The Sparsholt Affair

“I've developed an interest in him purely as the focus of your interest. Yours and Peter's,” I added, and watched him scowl. “I'm following the whole Sparsholt affair scientifically.”

I haven't read Alan Hollinghurst before, and as The Sparsholt Affair began, I thought I was in for a real treat: The first section – set at Oxford in 1940, with gowns and blackouts and fire watches on the ramparts – was wonderfully atmospheric, and as a group of young men yearn and strive for physical closeness (the narrator with his girlfriend, Jill; two other male characters hoping to catch the eye of the young Adonis across the quad who lifts weights in his underthings), I was yearning with them; this section ticked all my boxes of interest and narrative tension. The next section, however, skips ahead twenty or so years, switching to the perspective of the thirteen-year-old son of Sparsholt (who was the original Adonis), and while there's atmosphere and yearning of a different kind, the shift drained the tension of the original section. The next three sections continue to skip ahead ten or twenty years at a time, staying from the perspective of this son, Jonathan, and the plot never regained the pleasure of the original bit for me. An uneven experience, but with something interesting to say in the end – I would definitely read Hollinghurst again. (Note: Despite being published last fall in the UK, I read an ARC of the upcoming North American release, and as such, quotes may not be in their final forms. In my copy, Jonathan's red Volvo becomes a “Vulva” in later chapters, and I wondered whether this was a spellcheck issue or an inside joke. Either way, it highlights the dangers of quoting from an ARC, which I can't resist.)

He expected the old man to come round at some point to the Sparsholt Affair, but he never did, perhaps simply because it didn't involve him or anyone he knew personally, and was, besides, a hideous balls-up, of the kind that Chalmers himself, for all his much wilder adventures, had been far too clever to get caught up in.

In the foreground of the plot, the original group of Oxford friends go on to live successful lives after doing their duties in WWII, and when Jonathan grows up and becomes an artist, his path intersects with some of those who had known his father at school. At some point, the father was involved in a scandal – known infamously as the titular Sparsholt Affair – and while details are sketchy, it involved crooked land deals, male prostitutes, and disgraced politicians. Sparsholt himself went to jail over the matter, and despite being an openly gay man himself, Jonathan wasn't close enough to his father to ever ask him just what went on. And in the background, there's a lovely evolution of the gay scene. There are no activists in this story, characters simply take the dominant ethos for granted – so in the beginning, we have the closeted friends at Oxford being careful not to let the Censor discover what they're up to; Jonathan comes out in a world with shadowy gay clubs and partners beginning to live openly together, finding ways to make babies; Jonathan himself marries his longtime partner at one point; and in the end, when he becomes a widower, Jonathan discovers the current world of debauched raves and Grinder and self-made porn on Instagram. Over everything, as the world around him becomes more permissive, Jonathan feels the weight of his father's scandal; even as society eventually moves on and people need to look up the Sparsholt Affair in Wikipedia to remind themselves what it was all about.

"I shouldn't tell you this, it's what my Samuel calls the picture – our portrait, I mean. The Sparsholt Affair...Seriously, though, I suppose with something like that, it could colour your whole life if you let it.”

What I liked about this in retrospect was the shadowy nature of the “Sparsholt Affair” itself: we have no idea how the elder Sparsholt was actually involved in the scandal – he did go to jail, but this was long after homosexual activity itself would get you sent away – but because there was a mention of “male prostitutes” at the bust-up, the whole thing is remembered as a sex scandal instead of a dodgy land deal. (Naturally, this made me thing of the “Profumo Affair”: who doesn't remember that, if it's thought of at all today, as a sex thing instead of a Cold War spy thing?) And then this manufactured uncertainty made me think **spoiler**  What if the elder Sparsholt never had any gay flings in the first place? His activities at Oxford are only reported by Freddie in the first section, in papers he never published, and as he went on to become a novelist, that narrative just might be a bit of wish fulfillment for his friends. Or, Evert might have actually said “I had him” after an evening with Sparsholt, but that doesn't make it true. This uncertainty, and the way that rumours can, indeed, colour one's entire life, elevated the whole for me. **end/spoiler**

This was just a dead man's face, which the light of scandal might play over as readily as that of acclaim. He thought the convention was to kiss the dead parent on the brow, but a sense that that wasn't his father's style deterred him, and he felt he wouldn't regret not having done so. He took out his pocketbook, moved the visitor's chair to the head of the bed and sat down and drew him, a rapid but careful and observant sketch, five minutes' intent work. He thought, this is what we get to do. He couldn't remember for the life of him what colour his father's eyes had been.

A final note: Hollinghurst writes continually of missing fathers – physically or emotionally – and young gay men who are gerontophiles (some may have been looking for Sugar Daddies, but others do seem to be turned on by the greybeards), and I don't know if he meant to have the two conflated in the readers' minds; but don't see how it couldn't have been intentional. In the end, I loved the first section, but didn't find Jonathan himself to be interesting enough to carry off the rest of the book. I appreciated the subtle evolution of the gay scene, and the progression of society's attitudes, in the background; loved that Jonathan bore his father's scandal upon his shoulders even long after others had forgotten about it; this book has much of interest to say. I'm conflicted between three and four stars, but will feel generous in a rounding up.

