reading

The Riders a novel by Tim Winton

They were in it together, end of story.

The person you love is strange – familiar above all others but still strange. She has her world, full of interests, time, desires, doubts, needs, ideas. And you have yours. (What could be better…) The worlds are there on the same map like two cities superimposed: in the same place but slightly skewed, different or…very different because something has changed, whether noticed or unnoticed. Then we are not in it together and that is the beginning of a very different story. (What could be worse…)

Tim Winton has written the gripping story of a couple who have somehow become a couple no longer. He has placed The Riders in Europe but the story’s setting seems to shift under the characters feet; they are displaced Australians: a man and a woman who, with their child and with another on the way, have decided to live in Ireland after racing through Greece and Paris. Every decision seems to be made on the spur of the moment, with passion as their guide.

But, it turns out, they have made separate decisions. We don’t know this until we’re well into the tale and neither does the man. Scully is an engaging creature – slightly mad and slightly wonderful, with a robust love of life and the face, as he tells us, of a psychopath. He has gone ahead of his family in order to fix up a ramshackle house outside Dublin. To Scully, the old, broken-down hut is a kind of paradise, perched above a dreamy Irish valley, about which he says,

Wherever you looked…you saw mountains beyond and castle in the corner of your eye.

His wife Jennifer has returned to Australia to sell their house and she sends a telegram to tell Scully she’s on her way, with Billie, their nine-year old daughter. It was Jennifer who “had a feeling” about the old house and Scully has gone along, perhaps as mindlessly as he’s gone along with everything. Working away on the house, Scully explains it to himself:

He was doing it for Jennifer, no use denying it, but she appreciated what it had taken him to say yes. It was simple. He loved her. She was his wife. There was a baby on the way. They were in it together, end of story.

Hardly. When Scully goes to the Shannon airport to pick his family up, only Billie is there. Shattered by her mother’s absence, Billie refuses to speak. Scully is worse than shattered and the rest of the novel tells the hard story of his search for Jennifer, from Greece to Paris to Amsterdam. He wants her back, of course, but he comes to see that that is unlikely. What he needs, what he must get, is a reason. And a reason is impossible.

The novel’s title comes from a strange vision or dream Scully has the night before his life breaks in two. He has gone out for a celebratory drink with his Irish pals and returned very drunk to the now clean and liveable house. He crashes and wakes in the middle of the night. Desperate for a drink of water, he gets up. In the valley below, he sees lights and thinks that it must be teenagers fooling around near the old castle. He can’t resist taking a look and wanders down. It is not teenagers. It is a troop of mounted men, carrying torches. They stand almost motionless on their ghostly steeds. Scully can smell the sweat of the men and the horses but they appear unaware of him – as he says, “it felt as though he didn’t exist.”

What are these riders? We never see them again and Scully, a man of few reflections, doesn’t ask himself. It seems to me they are the nightmare Scully is actually living while his love is coming apart. He knows it but he can’t see it. Only the vision of this futile ritual of waiting before the ruined castle might warn him. But, as it is for all lovers who no lolnger are in love, it is a warning too late. The next day, his world will collapse.

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The idea behind the Russian Revolution – and the other revolutions of the twentieth century – was that revolution was justified and change was inevitable because the workers already owned the factories where they worked. Enterprises such as factories or mines or railways had grown into large, social organizations and any big business - the Marxist logic went - should not be owned privately. By overthrowing antiquated and artificial authority, workers would lose only one thing: their chains.

James Meek’s thrilling novel, The People’s Act of Love, is set in revolutionary Russia, when the sudden success of the Bolsheviks shook society and encouraged myriad challenges to authority. Some men sought a new kind of religion and believed that it was not chains that entrapped and limited mankind, but desires. The most committed of the believers thought that men must cast off, not their chains, but their testicles.

In The People’s Act of Love, a sect has made its home in Yazyk, a tiny Russian village on the border of Siberia. They believe that when men have their balls removed, they have, as Balashov the barber explains,

“lost nothing except a burden and gained a new life.”

He says these words to Samarin, who has escaped from a Siberian prison camp by walking across the vast wintry wastes. Samarin is unimpressed by Balashov’s sacrifice. He has grown up on many long discussions of what ‘the true revolutionary’ might think and say and do and the dream of perfection is no longer of interest to him. Both men happen to meet in the forest outside Yazyk and they both witness a troop train lose control of a railcar full of horses. In an unforgettable passage, Meek describes the horses falling out of the open boxcar door to their gruesome deaths in the snowy valley below. In such a world, perfection seems like a sour joke.

