Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Published in 1938, Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier has never gone out of print. The film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock won two Oscars in 1940.

Allison: 

“There are always two deaths, the real one and the one people know about.” Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea.

A hundred and twenty odd years after Jane Eyre was published, Jean Rhys wrote a novel asking us to consider the woman Rochester kept locked in his attic. Bertha—a scandal, a lunatic—whose reveal is so alarming as to inspire great compassion for the despairingly moody Rochester. Bertha was on my mind while reading Rebecca. I haven’t read Jean Rhys’ prequel to Jane Eyre, but I will now. I’m not sure every peripatetic-designed character in a novel warrants her own narrative, but Bertha may be an exception. Especially as penned by such a considered hand as Rhys, who balances the pirated story with a graver dissertation on colonialism, racism, and some other isms regarding mental illness and misogyny. A lesser received novel was dedicated to resurrecting Rebecca in the early aughts, but for whatever reason it never garnered much attention. I am hardly the first to make a comparison between Jane Eyre and Rebecca, their similarities are so blatant. They are both confessional narrations of would-be second wives: young, plain, rescued women, haunted by the enormity of their predecessors—ferocious, gorgeous, wild women. Ghost women.

Rochester’s ghost is still breathing and vindictive. Rebecca, however is dead as dead can be. Dead and mythologized by the denizens of Manderley. The unnamed narrator of Rebecca is confronted with Rebecca in a way that Jane was never offered opportunity. Unnamed cannot escape Rebecca as she is intertwined with the legacy of the inherited estate. What of Rebecca we know is only learned from other people. Mainly voiced through the point of view of Ms. Danvers whose love for Rebecca is severe and strange, borderline obsessive, even commonplace romantic. The mastery of this novel is on par with the contemporary genius of Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel for literature for his notorious slowburn domestic suspense. I’ve read many of his novels with the growing dread that the characters are willfully not going to make decisions that I will find satisfying, and then inevitably they don’t and it’s maddening and I want to throw the book at someone’s head. (Side note: Dad and I talked a bit about this novel before I completed this essay and he says there is no more maddening a novel than He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope, which by the title alone, I am inclined to agree…) The curious point of Rebecca is that the characters make all the unsavory decisions allowed and we, the reader, are ok with it. de Winter murders Rebecca and his new bride somehow finds it necessary. We learn it is not necessary, but we somehow grow to think she deserved it, possibly even wanted it, and in wanting it, she is vindicated. As for those that despair in Rebecca’s death, we find little sympathy, some, but not much. Rebecca remains, named, TITLED, a spoiler, potential sociopath, forever ferociously winning, and the heroine of the novel.

I keep wanting to come at this book with a feminist critique, but I have none. I am not dismayed by the pathetic Unnamed’s inability to escape her admiration for the tyrannical, mean, and ludicrous de Winter. Lots of sympathetic women love terrible men. Meanwhile de Winter is conquered by Rebecca. I am not even cross at the death of Rebecca. I, myself, am a first wife. A wild ghost. As much as I want Rebecca to survive and enact animalistic revenge, I am satisfied with her murder and forever haunting and seeping psychological ruin of a sad sack of a rich, domineering man. This is the stuff "Dateline." Frankly this is the stuff of love, which sits so snugly against hate. All equals passion, which is life. If we are so lucky.

On Dad’s scale of 1-10, I give this a 1. Loved it. Every salacious, horrid moment.

Wes: 

A romantic murder mystery is just what the doctor ordered this early summer after a rather extended lay-off in our book reviews. The review this month is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The story begins with a couple of chapters reflecting the end state after the story is to be told. Those chapters give a rather despondent picture while setting the stage for beginning the story. A common technique in cinema – telling the end of the story first – this was kind of a waste in this case it seems as there was no point of reference for the reader until the end of the book when one is compelled to go back and read those chapters again to get the gist of what was going on in those pages and finally end the story.

Apart from that and a couple of other points, this was a great read. In the early chapters, featuring the narrator’s initial meeting, courtship, and marriage to Maxim De Winter, she becomes an inexperienced heiress to the storied estate of Manderley. I found her curious descriptions captivating. I found myself easily identifying with the young bride as she constantly reflects on the things about her during her whirlwind marriage. She constantly focuses on whether she shall ever experience each moment, feeling, or scene ever again. It was as if she must grasp everything as it occurs so it will never be forgotten. As the story moves on and becomes more and more of a brooding nature, the ex-wife of Maxim’s, Rebecca, becomes the centerpiece of virtually every conscious thought of the newlywed. Every step she takes seems reflected in light of Rebecca’s memory as often articulated through Mrs. Danvers, the senior house keeper of the estate who loved especially her, along with seemingly everyone who ever knew her. This became crushingly evident to the young bride (interestingly we never in the book ever discover the narrator’s name – a rather curious fact not often seen in literature) when, in a random walk with Maxim’s business manager, Frank Crawley, he observes about Rebecca, “I suppose she was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life.”

Rebecca suddenly becomes a bugaboo that the narrator found herself constantly measuring herself against with little or no support from her disgruntled and seemingly distant husband. The scope of the young bride’s (she is half the age of her husband) frustration is wrapped up in the following quote which I see as the key quote in the entire book:

"If there was some woman in London that Maxim loved, someone he wrote to, visited, dined with, slept with, I could fight with her. We would stand on common ground. I should not be afraid. Anger and jealousy were things that could be conquered. One day the woman would grow old or tired or different, and Maxim would not love her anymore. But Rebecca would never grow old. Rebecca would always be the same. And she and I could not fight. She was too strong for me."

The source of her husband’s frequent changes in moods becomes evident soon after the quote above. A freighter runs aground near the Manderley beach and, during efforts to refloat her, a sunken sailboat is discovered with a body inside the cabin. When recovered, the body is identified to be Rebecca, long since thought to be buried based on Maxim’s identification of a body washed ashore miles away months prior. The shock comes from Maxim’s confession to the narrator that he murdered Rebecca by shooting her, sinking the sailboat with her aboard, and lying about the other body washed ashore.

Suddenly the whole tenor of the book changes completely from worries about Rebecca and her undying perfection to what kind of a despicable person she really was and, how in the world, Maxim might be able to avoid going to the gallows for her murder. With 100 pages of text remaining after the murder disclosure, Maxim counters every suspicion with a logical rationale for why Rebecca’s death could most likely be considered a suicide. Although the coroner’s inquest rules it a suicide, the boat builder swears by his analysis that someone deliberately punched holes in the hull. The cousin, Mr. Favell, an illicit Rebecca lover, openly blames Maxim for the murder but his rationale is destroyed by his own bad and illogical behavior and the discovery of a possible motive for suicide when it is discovered that Rebecca was pregnant.

The narrator never skips a beat. She is totally all in with her husband’s story and his efforts to clear his name. In the end, he is successful and Chapters 1 and 2 show the end of the story. Manderley is now a cinder, surrendered to the overgrowth and ultimate decay of everything. Meanwhile Maxim and his wife sit quietly in each other’s company but they are certainly not destined to live “happily ever after”. Instead they must contemplate a future of uncertainty – a worrying future whether the truth will ever come back to haunt them. The narrator might worry about her fate in the hands of a confessed murderer but she seemingly has no worries in that regard.

