Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science by Jim Endersby

How natural science was conducted in Darwin’s day

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an important figure in the history of botany and in British science in general. He was a close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, and the two exchanged over 1300 letters. In a career move similar to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, young Hooker served as naturalist on the ship Erebus in its exploration of the Antarctic and many Southern islands. Joseph’s father, William Hooker, was the founding director of the Kew Gardens, and Joseph succeeded his father in that post in 1865. Although he may have started out as a nepo baby, Joseph’s accomplishments in botany eventually surpassed those of his father. In his 2008 book Imperial Nature, science historian Jim Endersby looks at Hooker’s life and what it reveals about science and scientists in Victorian England.

As Endersby soon admits in his introduction, this is not a full biography of Joseph Hooker. Rather, it focuses on a specific period in Hooker’s early career, from the late 1830s to the mid-1860s. Endersby’s research is drawn largely from letters and publications of that period. Though he focuses primarily on Hooker, Endersby provides a broader view of how natural science was conducted in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. What he reveals on this subject could be applied to just about any of Hooker’s British contemporaries studying biology at this time, including his father William Hooker, Darwin, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Edward Forbes, Asa Gray, John Lindley, Richard Owen, and Hewett Cottrell Watson—all of whom are discussed frequently in the book.

Endersby provides much interesting insight into how these botanists practiced their profession—collecting, preserving, classifying, drawing, writing, and publishing—but he also reveals much about the social status of science and scientists at this time. During this period in history, science was largely the domain of independently wealthy “gentlemen.” Conducting science for money was considered crass and menial. Even medical doctors were looked down on as lowly blue-collar laborers. Hooker, however, needed to earn a living, so he had to navigate the difficult transition from aristocratic “men of science” to professional “scientists” that took place in the 19th century. Even the word “professional” was considered derogatory; Hooker and his colleagues preferred to be called “philosophical” botanists.

In his leadership role at Kew, with its extensive herbarium (collection of plants), Hooker was the foremost authority on botanical matters, such as naming plant species, in the British empire, if not the world. As Endersby describes him, Hooker was somewhat of a dictator over his domain. Endersby closely examines the relationships between metropolitan (London) and colonial (e.g. Australia, India) botanists. During his Erebus voyage, Hooker met two skilled amateur plant collectors, William Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania. For decades thereafter, these two men supplied Hooker and Kew with dried and preserved plants from these islands, which Hooker then analyzed, classified, and described in his botanical books. Through a deep dive into their correspondence, Endersby shows how Hooker was dependent on these colonial collectors but also strove to keep them in their place, asserting himself as the real botanist and big-city authority while condescendingly quashing their ideas.

I enjoy reading biographies and histories about the glory days of the naturalist explorer, so I found Endersby’s book quite interesting and informative. I will caution the reader, however, that Imperial Nature reads very much like a dissertation or a scholarly treatise intended to win over fellow historians or a tenure committee, not a general audience. There is much repetition in the text, frequent hair-splitting, and a lot of cross-referencing from one chapter to another. Endersby cites nine examples to defend a point he’s making, when three would have sufficed for the general reader. It’s very workmanlike prose, but Endersby delivers the goods. Those who are interested in the way these nineteenth-century scientists plied their trade will certainly learn plenty here.

Small Souls by Louis Couperus

Compelling start to a Dutch family saga

Name a Dutch author. I dare you. If you’re an American, chances are it’ll be Anne Frank or maybe Spinoza. Not much Dutch literature has been available to English-language readers, although there has been an increase in the last few decades. One notable Dutch author, however, did enjoy worldwide success in the early 20th century: Louis Couperus. His novel Small Souls was first published in 1901, then came out in English in 1914. It is the first of four books in a series also called Small Souls.