Although Balashov respects Samarin credentials as a ‘political’ – someone sent to the gulag for fighting for change – he can see that the escapee is a dangerous man. It is a known fact that a savvy prisoner planning to leave a camp will often invite a less-experienced prisoner to join him, not for companionship or mutual support, but for the much-needed food. So when a distraught Samarin warns Balashov that a maniac has been following him – a demon he calls ‘the Mohican’ – Balashov wonders if, during the trek from Siberia, Samarin and the Mohican have not, in fact, become one.

But Balashov may have already said too much. Talking about the town, he has described a particularly interesting woman, Anna Petrovna, the widow of a cavalry officer. Balashov blurts out,

“Please don’t hurt Anna Petrovna!”
“Why should I?” asked Samarin, “Is she worth hurting?”

What bite that quote has! Samarin, the revolutionary, already fused with the kind of sadism that will be perfected by Stalin.

Meek swiftly creates this rich world with absolute confidence, almost as if he is reporting on the real world. He has, of course, won awards for his reporting from Iran for the Guardian and from Russia for the London Review of Books. In his new novel, it is as though he wishes to see the imagined details sink down to the true depths of meaning that his journalism cannot reach. But the story maintains the grit and true tone of reality.

Yazyk, about to be visited by one or two or three maniacs, already has a madman in residence. His name is wonderfully bad – Matula – and he is the putative commander of a troop of the Czech Army, sent to Russia to fight the Bolsheviks but now marooned by the collapse of the counter-revolutionary effort and also the end of World War One. While Matula drinks and despairs and dreams of a becoming a dictator, his troops are beginning to embrace revolutionary ideas. Not only the centre cannot hold; the fringes are unravelling as well.

At the centre of Meek’s tale of men and their many madnesses, there is a woman, of course: Anna Petrovna. She has followed her husband to Yazyk, although she is not a follower in any sense of the word. She is, perhaps, the kind of powerful new woman who would become a force against the barbarity of the twentieth century. It is love that made Anna want to be with her husband even though he has decided mens’ desire is too dangerous a thing for the world. How Anna expresses her love - foolishly and wisely - is the wonderful story that Meek unfolds in The People’s Act of Love.

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irish laborer 1850s / graphic of eviction / peter behrens

The Law of Dreams by Peter Behrens

The first thirty pages of Peter Behrens’ The Law of Dreams are scalding and unforgettable. Written with control and rich sensual power, the pages describe a world being destroyed as if it were being swept by apocryphal fire. It is, rather, the real history of the displacement of the Irish peasants from their centuries-old life on tenant farms. Evicted from the precious potato plots that kept them alive, the peasants have nothing to keep them alive; even their tiny, windowless cabins are ‘tumbled in’ and burnt by British troops. Many times, the starving occupants are trapped inside, too weak to flee the flames.

The book is about the escape of one very young man, Fergus O’Brien, first, to England, and then to the so-called new world, a place known only as ‘America’. Fergus understands almost nothing about what is happening to his world except that he must leave or die. His plans come down to this:

Walk outside. That is what you do in dreams. The law of dreams is, keep moving.

And Fergus keeps moving until, by the end of the book, he is on his way south, leaving Canada with a fat wad of stolen money. Behrens may want to show us the harsh birth of a ‘modern’ world, a place we pass through, a place where identity, and even morality, have been burnt and betrayed away. But Behrens cannot plumb the depth of his great historical drama and the law of dreams, fully expressed, seems to be painfully shallow: “keep moving…to America.”

With the evictions and the great hunger due to the potato blight, the evicted Irish people are desperate to find a way to survive. Many cannot cope and sit at the side of the road, waiting for death; others go mad with a mix of hunger and rage and kill anyone who has something as basic as a coat to keep warm. The rest try to find a hope or a dream that might bring forth some kind of plan and, often, the dream is called ‘America’. The peasants don’t know where America is; they’ve heard that it is beyond Liverpool and as many as 40 days by ship to the West, across the great ocean. There’s something unreliably Biblical about that estimate and, more to the point, none of them can imagine how they could possibly find the three pounds required for a steerage ticket.

By eating grass and joining in with a band of robber-boys, Fergus survives. He crosses to Liverpool and, with other mad Irish, he fights with Scots. Almost killed, he is taken in by a well-heeled Irish madame with an eye for a pretty young man. She dresses him up for her gay clientele but Fergus runs away to the much rougher trade of railway work, where he can tend the horses that share the same fate as the workers: they are all being cruelly worked to death.

