The Master of Jalna by Mazo de la Roche

Hard times on the family farm

The Master of Jalna, published in 1933, is the fourth book of 16 in Canadian author Mazo de la Roche’s series of Jalna novels (the fourth novel to be published but the tenth novel in the Jalna chronology, because of all the prequels). These books take place mostly in rural Southern Ontario, along the shores of Lake Ontario. The Jalna novels are in the family drama genre, much like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women series, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, or the old TV show The Waltons. Sometimes the Jalna books venture into romance novel territory, but like the aforementioned examples, they can’t really be classified as romance novels. The family that stars in these books is the Whiteoaks. Their farm is named Jalna. The “Master” in this case is Renny Whiteoak, the eldest brother who manages the farm (The parents died prior to the first novel). As this novel opens, Renny is now married to his brother’s ex-wife, and they have a toddler daughter.

While the last Jalna novel, Finch’s Fortune, ventured as far as England, this installment in the series takes place entirely on the Jalna estate or its near environs. Wayward brothers Finch and Eden have returned from Europe to the family manor, wherein resides the Whiteoak siblings and their spouses, children, elderly aunt and uncles, and a few servants. The family’s circle of friends is limited, which means just about any woman the Whiteoak brothers meet is a potential mate. The dramatic events in this book are the universal dramas of many families: marriages, births, illnesses, deaths, funerals. This novel also brings in the element of financial hardship. The Whiteoaks are land-rich but cash-poor, and Renny, in his role as manager of the farm, is having trouble making ends meet. The family might have to sell some of its beloved acreage. It’s kind of hard to take such financial woes seriously, however, considering that this large family owns a lot of property, few of them work, and they always seem to indulge in lavish feasts of food and drink. A couple of the family members are actually borderline wealthy. The Whiteoaks have never been filthy rich, but they enjoy a prestige as a founding family of the region. Because of this, they often come across as having an inflated sense of pride and entitlement, particularly the elder generation.

Whether intentional or not, masculinity is a recurring and overt theme in these books. De la Roche uses the Whiteoak brothers to compare and contrast competing conceptions of masculinity. I expanded on that in my review of Finch’s Fortune, so I won’t go into it too much here. Though a woman herself, and possibly a lesbian, de la Roche really doesn’t give equal time or importance to her female characters. As the title indicates, Renny is the main focus of this book. He’s always seemed to be the author’s ideal of a man’s man. His marriage is far from ideal, however, as he and his wife Alayne are positively rude to each other throughout the book. Alayne was depicted sympathetically in earlier books, but her she’s just a constant whiner.

Much like a television series, the pleasure of the Jalna books comes from just seeing what these familiar characters are up to, even if it’s nothing earth-shattering. The other main attraction here is the atmosphere. These novels take you back to a wholesome, idyllic time and place in Canadian history. I recently made a visit to the Niagara region of Southern Ontario, where the farms extend right up to the shore of the great lake. Nowadays, this countryside is mostly occupied by wineries and tourism, but driving through the area it’s not hard to imagine what Jalna might have been like a century ago. The storytelling in these books is almost an afterthought, and mostly predictable. The first novel, Jalna, is quite good. The second and third books, however, did not impress me much. I’m glad I hung in there for this fourth novel though, because The Master of Jalna is an improvement over the last couple installments.

The Dark Mother by Waldo Frank

Annoyingly overwrought relationships spoil promising prose

Waldo Frank

The Dark Mother, published in 1920, is the third novel I’ve read by American author Waldo Frank. After completing it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like the idea of Waldo Frank better than I actually like Waldo Frank’s writing. Frank was a leftist, avant-garde American writer who was active in Jazz Age Greenwich Village, decades before the beat poets of the ‘50s or the hippies of the ‘60s. I keep hoping I will discover some obscure, unconventional, and unsung masterpiece among his oeuvre, but I always come away from Frank’s books feeling somewhat disappointed. Such is my reaction to The Dark Mother, as it was with City Block (1922) and Chalk Face (1924).