The book is a very interesting read. It started great, slowed down in the middle, and stumbled a bit at the end. There were several questions that are never answered, many never even referred to that were problematic to me. Why did Maxim sink the boat so close to shore – only a few hundred yards off the beach? Why did the body not exhibit gunshot wounds  or evidence of pregnancy? What exactly happened to Manderley – why did it burn down? Why did the narrator so easily succumb to Maxim’s murder rationale with little real justification? Why did Mrs. Danvers leave so suddenly? Why did Mrs. Danvers love Rebecca so much – almost to an obsessive degree – if she did so many vile things? Why didn’t the narrator guess her costume at the ball would be the exact same as Rebecca’s the previous year? This fact practically cried out to happen by the events that led up to it. Where is the ultimate justice in the murder of Rebecca?

Despite my objections, the book was very interesting to me - I especially enjoyed some of the narrator’s descriptions and whimsical depictions. She thinks a lot like I do some times. I am somewhat uncomfortable about the ending. I guess the good guys don’t always win. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment almost concurrently and that book did end with appropriate justice in the end. I guess that’s the difference between the late 1800s and the 1930s. The latter year has a different perspective (depression, progressivism, and rejection of religion) and does not see justice as a good that ought to rule out in the end. I rate this book as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best)

Oil! by Upton Sinclair

Oil! was published in 1926. Upton Sinclair ran for Congress twice for the Socialist Party, losing both times. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for The Dragon's Teeth.

Allison: 

As I began reading Oil! I realized immediately that I had read it before. The book opens with a rollicking chapter, The Ride, introducing Dad and Bunny, the patriarch and heir of the epic to which we are about to become interminably festooned. It is an epic, this novel, an epic and thorough investigation into the political and socio-economic machinations of pre-WWI America. But before all that, we have The Ride, and a few chapters of Bunny’s adolescence, in which we naively witness the power of Dad’s attention. And Dad is a powerful man, an oil man, hardworking, rulebender, full of proclamations and instructions, cheats and etiquettes regarding the ins and outs of life.  Bunny is the apt pupil, drinking up the specificity of Dad’s decree. Although I had read much of it before, years ago, with motivations I cannot remember, I very much enjoyed these opening chapters. There’s an energetic lilt to the prose, even thick as it is with detail. One really feels the bright, shining curiosity of Bunny’s personality. There is not an observation to be missed and all of it is regaled with an awesome wonderment. It reminded me of perhaps one of the richest scenes of Americana ever written, the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Underworld too, gave us fantastic fictions of real life characters. Yet, also like Underworld, beyond the opening spectacle, I found Oil! disenchanting. Once Bunny grows up, and his attentions turn to the solidarity of the working class, I’m not sure I want this narrator anymore, this degree of mad, blind enthusiasm that would warrant an exclamation of the word "oil."

This novel is an unabashed political rally. If there were a foil to Ayn Rand, I suppose it is Upton Sinclair, with his own political aspirations and obvious leftish bent. Bunny is a rich kid socialist—scratch that, I’m not quite sure of his leanings. Oh gosh, I’m about it expose my ignorance. I’m so worried I am going to misrepresent some of the politics of this book that went right over my glazed and enervated reading that I think I will avoid addressing it at all. Suffice it to say, Bunny is exactly the type of person I cannot stomach. Wooed by intellectual ruminations, with nothing but time and money to explore his own ego, at one point he even relates himself to the Buddha. I’m a fan of the Buddha and his understated shrug: “there is suffering.” But I’m not a fan of the over-financed, over-educated, white, pseudo-masculine, philosophic musings. (Not for want of trying, mind you. I’ve slept-read through The Razor’s Edge AND Eat, Pray, Love.) Bunny, enamored by the brilliance of those around him whose political manifestations are borne of experience and need and misery—seems innocuous, but he carries no care. Therefore, I cannot care for him. Bunny does carry an acute awareness of his privilege and middling crisis of power. As he matures into his beliefs, he banally flirts with guilt over the hypocrisy of using his father’s wealth for direct mutiny against its source. Here would be an opportunity for some intrigue! But, no. Somehow, the love between father and son transcends this conflict, the one relationship of the book that would be interesting to risk. Even as Bunny is reminded by an oil cohort, Verne, about the disgraceful way in which he is dismantling his father’s legacy—Bunny carries on, and Dad enables him with a mysterious bemusement. Dad, Bunny likes to reminds us, began as a mule driver. It seems unlikely he would allow his life’s effort to devour itself like a grim Ouroboros, building to sustain its own destruction, but he does. And it is spectacularly Boring!

After all, Dad does not bestow the same grace on his daughter Bertie. There is a thread of disdain for the corruption of wealth on the women in this novel. Bertie is shallow and unlikeable, her occasional appearance is an annoying disruption from the work of the novel. The Mom of the book is grotesque in her greed. Bunny has warmth for her, but the reader is not allowed to understand why, as she is as flat a character as could be. The only women of wealth who are given dimension are Vee Tracy and Annabelle. Both are screen actresses, who must work for their money, even if their work consists of keeping their bodies impossibly slim and their boyfriends in the oil industries. Rachel, Jewish, homely and as whip smart and stalwart a character as Bunny’s hero Paul, suddenly falls for Bunny not because he worships her, but the other way around. All Bunny needs to do is kiss her and she’s melted, despite her superior intellect and conviction. I don’t buy it, but I needn’t, because there’s so little novel left at this point, and the inevitable tragedy of it all speeds us recklessly off the cliff.

I didn’t love this book, because I felt like I was being sold something I did not want to buy. I’m not a big fan of big ideas in literature, of didactic lessons, even as they align with my own moralistic leanings. I can see the merit of such pursuits, or, frankly, the propaganda. Oil! clearly represents a time capsule of the American political nuance of the early twentieth century, perhaps with some human compulsion that is absent from political texts of the time. The difference between writing a history, though, is thus: history is relatable by the sheer evidence of the person’s existence through the events they endured. It’s the Buddha’s noble truth, “all life is suffering” to which we can identify. But with fiction, all that exists is the manufactured suffering by the writer. And if I’m to be sold a grand political philosophy through imaginary suffering, there had better be some “life.”     

Wes: 

After a rather long lay-off, our book this time is Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Written in the mid-1920s, Sinclair is clearly trying to reestablish the fame and controversy of his very first novel, The Jungle, written in 1906. This one, however, is not quite of the same ilk, probably because fewer readers are as intimately concerned with oil products as they are with eating meatpacking products from the sordid Chicago stockyards. Instead, most Americans of the time probably recognized oil products as essential for building America’s growing industrial might. As it is, the book is an interesting tale about every conceivable aspect of oil production and refinement with a lot of human interest added into the bargain.

