February Book Review: WOLF HALL

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

We're getting lovely, unexpected snow today, and I'm in a great mood because I can take credit for it. I need to go to Bangor one afternoon this week, and it would be best for my revision schedule if I went today. But nobody expected the snow and nobody's plowed and now I have to go tomorrow. If you live in coastal Maine and you're a snow lover, you're welcome. If you live in coastal Maine and snow doesn't thrill you, how about a good book?

Don't forget to click the icon to find more of this month's Book Review Club entries. I understand we have a new member, a seventh grader! Welcome, Cassandra!

Wolf Hall
By Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt & Co., 2009

Up to now, most books and movies have portrayed Sir Thomas More as a saint (which he actually became, three centuries after his death) and Thomas Cromwell, his successor in Henry VIII’s esteem, as a scheming meany. Hilary Mantel’s WOLF HALL nearly reverses those portrayals—although “turns them inside out” would be a better way of putting it.

Winner of the United Kingdom’s prestigious Man Booker Prize for 2009, this is an entrancing, exquisitely written book, but odd. A blacksmith’s son who rises to be Henry’s closest counselor, Cromwell is, in fact, a schemer--and we’re so deep inside his head that we understand and applaud every maneuver. Mantel achieves this with a technical maneuver of her own that sidles back and forth between genius and gimmickry.

It’s all in a pronoun. Cromwell’s tale is written third person, but the narrator seldom uses his name. Cromwell is “he,” almost always, and the reader frequently has to stop and unravel which pronoun refers to which human.

Opening the book at random, one finds the following paragraph on page 214, when a lieutenant of Cardinal Woolsey’s is reporting to Cromwell on the prelate’s downfall: “Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks, Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and secret pleasure….” By this point, the reader is astute enough to know that the “he” with his fingers together is Cromwell, not Cavendish. Earlier in the book, the reader had to stop herself from throwing the blasted thing across the room.

The gimmick works. It probably will never work again for another character or another author, and good luck if you want to try it. I don’t have a firm grip on why it succeeds, but here’s my stab at a theory: If this were written first person, we’d be completely in Cromwell’s thrall, relaxed in the knowledge we were seeing everything and everyone through his eyes. Replacing the intimate pronoun “I” with this almost-intimate “he” throws us off balance—whose perspective is this, exactly? We are one with this guy, completely inside his head…so who’s narrating? Who’s “he” this time—better read that paragraph again.

We’re alive, nervous, on our toes…just as Cromwell had to be to survive in a Tudor court that Mantel seems to know as well as her back yard.

The book’s approach to time is uneasy, too. We meet Cromwell in childhood, recovering from yet another beating by his brutish father. We see him run away to the Continent and then, in the next chapter…boom, he’s an adult, with a wife and kids, Cardinal Woolsey’s right hand. He’s grown into a skilled politician, a bit of an idealist—how did that happen, and how come we didn’t get to see it? We feel gypped.

But we learn that time is fluid, as we follow Cromwell’s thoughts back and forth along the arc of his life, seldom with anything as cut-and-dried as a flashback.

As the pages turn, we begin to understand Cromwell’s genius and where it came from. We watch his idealism die with Woolsey, watch him become Henry’s right hand instead, a councilor admired by some, feared by many, respected by all. He moves like a snake, we see that, but he’s kind to his friends and family. He mourns his wife and daughters, loves his dog. He’s a man of wit and taste. Really, he deserves his own pronoun—it’s a shame he has to share that “he” with anyone else.

Oh, and Thomas More? He’s a prig and a miser, mean to his wife. He rather enjoys burning heretics. He engineers his own downfall and execution partly by acting on a strongly held principal, but also by being a jerk. In other words, a perfect saint.

Love Your Library

Ah, small town library love. I refer, of course, to Friend Memorial Public Library, my little town's beating heart. Katharine and E.B. White adopted it when they moved here in the late 1930s and turned it into a tiny gem that continues to gleam today.

Big doings the next couple of weeks, and even those reading From Away can participate.

In the photo, librarian/restaurateur Nancy Randall and Library Director Stephanie Atwater are making valentines for posting around the library honoring donors' loved ones. ($5 a pop. Cheaper than chocolate!)

But more to the point, there's a silent auction of all sorts of goodies, half of them available on line. The items up for bid are like a snapshot of what it's like to live around here, put into perspective here by auction co-chair Pat Fowler:

A good public library is one of the most basic elements of a good community. What is happening this month at Friend Memorial Library in the small town of Brooklin shows this clearly. It’s one of the most active libraries in the state for communities under 1,000 population, circulating more items than any other and offering a wide range of programs and services. But such a resource must be funded, and Friend Memorial Library depends on its community as it serves it. Some funding comes from the Town, some from the library’s endowment, some from annual donations. And about ten percent of the library’s budget comes from one annual event: the Love Your Library Celebration around Valentine’s Day.