Behrens does a wonderful writing job: the descriptions of daily tragedy and exciting action rip by with as much speed and weight as the new locomotives cutting through the ancient fields. Fergus has a voice that seems true – half stunned by hard times; half shrewd enough to survive. Other characters, such as Molly, Fergus’ lover, are also genuine and full-voiced. She’s a hard woman who expects the worst: a beating is a normal part of sex; and when Fergus recklessly attempts to climb to the top of the ship’s mast, Molly bets all their savings against him making it. As the book goes on, however, Behrens seems to fall into a rythmn that becomes a formula: first, the action and, then, Fergus’ half-formed but lyrical thoughts. Initially, the style is rich in lyricism and fresh perception but it soon becomes predictable and irritating.

My other reservation with The Law of Dreams is personal. I am Canadian; Behrens is also Canadian; the book won Canada’s top literary prize. And yet, Canada is nothing more in the book than a brief stopover for Fergus, a place where he can – innocently enough - steal a wallet full of cash, take the money and run. The law of dreams may be to keep moving – running away from the end of peasant life in Ireland; moving on from the hard times in England, surviving the crossing and moving through a Canada that hardly seems to exist. But the story Behrens tells is, ultimately, a tale of a young man that history and circumstance turn into a thief. The author shows no sign of being aware that his ‘happy ending’ is false; the great failing of the book is that it leaves us with a sense that Fergus has found rather than lost himself.

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Spook Country, a novel by William Gibson

A few pages into Spook Country, there’s a scene in New York City between a young Cuban exile and a very old man who may be Russian or American; it goes like this:

Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity.

Bill Gibson is very good at scenes like this; he’s like a guy who’s a little high, tellin’ a tale flavoured by some old-style words, and everyone’s listening, letting him run because it’s fun listening to some guy who has some kind of inside track…until you get to that last word – contemporaneity – which is odd and difficult, hard to spell or even say, a word that’s disturbing; it shifts your attention back to the possibility that something is being revealed about the time and place in which we live and it is not fun; it’s, in Gibson’s words, dire and terrible.

Something is wrong in ‘spook country’ – meaning the America we all have in our heads. The real America is no longer quite as interesting as it once was; it is, instead, worrying and the worry is of a low register, like wondering how dumb the bully might get. So the piece of America you and I have inside is tainted; it’s a bit like having some kind of cultural cancer, something that warns of death. In Spook Country, the first artist we meet creates holographic tableaus of dead celebrities: we see a simulation of River Phoenix lying dead on the sidewalk in front of L.A.s Viper Room. When the centre no longer holds, the lights go out too. And if the cowboy swagger was a joke on the way up, it’s nothing compared to how desperate and scary it’s going to be on the way down.

Gibson’s novel is all about this new mental landscape, what he calls “the new bad thing”. It’s full of good people terrified by the fact that ‘a line’s been crossed’, that there’s more ‘cognitive dissonance’ than they can handle, and that even the truth may be ‘problematic to learn.’ In Spook Country, no one knows; everyone’s unsure and unclear, certain only about being unsafe. And, like that iPod, it’s only the flow of those loving brands that give us any purchase, any place, at the cost of giving us those problems ‘utterly dire and somehow terrible.’ For almost 200 pages, Gibson tosses it all into a blender of brush-metal cool and full-metal crazy and it’s a tribute to his wordweave that the first half of the book holds together so well.

There are 3 stories of 3 people: Hollis, an ex-rocker grrl trying to find a new writing gig; Tito, the Cuban kid who seems to have been bred bantam-weight specially for iPod spying; and Milgrim, a translator of Russian punk slang who’s addicted to Rize or Atvian or whatever drug you have. All that really holds these drifters to the job is their cool – that’s what has always made Gibson’s stories so hip and fun to read. It may also be part of the book’s limitation.

What the first half of Spook Country definitely succeeds at doing is setting up the second half, which is the part they’ll make into a movie. It’s a nerve-jangling, intricate, fabulous-what-the-fuck, heist-or-prank action thriller that draws the entire cast of the book to a grand climax on the midnight docks of Vancouver. After 30 years living there, Gibson must love the place because he paints it with gentle loving strokes and leaves the reader with the feeling that she’d be better off if she just picked up and headed there right now.

While the second half of Spook Country is fun, it’s in the first half that Gibson, in Van Morrison’s words, “gets down to what`s really wrong.” And what’s wrong is cyberspace. The characters in the book talk about cyberspace and how it has changed. This is cool because, as we all know, Gibson invented the word 24 years ago when he published Neuromancer. The word slipped from the book into our world and minds and, now, Gibson wants to update the word, the world, and us. Maybe the upgrade can have as much influence as the original.