The story is told from the perspective of “Bunny”, a diminutive for J. Arnold Ross, Junior, son of a former California mule teamster but current oil wildcatter and wheeler-dealer. Running from about 1912 to the successful re-election of Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Bunny follows and observes his J. Ross, Senior in his dealings as he develops one oil field near Long Beach and another, at Bunny’s urging, on a property that would benefit one of his youthful friends, Paul Watkins and in future will be his. Considered a practical education, dad works him into his business but also supports Bunny in a life of luxury, sending him to top schools, supporting various romantic and youthful peccadilloes. But they’re always together in dealings with the Paradise field (drilling began on Watkins’ property near Paradise, California). Through the field’s development in his formative years, Bunny sees every aspect of how oil is discovered, leased, recovered, refined, and sold off. His dad’s plan was clearly to groom him to inherit a fortune when the time comes.

The basic conflict of the book is between capital and labor. We see the inner workings of both through Bunny’s eyes plus how both are affected by government bureaucracies, education, journalism, Hollywood, politics, and religion. But Bunny is a complete idealist versus a pure capitalist like his father. Everyone he meets seems to impact his outlook at the moment. He accepts the last person’s position until his next conversation with one of the opposing positions. By the end of the book he settles on the socialist position which, understandably, reflects the author’s real world position. By then, his father has been swindled out of the bulk of his fortune by his partner and the outcomes of President Harding’s Teapot Dome scandal. Bunny ends the book with a fraction of his expected legacy, marries his socialist magazine manager, and plans to build a socialist college (commune) deep in the California hills. 

The book is a very interesting read and was made into a recent movie (I still haven’t seen it but will to see how it relates to the book). I have several problems with some of the author’s descriptions. The most serious is his depiction of the Russian revolution. He touts the White Russians as the monsters killing everyone in sight. He apparently missed the Red Russian methods for achieving dominance after the downfall of the czar (the Bolsheviks killed the czar and his family after all). The Communist tyranny they set up resulted in more than 200 million deaths, primarily among the undesirables (deplorables?) in Russia. I suppose Sinclair deserves some slack as Stalin had only been in control a year or two when this story was written. I guess the Kronstadt incident, murders of the Mensheviks and other atrocities under Lenin were not well known at the time. I also know Sinclair hated Christianity (religion is, after all the “opium of the masses”, according to Marx- the Communist god). Sinclair apparently knows nothing about its real practices but deliberately wanted to mock it, as nearly everything he states in his descriptions of Eli Watkins’ antics is wrong.

Despite my objections, the book was an easy read – not complex or obscure at all. If nothing else, Sinclair is very forthright and honest in his views. He definitely is a good observer of life in general and provides a concise view of the self-interests of many characters in the oil business and the environment as it existed in the roaring 20s. I enjoyed reading it, especially the passages on how oil leases are forged, the technical details of drilling and recovering oil, and techniques for “cracking” the crude oil into its refined products. I rate this book as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best). 

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

 Invisible Man was published in 1952 by Random House. It went on to win the year’s National Book Award and ranks high on many best English-language novel lists.

WES:

Ralph Ellison’s book, Invisible Man, was one I often heard talked about years ago when I was in college. It was reputed to be a good descriptor of the black experience at that time in the United States. I never read it until now and probably never would have had I not picked it up at the “Buy two, get one free” table at Barnes and Noble when selecting last month’s reading. I thought it might be a good sequitur to last month’s book about black crime and punishment in the South. I also thought how neat it might be to compare the recent black experience as expressed in Stevenson’s book with what was going on in race relations in America shortly after World War II. As I proceeded in reading this book, I must concede that I think that little has really changed. Human nature, universal as it is, still effects things in similar ways. The blacks see their condition as inhibited by real racial hurdles while whites, predominant in numbers in this society, exploit their status as a sort of natural order of things. These factors continually surface in the conditions depicted in Ellison’s work.

The unnamed narrator of the novel, born in the Deep South, begins with great idealism for learning and improving society while one always accepts responsibility for personal failures. But he quickly finds that in the white world, things are quite different and conditions are extensively stacked against any black man who steps out of his expected role. This is seen immediately when the youngster, just applauded for his scholarly high school speech, is asked to repeat it at a local political party function. But since he’s to be there anyway, he is inserted into a “battle royal” where, after being beaten to a pulp in a gang fight on stage, is asked to make his speech to the all-white city fathers while bloodied with sweat dripping down. Gaining approval to enter a prestigious black university, he does well scholastically but trips up severely in his school sponsored job when chauffeuring a rich northern sponsor and taking him where the black folk “really live”. Dr. Bledsoe, the black dean of the university casts him from the school for acceding to Mr. Norton’s, the rich benefactor, requests. As Bledsoe sees it, the black man’s role is, “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please the white man is to tell him a lie!” And that is exactly what Dr. Bledsoe has done his whole career – tell lies and say yes at every occasion until he was telling them what was what and masking anything hurtful to maintain the status quo.

This theme of mistakenly doing the wrong thing is constant throughout. The narrator moves to New York where he time after time is thrown into situations where no one tells him what to do or what is expected yet he is required to perform actions that constantly trip him up. It is almost as if he is a cog in a machine where it is never worth the effort to tell him what is really expected. Instead he fails each time believing something he did was wrong when it is the failure of the white man to really see him as a thinking, feeling being, worthy of mentorship or camaraderie or even the effort to tell him how to do the task right. Even Lucius Brockway, the black indispensable man working the critical machinery of the paint factory that everyone depends on fails to instruct him properly and this lapse causes much pain when the inevitable disaster occurs. Even after spending some time in what sounds like an iron lung getting intermittent shock treatments, he’s fired from the job after one day and no one tells him what’s happened and how his health might be impacted. Instead, the remainder of the book, he experiences sort of a brain fog at times that seems to affect his thinking and even what he is seeing, especially at night.

Finally becoming desperate for work in order to return and finish college, the narrator becomes a community organizer! Caught up in a local elderly eviction process where he gives an extemporaneous speech that moves people to action, he is hired by a group that calls itself “The Brotherhood”. It is really a thinly veiled communist organization which seeks to inspire events to bring about social change. What that consists of is never made clear. Our narrator is given a pseudonym and becomes quite prominent in the Harlem black community. Again, he is never told exactly what the score is – he is only supposed to organize the black neighborhoods for whatever and whenever the Brotherhood committee needs them to do something. Once again, he screws up moving off to raise anger over a local black man’s murder by the police and again is demoted for a failure that he never quite understands. This time, however, the whole district erupts into a full scale riot beyond anyone’s control except lots of police with guns.

Throughout these sundry experiences, our narrator discovers that no one seems to really see him or really interact as if they consider him a real human. He arrives at this conclusion one night when he copies the zoot suit guys and dons some sun glasses and a wide-brimmed hat while moving about. He finds himself able to go anywhere and interact with people who should know him but see only his outfit. Beyond that he begins to believe he really is the equivalent of being invisible. During the riots, he is nicked by a bullet in the head and seems to go mad, literally disappearing down a manhole into a blocked off abandoned basement which he makes his home. Believing it to be the perfect hideaway for an invisible man, he moves about at night and brags of stealing electricity from the city for the 1,369 lights he has serendipitously installed on his ceiling.  