What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered

Standing here among the sword ferns my senses seem to be thin glass, so acute at their edges I am afraid I will cut myself simply by touching the silicon edge of a bamboo leaf. The flicker's blade of beak as it slices into the apple makes me wince. My hands are pale animals. The smallest sounds, a junco flitting between viburnum leaves, a drop of water falling on the cedar deck, make me cringe. I can smell the bitter iron in the mosses on the apple tree's branches. My flesh at times is in agony, and I feel as if I have come out from some shadowed place into light for the first time. I feel, for the first time in years, alive.

I came to this book after reading Patrick Lane's Deep River Night: a story set in a 1960's logging camp in the B.C. Interior that felt so true in its details of life there, in the details of hopelessness and addiction, that I knew that Lane was writing from some experience. What the Stones Remember is the memoir that Lane began in 2001, and as it recounts his struggles to find his way back to living after a lifetime of drug and alcohol addiction, he also dips frequently into his far past – from his childhood of abuse and neglect to the stretch that he did spend in a logging camp on the North Thompson River as a First Aid Man – and as complementary reads, these two books focus and refocus, through fiction and non-, a lens on a remarkable life. Patrick Lane has been called “the greatest poet of his generation” and his writing here is never less than magical; I was transfixed.

The opal drop of water the chickadee drank is no different than the droplet at the tip of a bare apple tree bud that I lifted my hand to. I extend my trembling finger and the water slides onto my fingernail. I lift it to my lips and take a sip of what was once fog. It is a single cold on the tip of my tongue. I feel I am some delicate creature come newly to this place for, though I know it well, I must learn again this small half-acre of land with its intricate beauties, its many arrangements of earth, air, water, and stone.

What makes this memoir special is the focus that Lane trains on his patch of garden out on Vancouver Island: from the abundance of life that blithely flourishes, oblivious to the pained and petty lives of nearby humans, to the physical work and meditative planning that transform him body and soul, reclaiming an unpruned garden is a worthy metaphor for reclaiming a life. As other reviewers have noted, Lane might be guilty of going on a bit too long about every weed and bug, but extravagance is a small complaint. There is a naturalness to Lane working away with pitchfork and pruning shears and getting lost in some memory; the time shifts always feel organic, and the stories that Lane shares from his past are candid and fascinating; the conclusions he draws are wise.

The garden begins with my body. I am this place, though I feel it at the most attenuated level imaginable. Once dead, I am come alive again. Forty-five years of addiction and I am a strangeling in this simple world. To be sober, to be without alcohol and drugs in my cells, is new to me and every thing near to me is both familiar and strange.

I did find it interesting that for a recovery memoir, Lane only hints at his addictions; focussing more on their effects on those around him than the actual details of his apparent debauchery. I also found it interesting how many small details from his memories here eventually made it into Deep River Night: it makes me wonder if by not writing about his life as a drunk in this memoir, Lane had to eventually novelise those experiences in order to finally exorcise them. The following describes life in the logging camp, details of which made it into the novel:

The Sikhs, lonely and ostracized, fought each other on weekends with fists and knives, the white men in the bunkhouses raped Indian girls they'd had shipped up from Kamloops, the seventy-year-old Chinese cook sat drunk in his room drawing pictures of his child-bride back in China, the white husbands locked their wives in closets and bathrooms to keep them quiet, people drank and traded a wife or daughter for a bottle of whiskey. Drunks, passed out, never saw their wife or husband abuse a child or sleep with a best friend. I writhe with the memory of those bitter, unhappy times. I roll over, get out of bed, and walk into the garden.

Even if you know nothing else of Patrick Lane, What the Stones Remember is a fascinating read: the man has lived an extraordinary life, his writing is masterful, and the format of following his progress over a year of gardening works very well. As a complementary read for me, it's that much more elevated and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

It was interesting to me when Lane wrote of having lived with his young family in a trailer in Merritt, B.C. - calling it "a wretched, dusty mill town in southern British Columbia" - because I had known a guy from Merritt; a manly young redneck who seized my heart as a teenager. I wrote about Glen before, but I'll just reiterate that he was a mass of contradictions to me: he'd talk of having driven to Kamloops with his friends to find brawls, to rough up men coming out of the gay bar there, but he also described the beautiful sari his sister wore to marry a Sikh man from town - he honestly didn't seem to be made of hate or bigotry; he loved his mother as a living saint, but from the controlling way he treated me, it would be hard to conclude that he respected women in general; he was uncouth, uneducated, unphilosophical, but was also a talented artist who spent his free time sketching. Glen couldn't imagine himself with someone who wasn't Catholic, but he never went to church; all of his stories from high school involved drugs and drinking at bush parties, driving offroad while wasted and wrecking cars, the strings of broken hearts he left behind - but he constantly outlined for me the future of settled domesticity he imagined for us. Glen was raised in Merritt just a few years after Lane's first batch of kids were born there, and the writing of the town felt particular to me.

As a further aside, the only time I ever heard of Merritt in the news was when a deranged father murdered his three children violently in their trailer. The depiction of the wretched and dusty mill town, the squirrelly-eyed man with his mental problems and addictions, the isolation and helplessness of the community; it all seemed to shine a retroactive light on the place that shaped the redneck that Glen was when I met him; all ultimately feels particular to me and the ways in which my own self has been shaped.

Swimming Home

et cetera

A Latin expression meaning “and other things” or “so forth” or “the rest of such things”. The poem, “Swimming Home”, was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted seven of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?