Cyberspace was always, Gibson explicitly tells us, not a thing or place, it was just a direction, a way of telling where we were going and how we might enjoy the trip. In Neuromancer, cyberspace is – was – the ‘consensual hallucination’ we could jack into; in Spook Country, the distance to cyberspace has been reset to zero and being jacked in is continuous, necessary. As a result, the days of ‘mass media’, Gibson has a character explain, are over because we are now comprised of media. The difference between the single producer of media and the many consumers of media is now just a temporary state that can be easily undone by simple copying and redistribution. The only difference between things now is the tag attached and the momentary geo-location.

But all the information erosion doesn’t mean we’re helpless. In Spook Country, it’s the artists that explore the notion of ‘locative’ art – art that can appear and disappear and re-appear in another location – and it’s the artists who are essential to both sides of the spy game. One man’s iPod can carry spirit-saving music while another holds crimes against humanity. It remains the singer, not the song.

Gibson’s roots are in what used to be called science-fiction although more than any other writer working today he illustrates the blur between fact and fiction. Still, writers in the genre want happy endings. Spook Country ends happily enough to read to your little ones at bedtime. Maybe that’s a limitation; Gibson can’t quite give us the true degree of darkness that ‘dire’ deserves. He has, however, achieved what he set out to do; he has asked us to download the update to Cyberspace v1.0 and we’ve said yes and clicked the button. Now we’re like the young Cuban guy who hands the iPod to the old man and wonders – worries – if something peculiar, dire and ‘terrible in its contemporaneity’ will result.

Cyberspace 2.0: is it the new bad thing? Or if we understand that the collective hallucination is now non-consensual can we pull off what Hollis and Tito and Milgrim manage to do in Spook Country and foil the bad guys? If my fear is part of the program, what should I be afraid of? Gibson can’t quite decide. All we can do, perhaps, is to re-imagine for ourselves the scene in New York City when Tito is handing the iPod to the old man. In his mind’s eye, Tito morphs the old guy into a sagacious ape who cracks the virginally white case to reveal something ‘peculiar, dire and terrible in its contemporaneity.’ That’s the imaginative act we must now perform in order to answer the question:

What would that be?

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth book in the series of seven, the middle book. In Books 1 through 3 (The Philosopher’s Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban), Rowling introduces Harry and shows us how important he will be in the fight against the Dark Lord, Voldemort. The three books take The Boy Who Lived from a know-nothing kid to a teenage wizard capable of casting a spell powerful enough to save his godfather, Sirius Black. But as Harry gains power, so the world becomes more difficult to understand; there are complicated histories of relationships and there are competing visions of society. Harry never waivers in his opposition to Voldemort but it is sometimes difficult to be certain about who is good and who is bad. Book 4 will take us to the edge, a dark place where death is very real and Harry is uncertain that he is up to the test.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is deceptive. In the book, Harry faces a series of tests, contests that he must win: he fights a dragon; he enters an underwater world in order to save his friends; he finds a treasure hidden in a maze. These are tests that might have been taken directly out of The Big Book of Challenges for Magical Heroes; all that is missing is pulling a sacred sword from a stone! And, as if these feats of wizardly prowess are not enough, Harry must also – gulp – find a date for the school prom! The action is exciting for young readers and the prom certainly seems well aimed at the many young girls following the saga and hoping a few kisses might find their way into the story midst all the other magic.

But the tests are fake – or more correctly, the tests Rowling puts Harry through disguise the real test coming. Of course, the various challenges that make up the competition are traps - traps set up by Lord Voldemort in order to bring harm to Harry. We know that. But Voldemort must know that Harry is not so easily dispatched. The Dark Lord sets up the trials as a kind of ritualistic foreplay; they serve only to raise the level of excitement and bring Harry closer…closer…closer to his doom. The outcomes of the trials are predictable because we know Harry will defeat the dragon, save the friends, solve the maze. (Only at the prom is Harry’s performance lukewarm.)

As so often with Rowling, she lets the predictable play out into something quite different than we expect. The challenges in The Goblet of Fire lead to a very real life-and-death confrontation with the Dark Lord himself and it comes about in a flash. Harry and the unfortunate Cedric Diggory find themselves transported by magical Portkey to the Riddle family graveyard for a creepy ritual that enables the Dark Lord to move from the phantom world back to the physical. Voldemort incarnates himself by mixing ancestor’s bone with slave’s hand with a few precious drops of Harry’s blood. Part man, part serpent, Voldemort appears, gloatingly pleased to be back in the real world among his fawning and frightened followers. He seems unaware, however, that, by using Harry’s blood, the bond between them is strengthened and the killing of the noble young wizard won’t be as simple as he believes.