The book also highlights some of the stereotypes of blacks. We meet Jim Trueblood and hear his incest story where he is excoriated by his own black society but “help” is lavished on him by the white society, perhaps an evidence of white guilt. We see the black war veterans visiting the brothel where the highly educated vet is at the same demeaning level as any other farm hand veteran. He threatens violence to the white man and his chauffeur as examples of white privilege. Homer Barbie, the black preacher, extols the white founder of the University while Dr. Bledsoe lies to cover the faults. Mary Rambo, the black mother figure, takes pity on our narrator when he is down and out and, without question, presents her Christian charity. There’s Rinehart, the zoot suit man who one minute is a drug dealer and pimp, the next a preacher in a skid row church. Finally, there is “Ras the Exhorter” who recognizes the Brotherhood as a user of the blacks and succeeds in causing a real riot that costs him his life.

The final irony of the book is the discovery by the narrator what his grandfather, an ex-slave, meant on his deathbed when he told the narrator’s father, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I gave up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yesses. undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” The black man hates himself for what he has to do to survive but he finds that rage at his circumstances is less productive than lies. Our narrator tries both and ends up withdrawing, convinced it is easier to dwell in real invisibility away from society in a lost basement.  

I liked this book but it was hard going at first and difficult to get into for the first 200 pages. Some of the narrative was a bit confusing, lacking adequate description, but it was an early effort for the author. It makes me see, mostly in the glass darkly, what the blacks have to face living in white-dominated American culture. It also seems applicable to many other cultures, maybe even the Muslim culture where their very scriptures tell them to smile and lie when they are in the minority. I rate this book as a 3 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

ALLISON:

The lateness of the blog is due entirely to my inability to get it together, but if I haven’t been writing about The Invisble Man over the past two months, I have been reading and rereading and thinking and talking about  it nonstop. You can tell how much I care about a book by the amount devastation I inflict on its form. The constant stuffing into my bag, or coat pocket, scribbling into, eating over, and sleeping on top of has destroyed my book. It’s missing half a jacket, splotched and stained to a shameful degree, with complicated system of origami dog-ears bloating its girth. I’ve wrecked it, because it’s so dang good.

            Good is not the word. Astonishing, really. There is much to be said about the narrative, a tight first person point of view that catapults the action. The narrator addresses the reader as a confidant, or perhaps more accurately, as a portion of the narrator’s own psyche. Ellison does something I’m hard pressed to find comparison to within other novels I’ve read, although I am familiar with the process happening in my own head: constant questioning. The questions are often direct, and it is important to note they are rarely rhetorical—they are in earnest, desiring response despite their impossible nature, sometimes dreadfully implored, and mostly asking: “Why is this happening? What is happening?”

             To me, this is a book about rules. All the various spoken or unspoken, apparent or invisible rules that one must somehow anticipate, incorporate, validate, mitigate, or rail against in order to win or lose in any given situation. Even as I write this, I realize there could be no broader, less explicit statement. What’s to be won? And don’t we all do this? Yes, we do. But the rules are different for different groups of people based largely on stratifying, yet otherwise arbitrary factors like skin color, gender, socioeconomic and educational indicators like accents and modes of speech. In order to navigate various situations involving different social groups requires a special knowledge of what are the desirable traits depending on the scenario. Linguists have a term that has become a catchall for this behavior: code switching. Code switching, in its original linguistic use, is the practice of bi or multilingual people switching between languages in the same speech event. In America, we give code switching derogatory titles like Spanglish or Ebonics (although African American Vernacular English has been argued as its own distinct language), and misrepresent the practice as an inability to fully grasp Standard English. But linguists (and any code switching individual) will tell you that code switching is not to be confused with ignorance. Some words are more explicit, more expressive, more accurate and untranslatable in one language over another. Those that code switch are using a third language to communicate with precision, and have a wider base from which to articulate ideas. 

            The term code switching has been borrowed from other social science disciplines to include adjusting one’s outward mannerism to navigate various cultural terrains. The narrator of this book is constantly barraged with a hyperawareness of his behavior/appearance juxtaposed against those he is surrounded by. Indeed, he qualifies and questions the dynamics of every group, be they impoverished “peasant” black versus the college-educated black, or southern black versus northern urban black, the black of the Brotherhood versus those of Ras’ violent uprising, the rich white wives of the Brotherhood versus the white Brotherhood leaders, the old versus the young, and so on with infinite variations. In all of these encounters, someone is explaining to the narrator how he must behave for whatever motivation, as simple as existence, as profound as world upheaval. We could reverse those, though, couldn’t we? As profound as existence, as simple as world upheaval. The great success of this book is exposing the complex digestion and translation of all this input. It seems a hopeless, maddening occupation, and most importantly, one NOT DEMANDED of all of us. It is not important for whites to think about how they are impacting and representing themselves across all the strata the narrator of this book considers. Or, it absolutely should be important, but it doesn’t have the same stake.

            Simple example: When I was pregnant and throughout new motherhood, I would ride the train through the city and look at all the people with near spiritual awe, thinking of how all human life begins the same, and how every one of my fellow passengers was incubated in a womb of another human. How complex and amazing this assemblage of nucleotides into proteins into cells into consciousness is. If every infant is born with a scaffolding of warmth, food, touch, and eye contact, (which they are not) they should develop graced by the knowledge that who they are is perfect. My son was brand new and perfect, yet I began to worry about raising him into a “good man”. I defined “good man” as one who doesn’t rape or use his strength to lord over those he views as weaker, someone who encounters women with humanity and respect. My son’s father probably has different priorities and the idea of his mother loading these concerns on our innocent infant would likely horrify him. But these are the potentialities of men that I must guard against because I am defined as a woman and it is important that I know how to navigate a world where such violations prevail. However because I am white, and my son is white, never did I imagine I should raise him to know he will be judged and feared for the color of his skin (maybe I should?). Never did I think I must raise him how to talk to police so that he doesn’t get shot, or how to fight against an education, economic, and political system that works hard to exclude him, and hundreds of other highly specific worries that seem looney when looking at a fresh, unencumbered baby. But babies grow up and the world begins to tell them things about themselves, begins to teach them the rules. I was walking down the street with my now six-year-old and a man whispered something so violent and evil and dehumanizing into my ear as I passed that I stopped,  my hand still in my son’s, and I turned on him, screeching, “You are a vile piece of shit. I am with my son. My son!” The outburst was embarrassing and extreme, and not exactly what I wanted to say, but I had had enough. This kind of threatening catcalling varies in degrees of grossness, and happens to me on a weekly basis. But in front of my kid, that was the last straw. I said “I am with my son,” because had I been alone, I might have attacked him, but also because this man had now forced me to teach my son that I won’t be intimidated by monsters. I had a split second to make a choice, and I decided I’d rather risk the potential physical threat to both me and my child, than bear the successful landing of such cowardly, ugly power that this person believed he possessed because he was a man, and I was not. It was a scene not unlike the opening the book where our narrator beats a man in the street for calling him an offensive name after an innocent collision. I felt such rage and venom, that it certainly might have progressed that way if my son hadn’t been there, or if the man had done something other than stare through me, as I screamed and spit in his face. What the narrator asks of that scene mirrors exactly the thoughts as they spilled from my head:

“Who was responsible for that near murder—I? I don’t think so, and I refuse it. I won’t buy it. You can’t give it to me. He bumped me, he insulted me.  Shouldn’t he, for his own personal safety, have recognized my hysteria, my ‘danger potential?’ He, let us say, was lost in a dream world—which, alas, is only too real!—and didn’t he rule me out of it? And if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn’t I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! Let me agree with you, I was the irresponsible one; for I should have used my knife to protect the higher interests of society. Some day that kind of foolishness will cause us tragic trouble. All dreams and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.”  

