China To Me by Emily Hahn

I can't do this book justice, which is a pity, because I'm in such a rush.

Emily Hahn was an American writer who accompanied her sister to Shanghai in the early '30's, on her way to Africa (which she loved).  She fell in love with Shanghai and couldn't bring herself to leave.  Shanghai in the thirties was full of foreigners and had an intriguing cafe society that mixed folks of many nationalities and classes.  I can see why she found that a heady and fascinating mix.

After several years in Shanghai, she traveled to Chiangking (sp?) to write a biography of the Soong Sisters (Mrs. Sun Yat-Sen (sp?), Madame Chang Kai-shek, and Madame Kung, three sister married to the most important politicians in China at that time).  Through her contacts she knew an amazing number of people. 

Then she traveled to Hong Kong, planning to return to Shanghai shortly thereafter .. but her plans changed and she ending up staying in Hong Kong much longer than she intended and was there when the Japanese took the city. 

Emily Hahn had a fascinating love life, which she touches on glancingly here.  As much as I might have liked details (okay, I longed for them, and explanations, too), I think that she took care to tread a fine line between honestly and openness .. after all, she had a child by the time she wrote this account, shortly after returning to America in 1944.

In Hong Kong, there was an amazing diverse population as well.   Her account of the Japanese occupation is fascinating, as well.

Hahn's fascinating life seems to have grown out of her fascinating character.  She was described, on the back of my paperback copy of China to Me, as a "citizen of the world," and I think that must be true.  She got on with an amazingly diverse group of people and I think part of this must have been a writer's fascinating with observation.  To my view, she was far ahead of her time and a great adventuress, and this story reads like an adventure story, full of event.  She's a wonderful storyteller, and if you like tales of wartime hardship or adventuresome lasses, I recommend this book to you.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I enjoyed The Eyre Affair.  It centers on Thursday Next, a war veteran and police officer who investigates the loss of a time/fiction travel machine, the "prose portal," and the kidnapping of Jane Eyre from the novel of the same name.

This is fantasy, obviously, and alternative history - here, the authorship of Shakespeare's plays is hotly debated, Richard III is an interactive event like singing along to the Sound of Music, the Crimean War has been dragging on for 131 years, Winston Churchill never survived to adulthood, and literature is so popular its popularity would rival a combination of reality TV, NASCAR, and pop music - if that were possible.  Jane Eyre ends with Jane resignedly marrying St. John Rivers and taking off to Africa.  The novel's passionate admirers admit, when forced to do so, that the ending is unsatisfying.

Did I mention that there are vampires in this world?  And, almost everyone has an interesting name.

Thursday is another in a long line of detectives with personal problems. Her character's assertion, bravado, and independence reminded me a little of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski.  Unlike many detectives, while she is lonely, and lovelorn, really, she's far from alone:  she has her pet dodo, her ex-fiancee, both parents, an aunt and uncle, and even a brother.

Thursday is a veteran of the Crimean War and of a pivotal battle in which her brother was killed.  She's been traumatized by the war, and her life has been on hold since she broke up with her fiancee, also a veteran of her unit in the Crimea.

Her uncle Mycroft is an eccentric, a brilliant inventor who has devised a machine called the "Prose Portal."  To test the machine, he sends his wife, Polly, to the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," but has trouble bringing her back.

Her father is a fugitive ChronoGuard operative who is looking into the death of Nelson; he fears history has been rewritten by the French revisionists.  Meanwhile, Thursday's mother is convinced that her father is having an affair with Emma Hamilton.

There is a lot of exposition in this novel:  we also get to meet Joffy, Thursday's brother and another improbably named relation.  I found myself feeling that the plot didn't really get rolling until around page 250 and still didn't display any sense of urgency.

In Thursday's work she encounters many frustrating bureaucratic problems, but the worst is Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation.  The Goliath Corporation has its fingers in many pies; one of them is a 24-hour news network.

The ending was very satisfying, however, so I'd say it was worth the wait.  This is yet another book for lovers of literature; the novel Jane Eyre doesn't appear much until the last quarter of the book. But those readers who love the romance of Rochester and Jane will enjoy the ending hugely.

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Burrows

This is a fun and fascinating book, as its mixed-up title suggests, full of contrasting elements.

It appeals to me because it's set on Guernsey, a place about which I know little.  It has an interesting history.  It came to England as a Norman possession with William the Conqueror.  When England lost its French territories, it chose to remain with England even those it's quite close to the French coast and closer to it than to England.

Not surprisingly, Churchill felt he could not spare the resources to defend it from the Germans and so it was occupied from the fall of France to the end of the war.

