“James and the Giant Peach”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Nancy Erholm Burkert

 

160 pages, Alfred A Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0-394-91282-0

Sooooo…I should be honest and say I have not, in fact, read James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl; it was, rather, read to me in the 4^th Grade by Mrs. Roberts. But I figure that counts. Anyway…Dahl’s modern-day children’s classic is as eccentrically English as one could hope for, as you’ll see (*ahem*):

James Henry Trotter is a boy who lives happily with his parents in a house by the sea – until, that is, a carnivorous rhinoceros escapes from the zoo and eats his parents when he is 4-years-old (I know, right? Imagine hearing that shit when you’re only ten). James goes off to live with his aunts, the tall, thin and cruel Spiker and the short, fat and greedy Sponge, who, instead of caring for him, treat him with utter contempt, feed him improperly and force him to sleep on bare floorboards (could Dahl have made a more awful experience for his protagonist?). When he is seven, James meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that would change his life for the better (I guess Dahl doesn’t know enough not to talk to strangers). However, on the way home he trips and spills the crystals, whence they dig themselves underground. This causes the nearby peach tree to produce a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house, and from there…

Well, you really should read the book yourself. As for me, when Mrs. Roberts read this to my class I think we all thought that it was bonkers…but in a good way. Giant peach? Talking insects? Peregrination via Prunus persica? It’s all good, man. The outrageousness of it all just seemed – I dunno, normal. I’m sure there were subtle insights and hidden meanings to a lot of what Dahl wrote, but I’ll be damned if I could discern them when I was 10 – or 50. What I recall was a jolly good time in which we followed the travels and travails of a boy the same age as us as he escaped a dire homelife to seek adventure with a supporting cast the likes of which we had never even dreamed of. And it worked; don’t know why it worked, but it did. And perhaps, just perhaps, this mad work of English whimsey awoke something within that allowed me to open up and see the world differently, a world in which a giant peach and insect friends was not mad but rather all too rational and, even, desirable.

Or maybe giant peaches populated by large, sentient insects was just cool.

“Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World”, by The National Geographic Society

 

424 pages, The National Geographic Society, ISBN-13: 978-0870444623

My Dad got Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World from somewhere when I was a kid and I liked it so much that, when I moved out of my parent’s house, I took it with me. Without asking. “Stole”, if you want to get all legal about it. And am I ever glad that I did. As a kid, I would take this book and just open it to a random page and marvel at what I was looking at. Being new to history as I was, I was astounded that the world didn’t begin the day I way born; indeed, seeing as how human history stretched back far longer than I could have imagined, some nights I just became numb with how ancient we were and wonder what happened to all of those vanished civilizations and how one could spend their life studying one or the other and still only scratch the surface of what they were seeking.

And now that I am seeing this book once again with adult eyes, I have to say that, while the nostalgia factor is strong, the book itself is rather weak, overall. This comes as no surprise as, with the number of oversized books like this one that are conglomerations of pictures and facts and charts and so on, they all tend to be just introductory works meant as broad overviews of their topics that are designed to whet the appetite of the prospective scholar. So in that regard, it is a brilliant success for, while not going in-depth into any one culture, it at least gives one general sense of the same. Mission accomplished, for while I’m still rather ignorant of many of the peoples who inhabit this work, this book was one of many that opened my eyes to the past and compelled me to banish my ignorance and learn more – something I am still doing today.

“Corum: The Prince with the Silver Hand”, by Michael Moorcock

 

 

341 pages, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1565041882

 

Over the course of the mid-to-late 90s, White Wolf Publishing produced this massive omnibus collection of Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” stories, a recurrent aspect in many of his tales. Corum: The Prince with the Silver Hand was the twelfth in this series and the second volume featuring the character Corum Jhaelen Irsei, “The Prince in the Scarlet Robe”, and includes the tales The Bull and The Spear, The Oak and The Ram and The Sword and The Stallion. This second trilogy featuring Moorcock’s doomed survivor of a dead race shows that the man was more than just Elric (much as Robert E. Howard was more than just Conan). And the fact that Corum merited a second trilogy suggest that the public knew it, too.