David Markand’s father died when he was 10. He grew up in a small town in upstate New York. As The Dark Mother opens, David is 19, and his mother has just died. His sonless uncle in New York City offers to take David into his home and give him a start in his tobacco business. Just prior to leaving for the city, David meets a young man slightly his senior, Tom Rennard, a New York City lawyer who is vacationing upstate. The two strike up an immediate friendship. After David moves to the city, the two reconnect and continue getting to know one another. Tom is unmarried and lives with his sister Cornelia, with whom David also becomes close. Despite his relative youth, Tom is a jaded cynic who knows how to play the game of social climbing and career advancement while realizing that it’s all just a pointless game. He admires and envies the innocence, naiveté, and optimism of David, a literal babe-from-the-woods. While the two form a close friendship, even fraternal love, Tom’s self-hatred makes him resent David’s contentment to the point where he desires to corrupt the younger man and tarnish his enviable innocence.

Tom and David’s relationship is like that of an old, bickering gay married couple, but without the benefit of actually being gay. Their friendship consists mostly of discussing, analyzing, and arguing over their friendship and love for one another. Rarely, if ever, do we see the two having fun or enjoying each other’s company. Tom is the more annoying of the two, often badgering David with complaints about how David doesn’t pay him enough attention, or David doesn’t give himself up completely to their friendship, or David wasn’t there when Tom got home from work. In the desire to depict intense emotions and make profound statements about human nature, Frank really goes overboard with the intensity of the friendship, even for a century ago. It’s hard to imagine a couple of buddies as codependent as these two. Again, David and Tom are not gay, as evidenced by the fact that many women throw themselves at the two young men—married women, single women, young women, older women—to an extent that defies belief.

One admirable aspect of the book is Frank’s fine command of the English language. He tells the story in very poetic prose that’s experimental in style. Calling to mind Harlem Renaissance writers like Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison, who were his contemporaries, Frank’s writing does what modernism was supposed to do, before modernism pretentiously went off the deep end. His semi-abstract voice does not obscure the story that’s being told, but it’s unconventional enough to make you view the world and human nature in new and different ways.

Over the course of the book, Frank keeps introducing supporting characters who distract from the narrative arc of David, Tom, and Cornelia—the three leads, all of whom are rather annoying themselves. After a while, you kind of hope one of them will commit suicide (they think about it enough) just so something momentous will happen in this story that otherwise just drones on. 14 years after The Dark Mother, Frank published a sequel, The Death and Life of David Markand. I don’t fine David interesting enough, however, to want to read a second book about him.

Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History by Stephen Jay Gould

A fascinating biological saga somewhat tediously presented

Paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) wrote many books on natural history and evolution for a popular audience. His book Wonderful Life, published in 1989, focuses on fossils collected from the Burgess Shale, a geological formation in British Columbia, Canada. The remarkably preserved fossils of the Burgess Shale (I saw some in a Toronto museum last week) comprise the best illustration of the Cambrian explosion, when early invertebrate life exhibited a wide diversity of anatomical forms. Eminent paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott (1850–1927) discovered the Burgess Shale and for several decades monopolized the interpretation of the fossils. In the 1970s, however, three British paleontologists—Harry Whittington, Simon Conway Morris, and Derek Briggs—re-examined the Burgess Shale fossil record and ascertained that many of Walcott’s findings were erroneous. Walcott “shoehorned” several unique creatures into existing phyla, thus shortchanging the biological diversity and anatomical disparity of the Cambrian explosion. The three Brits revealed that many of the Burgess Shale arthropods belong to newly discovered phyla that led to evolutionary dead ends. Gould uses this scientific saga to illustrate his own theories of evolution and natural historiography.

The centerpiece of the book is a step-by-step recounting of Whittington, Briggs, and Conway Morris’s work with the Burgess Shale fossils. The reader follows along and joins in the excitement as they make new scientific discoveries. One thing Wonderful Life does very well is it really gives laymen like me an idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they do it. I also learned quite a bit about the anatomy, evolution, and taxonomy of prehistoric arthropods, topics I surprisingly found fascinating.

What I didn’t like about Wonderful Life is the way that Gould continually hammers home his thesis. It reads as if he’s saying: “These three scientists discovered something marvelous, and I discovered them! Now wonder at the revelations I’m about to impart to you!” Gould keeps stressing how groundbreaking this interpretation of the Burgess fossils is, but I never fully grasped the big deal. I never really thought that our present world was any more biodiverse than earlier eras, so in my case that’s one myth Gould didn’t have to bust. Gould does make a good point that evolutionary trees are often drawn in a way that makes it seem like homo sapiens were the teleological god-given foregone conclusion in the process, but it’s not like intelligent science-minded people can’t see around that. Anyone who’s ever done any genealogical research knows that family trees are more like unruly bushes than neatly pruned trees. The same holds true for taxonomical cladograms.

