“I Am Half-Sick of Shadows” by Alan Bradley

 

320 pages, Bantam Books, ISBN-13: 978-0385344029

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is the fourth book starring everyone’s favorite 11-year-old detective, Flavia de Luce. There, I said it. At 320 pages and 22 Chapters (well, 23), it is also the shortest of the books and the first with a theme, taking place as it does at Christmas at Buckshaw after the manor house is taken over by a film crew; and while the tale moves along from scene to scene at Bradley’s typical brisk pace, the murder doesn’t occur until halfway, much like The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag. Bradley is not a boring writer and I am always entertained by Flavia’s internal monologue and dastardly plots, but still…I know someone is going to die in this book, so I kept wishing that Bradley would just get on with it and jolly well kill somebody, already.

Flavia is in her usual cheeky cocksure self, which, if one were to be honest, is the best reason to read any of these books. The mysteries are solid and the tale is never boring, but it is for Flavia de Luce, brilliant chemist and amateur sleuth, that one reads them in the first place. Also, with each of these books, Bradley makes sure that his heroine does not remain a static, one-note cypher. Oh, Flavia still feuds with her sisters, is flummoxed by her father and mourns her mother, but we also see her emotional inner life, much as she may wish that she were all brains and no heart. In rare moments she declares that she was once close to her sisters, wants a father who is present in their lives and a mother – that is, before launching on an inner dissertation on chemical formulae.

And there are other clues as to just what kind of girl Flavia is, as when she reveals that she at last had tea with Inspector Hewitt and his wife, Antigone, after being invited during The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag – during which she said something that, while not meaning to harm, did so grievously. So, even Flavia has faults and can make mistakes and, just as importantly, can admit to them and mourn having done so. That she did so with Antigone Hewitt, a woman she obviously admires and whom she sees (if I’m correctly reading between the lines) as a potential surrogate mother, makes this incident all the more agonizing. It shows just how three-dimensional Flavia actually is, and it makes you respect the character (and the writer) all the more.

But one enormous issue with I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is this: evidently, this very pragmatic, logical and cerebral young lady…still believes in Santa Claus. One of Flavia’s self-appointed tasks in this book is to set a trap for Kris Kringle and deliver him up to her sisters Feely and Daffy as proof positive that this Right Jolly Old Elf is real, and the whole plot point feels just plain wrong. Surely, if Bradley needed a reason to get Flavia onto the roof of Buckshaw (for reasons that become evident) he could have stuck with her secondary motivation; that is, in creating a homemade fireworks display to celebrate the Yuletide and honor one of the houseguests. Her need to capture Father Christmas is just peculiar and not in keeping with whom this character is.

But I still love ya, Flavia, so much so that I have bought all of the books in the series (rather than borrow them from the library as I had been doing) and dearly hope that Bradley keeps churning out more adventures of Flavia de Luce.

“Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War”, by Tony Horwitz

 

432 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-0679758334

I have read dozens of books about American history in general and on the American Civil War in particular, but Tony Horwitz provides some refreshing insights into this seminal American conflict with Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. Traveling through ten different states, Horwitz sets out to answer several age-old questions about The Civil War (or “The Late Great Unpleasantness”, or “The War of Northern Aggression”, depending on which side you’re on).

But first and foremost, why can’t Southerners put the Civil War behind them? Why do so many of them insist on living in the past? Each chapter is written from a different state and they are informative, disturbing, poignant and often downright hysterical. Just the chapter names are amusing including, “At the Foote of the Master” (about expert Shelby Foote), “Gone With the Window” (about Atlanta’s continuing obsession with Gone With the Wind) and “The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells Some”.

Horwitz traipses through battlefields, camps with re-enactors, seeks out little-known stories and checks out dusty museums and personal collections. He also talks with dozens of people (both Civil War experts and simple folk) about such topics as slavery, The Daughters of the Confederacy, the Confederate flag controversy, Civil Rights, prisoner of war camps, The Ku Klux Klan and various Civil War luminaries. Perhaps the most enjoyable parts of the book involve Horwitz tagging along with some hardcore re-enactors.