Over the past couple of weeks donations have been pouring into the library, starting with personal donations of $5 or more, which are represented by handmade valentines hanging in the library all this month. Local people have also contributed more than 160 articles to the library’s two concurrent auctions—one online www.biddingforgood.com/friendml and the other a silent auction in the library itself. Bidding at both auctions will continue until February 13th.

In addition to a personal tour of the farm where Charlotte’s Web was written by E. B. White, there are day sails (with yummy foods) on such boats as the trawler Ellie Belle, the Concordia Starlight, and the motorsailer Burma. There is an exquisite doll created by Pamela Johnson, completely hand-made from delicate antique fabrics, wool from Pam’s sheep, tiny jet buttons, even including hand-knit mittens and stockings and a basket handwoven from dainty cranberry vines. Bidders can vie for a cocktail party with appetizers by Diane Bianco, or for barbecue treats with music supplied by the Brooklin Town Band—or a boules picnic with expert coach Andre Strong and a French picnic. There is elegant jewelry by local craftspeople: beadwork by Sihaya Hopkins at Blossom Studio and Julie Reed at The Big Sheep, handstrung gemstones from Elaine Daniels, an enameled pendant by Dottie Hayes, sterling earrings by Jeanette Ware. And wearable art: a felted hat by Sue Wright, a delicate hand knit shawl of silk and merino yarns, or a child’s 4th of July sweater (with blue sailboats on a red background) knit by Pam Steele. Prefer to do it yourself? Bid on hand-dyed yard from String Theory, knitting lessons from Sue Wright, a class in rug hooking with Ken Carpenter.

There are plenty of smaller, very practical items: an oil change at Affordable Performance Auto, 50 gallons of heating oil, a half cord of stovewood delivered to your door, 3 hours of housecleaning, a haircut at Verde, chair caning for the broken seat in that kitchen chair of your grandmother’s. Bidders can try for a day or a week of child care at Cheryl Roy’s, or a day of dog care at Creature Camp.

Is your garden your passion? Consider a dozen perennial plants, or a new bed of hostas or dalilies, or a consultation with Julie Wang of Blue Poppy Gardens, or 3 hours of garden work with Holbrook Williams, land management consultation by Cathy Rees at Arbutus Ecological Services, a certificate from Mainescape. Hungry? Bid on chocolates from Black Dinah, a cooking class with Terence Janericco, cheese platter from Bucks Harbor Market, blueberries and pork chops, homemade apple pies (or make the pie yourself using a polished stone pastry board from The Granite Shop), breads by Brooklin Bread Company, clams, oysters, lobsters, a share in Penobscot East Resource Center’s shrimp fishery.

Enjoy tickets to a production by the New Surry Theater, concerts at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Festival, or a meal at a local restaurant. Many local merchants have donated gift certificates: The Cave, Brooklin General Store, The Lookout, etc.

According to Library Director Stephanie Atwater, several dozen people are working on this event, 160 donated to the auction, and more than 200 so far donating money for valentines. “That’s pretty amazing for a town of about 800 people,” she said.

Revising Magic

I love revision. Really. I do.

This time around I'm revising in a bit of a deadline crunch, but it's still wonderful.

Here's the thing: Drafting a novel is fun, but scary. In order to make myself do it, I have to set a minimum daily word count--I can't eat lunch until I have a thousand words, and if I can keep going after lunch, so much the better. If I didn't set rules, I'd stop the minute it got difficult, which would be one minute after I stopped reading yesterday's words and began thinking up today's.

Revising, on the other hand, offers the fun of drafting with almost none of the terror. You know where the story's going, because you've been there, and now it's time to get in there and fix all the details you wanted to fix all along but didn't because you wanted to get the drafting OVER WITH FOR GOD'S SAKE. You can play with character and dialogue and descriptions and make jokes and giggle and generally have a great time.

So, a week and a half in (and a week and a half to go), I've augmented a character, clarified a relationship, begun to establish clearer motives, and actually made headway on the Logic of Magic. Now I'm ready to start at page one and mush my way through, tinkering. It'll be a hoot and a half, and I can hardly wait for tomorrow morning.