The Van Lowe family lives in The Hague. The family patriarch, “Papa” van Lowe, is deceased when the novel opens. He is survived by his widow, eight children, and numerous grandchildren. The elder Van Lowe was formerly the Dutch governor general of the colony of Java, a very prestigious position through which he might occasionally rub elbows with the King and Queen. None of Papa’s children, however, have quite lived up to his level of distinction. The eight Van Lowe siblings now find themselves in varying levels of social status and class, which sometimes inspires envy and resentment among them. Because they’re well-to-do, they spend most of their time visiting one another, throwing parties, criticizing and gossiping about each other. (Some of the men have careers, but we don’t really see them at work.) Twenty years ago, one daughter, Constance, married a diplomat forty years her senior. She cheated on her husband with one of his subordinates, causing a divorce and a scandal that forced her and her lover to flee to Brussels. Now, after 15 years in exile, she has returned to The Hague to reconnect with her family and her homeland, but not everyone is willing to overlook her shameful past.

Small Souls reminds me of British author John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (I have only read the first book in that series). In both cases, the reader is introduced to a large, rather wealthy family. An extramarital scandal threatens the family’s respectability, and the various siblings all have deep-seated beefs against one another. Often these squabbles feel like much ado over rich people problems.

What makes Small Souls interesting, however, is its quintessential Dutchness. There are thousands of novels set in London, but The Hague? In English, hardly any. Couperus’s novels provide a welcome look into Dutch life, one unique aspect of which is the Netherlands’ relationship to its colonies in Indonesia. The East Indies played an important role in the Dutch economy. The Van Lowe children grew up in Java, and the family still has agricultural interests on the island. In this novel, the adjective “Indian” is used to describe anyone or anything from Java. Couperus’s writing also exhibits a sensibility that’s more Northern than Western European. There’s an understated yet authentic psychological sensitivity here that reads more like the writings of Scandinavian authors such as Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Henrik Ibsen than that of English or French novelists.

Much like Galsworthy’s Forsytes, the difficult aspect of reading Small Souls is just getting a grasp on the huge roster of Van Lowes. One really needs to chart out a family tree to keep them all straight. Since I couldn’t find hardly any information on this novel online, I’ve done that for you (image attached below). As a member of a large family myself, I found Couperus’s depiction of brother-sister, parent-child, and husband-wife relationships quite authentic and insightful. As the first novel in a tetralogy, much of Small Souls is spent introducing us to this clan, thus setting the stage for further developments in the subsequent novels. I found myself thoroughly engaged in the Van Lowe family dynamics, enough to make we want to follow their fortunes through the next three books: The Later Life, Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan.

Van Lowe family tree (click to enlarge)

A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific by Robert M. Utley

Exciting adventures of the American West rendered confusing and dull

I’m a frequent tourist visitor to the state of Wyoming, where many locations are named after legendary mountain men: Colter Bay, Sublette County, Hoback Junction, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and even Jedediah’s House of Sourdough. Over the past two decades of venturing out that way, I had gleaned a few details about these historical characters. I was really looking for an authoritative history to provide a more comprehensive education on the lives and accomplishments of these intrepid adventurers, when I came across A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of mountain men by Robert M. Utley, former historian for the National Park Service.

Utley begins his history with the Lewis and Clark expedition. He focuses not on the two captains, however, but rather on two members of their crew: John Colter and George Drouillard, who remained in the West to become pioneering fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains. Utley then charts the profession of mountain man from the beaver-trapping industry to wagon train trail guides to government-commissioned explorers and cartographers. The book closes with the annexation of the West Coast territories into the United States, which some of these mountain men helped bring about. Even though you root for and admire these bold explorers, it is quite depressing to realize that much of this history was inspired by the pointless extermination of the beaver species just to make fashionable hats. Published in 1997, this book probably isn’t “woke” enough for today’s standards in the field of history, but any book on mountain men is going to glorify manifest destiny to some extent. Utley doesn’t treat Native Americans as evil villains in this book, but rather as obstacles that needed to be overcome. Critics might scold Utley for not telling the Indian side of the story, but really that would belong in another and different book than this.