The Bull and The Spear begins with Corum living in wedded bliss with Rhalina – this is not to last, of course, for the Vadhagh race have lifespans greater than a human’s, and so he watches as Rhalina grows old and dies, along with everyone else he knows. As time goes by he becomes increasingly isolated from the world at large, his days of wine and roses seemingly over. All too soon adventure calls in the form of strange voices that come to him in his dreams. When he disregards said dreams, Jhary-a-Conel, a Companion to the Champion, arrives and convinces Corum that the voices must be heard which turns out to be a request for help by the descendants of Rhalina’s people from the future. I won’t spoil it any more for you, but one thing about The Bull and The Spear that stood out for me was Corum’s isolation from…everything. The Mabden (humans) have nothing to do with him but, for all that, his legend continued to grow as the stories become more and more embellished and people began to “build shrines to him” and they made “crude images of him to which [they] prayed as they had prayed to their gods…It had not taken them long to find new gods and it was ironic that they should make one of the people who had helped rid them of their old ones”. To me, it would appear that Moorcock is noting an irony that is very much present not only in our own history, but also in our present society.

In The Oak and The Ram the tale begun in the previous book continues as the encroaching threat of the Fhoi Myore is threatening to unleash a storm of icy death upon the last remaining inhabitants in a dying world. Corum, assisted by his allies, begins a quest for Amergin, High King of the Mabden, who is trapped by a dark spell cast by the Gods of Limbo. Utilizing two legendary talismans – those would be the Golden Oak and the Silver Ram – Corum must restore the High King and defeat the forces of evil. This continuation in the tale of Corum was – there’s no other word for it – weak; not bad, really, but it doesn’t really break new ground and feels more like a retread of the previous book, almost like a soft reboot. As Moorcock is one of the kings of fantasy pulp, you can expect a lot of action and deep dialogue as the characters attempt to Save the World…Again, but this felt more like everyone was on a treadmill as plot points were repeated and declarations were made and so on and so forth and…I dunno, it just felt like things kept going ‘round in circles and nothing was really advancing – until they were, and then it just felt…fake? The tone was off, too, for while The Bull and The Spear was rather dark and deep, The Oak and The Ram was something else entirely. Can’t describe it better than that. Overall it feels like a filler book, which shouldn’t be surprising in a trilogy.

Lastly is The Sword and The Stallion which tells the tale of Corum’s Last Stand against the Fhoi Myore. Within, former friends become enemies while past foes become allies in after tragic circumstances as Corum soldiers on wielding his accursed sword (there’s always an accursed sword, isn’t there?) and riding his ancient stallion that guides his blade of truth (read the book). All the while this never-ending race war hurtles towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion as Corum fulfills a dark prophecy that could sever the world from Chaos and the mad gods – or erase all life from the world once and for all, all done in proper pulpy style. All in all, a tragic ending to Corum’s second trilogy, full of despair, cruel irony and themes of Greek Tragedy (recall that the original trilogy ended on a surprisingly happy and wholesome note. Weird, I know). Friends die, lovers betray and prophecies are fulfilled, rarely to anyone’s benefit. While the ending is sad and even a bit frustrating in many ways, it all feels rather poetic and in tune with how things were being set up for such a bittersweet finale, where death, betrayal and sacrifice are the only ways to achieve ultimate peace and freedom for the few survivors of the world. While the first trilogy was overall superior, this second trilogy of Corum more than holds its own and, seeing as the tone is so different, makes for a worthy, independent successor.