IN OTHER NEWS: Shhh. *whispers* My desktop computer's dying. Anybody have a recommendation for a new one? I'm not a gamer, but I hate sluggishness. Probably shouldn't be a Mac, since my laptop's a Dell. What do we all think about Windows 7? Is it true it sometimes swears at Microsoft Word, and loads photographs at random? I won't be doing serious research until I finish my revision, which may mean I finish it on the laptop. Good thing I have a back-up, or I'd be sweating bullets right now. As it is, I'm backing up every which way and several times over.

Which reminds me. Time to email myself today's revision. Losing a day's revising to the ether would make everything a lot less fun, wouldn't it?

ALA, or a Look Back in Time

During the mad rush to revision (more on that later), I've been taking advantage of the rare ski conditions by heading out into the woods just before dusk. Today I stood out there on my skis, listened to the silence, and thought, "At this moment, no one in the world knows exactly where I am." A comforting thought in this age of cell phones and twitter.

Last weekend, I was in the opposite situation, especially on Saturday when I joined many thousands of librarians--and those who sell things to them (including publishers)--at the American Library Association's midwinter meeting in Boston. The midwinter ALA meeting normally is a business meeting with little attraction for authors (except the awards hoopla at the end), but this year the authors started what amounted to a fringe festival.

So it was that I mushed down last Friday, the 15th, to stay with my friend Larry and go to a dessert party at the Somerville apartment of Grace Lin, a fellow Inkie who was to become a Newbery Honor recipient three days later. (Woot!) That's the party at left. I got a photo of Grace but it didn't do her justice so I stole one of her author photos, taken by Alexandre Ferron.

The next day, I met my editor, Kathy Dawson, at ALA, which was at Boston's new convention center in South Boston, right down the MTA Orange Line from Cambridge. Kathy and I wandered around the publishers' booths a bit, I met some people at Penguin/Dial and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who had been just names to me before, and I began indulging in the greedy insanity that is ARC-collecting. (Visitors leave book conventions looking like looters.) (ARC stands for Advance Review Copy--a paperback version of the hardcover.) Fortunately, having experienced this phenomenon at the New England Booksellers trade show, I brought two cloth bags with me. Also fortunately, I stopped once they were full, and declined give-away bags that would have fed the frenzy. (I feel extremely virtuous about this, although other loo...er, convention visitors clearly thought I was a wimp.)

I met several fellow Inkies and friends for lunch (Legal Test Kitchens, highly recommended), among them Marissa Doyle and Nandini Bajpai. That's them (Marissa on the left), framing a poster of Inkie Leah Cypess's new book, MISTWOOD.

My other photos made everyone in them look like yetis, but Nandini had better success (as well as the sense to ask somebody else to take the group shots) so here's a link to hers. You'll see that she also took photos at the day's big author event, theKid-lit Tweet Up organized by Mitali Perkins and Deb Sloan. Several hundred kids' book authors, all of them with Twitter accounts, showed up to hobnob and connect names with faces. It was very, very entertaining and instructive. All hail Mitali and Deb.

I'm out of time and this post is getting too long. So I'll write about revision (argh!) tomorrow, when I'm not in the snowy woods pretending I don't exist.

P.S. I suppose I should mention that THE UNNAMEABLES made the ALA/YALSA's final Best Books for Young Adults list. I'm pumped, and they even gave my name a much-needed extra consonant.

And I was doing so well...

There's one New Year's resolution down the drain. I was determined to blog at least twice a week, and now it's been a week since the last entry.

Here's the problem: Fed Ex, which lost my original edited manuscript, last Wednesday delivered the copy my editor Kathy Dawson sent out post-haste once Penguin returned from its holiday break. So I've been immersed in that, getting ready to talk to Kathy today about some of the finer points. (As well as the grosser ones, I guess.)

I have magic problems. Not magical problems, which wish themselves away, but problems with the logic of the magic in SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS. I have, as usual, made everything way too complex. It's all better than it was, but there's considerable tweaking to be done.

And this is a first: Kathy and I couldn't get the conversation finished in an hour, so we reconvene tomorrow at 9. In the meantime, I have stuff to do for the Brooklin Youth Corps and the library auction, for which I'm doing publicity. Whine, whine, whine.

Attitude adjustment: I get to sit around messing with words all day! I spend entire days in a fantasy world, and people do not hit me on the back of the hand with a ruler when I do so! I am a lucky, lucky woman!

Wish the friggin' magic would solve itself, though.

January Book Review

Click icon for more
book review blogs
@Barrie Summy

This is the twelfth edition of The Book Review Club -- I haven't been able to participate each month, mostly because of surgery, but I still think it's pretty cool. Be sure to click on the icon above to find more reviews.

