Don't get attached to ...

In high school, one of my husband's friends ruined Top Gun before Mark got to see it with one phrase: Don't get attached to Goose. That phrase has become our household shorthand for spoilers, or mock spoilers. The phrase returned to me recently when I was reading the latest entry in a newish historical crime series. I am a big fan of Tudor-era crime fiction -- C.J. Sansom's Shardlake series, Rory Clements' John Shakespeare series, Patricia Finney's books, the David Becket/Simon Ames series under her own name as well as the Sir Robert Carey series under the pen name P.F. Chisholm -- I devour them. After reading lots of biographies and novelizations of the various royals, it's fun to see the action from around the edges and to imagine how life might have looked to an ordinary person, navigating the not-so-easy daily realities of life as well as the larger shifts in religious beliefs and power structures. There was certainly enough intrigue and ill will around the court during the reigns of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to come up with fodder for plausible crimes, aside from the never-ending human motives for murder (love, jealousy, money, etc.).

I was intrigued when S.J. Parris' series debuted a few years back, with Heresy, a mystery set around real events, with her hero the real-life scholar and fugitive ex-monk Giordano Bruno. Bruno really did spent a couple years in England in the 1580s, the heart of the Elizabethan era. He may well have been an agent for spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham and in the books, he definitely is. Heresy was quickly followed by Prophecy and just out, a third volume, Sacrilege (which I was lucky enough to get as an advanced copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program). I thought this was the best installment yet in this series, and the book itself got better as it went along. All good. But I have one big problem. I don't want to get attached to Bruno. Between reading the second and third volumes in this series, I read The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which includes a description of the real life Bruno's fate and it is ugly. After being imprisoned for seven years by the Roman Inquisition, defiant to the end, he was declared a heretic and executed. By being burned alive. With his tongue "bridled," which, according to some accounts, means he had a stake driven through his face, to keep him from addressing the crowd.

In any of these series, you get attached to your hero, flawed guy that he is: Matthew Shardlake, David Becket, Simon Ames, Sir Robert Carey, John Shakespeare. They're the protagonists; we're meant to identify with them and they're often trying to navigate conflicting loyalties while protecting more vulnerable souls, making them even more sympathetic. But now I don't want to identify too strongly with Bruno -- because I know he's heading for a prolonged and painful end. There's also something of a contract in series crime fiction; as readers we expect our hero is going to resolve the problem and be around to take on the next one. So far, the books have generally conformed to that convention but if you're dealing with the real-life Bruno's chronology, it can't continue for long. I wonder why Parris didn't simply create a fictional hero based on Bruno -- it would have given her scope for a lot more books if he could hang around England longer, for one thing. Perhaps she'll exercise the fiction writer's license and simply have Bruno head out into an alternate future, where he chooses not to return to Italy and avoids the Inquisition. For the sake of the fictional character and my attachment, I hope so. Otherwise I fear this series is not going to see too many more installments. Sacrilege is set in 1584 and we know Bruno left England in 1585.

More on the real Giordano Bruno, if you're curious but don't want to read a whole book on the guy, is available on the Wikipedia page and in a New Yorker review of a recent biography.

My current reading is about another real-life Tudor-era figure who also met an early and unhappy end: I'm reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second in Hilary Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, the advisor to Henry VIII. But even though I know where he, too, is headed I don't mind entering Cromwell's mind and world. Maybe because it's literary fiction or perhaps because it is based on real events not embroidering on known facts, like the Bruno series. Or maybe because I knew Cromwell's fate from the beginning, and thus have been preparing myself all along. The third volume, which will presumably cover the Anne of Cleves disaster and Cromwell's downfall, should be a doozy.

It's not about the horse

A review of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie, along with consideration of The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak: First, the biography:

Only in the bizarre chessboard world of 18^th century European monarchy could an obscure princess from the German nation-state of Anhalt-Zerbst rise to become Empress of Russia, the vast and powerful nation that dominates the eastern part of the continent, then and now.

Catherine, writes biographer Robert K. Massie, was the equal of her illustrious predecessor Peter the Great – “his only equal – in vision, strength of purpose and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors and empresses.”

The story of her reign is fascinating but equally so is the unlikely tale of how it came about. Catherine – born Sophia – was plucked from relative obscurity by Empress Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the Great.

Elizabeth was childless and had taken her nephew, Peter, also a German, as her heir. For his consort, she chose another German related to Peter’s House of Holstein – little Sophia. As a young teenager, the princess was summoned to St. Petersburg.

While Sophia, soon rebaptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as Catherine, was an eager and willing student of Russian language, religion and culture, her young husband-to-be was not. Whether he was mentally ill or just damaged from a neglected and traumatic childhood, young Peter was certainly strange. He idolized the Prussian emperor Frederick the Great, and he spent most of his waking hours conducting pretend military drills in the Prussian manner. For his “soldiers,” he employed servants and, well into adulthood, dolls.

