Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene

The only Graham Greene novel I didn’t at least like among the 11 I’ve read before this one is The Quiet American. I know a lot of people love that one, but for some reason when I first read it in 2009 it fell flat. I gave it another whirl in 2018, but it still didn’t work for me. Most of these I read from around 2006-2011, but I trust my positive memories of the others despite the intervening time because I reread The Power and The Glory in 2016 and it reaffirmed its place on my favorites list. When I was in the throes of my first pass through some of Greene’s work I ended up picking up copies of other books by him that I didn’t get around to reading then. Earlier this month I read his final novel, The Captain and the Enemy and really enjoyed it despite not caring for the ending. That book also reaffirmed my love for the feel and tone of Greene’s work. I’ve been going back and forth on Doctor Fischer, though. On the one hand it does have Graham’s excellent prose, some great humor (especially early on), and his wrestling with existential issues and the idea that God might be cruel. But on the other, it’s Greene at his most cynical and I can’t quite decide how I feel about the deliberately grotesque and exaggerated characters. 

It opens with the narrator, a British man in his 50s who lost a hand in the war. He works translating letters for a chocolate factory in Geneva. He falls in love with a woman about half his age and they get married. This is another point on which I’m not entirely certain. If the man had been in his thirties, I don’t think it would have changed the plot substantively and would have reduced the awkwardness that the narrator himself admits to early on. Nevertheless, her father, the titular Doctor Fischer, is a millionaire who made his fortune by creating a toothpaste company. He has hangers on who the narrator and his wife call the Toads (based on her initial malapropism for toadies) who he invites to elaborate parties in which he humiliates them by dint of the gifts they receive if they follow the rules of the party. They are all borderline caricatures; exaggerated avatars of Greene’s hatred for certain types of wealthy people (all wealthy people?). The narrator’s wife has broken contact with her father and tries to keep him from going to the parties, but he is drawn into that world.

I’m going back and forth on this one. Is it the grotesque, cynical parody of a comedy of manners about the cruelty of God that seems to have been Greene’s intention? That book I may have been uncomfortable with but would have really liked, I think, in the same way I liked the movie Nightcrawler; great work that makes me really skeptical of humanity. Or is it merely unearned nihilistic grotesquery not quite counterbalanced by a very uncomfortable love story. It’s Greene, so there is at least his prose and storytelling ability, but I’m pretty much mixed on it. If I was in a different mood I might really like this, or it could become the second Greene novel I strongly disliked. So it’s a split between a mild recommendation and a mild pass.

Recommended/Pass

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 69/75

Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong

Back in my evangelical days, I feel like I was steered away from Karen Armstrong by the reactions of my theologically conservative friends for some reason. I don’t remember any specifics, but somehow I got the impression that her A History of God was anti-Christian. Since my drift from the faith I had picked up a couple of her books at library sales, this and her book on the history of religion and violence. Reading this, I suspect that whoever gave me that impression was probably based on the fact that her approach is more from a place of comparative studies and the books about other religions that had currency in the circles I was in were from the perspective of how Christianity disproved other systems. But again, I don’t remember specific conversations, but a general impression. Despite my apostasy, I am still very interested in religion and after reading this, I’m looking forward to more of her work.

While I’m no expert, this strikes me as a very good one volume history of Islam. It’s particularly good on at least three fronts. First, Islam, in the west anyway, tends to be portrayed as a monolithic thing, and this does a great job of showing the various threads of the religion and undermining that presentation. Secondly, if one reads it with an open mind, it does a good job of describing the conditions under which the Muslim world first came into contact with western modernity which in turn goes a long way toward explaining the subsequent history between the cultures. Finally, her chapter on fundamentalism contextualizes the more extremist end of Islam as part of a wider phenomenon as religions come to terms with the modern world. While fundamentalism in the Muslim world gets the most press, it does show up in most world religions.

Highly Recommended.

