Sex on the Moon

We often ooh and ahh over novels that ring so true we can't believe they're fiction. The characters are so perfect, the (often) period is rendered just so, and we get caught up in everything that happens. That's as close to non-fiction as a lot of readers get. But, for all our admiration of these hyper-realistic novels, we rarely talk about the non-fiction that reads like fiction – stories so crazy with such a strange cast of characters that we think it must be made up. Of course, it isn't (usually, anyway), and that just seems to heighten how surreal the story it. Sex on the Moon, Ben Mezrich's latest non-fiction thriller, is just like that.

On the surface, Sex on the Moon is the story of a heist, specifically, the theft of a 600-pound safe filled with moon rocks from NASA. But, because that crime is so huge and so ridiculous, as much as this is a book that came about because of the crime, it is really the story of the man who committed it. Thad Roberts was a co-op student at NASA on his third of three tours when he carried out the audacious plan he'd been formulating in his head for months. He was on his way to becoming an astronaut – his dream – and he decided to steal from NASA. For a smart guy, Thad spends a lot of the book being incredibly stupid.

But we should back-up, as Mezrich does, and look at who Thad is. To be honest, I spent the majority of the book really frustrated by him. Thad is a strong central character, and it's clear that Mezrich had lots of access to him while he was putting the book together, but he's a hard guy to like. Early in the book we learn that Thad has been disowned by his Mormon parents for having premarital sex with his girlfriend, who he later marries. They're a very young couple and without financial support from home, Thad ends up dropping out of college for a while to help make ends meet. It's unfulfilling, though, and when he decides to go back to school and is casting around for a goal, he settles on astronaut.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Maybe it's because I didn't grow up going to church, but religion in books fascinates me. I especially like the retelling of Bible stories, but again, I'm not sure why. It may be that I enjoy the subversiveness of taking something that is so well known, and hold so much meaning for so many people, and changing the context. Messing with those stories that are a not insubstantial part of our society's foundation seems almost dangerous in a strange way. Dangerous and brave – and important. In A History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes starts with Noah's Arc and then tries to move forward, but is almost inevitably sucked back into that defining motif of danger, death, and large passenger ships.

It's hard to know quite how to classify A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. On the one hand, it works quite well as a short story cycle, with stories that work independently of one another, but when read together have an added oomph. It's also sort of like a book of essays, filled with philosophy, literary criticism and discussions of art. I'm not sure it's even uniformly fictional. There are, however, 10 and a half chapters – the "half chapter" is inserted between Chapters 8 and 9 – as the title suggests, so if you read chapter by chapter, maybe it doesn't really matter how you define it.

The book opens up with "The Stowaway" a story about an impostor to Noah's Ark. The cheeky little narrator is quite critical of the choices Noah makes with regards to which animals will be saved. Rather like a primitive form a eugenics, Noah simply decides not to allow any undesirable or pesky creature aboard. And he's rather a brute about it. But he doesn't check quite carefully enough, and a family of woodworms – of which the narrator is proudly a part – manage to sneak on board to ride out the deluge in relative peace. The woodworm actually manages to make its way into most of the chapters, bringing with it a suggestion of hidden decay.

Barnes then moves on to a chapter about terrorists who take over a cruise ship. He is an author unafraid to shock his audience, and the tension he builds in this chapter is unreal. The stakes become so high, so quickly, that you don't even notice you've been placed on a modern-day ark. Here, though, everything is inverted. The stowaway is not a quiet, unassuming insect, but an imminently threatening and truly undesirably presence. Similarly, the person in charge is not the tyrannical Noah of the previous story, but a cruise director who is just as unsure as the passengers. History is doomed to repeat itself, Barnes seems to be saying, but see how it changes things up just slightly?

This sort of wink to the absurdity of things gives the book a kind of strange humour, or at least throws you off kilter just enough to appreciate that Barnes is arming you with perspectives that will help you later, when you reach New Heaven, or wherever else. But absurdity and irony, as fun as they are, are useless tools unless you can escape them. Enter the half chapter. Just when Barnes has you so completely confused as to his purpose, he interrupts his own history to tell you about love, about his sleeping wife. And it doesn't even matter, really, whether it's the real Julian Barnes or the fictional one talking, because what he is saying is that there's a reason all the rest of it matters. There's a reason we should examine past events and find the woodworms before their damage is irreparable, and that reason is love. Oh, it sounds ridiculous and cliché here, but that half chapter is perfectly timed for maximum effect, and it is stunning.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is strange and unexpected and the chronology of events it presents – it is "a history," after all – is very unlikely, but it is also a book that asks you to think about things. It doesn't force you to, though; if you want to simply read each chapter and not delve more deeply into what is going on, you can do that. But, if you want to think about it, Barnes has offered up a book that will reward you for it. Because as weird and, sometimes, disorienting as this book is, it has something really interesting to say. And, best of all, it has an interesting way to say it.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
by Julian Barnes
First published in 1989 (cover image shown from Vintage International edition)

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Sometimes when I'm reading I don't want to think about the bigger picture of the book, I just want to be plunged into the life and emotions of one character and then spend the day there. It's escapism in its purest form, because to experience the intensity of emotions rolling around in someone – fictional or no, because biographies can be great for this too – is a kind of catharsis rarely available to us; rather than reliving moments from our own life, we can simply experience moments from theirs. Perhaps the best novel for this kind of immersion is Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. 

