early Nazi enthusiasts—Himmler (born in 1900) was just a shade too young for First World War service. His view of war and its cleansing potential was as absurdly romanticized as his desire to return to a racially purified, fantasy Germany. And just as deadly.

Himmler combined his utopian fantasies with the genius for vicious power politics that marks all successful players in totalitarian systems. He always emerged from internecine struggles and betrayals with enhanced powers, and for all Hitler’s absolute centrality to his regime, the way Himmler wove together the tools that came to his hand—the police machinery, the settlement policy, the camp system, the forced labour programs—was also crucial to creating the violence and chaos that defined Nazism. Not the least example of Himmler’s destructive capacity was intense repression of all dissent right up to the war’s last days, aimed to prevent another Great War-style collapse on the home front. That Germany continued to resist long after its cause was hopeless, Longerich argues, “was the work of Heinrich Himmler.”

In conversation: Henry Alford on manners

By Brian Bethune - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Henry Alford, 49, has written about everything and anything for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but lately he’s focused on manners. His new book, Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, is less a collection of etiquette dos and don’ts than a more wide-ranging investigation into the often grim state of public manners—what he calls “post-apocalyptic public restrooms” loom large—and into how we can all treat one another better with grace and civility.

Q: After reading your bracing tour of your loogie-launching, real-estate-value-obsessed, cab-stealing fellow New Yorkers, it’s somewhat surprising to hear your opinion that manners are not at an all-time nadir.

A: That question can be argued either way, and interestingly, Judith Martin [Miss Manners] said the exact same thing to me. You can argue that manners have gotten worse or better depending on your mood. But it’s too easy to use one’s current, and probably mild, level of discomfort as a societal barometer. Yes, I too am hugely dismayed by the gentleman sitting next to me on the bus who is clipping his toenails. He looked like such an upstanding individual when I first boarded. But if we take the historical perspective, that toenail clipping is almost nothing compared to the behaviour you might see in, say, a medieval tavern. I refer to bodily fluids. I refer to bodily noises.

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REVIEW: Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China

By Brian Bethune - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Chinese have many sayings about heaven and earth, and the relationship between divine and mundane order. One of them is encapsulated in the title that Palmer, a perceptive British writer living in Beijing, gives his study of 1976 China, the year the bloody chaos of the Cultural Revolution finally ended. With Mao Zedong on his deathbed and his would-be successors jockeying for power, Chinese heaven—political and social order, in other words—was metaphorically cracking. And then the Earth literally shook. On July 28, a quake flattened the city of Tangshan and its outlying villages, killing half a million people in perhaps the deadliest 23 seconds in human history.

The era’s corrosive politics had even seeped into earthquake science. Weeks before the disaster, Chinese seismologists, alarmed by warning signals in the region—a drop in the water table and high levels of radon in the water—were attempting to get national officials’ attention. But they were hampered by the fact the Communist party’s man at the seismology bureau, their pipeline to the country’s rulers, had just been denounced as a “capitalist roader.” It’s doubtful, though, that any warning could have saved many from a quake that struck at the worst time (the middle of the night) and worst place possible (directly under a city of one million).

It was the aftermath that enraged the populace: the panicked militia shooting “looters” (people trying to find food in public granaries), the refusal of foreign help, the concentration on Tangshan city (some villages received no aid for months). The Communist state’s inept and callous response proved too much for a population already boiling over in resentment at the Cultural Revolution’s excesses, and 1976 became the revolutionary year in which China began its transformation into a modern superpower. And in his epilogue, Palmer nicely captures just how far China has come over the last 35 years. Today’s Beijing is rife with Cultural Revolution kitsch, including theme restaurants with singing waiters dressed as Red Guards, who address delighted diners as “comrade,” now a slang word for “gay.”

Bestsellers – Week of January 2nd, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, January 5, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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The baby killer at Toronto’s Sick Kids was rubber

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

QMI Agency

In April 2010 a story concluded in a Dutch courtroom, much like a similar one burned into the memories of Canadians of a certain age. Nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of seven murder convictions that had put her in prison, supposedly for life, in 2004. After the unexpected death of a baby cardiac patient—determined by autopsy to be a case of deliberate poisoning with the heart drug digoxin—de Berk was arrested. Deaths previously ruled natural were relabelled because de Berk was present. Prosecutors took as proof of guilt indications that fell far short of evidence—in her diary de Berk confessed to a “very great secret,” which she later said was her unscientific interest in tarot cards—and ignored the fact she wasn’t present for some of the “murders.”

