Disaster in Nova Scotia
Canadian author Hugh MacLennan’s 1941 book Barometer Rising is a historical novel focusing on the Halifax Explosion of 1917. During World War I, Halifax served as an important seaport for shipping supplies to the war effort in Europe. As the result of an accidental collision, a French munitions ship blew up in Halifax harbor, leveling entire neighborhoods and killing approximately 2000 people. MacLennan, who grew up in Halifax, experienced the event as a young boy.
The novel opens a few days before the disaster. A soldier returns to Halifax after having been wounded in France. He faces a court martial for disobeying an order on the battlefield, and has returned home to seek out other men from his unit who might clear his name. His nemesis and former commanding officer, Colonel Geoffrey Wain, runs a shipbuilding company in Halifax, where Penelope Wain, the colonel’s daughter, works as a ship designer. She previously had a love affair with the soldier in question, but has since begun a relationship with another former member of his battalion. All parties are caught unawares when disaster strikes.
MacLennan is definitely a writer of great literary talent. Though he approaches World War I from a totally different perspective, some passages are reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. On the other hand, the court martial and love triangle storylines get a little melodramatic at times, like something one might find in a war novel by Pearl S. Buck or James Michener. Oddly enough, what the plot of Barometer Rising really calls to mind are those disaster movies of the 1970s, like Airport or The Towering Inferno. Three quarters of the book is spent establishing intrigue and romance, when what the reader is really waiting for is the disaster, at which point all bets are off and the intrigue and romance take a back seat to survival. When MacLennan does finally depict the disaster, it is a tour de force of gripping realism. I knew nothing about the Halifax Explosion beforehand, but reading this book has given me not only a firm grasp of the factual events but also a visceral understanding of the sheer horror of the catastrophe.
Where Barometer Rising really rises above the level of a disaster potboiler, however, is in its thoughtful contemplation of Canadian identity. Just as important as the historical narrative of the disaster is MacLennan’s inquiry into what it means to be a Canadian, a Nova Scotian, or a Haligonian. He questions his nation’s role in the Great War, not only for the jingoism and opportunism that come with wartime but also for the treatment of Canada as a sort of vassal state to Great Britain. At what point does the former colony come into its own as an independent nation? Of course, Canada has gone a long way towards solving this identity crisis over the past century, due in no small part to the work of artists like MacLennan, but this book serves as an insightful time capsule of feelings on Canadian nationalism at the time of its publication. Though a native of Nova Scotia himself, MacLennan’s depiction of Halifax is not always flattering. He paints an objective portrait, at times nostalgically reverential and at times scathingly critical. The novel ends in a hopeful tone, however, as, much like New York after 9/11, the citizenry rises to the occasion and works toward recovery.
In Canada, Barometer Rising is considered a landmark book in the development of that nation’s literature. For readers elsewhere, it’s a powerful reminder that the rich literary history of the Great White North deserves greater recognition and should not be overlooked.
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Family business in a Norwegian coastal town
Alexander Kielland is regarded as one of “The Four Greats” of 19th-century Norwegian literature. His first novel, Garman and Worse, was published in 1880. (This book should not be confused with another Kielland novel entitled Skipper Worse, published in 1882, which is a prequel to this novel.) Garman and Worse takes place in a small town on the coast of Norway. The title refers to the name of a shipping business founded by two families, the Garmans and the Worses. Of the two, the Garmans have the larger stake in the business and are the prominent wealthy family in the town. The novel is largely the saga of the Garman family, though the cast includes a variety of townspeople as supporting players. Richard Garman, the somewhat flighty black sheep of the family, has chosen to man the lighthouse at Bratvold while his brother Christian Frederick Garman, referred to as the young Consul, occupies the nearby family estate of Sandsgaard and acts as president of the family business. When Richard’s daughter Madeleine, who has grown up in rustic isolation at the lighthouse, reaches the age of womanhood, he sends her to Sandsgaard to live at her uncle’s house, where she can acquire the cultured manners necessary to enter society and field potential suitors.
