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After Life
Rhian Ellis
Viking
292 pp.
$23.95
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Rhian Ellis's
debut novel, After Life, opens with a wonderfully promising
first line: "First I had to get his body into the boat."
Ah, one thinks: a body, a boat, a murderous narrator.
What more could one hope for?
Lots, as it turns out.
The murderous narrator, Naomi Ash, is a twenty-one-year-old
medium who lives in America's largest community of mediums and
sundry spiritualists (Train Line, New York), and the boat into
which she's struggling to get the body (her boyfriend's, we soon
learn; name: Peter) belongs (in a way) to her mother, who is
herself a medium who fled New Orleans a decade ago (with Naomi
in tow) when the cops hassled her too much.
I know what you're thinking: Um, all right, sure. But what
about the body?
Motive. Victim's full identity. Victim's precise relationship
to the murderer. It's the standard stuff you expect to be handed
over rather quickly, yes?
Not this time.
Instead, Naomi loads her victim's body into the boat, rows
it to a discreet spot, buries it on the shore and lets it lie
undisturbed while she tells us how, precisely, she came to be
a popular medium (with real visions, no less) in Train
Line. It's a cunning trick on Ellis's part, of course, because
Naomi's story humanizes her so completely that by the time she
actually gets to the motive behind the murder (to say nothing
of the murder itself) she's fully two-thirds into her story,
and she's won us over. For a woman who opens her story with a
dead body, she's a whoppingly appealing character.
But murder will out, as they say. Or to be more precise, rich
people will eventually want new lakefront mansions, and backhoes
will find buried bodies if they happen to lie under their planned
foundations. Which, as it happens, is precisely what happens
with Naomi's Peter: ten years after the murder, he's suddenly
in the news. Unidentified, but not (inevitably) for long. And
then--you should probably have guessed this part already--Peter's
voice calls out to Naomi during one of her readings. (How's that
for raising the guilt and paranoia levels to Hitchcockian heights?)
To make matters worse, Naomi's mother is hell-bent on communicating
with Peter's spirit herself (although she doesn't know it's Peter's)
in order to salvage her reputation as a medium. (Her brand of
spiritualism has evolved from floating tables, ghostly voices
and mysterious gusts of perfume to a level of physicality that
might by turns shock, excite or embarrass you.)
What's a girl to do?
Wel, if you're Naomi, you might consider trying to volunteer
your services to the cops as well, to misdirect them and blunt
your mother's efforts, if she ever manages to score a bull's
eye.
Ellis does a stellar job with the minutiae of the medium's
daily world--from the mechanics of disembodied voices to the
individual traits of her various mediums--and her skill at manipulating
and massaging her story along such an intoxicatingly sinuous
line (in a first novel, no less!) is nothing short of stunning.
This is, hands down, one of the two best, most intelligent psychological
thrillers I've read this year. (The other, by the way, is Penelope
Evans's First Fruits--click here
for my review of it.)
Don't miss this one.
--Daphne Frostchild
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Sex and Real Estate
Marjorie Garber
Pantheon Books
245 pp.
$23
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"What do
college students talk about with their roommates?" Marjorie
Garber asks in her new, fetchingly titled book, Sex and Real
Estate. "Sex. Twenty years later, what do they talk
about with their friends and associates? Real Estate. And with
the same gleam in their eyes." The evidence that we do,
in fact, blur the two--sex and real estate, or to load the pairing
with greater complexities, sex and home--is glaringly obvious,
particularly to devotees of shelter magazines and anyone who's
seen a Calgon commercial ("Calgon, take me away!")
And it makes for wonderful material on which to build a book,
as Garber demonstrates abundantly.
While the book's eight essays are surprisingly wide-ranging
(she covers everything from Carl Jung to color restrictions in
historical districts), Garber's writing voices are possibly even
more diverse. In some of the lighter essays (like the introductory
"Sex and Real Estate" and "The House as Beloved"),
Garber writes in a casual, even seductively comfortable voice
that makes reading effortless and should remind many readers
of Witold Rybczynski's voice in his classic Home. She
doesn't write with Rybczynski's historical focus, but the associative
examples she draws from contemporary life are well-chosen and
strongly presented. In other essays (like "The House as
Mother," which deals in part with Freudian interpretations
of the concept of home), Garber writes in a decidedly more academic
tone, which is certainly to be expected of a Harvard English
professor. (Garber is also the director of Harvard's Humanities
Center).
One is tempted, of course, to say that her casual writing
voice is like a comfortably aged leather club chair, as opposed
to the harshly severe Mies van der Rohe style of her more strident
academic voice. But we probably should avoid furniture metaphors
and say, simply, that Garber's range ( in both voice and topics)
is so broad that everyone from do-it-yourself restorers and This
Old House voyeurs to well-read interior designers should
find the book enthralling.
Along the way, they will learn some interesting facts to toss
out at their next housewarming, like, for instance, this tidbit:
"the legs of Victorian pianos were draped and covered with
fabric because it was thought indecent to let them show."
And while we snicker about those Victorian prudes, perhaps we
should (since, after all, the book's subject interests you enough
to have read this far) ask ourselves whether we house lovers
should worry about whether we are in fact suffering from a rare--indeed
forgotten-- disease that the Victorians' forebears would have
recognized: homesickness, which was "[o]nce regarded
as a 'real' illness--in the late eighteenth century doctors often
diagnosed 'the longing for home which the Physicians have gone
so far as to esteem a disease under the name Nostalgia."
Sadly, a cure is not listed.
--Daphne Frostchild
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Wreck of the Medusa
Alexander McKee
Signet
294 pp.