The confrontation between Harry and Voldemort is worth all the preliminary palaver. Harry is both terrified and terrific, a writing feat that Rowling pulls off a number of times throughout the saga. Certainly Cedric Diggory’s death demonstrates how close Harry comes to dying.

The middle book of the saga ends with Voldemort foully reborn but, again, denied. We feel his frustration and fury. Harry survives, singed by the furious fight, and he will stand taller having fought evil face-to-face. But his difference from the rest of the world will deepen and difference is always suspect. Having succeeded with the challenges of The Goblet of Fire, Harry is ready for the real test that he knows is coming. Voldemort is back, feeding his underlings’ dark dreams of dominance and being strengthened by their slavish support. In the next three books, the world grows darker and Harry’s world gets lonelier. Although he is ready to fight Voldemort, he knows he cannot win alone but, as yet, he is not yet ready to lead.

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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, book three in the series of seven, is arguably the best. It is full of wonderful magic, exciting incident and breath-taking escapes. It also deepens the story into the past by introducing two important characters who provide a fuller account of Harry’s parents. And, for the first time, we begin to see Harry not just as a magical kid but as a young man whose friendship with Hermione might develop into love.

In Book 1, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Rowling set the stage and introduced us to Harry, The Boy Who Lived despite Voldemort’s attempt to kill him. Even more important: we came to understand, with Harry, that he must learn much more about who he is in order to survive when the Dark Lord returns for a second try.

Book 2, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, deepened the imminent danger by showing us a world in which evil can be embedded in the apparently innocuous and familiar. The plans of such evil were also made clear: to create a world in which the privileged few have total authority over the enslaved majority, a group that would include all Muggles, even magical ones such as Hermione.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban directly confronts authority. It begins with Harry running away from the Dursley house on Privet Lane because he can no longer submit to Uncle Vernon unfair rules. Harry risks expulsion from Hogwarts and, as he later finds out, he risks death because a murderer has escaped from the great and fearsome prison of the magical world, Azkaban, and this homicidal maniac wants to kill Harry. The man has a name worthy of a Dickens character – Sirius Black – and this is what Harry is told about him:

• » Sirius Black is a vicious murderer who killed a dozen Muggles with one curse.
• » He helped to kill Harry’s parents, James and Lily, on the same night Voldemort tried to kill Harry.
• » He is now out of prison and desperately trying to track Harry down and kill him.
• » Sirius Black has done all this evil in the service of the Dark Lord.

It will take half the book for Harry to learn that all of this information is completely false.

Sirius Black is actually Harry’s godfather and he was one of his parents’ closest friends. His crimes were fabricated when Sirius tried to save James and Lily from Voldemort, who is Sirius’ sworn enemy. The escapee is indeed trying to reach Harry: to save him. The world, it seems, is upside down – a common feeling for many kids Harry’s age (and a few others). Even the guards chasing Sirius will be revealed as soul-destroying monsters, much closer in allegiance to the Dark Lord than to Dumbledore.

As in Books 1 and 2, Book 3 is full of fantastic, often funny, incident: the Knight Bus arrives out of nowhere to save a bereft Harry, only to make him think that he will be killed in the ensuing wild ride; the wonderful Weasley twins, George and Fred, give Harry the Marauder’s Map, a kind of secret key to Hogwarts that enables its possessor to see exactly where everyone is; and Hagrid introduces Harry to Buckbeak, the Hippogriff, a monstrous mix of eagle and horse that could just as easily kill Harry as help him.

From Sirius, Harry will learn precious background on the lives of his parents and their magical friends. In their time, they stood up against an earlier attempt by Voldemort to seize power. One of those friends is Remus Lupin, who is a werewolf and at Hogwarts as Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts only as long as his health will hold. Lupin teaches Harry how to cast a Patronus, a magic spell that is the ultimate positive force – as Lupin says, “…of hope, happiness and the drive to survive.” Harry struggles with the difficult spell, always dragged down by the flashing memories of the death of his parents. In a scene wonderfully described by Rowling, Harry manages to create a Patronus and save the injured Sirius in the nick of time. By saving his godfather from the soul-sucking Dementors, Harry begins to assume his own authority and develop the level of power he will need to fight Voldemort.

