The Time Traveler's Wife

I simply cannot count the times that I closed the book, set it down and said, "Dangit,  Niffenegger." 

There's a bit of male culture that not a lot of women understand.   I suppose there are a lot of things in that realm that are difficult to understand, but specifically for today I'm talking about calling someone by their last name.  I've had women tell me that by not referring to someone by their given first name you aren't seeing them as an individual, you aren't recognizing them for their essence,  who they are independent of their family name.  Naturally I call "poppycock" on that.  Sure, that may be how someone takes it, but that is not at all how it is meant.

So, please allow me to peel back the curtain a little on Man culture here.  Not too far, naturally.  No one would want that.  Honestly I hadn't thought about this aspect until this gem of a novel.  Every time my sniffling exclamation was, "Dangit, Niffenegger," and never "Dangit, Audrey."  For guys, calling someone by their last name is a badge of respect; significant respect.  It's fallen into disuse before our generation and, typically for me, that means I'm attracted to it.  It says, "I recognize you as a credit to your family name."  It's on the same level as "sir" and "Mr." or "Mrs." with me.  People get annoyed at me for using them because they come off as formalizing, but really it shows that I respect you in a way that only repeated reminders to call you by your first name will relieve.  And Niffenegger is VERY much up there with this book.  

Early on I was a little thrown off by some of her writing.  The female lead, Claire, was very well written, but when it came to Henry it fell short.  He was doing things few men would ever do and noticing things no guy ever notices, let alone when they are a little boy.  No little boy is going to notice that his mother's fingernails match her shoes.  Henry does.  There are more examples of this throughout the first few chapters and I sympathize.  As a writer I find it difficult to write characters of another gender, and I see it all the time where men don't know how to write women and women don't know how to write men.  They are great at writing caricatures of men.  Seeley Booth of the "Bones" series has always bothered me as a particularly 2d example of a man, but in TV and movies you can get away with this.  You've got an hour, maybe more, to transmit a lot of information and stereotypes work well.  In books, if you go beyond dialogue and deep into internal reflections and reasonings, you have to nail it.  There is no faking it.  If you do a crap job you can't just do a razzle dazzle to distract.  Ok.  You can.  But people have to fully buy into it to get away with it...and since mostly women read "Twilight"...  *cough* sorry.  

One of the many rewarding things about reading "The Time Travelers Wife" is that you can see the author grow over time.  Something happens around chapter two or three where she suddenly shifts into being a better writer.  She gets Henry and his perspective right.  Niffenegger runs with it and there's no stopping her.  

"The Time Travelers Wife" is the story of Henry, an individual with a genetic disorder that unsticks him from time.  Usually this occurs during times of high stress but it's been know to happen during average every day moments as well.  When we first meet Henry he is in his later 30s and Claire, his eventually to be wife, is 8.  While this seems sketchy you come to realize in his 30s Henry, in Claire's future, is already married to Claire.  It's almost a Twilight Zone episode.  In the hands of a lesser author that is where it would remain, just in the weirdness, but Niffenegger is not a lesser author.

What emerges from this bizarre opening tale is something very rare in this world.  "The Time Traveler's Wife" is that rare book that is about absolutely everything and in the end reaffirms life, virtue, and makes you look at the world far more positively by the end.  The couple doesn't come off as unrelatable in the least.  They go through all of the same highs and lows, same difficulties and joys, that every couple does.  In fact she somehow uses Henry's chronal displacement disorder in such a way as to increase the relatability.  I still don't know quite how she does it.  Books don't normally make me smile, cry, grit my teeth, or shout in triumph, but this one truly does.

It's kind of like "The Notebook" but less sappy and more realistic.   

Yep.  I said it.  A genetic disorder that causes uncontrollable TIME TRAVEL is more realistic as a plot device than the entirety of "The Notebook".  

"The Time Travelers Wife" is the first novel I've read from this century.  I was leery of it at first.  I mean, honestly...Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die and this book is just 15 years old?  Could it really deserve to be on this list?  Other Modern novels (And I'm perpetually throwing shade at you Catch-22) clearly didn't deserve it.

Does it belong on the list?  Emphatically, yes.  