Though eager to learn about this subject, I found A Life Wild and Perilous frequently confusing and consistently dull. Utley is a highly respected historian, so I’m sure the book is well-researched­. He has drawn widely and deeply from the diaries and published exploits of many historical figures. I don’t doubt the accuracy of his facts, but his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. While no doubt these mountain men had some exciting adventures, the text is mostly, “This guy went here. That guy went there,” over and over again in an exhausting morass of detail. The table of contents makes you think that Utley will be focusing on one or two famous mountain men in each chapter, but that’s not the case. In each chapter, he’ll drop the names of forty or fifty of these trappers, their stories all jumbled up together, and you’re expected to keep them all straight. As a prose stylist, Utley has a way of phrasing a sentence that makes you think, “What exactly did he just say?” and requires frequent backtracks and rereads.

It’s also difficult for the reader to orient himself geographically. There are very few maps in the ebook, and they are pretty useless when reading on the Kindle. (The print edition might have more maps; I don’t know.) In keeping with the frontier times he’s discussing, when state boundaries and most towns as we know them today had not yet been established, Utley denotes locations by rivers and mountain ranges. The result is that the reader better have a very firm knowledge of the topography of the American West, or you’re going to get lost. It would have been quite helpful if once in a while Utley threw the reader a bone with a comment like, “near present-day Driggs, Idaho,” but no; he never does.

A Life Wild and Perilous is packed with data, particularly on who was where and when, but because of Utley’s confusing way of relating these facts, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much. All the information is there, it’s just difficult to process. This would be a fine reference work for looking up specific historical details, and that’s pretty much how it reads. As a linear narrative, it’s not very user-friendly at all.

The Cabin by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Short but powerful naturalist novel of Spain

Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) published his fifth novel, La Barraca, in 1898. In English, the book is titled The Cabin or The Shack. The novel takes place in a huerta, or farming community, outside the city of Valencia, which is located on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. The farmers who comprise the novel’s cast do not own the land on which they live and work. They rent from a landlord who lives in the city. Most of the families in the huerta are struggling to make ends meet, and many owe debts and back rent to the landowner.

In the opening chapter, Pepeta, a farmwife, brings her goods to market in Valencia. In the city, she runs into a former neighbor who is now a prostitute. Pepeta remembers when this young woman was once a respectable farmer’s daughter. This inspires a flashback to a momentous event in the history of the huerta. A poor, hardworking farmer named Barret (the prostitute’s father) suffers the persecution of his oppressive landlord, Don Salvador, which leads to a violent altercation between peasant and master. The Barrets are driven from their land, leaving their farm and its barraca vacant for many years. The other residents of the huerta see this unoccupied, unproductive land as a symbol of rebellious pride, a thorn in the side of the rich landowners. One day, however, a new family appears at the huerta, their belongings in tow. To everyone’s surprise, the newcomers take up residence on the old Barret farm. Much like scabs would be viewed by strikers, these interlopers are treated with hostility and animosity by their neighbors. Although the new resident, Batiste, is just a poor and industrious farmer struggling to succeed like everyone else, he and his family are shunned and antagonized by the other families of the huerta.

Though largely forgotten by American readers these days (who would be hard-pressed to name any Spanish novel other than Don Quixote), Blasco Ibáñez was highly respected and widely read by English-language readers and critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The English edition of The Cabin alone sold over a million copies. Blasco Ibáñez wrote in the style of naturalism that was forged and popularized decades earlier by French author Émile Zola. In fact, Blasco Ibáñez is the first author I’ve come across who can do Zola’s style as well as Zola himself. That’s not to say that the Spanish author is merely an imitator of his predecessor. Active roughly a quarter century after Zola, Blasco Ibáñez brings naturalism into the modern world of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Naturalism is a form of realism that aims to document modern life in rich detail and unflinching verisimilitude without shying away from subject matter traditionally considered difficult, ugly, or unseemly. Drawing from modern science and social science, naturalism generally depicts its characters as not being masters of their own destiny but rather as slaves to forces of nature and nurture—evolution, heredity, economics, politics—that shape their identities and influence the course of their lives. This is apparent in La Barraca as animosity and violence escalate the Barrets and their neighbors, when everyone’s real enemy is the system of feudalistic peonage that enslaves them.