Time is the ultimate authority but even the linear progress of hours gets challenged by Harry and, more precisely, by Hermione. Dumbledore has provided some clues for them; only Hermione is clever enough to decode them and make it possible for Harry to go back in time – a few precious hours but enough - to save Sirius. Imagining that it is his farther returned from the dead to save them, Harry performs the magic and seizes the authority of the patriarch, a power he will need later when he confronts the Dark Lord.

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  Dobby, the house-elf, appears with a warning for Harry. Source: mugglenet

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets a novel by J.K.Rowling

The idea that a piece of your soul can live in a book is a notion that all writers believe – it’s the heart of creativity, isn’t it? In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Jo Rowling tells a tale of how dark that heart can be, how depraved creativity can become. For what could be worse than Voldemort putting his broken soul into a book that will corrupt young minds and destroy the only powers capable of saving the world? Like Tolkien before her, Rowling knows that great fantasy is a shadow-play of the real world in which great powers struggle to create identity or erase it. For Tolkien, it was the Nazis. For Rowling, it is still unclear who the real-world echo is.

The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was a suitably ‘soft’ intro to Harry’s world. Harry may be The Boy Who Lived to the community of witches and wizards but, at age 11, Harry is unaware of his powers, uninformed of his history, unloved in his home and unsure of any future worth having. The plot of Book One is less important than the two ‘sets’ Rowling creates for her drama: Harry’s unhappy lodgings with the Dursleys and his new, true ‘home’ at Hogwarts. From the former, Harry wants only to escape; from the latter, Harry begins to learn the value of a force even greater than his newly recognized magical powers: friendship.

Book Two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, begins with Uncle Vernon’s ringing cry that he will not tolerate Harry’s ‘abnormality’. However, even Harry will find his surprise visitor abnormal; Dobby the House Elf is almost too strange to believe. The elf means well; he has come to warn Harry that a plan has been hatched to kill him and that he must not go to Hogwarts. However, if Harry has no Hogwarts, he is has no home!

Dobby will turn out to be an important player in the entire Harry Potter saga, indeed he gets more and more important in the subsequent books. Although Rowling is a master plotter, she drives her stories with character and, for Dobby to be believable, he must be both very strange and totally sympathetic. She succeeds with an unlikely creature and begins to develop an important theme: that tolerance is necessary for identity to flourish and flourishing identity expresses our collective freedom. Power underlies it all, of course, and in this book it becomes clear that Harry will have to fight for Dobby’s freedom as much as for his own.

While Rowling is a serious writer with important ideas, her method is that of a storyteller who fills her yarns with wild adventures and ghastly ghouls. When Harry and Ron attempt to board the famous Hogwart’s Express on the first day of school, they cannot get through the platform barrier and have to fly the family car to school; it’s a brilliantly imaginative adventure! As for monsters, The Chamber of Secrets has at least two spectacular beasts, one almost good, one totally bad: Aragog, a giant spider, and the Basilisk, a giant snake that Harry must duel in the book’s climax.

The plot of the book is suitably contorted: slogans begin appearing on the walls of Hogwarts, threatening the release of a muggle-killing monster from the Chamber of Secrets; the school authorities deny there is such a chamber but it turns out that the whole event is a replay of something that happened fifty years earlier and which resulted in the death of a muggle student. Muggle is, of course, the term for non-magical humans; the much nastier term that appears splattered across the walls of Hogwarts is ‘mudbloods’, akin to the real-world racist slur, ‘nigger’.

As people begin to get ambushed in the halls of the school, fear grips the students and professors and the forces of evil challenge Headmaster Dumbledore’s control. Although he has to temporarily leave, Dumbledore makes it clear to Harry that,

‘…I will only truly have left this school when none here are loyal to me. You will also find that help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it.’

However with Dumbledore pushed aside, Harry must find the strength to fight within himself. He finds a diary that is as much a part of the plot to kill him as a critical clue to solve the mystery. Rowling’s wonderful imagination blends the real life of any teenager reading a diary with a fantasy that only fiction could create:

Harry sat on his four-poster and flicked through the blank pages… Then he pulled a new bottle out of his bedside cabinet, dipped his quill into it, and dropped a blot onto the first page of the diary.
The ink shone brightly on the paper for a second and then, as though it was being sucked into the page, vanished. Excited, Harry loaded up his quill a second time and wrote, ‘My name is Harry Potter.’
The words shone momentarily on the page and they too sank without trace. Then, at last, something happened.
Oozing back out of the page, in his very own ink, came words Harry had never written.
`Hello, Harry Potter. My name is Tom Riddle. How did you come by my diary?’