In short, it’s a close replay of Toronto nurse Susan Nelles, the deaths of dozens of babies at the city’s Hospital for Sick Children during 1980 and 1981, and the resulting Grange inquiry after the bogus case against Nelles collapsed. But the real parallel remains unknown to most Canadians even now: it’s not that the wrong person was fingered for murder, but that no murders were committed at all.

That’s the conclusion meticulously and persuasively argued by retired physician Gavin Hamilton in The Nurses Are Innocent. Between June 1980 and March 1981, baby deaths spiked 625 per cent at Sick Kids’ cardiac unit—43 cases in all. Autopsies belatedly performed as death inexorably followed upon death seemed to show poisonous levels of digoxin. Investigators focused on Nelles, because she was (apparently) on duty for 24 of the deaths, and because she had the temerity to ask for a lawyer. Later, the Grange inquiry managed to cast a lifelong cloud of suspicion over another nurse, Phyllis Trayner (now dead), while ruling eight of the deaths as murders.

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Bestsellers – Week of December 19th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 8:54 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

At the outbreak of the Second World War, neutral Portugal was an impoverished authoritarian state on the fringe of global events. Then, almost overnight, its capital, Lisbon, became the place where Allies and Axis kept an eye on each other. That suited the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar, who knew the risks of joining either the Allies (German or Spanish invasion) or the Axis (losing Portugal’s colonies to Britain). The belligerents also accepted the status quo. The Allies in particular desired an escape hatch from the Nazi-dominated continent, and thousands of refugees passed through Lisbon. Toss in the spies (including Ian Fleming, who based Casino Royale on Lisbon’s chic seaside casino in Estoril) and the exiled royalty (including the duke and duchess of Windsor) and Lochery is right: Lisbon was “like Casablanca, only 20 times more.”

And then there was the wolfram, the rare hard metal vital to modern armaments. Portugal was its main European source. Just as the Allies took over an Azores island for an air base (the price of Portuguese neutrality), the Germans made it clear that peace depended upon access to wolfram. That too suited Salazar, who played, in Lochery’s retelling, his limited cards skilfully. The tungsten was forthcoming, but only in exchange for gold, which the Nazis obtained by looting Europe. Portugal ended the war with at least 124 tonnes of German-paid gold (and almost certainly much more), three-quarters of which U.S. negotiators believed was looted.

But those negotiators, who succeded in forcing the return of stolen gold by other neutral nations, were hamstrung by their own government’s desire to keep the Azores base for the new Cold War. In the end, the Portuguese returned just four tonnes. The rest remained as an integral part of Portugal’s slow transition to a modern economy, and as one more of the war’s still-open wounds.

REVIEW: Tolstoy: A Russian Life

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Count Leo Tolstoy—novelist nonpareil, Christian mystic, proto-Communist, mad aristocrat and very embodiment of Mother Russia—may have lived until he was 82, but he has always left the impression that his lifespan was twice as long. One reason is caught in Bartlett’s subtitle: Tolstoy’s wildly eventful 19th-century life (1828 to 1910) spanned all the changes in pre-revolutionary Russia that would make it one of the most important nations of the 20th century. Born in a land without railways, he was eventually filmed by movie cameras wielded by celebrity-hunting American journalists. He died only seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution, but his father was a veteran of the war against Napoleon. At Tolstoy’s birth, the Russian nobility controlled serfs as though they were slaves—his grandparents gave his father a peasant girl when he was 16, for his “health.” Tolstoy abused his female serfs too after he became a landowner at 19, before he squandered his inheritance on gypsy singers and gambling.

Later, after a spiritual crisis in the 1870s, Tolstoy emerged as a Christian heretic opposed to violence and property, and a champion of peasants. (Of interest to Canada, he published his last novel, Resurrection, in 1899 to enable members of the Doukhobor sect to emigrate here.) A later influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Tolstoy the political-religious thinker was also the subject of articles by Lenin. Like most great artists, he matters to most people precisely because of his art, but Bartlett makes a case for the rest of Tolstoy’s life too, and for the real possibility that he would be remembered now, even if he hadn’t written War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Yet he did write them, and in the end that does matter most. Between the aristocratic excess and the ascetic zeal, Leo Tolstoy, for all his imperiousness and focus on large ideas, demonstrated a genius for observing and describing the smallest changes in human consciousness that has awed his readers ever since.

Christopher Hitchens: no heroes, no allies

By Brian Bethune - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Like any polemicist worthy of the name—and in our time no one deserved that honourable title more than Christopher Hitchens, polemicist tutti polemicists, now dead of esophageal cancer at 62—Hitchens was fond of the sound of his own voice. And with good reason: he didn’t just have a lot to say, he said it with wit, supple (and occasionally venomous) prose and utter fearlessness.