The other half of Gould’s argument is his assertion that contingency plays a big role in evolution. Again, I met this hypothesis with a resounding “Duh!” Contingency, as Gould vaguely defines it, is something like what most of us might call “the butterfly effect.” Small random or haphazard incidents amount to big changes over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Gould states over and over that if we “played back the tape” of evolution with different random catastrophes, then humankind would have never evolved. That seems like a no-brainer, at least to an atheist. What Gould fails to point out is that if humanity never evolved, then there wouldn’t be any humans around to contemplate evolution. Intelligent human life may have been a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s a prerequisite for the very discussion we’re having.

Some other scientists have taken issue with Gould’s arguments here, in whole or in part, such as Richard Dawkins and Richard Fortey. Obviously, I’m not in a position to argue evolution with the late great Stephen Jay Gould. I can, however, say that Fortey is the best writer of the three, while Gould and Dawkins are rather full of themselves. I like the science that Gould presented in Wonderful Life. I just got tired of him telling me how amazed I should be at his conclusions.

The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music by Dunstan Prial

One of jazz and rock’s most influential tastemakers

As a fan of classic rock music, I know of John Hammond as the record producer and Columbia executive who discovered Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. (It’s Hammond’s grinning visage, looking like he could be Stevie Ray’s dad, that graces the back cover of Vaughan’s debut album Texas Flood.) Journalist Dunstan Prial’s 2006 Hammond biography The Producer, however, has taught me that there was much more to Hammond’s long and influential career in the recording industry.

The bulk of this book is concerned not with the history of rock but with jazz. In fact, Hammond’s first encounter with Dylan in the early 1960s doesn’t occur until chapter 12 of 16. Hammond’s career started way back in the 1930s working with artists like Benny Goodman (who eventually became his brother-in-law), Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. Through his work as a critic for DownBeat magazine, a talent scout and producer for record companies, and an all-around jazz impresario, Hammond helped launch some of the biggest stars of the swing era. On the tail end of the jazz age, he also discovered Aretha Franklin and produced her first two albums.

John Henry Hammond Jr. decided at a young age that he wanted to work in the music industry. One of the reasons he was able to make that dream a reality is that he was independently wealthy, being a great-great-grandson of railroad and shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Gloria Vanderbilt, more famous in recent years, was his first cousin.) To establish himself in the music business, Hammond often worked for free or for little pay, just for the joy of making music. He would often use his own money to finance a record, a concert, or to keep a hungry musician afloat. He had no musical talent himself (at least none is discussed in this book), but he had great taste and a keen eye for spotting future superstars. In The Producer, Prial argues convincingly that Hammond’s taste was instrumental in shaping American popular music in the 20th century.

In addition to his contributions to the music industry and popular culture, Hammond was active in the civil rights movement. Seeing jazz music as a means to further the integration of Blacks into American society, Hammond was the first music producer/promoter to put Black and White musicians together on the same stage. When, at Hammond’s urging, Benny Goodman added Black musicians Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band, it was a milestone moment in racial integration that preceded Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball by a decade. Hammond was also a long-time board member of the NAACP before resigning in protest over the organization’s disagreements with Martin Luther King Jr.

Prial interviewed Hammond’s sister and sister-in-law, some industry associates like Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun, and a few musicians such as Hampton, Springsteen, and the surviving members of Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. Most of Prial’s research, however, comes from previously published biographies, interviews, and some archival documents—sources into which he has dug admirably deep and wide. Springsteen’s vivid and exuberant recollections of Hammond’s benevolent guidance are really the highlight of the book for rock fans. Much of the Dylan material comes from Dylan’s Chronicles memoir. Prial’s narrative highlights about ten or twelve big stars that Hammond discovered and/or championed. There is much praise here for Hammond’s major accomplishments, but this is not a unilaterally positive, hero-worshipping biography. Hammond had his faults and difficulties as well. The reader gets a balanced and comprehensive sense of Hammond’s personality from Prial’s well-researched and well-written account.

The Shadow Puppet by Georges Simenon

Only murder in the building

First published in 1912, The Shadow Puppet is the twelfth novel in Belgian author Georges Simenon’s series of mystery novels starring Parisian police detective Jules Maigret. The original French title of this novel is L’Ombre chinoise, meaning literally “the Chinese shadow,” which refers to a certain type of shadow puppet. This novel has also been published in English under the titles of Maigret Mystified and The Shadow in the Courtyard, the latter title being the most accurate. If this were a Hardy Boys mystery, the story would actually involve a shadow puppet, but here the title is strictly metaphorical, referring to a human silhouette viewed through a window shade.