The joy of reading old books by dead guys is that every once in a while you discover a writer whose work you really love, and that author has twenty or thirty books that you’ve never heard of that you can now look forward to reading. Such is the case with Blasco Ibáñez, my latest discovery. The Cabin is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and both have been excellent. This is a short novel, smaller in size and more intimate in scale than his epic The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, but a lot of emotional power is packed into this small package.

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

Yet another English novel about a country parson (or two)

English author Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh was written between 1873 and 1884, but it wasn’t published until 1903, after Butler’s death. It’s unlikely that England would have been ready for the novel much earlier than that, since the book is defiantly critical of Christian doctrine and conservative Victorian conventions. This novel traces the lives of five generations of the Pontifex family but focuses primarily on just two of those generations: Theobald Pontifex and his son Ernest, both of whom are clergymen. The bulk of the narrative takes place during the 1850s and ‘60s. The novel is narrated by a playwright named Overton, a childhood friend and lifelong acquaintance of the Pontifex family. Overton has a bothersome habit of foreshadowing, which often amounts to spoiling the events of future chapters.

The Way of All Flesh is a satirical work in which Butler lampoons the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the Anglican church and its clergy. In addition, he criticizes the educational system, the class system, and even the marriage system in practice in England at this time. Butler mentions Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species and recently published works criticizing contradictions in the Bible as challenges to fundamental beliefs of Christianity. He stops short of atheism, but his criticism of the church and his skepticism of Christian dogma would have been considered radical freethought by Victorian standards. This multi-generational story also illustrates a recurring pattern of cruelty from fathers to sons and its effect in molding those sons’ later lives and characters. The wryly comedic tone, though not overly done, at times clashes with the serious subject matter—such as child abuse, for example—but Butler’s comical comeuppance of the clergy is deftly pointed and amusing.

Even though The Way of All Flesh is a refreshing reaction against religion, I was still disappointed to come across yet another British novel about a country parson and his moral crisis, including lengthy debates about church policy. Why were English authors so obsessed with their clergy? Other European national literatures—French, German, Spanish, even Polish—just seem to be more concerned with real life and a broader view of it. In French novels of the same era, for example, the characters actually have sex like real people, whereas the antiseptic morality in English novels doesn’t allow the characters to even touch each other; they just seem to reproduce by spontaneous asexual blastogenesis. Though Butler satirizes Victorian stuffiness, he still buys into many traditional British ideas of class. People are born as “gentlemen” or born “low,” and the best they can do is learn their place and stay there. As an atheist, I admire Butler for boldly criticizing organized religion. I think there are better ways to do that, however, than making me sit through 60 chapters about the life of a country parson.

The final quarter of the novel finally veers away from theology, at least temporarily, into more secular matters, but it’s still rather tedious. Marital, financial, parental, and medical problems are dispatched far too conveniently to be believed. Another cliché of English lit rears its silly head: An abundance of bachelor uncles and spinster aunts just waiting, like a good deus ex machina, to bestow their wealth upon nieces and nephews. When a man has all the money he could ever want handed to him on a silver platter, and he can pawn off his children onto idyllic foster parents, imagine what he can do with his life! That’s not realism; that’s fantasy.

The Way of All Flesh is a great title, but it implies that this novel will reveal universal truths about human existence. There’s really nothing universal about this story, however, unless you happen to be a clergyman or a seminary student. The characters are sympathetic and the humor is witty, but the life lessons are contrived and unrealistic. Even so, if you can make it through the first half, the second half is moderately entertaining.