Written entirely in prose poetry, Smart's novel tells a fictionalized account of her real-life love affair with the English, married poet George Barker, with whom she had four children (for the purposes of scale, he had fifteen children, with various women). In the novel, the unnamed narrator is a young woman who falls in love with a married man and, in the short version, she becomes pregnant, has the child, but never sees him again except in her imagination – he, it seems, is institutionalized. It is a heartbreaking story, if a familiar one. What sets By Grand Central Station apart from the genre of cliché love-triangle narratives, though, is the voice at its centre.

Grief and anger and confusion and bliss and myriad other emotions bubble, not under the surface, but in force throughout this story. The narrator is written with such passion that her feelings read like the purest, most broken expressions of loss and love ever committed to the page. She is not a cliché character; she is a woman in love who has been decimated by it, rejected from society as an unwed mother. Smart's descriptions of her narrator are beautiful in their ability to place you in her position, wondering what will come next and unsure whether the fantasies are real life, what's yet to come, or devastating and impossible dreams. 

In the forward – and I recommend you pick up a copy of this book that has one – Brigid Brophy lays the novel bare. Her writing is perfectly matched to Smart's and the cadence and imagery that she sets up in her note prepares you to enter the encompassing world of Smart's prose poem. I rarely read forwards because I don't like to have the story spoiled, but Brophy has no desire to tell you what to think about By Grand Central Station; rather, she wants you to read it with your eyes open, so you can experience the story on two levels: that of the narrator, and that of Smart's own experiences.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is a novel in which it is not so much the story itself, but the way it is delivered that draws you in. Knowing the back story is almost a prerequisite to understanding the novel, because Smart doesn't waste her breath laying things out for you. This is not a step-by-step confessional, this is a rolling, turbulent and vivid account of the defining moments of this young woman's life. The story is, of course, present, but its details are not always clear. And that is maybe one of the defining things about grief, anger and love: our feelings are so raw and real that we cannot believe that everyone else isn't feeling them too.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
by Elizabeth Smart
First published in 1945 (cover image shown from Grafton Books edition)

The Penelopiad

There's something a little bit seductively dangerous about the retelling of a well-known, classic story. I'm not sure why that is – and maybe it's just me – but it just seems brave in a rebellious sort of way. Perhaps it's the author's apparent belief that they know better than the original author that intrigues me, I don't know. But there is something about the genre of retold stories that hooks me; it's as if I am compelled to read them. When done poorly, the retelling is typically dull, adding a new detail here and there without really advancing the story. But when done well, the retelling gives you insight into levels of the original story you probably hadn't even considered before. Obviously, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is an example of the latter (I say obviously because why else would I bother to write about it?). 

In The Penelopiad Atwood retells The Odyssey – Homer's epic about Odysseus' long journey to return home after the Trojan war – from the perspective of those left behind, namely, Odysseus' wife Penelope. This alone isn't an entirely original way to retell a story that is traditionally dominated by a man, but what makes Atwood's revision much more interesting is her inclusion of the maids. In the myth, upon Odysseus' return to Ithaca, he slaughters all the suitors who are after his wife and then hangs 12 of her maids. The suitors die for obvious reasons, but the maids' deaths are never properly explained, which is an injustice Atwood sets out to right.

The centre of the story, however, is Penelope. It is the story of her life – beginning before she met Odysseus – and it is told by her. Penelope tells her story from memory, because she has long-since died and become a resident of Hades, which allows her to include lots of little retrospective details. She frequently reminds her audience that she did not know then when she knows now, a position that allows her to refute and explain rumours that circulated about her. Penelope is a tart character and her voice is both sharp and soft, depending on what's called for and what part of her story she is telling. Most of her sharpness, though, is reserved for the other female characters who she perhaps felt threatened by – most especially her cousin Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships and took Odysseus away from home in the first place.

In between the slices of Penelope's story enter the maids. Atwood has set them up as a kind of Greek chorus, and their interjections are some of the spiciest parts of the story. The maids sing dirty jump-rope songs, they sing about their roles in the household, they take Odysseus to an imaginary modern-day court to charge him with murder. The maids are, in many ways, more of a counterpoint to Penelope's story than the original myth because they tell an alternate tale of life in Ithaca, waiting for Odysseus to come home.

The Penelopiad is so enjoyable, I think, because it doesn't try to retell us a story we already know. Rather, Atwood picks up characters that were previously side notes and gives them voices and back stories and life, all of which the original narrative failed to do. Is it an accident that these characters are female? No. But the story that Atwood tells her is a nuanced feminist portrayal in which there are complex characters and rivalries represented by both genders, which is sort of the goal really. The Penelopiad is a bit gossipy and a bit scandalous, but it also respects the realities of the myth it is rooted in, making it a generous and entertaining read.