I don't normally say this, but if you haven't read it I highly suggest it.  It belongs on the list, it should be on your shelf.  It is officially in my top 10 books of all time solidly...and that's a pretty fluid list.  My life is genuinely better for having read it, and...I won't go so far as to say we can't be friends if you haven't read it.  It is, however, one of those books I'm dying to talk with someone over coffee about.  Coffee and pie.  Coffee and pie or cake.  Coffee and pie and cake.  There we go.  I knew I'd get there eventually.  

So...next time..  

The next book on the list is "Middlemarch" by George Eliot.  That's right, we are headed back to the Victorians and I know nothing about it.  Absolutely nothing.  The one thing I do know for certain is that it is the book right before "War and Peace".  Yeah.  "Middlemarch" is feeling like a slight stay of execution before I need to use my sliding glass doors as a massive flow chart just to keep the story straight.  Please be good...please be good...

Apparently getting the proper translation is supposedly key to "enjoying" "War and Peace".  I got the 3.99 classics on Amazon so...we'll see.

Provehito in Altum,

W

Birdsong (Finale)

Since I've been off Facebook I've had plenty of time to think about how I approach doing things.  Having time to reflect is always a benefit in this world that favors and encourages knee-jerk responses.  As such, it's been kicking around in my brain that I need to readjust my approach to the 100BYSRBYD.  I've spent a lot of time making each bit a synopsis and, while interesting in some ways, that doesn't really help many people.  I'll be making the shift to reviewing the book overall rather than recounting the individual events.  There's more to say about a book than simply what happens, and if I synopsisize (not a word apparently) it then why should you read it yourself?  Reading is kind of what this is all about. So...to continue...

"Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks is a hell of a book.  And by "hell" I mean both that it is a great book and that so much of it seems to take place in the closest humanity can get to hell on this side of the veil. 

In the previous entry I posted about the opening love affair that occurs.  I haven't looked but I'm sure I mentioned my general contempt for all books that glorify affairs as these wonderfully romantic things that are somehow virtuous rather than devastatingly destructive and wholly selfish events.  The book surprised me by ending its first part with her leaving Stephen to return to her proper husband once she realized she was pregnant.  And then...the war.

Oh, the war.  World War I, to be precise.  Faulks clearly dug deep in his research to find some of the most amazing, gripping, and detailed accounts that he could then immortalize her.  "Catch-22" serves to mock war and all its facets as horrible and pointless and so does "Birdsong".  The key difference between the two is that "Catch-22" tries to do so by pointing out how clever it is.  "22" is the party equivalent of the guy with a can beer in his hand, laughing at his own jokes which he follows up with, "amiright?".  "Birdsong", on the other hand, is the vet in the corner staring out of the window trying to ignore the blowhard and remembering it all too well as he walks his his tortured way through PTSD.  He's not going to say anything unless you ask and even then it's all still too fresh.

Faulks makes you feel the mortar fire, the desperation, the claustrophobia of the tunnels beneath the trenches, the anxiety, the loss of normalcy and as many aspects of that life as it was that he possibly can. 

And why?  Why does this book exist?  For that matter, why is it on the 100BYSRBYD? 

The why is represented in the character of Elizabeth whose life is vastly different that Stephen's.  She exists 50(ish) years later in the 1970s, a modern woman in a modern time who juggles her career, friends, and the monthly visits of her married boyfriend.  Everyone tells her that he's never going to leave his wife, and he strings her along with, "I'm just waiting for the right time...".  After an inciting incident which I won't reveal her...cause spoilers...she starts to try and forge a connection with her past and she begins to look into her grandfather's involvement in World War I.  She begins to sift through his things to try and glean what happened.

The world is so far removed from that time that her research creates a series of realizations, not least of which is the selfishness of her generation and the selflessness of her grandfather's.  This smacked me in between the eyes particularly when Elizabeth travels through France and takes a handful of back roads to come to a war memorial forgotten by the rest of the world.  It's a tall structure literally in the middle of a farmer's field.  It's a massive structure built of bricks each bearing the name of every man who died there. 

"I didn't know.  They never told us." Is her reaction as she weeps, devastated on the sight at her ignorance and the ignorance of the world at large.  I'd bet all the money I currently have that you could easily swap Faulks and Elizabeth at that part of the novel.