Young Catherine was left to learn the navigation of Russian imperial court life herself, dealing with the vain and unpredictable Elizabeth as well as her immature and unprepared young fiancé. Even after the pair were married – and Catherine had grown into an attractive young woman – the marriage went unconsummated and the heir Elizabeth had essentially ordered up did not appear.

Finally Catherine was encouraged to take a lover and she bore the first of her three children – fathered by three different men, none of them her husband, according to Massie. It was a boy and the delighted Empress Elizabeth immediately seized custody.

When Elizabeth died, Catherine’s husband Peter ascended the throne. His brief reign was a disaster. He tried to remake the Orthodox Church in the Lutheran image, ordering the destruction of icons and the shaving of the priests’ beards. He tried to remake the Russian Army in the image of his beloved Prussia, putting an uncle from Holstein with no military experience in command. And he embarked on a disastrous war with Denmark, over a territorial dispute that was important to Holstein but had no bearing on Russia. Within a few months “Peter had provoked and insulted the Orthodox Church, infuriated and alienated the army and betrayed his allies,” Massie writes.

Desperate, military and political men in Russia’s top circles turned to Peter’s wife – the mother of his purported son and heir, Paul. For the start of his reign she had been out of commission – pregnant with another child by a dashing Russian officer. Peter, meanwhile, had taken a mistress he much preferred to Catherine and hoped to replace her. But after giving birth, Catherine quickly reasserted her influence and seized the reins.

When a group of soldiers appeared at her residence, she told them “that her life and that of her son had been threatened by the emperor but that it was not for her own sake, but for that of her beloved country and their holy Orthodox religion that she was compelled to throw herself on their protection.”

From there, Catherine consolidated her hold on power -- helped along the way when her allies (including her lover's brother) -- managed to kill the deposed emperor in a dinnertime struggle at his place of confinement. Her regime claimed Peter died of hemorrhoidal colic (!)  but no one really believed it (even if few in Russia would dare to say so) and throughout Europe she was always considered a usurper even as she befriended Enlightenment figures including Diderot and Voltaire and created one of the world's great Western art collections, which survives today at the Hermitage.

Like Elizabeth I before her and Victoria after, Catherine's long and stable reign is a historical anamoly. A woman managing to gain, hold and exercise power and literally rule men is so incredibly unlikely that when it happens it becomes mythic. And unlike English queens, it appears Russian empresses were acknowledged to have sex lives, even outside of marriage. Empress Elizabeth and Catherine both had a series of "favorites" with all-hours access to their private chambers. Catherine eventually installed one as King of Poland (under heavy Russian control). The most famous, Gregory Potemkin, was rumored to be her husband though they never could have acknowledged it and their partnership evolved from romance to administration. Massie matter-of-factly recounts Catherine's lovers (a total of 12) but never brings up the notorious rumors about sexual relations with a horse. Untrue rumors, I should add. Even Snopes says so.

When Catherine died in 1796, her son Paul succeeded her -- but their relationship had always been a difficult one, starting from his birth when the Empress Elizabeth took him away and severely limited Catherine's access to her own son. Peter the Great had changed the law so that a Russian ruler could name his or own successor -- meaning Catherine had tactical power to keep her son under her control. When Paul finally reached the throne he changed it back to primogeniture, or the nearest male heir. "Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through," Massie writes. "And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman."

After reading the biography, it was interesting to see a different perspective on the German princess in Eva Stachniak's novel The Winter Palace. The story is told from the perspective of a Polish girl, a few years older than Catherine, who becomes a ward of Empress Elizabeth when her parents die while living in St. Petersburg. Barbara is recruited as a household spy by the aging Empress, directed to befriend Catherine and report back about the actions and thoughts of the Grand Duchess. Eventually, though, she becomes a sort of double agent, serving Catherine -- and simply seeking to survive the normal intrigues of palace life and then the upheaval after Elizabeth dies, Peter is deposed and Catherine takes over. After having read the biography, I was surprised at the portrait of Peter -- I wouldn't call it sympathetic but in Massie's account, he was far worse, especially in his treatment of Catherine. And his actions upon assuming the throne, both in allying himself with the Prussia, hated by most Russians, and in making enemies of the Orthodox Church, are almost unmentioned. Barbara herself is a fairly sympathetic character though even her developing relationship with her husband is merely hinted at. And this may be a bit of a spoiler but her disillusionment toward the end of the book seems just implausible -- surely someone who had spent so many formative -- and successful -- years at court would have developed a healthy self-protective realism and cynicism about the motives and duplicity of powerful people.

