Pearls Picks for October 1st

One of the best reasons to give Janet Lee Carey's Dragon's Keep to young teens (especially girls) is that it's a page-turning fantasy filled with well-drawn, three dimensional characters (both human and otherwise). Because one exciting episode (and chapter) no sooner ends than another one begins, Carey's book would have made a wonderful serial, if only there were a magazine for teens that did that kind of thing. Way back in the mists of time, the mage Merlin prophesied that the 21^st queen of Wilde Island would accomplish three feats--she would redeem the family name; she would bring peace with the wave of her hand; and she would restore the glory of her home land, now menaced regularly by dragons. And Princess Rosalind Pendragon, the young heroine of Dragon's Keep, is to be the 21^st queen of the land. But Rosalind has a secret that only her mother, the 20^th queen, knows--she was born with a dragon's talon instead of the fourth finger of her left hand. All her life Rosalind has been forced by her mother to wear golden gloves to hide her deformity, lest she be taken for a witch and banished or killed; she's also had to endure the visits and ministrations of countless healers brought in by the queen to attempt to remove Rosalind's "flaw." It's only when Rosalind is kidnapped by a dragon and forced to work as a nursemaid to his motherless children, that she begins to understand that her flaw is intricately bound up with her fate, and that to accept the one is to begin the fulfillment of the other. Another good reason to suggest this book to teen readers is that the issues it raises--self-acceptance being probably the most important--make it a perfect choice for a teen/parent book discussion.

Stephen Carter's third novel, Palace Council, is, like his first two (The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White), a mystery woven into an engrossing family saga. Palace Council begins in 1952, when 20 well-known and influential men secretly gather to formulate a plot that will determine the course of history. Two years later, Eddie Wesley, one of Harlem's up-and-coming young writers, stumbles over the dead body of a prominent lawyer and as a result becomes aware of the existence of this top-secret group. Who is on the membership list? What is their ultimate goal? And, even more importantly to Eddie, does the disappearance of his idealistic younger sister, June, trained as a lawyer, have anything to do with them? Along with the love of his life, Aurelia Treene (whose husband, it turns out, is intimately involved with the cabal), Eddie searches for answers to these questions for two decades, in the process meeting such luminaries of the period as J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and even Langston Hughes. The mystery aside, Carter's illuminating evocation of Harlem's upper class black society is one of the strengths of this novel (as it was in his earlier two). If you're always on the hunt for a satisfying novel in which it's easy to lose yourself in the plot and the lives of the characters, Carter is a good author to know about.

These days I've been treating myself to reading or rereading all of Georgette Heyer's novels in the order in which they're being reissued by Sourcebooks (in lovely trade paperback editions).  Although they've not yet reprinted my favorites (those being The Grand Sophy,  Sylvester,  Arabella, and  The Reluctant Widow), I just finished Black Sheep, which now joins the other four on my "absolutely best of the best list." So even though I included Heyer's  An Infamous Army in March's Pearl's Picks, I feel compelled to rave about Black Sheep. Abigail Wendover is beautiful, smart, and high-spirited.  She's also, at age 28, well past the optimal marriageable age for an upper class Regency woman. She and her also-unmarried and much older sister are raising their orphaned heiress niece, Fanny. Fanny has most unfortunately fallen in love with a cad of a fellow named Stacy Calverleigh (who's obviously after her not inconsiderable inheritance). In attempting to break up the relationship, Abigail finds herself forced to spend more time than she wishes with Stacy's uncle Miles (the black sheep of the title), who has just returned to England from years spent womanizing and making a fortune in India. Miles is strong-willed, unconventionally handsome, and witty enough that he can invariably bring Abigail to giggles, even when she's furious at him (which is almost always). Obviously these two are going to get together (this is a romance, after all), but you can have faith that Heyer's going to throw a lot of obstacles in the putative lovers' way. Heyer's writing is both clever and droll--the closest to Jane Austen that you'll get--but I found myself chuckling over all the Regency era slang that Heyer uses: "a fit of the dismals" seemed pretty easy to decode, as did "slow-top," but what about "lobcock," "scaff and raff," or "turnip-sucker"? And what does "quizzes" mean when it's not referring to tests but rather describing a group of women? And what is a "brummish" story? (Context will usually give you some idea, but Google "regency slang", if you really want to know.) Perhaps the worldwide legion of Georgette Heyer fans can join forces and bring some of these words back into common usage--I think stating that you're having (or are in) "a fit of the dismals" is so much more descriptive than saying that you're feeling blue, don't you?