The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood
First published in 2005 (cover image shown from Vintage Canada edition)

February

It's kind of amazing how much three days can change how we feel about a month. February always feels like it flies by, like it's so much shorter than every other month, but really, it's not that far removed from January. The real difference is that we expect February to make up for its shortness by cramming it full of other things. First there's Groundhog Day, then Valentine's, then Family Day (if you live in Ontario). It's a month filled with manufactured and relatively insincere holidays, but for some reason, having a calendar holiday in almost every week just serves to make the month go by more quickly. Unless, of course, February is an annual reminder of loss, of change, of bleak skies and dangerous storms. The Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, sank on Valentine's Day 1982; there were no survivors. For the families of the men who died, February suddenly became the month around which their year pivoted, mercifully short because of the emotional impact it smacked them with every year. In her novel February, Lisa Moore tells the story of Helen O'Mara, whose husband Cal died on the Ocean Ranger. Moore's characters are fictional, but her story, and the way it ebbs and flows around the events of Feb. 14, 1982, speak of very real lives.

Rather than taking a linear approach to the story, with the Ocean Ranger disaster the initial conflict or later apex, Moore roams through the lives of her characters. The novel's present is more or less now, and its real-time story line takes place over a little more than a year. Moving in and out of this straight and forward-moving plot line run all the lines of Helen's memory, as well as an extended aside about her son John. John doesn't live in St. John's, but after finding out that he is going to have a child with a woman he hardly knows, he decides to come home. His musings and late-night phone calls ground the novel in the present, reminding you that there is more to life – both his and his mother's – than their shared tragedy.

Helen is much less grounded in a day-to-day reality. That isn't to say that she spends all her time in bed crying – she left those days behind her long ago – but her narrative often floats around in time in a way that reminds you of how present the past is for her. Helen's memories of her children growing up, of her early days with Cal, of hearing about the Ocean Ranger, are vivid in their detail and sharp in their emotion. Her desperate need to recreate what happened, to understand the rig and how it worked, as a way to better understand how it could have sunk so quickly, is painful to read, but also understandably cathartic for her. If she can just understand what happened, if she can just picture what Cal was doing, then maybe she can find peace. But there were no survivors, so no one can tell her for sure. 

The way Moore links and builds Helen's memories allows her life to slowly form around you, as if she is someone you are really getting to know. People don't tell their life stories in a straightforward way, they let out big moments and easy details first, not sharing the smaller, more personal, less obviously consequential pieces until later. In some ways, Helen's grief is easier to focus on and talk about then the happy memories below it, or the chance for happiness now. Being sad in the face of great tragedy is much less awkward and embarrassing than sharing the happy, personal memories you have of your dead husband. Reading February is about getting to know Helen by grieving with her. You miss Cal the way she does because of the way she remembers him; as a reader, you regret that you couldn't have met him before his death.

But slowly, Helen's present day begins out win out over her memories. Little by little, her daily routine becomes the more prominent storyline, as if Moore is subtly hinting at the way even people who live in their memories can be pulled back into real life. Moore does this without resorting to cliché moments; there is no eureka moment for Helen, no one action that spurs her toward actively participating in her own life. Rather, she is drawn out. She doesn't say goodbye to Cal exactly, but she allows him to recede in favour of someone new. 

February is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. The cadence of the language, and the way the word choice reflects the description not just in tangible accuracy but in tone makes for a novel that is greatly coloured by the emotions of the characters. Dialogue flows in and out of description and memory and the consistency of Helen's voice is strangely comforting. February is as much about tone as it is plot, and the way Moore has combined the two makes for a story that is, at times quite breathtaking. If I could spend every month with Moore, I surely would.

February
by Lisa Moore
First published in 2009 (cover image show from House of Anansi Press edition)

The Golden Mean

For pretty much every level of education, December is a busy month: there are final exams, major projects, term papers – lots of things come due at the end of the year. In the haste to calculate marks and study for exams, the whole goal of education (learning) can get pushed aside in favour of cramming. Aristotle would, I think, be appalled. His philosophy of education, as laid out in Annabel Lyon's novel The Golden Mean, was that it should never end, and if anything represents a full-stop in the classroom, it's a final exam.

In philosophical terms, the Golden Mean was Aristotle's attempt to create and define a balance between extremes. The mean is golden because it represnts the middle point best suited to the situation, not the mathematical centre of a problem; basically, it recognizes that not all situations require a meet-in-the-middle solution. This philosophy encompassed much of what Aristotle did, as a man, a teacher and a philosopher and Lyon's novel gathers that and, rather than stating what the golden mean is, infuses it into all the layers of her novel. And you might think a story that avoids the extremes wouldn't be all that interesting, but Lyon takes care of that too.

Lyon's Aristotle is based on what must have been years of research, but by making him the narrator, she gets around the trap some writers fall into of trying to display their research on the page. Aristotle sees things and thinks about things and remembers things, and as he tells the reader about them, Lyon is able to couch her material in character-building details that teach the reader about some relevant Aristotelian details, all the while expanding on her fiction.

Like all good historical fiction, The Golden Mean centers around real events, namely the time Aristotle spent as the tutor for a boy who would grow up to be Alexander the Great. Aristotle also spends time with Alexander's older, severely disabled brother, drawing him out of his filthy conditions and teaching him to ride a horse, which gives him great and sudden joy. Education and the the process and importance of learning are through lines in this novel, which is one part present day in Macedon and one part Aristotle's memories of his own childhood education. Life is about learning, Lyon's Aristotle seems to be saying at every turn, you can never really know it all.