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 71/75

Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Over the past couple of years, Kiernan has become a favorite writer. Her blend of literary modernism with a horror mood, her gen-x transgressive streak, her absolute clear eyed approach to writing about mental illness and despair, her prose, and her ability to evoke a sense of queasy wonder have made for some of my most memorable recent reads. I started out with what was then her most recent novella, Agents of Dreamland, when I heard it plugged on the Coode Street Podcast in the context of a wave of work that was reimagining Lovecraft. At the time, I said it was Lovecraftian with nods to Le Carre, Winnie the Pooh, Literary Modernism and Vonnegut (I’m excited to revisit this and see if that assessment holds up. I’ve convinced one of my book clubs to use it as its next selection.) Since then I’ve read seven more novels and a best of short story collection by her. Most of that work does carry a heavy Lovecraft influence, but her voice is her own and she is a far better prose writer. I’m always a little leary going back to the early books of a writer I’ve loved for their later work. Silk is Kiernan’s debut, and while I picked up a copy shortly after discovering her, I had been worried whether or not I would like it. An unfounded hesitation.

Silk won an award and was shortlisted for another in the first horror novel category. And yet for nearly the first half of the book there is no clear supernatural horror at all. Instead it is a trip through a very specific southern version of decadent gen-x 90’s goth bohemia. It’s equal parts drug novel, trauma novel and the rough life of its poor, marginal, often queer characters. It feels a little like Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, or a queer version of the Johnny Truant sections of House of Leaves filtered through a song written by Tom Waits and performed by The Cure. It’s a squalid and fascinating world. Niki Ky, a woman fleeing her past breaks down outside of Birmingham, and falls in with Daria, the bassist and lead singer in a three piece band called Stiff Kitten. Daria is in a fractious relationship with her guitarist. Niki and the band members get mixed up with Spyder Baxter, a mysterious goth who runs a curiosities shop and her girlfriend, Robin and hangers on. Robin convinces those hangers on to participate in a peyote ritual of her own design which results in the awakening of horrors from Spyder’s past, with consequences for all the major characters. 

Even in this debut novel, Kiernan’s prose and ability to evoke horrors both supernatural and those resulting from past trauma is fully on display. Every character has a harrowing backstory and these play out in some melodramatic ways (I mean that mostly as a compliment). Holding back on the supernatural elements until the moment they emerged was a great strategy. Without that turn, this could have been a cult classic literary drug/bohemian novel. As is, the horror elements really take it over the top, especially for a debut. If I like Kiernan’s later work more, and I do, that’s more a reflection of my level of affection for those books and not on this.

Highly Recommended with a heavy content warning.

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 68/75

The Mist In The Mirror by Susan Hill

I picked up a copy of this on a whim at a library sale in Raleigh a year or so ago, and I’m glad I did. I had never heard of Susan Hill before, though she’d been publishing books in the UK since the 1970s. I would read more of her books.

The Mist in the Mirror is a Victorian era gothic horror/weird tale. An aging man publishes a manuscript given to him when he was young by Sir James Monmouth. Monmouth was himself old at the time and was writing about his experiences in middle age. He was an Englishman who had been raised in Africa by a guardian. Upon that guardian’s death he took a colonial tour and spent years in various Asian and African countries. Monmouth was very much in the colonialist mindset, but that is not a theme that is explored deeply in the novel, unless I completely missed something in the subtext; a real possibility. Throughout his journeys he kept coming across traces of the presence of a colonial explorer named Conrad Vane.

The novel opens, inside the framing device, as Monmouth returns to England intent on a scholarly life, beginning with a biography of Vane. He checks into a low end boarding house and eerie things start happening. As he follows what leads he has about Vane’s life, he meets with a great deal of resistance and senses that there is some dark history around his subject. Soon he begins to find a dark history around his family as well.

While the themes of seeking out forbidden knowledge and finding out too much for one’s sanity may make this seem like a Lovecraftian work, it is not. It is gothic in mood. And mood is the key to what makes the book work. The resolution is just ambiguous enough, and the titular mist is never explained, but the book creates an eerie atmosphere that was quite enjoyable.

Recommended

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 67/75

The Difficult Wheel by Betty Adcock

 A friend with good taste recommended Adcock to me almost 15 years ago and I picked this up at the next Library Sale I attended, but I only got to it this year. I'm torn between being upset with myself for not reading these poems sooner and being glad I was ready for them when I did

These poems, especially in the first of three sections, really hit home with me. I will be dipping into this for years to come and seeking out more of her work.