My mother says I'm the only jewel in her crown
But I've made her tired with all my etc,
So now she walks with sticks

To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.

It seems pertinent to note that in the same year that Deborah Levy released Swimming Home, she also adapted two of Sigmund Freud's case studies into radio plays for the BBC. This book completely reflects what was occupying Levy's mind at the time: For a novel, this book has the feeling of a play, and in ways both overt and subtle, the story constantly invokes Freud. It has so much heft for a short work, and I think that's because of all that's left unsaid but yet feels present in the mind; all that's added by the book's et ceteras. Perhaps not as remarkable as Levy's later Hot Milk, this is still an engaging and thoughtful work of fiction. 

The plot is deceptively sparse: Two couples, and the teenaged daughter who belongs to one of them, are renting a villa outside Nice, and when they discover a beautiful young woman swimming naked in their pool – a young woman who explains that her reservation was mixed up and she now had nowhere to lodge – they offer to let her stay in their spare room. The woman who makes this offer may or may not be tempting her philandering husband (a world famous poet) into making the final blow to their shaky marriage, and we soon learn that the young woman is also a poet and had accidentally-on-purpose arrived at the villa in order to ask the man to read her work. The young woman, Kitty Finch (and what internal conflicts does that name suggest?), is such an unsettling presence: her unabashed and frequent nudity; attracting not just all the men, but luring the teenaged daughter's affections away from her mother as well; cutting the tails off of rabbits that had been shot by a hunter and arranging them in a vase; screaming at the old woman who rents the villa next door. We understand that Kitty has recently taken herself off her prescribed antidepressants (and because the poet had been candid about his own struggles with Depression in his work, Kitty feels an extra-strong connection with him), but her behaviour is so bizarre, and the other characters are so on edge themselves, that there's menace read into Kitty's every innocent action; literally anything feels possible.

Much of the Freudian imagery is obvious – the father continually losing his pen and only his daughter, Nina, can find it; the swimming pool as a return to the womb; Nina wondering what the tangled sheets on her parents' bed means because she was hoping that they would break up so she could finally take her mother's place – and I couldn't help but think that each of the characters represented some Freudian idea: the husbands – the glutton and the philanderer – as Id; the wives – the finance-minded businesswoman and the war correspondent – as Ego; the retired psychiatrist next door overlooking everything as Superego. In a way, Kitty and her damaged psyche seem to represent “external pressures” that will bring out the best and the worst in the other characters; no wonder the overseer next door wants to keep her in check. There's a desirable maiden, a matron, and a crone (along with a virgin on the cusp of her next psycho-sexual transition), death and desire are in constant battle, dreams come to life as centipedes and sugar mice, and it all sits heavily in the book's unacknowledged et ceteras. And there are so many details left unrevealed to the reader – What else did Nina see under her parents' bed? What was written on the yellow slip of paper? What is the text of Kitty's poem? – and these details left me rather anxious; so much unsaid, unrevealed. And yet, this book is pointed in what it does say. Here's the woman next door, Dr. Sheridan, on declining an invitation for dinner at the villa:

When couples offer shelter or a meal to strays and loners, they do not really take them in. They play with them. Perform for them. And when they are done they tell their stranded guest in all sorts of sly ways she is now required to leave. Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart. A single guest was a mere distraction from this task.

That bit reminded me of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and when depressed poet Kitty starts collecting stones (and Nina reads the phrase “the Drowning Stones” in her poem), it felt like of course we're supposed to be thinking of Ms Woolf. And here's the poet's wife, and Nina's mother, Isabel; how she feels but cannot say:

She had attempted to be someone she didn’t really understand. A powerful but fragile female character. If she knew that to be forceful was not the same as being powerful and to be gentle was not the same as being fragile, she did not know how to use this knowledge in her own life.

The poet, Joe, provides more foreshadowing in what he will not say:

“I've been thinking about your title, 'Swimming Home'.”

His tone was offhand, more nonchalant than he felt. He did not tell her how he had been thinking about her title. The rectangular swimming pool that had been carved from stone in the grounds of the villa reminded him of a coffin. A floating open coffin lit with the underwater lights Jurgen swore at when he fiddled with the incandescent light bulbs he'd had to change twice since they arrived. A swimming pool was just a hole in the ground. A grave filled with water.

And Nina, many years later, reflecting on this week in her youth:

I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made of bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.

A stuffed animal in a rattrap, a pony on a patio, tattooing the wrist of someone who had avoided the Holocaust; the imagery can be strange and unsettling, but it all seems to resonate with the internal struggles we deal with every day; metaphorical and wise, I enjoyed this read very much. The last word is for Kitty:

Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely.

Winter

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.

Ah, this is exactly what I warned about in my gushing review of Autumn, a book that spoke to me deeply and particularly: Winter is quite a good book, Ali Smith explores many of the same issues in the same ways as she did in her earlier volume in the Seasonal Series, but without a direct connection to my own idiosyncratic pleasure centers, this one didn't excite me as much. Still a good read from a master of postmodern storytelling:

And here instead’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which Sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every grassblade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty by it, how even the dull tarmac of the roads, the paving under our feet, shines when the weather's been cold enough and how something at the heart of us, at the heart of all our cold and frozen states, melts when we encounter a time of peace on earth, goodwill to all men; a story in which there is no room for severed heads; a work in which Sophia’s perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure thank God, the kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful, has a perfect muffling decorum of its own, snow falling to whiten, soften, blur and prettify even further a landscape where there are no heads divided from bodies hanging around in the air or anywhere, either new ones, from new atrocities or murders or terrorisms, or old ones, left over from old historic atrocities and murders and terrorisms and bequeathed to the future as if in old French Revolution baskets, their wickerwork brown with the old dried blood, placed on the doorsteps of the neat and central-heating-interactive houses of now with notes tied to the handles saying please look after this head thank you,

well, no,

thank you,

thank you very much.