There are also a lot of really compelling details about Aristotle's home life and his marriage, which bring out some fascinating bedroom scenes. Sexuality and marriage are facets of Aristotle's life that I had never really thought about (not that I think about Aristotle all that often), but Lyon's rendering of his whole life – both inside and out of the classroom and the home – make him feel like a proper character and not just a historical name. 

And really, Aristotle is a full character, and The Golden Mean is an incredibly seamless novel, which makes you wonder where research ends and fiction begins. The city of Pella is so fully realized that you can almost feel the grime from the dusty roads. The Golden Mean is as escapist as it is educational, a combination it seems Aristotle might approve of.

The Golden Mean
by Annabel Lyon
First published in 2009 (cover image shown from Random House edition)

The Sword in the Stone

Sometimes it just works out that you discover a great book because of a movie, and not the other way around. That is the case with T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, which first made itself known to me (and, I'm sure many other people) through the Disney movie of the same name. But as good as that movie is (I love it as a kid), the book far surpasses it.

Generally, the story goes like this. Wart lives in Sir Ector's castle in the very ancient times of England when there were still valiant knights and dragons to fight and wizards and witches and Robin Hood (excuse me, Robin Wood – White clears history's name fumble quite nicely). Wart is not Sir Ector's son, though, that honour falls to Kay who is a couple of years older and despite all of his advantages, at least eight times more insecure. Anyway, Wart goes into the Forest Sauvage (old England has some suspiciously French names in White, which I suspect is a nod to the original Morte d'Arthur) and, after spending a rather harrowing night in the wild trying to retrieve a lost hawk, he stumbles upon Merlyn.

Of course, Merlyn knew he was coming because he ages backwards and because he's a magician. Wart and Merlyn head back to the castle and Merlyn becomes the boys' tutor. And, sure, he teaches them both all sorts of important things, but really he saves the best – and most cryptic – lessons for Wart. Merlyn, of course, knows that Wart is going to become King Arthur (his real name being Arthur) and he goes about preparing him for the job by turning him into various animals and letting him learn indirect lessons about valour and bravery and history.

The lessons are one of my favourite parts of the book. I like the way White has imagined the the different social codes and ingrained memories of the various animals. I also like that Wart isn't a natural as any of them. He has to learn to swim like a fish; he has to be taught how to fly; he is conscious of the way the shape of his body changes and White describes it all in a way that makes you think of how weird it would be to suddenly become a snake (or whatever). 

My other favourite part are the anachronisms. The story is full of them – because Merlyn a) ages backwards, and b) is not always very good at his spells, which means sometimes bowler hats end up in the 12th century – and the characters' reactions are perfect. Usually, they don't even notice because whatever is being mentioned or conjured is so foreign that they can't even begin to understand it. Merlyn, though, goes into fits over it, which is hilarious. Additionally, because the book was written in the '30s (prior to the outbreak of WWII), a lot of the anachronisms now seem really old fashioned, which adds another level of humour to the references.

Of all this, though, I'm not sure how much younger readers pick up. There are certainly points that are obviously funny and meant to make kids laugh, but there's a lot going on that would be so far over their heads that it can only have been written for their parents. It's a pretty quick read – certainly as face-paced as any thriller – and it's the sort of perfectly engaging book to bring on a picnic or something, during which you'll chuckle about something and the person you're with will want to know what's going on, so you'll have to explain to them something about a giant, at which point you'll realize that White has cleverly inserted a Hitler-Mussolini figure into the story who gets defeated before he does any real damage, and you'll wish that were really the case. And that's when it will strike you that, for all the lightness and the adventure, White's retelling of King Arthur's coming-of-age is also about England itself.

It's quite ingenious, really, how he buries that metaphor. And it works perfectly, elevating a children's story into something much greater and, in some ways, much sadder – but always gripping and almost always hilarious.

The Sword in the Stone
by T.H. White
First published in 1938 (cover image shown from Laurel Leaf edition)

Mister Pip

When I decided to start a book blog, I wanted to write about the books that worm their way into your everyday life. Of all the books I've read, Lloyd Jones novel Mister Pip might demonstrate that side of literature – the side that is all-encompassing, that draws you in and makes you feel like you know the characters as if you are a part of their world as much they've become a part of yours – better than anything I've ever read.

Mister Pip is set on a small island in the South Pacific in the early '90s. The island, which used to be home to a major mining operation, has fallen into a kind of civil war, with the "red skins" (an army from an undisclosed country) fighting the rebels. Jones focuses his story on one village on the island, which sounds pretty primitive in terms of its amenities (a collection of houses and a school building) but has enough to keep the residents happy.

When the story opens, the school has just been closed. Our narrator, Matilda (about 11 at the beginning of the story) is not lamenting this fact. In fact, she enjoys the freedom. So when her mum tells her that Mr. Watts - also known to the villagers as Pop Eye - the only white man in the town, is going to start teaching, she isn't sure what to expect. Mr. Watts isn't particularly qualified to be a teacher, so rather than try to give them lessons in math and science, he reads them Charles' Dickens Great Expectations. Because the story takes place in a world that the children have never experienced, Mr. Watts teaches them how to use their imagination. He asks them to close their eyes and say their name, just in their head. No one else can say your name like that, he tells them, explaining that Dickens (Mr. Dickens to all concerned here) did that until he could find Pip's voice and that they can do that to see England.