This passage is a great example of the interrogation the reader encounters with the text. All of the questions compel us to weigh in. We cannot help it. A question triggers something in our brains that a statement does not. It automatically inspires our own inner debate, or insecurity, if even for a second. And in the case of this narrator, we are joined to his perspective, which I believe is one of bewilderment. The bewilderment I recognized in my son as he watched me scream at that stranger. “Why? Why is this happening?” For some of us, this bewilderment is not a state in which we are comfortable, because for white America, systematic and institutional racism is not bewildering. The privileges gained by the white population are so propagandized as natural “freedoms” and “human rights” that they are the opposite of confusing, rendering the racist doctrines that build and maintain the platform from which whites can feel so secure in our fundamental entitlement invisible.

            So far I’ve avoided the most salient observation of this book because I feel inadequately equipped to address it. Ellison began writing Invisible Man in 1947, but reading it today is like no time has passed. This book exists completely in the present. And that is humbling and disturbing and important to consider. In the book club we’ve read many “period” novels thus far; The Moonstone, The Beautiful and the Damned, and The Thin Man, that have had racist, outdated sentiments that have disturbed me to encounter. As a white woman, how frankly stupid I would be to think: “Well, things must be better because I am offended by this language and we don’t casually write racism like this anymore, thank goodness.”  Meanwhile, all the unrest, the political posturing, the manipulation and maddening rules of navigation of Invisible Man are as present as ever.

I loved this book. I will probably return to it many, many times throughout my life. Thanks for choosing it Dad! 1 out of 10 (1 being the highest). 

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

Just Mercy was published in 2014 by Spiegal and Grau and won the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

ALLISON:

I am a pop-law addict. Like millions of people all over the world, I listened each week with bated breath to the podcast Serial, hosted by journalist Sarah Koenig, and it’s successor,  Undisclosed, created by lawyer/bloggers committed to overturning the murder conviction of Adnan Syed. I watched all of the “Paradise Lost” documentaries which followed the post-conviction trials and eventual release of the West Memphis Three—and Damien Echols' narrow dodge of execution. I watched Ken Burns’ film, “The Central Park Five,” which documented the interrogation and conviction of five teenagers in the rape of the Central Park Jogger, which thirteen years later was confessed to and collaborated by DNA evidence as to have been committed by a one serial rapist, not amongst those charged. I’ve watched “The Staircase,” “The Jinx” (holy cow, what an ending), “Making a Murderer,” and my fair share of Datelines.

What I’ve not done, is analyze why I choose to fill my downtime with this subcategory of “entertainment” even though it mildly embarrasses me. It’s uncomfortable to think about why I might be simultaneously drawn and repulsed by the true crime genre and what my limitations for comfort are. The first inkling of this threshold came when I forced myself to read In Cold Blood about a decade ago. It was too good, it scared the daylights out of me and I knew suddenly that I’ve no real curiosity about why or how someone kills. For example, I have not, nor will I, read or watch anything to do with Columbine or the book One of Us about Anders Breivik and the Norway massacre. As I was setting up the Top 10 books of 2015 display at work around Christmas, of which One of Us was included, I remember saying, quite surprised: “There is nothing I would want to read less than this,” and its prominence amongst the new nonfiction books still haunts my peripheral as I move about the store. No, I don’t want to read about violent criminals. But, I do sort of have a compulsion for the spectacle of the courtroom, which might be why I chose this book for book club.

That, and I like the title. I like to think about the elegant play of the words Just Mercy:  just as fair, just as simple. Just Mercy was also a NYT Top Ten Book of its publication year (2014) and its relevance and brilliance has been murmured about the bookshop for quite a while now, with many on staff reading and recommending it. Full disclosure—the editor of this book, Chris Jackson, is not only a tremendous force in the publishing world as you can read here, but also a family friend of the bookshop. Kudos to Chris for bringing this book to fruition because it is a remarkable read. I’d go as far as to say one of the most important books I’ve read in my life.

So, I liked this book, but it was hardly what I’d expected. I was prepared for the statistical evidence of our prison infrastructure to outrage and to frustrate me, but what I didn’t anticipate was to being so profoundly moved by Bryan Stevenson’s plight. This book is less of a political text than it is a straight-forward memoir. Stevenson’s narrative is engaging and intimate. And surprisingly emotional. There are plenty of stereotypes that go with the moniker “lawyer” and he only satisfies the good ones. He is courageously optimistic, he is exhaustive, he is, first and foremost, concerned with justice. His version of justice is merciful and redemptive. I say “his version” because it is clear that there is no solid definition of “justice” in this country. Our legal system, our laws and their enforcers—from the beat cops, to detectives, to district attorneys, and judges, even the jurors—is a mutable, arguable apparition. It’s a game. A game about winning and losing. And there are many variables stacking the deck. Consider this essay, written about being a juror in a New York City murder trial. The writer, one of only two men of color selected for the jury of an accused black man (there is only one black juror, a woman), details all of the pressures to succumb to the group and convict, despite little evidence and a dubious signed confession. This is a nice companion piece to Stevenson’s chapter on jury selection, the practice of striking black jurors from service, and what it is we ask a jury to do—convince each other. Nonconformity is not a popular choice and when you are the sole dissenter, it can be agonizing. Tim Sullivan puts it frankly in his book, Unequal Verdicts, regarding the jury in the Central Park Five cases: “There’s always a danger that jurors will try to come up with something, because at some point they feel like prisoners. If a jury is in there for ten or twelve days (deliberation), as these were, people start looking for a way to get out.” The choice to convict can be born of any number of prejudices, or it could be a mere matter of convenience.

Stevenson is a black man, and this is definitely a book about the racial discrepancies represented in the access to legal services, sentencing, and incarceration of black people in this country.  He presents his experience as a lawyer and architect of the Equal Justice Initiative as exhausting, emotionally taxing, humbling, but also sometimes humiliating. As a black man, fighting for the rights of all underrepresented, be it minority, the poor, the young, or the mentally ill, he has faced outrageous obstacles related to his own skin color. This stuff was hard to read. The anecdote of the racist white guard, who forced Stevenson into a strip search in order to gain access to a prospective client, is particularly inflaming. I wondered why Stevenson relented to such treatment. I was infuriated for him, but he says:

I thought about trying to find an assistant warden, but I realized that that might be difficult, and anyway an assistant warden would be unlikely to tell an officer that he was wrong in front of me. I had driven over two hours for this visit and had a very tough schedule over the next three weeks; I wouldn’t be able to get back to the prison any time soon if I didn’t get in now. I went inside the bathroom and removed my clothes.