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

German humor escapes me

Despite his Italian-sounding name, Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria of Spanish and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Over the course of his life he resided in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England and eventually became a British citizen. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, a victory claimed by both Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Canetti wrote his literary works, however, in the German language. His 1935 novel Die Blendung has been published in English translation as Auto-da-Fé and/or The Tower of Babel. The novel takes place in an unspecified European city, though there are a few indications that the characters are speaking German. The term “auto-da-fé” refers to a public punishment inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition, often in the form of burning victims at the stake. Both of the English titles are metaphorical, not literal.

Peter Kien is the Western world’s leading sinologist (scholar of Chinese philology) and the owner of a private library of rare and important books on the subject. He leads a reclusive and regimented life spent mostly within his apartment of four rooms, the walls of which are covered floor to ceiling with books. The first two chapters of this novel start out with great promise. Kien’s intellectual pursuits could possibly serve as the basis for an intelligent and engaging novel. Kien is also an extreme misanthrope who stoically critiques the idiocy of all the human beings he encounters. This dark outlook on mankind also intrigues the reader, who wonders if Kien is just a surly curmudgeon or a potential serial killer.

Auto-da-Fé never lives up to the promise of those first two chapters. It immediately takes a left turn into a slapstick comedy about henpecked husbands and shrewish wives. Like most Nobel laureates, Canetti has received much critical and popular praise. I read several reviews online that made it sound like Auto-da-Fé was not only Canetti’s greatest work but also one of the best novels of the last century. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find that his novel is terrible! I’m guessing that Canetti was going for an absurdist humor somewhere along the lines of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1938) or Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1928), neither of which I liked, but Auto-da-Fé is not even absurdist, it’s just asinine. Nor is it the least bit fun. In fact, it is incredibly tedious to slog through insanely long chapters in which the characters grind their way through interminable conversations and capers that amount to nothing. This novel is an even more colossal waste of time than The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, another Nobel-hallowed work of German-language humor that I didn’t get. Late in the book, there is a serious chapter dealing with childhood sexual abuse. It is handled very well, which makes one think that Canetti might actually be a very good writer if he would stay away from comedy.

Perhaps one reason critics and “intellectuals” praise this book is because one of its themes is the love of books. Beyond those first two chapters, however, the books in question are not discussed in any way intelligently. Kien, contrary to his personality and his profession, values all books indiscriminately as if they were just bricks of paper whose contents are irrelevant. Another defiance of logic is the fact that Kien seems to have an unlimited supply of money at hand. If pointless silliness isn’t enough to put you off this book, Canetti also provides many derogatory comments towards women and Jews. Defenders might say, “Those are the characters speaking, not the author.” Canetti himself is of Jewish heritage, so perhaps he’s criticizing anti-Semitism instead of Semitism. However, when three of the main male characters are extreme misogynists, two others are womanizers, the only female character is portrayed very negatively, and the reader has to sit through lengthy sermons about how women are simply evil, isn’t it safe to say the novel itself is misogynistic?

Jack Kirby’s The Demon by Jack Kirby

Supernatural adventures with spectacular art

Comic book artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby is best known for co-creating many of Marvel Comics’ most famous superheroes. He was Marvel’s number-one artist (both qualitatively and quantitatively) throughout the 1960s. In 1970, however, Kirby got fed up with his treatment by Marvel and jumped over to rival DC Comics. With the new creative freedom that DC allowed him, Kirby created some bold and innovative new comics series. These titles didn’t achieve household-name status like Superman and Batman, but they are nonetheless regarded in hindsight by comics aficionados as groundbreaking and amazing work. One of Kirby’s creations from this period, The Demon, made his debut in September 1972 in his own eponymous series that ran for 16 issues, up to January of 1974. The entire run of that series has been collected in a beautiful paperback edition entitled Jack Kirby’s The Demon, first published in 2008. I’m reviewing the 2017 edition (ISBN 978-1-4012-7718-5).