Mr. Watts doles out the novel one chapter each day. To fill in lesson time, he invites the mothers and grandmothers of the students to come in and tell them about things they know. One woman comes in to talk to the children about the colour blue; another recites recipes; Matilda's mother, who does not approve of Great Expectations, nor her daughter's infatuation with Pip, is a frequent visitor to the class. Dolores and Matilda have a strained relationship, and Dolores blames Mr. Watts for that. Matilda would rather hear about Pip than Jesus, and Dolores is a religious woman who resents Mr. Watts influence over her daughter.

After Mr. Watts reads the book to the class once, he goes back to the beginning and reads it to them again. The class reads it all the way through more than three times before disaster strikes.

The red skin army descend on the village. They make everyone line up and give their names. At first, they seem not so bad. But then a soldier discovers Matilda's shrine to Pip on the beach. Who is Pip, the army commander demands. Where are you hiding Pip? The children explain that Pip belongs to Mr. Dickens and Mr. Watts (who the army now think is Mr. Dickens) explains that Pip is a character in a book. But when Matilda runs to the school building to retrieve the book and clear up the confusion, it isn't there. So, in retaliation, the army ransacks all the homes in the village and burn everyone's possessions. Then they leave, saying they will be back and Pip had better be there.

In the meantime, Mr. Watts tries to keep moral up among the students. He tells them that if they can't read the book, they will have to recreate it through memory. He charges the children that they are responsible for making sure Dickens' masterpiece isn't forgotten. Of course, when the army returns, there is no Pip. So the army burns down their homes. And, without giving everything away, things go from bad to worse for the villagers.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mister Pip is how Jones puts you in exactly the same place as the villagers. Like them, and especially like Matilda and the other children, you know the situation on the island isn't good, but you have no concept of how bad it is. Like the children, you are shielded from reality by their fixation on Great Expectations. As the book moves farther and farther from their lives, your view on the violence occurring around them broadens. I don't want to give everything away, but the last 50 or so pages are shocking.

I thought I was reading Mister Pip because I needed a lighter book. I was wrong. Jones' story is incredibly compelling and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The characters are wonderfully described and as a storyteller, Jones has serious guts. He isn't afraid to tell a story that might not be comfortable, but is nonetheless stunning. And, if you ever needed to be reminded of the power of literature, this book will do that for you.

Bluebeard, Revisited

When I was a kid (and I guess now too), my parents were big supporters of books. Pretty much any kind of book I wanted to read or be read, they were happy with, although I'm sure they steered my taste a little. At some point, though (I might have been 5), I got a box-set of Brothers Grimm fairy tales - there were four soft-cover illustrated books, I think, each with four stories in them. And like any kid who grew up with books instead of TV, I loved them. And so did my parents. Well, except the story of Bluebeard, the misogynist who murdered his wives and then kept their bodies stacked in a secret room. In the only act of censorship I have ever encountered on the part of my parents, my dad was so horrified by the story of Bluebeard that he threw that book into the recycle box and refused to even mention what the story was about for years.

So, although I had never actually read the story of Bluebeard, it took on this weird, mythic quality and I became very curious about it. Four years ago, I discovered (through a class) Angela Carter's book The Bloody Chamber. It's a book of short stories that reworks classic fairy tales (such as Little Read Riding Hood, Puss-in-Boots, Beauty and the Beast, etc.) so that the female lead is the one with the agency. Carter takes her heroines and, rather than making them a vessel through which the story and moral develop, makes them proper characters who think, feel, live, etc. The first story in this book, which is by far the longest, is called "The Bloody Chamber" and it's about Bluebeard.

Upon reading the story, I realized a couple of things. First, that the original Bluebeard fairy tale was incredibly violent; and second, that Bluebeard was essentially a psychopathic serial killer who tricked his wives into "allowing" themselves to be murdered. If you aren't familiar with the whole story (as I was not) it plays out like this:

Bluebeard marries some pretty young thing and takes her home to his castle. Things are good for a while and then Bluebeard has to go away (on business? it's never really explained) so he gives her his giant ring of keys and says that she can go into any room in the castle she wants, except the one this specific little key opens. Naturally, her curiosity is piqued and after a couple of days she decides to see what's in that room (he'll never know, right?). Well, in that room are all his previous wives, dead and hanging up. She's disgusted and terrified (naturally), and just as she tries to leave, he returns and kills her. That's the story, in a nutshell, although there are variations on how he discovers she's found his secret wife-stash. I guess the moral is obey your husband or something.

Anyway, Carter was clearly as fascinated by this rather disgusting story as I was. In her version, though, she gives some backstory to the young wife, as well as incredible description and detail about her short life in the castle. Carter's Bluebeard also defies the original story. He does not appear to be a viscous, hate-filled monster, despite the many violent and tortuous murders he has committed. When he discovers his wife has entered his secret room (the key was damaged in the lock), he is upset, but not merciful. He tells her to go bathe, put on a white dress; her fate, he says, will be decapitation.

But she is saved. Not by his supposed grief (he truly is a psychopath), but by her mother. They had spoken on the phone the previous day and she had sensed that something was wrong (the moral of this story might be: never underestimate your mother). So she came to her daughter's rescue, killing Bluebeard before he could swing his sword down on his wife's pretty neck. Although the ending is quite violent, it is also a happy one, in its own way. Celia (the wife who lived) inherited Bluebeard's enormous fortune and she and her mother and her lover live quite comfortably in his castle.