The above (overly long) excerpt was chosen not just for the wintry imagery and the po-mo self-awareness, but also because of the book's recurring theme of recurring atrocities, and the power that the people have in protesting a government that doesn't work for you: whether violently, as in the French Revolution, or nonviolently, as in the Greenham Common protests that Smith asserts changed Britain's nuclear weapons policy. Of course Sophia would rather be a character in a more straightforward type of novel; perhaps something by Dickens – but despite the midwinter setting, something more A Tale of Two Cities than A Christmas Carol; there will be no ghosts here, but severed heads abound. And as in Autumn, Shakespeare is invoked: I loved the image of Art squirming as Lux summarises the plot of Cymbeline for his family (because, not being familiar with the play himself, he assumed she was making it up), and I snorted when later, Art gives this same summary to a Shakespearean expert and he preens as she admires his insight (and surely this ties back into women artists everywhere and the men who take credit for their work). In a related thread about the recurrence of history and the debt we owe our ancestors, is this bit about a young Croatian-Canadian woman's reaction to seeing her family's genealogy stretching back hundreds of years:

I was seventeen, walking along a street in Toronto and I stopped and just stood there in the middle of Queen Street because the day went dark all round me even though it was the middle of the day, and I knew for the first time I was, I am, carrying on my head, like a washerwoman or a waterwoman, not just one container or basket, but hundreds of baskets all balanced on each other, full to their tops with bones, high as a skyscraper, and they were so heavy on my head and shoulders that either I was going to have to offload them or they were going to drive me down through the pavement to the ground. 

This all ties in with Brexit and efforts to expel illegal immigrants and aren't we all one family anyway? There are references to Trump, to Teresa May, Syrian refugees, and the Grenfell Tower fire; with an ageing hippy character, we read the voice of protest, but also recognise the subtext of plus ça change. Just as Autumn explored the art of Pauline Boty, Winter introduces the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth (with Smith seeming to suggest that her own writing should be seen in the same light as Hepworth's art; as something that “makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.”) I liked that Art is a writer of terrible blog posts, and I loved that Daniel from Autumn makes an appearance as a younger man. 

That's life, and time, for you.

There's politics, art, feminism, and a traditional plot, but Winter didn't blow me away. (Actually, I'd say that Moshin Hamid handled similar material much more ably in Exit West.) Four stars is a rounding up and I happily await Spring.

Tunesday : Mother's Little Helper

Mother's Little Helper

(Richards, K / Jagger, M) Performed by The Rolling Stones

What a drag it is getting old.

"Things are different today,"
I hear ev'ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill
There's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day.

"Things are different today,"
I hear ev'ry mother say
Cooking fresh food for a husband's just a drag
So she buys an instant cake and she buys a frozen steak
And goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And to help her on her way, get her through her busy day.

Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old.

"Men just aren't the same today,"
I hear ev'ry mother say
They just don't appreciate that you get tired
They're so hard to satisfy. You can tranquilise your mind
So go running for the shelter of your mother's little helper
And four help you through the night, help to minimise your plight.

Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
What a drag it is getting old.

Life's just much too hard today, "
I hear ev'ry mother say
The pursuit of happiness just seems a bore
And if you take more of those, you will get an overdose
No more running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
They just helped you on your way through your busy dying day.

I know I've written quite a bit about my mother-in-law and her struggles with Alzheimer's - and especially about how grateful I am to Rudy and Dan for offering to share a home with the old folks - but I haven't written much about my role in the whole situation. It would be a stretch to refer to myself as the "mother's little helper" here, but I can heartily agree, "What a drag it is getting old".

I got a call last week from Rudy: She thought that her Dad (who has had three heart bypass operations over the years) was looking flushed and quick to tire, so she insisted on making him a doctor's appointment for the next day; would I be willing to come and sit with my mother-in-law, Bev, for a couple of hours? I happened not to be working that day, and nothing could be easier: I was in.

I went over, read my book for a couple of hours until Bev got up, and then I made us some eggs and toast: breakfast for her, lunch for me, and she protesting the whole time as she sat at the table, "I could be doing that cooking. You don't need to come here and take care of me." She hasn't touched a stove in years, but I acknowledged  her protest as I made a production of simply wanting to help out. We ate and moved to the living room, and just as I was starting to think that this appointment was taking a very long time, Rudy called to say that the doctor didn't want to fool around with heart symptoms - they had been sent to the hospital for x-rays, and she didn't know how long they'd be gone. I've known my mother-in-law for nearly thirty years, I'm as comfortable with her as I am with anyone; but not being comfortable with most people, I found myself fumbling with their TV remote, suggesting we see what was on.