From his days as a young militant Trotskyite to his end-of-life position as the Last Man Standing in defence of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hitchens always aimed high, preferring to wield his claymore against targets who were fully able to dish it back. High on the list were: Henry Kissinger (“should have the door shut in his face by every decent person”), Mother Teresa (“a lying, thieving Albanian dwarf, friend of poverty, not poor people”), the royal family (“what you get when you found a political system on the family values of Henry VIII”), the entire anti-war movement (“some peaceniks clear their throats by saying that, of course, they oppose Saddam Hussein as much as anybody, though not enough to support doing anything about him”) and God, or at least his more fundamentalist adherents. Continue…

Bestsellers – Week of December 12th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 0 Comments

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P.D. James enters the Austenverse

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

David Harrison/Redux, Alex Baily /CP; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

“Did you know there were about 70 of them?” asks P.D. James, a note of wonder still in her voice. “And some of them so extraordinary—zombies and sexual obsessions.” The grande dame of classical British mystery novels, now 91 and still hard at work, is talking about sequels to one of the best-loved novels in English literature, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813. Baroness James of Holland Park had decided, as she was turning 90, that perhaps she shouldn’t embark on any projects as lengthy as another novel of Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh, and her thoughts turned to some unfinished business she had with Pride and Prejudice. “Austen is absolutely my favourite novelist,” says James, “Emma is my favourite book—I think it’s a perfect novel—but I’ve always wondered about Darcy’s emotional reactions. I thought I’d write a story working through that, and then I thought I’d better have a look at who else might have done that.”

And so James encountered the Austenverse, as it’s become known. Beyond Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bollywood’s Bride and Prejudice and the nine more or less straight-up film adaptations of Austen’s novel, there is an entire fictional sub-genre of unhappy modern women obsessing over the author’s placid rural world. Sometimes the women in those stories play out their dreams in an Austen-esque way, or even end up in Austen-era England. In one 2008 BBC miniseries, Lost in Austen, a 21st-century Londoner switches places with heroine Elizabeth Bennet—that is, with a figment of Austen’s imagination—and proceeds to wreak romantic havoc in the setting of Pride and Prejudice.

James being James, her entry was always going to be different, and right from its title: Death Comes to Pemberley might as well have been called Death Comes to Eden. Aside from its zombie-killing corner, the Austenverse is a happy land where really bad things, like violent death, just don’t happen. The story opens in 1803, six years after the original was written, long enough for Elizabeth and Darcy to have had two sons and settle into his ancestral home of Pemberley. It’s the evening before the annual ball and there is unspoken tension in the perfect family. Matters worsen as a carriage careens up to the house and wayward sister Lydia tumbles out, screaming that her husband Wickham has been killed.

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REVIEW: December 1941: Twelve Days That Began a World War

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Scholars have been seeking decisive hinge moments in the greatest and most chaotic episode in history ever since the Second World War ended. John Lukacs found one in his marvellous Five Days in London, May 1940 (1999), when Churchill ensured the conflict didn’t end then on Hitler’s terms. Now Mawdsley is focusing on another, less arguable in its claims—the war did indeed go global in his title month 70 years ago—but equally intriguing in its new take on events.

On Dec. 1, 1941, the war was overwhelmingly a European fight. The Wehrmacht still had hopes of taking Moscow and decapitating the U.S.S.R.; Britain had yet to register a major military success; Japan was unchecked in Asia; and American isolationist sentiment remained ascendant. Twelve days later, the world looked very different. In a series of savage counterattacks, the Soviet Union showed it was far from dead—the Nazis’ one-year campaign to destroy it had failed. Britain (and its future Commonwealth) had rallied and in Africa achieved their first significant victory over German forces. Crucially, Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war had finally brought the Americans into the struggle. (Churchill famously remarked of Dec. 7 that he had gone to bed and “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”) Most sinister of all: December 1941 was the month in which Hitler committed the Nazi state to the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

All of these are well-known facts; where Mawdsley, a historian at the University of Glasgow, shines is in his linkage of events. On a smaller scale, British success in Africa meant shifting Luftwaffe units there, leaving the Nazis’ Russian front weaker. On a higher geostrategic level, both Japan and Germany expected the other to bail it out: the Nazis especially thought war in the Pacific would keep America from European intervention. And since their previous strategy in that regard—essentially holding European Jews as hostages against U.S. power—had failed, Hitler felt free to give full rein to his murderous anti-Semitism.