I won't say that I wish I had been allowed to read Bluebeard as a kid, because it really is the stuff nightmares are made of. And, even if you convince yourself that it's just a story, all you have to do is turn on the news to discover that it's a little too close to some realities to be coddled away. As a man with three daughters, I'm not sure my dad could have done anything but throw the story away and hope it never became part of our consciousness. But it did, because horrible things have a way of creeping in. But "The Bloody Chamber" is a reasonable antidote, although the sex might be a little to vividly described for it to ever become a children's story.

Carter has a way of putting words together that makes certain descriptions stick with you. This can be both good and bad. But her real gift is that of a life to previously passive, unanimated characters. Call it what you want, but Carter does an excellent job of both preserving the original stories and turning them completely around, which makes this book both interesting to read once and almost hypnotic to reread.

The Bloody Chamber

by Angela Carter

First published in 1979 (cover image shown from Penguin edition)

Not Wanted on the Voyage

Repurposing Biblical stories into complex and well imagined works of fiction is, I think, much harder than its sister-genre of retelling fairy tales. Harder because there are probably a lot more people who know the Bible story you're working with, and the backlash-potential is huge. But harder also because Bible stories are more about the moral than the story itself, so the characters exist simply to carry the reader (or listener) toward the moral. When scholars talk about the characters of the various Bible stories, they describe their lives through family trees, not personal details. This means that when someone, such as Timothy Findley, sets out to re-imagine a Bible story, they must remain true-ish to a story that has almost no details. Nonetheless, Not Wanted on the Voyage is a novel that speaks back to its source-material in every sentence.

And somehow, Findley does that while using a cat as his narrator. Mottyl belongs to Mrs. Noyes, wife of Dr. Noyes, who is more Biblically known as Noah. Biblical stories may not give the reteller much, but they do give them a story arc, which Findlay stays more or less true to: the is a novel about Noah, who builds the arc and then sails it for 40 days and 40 nights in the rain. Findlay cover the basic story elements - the animals going on two-by-two, Noah's family and their new role as populators of the Earth, etc. - but it's all the extra detail and background, and the world he creates that makes this book unforgettable.

Using a cat's perspective is kind of genius in this way, because a cat really can be omniscient (or close to it). Mottyl also has a life outside of the family compound, and is free to come and go as she pleases. She is also the confidant of Mrs. Noyes (it's amazing what people will tell their pets), so all the family gossip she misses is relayed to the reader that way.

Throughout the book, Findley kind of responds to pieces of the Genesis story, quoting short passages at the beginnings of chapters and then agreeing or disagreeing, based on the way his story unfolds. "Not wanted on the voyage" was a baggage label, used by the arc's human passengers (Dr. and Mrs. Noyes, their sons and their sons' wives) to indicate which articles they would like to still have after the flood. But it might just as well have been a label for all the people and animals not included on the arc's manifest. Mottyl was not wanted on the voyage (by Dr. Noyes, of course) but she slips in anyway, as cats are wont to do, so the story continues after the rain has picked up the ship.

Dr. Noyes is a tyrant - a fact that Findley reveals to the reader more and more plainly as the story progresses. He is also incredibly old, almost as old as Yaweh, and a drunk (possibly reasons for his brutishness, but not enough to excuse him of his actions). He abuses his wife (when he manages, she is quite a formidable woman) and his daughters in law. He murders his wife's singing sheep in a fit of rage and fire. He rapes his daughter in law with a foreign object in a scene I could hardly stand to read (if I'd held the book any farther away from my face, I would have dropped it). In short, Findley is not particularly kind to Noah (not that this iteration of the man deserves much kindness).

One of the most interesting details that Findley brings to the table, though, is why the flood happened at all. In a slight twist on the "real reason," Yaweh comes to visit (literally, visit) Noah and admits that he's horribly depressed. The people, he says, are not treating him well. To cheer him up, Noah shows him a magic trick: He places a penny under a bottle and fills the bottle with water; because of refraction the penny seems to have disappeared. Yaweh is delighted; all his problems can be solved with water because water makes things disappear.

It's small scenes such as this that make Not Wanted on the Voyage more than a retelling or recreation of a Bible story. Findley's attention to motives and consequences make the characters more than archetypes or simple names on the page. And even though you know the story line and how the tale will end, Findley's novel makes you doubt what you remember and forces you to re-experience the story through his, and Mottyl's, eyes.

Not Wanted on the Voyage

by Timothy Findley

First published in 1984 (cover image shown from Penguin Modern Classics edition)

Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

It's almost a cliché to describe someone's prose as beautiful, but I've encountered very few author's for whom the description is more apt than Sena Jeter Naslund. Her writing is lyrical and clear and all of her descriptions seem rimmed with a kind of golden light (for reasons I have yet to figure out). Her novel Ahab's Wife is the perfect vehicle for such an alluring style.

Naslund built Una, the titular wife, around an almost throw-away reference made in Herman Melville's Moby Dick in which Captain Ahab laments leaving his "girl wife" only a day after their wedding. And that's the only description Naslund had to work with when she created Una, one of my favourite literary women.