We watched one after another of the daytime roundtable shows (Kelly and Ryan, The View, Canada's The Social), with Bev at one point running off to the washroom, afraid that she wouldn't make it there in time. She was gone for quite a while, and although I know that Rudy would have been in there helping her clean herself, I just honestly don't know what Bev would be comfortable with me doing; what I'd be comfortable with me doing. She slowly made her way back down the hallway, in new pants, and we continued watching TV; her giving commentary every now and then; me nodding and smiling. At one point Rudy called to say that the x-ray had shown no new cardiac damage, but that her Dad did have too much fluid around his heart. They were going to give him some Lasix (in order to pee out the excess), but if they didn't like the way everything looked soon enough, they were thinking about admitting him. And that was a stunner: it all worked out that I could come and sit with Bev for as long as it took that day, but what would we do if Jim wasn't home soon to take over? Who would watch her at night? Or the next day; the next after that?

Eventually Rudy and Jim were able to come back home, and they explained that the hospital had ordered stress tests for later in the week. They went last Friday for the blood-taking portion of the tests (and Rudy and Jim took Bev to the hospital with them), but today was part two of the test, and I was asked to go over there again. No problem.

When I arrived this time, Bev was in her room getting dressed (so no quiet time alone for me this week), and she came out just as Rudy and Jim were leaving. Jim had put Bev's pile of morning pills on her placemat at the table, and I poured her a glass of juice to take them with; encouraged her to have a seat while I whipped her up some toast and eggs again. She didn't want to sit yet, and she laughed at the idea that everyone thought she needed a babysitter, and I laughed too, saying that I was just there for company. When I looked over my shoulder while I was cooking to see if she had sat down yet, Bev was reaching for Jim's pill organizer and saying, "I just need to take my pills I guess." She had just taken her own pills, literally, a minute earlier, and if I hadn't been there to stop her, she'd have added more that weren't hers. I guess she does need a babysitter. (When I mildly stated that she had just taken her pills and didn't need any more, she looked at the organizer in her hand and said, "Sometimes I don't think I should take Jim's pills, and he shouldn't take mine either, because that wouldn't be the best thing." Right-o.)

Bev had her breakfast, we moved to the living room (and I didn't fool around this week; I turned on the TV right away), and we watched most of the same shows as last week; Bev adding commentary, me smiling, agreeing. The whole thing feels a bit phony from my end, but I do hope that Bev is feeling taken care of. She made a statement about how she's getting used to living here; thought she was confiding a big secret by admitting that she hadn't wanted to come, but now really enjoys being able to see more of all of us. So, that felt normal and lucid. But later, Bev started talking about how sad she was to lose her father so young (he passed suddenly before she was even married, and this is a frequent topic for her lately), and a minute later, she was talking about how much she had enjoyed becoming a grandmother, adding that her Dad had been so excited when Dave was born because he had had only daughters himself and was looking forward to having a boy around: of course, he had been dead for many years before Dave was born. Bev ended that story with a consternated look on her face, so she may have been realising that her math didn't add up. I smile, I nod, there's no reason for me to correct anything.

Again, the whole thing took longer than I could have anticipated - I was there for four hours - but I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It turns out that this week was a "chemical stress test", so instead of putting Jim on a treadmill and physically stressing his heart, they injected him with some kind of stimulant that simulated heart strain - and this was such a strain that he had to lie down for nearly an hour afterwards before he felt well enough to be driven back home; I have no idea what that means medically; what it means for our future. So, there you go: I'm not quite mother's little helper, but man, what a drag it is getting old. (It feels ironically pertinent to add here that Bev is only two years older than Mick and Keith.)

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood

We talk about our memories, our mother, the madness that was our childhood, and the strength her belief in the...story must have required of her; to keep going, to leave the familiar and known behind twice, and invite the condemnation and judgment of her family and friends for our disappearances. She did what she believed she had to do to protect her family. And we survived because of and in spite of that.

I didn't know anything about Run Hide Repeat before picking it up, and I can't stress enough how important that was for my reading enjoyment. If someone else is thinking about reading this, I can only implore: Don't read any reviews, any summaries, not even the book flap that gives so much away (I put the ellipses in the opening quote to prevent even a whiff of spoiler.) In addition to having an incredibly interesting story to tell, author Pauline Dakin paces her memoir like a thriller; doling information out slowly and thoughtfully so that the reader's experience mirrored her own as she got older and gained more insight into the why of her crazy childhood. I was fascinated, overwhelmed, horrified: what more could I ask? Although I do have some caveats, they will necessarily be behind my spoiler tags; I still, wholeheartedly, recommend this read. 

I was able to hide the following behind spoiler tags on Goodreads, don't read this if you'd like a satisfying reading experience with the book!

Dakin's parents divorced when she was five years old and her younger brother was three, and as she remembers him from then, her father was a violent alcoholic. Her mother did her best to raise two young children alone, and once she discovered comfort and counsel in the pastor at a new church they began to attend, Ruth Dakin started involving her children in trips and activities with the pastor, Stan Sears, and his wife. Pauline remembers a weird childhood – being woken up to go on day trips away from home, being told to always be secretive about the family's movements, being uprooted and quietly moved across the country, twice. Every time she protested, her mother explained that she'd be told everything when she was older. So, when Dakin was twenty-three, her mother – and Stan Sears, who was apparently now her mother's lover – explained to her that her father was actually a dangerous Mafia kingpin and that Stan was a member of a shadowy non-governmental protection agency; always a short step ahead of the goons trying to kidnap, kill, or enlist Dakin and her brother in their father's business:

It was a small, tight organization in which leaks were not tolerated. The agency comprised a cadre of undercover security people who gathered intelligence, provided protection for people under threat, including my family, and who – when necessary – would fight or even kill as part of a government-sanctioned but secret war on what was seen as the growing domestic threat posed by organized crime.