The young Consul has three grown children of his own, and Kielland continues to add new characters in each chapter until the ensemble cast becomes vast and ungainly. I actually had to draw up family trees just to keep track of everyone. With so many intertwining plotlines, the reader wonders when one protagonist is going to rise above the others and become the protagonist of the novel. That never really happens, however, as Kielland constantly shifts perspective from one character to another and distributes the narrative equally among them. Kielland was a realist, and he depicts his fictional microcosm of society with an admirable complexity and authenticity. At times his writing is reminiscent of Emile Zola’s naturalistic novels in his attention to detail and psychological insight, but Kielland’s is a kinder, gentler, realism—less pessimistic, less cynical, and less preachy in its social criticism.
The affections of no less than four young women are at stake in the novel, which leads to much jockeying of position among various admirers: a schoolteacher, a businessman, a lawyer, a clergyman, a laborer, a fisherman, and others. Garman and Worse could therefore probably best be classified as a novel of manners, but Kielland’s concerns are broader than that. Early on, the book shows signs of becoming a novel of class conflict, but that thread disappears for many chapters, only to be recovered towards the end of the book. Though the plot contains few of what might be called exciting events, the reader gradually becomes intimately invested in the lives of these characters as each grows over time and learns his or her own moral lesson. As a study of human nature, Garman and Worse is quietly compelling.
I had previously read a collection of short stories by Kielland, entitled Tales of Two Countries, which is similar in style and quality to this novel. Compared to other Norwegian writers, Kielland’s writing is more realistic and less romantic than that of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, another of The Four Greats. Most readers of today would probably prefer a more modernist writer like Knut Hamsun, but those who enjoy classic realist literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries will find Kielland much to their liking.
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Good to have him back
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, originally published in 1905, is the third collection of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle featuring Sherlock Holmes. The volume contains 13 Holmes mysteries that originally ran in issues of the Strand Magazine and Collier’s Magazine in 1903 and 1904. Conan Doyle had killed off his famous character a decade earlier, but popular demand brought the great detective back to life. After the 1902 publication of the successful novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, which takes place before Holmes’s death, Conan Doyle decided to fully resurrect the character by negating his previous demise at the hands of Professor Moriarity.
In the book’s opening entry, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes reappears and explains to Watson how he faked his own death. Though necessary to get Holmes back in action again, the explanation is more convenient than convincing. In fact, the story isn’t really much of a mystery, just a lot of Holmes telling Watson what’s what. Still, it delivers some thrills as Holmes goes up against Moriarity’s right-hand man, a killer sharp shooter. Another interesting villain is introduced in “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton.” The title character is a professional blackmailer, and to stop him even Holmes and Watson must enter some ethical gray areas.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes is loaded with great stories, like “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” in which Holmes uses cryptography to catch the criminal, and “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” an ingenious tale in which Holmes tracks down a burglar with a bizarrely specific taste in loot. “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” “The Adventure of the Priory School,” “The Adventure of Black Peter,” and “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange” are all skillfully crafted cases of murder and abduction. Conan Doyle provides the supporting characters with some really elaborate and complicated back stories, which are revealed through intricate clues parceled out in a tantalizingly measured and piecemeal manner.
Conan Doyle doesn’t hit it out of the park every time. Sometimes the criminal’s back story overpowers the mystery narrative, as in “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez.” Sometimes the crime itself isn’t all that compelling, as in “The Adventure of the Three Students,” a case of who cheated on a test, or “The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter,” in which a Cambridge rugby player goes missing the day before the big game against Oxford. Even the latter example, however, ends up with an unexpected and touching resolution. The book ends on a high note, “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” in which Holmes has to track down a lost document that might mean war for Britain if it falls into the wrong hands. In this last entry, Watson informs us that Holmes has now retired from detective work, but somehow I suspect he will be back for more.
Though Conan Doyle may have been reluctant to revive his dead hero, you won’t find any indication of a lack of enthusiasm in any of the selections included here. Overall, the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes are better than those in the second volume of short stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which at times felt a bit tired. Though not all masterpieces, the 13 stories in The Return are fastidiously crafted with care and detail. Holmes’s earliest stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes will always be the best and most memorable, but The Return of Sherlock Holmes is a satisfying return to form.