The story starts in rural Kentucky (well, the story really starts in the middle, explaining Una and Ahab's relationship, but then it moves back to the beginning). Una is an only child, named for Spencer's The Faerie Queene. Una is a pretty good kid, but her father is a religious extremist and disapproves of many things his young daughter says or does. Eventually, after a bad beating, Una is sent to live with her mother's sister and her family, who operate a lighthouse on the east coast.

After the dark woods and her oppressive father, Una finds life on the rocky lighthouse island pretty freeing. She plays with the goats and her little cousin Frannie and, despite initial reservations, she starts climbing the lighthouse tower. The steep an winding staircase exhausts her at first, but she works at it and eventually can run up and down it with ease. At the top, she trains her eyes to see ships, glaring into the sun and stretching her sights far out to sea.

One day, she spots a small boat, which eventually makes harbour on the little island. The occupants, two young men named Kit and Giles, become regular visitors to the little island and soon become good friends of Una and Frannie's. Then one day Kit and Giles announce that they are joining the crew of a whaling ship and probably won't be able to visit for a while. Una, longing for a little adventure (she's grown up on the island and now finds it a bit small), runs away during one of her aunt's visits to town and joins the crew of the same ship as a cabin boy, her job confirmed when she climbs the mast in he harbour and spots a whale.

She soon becomes friends with the captain's son, along for the journey to learn his father's trade, and eventually makes herself known to Kit and Giles, who are horrified at first but come to appreciate her presence. But the fun can't last forever, and after they've harvested a few whales, giving chase to another ends in the ship being stove and Una, Kit, Giles, the captain and his son and various other crew members finding themselves adrift in a lifeboat. Naslund doesn't shy away from unpleasant details or uncomfortable realities, and the cannibalism that keeps Una, Kit and Giles alive long enough to land on Ahab's ship is slowly revealed in painful detail.

But Giles cannot live with what he did to save himself, and he quietly commits suicide by falling from the rigging. And so there is just Kit and Una, who get married in their grief, despite the fact that Kit is already starting to lose his mind. Ahab marries them on his ship and when the Pequod arrives back in the Nantucket harbour, Una and Kit disembark to find his family (who live there) and set up house. But Kit is violent and crazed. He blames Una for his life and Giles' death. He is abusive and unpredictable, and then he is gone. Kit runs off, and although he survives he sends word that he will never return, leaving Una a widow whose husband is still alive.

And then there is Ahab, perfectly written into the story. And even though Naslund tells you in the title that Una and Ahab will be married, it's almost a surprise when it happens. But it does, of course, in the most surprising and natural way. But Ahab is captain of the Pequod and he isn't famous for his obsession for nothing. He leaves Una the day after their wedding and is gone for well over a year. But Naslund keeps him in the story, either through his musings or letters, or Una's thoughts of him, which run deep. Their marriage is real, and it's so vivid that it exists almost as another character in the novel.

She becomes pregnant and decides to return to her mother in Kentucky to have the baby. There, she loses both in a horrible snowstorm, but gains the friendship of a runaway slave, who she helps find freedom. Eventually, after Ahab's return and subsequent departure, Una does have a child, a son she names Justice. And although Ahab dies chasing the white whale (Naslund can't change the original script), she does give Una a kind of happiness in the end, like a soft bed at the end of a hard day's work.

In Ahab's Wife, Naslund gives you the life of a woman, from beginning to middle age. It isn't always a pretty or a happy life, but it's a life you want to inhabit anyway. Una is a remarkable invention, almost more so because everything about her story is so unaffected. As leading ladies go, she is one you will want to revisit and obsess over just as much as Ahab did.

Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

First published in 1999 by William Morrow & Co. Inc. (Cover image shown from HarperCollins edition)

Wicked

For a while there, it seemed like every few years someone would come out with a series of books retelling fairy tales. There were politically correct retellings and modern day versions and the genre had become pretty stale by the time Gregory Maguire came out with Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. He has retold other stories as well (Cinderella and Snow White, for example), but what made Wicked stand out was that he didn't simply retell L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, he created an entirely new world in which to tell an intersecting story.

Before Elphaba (every witch has a name, after all) is even born, the picture Maguire paints of Munchkinland is stark. The quarter of Oz (the nation's eastern chunk) is undergoing serious religious upheaval, and the witch is born in the middle of it, on the night her unionist minister father must address the growing mob. As if that weren't enough, she is born green, with fierce little teeth and a complete aversion to water. Given the circumstances, it's amazing Elphaba was permitted to grow up at all.

But she does, and as she gets older and experiences more of life and the different ways of life in Oz, Maguire unfolds the world he has created. And Maguire's Oz is not the tra-la-la world of the movie, or even the slightly menacing world of the original story. Rather, Maguire's Oz is a political one, filled with intrigues, poverty, boarding school and creeping Nazi-like public reforms. The Yellow Brick Road, for example, is not a merry trail to skip along through fertile Munchkinland fields, but a road built to colonize Oz and keep the various districts (Munchkinland, Quadling Country, the Vinkus and Gillikin) anchored to the Emerald City, the Wizard's seat and the hub of the country.

Elphaba hate the Wizard and is policies of marginalization and assimilation, so she leaves school before graduating and goes underground as an activist and member of the resistance movement in the Emerald City. There, despite her efforts at anonymity (not so easy when you have green skin), she is discovered by Fiyero, a Vinkus prince and former classmate. They have a love affair, but her resistance work gets him killed and the shock of it drives her to into the cloistered safety of religion, which she had previously eschewed.