A concierge at an apartment building on the Place des Vosges calls the police to report a murder, and Maigret reports to the scene of the crime. Passing through an arched entryway, he enters the large courtyard of this apartment complex. On one side of this courtyard resides the laboratory of a serum manufacturer (medical elixirs, I presume). The owner of the company, Monsieur Couchet, has been found seated at his desk, shot to death, and his safe emptied of its contents, estimated to be 360,000 francs. Couchet, a very wealthy man, doesn’t actually reside in this building, but through an unfortunate coincidence, his ex-wife does. Both have remarried since their divorce. Couchet also had a mistress, not much of a secret, for whom Maigret develops a sympathy. Although on the surface this crime appears to be a typical armed robbery killing, Maigret comes to suspect that the murder may have been committed by one of the building’s residents. As he delves into the case, he uncovers the secret lives of these tenants and their tangled web of relationships.

The fact that an industrial pharmaceutical laboratory would exist on the ground floor of an apartment building is one of those little historical details that makes Maigret novels interesting. From reading these mysteries, you learn a lot about what life was like in Paris, and France at large, in the early twentieth century. The reader gets to see aspects of Parisian life they’d never find in a tourism brochure. One facet of French society that Simenon often addresses in these novels is class consciousness and social status. In The Shadow Puppet, differences in financial status—between the rich Couchets in their mansion on Boulevard Haussmann, the middle-class tenants of the apartment block at the Place des Vosges, and the hard-up mistress and her peers living in Montmarte—play an important part in the story. As usual, Simenon goes beyond mere stereotypes and caricatures to create complex characters with realistic psychological motives.

I became very involved with the lives of these characters; that aspect of the novel is expertly done. The mystery story itself, however, is not one of the most artfully constructed puzzles in Maigret’s casebook. To set up this unusual web of relationships between the characters, Simenon had to rely on maybe one too many coincidences. It is a little hard to believe that some of these people just happened to end up as next-door neighbors to each other. This murder also suffers from a shortage of viable suspects, leading to a conclusion that’s not unforeseen, though there are some creative revelations in the details of the crime. As always, this Maigret novel is a compelling read, thoroughly entertaining, but would it make a top-ten list of Maigret books? Probably not.  

The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

Boring horror quest with creepy marital advice

English author William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) got his start writing nautical adventure stories for pulp fiction magazines, then eventually moved on to fantasy and horror fiction. He is best remembered today for his two novels The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), both of which span the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.

The Night Land opens in the “present day,” at least as far as the narrator is concerned, but to us the world depicted seems rather medieval, like something from a William Morris novel or a pre-Raphaelite painting. The narrator writes in a sort of antiquated Yoda-speak, in which every sentence begins with “And,” or, on rare occasions, “Then.” The unnamed hero falls in love with his neighbor, Lady Mirdath the Beautiful. They marry, but she soon dies in childbirth. That all happens in chapter one. In chapter two, the narrator is inexplicably transmigrated to a world millions of years in the future. The sun has died, leaving the Earth in perpetual night, but heat and some light are provided by geothermal energies. This dark world is filled with monsters and evil. The surviving humans have retreated to a giant pyramid, miles wide and tall, containing over a thousand cities. The narrator begins receiving telepathic messages from a woman named Naani, who lives in another stronghold of human holdouts in a distant unknown location. He suspects that this Naani may actually be his deceased love Mirdath, so he sets out alone upon the Night Lands to find her.

The Night Land is slightly better than The House on the Borderland, simply because House was a messy assemblage of spooky imagery with no rhyme or reason to it, while the happenings in The Night Land actually obey a fictional logic. But boy, is this book boring! While Hodgson seems to have put a lot of thought into the creation of this world, it reads as if no forethought whatsoever was put into the story that takes place there. Random events just happen without building upon each other, and the text is unforgivably repetitive. The narrator wanders through the land, eats, and sleeps. Occasionally he sees a monster, which he either avoids or fights. Certain phrases are repeated over and over again, to the point where you’ve gotta wonder if it’s intended to be a joke: “I ate two of the capsules and drank some of the water.” “I saw x number of fire pits,” and “I lie down and rest among the moss bushes.” While reading The Night Land, you could space out for a half an hour and not miss anything, because each chapter is pretty much the same as the one before. There’s only chapter towards the end that could be called exciting.