His romantic vision of a cozy re-enactment weekend (complete with camp fire, hardy stew and good camaraderie) is quickly burst when he’s made to remove or discard almost everything he has, including his clothes, eyeglasses and food (they’re not vintage 1860s; also, Confederate re-enactors tend to constantly starve themselves to obtain the appearance of proper, emaciated Southern soldiers). Some hardcore even go so far as to soak uniform buttons in urine to achieve the correct “patina” – all of which sounds more like work than fun.

The most disheartening parts of the book involve describing the New South, which is more integrated than ever before yet feels more divided than any time since…well, the Civil War. Confederates in the Attic succeeds as a first-hand account of one man’s attempt to understand our modern (circa 1998) views of the Civil War and how they stack up against the actual war. This is done in a well-written, very humorous, fast-paced travelogue style that is highly entertaining and deeply moving and difficult to put down.

“Enigma” by Robert Harris

 

320 Pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0679428879

Y’know, I’ve read a lot more of Robert Harris’ books than I realized: first there was Fatherland (reviewed on January 3^rd, 2024), next was Archangel (reviewed on February 3^rd, 2024) and now there’s Enigma – and I think this is the last one…but we’ll see. Unlike Harris’ other two books, Enigma is about actual events, in this case the English effort to crack the German “Enigma” cipher machine which was used to protect military communications. In the book, Tom Jericho, a gifted cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park – the principal center of Allied code-breaking during the World War II – is recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, another cypher clerk. After a few weeks, he is told Bletchley needs him back since it has become locked out of the Naval Enigma and convoys HX-229 and SC-122 are at risk from a pack of 40 German U-Boats, setting up the largest convoy battle of the war.

In describing Bletchley Park’s attempts at decoding the German Enigma cyphers, Harris explains the art of cryptography, the workings of the Enigma Machine, the development of the first computers and even commentary on the collapse of the class system in Britain during the War. But the convoy battle simply serves as the background for the main story, for Claire has mysteriously disappeared and Jericho and Hester Wallace, Claire’s friend and flatmate, set out to solve the mystery, which appears to be related to some mysterious unbroken cryptograms from the Ukrainian front. What is the subject of the cryptograms? Is there someone inside Bletchley feeding information to the Nazis? Is the missing girl a traitor or a victim of circumstance? As the clues pile up and the mystery unfolds, Tom and Hester race against time in order not only to find Claire and solve the mystery of her disappearance, but to crack the Enigma code, as well.

I found Enigma to be a prototypical Harris book: an efficient and taut thriller, seamlessly interweaving the fictional mystery story with historical facts – the structure, by the way, intended to mimic the Enigma itself, with its wheels within wheels giving new meaning to strings of symbols, each wheel here being a new configuration or interpretation of some character’s motivation. And fear not if you are unfamiliar with the Enigma machine or the art of cryptology, for Harris manages to explain it all in readily accessible language and with easy to follow logic. Also, the characters are interesting enough that you actually give a damn what happens to them, even the mysterious Claire, who only appears in flashbacks and in other’s descriptions of her. But the real treat is the immersion into the paradoxical life of the intelligence agent: how do you use the information gained without compromising the source?

“The Last Prince of Ireland”, by Morgan Llywelyn

 

368 pages, William Morrow & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0688107949 

I bought The Last Prince of Ireland by Morgan Llywelyn from the overstock shelf at – get this – B. Dalton (seems to me I’ve said that before). So anyway, this novel is about O’Sullivan’s March, in which Donal Cam O’Sullivan Beare, the last independent Chief of the Name of the O’Sullivan Beara Irish clan, gathered a thousand of his remaining people – about all that was left – after their defeats at Kinsale and Dunboy and set off northwards on a 300-mile march, starting on December 31^st, 1602. If you know next to nothing about Irish history – place me firmly in that column – then all of that was Irish to you. But, by and large, you don’t need to know any of that when reading this book, as it is a tale of resilience in the face of starvation, exhaustion, betrayal and hopelessness that can appeal to anyone.