Tom Riddle’s full name is Tom Marvolo Riddle and a wonderful name it is, worthy of a character in Dickens. The name ‘Riddle’, Harry learns when he confronts him in the chamber, is a part of a…riddle, an anagram that can be unpacked into the statement:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

Riddle, the physical being standing before Harry, is actually a memory phantom left by the body-less Voldemort to draw Harry to his doom. Voldemort, speaking through the shimmering image of Riddle, can’t resist drawing similarities between himself and the boy he is trying to kill:

… there are strange like¬nesses between us, Harry Potter. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike … But after all, it was merely a lucky chance that saved you from me.

Harry’s good fortune certainly seems to have run out as he faces the giant killer-snake Basilisk, whose vision can kill and whose poisonous fangs are a foot long! The fight is a worthy climax to a book that established Rowling and the Harry Potter series as a major literary event. Perhaps the most important narrative element established in this novel is the idea of Horcruxes, although that name will only appear much later in the series. With the diary in this book, we learn that Voldemort is a new kind of demon whose soul has been separated from his body and distributed to a number of material objects; the diary was one such Horcrux and Harry was strong enough and lucky enough to kill it. Finding and destroying all the foul pieces of the Dark Lord’s soul is the daunting task facing the young wizard. Harry and his readers are just beginning to understand how difficult that will be.

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  Bad news for the Dursleys: change. Source: still from first movie / mugglenet

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, a novel by J.K.Rowling, 1997.

Triumphant success demands explanation and Jo Rowling has explained that she took years to carefully lay out the entire intricate plot of the Harry Potter saga. Certainly the wonderful way the various stories and myriad narrative elements interlock and unfold are reasons the books have sold so well. But at the beginning ten years ago, it must have taken guts to present the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and to rely, not on a gripping plot, but on two much softer things: uncertain young characters and charming small incident.

Rowling spends the first third of the book just getting Harry from the mundane world of muggles to the magical haven of Hogwarts and, then, she takes the same amount of time to set up a creaky plot about a stone that provides eternal life. Even in the action climax, Harry doesn’t do much more than get saved by his good luck…before fainting. Although the wonderful villain of the series, Voldemort, makes a last-minute appearance, it’s not much more than a hissing cameo and his stand-in throughout the rest of the book, the turbaned Professor Quirrell, is totally uninteresting.

How did this seemingly limp little book capture so many young minds and establish Harry as the emblem of a generation? I think Rowling understood she first had to place Harry in the spot similar to many of her readers: a home they see as unfriendly and from which they yearn to escape. Having created a cast of charming characters, she was confident in her ability to bring them to life in warm and witty incidents that suggest their world-changing powers.

Like all lively eleven-year olds, Harry Potter’s world is seething with mystery. Most of the questions are versions of, “Who am I?” and “What will I be?” Harry’s adopted family, the Dursleys, are, however, determined worshippers of ‘normal’ and their first rule is, “Don’t ask questions.” Like Cinderella before him, Harry is too special to stay quiet and Rowling seems satisfied to let Harry slowly develop his powers. Yes, they are magical powers but they are always wedded to more mundane qualities that mere muggles might also possess: kindness and curiosity.

The scene at the zoo where the naïve Harry meets the innocent boa constrictor is a good example. Harry accidentally manages to make the glass separating the big boa from the big world disappear; all the young boy and boa were doing was having a pleasant chat about their surprisingly similar lives. Although identified as being from Brazil, the snake was bred in the zoo and has never been anywhere. Like Harry, he is trapped. And like Harry, he escapes.

It turns out that magic – and later malice – can easily penetrate the fortressed normalcy of suburban Privet Lane. The magic comes first in the form of a letter inviting Harry to the school at Hogwarts; it is addressed:

Mr H. Potter
The Cupboard under the Stairs
4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

No matter what Uncle Vernon does to deny it, the magic opportunity won’t go away. In a hilarious sequence of scenes, the entire traumatized Dursley family (with Harry in tow) tries to escape the letters by running away, only to meet up with the giant Hagrid. It is Hagrid, a central character in the entire series, who fills Harry in on his missing past and his dead parents, whom Harry believed to be victims of a car accident:

Hagrid stared wildly at Harry. `But yeh must know about yer mum and dad,’ he said. ‘I mean, they’re famous. You’re famous.’

Isn’t it wonderful to be informed that you’re famous! Hagrid can barely say the name Voldemort but he manages to explain the confrontation ten years earlier between the baby Harry and He Who Cannot Be Named. It is just the beginning of a search for understanding that will take over 3,000 pages and the entire seven novels.