Juliet Ashton is a writer touring England, and tiring of touring, to promote her new book.  Her new book is a collection of comic essays she wrote during the war, meant to humorize the hardships and privations of the war years.  As she wraps up her tour, she writes to her publisher that she is concerned about what she'll write next.  She's looking for ideas.  And, she's eager to turn her back on Izzy Bickerstaff, her nom de plume when she wrote her wartime pieces.

Out of the blue, she receives a letter from the island of Guernsey, from a pig farmer no less, who is writing her because he found a book, second-hand, with her name on the flyleaf.  He writes her because he wants more books, something of which there's a shortage in Guernsey after the war.  In particular, he wants a biography of a writer he's grown to greatly admire, Charles Lamb.  Ashton shares his interest in Lamb and is intrigued.  She comes to correspond with him and other natives of Guernsey.  She soon decides that her next book will be about Guernsey during the war years, and she decides to visit the island.

The novel contains many comic and cozy elements:  a close-knit community of eccentrics, a romance, an orphan child being cared for by a community.

It also contains very dark elements:  starvation, internment in labor camps, execution.

It is a story told in letters, a form I particularly love.  Letters are a particularly fine and economical way to convey comic vignettes, of which there are many in this novel.

The plotting is eventful, if predictable.  Predictability, however, is what many readers want.  The think the fact that this book has been a big best-seller around the world and is a book club favorite proves that.  Winningly, it's not too long, either.

I found the style to be accomplished, but the characterization to be uneven.  Somewhere after the one-third mark I found myself enjoying it less.

A word about the literary society:  early on in the book, one character talks about his great interest in Charles Lamb.  I had not thought about Charles Lamb since taking "Romantic Poets" in school.  Lamb's own life story is poignant, and I found it to be an agreeable element in the novel.

This is a good book for folks who like cozy communities, eccentric characters, stories about literature, stories about writers, stories about World War II and stories set in exotic locales.

Maeve Binchy

Ms. Binchy died on July 30, I believe, and of course, I was very sad.  Selfishly, I minded that I would not be able to read any more of her books (except for Minding Frankie and one or two others I hadn't gotten around to reading yet - Quentin's, I think).  I also mind knowing that now that she has passed, her work will likely be quickly forgotten.

In a way, it is what it is and can't be helped:  part of what made her work exciting to me was the casual but profound way in which her fiction reflected some of the enormous social change going on in Ireland over the last 4 or 5 decades.  The very timeliness and currency of her books mean that in ten years they may seem very dated.

It will not seem shocking but quaint to read a woman's dilemma when her shiftless, alcoholic husband who had deserted her years before appears on her doorstep and asks her to care for him in his final illness.  Social convention in the past would have robbed her of her choice; if shame didn't compel to take her wayward husband in, her priest would.  Today, women have choices but that doesn't mean that they're easy to make.

Maeve Binchy's cheerful grasp as a storyteller was pretty darn big - full of chiches, melodrama, self-help bromides, and breathless run-on sentences that captured the flavor of conversation.  But her books created joy:  her stories made you laugh and cry and you consumed them at a breakneck speed, dying to know what was going to happen.

While some novels, like Tara Road, had an ending that was entirely too neat, other novels like Glass Lake, Circle of Friends, and Scarlet Feather had elements that reflected the complexity and complication of real life.

I noticed one reviewer mentioned that Glass Lake and Evening Class were her favorite novels; they were mine, also.  In Glass Lake, it seemed to me that she took on her most audacious question:  is there ever a time when a mother may be forgiven for abandoning her child?  I think the ending was hard for her and I would have preferred a stronger one but it was bold and brave to write that novel.

I can't really tell you why I loved Evening Class.  Perhaps it was merely that while I have taken many evening classes that did not result in friendship or friendships, the nourishment these friends take from each other is nourishing, cozy and completely wish-fulfilling.  Is that wrong?  Can it be wrong?

I recall that the heroine of Scarlet Feather was married to the master's son; her mother was that family's longtime housekeeper.  Her resentment of her mother's status and treatment was so greatly present in her mind that I could not wonder if that, as well as her career (and her husband's) contributed to the breakup of that marriage.  I've always wondered what Binchy was saying there:  Was she saying that we should not marry outside of our class?  (Surely not!)  Was she simply creating a good story, knowing that many of her readers would identify with the heroine's nose-pressed-against-the-glass feeling?  I wonder.  This character was strong, independent, hard-working, ambitious and truly competent.  Perhaps this little unresolved complexity was another intriguing element of Binchy's work.

I loved reading her books, I greatly admired her combination of gratifying plots and profound reflection on women's choices, I will miss her and someday I hope I'll write something that was inspired by her.