Her Fearful Symmetry
By Audrey Niffenegger
Scribner, 2009

It’s hard to write about HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY without giving too much away. I’ll say only this: IF a vibrant, intelligent dead woman were to miss her life enough to haunt her own flat, she’d be bored to insanity. And then what?

I haven’t read Audrey Niffenegger’s blockbuster first book, THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, but I’m now determined to do so. Although her second book has some problems, the situations and characters are compelling to the point of mania. I got it for Christmas and finished it two days later despite competing seasonal events.

Niffenegger is particularly skilled at characters who are a couple of bubbles off plumb, and you have to be careful about that stuff. Niffenegger is careful, creating a cast of characters who demand our interest and compassion at the same time as they flirt with our disquiet. With one major exception toward the end, the thoughts we share with these troubled folks make perfect sense.

A character in its own right is Highgate Cemetery, famed resting place for the likes of Karl Marx, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliot. On stage throughout the novel, the graveyard is a reminder that death comes to us all and it’s up to us to figure out how we’ll deal with it.

Noted book dealer Elspeth Noblin sets the stage by dying in a London hospital on page one. On the page two we see her younger lover, Robert, crawling into bed with her body—this man, we conclude, will not let go easily.

Elspeth has left her fortune and her expensive London flat—next door to Highgate Cemetery—to the twin daughters of her own identical twin, who is estranged and living in the U.S. The conditions of the bequest are that the twins must move to London and live in the flat for a year before selling it, and their parents are not allowed in. Robert, who lives downstairs, is instructed to remove Elspeth’s diaries from the flat, although he’s invited to read them.

At first, Robert can’t bear to read the diaries. (When he finally does, late in the book, revelations occur) As he moves through Elspeth’s flat, getting it ready for the younger twins, Robert keeps feeling wisps of touches, is convinced things have moved from where he left them. Could this be Elspeth, or is he going nuts? His friends know it’s the latter, and he’s pretty sure they’re right.

Enter Julia and Valentina, the younger twins. They are “mirror twins,” superficially identical but opposite: one is right-handed, the other left-handed; a mole that’s on the right in one is on the left in the other. Even Valentina’s internal organs are reversed from normal. Like their mother and her twin, they are oddly beautiful—tiny, pale, blonde, skinny, dressed alike in fetching but creative get-ups—and excessively close. Julia makes the decisions for the two of them, but fragile, asthmatic Valentina is the one everyone likes. Julia resents that a little, as Valentina resents Julia’s control.

Moving into the flat, they make friends both with Robert and with Martin, the brilliant upstairs neighbor who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Robert and Valentina are attracted to each other; Julia tries to help Martin win back his health and his wife. The point of view shifts from one to another, often giving us more than one perspective on a single event. Niffenegger pulls this off with gorgeous clarity, never once puzzling us into withdrawing from the story.

And then there’s someone else’s point of view, expressed so thoughtfully that you know just what it would be like to … but I’m not going to say what.

I had reservations about a couple of the book’s plot points, which didn’t seem to have enough character support. The major example is Valentina’s heroic effort to wrest herself from Julia’s loving control: She has ample motivation for drastic action, but not quite enough to justify the harebrained (and admittedly delicious) plan she ends up concocting. This could be viewed as a serious flaw in the book, but it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment one bit. I simply filed the problem away to consider at leisure when I wasn’t having such a good time.

On to THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE. Without the ghost of a delay.

Welcome, 2010

OK, I utterly and completely swear that this is the last picture I'll post of the lights on my maple tree. Until next December, anyway. But aren't they gorgeous? I under-exposed the shot to bring out their full magnificence. Not sure that blue tinge would be there under normal shooting conditions.

Anyway, it's now this weird year, 2010. Fun to type, but it won't be as much fun to write as 2009, which had a wonderful, swoopy quality.

We stayed quietly at home last night, relaxing after what seemed like one holiday event after another, although I suspect to someone else our High Times would feel a lot like boredom. We're both looking forward to getting back to serious work. Or at least I will be once my missing manuscript arrives (the one "overnighted" from NYC on December 21)--I suspect that may mean my editor sending me a new copy. I've been doing some useful background work while waiting for it, wrote a scene I know I'll need, resolved some philosophical issues ... but am seriously (really!) looking forward to the full glory of the revision ahead of me.

And it's supposed to snow like bejesus the next two days, which delights me because I may finally venture out on skis. I'm trying to persuade Rob that anything over a foot means we call someone to plow rather than snow-scooping it ourselves, but no headway so far.

Here, as an alternative to another maple tree lights photo, is a short film my friend Larry found on YouTube. Happy New Year!