Stan and Ruth told wild tales of hand-to-hand combat, drug-tipped blowdarts, and poisoned powder sprinkled on their family room carpet. Every story answered a question that Dakin had about her strange childhood, distanced her even more emotionally from the father she rarely saw, and made her begin to live in fear for her future: these mobsters were still out there, still waiting to pounce, still being combatted by those from the “Weird World”. As I was reading this, it all felt too unbelievable (this happened in Canada?), but like Dakin, I had no reason not to believe what her mother was telling her. As Stan described the communication device in his wallet (that sent him urgent warnings via Morse code to his butt), the undetectable doubles that the Mob had replaced various members of the Dakin family with, and the idyllic safe compound that he wanted to whisk Ruth and Pauline away to (with complications always preventing the move at the last minute), I started to wonder, “Is this all really supposed to be true?” And that's what's so special about Dakin's pacing: She gives just enough clues that something isn't right so that the reader has doubts just at the point that she, in the narrative, began to have doubts. As Dakin realises that Stan has been lying to and manipulating her mother for decades, the question becomes: Why?

Books, television and movies condition us to think of psychosis as expressing itself through acts of violence; through dark, disturbing behaviour; and through wild-eyed madness – not through a quest for nirvana. There had been unnerving manifestations: the organ-harvesting ship, the times Stan described discoveries of warehouses or buildings full of women and children being sold or used as sex slaves, or raids that liberated young drug-addicted Mafia soldiers. And they were incarcerated, yes, but Stan always described them as saved from a life of brutality and evil. Always these horrific scenes were in aid of positioning Stan and his made-up anti-Mafia agency as rescuers, as bringers of love and light. In Stan's case his psychosis was expressed in aspirations to do God's work in an imaginary world, but all the while he was creating chaos in the real one.

And this is the part that prevented me from giving a full five stars to a book I was really enjoying. Dakin decided to start researching psychiatric disorders to find one that might fit Stan and his actions, and after many years and consultation with many experts, she came up with “primary persecutory type delusion disorder, with secondary grandiose type”; that her mother had been caught up in the delusion through the folie à deux phenomenon. The final part of Run Hide Repeat is meant to outline the effects of undiagnosed mental health issues, with a plea for more research into Stan's rare condition, but I couldn't help but wonder if Stan actually was suffering from a delusion disorder: what if he was just a sociopath who got his kicks out of pulling Ruth's strings; who says he believed all that he was saying? Per the Goldwater Rule, the psychiatrists who Dakin consulted with are ethically prevented from assigning Stan a diagnosis without having met with him, and as I only know him from the stories that Dakin had written here, she hasn't convinced me that Stan really did believe in the Weird World, and the O, and the inside. On the other hand, Dakin was wonderful at exploring the effects that Stan's behaviour (however provoked) had on her family, and the picture of her wasted and dying mother cautioning Dakin to remain vigilant because she wouldn't be around to watch over her anymore was affecting; there's no doubt that Ruth believed every word she was told and she spent her entire adult life trying to protect her family from the monsters in the shadows. And that's a great story.

Pauline and her brother were born on the west coast, in Vancouver, moved out of their father's house when she was five, and when she was nine, their mother uprooted them and moved to Winnipeg, in the center of the country. Just as Pauline was getting over being the new girl, when she was thirteen, the family moved with little warning to St. John, New Brunswick on the east coast. Eventually, Pauline's mother, and then Pauline herself, relocated to Nova Scotia; her brother to Edmonton.

By contrast, my brothers and I were born on the east coast of Canada, in Charlottetown. We moved to St. John for my Dad's job when I was three, and when I was eight, we were uprooted and moved to small town Ontario, in the center of the country. Just as I was getting over being the new girl, when I was fourteen, we were moved with a few months notice to Lethbridge, out west. Eventually, my parents moved back to Ontario, I spent the next seven years in Edmonton, and shortly after my brothers and I settled our families around them here, my parents retired down to Nova Scotia.

Dakin spends a lot of ink on the unsettled nature of her childhood - the moves and the powerlessness and unrootedness she felt - and that was my childhood, too. When she made it to St. John someone asked her what her father did for a living - assuming that it must have been a work transfer that brought the family there - and she found it awkward not to have that excuse: they were always moving and she didn't understand why. By contrast, I was told that that we were always moving for my father's work, but I still didn't understand why.

I was visiting with my seventy-six-year-old mother-in-law last week, and she was talking about some of the old friends she's still in contact with; a couple of whom she has known since kindergarten. And that's unbelievable to me: I have no old friends, no hometown, no continuity to the people in my life besides my brothers who were also dragged around. Dakin's case was obviously extreme - she wasn't allowed to have a relationship with her extended family because Stan had convinced her mother that they had all been replaced with Mafia doubles - but we were geographically isolated from our extended family, and in essence, I never had grandparents or cousins or aunts and uncles. For the past twenty years, with few phone calls, rare visits up to see us, and maybe us going down there once a year, I have essentially felt like I have no parents either. The instincts that made it so easy for them to break ties with their families and not settle us in any one place must be the same instincts that make my parents indifferent to us now: at least Dakin had a close relationship with her mother in the end; geographic isolation, by design, prevents that for me. And at its root, I know that all of the moving - the lack of old friends, a hometown, continuity and an extended family - has left me broken, too. At least Dakin can conclude that her mother, however misguided, always put her children first; I have no such comfort.