Canon Worthy

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 66/75

The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greeene

There are two family movies that worked for me way better than I expected going in, but then in the final moments ruined what went before, or at least snapped the mood that had been created: Secondhand Lions and the first Night at the Museum. Going into them, they did not at all seem like they would be in my wheelhouse, and yet by the endings I had been won over. But then that came crashing down. In Secondhand Lions, all the characters from the tall tales the old men had been telling the protagonist showed up. I always thought it would have worked better, and been a nearly perfect family movie if they had left the veracity of those tales ambiguous. Night at the Museum came to a perfect, sweet, non-treacly ending. Then there’s a giant dance party in the museum that completely ruins the mood. In both cases the mood that was the natural stopping point was snapped and the viewer, or at least this viewer, left with a bad taste in the mouth. I had a similar, but less extreme reaction when reading Graham Greene’s final novel, The Captain and the Enemy.

Greene has long been a favorite. I discovered him almost two decades ago when I was delving into Catholic novelists. I loved how sordid and seamy his worlds were and how his characters end up in situations that they are sure will damn them (in the literal sense) and yet there is no other moral choice to be made, so they move on. I was nervous going into this, knowing it was very late in his career and I wondered if I would enjoy it. But it is a perfectly structured thing that begins with a shocker, turns into a coming of age story that is gradually revealed to be a love story and veers into espionage in the third act. All of this flows naturally and happens in a perfectly believable manner and comes to a perfect conclusion. Then there is a postscript chapter that plays like a joke from Greene’s excellent Our Man in Havana but feels very out of place here. I suspect the postscript is mainly intended to show the fate of the narrator of the main body of the text, but it undid the tonal work the rest of the novel built and I walked away with a different set of emotions than I would have if it had ended just a few pages earlier. 

Other than that ending, though, the book is fantastic. Great prose, great structure, intriguing story and characters. It has that same sense of frustrated moralism that is characteristic of the best of Greene’s work. The narrator gradually reveals his failings, almost without seeming to realize it. Brilliantly done. Similarly, the book comes out strongly against 1980s US foreign policy towards South America, without being explicitly polemic; it’s subtly done. Subtext is everything in this book, and the narrator is out of his depth. The natural ending point is somewhat cruel, if not as explicitly so as his bleak crime masterwork, Brighton Rock. While I was put off by the postscript, I enjoyed the rest of the book enough to recommend it enthusiastically.

Highly Recommended.

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 65/75

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I picked up a used copy of I, Claudius years, maybe a decade, ago when I saw that it was on both the Modern Library 100 greatest novels of the 20th Century and Time Magazine’s top 100 lists. I have since decided that I don’t have to complete those lists (I still may, but I’m not obsessed with finishing them now). It has been on the shelf since then, and is a prime example of why I needed to do my 2020 project of focusing on reading books I owned at the beginning of the year.

The book I thought about most while reading I, Claudius was CS Lewis’s best novel, Till We Have Faces. This is unfair. While both are set in western antiquity and, to different extents, use ancient paganism to talk about Christendom (admittedly I, Claudius does this only obliquely, but it is there), they are very different. Till We Have Faces is set in the fictional city-state of Glome, which is not greek but interacts with the Greeks and retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters. I, Claudius retells the period of Roman history from the aftermath of Julius Ceasar’s death to Claudius’s reluctant (in this telling) assumption of the throne in the first person voice of Claudius himself. Till We Have Faces is by far the better book, and the differences outweigh the similarities enough that it’s an unfair comparison, but the tone of I, Claudius brought the Lewis to mind.

My enjoyment of the book was certainly hobbled to some extent by being relatively ignorant of the period of Roman history covered. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the book; I did. But I think a prior knowledge of the history it recounts would likely have really improved the reading experience. That said, the story is compelling, and Claudius’s voice is charming. He does seem to both want to pearl clutch and cluck the tongue at certain aspects of the decadence on display and participate in it at the same time. Some of that is an intentional complication of the character and some of it is a funny commentary on the time in which it was written. Overall, though, I, Claudius is a very enjoyable historical novel that I would recommend, especially to those who are interested in the time period.

Recommended

Owned But Previously Unread 2020 64/75