“The Dry”, by Jane Harper

 

336 pages, Flatiron Books, ISBN-13: 978-1250105608

In Jane Harper’s The Dry, Aaron Falk, Australian Federal Police agent, returns to the struggling farming community (and hometown) of Kiewarra for the funeral of his childhood best friend, Luke Hadler, and his family. Severe drought has put the town under extreme pressure and the community is shocked (but not surprised) when the Hadler family is found dead in their farmhouse in an apparent murder-suicide perpetrated by Luke. While Falk is loath to confront the townspeople who drove him away twenty years earlier, the circumstances around the deaths of the Hadlers compels him to dig deeper into the events leading up to the tragedy – and to confront the long-hidden secrets of his own troublesome past in this water-forsaken town.

The Dry is a first-rate page-turner that depicts its setting – the parched, small-town farming communities outside of the landmark Australian cities – in intimate (not to say depressing) detail. The characters are all fleshed out and believable, while the pace is that of a long-distance runner: steady and assured, not in a rush to get to the destination but, rather, determined to move along at its own pace and arrive, triumphant. And as for the ending…well, let me just say that I like my mysteries to be mysterious, and the unexpected twist as the killer is at last revealed and the mystery is solved left me satisfied that these 336 pages weren’t a waste of my time (and made me wonder why I didn’t figure it out on my own. Damnit).

So, yeah, The Dry is a first-class mystery that will leave you guessing until The Big Reveal; so glad I found and assigned it for the Mysteries & Munchies book club (he said in all modesty).

“Art in the Blood: A Sherlock Holmes Adventure”, by Bonnie MacBird

 

336 pages, ‎ Collins Crime Club, ISBN-13: 978-0008129699

So we had a power outage out here and, rather than sit in darkness, I took my mother to her local library (which was, evidently, on a different grid) just to have a look around – and I found this, Art in the Blood – A Sherlock Holmes Adventure by Bonnie MacBird. Now, as I’m sure you remember, Dear Reader, as of this writing I am running a mystery book club at the Fraser Public Library and find myself on the lookout for new books to suggest to the folks. So when I saw a brand-new Sherlock Holmes adventure that I could borrow and read at no cost to myself I said, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll be the guinea pig” (I mean, why not; it was free, after all).

And I’m glad that I did for, in reading Art in the Blood I had the very real sensation that I was reading an authentic Holmes mystery written as Conan Doyle would have. The pacing, the language, the characterizations – especially, it must be said, of Holmes and Watson – all felt to me like MacBird had channeled Sir Arthur and wrote a book the way he would have. Be warned, however, for the story is rather dark – very dark, perhaps – concerning as it does art theft, torture, child abuse, rape, incest and pederasty, themes atypical for a Holmes story but which, I would argue, existed during the Victorian Age (as well as our own, mores the pity).

The story is certainly more action-packed than most Holmes mysteries (although Holmes is perfectly able to comport himself physically) with famous names periodically being dropped: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec meeting Holmes and Watson? Why not! And Vidocq is based on Eugène-François Vidocq, a French criminal-turned-detective (Conan Doyle partially based Holmes on Vidocq, which makes this an inside joke). There are little inconsistencies that quirk at True Fan; for instance, Mary Morstan – that’s Mrs. Watson – has a sick mother in this outing, but canon has established her as an orphan.

So, for what it’s worth, I thought that Art in the Blood was a fast-paced novel with several intriguing subplots and some nicely thought-out twists and turns. MacBird captured the Victorian Era and atmosphere convincingly, the dialog especially. The local color was certainly well done; facts about the historical period were well detailed in language, setting and in society’s detail. Stepping into Conan Doyle’s shoes couldn’t have been easy, but MacBird did a very credible job with this fast-paced and dark adventure. If the book club agrees I’ll put it on the calendar; regardless, I look forward to reading the second book.