I enjoyed both these books, the biography more than the novel, though I will still read the next in Stachniak's planned series about Catherine. If nothing else, it makes a nice break from the machinations of the English court.

Catherine the Great: A-

The Winter Palace: B

Teaser Tuesdays: The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak

Are the Romanovs the new Tudors? First Robert K. Massie comes out with a blockbuster biography of Catherine the Great -- and it's a damned good book, too. Now Eva Stachniak gives the story the fictional treatment with The Winter Palace, a novel about Catherine's Russia written from the point of view of a Polish servant who becomes a confidant -- and spy -- for the German princess who will become Russia's greatest empress. The Teaser Tuesday rules: open to a random page, pick two sentences and post. If you wish, add your blog post in the comments section of the Should Be Reading blog.

So here's mine:

"Sprawled in her gilded armchair, chewing on a pork-belly slice, the Empress surveyed the scene of her making. Her feet rested on an embroidered footstool; folds of her purple dress framed her like soft drapery." (p. 292)

Yikes! I just started the novel -- but having read the biography I have a good idea what a formidable character Catherine turns out to be. Hope it's an entertaining journey ...

Future Perfect Continuous

It's all over but the workshops. Yet Another World materialized in the San Carlos for one night and three exhilarating days, and then it was over. What's left is the post-Seminar letdown ... and a massive new reading list.

I promised further explanation of this year's theme. Can't say I can, other than to reiterate that it isn't really dystopia -- though there was a good bit of that -- nor scifi, or speculative fiction as high-end scifi is frequently styled these days. The subtitle was "Literature of the Future" and the guiding texts were 1984 and Brave New World, if that helps. In his introduction in the Seminar's program, Program Chair James Gleick writes this, referring to the writers gathered for the Seminar: "What they do share -- what their work reveals -- is a deepening awareness of past and future, which also means an awareness that our world is not the only one possible."

I won't even try to come up with a coherent report about what the Seminar covered or explicating further on the theme -- keep an eye on the Seminar's always-expanding Audio Archives for recordings of individual sessions. Here, instead, is an episodic report of stuff I heard that I thought was interesting (and short) enough to jot down in my notebook.

Interesting information new to me

In his opening introduction, Gleick told us about a religion newly officially acknowledged as such in Sweden: Kopimism, or copyism, it is a religion dedicated to file sharing. Ctrl-C and Ctlr-V are sacred symbols. "That is not speculative fiction," Gleick said. "That is Wikipedia. And it wasn't there yesterday."

Sharks save swimmers, according to Jonathan Lethem. How? Because after a shark attack, the number of drowning deaths decreases for a few years.

Year of the Flood, according to Margaret Atwood, is not a sequel or prequel to Oryx & Crake but a simultaneal.

Colson Whitehead's first piece of professional writing, for the Village Voice, was a think piece about the series finales of Who's The Boss and Growing Pains.

After finishing a novel, Cory Doctorow buys a steampunk bondage mask from some specialty shop in Bulgaria. According to William Gibson.

After Chronic City was published, Wikipedia had to lock down the Marlon Brando page because fans of the book were trying to revive him in keeping with the book's plot.

Pithy quotes

"Paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself." -- Jonathan Lethem

"Technically every woman is the woman I never married. So why not call her Marie?" -- Charles Yu, from How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

"The real versus the unreal doesn't mean what it used to." == Jennifer Egan, discussing how much of our lives are now conducted virtually

"We may be tempted to dismiss books with ghosts and monsters in them. Scary is really hard to do." -- Michael Cunningham, who is currently adapting The Turn of the Screw for the screen

"I've always found someone like Beckett to be a form of high realism." -- Colson Whitehead

"MacArthur Park is an investigation of the artist's journey." -- Colson Whitehead

The human mind "is a factory for processing metaphors." -- China Mieville

"Everywhere I go, the empire collapses. The State Department is desperately trying to send me to China." -- Gary Shteyngart

On paranoia: "It's essential as a sensibility and it's disastrous as a world view." -- Jonathan Lethem

"The past is rumor. The future is speculation. The present is over. So where are we, as writers?" -- Valerie Martin

About that dystopia thing

Margaret Atwood has coined a term "ustopia" that covers both dystopia and utopia, normally cast as opposites. "They're much more like the ying and yang," she said. "Within each dystopia there's a little utopia and within every utopia there's definitely a little dystopia, especially for people who don't fit the plan."

About that steampunk thing

The Seminar's major disappointment was the spoiling of the panel addressing steampunk by the moderator's insistence on trying to make the panelists define the term (Why steam? Why punk?) -- and by the way the panelists were Dexter Palmer, China Mieville and William freaking Gibson. And when the panelists did offer definitions, and hints that it might be broader and more interesting than just young guys in funny mustaches, the moderator kept interrupting them and narrowing it down. Infuriating.