The story builds steadily in emotional intensity to the point where one becomes highly attuned to the emotional states of the characters, feeling both their pains and their joys. This is one of the strengths of the book, as there are no two-dimensional cardboard cutouts to be found; each character has depth and are not merely representory stand-ins or typical archetypes. As they fight and strive and suffer and die, you feel for them and egg them on but, as you do so, you cannot escape the sense that their cause is ultimately doomed, as are they. That so many of these people are ordinary – and non-combatant women and children to boot – only makes their plight all the more impactful and their survival all the more invoking (and to think, the Irish had 300 more years of English misrule to undergo).

So be warned: there is a lot of doom and gloom to be found in this book, hanging over these people like a literal dark cloud. If detailed descriptions of people suffering, struggling and starving as they fend off attacks from the marauding English – and other Irish, as well – then The Last Prince of Ireland may not be the book for you. But survival was the goal; the physical survival of all the people that O’Sullivan Beare was obligated to lead and to fight for. But this physical survival was always seen by the lords as concurrent with survival of what was truly “Irish”, which is simply a bitter truth: in the effort to simply survive, much of what was once treasured is lost to the ravages of time and expediency. An old lesson, to be sure, but one that The Last Prince of Ireland teaches all too well and all too tragically.

“To Marry an English Lord: Tales of Wealth and Marriage, Sex and Snobbery in the Gilded Age” by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace

 

414 pages, Workman Publishing Company, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0761171959

I absolutely love the Gilded Age, but I don’t really know why; there’s so little to recommend it on a personal or professional level, but…there it is. So whenever I come across a book on this era I naturally snatch it up – like this one, To Marry an English Lord: Tales of Wealth and Marriage, Sex and Snobbery in the Gilded Age by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace which, as the cover blurb tells us, was the inspiration for Downton Abbey. This was a chatty book that was organized rather strangely: you start a chapter or a section reading some fascinating story about this American heiress or that English grandee and, upon turning the page, run smack into some photo essay telling a completely different story.

Not that these many photos and sidebars weren’t useful; indeed, they include detailed information about Victorian and Edwardian high society, such as which fashions were all the rage, how calling cards worked, how wealthy women could easily conduct little extramarital affairs on the side – you name it and it’s all here in all of its high-class debauched glory. I thought that the two authors were rather like a couple of Old Maids discussing the goings on of the Well-to-Do over their backyard fence, sharing copies of People Magazine to illustrate whatever strumpet they were dissing. Oh, they were all going to hell in a handbasket, no doubt, but they would do so with elegance and style, make no mistake.

This may be the best thing about the book, but it would have been even better if the format was different – say, as a coffee table book, where the pictures would have been given more justice. Furthermore, the book is repetitive in the extreme: once we get past the well-known Buccaneers who crossed the Atlantic to harpoon their own Great White Lord – y’know, Jennie Jerome, Consuelo Vanderbilt and such – we read about their erstwhile cousins who came afterwards and damned if I could differentiate between the lot. And it’s not just that the women’s stories were all similar; the authors actually recap the same stories two, three and even four times in subsequent chapters. I mean, enough, already.

Oh, and mustn’t forget all of those lists, especially the last which details each heiress with her father, husband and manor house – again with the repetition! I get trying to enlighten the reader, but it looks like the authors substituted quantity for quality and just loaded one down with facts and figures. Not a bad book, don’t get me wrong, but gossipy and rather unserious, a kind of cross between a dynamic history book and a high-society gossip rag. To Marry an English Lord is a detailed Who’s Who chronicling the lives of the many young, rich American women who relocated to Britain in search of husbands with fancy titles and the men who married them for their money. Really, these high-class low-lifes deserved one another.