Stories in this collection
The Adventure of the Empty House
The Adventure of the Norwood Builder
The Adventure of the Dancing Men
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
The Adventure of the Priory School
The Adventure of Black Peter
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons
The Adventure of the Three Students
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
The Adventure of the Second Stain
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Freethinker or not?
German-American writer Paul Carus was a prolific author, editor, and publisher of books and journals on religion and philosophy. He was the editor of the philosophical journal The Monist and managing editor of Open Court Publishing, which were both founded by his father-in-law, zinc magnate Edward C. Heleger. Carus, who referred to himself as “an atheist who loved God,” devoted his life to encouraging interfaith dialogue, introducing concepts of Eastern religions to the West, and seeking common ground between Christians and freethinkers. Towards achieving the latter goal, Carus formulated and promoted his concept of The Religion of Science, of which his 1893 book of the same title provides a concise overview.
Monism is an ancient philosophical world view that was clarified for the modern era by 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. Monism asserts that the universe is composed of one substance, matter, as opposed to dualism, which professes that the universe is comprised of both matter and spirit. In The Religion of Science, Carus proposes a monism based on science that modern people can apply to their daily lives. He calls for a rational religion that worships the truth, as revealed by scientific inquiry, rather than one in which reality is obfuscated by ancient myth and superstition. This religion will have an ethics based objectively on duty to mankind rather than on dogma or hedonism. Carus explains his concepts in very straightforward, eloquent, and quotable prose that even philosophically illiterate general readers can easily understand. I loved the first few chapters of this book, which promise an excellent, clearly stated, freethinking “bible” along the lines of Ernst Haeckel’s exemplary monist text The Riddle of the Universe.
As he advances his argument, however, Carus ventures further and further from Spinoza, pushing the envelope of monism, and the book becomes progressively less attractive to materialist freethinkers. While Spinoza’s religious view is generally described as pantheism, Carus calls his religion entheism, which is likely a shortened name for panentheism. Essentially, Spinoza says that God is nature (i.e. matter), while Carus is saying that God is the laws of nature. The difference seems like unnecessary theoretical hair-splitting intended to make Carus’s god more palatable to traditional theists. The most controversial aspect of Carus’s philosophy is his belief in the soul and immortality, though his conceptions of both are nontraditional. To Carus, a man’s soul is the sum total of his ideas, impulses, and will. While acknowledging the materialistic causes of human behavior, Carus then mystifies human consciousness by describing it in spiritual terms. Man achieves immortality, in Carus’s view, by leaving a legacy of ideas and memories, and thus contributing to human evolution and culture. This may be a worthy concept, but Carus deliberately couches it in terms that suggest an afterlife, which seems an attempt to pacify religious readers. In fact, the latter chapters of The Religion and Science are a series of concessions to traditional religion, consciously designed to cast as wide a net as possible to possible converts. In the end, Christians might be more likely to appreciate this book than freethinkers, who may see it as one big cop-out.
Though I certainly don’t agree with everything Carus has to say in The Religion of Science, I still think it’s a valuable text in the history of freethought. It may only be a baby step toward a rational humanity, but it’s certainly an improvement over the prevailing religious dogmas. Neither the faithful nor the freethinking reader is likely to buy wholeheartedly into Carus’s philosophy, but each can draw something useful from it to augment their own personal philosophies.
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An outstanding series, but not the best volume
This is the ninth book I’ve read of The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, a series which will eventually amount to 14 volumes. (I’m not reading them in numerical order.) Overall, the series so far has just been spectacular. I had very little prior experience with Simak before I stumbled upon Volume One, but I immediately became hooked on this series. Volume Eleven, Dusty Zebra and Other Stories, is another great collection of short fiction, but by no means the best book in the series.
Each volume contains at least one example of Simak’s non-sci-fi writing. The longest work in this book is a western novella called “Way for the Hangtown Rebel!” It’s a constant stream of action scenes that might make a decent B-movie but adds up to one pretty formulaic story. Also included in this collection is a tale of World War II combat, “Guns on Guadalcanal,” which has little literary merit and suffers from the expected anti-Japanese racism of its era.