Dunbar

“I must tell my story,” wailed Dunbar. “Oh, God, let me not go mad.”

Dunbar is the sixth book in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, and having read them all, I once again say, “Meh”. The idea of updating and reinterpreting Shakespeare's plays seems so doable – the themes that Shakespeare explored are universal ones, just transplant them into today's world – but none of these books really capture the humanity behind the drama of his most famous characters; maybe it can't be done. Once again for my experience with this series, this read was just okay.

It makes sense to reshape an historic king as modern billionaire businessman, and in Dunbar, the title character is a ruthless self-made media mogul, who when he turned eighty, decided to hand over the reins of his company to his two eldest daughters and semi-retire. At the same time, Dunbar cut his youngest daughter out of the company – the too good to be true Florence – because of her basic disinterest in turning billions into more billions (while enjoying the comfort that the millions of dollars her undisinheritable portion of the family trust generated for her). As the book opens, Dunbar is being held against his will in a remote British sanitarium, having been institutionalised through the machinations of his elder girls; the interchangeable and cartoonishly evil Abigail and Megan. Having suffered a fall that scrambled his brains, exacerbated by the drugs given him by his daughters' co-conspirator “Dr. Bob”, Dunbar isn't in full control of his faculties, but he does know that he doesn't belong in lock down. In this beginning chapter, Dunbar is railing against his situation in conversation with fellow patient Peter – a comedic actor known for his impressions and one-liners, an alcoholic being held in order to dry out as a condition for returning to prime-time television – and the dialogue between the muddle-minded old man and his “Fool” was good fun; my initial impression was that St. Aubyn had perfectly captured the feeling of a play on the page. 

These Dunbar girls were arrogant, imperious and tough, but toughness was not strength, imperiousness was not authority and their arrogance was an unearned pride born of an unearned income.

But then we meet Abby and Megan – literally in bed with Dr. Bob, conducting a sadistic threesome that sees the physician having a nipple chewed off – and their greed and evil knows no bounds; from setting a man on fire to hiring assassins with poison blowdarts, nothing will stand between the sisters and their sell-off of the family company at the first opportunity. Now, in the original King Lear, I can find it hard to keep straight all the characters and the behind-the-scenes machinations, but at least the plot involves identifiable double-crosses and soldiers and action. By updating the story to the modern business world, we get lost in business-speak; the debt leveraging and Board votes that had me not caring whether the Dunbar Trust was taken over by Eagle Rock or Omnicon; a secret phone call on a burner cell isn't quite as dramatic as a lie that leads to a man having his eyes gouged out. But my bigger complaint is that, after that first good bit of repartee between Dunbar and Peter, the novel form allows St. Aubyn to explore characters' interior lives, and pages can go on and on without any dialogue as this or that person mulls over how a demanding or absent mother made them who they are; the book very quickly loses the spirit of a play. (And one added complaint from this Canadian: Why have Dunbar be a Canadian? So he could be a fit old man, having spent his summers swimming and his winters skiing? Because St. Aubyn decided he should be not an American, and not a Brit, but somewhere in between? Besides nothing in his character actually marking Dunbar as identifiably Canadian, I will note that there's little chance one of us would use the terms “cavs” or “toffs” to derogate others.)

Why go on? Why drag his suffering body into the next valley? Why endure the anguish of being alive? Because endurance was what he did, thought Dunbar. He hauled himself up and straightened his body one more time and brought back both his fists against his chest, inviting that child-devouring sky-god to do his worst, to rain down information from his satellites, to stream his audiovisual hell of white noise and burning bodies into Dunbar's fragile brain, to try to split its hemispheres, if he could, to try to strangle him with a word-noose, if he dared.

“Come on,” whispered Dunbar hoarsely. “Come on, you bastard.”

And yet, there were good bits that came straight from King Lear: the dialogue with the Fool; Dunbar lost on the heath and ranting to the skies; the touching moment when he realises that he had cut off the only daughter who ever cared for him. And it should be stressed that these were all action scenes: it was the interminable backstories that I found tedious; only in the action was Shakespearean-like humanity revealed. As a novel, I don't think this succeeds at all; three stars feels generous.

Later edit:

The reason why I thought to pick up this book right now is that we were planning to see an adaptation of King Lear, and I wanted to refamiliarise myself with the play. After I read Dunbar, I went to Wikipedia and read what the scholarship has been around the play over the years, and I was intrigued to read that there are many who have focussed on the Freudian psychological aspects: that when King Lear asks his daughters to proclaim their love for him at the beginning, he is actually asking them to stand in for his absent mother; that this is the psychological subtext that we're engaging with as these mother substitutes eventually banish the helpless old man from heart and home. 

And I found this interesting because the production we were planning to see, Lear, features the formidable Shakespearean actress Seanna McKenna in the title role; playing it as a woman, and hence the title modification. Would it still be as engaging without the Freudian father-daughter-mother dynamic? I happened to catch Colin Mochrie - who plays the Fool in this production - on a talk show last week, and he said that putting a woman in the lead was transformative: That it's one thing to have a man curse his daughter's womb, but when that same curse comes from her own mother, it's downright chilling. I was unconvinced.

