Category Archives: Potter’s House (The)

Long Hot Summer

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I thought that I would read more books and post more blog entries as I stayed housebound during Charleston’s hot and sticky summer, but it didn’t turn out that way.  A lot of this dereliction was caused by a Kindle game called Every Word, an addictive scrambled word game that the friendly Amazon people give Kindle owners for free.  A big time-suck, but so much fun.  I did get some reading in, though.

New (to me) books

I finished the second half of Midnight Rising (my book), an exciting and sad account of John Brown’s inexplicably nutty attack on Harpers Ferry.  Tony Horwitz finds heroism and cruelty on all sides of the attack and during the subsequent trial and execution of Brown and his captured men.  The story of John Brown and Harpers Ferry is familiar to me, but Horwitz makes a particulary detailed and compelling case that Brown’s actions and their consequences were pivotal in the run-up to the Civil War.  There is a long period between publication of each of Horwitz’s books, but they are always worth the wait.

I read half of The Potter’s House, by Rosie Thomas (library book), then flipped through to see how it turned out. Slow, boring, silly.  I liked Thomas’ Kashmir Shawl, so this was a disappointment.  I’m glad I didn’t spend any of my money on this thing.

Same thing with False Mermaid, by Erin Hart (library book).  This is Hart’s third book about a pathologist named Nora Gavin.  I’m a bit tired of pathologists in mystery series, but I really liked the first book in this series, Haunted Ground (Kindle book), especially the setting in Ireland and the details about ancient Irish history.  I thought the story about the years-back murder of Nora’s sister, heavily referenced in the first book, would be compelling, but it felt kind of flat.  Glad the library had it and I didn’t have to buy it.  I still want to read the second book, Lake of Sorrows, because Hart can be that good. 

I also read two books (library books) that aren’t just new, but by a new author:  Alan Furst.  I read about Furst in an article about a new British mini-series starring the former, fabulous Doctor Who, David Tennant.  The series is called The Spies of Warsaw, from the book of the same name by Alan Furst, “master of the historical spy novel”, according to Amazon.  So I added Alan Furst to my library list, and the library had two of his books. The World at Night is set in Paris just before and during the first part of the German occupation, and Dark Voyage is set on a Dutch tramp steamer in May and June 1941.  In a nutshell, The World at Night is about a French guy who has sex with different women and one fairly simple spy mission.  Boring both as a spy story and a love story.  Dark Voyage was a lot better with more interesting characters, and I liked the stories about the ship’s clandestine work for the British in the Mediterranean and the Baltic.  Still, Furst is a library and maybe used book store author for now.  On the other hand, I can hardly wait until January to see David Tennant in the new series.

Old Favorites

 I picked Archangel, by Robert Harris, off one of my shelves, read every word and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I read it years ago, but remembered hardly anything about it so it was almost like a new book.  Great characters and a really good story, based on events that started with the death of Stalin, and continue in post-USSR Russia.  Reading one of Harris’ novels is always a treat, but unfortunately he hasn’t written very many of them.

 I thought I would be reading a new book when I picked John LeCarre’s The Secret Pilgrim from another shelf, but realized fairly soon that I’d read it before.  I’ve bought several of LeCarre’s post-Cold War novels, but never really got into them.  I thought The Secret Pilgrim was one of those, but it consists mainly of an old spy named Ned reminiscing about (cold) war stories while George Smiley talks to a class of new spies.  The book was written in 1990, just after the break up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and John LeCarre, through George Smiley and Ned, has some prescient things to say about how the world would change after the victory of the West and capitalism. 

I then read a book, Pray for a Brave Heart (my book), by another great espionage author, who has a different perspective on the Cold War than LeCarre.  British author Helen MacInnes wrote Above Suspicion, one of my favorite spy novels, just before World War 2, followed by a couple more books set in occupied Europe.  MacInnes and her husband moved to the US after the war, and, after two lackluster novels, she found her niche in writing bestselling books about innocent Americans caught up in the Cold War struggle against Communism.  MacInnes tends to be earnest in these books, and seems to have lost her British sense of irony after she came to the US, but she is a fantastic storyteller and idealistic without being dogmatic.  Starting with Pray for a Brave Heart in 1955, she wrote six superb espionage novels set in various interesting European locations, good reads every one.  After 1968, I find the quality of her books a little more hit and miss, but even at less than her best, her books are very good.  Most of Pray for a Brave Heart is set in Zurich and a small mountain town not far away, and I enjoyed the descriptions of these places and how they were used in the plot.  The central plot concerns smuggling notable East Europeans out from behind the Iron Curtain, very current affairs for 1955, and still exciting to read about.  I was pleased to see that this book, as well as Above Suspicion, will be available in new editions in early 2013.  Nice to see this author getting attention again. 

Instead of reading the good non-fiction book I bought about the Indian Mutiny, I reread Flashman and the Great Game (my book), in which Flashman is caught in besieged Cawnpore and Lucknow and sees and experiences conditions similar to those in The Siege of Krishnapur.  As usual, he has many other adventures involving real historical people, he fornicates freely, extricates himself from deadly situations by the skin of his teeth, and n-words every non-European he comes across.  Love Flashman, get tired of some of the things he says.  While I was reading Great Game, I was also reading Midnight Rising.  After I finished them, I thought I’d read Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which is also about John Brown and Harpers Ferry, again.  But too much Flashman in a row is not a good thing, I put the book back and will take a Flashman break for a while.