And that is the point of the novel; there is a massive gulf of what we don't know.  Everything we are taught in World War I was names, dates, important battles, casualty numbers and how it caused World War II.  Honestly, I learned more about World War I watching, "Black Adder" than I did in school.

"Birdsong" serves to give the reader context for what occurred, and good Lord does it.

There is a scene in which one of Stephen's fellow soldiers is sent back home on leave.  He has massive difficulty functioning.  He remembers the city, his parents, his childhood home, all of the modern conveniences, but none of it seems realistic to him.  Months in the trenches has changed everything for him.  Everyone expects him to enjoy himself but the only thing he can think is of all the atrocities he's experienced at the front and how no one could understand.  He tries to unburden himself to his father, tries to express his thoughts and feelings, but in stereotypical English fashion his father tells him it's best not to discuss it.  With everything pent up inside and no way to get it out we realize it is the very moment the character becomes an alcoholic.

As I closed the book after turning the last page the ending felt a little hollow.  It was hopeful and a 60 year promise was fulfilled so everyone should feel happy...Yay!  It felt tacked on, as if Faulks' agent wouldn't let it end where Faulks wanted it to.  The "good damage" was done in me regardless.  I've spent a few hours now thinking about that gulf of what we don't know, what we can't possibly know.  The ancient Greeks referred to the effect of knowledge as a light, a lamp shining on everything else we encounter. 

It is so easy to believe that we know enough, that we are done, that we don't need to seek out more knowledge and understanding, but I disagree.  The more we seek, the more we read, the more we try to understand, the more we try to know the brighter that light becomes and the more we see by it.  If we give in to our own desire for ignorance the more likely it is that we will die in darkness.

Faulks challenges us to chase after the knowledge we are uncomfortable with.  There is a scene where Elizabeth goes to a veterans hospital to meet a man in his 80s who may have known her grandfather.  I nearly cried in that part for many reasons, but chief of those was because the man hadn't had a visitor in 40 years.  He'd been sat at the same window for 40 years believing no one cared, no one wanted to hear, no one literally knew that he existed.  I can't help but wonder how many...  Well, I won't finish that thought. 

I don't just recommend that you read this book; I implore you to read it.  It will broaden your understanding and add just a bit more light to your lamp.

Pax,

W

War is Certainly Hell (Birdsong Part Two, France 1916)

Faulks' style is never content to remain stuck in a single person's perspective for too long, and he is certainly right to do so.  War is a strange thing in that a person can walk through the exact same events and have an entirely different perspective. 

My self-critical brain stands up and says, "Yeah, but you can say that about life in general."  You could say that, but it seems to me to be even more true when we talk about soldiers in war.  The effect is  amped up like colors under blacklight.  That may actually be a more apt metaphor than I realize.  There is a concept in art that states that the viewer of any artistic piece brings all the psychological pieces of themselves to bear onto the piece.  When someone views, reads, or listens to a piece of art it acts as a sort of mirror so that the person isn't seeing the thing objectively.  They bring a massive amount of subjectivity independent of any creator's intention.  War, from what I've read, turns this (and everything in a human being) up to 11.

The second episode of the seven opens with a new character, Jack Firebrace.  He's a miner from back in England who joined up to dig tunnels from the English trenches into German territory.  From there they set a mine to punch a hole inside enemy territory.  The difficulties for Jack are to numerous to mention.  Each hole is only three feet wide, timbers that hold up the walls falter, explosions overhead destroy the structural integrity of the tunnel, and, as we discover in the opening scene, the ever present danger of discovery by German tunnelers coming from the other direction.

I've never in my reading experience had someone such write in such a way that I experienced full on claustrophobia in the middle of a quite open room.  Throughout the entire second part of the novel Faulks does a truly admirable job of making you feel like as if you are actually there, in a situation in a part of the world and a time that you never could have experienced on your own.  All great writing does this and Faulks is as much a master as Tolkien in world building.

As the perspective shifts between Jack and Stephen in the days leading up to the climatic big push you watch people come apart in vastly different ways including our protagonists.  Jack is dealing with issues from his wife and sickly son back home by throwing himself into his mining.  Helplessness can be ignored when you have something to do with your hands.  Stephen is given a group of men to command and begins to suspect that they are being led as lambs to the slaughter despite the reassurances of his superiors.  Stephen clearly uses the war to give his life some sort of meaning since Isabelle left him with their baby still in her womb, and how he deals with that comes out in some surprising ways, one of which I'll get to soon. 