The story begins in the days of King Arthur. The evil sorceress Morgaine Le Fey, after laying waste to Camelot, hunts down the wizard Merlin. As he flees into another plane of existence, Merlin summons up a powerful demon named Etrigan to battle Morgaine Le Fey’s army of evil minions. Flash forward to the 1970s, and Etrigan is still doing Merlin’s bidding by fighting the forces of supernatural evil. Jason Blood, an expert in demonology, is the human host for the Demon. He undergoes a Hulk-like transformation when Etrigan’s powers are needed. This coexistence with the Demon has granted Jason immortality. He has lived for centuries without aging.

The stories here are somewhat basic: a monster shows up, and the Demon fights him. Like Shakespeare, Kirby draws story material from folklore and public domain literature. There’s a werewolf story, a Phantom of the Opera story, and a Frankenstein story, all with original touches from Kirby. The real attraction here, however, is the fabulous art, which is some of the best Kirby work I’ve ever seen. Kirby seems to have designed this series to allow himself to draw all the things he loves to draw: monsters (reptilian, rocky, furry, metallic), medieval-looking weapons and warfare, bizarre artifacts and machinery, and ugly faces. I don’t know if Kirby ever drew Doctor Strange for Marvel, but if he did, it would have looked a lot like this. This book unfortunately demonstrates that Kirby was not so great at drawing women’s faces. They look like unbaked biscuits with receding hairlines. He was a master, however, at drawing men’s faces, the uglier and craggier the better.

The Demon was not a part of Kirby’s Fourth World saga—a sci-fi/mythological epic that ran through at least four Kirby-created titles. When the Fourth World comics didn’t sell so well, DC asked Kirby to create some new stand-alone superheroes. The Demon was among these early-1970s creations, along with OMAC and Kamandi. Jason Blood, Etrigan’s human alter-ego, resides in an apartment in Gotham City, which sets him up for crossovers with Batman and other DC heroes. Although Kirby only wrote and drew the original 16-issue run of The Demon, the character has since been revived by later DC creators. The Demon has had a handful of his own series over the past half-century and has also guest-starred in the adventures of other DC heroes. Although not an A-list hero, Etrigan the Demon continues to be active in the DC universe today.

Paperback reprints of classic comics are usually printed either in black-and-white on newsprint or in full-color and bright matte paper that makes the colors too bright and garish. This volume, however, is printed on something in between, a clean white sheet with an uncoated texture that makes the colors rich and vivid. It’s very well done. Diehard Kirby fans should own this book.

Above: Cover of The Demon #2, 1972. Below: Spread from The Demon #6, 1973. Art by Jack Kirby. © DC Comics.

Life in the Soil: A Guide for Naturalists and Gardeners by James B. Nardi

Inside the society of dirt

I fancy myself an amateur naturalist. I like to explore nature and see what I can see: birds, plants, mammals, fungi, butterflies, etc.—whatever I can identify. One aspect of the wild that I’ve never really known much about, however, is the soil. Seeing as how so much life springs forth from the soil, and it’s loaded with living organisms, I wanted to learn more about the ground and its inhabitants. I found what I was looking for with Life in the Soil, the 2007 book by James B. Nardi, a research scientist at the University of Illinois. Suitable for general readers (nonscientists), this book provides a detailed look at what goes on in the dirt beneath our feet.

What is soil made of? How is it formed? How long does it take rocks and plant matter to become soil? What living creatures are involved in this process? How do elements and minerals cycle in and out of the soil? What makes good soil vs. bad? Nardi answers all of these questions and more. The reader comes to a vivid understanding of the soil as a living, breathing, changing community of organisms and nutrients. On the one hand, this is a book that’s deep enough to detail complex chemical reactions and biological processes. On the other hand, it’s accessible enough to first provide elementary explanations of chemical notation and taxonomical hierarchy.