And then there’s the love story . . . ugh. A large portion of the book is basically a marriage manual for troglodytes: If you’re woman is “naughty” and doesn’t know who’s boss, flog her. Because the novel was published before World War I, popular morals wouldn’t have allowed the hero and his female companion to have sex (because there’s no marriage in the wildernesses of the Night Land). Nevertheless, there are all kinds of clumsy, gooey love scenes in which Hodgson hints at his own propensity towards foot fetishism and S&M fantasies. Such intimate moments are not only creepy but also boring, because they’re just as repetitive as the rest of the book. H. P. Lovecraft greatly admired this novel, but then again, H. P. Lovecraft died in 1937. Given all the talk of wife-whipping, I’m not sure how one can justify admiring this novel in the 21st century.

Fool me once, Hodgson, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I gave him a second chance after The House on the Borderland, but The Night Land really wasn’t much better. This might appeal somewhat to the Dungeons & Dragons crowd, but I would imagine most avid readers of sci-fi, fantasy, or horror would find this book to be a rather dull and clumsy foray into those genres.

My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin

Deadly treks through Asia with a Swedish adventurer

When Sven Hedin was a young boy in Stockholm, he dreamed of being an arctic explorer. As a young man, however, his early career led him to far Eastern Europe. There he realized that he could still be an explorer, but he directed his sights eastward to Asia instead. From 1885 to 1890, Hedin made two trips into Iran and several of the “Stans” of the Near East. He then organized a series of more extensive expeditions deeper into Asia, where his journeys took him to India, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Hedin’s main goal was to fill in the “white spaces” on European maps, to chart uncharted territories. He was one of the first, if not the first, European to set foot in many of the sites he explored. In fact, Tibet didn’t want Westerners in their country, so Hedin had to sneak in. Often he and his all-Asian crew would go two months without seeing another human being, and they once went two years without seeing another European. Hedin’s explorations made him the undisputed firsthand authority on the mountainous region known as the Transhimalaya. In his autobiography My Life as an Explorer, Hedin recaps his daring, adventurous, globe-trotting life. I believe the book was written in 1924, and the first English edition came out in 1925. Despite all the amazing achievements catalogued within, this is not even a complete career memoir because Hedin continued to explore Asia for another decade after this book was published.

While engaged in his expeditions, Hedin surveyed and mapped the terrain and gathered geographic, geologic, zoologic, and ethnographic information. The problem with My Life as an Explorer, however, is that you don’t really get to learn a lot about his discoveries in the places he explored. Hedin published that sort of data in more specialized volumes, such as Scientific Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899–1902 (12 volumes). My Life as an Explorer, however, is devoted more to tales of survival and adventure aimed at general readers: nearly starving to death or dying of thirst in the desert, nearly freezing to death in the mountains, nearly drowning in rivers and lakes, nearly suffocating in sandstorms, etc. You will be amazed at the scores, nay hundreds, of horses, camels, mules, and dogs, and even about a dozen humans, who perish over the course of this book. The tenacious Hedin plows ever forward, regardless of body count. The last quarter of this memoir, in which he recounts his third expedition to Tibet (1905–1908), is the exception to this adventure-only style of narrative. There he does go deeper into what he observed of Buddhist culture in his visits to Tibetan holy sites. The first half of the narrative is a bit slow, but the book finishes on a high note.

It’s not too easy to follow along with where Hedin is at any given moment or where he’s going. Many of the place names he uses aren’t current, though a Wikipedia search can usually clear up such uncertainties. The book includes a few simplified cartoony maps, but they don’t help much. Hedin’s detailed, professional maps are printed in other books like the Scientific Findings mentioned above. In addition to the maps, this autobiography is loaded with illustrations drawn by Hedin himself. With his sketchbook, he chronicled the people, places, and memorable moments encountered along the way. He’s a pretty good artist, but his drawings don’t come across very clearly on a Kindle Paperwhite. (He also took photographs, but they’re not in this book.)

Armchair explorers will envy Hedin’s travels but not his hardships and near-death experiences. If you like to read historical explorer accounts, this is a good one, though maybe too long and arduous for casual readers. Reading this autobiography makes me want to look into Hedin’s previously published reports of each individual expedition. They’re probably less exciting than this book, but I think one would learn more about the places visited.