It’s upsetting to me that he would succumb so easily to an act of aggressive indignity, but Stevenson has a higher purpose and the take away is: As comfortable as many of us are not considering those who might very literally be rotting in prison in violent and inhuman conditions over tenuous convictions, Stevenson can’t. He can’t waste a single minute.

And he can’t turn it off, he can’t get hardened, or deaden to all of the pain he has worked his life to immerse himself in. He couldn’t ignore the cries of a grandmother for his attention to her tiny, fourteen year old grandson who had killed his mothers’ abusive boyfriend after a brutal pummeling that left the boy thinking his mother was dead. This part of the book—young Charlie’s chapter—hurt the most. Like a sucker punch it caught me off guard that so many prison staffers would stand idle as this child, weighing under 100 pounds, was left unattended with adult men in a cell. How is that not cruel and unusual? How is it not just as criminal? If we think Stevenson’s documentation of prison sexual abuse might be exaggerated, we only have to look at Michigan’s history of paying out hundreds of millions dollars in reparations due to rampant sexual violations by prison guards and employees in their women’s prisons. In contrast, the state recently threw out lawsuits regarding male juveniles’ claims of sexual abuses in adult facilities, sending the message that a prisoner’s right to bodily integrity might be protected against state employees (sometimes), but meaningless against the conduct of incarcerated peers.

I am dancing around the biggest through line of the book, the wrongful conviction and horrifying treatment of Walter MacMillian, who was placed on death row before he was even tried for the crime for which he was accused. It is unbelievable. And shameful. It makes me feel ashamed—that I never knew about this case before picking up this book, that every time I have voted, I haven’t really considered the death penalty. I should be ashamed. I had no idea the prison system was this massive monetary industry. Who would want to make money on this suffering? (Stevenson doesn’t go into the prison money machine too much, but for an example of how judges and prosecutors can financially gain from incarcerations watch the documentary “Kids for Cash”—rest easy that the judge in this film was just sentenced to 28 years for his corruption). Stevenson’s had some triumphs. He saw the Supreme Court ban sentencing juveniles convicted for non-homicidal crimes for life. And he has woken me up to that which I had closed my eyes. I can’t unlearn what I’ve witnessed through his book, nor do I ever again want to ignore it. I can do better and I most certainly will.

I give this book an easy 2 on the scale of 1 to 10 (1 being the highest).

WES:  

This month’s book is Just Mercy – A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson. This is a true story of a young Harvard-trained attorney who, after working a summer with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee (SPDC), decided to devote his career to gaining justice for prisoners on death row and those in other terrible circumstances in southern prisons. The book revolves around Stevenson’s efforts to forestall the death penalty of Walter McMillian who was convicted of murder under appallingly false circumstances with a racially motivated sheriff, prosecutor, and judges. McMillian had many witnesses to validate his alibi but all mitigating evidence was negated by two white men’s testimony whose “witness” was proven as coerced. Stevenson had to first convince several appellate courts that the evidence was tainted and get a new trial – all before the exorable death penalty would claim the life of a patently innocent man. Ironically, this all takes place in Monroeville, Alabama, the same fictional scene of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird where another innocent man was accused of a crime in a racist society.

The purpose of this book is not to highlight any one especially horrible case, as the McMillian case certainly was, but to highlight a general tendency in many southern states to continue to foster post-Jim Crow era values throughout the southern criminal justice systems. The history and morals of the south consistently lack any mercy even where the evidence that poverty and severe upbringing has led people to mistakes that would ruin their lives forever. His design is probably best expressed in the author’s own words, “We’re supposed to sentence people fairly after fully considering their life circumstances, but instead we exploit the inability of the poor to get the legal assistance they need – all so we can kill them with less resistance.” The author highlights four types of cases he sees as most serious. These include: convictions where the perpetrators are sentenced to death; those cases where juveniles are sentenced to “death in prison” (i.e., those tried in adult court and sentenced to life sentences with no chance of parole); those clearly mentally ill who are sentenced to death/life in prison; and, women sentenced to life for allegedly killing a stillborn child. 

Walter McMillian eventually is exonerated but he never recovers from his experiences. His story weaves throughout the book with Stevenson introducing other judicial malfeasance cases from the examples above which, though terribly unjust on the surface, may be truly outliers or cases that had fallen through the cracks in the judicial system. Stevenson outlines what his legal objectives are in a conversation he had with Rosa Parks, of all people. These objectives are:

1)      Stop the death penalty.

2)      Stop the tendency toward excessive punishment and racial bias in criminal justice.

3)      Free people wrongly convicted.

4)      Help the poor and provide defense for the indigent.

5)      Stop putting children in adult jails and prisons.

6)      Put more diversity in the criminal justice decision-making roles.

7)      Educate the public on the plight of the poor.

8)      Confront abuse of power of police and prosecutors. 

I would say that these are all important in this book with the need to educate the public on the plight of the poor and black lost in the callous southern justice system foremost. Interestingly, Ms. Parks’ comment to him after hearing the goals was, “Ooooh, honey, all that is going to make you tired, tired, tired.” An apt response in this case as Stevenson often complains of all the time he spent on the road and the overwhelming nature of the paperwork, interviews, depositions and discovery activities that his work entails with hundreds of cases suspected of potential official abuse. His most serious point is the lack of legal resources especially after prisoners are convicted. He indicts the US Supreme Court for hurrying along death cases and limiting the appeals in death penalty cases. His group spends tremendous time, patience, and work to save those prisoners unjustly accused and those whose penalty is too severe. It appears they are not getting the necessary help except through groups like Stevenson’s. Instead, things are worsening, the accusation being that a “prison-industrial complex” has been foisted on the public designed for mass incarceration of the poor and helpless.

Reading this book, which seems to evoke emotion against the state for lacking mercy, Stevenson has it all wrong. People display mercy. The state does not. Nor do we want it to for when it does it picks winners and losers and justice for someone is denied. The state is required to enforce the laws as written. People are expected to obey or face the consequences. People are entitled to a speedy trial and to face their accusers in open court. All the examples in the book feature corrupt people corrupting the system and using their authority wrongly. This only shows the brokenness of individuals in the world, be they the accusers or the accused. Stevenson says that everyone is broken referring of course to the poor he champions. He has no comment for those broken people who are tasked to enforce the law. Justice under our system is supposed to be blind. In fact the Bible says in Leviticus 19:15, “You must not act unjustly when rendering justice. Do not be partial to the poor or give preference to the rich; judge your neighbor fairly.”