The thing that sets this book apart is, of course, the details.  It's abundantly clear that Faulks had to do massive amounts of research including getting ahold of all the veterans from the war still alive.  There are so many things in this novel that he couldn't make up or simply intuit.  As someone who is addicted to trivia, it was a dream to find glorious tidbits on every page that both illumined and horrified me.  As a general pacifist unwilling to mobilize and authorize the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men for a cause other than defense of our own country, it did the incredible job of both affirming and challenging my position. 

This is where "Birdsong" far excels as a war novel up against "Catch-22".  I was disgusted with "Catch-22" and may have even referred to it as an "abortion of a novel" so filled with nihilism and self congratulatory cleverness that swung at the load bearing pillars of virtue and nobility, laughing maniacally as the structure collapses on itself and wondering why nothing magically sprung up to take its place.  While "Catch-22" deals with many of the same issues but paints them as a pointless farce.  In "Birdsong" the characters actually struggle with the horrors of war and virtue.  There is a tension there that simply can't exist in "Catch-22".  This is specifically highlighted in the way each deals with prostitution that the soldiers use to "comfort" themselves.

In "Catch-22" the main characters engage the prostitutes mechanically, looking at them with efficient pragmatism.  When one soldier beats a prostitute the other characters concern and reason for stopping him and trying to smoothe things over is only so that they will be allowed back.  They take care of the problem with money, chocolates, and silk hosiery.  The women have as much function as an ATM further highlighting the pointlessness of existence and general ennui that is prevalent in much post-modernist writing.

In "Birdsong", Stephen knows that his company and the company of one of his fellow men of rank, Weir, is going to make the push and in all likelihood be fodder for the German guns.  It's so sure that when he looks through a pair of binoculars at the enemy position there is even a sign that says "Welcome, 29th British Infantry!" hanging over the German artillery position.   Stephen has known for some time that Weir was still a virgin and he decides that this is a travesty that he can rectify before they certainly die.

Wier protests once he realizes what Stephen is up to but relents once he is shoved into the whorehouse.  Stephen is all big talk, but his heart seems to be in the "right" place.  He thinks back to Isabelle and how the union with feminine flesh illuminated his life.  He can't imagine existence without having tasted that at least once.  Certainly it burned him, and crippled him in some ways, but to him it was light and nourishing light at that.  Weir lets out a bellow of rage and kicks open the door blaming Stephen for what happened.  Stephen freaks out, wondering what Weir has done but comes to find out that the rage was only due to the fact that his friend couldn't bring himself  do what Stephen expected.  The prostitute laughs and offers Stephen to take Weirs place.  He did pay for it after all.  Stephen ascents as long as its with a younger prostitute.  Once she touches Stephen his whole world shifts and he sees the darkness, the perversion of the situation.  It's not the warm, loving touch of Isabelle that he assumed was common to all woman.  He's disgusted as he wrestles with his conscience and makes a fumbling but polite exit.

That is ultimately what sets it apart; the struggle with conscience, the endurance of virtue in the darkest of circumstances, the seeing through of duty even when certain death is before you.  Those elements are often found in the most enduring stories of heroes.  The difference between the two is similar to the difference between Loki and Thor.  We can do without worshiping the cowardly trickster as a species.  We cannot do without tales of self sacrifice for the greater good, the denial of self for the others, or the wrestling with virtue because it is right. 

Naturally, and I half-expect this, the novel could take a terrible turn any minute now.  We are moving from the front line at Amiens and going to 1978 in the next part.  We shall see how that goes. 

Pax,

W 

Settling Accounts (Rebecca to Birdsong)

As per my usual blogging style I find that it's been a year since I last entered anything here.  I'm appalled by my behavior on that count AND by the fact that I didn't lay a finish to the novel, "Rebecca".  I am apparently confoundedly thick.  I'm not sure where my copy is and as such I can't excerpt it like I like...BUT I will review it.