“The Last Kaiser: A Biography of Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia”, by Tyler Whittle

 

368 pages, Times Books, ISBN-13: 978-0812907162

I picked up my copy of The Last Kaiser: A Biography of Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia by Tyler Whittle (or rather, Michael Sidney Tyler-Whittle) from John K. King Books on Lafayette Boulevard in Downtown Detroit, one of my favorite used book hunting grounds that my Dad and I used to make semi-annual excursions to (I’ve mentioned this before). We here in the States have a very specific idea of just who and what Kaiser Bill was (assuming any of us remember, that is), with “Warmonger” topping the list. But according to Whittle, Wilhelm – contrary to allied propaganda – didn’t want war, especially the two-front war that was the dread of every German leader since…well, forever. But the propaganda of the Allied powers was a powerful thing, and any attention to truth and balance was mostly nonexistent or distorted (and the winners write the history).

There is, of course, more to the story. Wilhelm had a tempestuous relationship with his parents – they would be Friedrich Wilhelm Nikolaus Karl, Frederick III of Germany and Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – seeing as they were reforming liberals and he was a reactionary aristocrat, but Whittle makes it sound like family meant a great deal to him (he got on well enough with King George V and seemed to really like Tsar Nicholas II, in a condescending manner). His mother never ceased to consider herself British and looked down on the German court and culture as inferior to Victorian Britain, while his father was out of step with public opinion, being too liberal for the prevailing political climate. Wilhelm compensated by becoming very nationalistic, while his parent’s exceedingly high standards meant that they never saw Wilhelm as being never quite good enough.

While reading this biography it became quite clear – to me, at any rate – that Wilhelm’s life, character and attitudes were shaped by his left arm. I’ll explain: his was a breech birth, being born feet-first instead of head-first, and so the attending physician forcibly pulled the left arm downwards, tearing the brachial plexus, then continued to grasp the left arm to rotate the infant’s trunk and free the right arm, but permanently injuring the left arm and causing it to be withered and half the size of his right for the rest of his life. From a mental point of view – what with all of the ipecac and chloroform Victoria was given, along with Wilhelm’s hypoxic state at birth – it all possibly gave Kaiser Bill mild brain damage which manifested itself in his subsequent hyperactive and erratic behavior, limited attention span and impaired social abilities. Indeed, the way he behaved even in adulthood made him seem as a child who never grew up.

Anyway…Kaiser Bill, under Whittle’s pen, actually comes across as a complicated though not unlikable man with his share of strengths and weaknesses, a shocking revelation to me, seeing as I always thought of him as a warmongering loud mouth. He overcame a very difficult birth disability at great sacrifice, became Kaiser at least ten years too early for his own (or Germany’s, or Europe’s) good and was really caught in profound international currents not of his own making (oh, and he was a big fan of PG Wodehouse). For opponents of the time and later detractors there is enough in a few of William’s speeches and actions to condemn him, which they certainly did; however, the countervailing evidence unearthed by Whittle suggest a much more complex man, and his balanced interpretation is a far more accurate picture of a man who should, perhaps, have been an actor rather than an emperor. Kaiser Bill, we hardly knew ye.

“The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined”, by Georges Duby, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, With a Forward by Thomas N. Bisson

 

392 pages, The University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226167725

In The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, prominent Annales historian Georges Duby offers a tripartite view of medieval French society, a construct which depicts men separating themselves into a triple hierarchy: Those Who Pray; Those Who Fight; Those Who Work. He considers how this medieval theory of orders originated, discusses its complex history and shows how different interests – cultural, political and economic – were involved in its creation and use. The Three Orders also shows how the tripartite schema came to occupy a central position in social thought and clarifies the manner in which feudal society viewed itself.

Beginning with a brief examination of a popular early 7^th Century treatise on the Three Estates of France, Duby then jumps abruptly back to the period in which the notion that French society was thus divided was born. Essentially, the bishops of the tottering Capetian state drew upon older imaginings of hierarchical order to project a new rationale for royal power and peasant subservience; their tripartite scheme collapsed with the monarchy itself, only to be resuscitated in the 12^th Century with the creation of the Feudal system and the conflict between Capetians and Plantagenets contributed to a definitive restoration of monarchical trifunctionality.

In tracing the fortunes of the Three Orders, Duby shows how this tripartite scheme came to occupy a central position in social thought and clarifies the manner in which feudal society viewed itself.