$6.99
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On June 17,
1816, a French frigate named the Medusa set out from Rochefort,
France, for West Africa. It was supposed to lead a convoy of
four ships to the French colony of Senegal, which was being returned
to the French by its English captors as part of the settlement
that followed Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. But, as Alexander
McKee writes in his brilliantly researched account, Wreck
of the Medusa, the Medusa's captain was not sufficiently
experienced to guide the convoy along the coast of West Africa,
which, McKee writes, "ranked as one of the least-known and
most imperfectly charted areas in the world." Nor was he
willing to rely on his well-trained, largely Republican officers
for advice (the captain was an aristocrat who had accepted exile
during the Revolution). Instead, he turned for advice to a passenger
who, McKee writes, "had never served in the Navy and was
not now a member of the crew but who claimed vast sea-going experience.
In all societies one meets people like this and they usually
turn out to be bank managers, postmen or butchers." In time,
the captain ordered the officers to treat his passenger-guide
as the ship's pilot. To make matters worse, the captain ignored
written orders that he keep the convoy close together, and he
soon sailed ahead of the other ships and used the coastline as
his navigation device rather than sailing a much safer route
out of the sight of land (and out of the reach of shallow waters).
Inevitably, the Medusa went aground on the Arguin Bank,
"a vast uncharted sandbank stretching many miles out from
the coast north of Senegal." And that's when the real
trouble started. Rather than ferry passengers to shore in the
Medusa's six lifeboats, a large, ungainly, flat raft was
built, and after it and the other boats were mostly filled, the
captain shouted that he'd be right back to join the others on
the raftand then he hastily fled and jumped into his own barge
at the front of the line. Of course, since there were still at
least eighty passengers and crewmen on the Medusa at that
moment, the captain risked execution for abandoning his ship
prematurely, but as he later argued, he was now the captain of
a flotilla of lifeboats, and he needed to be at the front of
the line. Unfortunately, the life raft didn't respond promptly
to the other boats' towing efforts, and whether the line was
cut (as many survivors claimed) or merely broke under the strain,
the 150 people on the life raft soon found themselves adrift
and, since solid timbers aren't particularly buoyant, waist-deep
in seawater.
Wreck of the Medusa was originally published in 1975
(under the title, Death Raft), when the Alive!
craze was just a year old. (McKee's interest in survival stories
was decades-old by then.) But tales of cannibalism (yes, the
survivors on the life raftpartook) and desperate survival in
extreme conditions (some people survived by abandoning their
life boats and hiking through the Sahara desert) are perennial
favorites, and Wreck of the Medusa is a true classic of
the tradition. Anyone remotely interested in the subject (or
anyone simply needing a reason to be happy they're on secure
land) must read it.
--Woody Arbunkle
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The End of War: A Novel of the Race for Berlin
David L. Robbins
Bantam Books
398 pp.
$24.95
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David L. Robbins's
The End of War, his second novel set in the Second World
War, opens on New Year's Eve, 1944. D-Day is seven months in
the past, and Hitler has staged a massive, unexpected counter-offensive
in the Ardennes forests. It's a seemingly hopeless, last-ditch
effort to keep the Allies from rolling into Germany and taking
Berlin, but for a while at least, it works. After the Nazis succeed
in advancing a group of soldiers westward, it becomes known as
the Battle of the Bulge.
Charley Bandy, a photographer for Life Magazine, has
just returned stateside, expecting the war to end soon, but with
Hitler's Western advances against the Allies, he realizes he
has to return to the war in order to document the unexpectedly
dramatic fight for Berlin. In the meantime, on the Eastern Front,
Ilya Shokhin, a Soviet soldier and veteran of the Battle of Stalingrad,
is moving toward Berlin with a prison battalion and trying to
win back (through courage under fire) the freedom and military
rank he lost after a relative crossed Stalin. And Lottie, a cellist
with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, endures the grim endgame
with her fellow frightened Berliners, hiding in cellars during
the Allied bombing raids and praying the Americans reach Berlin
before the Soviets do.
Unfortunately for Lottie, the Americans--or at least Franklin
Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower--aren't willing to claim Berlin
for themselves at the expense of friendly relations with the
Soviets. With a strong eye for political strategy, Robbins lays
bare the reasons the American strategy is flawed, and why Winston
Churchill and Josef Stalin are right to play a subtle psychological
war between themselves with Berlin as the ultimate prize. If
the British get there first, their claim to be a powerful empire
will survive intact; if the Soviets get there first, they cement
their place in the new world order. Only the Americans (at least
Roosevelt and Eisenhower) fail to see how vital Berlin is: lose
it to the Soviets and the Soviets are suddenly serious contenders
on the world stage, with eastern Europe in its grasp and western
Europe at its fingertips.
Robbins tells his story in a clear, methodical way, crosscutting
between his three 'human' characters (Charley, Ilya and Lottie)
and what he calls his three Olympian characters (Roosevelt, Stalin
and Churchill) smoothly and dynamically enough to keep his readers
moving through the text happily. It's a superb solution for a
sticky problem historical novelists face--how does one enthrall
the reader with foot-soldier stories while doing justice to the
complexities of war strategy and politics?--and Robbins is justified,
I think, in calling it a structure in the tradition of Greek
tragedy.
Robbins has done his research thoroughly, and he clearly understands
the military and political aspects of his Olympian characters'
stories. But it's the smaller scenes with the 'human' characters
that linger, I think: Charley stumbling onto a collection of
frozen soldiers in the woods; Lottie watching her mother apprehensively
as she tries to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a
bomb shelter. Or perhaps most grimly, Lottie helping her mother
butcher a dead, rotting horse on a Berlin street under the cover
of darkness. In these scenes, Robbins shows the sort of strong
visual imagination an historical writer needs to bring history
vividly to life.
Robbins is a serious writer who respects his craft and his
subject, and he's not to be missed by anyone who enjoys historical
fiction or World War II narratives.
--Doug Childers
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