"Rebecca" is one of the single best suspense novels I have ever read in my life.  Unlike...some...it absolutely deserves its place on this list of 100 Books.  Mdme. Du Maurier is far and away one of the best writers I have encountered in ages.  She can take an otherwise beautiful scene and inject just the right amount of tension that makes you think there is something wrong. By the same hand she deftly gives you reason to believe that everything actually is fine, you're just making something out of nothing.  Her sense of character and setting is so good it's ridiculous.  There is no character that is not believable.  Even the secondary villain of the novel, Mrs. Danvers, is quite believable.  You do not walk away thinking, "Oh, that could never happen."  Instead you wonder how often this sort of thing actually does happen. 

When we come to the end and the massive reveal, when the truth comes out, it is more ugly and sinister than you imagine.  At the same time, though, you feel as if you suspected it the entire time.  When the true villain is revealed (and just who that is happens to be up for debate) you actually understand the actions taken.  They are entirely logical.  Now, it is up to the reader to decide if that's a comfort or not.

The fallout at Manderlay is complete.  No one gets out of it unharmed, and Du Maurier leaves it all hanging there making you wonder what will go on, what lays beyond the final dot on the last page.  Normally that sort of thing annoys me; often it's used in a manner that tries to show the world how clever the author is.  Not so here.  To put a bow on it would detract from what the characters and yourself had just experience.  Life rarely has a tidy bow on it at any point, and all the feelings, thoughts, and emotions continue to wreck havoc on the couple beyond and probably into their last days. 

Short version:  It's a novel I'm proud to have on my shelf...as opposed to, say, "Catch-22". 

I bring up "Catch-22" and I'll be bringing it up again soon because it is the first novel of any war that I'd read on this list.  Now I have "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks to compare it too. 

I won't go too much into "Catch-22" except to say it was a pointless novel about the pointlessness of war and the pointlessness of everything.  Nihilistic to its core it even went so far, to me, as to not even be able to justify its existence.  "Birdsong", on the other hand, blimey what a book. 

The reason I hadn't gone back to it, and thereby back to this blog, was due to the first part of the book.  I made the horrible, horrible mistake of judging it by the first 99 pages. 

"Birdsong" opens up from the perspective of Stephen, a young man somehow attached to the British military, who has come to live at the home of the Azaires.  Rene, the husband, teaches Stephen about the French textile industry.  Isabelle is the second wife of Rene and takes care of his children.  It doesn't take long for romantic tension to build up between Stephen and Isabelle and I proceeded to gag. 

I like a love story.  I have an almost feminine love for love stories.  Watching a couple go through the BS of life trying to find each other, and then overcoming insurmountable odds to end up together and hand in hand bravely face down the rest of their lives...  Honestly there probably isn't a better, more hopeful thing someone can write about.  BUT...This whole "oh dash it all, Penbrooke, I'm married to another...whatever shall we do...Oh, I can't...but, oh, I want to" back and forth tripe is ridiculous.  When the obstacles to a romance are marriage, that's when I check out. 

It's not love.  It's hormones.  I know, the post-modernists would rise up and say, "But all love is just hormones!" to which vehemently respond that just because that is the entirety of your limited experience, that doesn't necessarily make it so.  There is out there significant love; true, faithful, sure, enduring, selfless love.  I know because I experience that every day.  Infidelity, even when it's dressed up as polyamory, or an "open marriage" is the exact opposite.  It is false, unfaithful, unsolid, fleeting, selfish lust.  There is nothing noble in it whatsoever; nothing that pushes the human narrative towards the light, and I reject it as a narrative device wholeheartedly.

Except...

Except when it is not glorifying it.  When it shows, and rightly so, how destructive and gutting it truly is. 

When we arrive at the end of the first part of the novel (which is broken up into 7 episodes or acts) we see just that.  The farce is laid bare, the hopes are dashed, and the child they created between the two of them returns to her husband.  Stephen watches both the woman he "loves" and the child she is carrying walk out the door with only a cowardly note left behind. 

I don't root for a cheating couple.  I can't.  I won't.  Yes, her husband punishes her with a belt.  He's a brute and a terrible man.  I agree.  But infidelity is not a cure for anything.

The second of the 7 episodes begins with Stephen on the front lines of World War I.  And I'll properly write that episode up next time. 

Pax,

W