The problem behind all the difficulties in this book is sin. All have fallen short of the Glory of God and all will be judged individually and personally by a holy God. He will show mercy on those who have accepted His free gift of mercy or as it is more widely known, grace. Those who won’t ultimately don’t want His free gift and will get what they have decided they want, a life away from God. For this though, they will pay God’s appointed penalty. This book wants the government to be something it isn’t. It wants mercy from government whereas God’s role for government is to restrain the wicked and to strike terror into the hearts of the evil doers. This is what is being done by the government in this book; however, incorrectly it may look. On the other hand, Stevenson and his firm are doing what God, and good government, should want: sacrificing their time, money and effort to help those weak and wounded among us. I heartily commend him for it. But the Left’s drive to have the government remove all restraint and lessen all penalties is totally misapplied effort.

I particularly disagree that the death penalty should be abolished. While the author’s snide comment that we would never rape or assault a rape/assault perpetrator (eye for eye comment, I guess) may be apropos in some circles, but premeditated murder is in a completely different category. That person when destroyed has had his life snuffed out. He/she will never have a future and will never breathe again on this earth. If unsaved, they will never have a chance for salvation. That person has been created in the image of the Almighty and created by Him. The murderer with evil intent has, in effect, cursed God by destroying his highest creation. The penalty of death is exquisitely fair – to sacrifice one’s life for the life taken maliciously. To let the intentional murderer survive is an affront to God (i.e., man has again, as he is always wont to do, inserted his will as better than God’s). The death penalty is not one to be taken lightly and it surely is not in the US. One fellow in the book has been on death row for over 30 years yielding many chances for judicial and appellate review. The death penalty must be preserved because if it is not, life will continue to be cheapened everywhere this mantra to abolish the death penalty wins favor. 

Overall, although this book’s appeal was mostly to emotion seeking, by outrageous but intentionally selective case examples, to overturn major law and policies voted on by the people, the book was interesting reading. I applaud all that the author has done. He has truly used his skill and talents to help the helpless but I also see where much of the current “Black Lives Matter” comes from and probably where it is going. One point entirely missing from the book’s discussion of the increase in prison spaces and population is that the crime rate went down in almost exact proportion. The trend is now in the other direction with the BLM movement and the mass release of so-called drug prisoners around the nation. I think this book can furnish a lot for further discussion on this page! Although it was an easy read, the problems I had with the overly emotional descriptions with little or no fairness toward the victims’ and the government’s plight lead me to rate it as a 4 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas

“The Man in the Iron Mask” is the last portion of the D’Artagnan Romances and was serialized between 1847 and 1850 in its original language: French. Neither Dad’s nor my edition has a translator listed.

WES:

The introduction to my copy of The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas likens it to a comic book or one of the pulp western novels that were popular some years ago. It also resembles the populist Robin Hood in England and the cowboy to America. These analogies are right on as The Three Musketeers stories seem to fulfil the same purpose for the nineteenth century Frenchman. This book is the final in Dumas’ series about the musketeers and their adventures as the upholders of truth, honor and loyalty to the French kings in the late 1500s and early 1600s when swordsmanship still predominated and romanticist depictions of the kings and their courts tickled the tastes of the French reading public.

In this book, the great scandal is the discovery by Aramis, Bishop of Vannes, an ex-musketeer that the present king of France, Louis XIV, has a twin brother who has been secreted away in the Bastille by his mother, Queen Anne of Austria, allegedly to protect the kingdom from potential disruptions in the royal succession. I never quite understood how Aramis figured this out since it was such a momentous secret. Since the two princes look exactly alike, Aramis plots to capture the king while he is visiting Monsieur Fouquet, the surintendant (yes, that’s what they call this post – not superintendent) of finance – the principle minister to the king. It also happens that both the king (who is married and has a queen) and Fouquet are in love with the same woman, Mademoiselle de la Valliere, who is the king’s mistress. She really is also secretly in love with Raoul, son of Athos, another retired musketeer, but has evidently decided her best interests are with the king.

Anyway, the plot is consummated when Aramis whisks Philippe, the brother, from the dungeon and takes him to the fete where the king is celebrating. They secretly have a room overlooking the king’s room and spy on how he conducts his toilet for a couple of days. One night they lower the king’s entire bed below ground, kidnap him, and take him to the Bastille where he is inserted via a clever ruse into the ex-prisoner’s room. His screaming and beating the door is fruitless as Aramis convinces the governor of the Bastille that he is mad. Meanwhile, Philippe replaces the king and attempts to fool all that he is the king. Aramis has to fool his old friend, D’Artagnan, the captain of the musketeers, who is ordered to arrest Fouquet for using his office to enrich himself and trying to steal the king’s mistress.

For some inexplicable reason, Aramis reveals to Fouquet the whole plot to exchange the kings, one the good king, Philippe, for Louis, the alleged 2nd born usurper. Fouquet, instead of going along with the plan, blows up the whole thing, and actually goes to the Bastille and rescues the king who had previously ordered his arrest. Before the king could react, Fouquet offered Aramis and Porthos, another ex-musketeer who was unwittingly helping Aramis, a refuge to escape the king’s wrath, his property on Belle Isle (no, not the Island in Detroit River – this one is off the coast of France). When the king returns, he is understandingly enraged at all the plotters and orders D’Artagnan to arrest them but not before he personally orders Philippe to wear an iron mask and D’Artagnan to secretly take him to a desert island where he can be held for the rest of his life. Thusly, Philippe is last heard of on page 318 of a 574 page book. I guess his curse is to last forever as the musketeers never do rescue him.

Instead, the rest of the book is devoted to the fate of the major characters and the last adventures of the musketeers. We find that Raoul is so crushed by the lost love of de la Valliere that he goes off to war. He is killed in the African war and the news causes the death of his father hours before the embalmed body of the hero-son returns. They are buried together and de la Valliere comes to weep over the grave after being superseded by a younger mistress. Fouquet, despite his heroic efforts to save the king, is imprisoned by D’Artagnan after betrayal by his clerk, Colbert, who takes his place. D’Artagnan does manage to save him from the gallows. D’Artagnan is ordered to capture Aramis and Porthos by besieging Belle Isle but instead gives them time to escape. This brings the wrath of the king onto him. He’s fired and the siege proceeds without him. Aramis escapes to Spain but Porthos is killed when the powder keg he throws at a company of attacking soldiers collapses the cave on top of him.

Louis suddenly becomes mellow and seems to forgive everybody. D’Artagnan gets back into good graces simply through his sheer loyalty and honor to the king. Even Aramis comes back later to lead an effort to turn Spain into a neutral while Louis moves to war against the United Provinces who were formally his allies against Spain. France, however, is loath to ally itself to a Protestant confederation against a fellow Catholic state. D’Artagnan in reward for his virtue and loyalty is promoted to Marshal of France and leads the attack but on the very day of his marshal’s baton award, he is killed attacking a Dutch fort. Thus comes to an end the musketeer story. Aramis died in his bed, I guess.