The bulk of this book is a field guide to all the creatures who live in, contribute to, or even just scratch the surface of the soil. The general arrangement is from smallest to largest, moving from microbes to invertebrates to vertebrates. This guide does not differentiate at the species level but rather at the family level. To include thousands of species would have been impossible, but this book will help you differentiate between true scorpions, pseudoscorpions, and microwhipscorpions, or between dung beetles, soldier beetles, tiger beetles, and ptilodactylid beetles, as well as different families of worms, flies, amphibians, rodents, and so on. There is no specific geographic range to this guide. In general, Nardi addresses an audience of American and British readers, but at times he might mention the land leeches of Guatemala, the shield-tailed snakes of India, or a stink badger from Indonesia. Within each family, Nardi discusses life cycles, feeding habits, and most importantly, the effect the organisms have on the soil. This guide is heavily illustrated with black and white drawings. The text makes reference to 69 color plates, but they are nowhere to be found in the ebook edition.

After the field guide portion of the book, Nardi outlines strategies for the creation and preservation of healthy soil, but at the same time he makes it sound like soil degradation is beyond the point of no return, and world famine is imminent. He encourages readers to start their own compost piles, but then he makes that process sound as difficult as possible, as if you need a PhD in biology and chemistry just to rot some vegetable matter. Finally, Nardi gives some tips for those who might like to collect and examine soil samples in order to view some of the creatures discussed in the book. The key audience for this book would be hobbyists in microscopy. Although the information in the book is scientifically comprehensive, the text is written in very simple vocabulary that even a junior high student can understand, so this would be a perfect gift for any kid or grown-up with a microscope. There is also some useful information here for gardeners, but again, without that microscope much of the book won’t apply to your average casual gardener.

Life in the Soil delivers a thorough entry-level education in soil science and biology that elevates the novice naturalist to an intermediate dirt-lover. I could have used those color plates, and at times the presentation of the information wavers between too elementary and not elementary enough. Overall, however, I learned a lot from this book and will likely refer to it on future hikes.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Young writer tries too hard

I have read quite a few of John Steinbeck’s novels and thought I had heard of all of them until I recently stumbled upon To a God Unknown. Published in 1933 when Steinbeck was in his early thirties, this was his second novel, after Cup of Gold. I was intrigued by To a God Unknown for the simple fact that any mention of it had somehow eluded me for fifty-plus years of my life. After having read the book, however, I can say with some certainty that the reason you’ve probably never heard of this novel is because it isn’t very good.

The time period of the novel is not specified, but it feels like the late 19th century. (I don’t recall any motorized vehicles.) Joseph Wayne is the third of four sons in a Vermont farming family. In bygone days of a century or more ago, the eldest son typically inherited the family farm after the father’s death, so Joseph decides to build his own future by striking out on his own and heading West to California. He finds some beautiful untouched land and establishes a homestead there. From Steinbeck’s descriptions of the surrounding countryside, it sounds like this would be located in what is now Monterrey County near the city of Soledad. 

Soon after Joseph establishes himself in California, his father dies back home. Hard times befall the Wayne family in Vermont, so Joseph’s three brothers and their families move out to California to join him. They build houses in close proximity to one another and work the surrounding land. The eldest brother, Thomas, is a rugged and likable common-sense farmer. The second brother, Burton, moonlights as a Protestant preacher and bears the judgmental attitude that comes with Christian fundamentalism. The youngest brother Benjy is the black sheep of the family, a heavy drinker and ladies’ man with a knack for inciting trouble. Joseph is the serious and moody member of the family. Being the pioneer in this California venture, he assumes the role of family patriarch.

The problem with To a God Unknown is that Steinbeck goes out of his way to load the story with religious imagery every chance he gets, often in a very heavy-handed and obtrusive manner. Joseph develops a love for the land that amounts to a form of pagan worship. He believes a certain tree on his land, for example, bears his father’s reincarnated soul. Burton, the Protestant preacher, naturally has a problem with this. Meanwhile, the family is surrounded by Mexican workers who are devout Catholics, though not without a few of their own pagan traditions. All of these religious cultures mix and clash. I like what I think is the book’s message: that we could learn a thing or two from the ancient pagans about how to respect and care for the land. I didn’t much care for, however, the way that message was delivered. In his early-career eagerness, Steinbeck seems hell-bent on convincing you that this family farming story is an epic of biblical proportions, to the point where he departs too much from realism. Contrast this with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, an authentic realist novel about family farmers that rises to the level of an epic, but manages to do so in a seemingly effortless manner.