Every year about this time I go back to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog): there are few other books I know of that are as reliably funny, no matter how many times I reread them. Jerome describes a boat trip up the Thames from London to Oxford, undertaken by 'J,' the narrator, and his friends George and Harris. The three (exemplars par excellence of the Victorian gentleman hypochondriac) undertake the journey in order to attain a healthier life, see the countryside, and experience nature's beauties and bounties. The only passenger along for the expedition who's not entirely thrilled about it is Montmorency, a small fox terrier.  Jerome's writing is sublimely dry and understated; his descriptions of J, Harris, and George (to say nothing of the dog) struggling (ineptly, for the most part) to cope with the ABCs of boating and camping, as well as their experiences as tourists, make it difficult not to chortle aloud in a most undignified manner quite unbefitting, I'm sure, those who were reading the book when it was first published in 1889. Like many other readers, I'm sure one of my favorite parts is when Harris gets lost in the maze at Hampton Court.  Here's an example of Jerome's style, a description of one of the quartet's first days on the water:

The idea, overnight, had been that we should get up early in the morning, fling off our rugs and shawls, and, throwing back the canvas, spring into the river with a joyous shout, and revel in a long delicious swim. Somehow, now the morning had come, the notion seemed less tempting. The water looked damp and chilly: the wind felt cold.

'Well, who's going to be first in?' said Harris at last.

There was no rush for precedence. George settled the matter so far as he was concerned by retiring into the boat and pulling on his socks. Montmorency gave vent to an involuntary howl, as if merely thinking of the thing had given him the horrors; and Harris said it would be so difficult to get into the boat again, and went back and sorted out his trousers.

I just love the way the line, "spring into the river with a joyous shout," is followed by everyone thinking better of the whole idea--is there a camper among us who hasn't had those identical feelings? 

To the hard-boiled mystery plots made popular by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (who, in a much reprinted essay first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944 called "The Simple Art of Murder," advocated taking murders out of the drawing room and into the streets, where they belong), Ross MacDonald added an interest in, and thorough knowledge of, Freudian theory. MacDonald's novels, set in and around Santa Barbara and other Southern California cities (although they have invented names), are marked by their complex (but never confusing) plots and their emotionally wounded, often young, characters, as well as a writing style that has had an enormous influence on contemporary mystery writers like Sue Grafton and Robert Parker. In a MacDonald novel (here comes Freud) the past is never far away. The sins of the fathers (and/or mothers) are always, always, visited on the next generation. His novels don't have to be read in order, and, if you're not familiar with MacDonald, The Underground Man is a good place to start. (That it's been influential since it was first published is undeniable: in an unprecedented move, John Leonard reviewed the novel on the front page of The New York Times Book Review when it was published in 1971.) In the course of tracking down a child kidnapped by his father, Lew Archer (MacDonald's detective, who covers up his essentially romantic nature with a loner, tough-guy exterior) must contend with a wildfire threatening the homes of some of the wealthiest residents of the area, as well as a family's deepest held secrets--secrets whose repercussions have spilled into the present and led not only to a murder in the present, but evidence of murders that occurred in the preceding generation. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard is reprinting all of MacDonald's works, which should make all mystery fans very happy. 

If you were to pick one of the most unusual spots in the world in which to set a novel, the setting of Jeff Talarigo's The Ginseng Hunter would be a good choice: it takes place in a valley in China located along the Tumen River, which divides the country from North Korea. At the turn of the 21^st century, the narrator, a nameless, solitary, middle-aged man who's half Chinese and half Korean, makes a meager living selling the ginseng he digs from the ground--limiting himself, as his father taught him, to picking one root a day. Once a month, except when winter makes the roads impassable, he goes to the nearest city, Yanji, an eight-hour walk away, where he sells his ginseng, buys provisions, and visits a prostitute. But political events in the larger world begin to intrude on his clockwork existence: Chinese soldiers have dug foxholes close to the Tumen, and dead bodies are seen floating in the river; an unfamiliar child steals food from his garden; and a truck driver tells him about how easy it is to earn money by turning North Korean refugees in to the local authorities. On one of his visits to Yanji, the young prostitute whom he regularly sees begs him to help her find a better life. What should he do? How involved in another's life does he want to become? Woven into this story is another: the harrowing tale of a mother and daughter facing starvation under the brutal regime of North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-il. Talarigo's second novel (his first as The Pearl Diver) is not an easy book to read, because its subject matter--political oppression, loneliness, and the madness of grief--is so overwhelmingly sad. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it--the prose is spare and immaculate, the description of life in the narrator's valley is simultaneously vivid and bleak, and the depiction of the best and worst of what mankind is capable can only encourage us to be better people.