The good news is that the rest of the volume consists of seven science fiction stories. The book opens with its delightfully funny title selection, in which an opportunistic family man stumbles upon a way of communicating with an alien intelligence through the universal language of commerce. Next up is “Hobbies,” which is one of the stories that would eventually make up Simak’s 1952 novel City, but this ingenious and unpredictable vision of the future of mankind, caninekind, and robotkind is excellent even on its own. Another fine selection is “Courtesy,” about an interplanetary expedition party who, when faced with imminent death, must turn to the local aborigines to find a cure. The plot drags at times, but the story imparts a valuable moral lesson.
In his 1955 novella “Project Mastodon,” also included here, Simak gives a lot of creative thought to the political, economic, and military ramifications of time travel, but he has a pretty cavalier attitude toward how actions in the past, such as resource extraction and settlement, would effect the course of history. This story has a great premise which Simak would eventually develop into the excellent 1978 novel Mastodonia, but here the idea feels a little half-baked, and the ending is a disappointment. The 1932 story “Voice in the Void” is about two adventurers stealing a Martian religious relic. Though this early effort is not on a par with Simak’s mature writing, it makes for pretty good pulp fiction. “Final Gentleman” is a Twilight-Zonish piece of conspiracy sci-fi in which a writer finds the life he has known was just a sham and he merely a puppet. It has a good suspenseful buildup, but gets a little too trippy and suffers from a lack of clarity at the end. In “Retrograde Evolution,” another tale of interplanetary contact, Simak comes up with an interesting theory on war, peace, and culture, but he expresses it too obtusely, to the point where the story begins to bore.
Like all the books in the Complete Short Fiction series, I enjoyed Volume Eleven, enough to give it a four-star rating, but that’s actually a weak showing compared to five-star volumes like numbers One, Two, Seven, Eight, and Ten. The whole series, as I’ve seen so far, is well worth reading, but if you’re only going to pick a few of the books to read, this one should not be among them. If you read City (as you should), you’ve already got “Hobbies” covered, and “Project Mastodon” is in the public domain so you can download it for free.
Stories in this collection
Dusty Zebra
Hobbies
Guns on Guadalcanal
Courtesy
Voice in the Void
Retrograde Evolution
Way for the Hangtown Rebel!
Final Gentleman
Project Mastodon
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Family saga of the Jewish diaspora in China
Though Pearl S. Buck wrote historical novels about a variety of peoples and places, she is best known for her books set in China, the country in which she was raised. In the case of her 1948 book entitled Peony, however, the subtitle “A Novel of China” really doesn’t let you know what you’re in for, as this is quite an unconventional book by Buck. Here she bases her story on the history of Jews in China, particularly the centuries-old Jewish community of Kaifeng, Henan Province, where the story of Peony takes place.
Ezra ben Israel’s Jewish ancestors arrived in Kaifeng four generations prior to the start of the novel. His family has managed to maintain their Jewish identity despite the progressively shrinking membership of their synagogue. Ezra, a successful merchant, is the son of a Jewish father and Chinese mother and displays a healthy respect for Chinese customs. His wife, however, is more of a hardliner in her devotion to the Jewish faith and believes in preserving the racial purity of her community. She envisions her son David as the future rabbi of the Kaifeng synagogue and wants to marry him to Leah, the daughter of the current rabbi. Peony, a young Chinese woman, is a bondmaid in the family household and has been raised almost as a daughter to Ezra and a sister to David. She is secretly in love with David, but realizes that as a bondmaid (a nicer word for slave) she has no chance of being his wife. Instead, hoping to please him, she schemes to encourage his marriage to a wealthy Chinese girl to whom she learns he is attracted.
Because the Jews were welcomed by the Chinese and allowed to live according to their Jewish faith and customs, this is not a tale of religious persecution. The primary threats facing the Jews of Kaifeng are assimilation and attrition. The Chinese were so welcoming that cross-cultural exchange and interracial marriage became common, resulting in cultural dilution. David is faced with the dilemma of to what degree he owes allegiance to his ancestral culture (and his mother) and how free he is to follow his heart and live his own life as he sees fit. As is often the case with Buck’s books, the story sometimes ventures into soap-opera melodrama, but she is such a good transcriber of human emotion, and the characters feel so genuine, that the reader usually doesn’t care. Even when the plot of Peony becomes romantically overwrought, it is anything but formulaic. The narrative takes unexpected turns and neither succumbs to mawkishness nor settles for an easy ending.
