Reading Roundup - July 2017

2017 ReadingChallenge

Just the one book this month, with Carpentaria actually taking until the 3^rd of August to finish. Both a first look into a culture that is almost completely new to me and a weird parallel to One Hundred Years of Solitude, it blends oral storytelling with magic-realism to great effect.

This month past saw me through three more books in the Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third, and probably most well-known, of the Sherlock Holmes novels. Set during the earlier years of the partnership of Holmes and Watson, it was presented during the period of the great detective's death as a means to stave off pressure to return the character full tie. It pits Holmes against an apparently supernatural foe, and features some of the classic moments of the canon, as well as some prize examples of Holmes's dickery. He lies to Watson, and despite knowing who the killer is from the get go, holds off in search of evidence so long that his client is almost mauled to death and a young woman brutally beaten (in as much as the narrative cares after she has been revealed as the killer's – largely unwilling – accomplice; Watson is Judgey McJudgerson on this one.)

Conversely, the final novel – The Valley of Fear – is perhaps the least known and regarded of the four, despite featuring the second and final appearance(1) of Professor Moriarty in the canon(2). Similar in structure to A Study in Scarlet and, like Hound set before the fatal confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls, it swaps Mormons for Masonic trade union mobsters terrorising honest mine owners and opposed by the brave men of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, based loosely on the case of the Molly Maguires. As with many of Doyle's inclusions of contemporary secret societies or fringe groups, the depiction is startlingly black and white to modern eyes, but would have represented the first and all that many of his readers might have heard of such things. It is also of note that the main narrative doesn't even feature an actual murder until the epilogue, and that it features a police detective whose skills almost rival Holmes's own.

Finally, The Return of Sherlock Holmes was Doyle's capitulation to market pressure for more Sherlock Holmes' stories. It begins with 'The Adventure of the Empty House', in which Holmes returns to London and reveals his survival to Watson, before bringing down Moriarty's lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran.

'The Adventure of the Norwood Builder' and 'The Adventure of the Abbey Grange' both feature cases in which the accused client reaches Holmes in a state of dishevelment having been set up, in the one case to take the fall and the other to provide an alibi for murders that are not, for one reason or another, ever actually committed. 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men', on the other hand, belongs to that subset of Holmes stories in which Holmes' preference for intellectual rigour over action arguably results in the death of his client, a category from which 'The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist' escapes by a matter of moments.

'The Adventure of the Priory School' sees Holmes claiming his biggest ever payday when he uncovers a plot to manipulate an aristocrat's will. Also of note, ' The Adventure of the Second Stain' brings Holmes into affairs of national importance, and features a twinkly-eyed Prime Minister of no given name and peculiar perspicacity.

'The Adventure of Black Peter' is a fairly routine terrible history case, ' The Adventure of the Six Napoleons' sees Holmes tangle tangentially with the Mafia, and ' The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez' has a bit of both, as a murder leads to the uncovering of an academic's secret past in a Russian revolutionary brotherhood. Comparatively speaking, 'The Adventure of the Three Students' and 'The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter' are light fare, although the latter's seemingly trivial case of a missing rugby player resolves into a tragic denouement with no criminal component.

Perhaps the most remarkable story in the book is 'The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton', not least for Holmes's singular failure to resolve the case in hand for himself. Tasked with recovering compromising material from the titular master blackmailer, Holmes makes a reckless attempt to strong-arm the villain before finally deciding to break into his house, quite by chance on the night that he happens to be murdered by another party. It's a rare show of fallibility, with Holmes operating out of his comfort zone and stuffing it almost completely.

I've sometimes had mixed success with the work of Cornelia Funke(3), but Ghost Knight is a cracking read. It's nothing all that new – boy sent to boarding school after friction with potential stepfather, threatened by ghosts, makes a friend in the local eccentric, resolves the problem(4) and in so doing finds a way to resolve his personal issues as well – but well told and wonderfully pacey; I finished the short novel in a day.

Rosie Revere, Engineer is a book that I bought for my daughter and which, in her inimitable style, she flatly insisted that she didn't like until I practically forced her to listen to me read it, after which she asked for it every night for a week. It's a simple, but affecting, tale of young Rosie, who hides her desire to invent for fear of being mocked. Then her Great Aunt Rose – who is implied to be the original Rosie the Riveter – assures her that it's great to try and okay to fail, so long as each failure leads to another, better failure on the road to – maybe – success.