And then yesterday we went into Toronto to see the play and it was mesmerising. We saw King Lear at the Stratford Festival a couple of years ago, and I thought at the time that Colm Fiore had done a stunning job in the lead. But Seanna McKenna was pure genius - her command in the first scenes, her descent into madness and frailty: this was a powerful God-anointed queen and her downfall was as affecting as any that ever befell a man (it certainly helps that the actresses who play her elder daughters, Deborah Hay and Diana Donnelly, are wonderful as well: there is nothing cartoonish to their evil). The parallel between Lear and her daughters in the foreground and Gloucester and his sons in the subplot seemed natural in their same-sex exposition of efforts to usurp a parent's power and authority, and that's satisfyingly Freudian, too. This production is a masterwork and I am delighted that our whole little family was able to go see it together.

And a final note: When I saw that this year's Stratford Festival was going to engage in some gender-bent casting, I was kind of ambivalent. I understand that in Shakespeare's day the women roles were played by boys, and with so many of his plots involving boys playing girls pretending to pass as boys - not to mention the dearth of good and meaty roles for women to play - there's certainly artistic truth to putting a woman into a traditionally male role. But a few years ago we saw a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and there were women playing male characters as women (to put a lesbian spin to the lovers subplot) and the roles of Titania and Oberon were both played by large men (who rotated in the two roles) and the intentional drag queen vibe was distracting: I'm all for diversity and inclusion, but these seemed political choices instead of artistic ones. And when I saw that the wonderful Seanna McKenna would be at Stratford this year - playing the title role in Julius Caesar - that felt like another political choice. Yes, she knocked it out of the park playing Lear as a queen, but how will she do as a woman playing a man? After yesterday, I think she'll be amazing, and I can't wait to see it.

*****

Books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series:

Shylock is My Name

Vinegar Girl

The Gap of Time

Hag-Seed

New Boy

Dunbar

Macbeth

And Related:

Nutshell

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

 A man in a leather hood entered the window of a house in Citrus Heights and snuck up on a sixteen-year-old girl watching a television alone in the den. He pointed a knife at her and issued a chilling warning: “Make one move and you'll be silent forever and I'll be gone in the dark.”

I read a lot of true crime in my early twenties in an effort, I suppose, to “understand the human condition”. As I matured, I began to recognise the prurient nature of my interest; began to realise that behind every pseudonymous victim on the page stood a real and suffering person, and no longer feeling good about my self-perceived voyeurism, I moved on to other interests. I'll Be Gone in the Dark is true crime – detailing the evil acts of a man who raped over fifty victims and killed a further ten between 1976 and 1986 across California – but author Michelle McNamara elevates the material beyond the merely salacious; there is humanity on these pages (that of the victims, the investigators, as well as the author's own), and the book offers the prospect of finally capturing the Golden State Killer by shining a light in the corners where such a cockroach might yet be hiding. I wouldn't call this an “enjoyable” read – there is unvarnished horror here – but it does feel essential. (Caveat: I read from an ARC and quotes might not be in their final forms.)

There's a scream permanently lodged in my throat now. When my husband, trying not to awaken me, tiptoed into our bedroom one night, I leaped out of bed, grabbed my nightstand lamp, and swung it at his head. Luckily, I missed. When I saw the lamp overturned on the bedroom floor in the morning, I remembered what I'd done and winced. Then I felt around the covers for where I'd left my laptop and resumed my Talmudic study of the police reports.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark is really two stories in one, detailing both the Golden State Killer's crimes and the author's own reasons for pursuing this story. As a result, the wealth of autobiographical information serves as a memoir for McNamara: from her childhood in Chicago and her relationship with her parents there, to her attempts to find balance between obsessive online/in-person sleuthing and her family's needs, to the report of her sudden death during the writing of this book. The passing of McNamara at so young an age adds poignancy to the project, and it can't help but nudge readers towards understanding the author's intent – to finally catch California's most prolific, yet underpublicised, serial killer – and that helps to elevate this beyond the merely prurient: There is evidence that McNamara has reinvigorated the investigation in this cold case and hopefully the GSK will eventually, finally, be brought to justice. (In both the online version of the original article that led to this book, In the Footsteps of a Killer, and McNamara's own blog, True Crime Diary, there are discussion boards in which others can join in the investigation; who knows what such crowdsourcing will uncover? Someone knows this guy, even if he's long dead himself.)

If you commit a murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn't just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he's led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.

Okay, I've only focused so far on the author, but I'll Be Gone in the Dark does also outline every attack and piece of evidence linked to the GSK; it is graphic without being gratuitous, which must be a tough line to walk; McNamara handles this expertly. With an introduction by Gillian Flynn, a third section of evidence added by McNamara's fellow researchers after her death, and an Afterword by McNamara's husband (comedian Patton Oswalt, whose Netflix special Annihilation deals in part with his wife's passing and the year following; I laughed and cried watching it last night), the entirety of this book is a unique and important read; it just might lead to justice.

Later Edit: Just two months later, they've caught the monster. In her book, McNamara always thought that a breakthrough might come from some DNA website, and it turns out she was right.