For much of the book, the time period of the story is indeterminate. Buck goes out of her way to make the story timeless by eliminating historical detail. For example, neither horses nor automobiles are mentioned as a means of transportation, and the Jewish family acts as if they could be straight out of Ben-Hur. Towards the end of the book, however, the Empress Dowager Cixi makes an appearance, which places the story roughly in the 1890s. The ebook edition from Open Road Media includes a substantial afterword, written sometime after 1990, by Wendy R. Abraham, an expert on the Jewish diaspora in China. She gives a detailed historical overview on the subject, from the arrival of the first Jews in China as early as the 8th century to a summary of the research on the Kaifeng Jews up through the late 20th century. The nonfiction account of this surprising episode in world history is truly fascinating, and the fictional narrative that Buck crafts from it is moving and thought-provoking. Though not as outstanding as The Good Earth trilogy, Peony is one of Buck’s better books.
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Financial chicanery and commercial skullduggery
Upton Sinclair’s novel The Moneychangers, published in 1908, is loosely based on the real-life stock market crash known as the Panic of 1907. The story takes place in New York City. In the opening chapter, Allan Montague, an attorney, is reunited with a childhood friend from Mississippi, Lucy Dupree, who is recently widowed and has decided to settle in New York. Lucy wants Montague’s help being introduced into “Society,” but he soon finds himself assuming the role of protector as the beautiful Lucy is sought after by wealthy, married philanderers. Though there is no romantic connection between the two, Lucy is naive to the big-city ways of the metropolis, and Montague takes it upon himself to defend her honor.
The story then makes a segue from chivalry into business. From their days back home in the South, Montague and Lucy are both stockholders in the Northern Mississippi Railroad. Lucy wants to sell her stock, and she asks Montague to act as her financial representative. Though this railroad is a small business, it has the potential to become a lot bigger through a deal with The Mississippi Steel Company. As New York’s wealthy financiers get wind of this, they show an interest in Lucy’s stock and start sniffing into her and Montague’s business. The more he deals with these interested parties, the more Montague learns about the underhanded deals going down in the world of New York finance, and how a handful of wealthy and powerful oligarchs manipulate the market, the courts, and the legislature to their advantage.
Compared to other writers of the muckraker era like Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair always had his own unique style that was more propagandistic and preachy than his contemporaries. He was never afraid to push his political agenda, no matter how blatantly, even at the expense of plot and characterization. (That’s not a criticism, just an observation; I actually admire him for it.) Here in The Moneychangers, however, Sinclair definitely makes an attempt to craft a satisfying melodrama. Stylistically, the book greatly resembles Dreiser’s novels The Financier and The Titan. Sinclair nevertheless still manages to get his digs into the capitalist class, but not so dogmatically as he does in books like The Jungle, 100%, or The Millennium. This may be because none of the book’s characters are members of the lower, working, or even the middle classes. The story is told entirely through the perspective of lawyers, bankers, and well-to-do businessmen. Having covered the proletariat with due diligence elsewhere in his body of work, perhaps here Sinclair was aiming to educate middle-class readers through subtler persuasive tactics.
The Moneychangers isn’t very compelling at first, but it improves considerably as it goes along. The first half is rather slow, and the whole storyline about Lucy and her reputation feels a bit unnecessary to a novel that’s ultimately about finance and greed. The second half of the book, however, is really quite good. The instances of financial, commercial, and political corruption start out small but then gradually snowball into an avalanche. One particularly clever scene of journalistic espionage turns the book into a thriller worthy of a 21st-century film adaptation. Though Sinclair develops his case gradually without resorting to diatribes, by the end of the novel he has presented an ample laundry list of evils perpetrated by the oligarchs of American finance. The Moneychangers proves once again that even Sinclair’s lesser known works are often of high literary merit and loaded with valuable perspective on American history.
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