I enjoyed rereading Sarah Caudwell’s Thus was Adonis Murdered so much, that I started her The Sirens Sang of Murder, and again it was a problem of reading two books by a talented but very stylized author in a row.  The witty young lawyers and their clever bantering lose too much of their charm when taken in too much quantity, so Caudwell needs to also be put aside for a while.

 

Trip to the library

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Finally went to the library, first time in months.  Our nearest branch of the library isn’t very big, but I found a couple of books that are on my list, as well as books by authors I have read before and liked.  I already finished The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer, a standard type spy thriller.  I hadn’t read anything by Steinhauer before, so at least it’s good to find something from a new author.  The book was OK, but I saw the plot twist and guessed the ending way too early.  The characters and locations weren’t that interesting either.  If I come across another book by this author, I’ll give it a try, but I’m not going to be looking that hard.

I finished The Kashmir Shawl, by Rosie Thomas, (Kindle book) last week and enjoyed it enough that I looked for another Thomas book at the library and found one called The Potter’s House.  I liked the settings of The Kashmir Shawl: the city of Srinigar in Kashmir, an Indian state called Ladakh in the north of the country, and Wales.  The best parts of the book were about the friendship of three English women in Srinigar during World War 2; the parts about a granddaughter of one of the women trying to find out the history of her grandmother’s Kashmir shawl were less interesting to me.  Some genteel romantic entanglements, and information about making pashminas, early mountaineering techniques and Welsh missionaries in India moved the plot along and made for leisurely pleasant reading.  My favorite details were ones about the winter weather, I’d never thought about India having snow, but of course it makes sense with the Himalayas on the northern border.  Most niggling thing was trying to figure out how the Welsh names of two of the characters should be pronounced.

The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham, is fascinating but slow going, I read a couple of chapters at a time, which works because each chapter deals with one separate region in one fairly short time period.  I’m almost halfway through the book; the exciting explorer stories are finished and now it’s mostly about European politics and rivalries driving a very messy scramble for African colonies.  Now I realize I need to know at least a little bit about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 in order to get a better perspective on why the Great Powers were so goofy in the late 19th century.  Wikipedia will have to do for now, the library didn’t have anything on 19th century European history.  

Fun facts about Thomas Pakenham:  he is the 8th Earl of Longford, although he doesn’t use the title, and one of his sisters is romance novelist Antonia Fraser.

In between French and English shenanigans in Africa I re-read a favorite mystery that had been packed away in a box for several years:  Thus was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell.  Sarah Caudwell wrote three books about Hilary Tamar, a professor of legal history, and his/her friends, young members of the Chancery Bar in London (lawyers).  I really can’t figure out if Hilary is a man or a woman; I don’t know if it’s just me, or if Sarah Caudwell is being deliberately confusing.  It’s kind of like the young Mrs deWinter’s name in Rebecca – I’m pretty sure Daphne du Maurier left it out on purpose.  I’m not clear on how the British legal system works either; however, in spite of all the confusion the books are very funny and clever and I always enjoy reading them.  A lot of this one is in the form of long letters from one of the lawyers on vacation holiday in Venice.  Book published in 1981, not that long ago but well before the age of Internet and the cell phone.

I’ve started on another library book called Girl Sleuth:  Nancy Drew and the women who created her, by Melanie Rehak.  This one wasn’t on my list, but looked intriguing.  The story so far:  Carolyn Keene didn’t write the Nancy Drew books!  In fact she never existed!  Other people wrote the books!  I think I already knew this, but I didn’t know all the details about the children’s book syndicate that developed Nancy Drew (and the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins, among many other series), but Melanie Rehak certainly knows everything and wants to write about all of it.  I’m thinking this might be one of those books with 100 pages of material expanded to 300, but I’ve read and enjoyed lots of Nancy Drew books and I think I can get some good stuff out of this and skim the rest. 

Which leads to a digression:  before I read the all-American girl Nancy Drew detective stories, I read the Famous Five and Secret Seven children’s mysteries by Enid Blyton.  I don’t think many, if any, of Enid Blyton’s books made it to the US; I read them when we lived in southern Africa when I was in elementary primary school.  “Enid Blyton” wrote hundreds of books (most of which I haven’t read) so many in fact that I wondered if her name was the nom de plume of a writing syndicate too.  So to Wikipedia, which says that Enid Blyton was a real person and it’s sufficiently clear that she wrote all her books herself.  It also, in an interesting and fair-minded way, says that she was a Grade A Number 1 Mommie Dearest bitch whose books are racist, sexist and classist, and many discerning people say that the books have no literary merit either.  I have little patience with people who look down on books because they are commercially successful, but there are examples to show that Enid Blyton inserted some language, ideas and characters into her books that were nasty then and are clearly unacceptable now.  I see on amazon.co.uk that the Famous Five and Secret Seven books are still in print.  I loved the books and consumed them like potato chips, I hope I just skipped over bad words and stereotypes and didn’t let them into my heart.  The Wikipedia article said the publishers have made judicious edits to the books and kids still enjoy them. 

Can’t help it, just one more digression:  The Mommie Dearest image of Enid Blyton comes from a book that one of her daughters wrote.  Now I remember that Christopher Robin Milne hated the Winnie-the-Pooh books and didn’t have many good things to say about his father A.A. Milne.  I hope none of J.K. Rowling’s kids write, or have reason to write, a mean book about her.  She seems like a very nice person, as well as a good writer.