All of this ostentatious symbolism might be forgivable if you actually cared about any of the characters, but that’s hard to do when they all speak in very stilted, stage-play dialogue that doesn’t resemble real human speech. Joseph and his wife sound more like professors of philosophy than farmers, and Steinbeck belabors words like “sacred” and “holy” in order to hammer home his religious imagery. To a God Unknown is not up to the level of quality one expects from Steinbeck. It reads like the work of a young author trying too hard to prove he’s profound.

The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill

Heavy-handed symbolism as O’Neill goes artsy

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown was first staged in 1926. O’Neill may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but not every one of his works is a masterpiece, or even good. Sandwiched between better-known repertory classics like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude comes this oddity. I have almost worked my way through O’Neill’s complete works, and this is one of the weirdest dramas he ever wrote. It doesn’t read like O’Neill at all but more like something by Samuel Beckett. Beckett, however, would have done it much better. When The Great God Brown debuted, the New York Post called it “a superb failure.”

Mr. Anthony and Mr. Brown are partners in a construction firm. Their teenage sons are best friends who have just graduated from high school. While Brown is the junior partner in the firm, often looked down upon by his partner, his son William shows far more promise than Anthony’s son Dion. William “Billy” Brown is a good student with the potential to become a great architect and take over the leadership of the family business. Dion Anthony, on the other hand, has the temperament of a tortured artist-poet and is a heavy drinker and philanderer. Both young men are in love with the same high school sweetheart, Margaret, but she only has eyes for Dion. While William is jealous, he resigns himself to bachelorhood and focuses on his career. 

Dion is a terribly overdone caricature of the artiste. His speech is just a series of random phrases, many of them biblical, which he spouts in an ostentatiously crazy way. He constantly refers to himself and others he’s speaking to in the third person. To some extent, O’Neill seems to be making fun of the artist stereotype, but at other times he’s clearly buying into it. Although there is definitely occasional humor in The Great God Brown, it also seems clear that O’Neill intended the play to be philosophically profound in much the same way that Dion thinks the relentless stream of non sequiturs that he utters is profound.

One of the odd things about this play is that the characters wear masks. The opening scene takes place at a dance, so at first I thought perhaps it was a masked ball, and the characters were wearing Mardi Gras or domino masks, but that’s not the case. The characters don their masks anytime, 24/7, at their discretion. O’Neill recycles this dramatic convention from ancient Greek tragedies or Japanese Noh theatre. The masks symbolize the difference between one’s true self (mask off) and the personality he or she projects to others (mask on)—what The Who once referred to as an “eminence front.” Confusingly, however, in The Great God Brown these masks function as more than just metaphor. The masks sometimes cause cases of mistaken identity, which means that the characters must literally see the masks just as we do, yet no one in the play seems to find the wearing of masks the least bit odd. The masks also exist as disembodied objects. When someone finds a discarded mask removed from its owner, they react as if they’ve discovered a corpse. This unresolved ambiguity between the reality and metaphor of the masks is just bizarre and clumsy. An avant-garde playwright like Beckett might have pulled it off, but this seems woefully heavy-handed and out of place in what is otherwise a pretty typical O’Neill play about relationships and morals.

The Great God Brown may be a terrible play, but it sure isn’t boring. It’s hard to tell what audiences of 1926 would have thought of this. They might have eaten up this pretentious drivel. For readers of today, however, there is some pleasure in watching this train wreck unfold. One can imagine what it would have been like to spend an evening in the theatre experiencing this strange presentation. It is somewhat kitschily entertaining in the same manner as one of those hacky movies that’s so-bad-it’s-good.

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.

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.