The Hole in the Middle of the Story

This summer I read two page-turners, novels that sucked me in and kept me reading late into the night.  One is Cailin Mullen's Heather, which could be classed as a police procedural in which a young woman chief of police in a small New Jersey town tries to revive a cold case and unravel mysteries about her own life.  The other is The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali and set a world away in Tehran with the Iranian Revolution of the 1950s roaring in the background.

 

Aside from the fact that both novels have strong women as the anchor character, at first glance the two  books seem to have little in common.  The Stationery Shop is a love story which goes off its rails when tension mount as a society comes apart.  The heroine doesn't learn why she was jilted until 60 years and several hundred pages later.  Heather, however, from the beginning is a mystery and while there's a lot of sex in it, there's relatively little love. 

 

The stories, however, share a characteristic that isn't immediately obvious. The resolution of the mysteries, the explanation of what has happened in both cases depends on a woman who is able to rise from terrible circumstances to a position of comfort if not plenty.  Bully for them, I'd say, it weren't for the great hole this leaves in the plot. Of course, in both cases the story is told so skilfully that you don't notice the problem until you've finished reading the book.  Then you begin to wonder: how did this happen?

 

This secondary mystery may not bother you.  If you're happy to take a story as presented and not wonder too much about loose ends, I'd recommend both books as good reads.  But for me the lack of information about the woman who overcomes great odds is deal breaker.  No amount of captivating detail and harrowing suspense can make the books anything more than second rate.

 

A Month in the Country: An English Pastoral with Long Shadows

  

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

 

This week's selection is a direct follow-up of Orbital, Samantha Harvey's space pastoral.  As I noted earlier, she said J.L. Carr's book A Month in the Country inspired her to write a tale in which no dramatic events take place, but  where context and climate are all important.

 

Carr writes in the first person from the point of view of Tom Birkin, badly damaged by World War I, who had trained as an art

restorer and finds himself cleaning up a mural in a village church in England during the month of August 1920.  I suspect that I found the book particularly pleasing because his evocation of wonderful summer weather rhymed with what we have been experiencing: not too hot, enough rain to keep things fairly green, sweet smells of growing things all around.   I also had an afternoon and evening free to indulge in reading, which allowed me to float along on the river of Carr's words.

 

But even without the weather cooperating, I think I would have delighted in the book, which is seemingly such a simple story.  There are threats in the shadows.  We do not learn what exactly happened in the War which left the man with an uncontrollable twitch to his face, and memories that he would is trying to repress.  Similarly, there is the mystery of the gorgeous mural that he is cleaning, which turns out to be a painting by a Master, not an ordinary itinerant painter.  Is there a connection between it and the grave that another ex-soldier, now an archeologist, is supposed to be looking for?

 

Then there is the name of the woman who left the money to clean the mural and find the grave: Hebron.  FamillySearch says that it is a name from Northumberland, possibly from "from Old English hēah ‘high’ + byrgen ‘burial place, tumulus’."  But there are other Hebrons in this world, and possibly therein lies a good part of the tale.

A Kind of a Space Pastoral: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

 

 

The past couple of weeks have been wonderful for star-gazers.  There was the complete eclipse of the sun that swept across the   North Atlantic and Europe, a grand show of the Perseid meteor shower, a rare planetary alignment visible (so it is said) a bit before dawn a couple of weeks ago here, and finally last night's partial eclipse of the moorn.  Sad to say, I didn't see any of the events either because of cloudy skies or too bright city lights. 

 

Whatever, now is a good time to consider Orbital by Samantha Harvey.  Published in 2023 and the winner of the Booker Prize the following year, the book documents 24 hours in the lives of six astronaiuts and cosmonauts on the international space station.  There is no great drama: the space travelers get on reasonably well despite being from countries that sometimes have been enemies (Russia, the US, Japan, Italy and the UK).  Even the small glitch in the system that keeps the spaceship liveable for humans passes as more of a nuisence than a real danger. What the novel chronicles are the musings of the crew about the earth and what they are doing up in space.  And that is more than enough...

 

Harvey says she got the idea for the book after reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr.  Not much happens in it either, but the time, place and concerns are there to read and are precious.

 

A book to savour, and to dip back into frequently as you try to puzzle out what life on earth means