For my bedtime listening, I've been going back to the Harry Potter series(5), and have so far got through Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. My biggest takeaway from this – besides the fact that I find it odd that Stephen Fry doesn't give Professor McGonagall any kind of Scots accent, and puts the stress on the second syllable of Malfoy – is that damn those books were dark. I'd sort of blanked out just how horrid the Dursleys are, and had forgotten that even in book one we have Voldemort suckling on unicorn blood while living parasitically in the body of another human being. Then book two has children being stalked by an unseen monster, giant spiders trying to eat the protagonists, and a young girl's soul being consumed by a possessed book.

Never mind bringing a generation to reading, I'm amazed it didn't bring more of them to therapy.

These first two books are what Tolkien might have called essays in the craft, with Rowling not yet the accomplished writer she ended up. As a result the prose is a little hit and miss, but overall they hold their own among the crowded field of children's fiction, even if they aren't quite up to the standards later set by their successors.

My actual copy of this is as old as dirt and
looks like the opening credits of The Time
Tunnel.

Finally this month, A Wrinkle in Time was another re-read, and a slightly disappointing one. The opening volume of Madelaine l'Engle's Time quar/quintet is chock full of interesting ideas, but in retrospect the dialogue is somewhat stilted and the 'love conquers all' finale is a little bit pat in a novel of cosmic good and evil. Or perhaps it's the only ending that makes any sense?

Still, it's got a lot going for it and a strongly humanist theme(6) that I approve of, and I especially like that the young protagonist Meg learns to recognise that her father is not omnipotent – and that that's okay – as well as that her 'flaws' – the 'unladylike' traits of anger and stubbornness – do not have to be weaknesses.

(1) Well, he's never 'on screen', as it were, but his actions directly affect events, rather than simply being referenced at a distance.

(2) An appearance which, notably, contradicts some of the details of 'The Final Problem' by implying that Watson and others of Holmes's associates knew of his pursuit of the Professor.

(3) Her more YA-oriented fare, such as the Inkheart trilogy and the Reckless series have generally gone down better than those aimed at younger readers.

(4) In this case by undertaking an apprenticeship with a long-dead knight.

(5) I wasn't quite an early adopter, but started reading the series around the publication of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so I beat the absolute Pottermania that kicked in for the fourth book.

(6) The series doesn't get really Christian for a while.

2017 Reading Challenge - Carpentaria

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (read by Isaac Drandich)

Reason for Reading: A while back, I caught the first episode of a series called Cleverman, which has joined the list of stuff I Will Get Back to One Day. I've mostly put off watching it because it's a pretty dense piece of work, and quality, thoughtful TV requires more focus than I necessarily have to spare from family life from day to day. Anyway, this prompted me to add Australian literature to my challenge list, specifically seeking out Aboriginal writers. The research I was able to do with my limited time and resources turned up two significant titles: The Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, and Carpentaria.

Sometimes comic, often tragic, Carpentaria presents the struggle of an indigenous people to retain their meaning and relevance in the face of a world that wants to forget their stories. In a rambling, non-linear narrative, the novel tells the story of the town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the aboriginal families of the Pricklebush live uncomfortably alongside the white folks of Uptown. Through the lives of Pricklebush patriarch Normal Phantom and of his estranged son Will, of travelling religious leader Mozzie Fishman, of Norm's wife Angel Day and of Elias, an amnesiac white man washed ashore on the beach, and through the blending of the natural world, Christianity and the ancestral spirit world of the Queensland Aborigines, Wright weaves a tale that, although set about fifty years later and on the other side of the world, is a close match for the first book in my challenge, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The parallels are not so exact as to suggest plagiarism, merely indicative of similar influences. Both are set in isolated, ill-founded towns – Desperance was created as a deep-water port, only for the river to shift course and leave it locked behind miles of mudflats and simultaneously exposed to cyclones – whose local worthies struggle against outside authority. Both towns hold strong against government interference, but capitulate to the crushing power of international capitalism; the Gurfurrit Mine takes the ancestral land of the Pricklebush mob, and offers them dangerous jobs in return. Both feature characters with their own, eccentric religious and philosophical views. They even both end with a catastrophic storm sweeping away all that has gone before. Where they differ markedly, however, is in their narrative voice, with Wright adopting the customs of oral storytelling in contrast to Garcia-Marquez's intense literary style. This is not to say that Carpentaria is less well-written than One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a meticulous piece of writing, where a deliberate rawness rubs shoulders with profound eloquence.

The next book on my list is That Deadman Dance, which is not available in audiobook or Kindle format, so will be approached in dead tree format, and an imposing format it is.