After several years later she emerges with the idea to visit Fiyero's homeland in the Vinkus (the wild west of Oz) and explain things to his wife Sarima. But when Elphaba arrives, looking every inch a witch by this point despite not being particularly magical, Sarima doesn't want to hear about Fiyero's death and forbids her to speak of it. And then winter rolls in and Elphaba is stuck in the castle at Kiamo Ko. But she isn't bored. She discovers a magical text and begins working to combine her interest in life sciences with the practical necessity of magic (if she looks like a witch, she may as well be one).

It's along this point that Maguire's story catches up with Baum's. Elphaba makes an enemy of the Wizard with her work at Kiamo Ko (where she stays on for several years) and, when Dorothy visits him asking to return home, he sends her to kill Elphaba, who has become rather notorious. And you know the rest, really.

What really makes Wicked such a memorable read isn't just the politics it's laced with, but the way in which Maguire forces you to consider a story you already know from another angle. And a rather compelling one, at that. Elphaba is not an immediately likeable character. But, as you become drawn into the world of Oz and begin to understand where she's coming from with her "evil" ways, she seems far less wicked. That's not to say that Maguire has stripped Elphaba of all wickedness. Instead, his world is devoid of those black and white categorizations that make up so many fairy tales, which forces you to think about what you're reading and whether the witch really was wicked.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

by Gregory Maguire

First published in 1995 by HarperCollins (cover image shown from 1996 edition)

Autobiography of Red

As nice as a straightforward novel can be, it’s always exciting when a writer takes a real risk with their work. Sometimes authors take a risk in with style or with subject, but rarely do they tackle them together. In Autobiography of Red, that’s just what Anne Carson does.

The title alone is different, but when I opened the book and discovered that Carson had written a novel in verse, I think I gasped a little in excitement. There are a lot of ways to tell a story and sometimes we get lazy about it, falling back on comfortable themes and images. Carson does not do that.

Autobiography of Red tells the story of Geryon, who is at once a young man and a red-winged monster. In Stesichoros (the Greek poet who wrote The Song of Geryon quite a long time ago)’s account, Geryon is the grandson of Medusa. His form is debated, but historians seem to agree that he was a monstrous warrior; he lived on the Mediterranean island Erytheia (the red island of the sunset), where he kept a herd of red cattle. Herakles, for his tenth labour, was required to go to Erytheia and obtain all of Geryon’s cattle. In the process of doing so, Heracles kills Geryon.

In Carson’s telling, Geryon and Heracles are much more complicated and also much harder to place. She starts her story (after a couple of appendices laying out Stesichoros’ mythology in a lovely way) with Geryon’s childhood. That was when he started his autobiography. Geryon starts collecting things secretly, forming his autobiography out of objects he finds and patterns he makes—but it’s a secret (except from his mum), because for Geryon, an autobiography is an interior thing, just for him.

When Geryon grows up a bit, he meets Herakles and falls in love. Where this story takes place, in both time and space, is a great mystery, but nonetheless the two leave Geryon’s world for the world of Herakles’. It’s around this time that Geryon takes up photography, adding the images to the ongoing project of constructing his autobiography.

The scenes between Geryon and Herakles are so precise they are almost vague—it’s as if the more detail Carson gives the less real the scenes appear, which makes for a very beautiful and disturbing story. Carson, taking full advantage of the emotional power and potential for suspense offered by verse, slowly unfolds their relationship, just as Geryon slowly and uncomfortably unfolds his wings for Herakles.

Of course, Herakles cannot stay a good guy forever, and he crushes Geryon when he leaves. Geryon, who has only ever been vulnerable to abuse and neglect, sets off to travel the world and eventually runs into Herakles again. But Herakles has moved on, and his new lover Ancash becomes an awkward reality for Geryon as the three men travel on together, setting out to reach the top of a volcano. Geryon’s attraction to fire (and really, all things red) is pronounced in the latter part of the book. He becomes mesmerized by flames and describes them seductively, making them leap at you in a terrifying way. In another writer’s hands, Geryon’s attraction to fire could be an all-to-easy metaphor for his destructive lust for Herakles, but here, it is much more rich than that, and fire means many other things, including home.

Geryon’s journey, from abused child to lover to heartbroken youth to travelling artist, is the kind of story arc a writer can do a lot with. In Carson’s hands, Geryon’s autobiography become much more than a myth retold. By refusing to give her readers any sense of where the story unfolds (she mentions American money and countries in South America, but you just know that these are places you could never travel to), Carson manages to heighten the mysterious qualities of Geryon’s life while simultaneously grounding it in real, throbbing emotion and striking imagery. Geryon is, after all, a photographer.

More than anything, though, Autobiography of Red is a romance. Not between Geryon and Herakles, though, but between Geryon and life. And reading Carson’s story draws you into that life and makes you think about your own. For her, as for Stesichoros, Geryon is not just a side character in the story of Herakles’ triumph. Rather, he is the centre of the story, dominating Herakles because Herakles had to find him. And although he may be soft-spoken and gentle in his description, Geryon is someone who will draw you back to him again and again.

Autobiography of Red
by Anne Carson
First published in 1998 by Random House (cover image shown from Vintage Contemporaries edition)