This story was somewhat disappointing in several ways. After spending the first 50 pages bemoaning the injustices done to Philippe by his mother and Louis XIII, I was looking forward to seeing him mount the throne and be the good king and somehow fool everyone by convincing everyone he was Louis XIV. I figured Louis would be the man in the iron mask. Instead, there was no redemption – the bad king remained king and Phillipe was sentenced to wear the mask and suffer eternal anonymity. The long description of Athos parting with Raoul as he went off to war was a bit much in the romanticism vein although this device was necessary, I guess, as a means to show the fate of Phillipe. I about tore my hair out with all the names that the characters used almost as a means of disguise. Everyone seemed to have multiple names. For instance, Porthos was known intermittently as Baron du Vallon, Signeur of Bracieux, and Signeur de Pierrefonds, among others. I guess the French are fond of all these titles. Every place you own gives you a different title, I suppose. I am the Baron de Little Oak Pond!  

Overall, this book was interesting, especially the fierce loyalty of everyone to the king even when he steps on your neck. I did not like how it didn’t proceed as I thought it should. Poor Phillipe might still be sitting out there on his prison island of Ste. Marguerite – where ever the heck that is – I looked for it off the coast of France! I did like the character of the musketeers and their all for one, one for all attitude and dialogue. It was interesting seeing Aramis trying to outwit D’Artagnan. I still don’t know why he divulged the plot to Fouquet and NOT to his fellow musketeers, especially to the captain of the king’s guard who was most in position to help the cause. I guess that was a case of one for one! Although it was an easy read, the problems I had with it leads me to rate it as a 5 on my scale of 1-10 (1 as best).

ALLISON:

It took me longer than usual to read this book, in part because my edition (Oxford World’s Classics) has twenty-nine more chapters than other versions, indeed the one Dad read. What might you have missed, were you not to read the first 200 pages that I unknowingly slogged through? As the intro of my edition points out, the reader would miss a single day (maybe in both the effort of reading—although, I’d estimate my 200 pages took more like a week—and narratively in the plot). This single day, detailed by Dumas, reveals some backstory that may or may not be critical to understanding future relationships. Raoul has a much bigger role, and his heartbreak with Louise is played out, setting him as a hopeless rival with King Louis. Financial, political, and romantic complications between Fouquet and Colbert are expounded. Largely the chapters are concerned with the plot to free Philippe, which is painstakingly revealed, along with its various motivations from key players. A critical and exciting piece of the book contained in these opening 200 pages was the revelation of the Queen’s birthing of secret twins, as detailed by Madame de Chevreuse to the Queen herself, and the following explanation of how the baby, young child, and eventual man, were hidden and cared for without even his brother, King Louis, the wiser. (This is arguable. At some points it is assumed Louis has been complicit in the plot to hide his brother, at others it is insisted that he was unaware of Philippe’s existence.) The plot to free Philippe was so dense in the first half of this book, that when the event is actually carried out, its quick failure and subsequent disappearance of Philippe from the narrative is surprising. He’s the title character after all and such a romantic figure. Without the first twenty-nine chapters, he becomes supporting cast, if not a fleeting walk-on.

But The Man in the Iron Mask is not the accurate title of this tome and the history of these characters extends far beyond the first 29 chapters. An alternate title for this portion of Dumas’ epic is Ten Years Later, as this is a continuation of the saga of The Three Musketeers. I didn’t know this going in, in fact I was unfamiliar with the names of the heroes (Athos, Aramis, Porthos, D’Artagnan) and it took me quite some time to figure out their particular significance. My early readings of Porthos were especially comical. The chapter “How Mouston had Become Fatter without giving Porthos Notice Thereof, and of the Troubles which Consequently Befell that Worthy Gentleman” although already ridiculous, was made even more hilarious without the context of Porthos’ Andre-the-Giant-esque stature. I spent a good portion of this book wondering why I felt untethered to the characters, like I was missing critical information before I discovered that there were likely 1200 or so serialized pages preceding even the extra ones I had read. So, yes, I was missing quite a bit.

We’ve read a couple of serializations in the bookclub thus far: The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Moonstone. Neither of which are as complex and encompassing as what Dumas accomplished with The Three Musketeers series. Dumas, although not the first, could be considered the Godfather of historical novel, employing real life figures as his protagonists and villains. I am quite fascinated by the time of long-running serializations. If we were to compare this format with the media of today, we might consider Dickens and Collins as having written one-off six-episode television mini-series that the BBC has so expertly mastered. Dumas, rather, has written a twelve year epically-arced American television series, like NYPD Blue. Where Dickens and Collins both had suspense-driven plots, Dumas was almost theatrically Sophoclean, or more contemporarily, soap-oprean, in its longwinded and complicated conversational interactions. All of the plot points are reiterated in verbal form, individually, by all parties involved. I won’t lie, this was tiring. In the introduction to my edition, David Coward says Dumas spent little energy creating a universe of historical detail, like “descriptions of dress, buildings, or court ritual” or even mooring the reader in summaries of previous action, “which would simply have bored the reader.” However, being a Johnny-come-lately reader, I would have much preferred an anchorage in the history of our heroes to the thick dialogue of “What we’re going to do, why we might do it, how we’re going to do it, and who we plan to undercut while we’re at it,” over and over again.

Which brings me Dumas’ panache for thrilling action! Once they finally stop pontificating and get to it, the action of this book was marvelous. I recently watched the film Titanic and recalled the bookclub’s reading of Dead Wake and thought, “Would Larson’s depiction of the sinking of the Lusitania have been so successful without the visual impact of Cameron’s film?” We all experienced the Titanic sinking so viscerally, in one of the very first CGI masterpieces, that much of Larson’s work conjuring the horror of an event few of us could possibly fathom, was done for him already. That’s not the case for Dumas. This being the final chapter of the Musketeers histories, Dumas was especially rousing in their demise. The grotto scene where Porthos and Aramis lay trap and kill dozens of soldiers is chilling and brutal and as terrifying as any horror film. Porthos’ death scene has all the emotional impact of an avalanche. The chase of the black horse and the white horse (my absolute favorite chapter), in which D’Artagnan arrests Fouquet is in equal measure poetic and kinetic, as to have left me breathless. And Raoul, poor Raoul and Athos’ heartbreaking finale. I did not need any visual context to experience these dramas to their fullest—all of it was imbedded terrifically in the text. Unfortunately, in the end, I wanted more of this, earlier and sustained.

And what the heck happened to Philippe?

In the intro, David Coward, absurdly states: “But a summary of the plot so far is as necessary as a handle on cabbage.” I’ve hardly heard a more bizarre comparison (although I plan to use this often and immediately). A handle is unthinkably incongruent to the function of vegetable, but a rooting in time and place, would have greatly influenced my reading, especially as there was so much political machinations going on in this story. Dumas is not responsible for my loss of footing, of course. He meant for me to be hooked from the start. If only I hadn’t started from the end.

I give this book a 4 on Dad’s scale of 1-10, 1 being highest. Although oft lost, I was also oft moved. n and immediately).ary, wouldarlly in the text.rilling in their demise.  mastered.