The long, slow introduction of Harry’s world and the similarly paced description of Harry’s new life at Hogwarts demonstrate that Rowling has a big story to tell; she wants us to know Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione, understand shifting allegiances of the Hogwarts professors, especially those of Severus Snape, and also give readers the chance to eavesdrop on Harry’s dveloping relationship with Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, the only wizard with both the magic and the mind to match the evil Voldemort. In a scene typical of Rowling’s amiable storytelling, Harry’s first ‘encounter’ with Dumbledore is when he sees the wizard’s card which is included in Ron’s favorite candy, Chocolate Frogs. It is a sweet gesture to the innocent passions of youth but it also contains within it a clue that will be needed to help unravel the mystery of the philosopher’s stone; it is typical of Rowling’s genius to mix childlike story with important clue.

The book is half-done before the plot pokes through the charming set-up, although it isn’t much of a plot. Something – we don’t know what – has been stolen from the great goblin bank, Gringott’s. Very slowly we find out that it is a stone, a magical stone of course, that grants eternal life to its possessor. Ho hum is my reaction to stones that grant eternal life and I suspect many kids couldn’t care less. But I don’t think the stone matters much. Along the way there are adventures with a nasty troll, a three-headed giant dog called Fluffy, a dragon named Norbert and a trio of centaurs in the Forbidden Forest, one of whom saves Harry’s life. The climax between Harry and Voldemort comes and goes quickly with Harry, true to form, passing out. The book is a short, soft start to a long, strong story, saved by the fact that, while it is full of unanswered questions, it is equally full of wonderful character and memorable incident.

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Austerlitz a novel by W.G.Sebald

In Austerlitz, W.G.Sebald’s last book before his untimely death in a car accident, a man quietly relates what he knows of the world and of himself. Austerlitz begins his story when he happens to meet the book’s narrator; each time they meet, he seems quite ready to pick up the tale where he left it. And ready to flood the narrator with encyclopaedic knowledge of the fortifications of Antwerp and their futility, the moths of Wales, the layout of Freemason temples, the nature of Calvinist sermons and of pigeons and cockatoos, and, of course, the details of the important battle of Austerlitz. The man Austerlitz is also waging a battle; it is, in the words of his nanny whom he finds when he returns to Prague, “to imagine who or what I was.”

Click the cover to go to my review…or click here.

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De Niro’s Game a novel by Rawi Hage

Do you remember De Niro’s game in The Deerhunter? The game was Russian roulette, played for money in some backroom bar in Saigon not long before the Americans had to scramble into helicopters perched on the Embassy roof. The character played by De Niro is a ruined man, broken by a ‘bad’ war; but that begs the obvious question: ‘Is any war ‘good’?’ Certainly Bassam and George, the characters in Rawi Hage’s novel De Niro’s Game don’t think so. The novel opens with Bassam’s words:

Ten thousand bombs had landed, and I was waiting for George.
Ten thousand bombs had landed on Beirut, that crowded city, and I was lying on a blue sofa covered with white sheets to protect it from dust and dirty feet.
It was time to leave, I was thinking to myself.

Click the cover to go to my review…or click here.

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Bel Canto, a novel by Ann Patchett

The terrorists in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto wait in the air conditioning ducts of the Vice Presidential mansion of an unnamed South American country. Their plan – to kidnap the President – is predictable both as news and as novel. What happens in Patchett’s lush and witty story, however, is not what we might expect…

Click the cover to go to my review…or click here.

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Amsterdam : A Novel by Ian McEwan

There are good reasons for Ian McEwan’s popularity: his writing is crisp and smart; sentences and paragraphs are models of precision - he’s the BMW of writers. … But in a novel rich in sharp perceptions of modern ambitions and the souring of those ambitions, McEwen seems only able to mock his characters, in the same way he trivialized the concerns of anti-war protesters in Saturday. In Amsterdam, when the crunch comes, McEwen’s rich talent for precise realism morphs into a Monty Python sketch.

Clcik the cover to go to my review…or click here.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Grim but wonderful. The world has been destroyed…somehow: a climate crash, a nuclear disaster, maybe god’s punishment - we don’t know. Ash is everywhere, the trees are all dead, nothing is growing, even the sea has become a lifeless gray sludge. A few survivors wander along the road, ransacking the empty houses for what’s left of canned food and gasoline. We travel with an unnamed father and his son, a boy of 10. They push a broken shopping cart crammed with whatever they can find to keep themselves warm and fed.

They are Wal-Mart shoppers in Hell. (Click the book cover to read my review.)

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