Despite that, the three extremely smart and extremely patient men managed to say some interesting things about steampunk as a genre, ethos and lifestyle choice. Mieville's definition was two words: Fantastical Victoriana. Gibson's is a little longer: Technologically driven alternative history.

When Mieville finally got to talk, he made a really interesting point about why steampunk has become so popular in the last 12 years. Victorian Britain, the epicenter of steampunk, was built on the proceeds of the Raj, Mieville pointed out. Yet in classic steampunk texts, there is no Raj. Steampunk, he said, expresses a "particular anxiety about resurgent imperialism." Mieville's disquisition met with loud applause from the audience. Unfortunately the moderator did not take this as a hint that he should get out of the way and let these guys talk. Oh well. Every Seminar has one. It was just too bad that this year's happened on the panel I was most looking forward to.

Books mentioned by Seminar authors that might be worth checking out

Futuredays by Isaac Asimov (mentioned by James Gleick in his program intro, includes the program illustrations by Jean Marc Cote)

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (mentioned by Jennifer Egan and Michael Cunningham)

Pavane by Keith Roberts (mentioned by William Gibson)

In Praise of Shadows by Junichuro Tanizaki (Gibson again)

Pandemonium 1660-1886 by Humphrey Jennings (yet another Gibson)

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell (mentioned by Valerie Martin)

Writers who could probably make it as TV stars and/or stand-up acts if the writing thing goes south

Margaret Atwood & Joyce Carol Oates (on some PBS Charlie Rose-style show)

Colson Whitehead

Gary Shteyngart

Margaret Atwood & Gary Shteyngart (on some late night Craig Ferguson-style show)

Cocktails created by Jason Rowan of Embury Cocktails for Seminar receptions

(Detailed descriptions appearing gradually ... )

City of Tomorrow

Future Perfect Continuous

Neurogibson

Atomic Sunset

Chocotopia

Release the Kraken

Fantastical Victoriana

In which I assert my coinage of the term Conch Gothic

Years ago, I came up with a term for the particular weirdness that occasionally erupts around here: Conch Gothic. This is more a sensibility than a literary genre, at least so far. The perfect exemplar of Conch Gothic would have to be the story of Elena Hoyos and Carl Von Cosel. Though I'm pretty sure serious weirdness has been going on here long before that. It's the island thing, I think, where isolation allows weirdness to develop in ways that other places might nix earlier -- paradoxically combined with the seaport diversity that gives places like this (and New Orleans and Savannah, for example) a live-and-let-live nonjudgmental ethos. I write this because 1) China Mieville said any movement or school of thought/writing needs to own its name and the name needs to be cool and 2) I mentioned Conch Gothic to William Gibson at a party Saturday night and he seemed to like it so if it shows up in a work of his fiction in the future, you'll know where he got it.

Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I've been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I'm not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction). Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews -- The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it's Grossman's unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction -- which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it's his noticing books that are not the usual suspects -- two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published -- though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That's A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

Why the George R.R. Martin? As so many others already knew, and millions more of us have discovered since HBO started airing the screen adaptation, this is an amazing world Martin has created, full of compelling characters and apparently endless plot possibilities. I've only read the first three books because 1) I'm waiting for a co-worker to finish Book 3 so we can talk about them as we read them and 2) I don't want to catch up to Martin too soon then become of those disgruntled fans who hates him because he's taking so long writing his next book. Grossman has an excellent explanation for why he chose Martin's latest book, A Dance With Dragons, in this Salon compilation of writers naming their favorite books of the year. In case you don't feel like scrolling through 50 writers, here's the meat of Grossman's case:

As for craft: Yeah, on the level of sentence, you couldn’t stack “A Dance With Dragons” up against Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” or Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child.” But as a plotter, an orchestrator and pacer of narratives that weave around and resonate with each other, Martin leaves them far, far behind. Is that important? Maybe not to the people who give out Pulitzers. But it’s important to me. It’s why “A Dance With Dragons” is the best book I read this year.

If I were to name the best literary nonfiction I read this year, I'd go with Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber, followed by The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. Outside of those, my top five were all genre: A Surfeit of Guns, by P.F. Chisholm, part of her entertaining Sir Robert Carey series and The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor, another historical crime novel. Honorable mentions to Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, the latest in his keeps-getting-better Matthew Shardlake series (soon to be on screen portrayed by Kenneth Branagh!) and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, the latest but I hope not the last of Sally Gunning's novels set in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.

As for nonfiction, I read a lot of good ones this year. Really good books, written by smart people who neither talked down to their readers nor preached to the academic choir. But my favorite came out of journalism: Rin Tin Tin by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. I'm a dog person for sure, but I am not a big consumer of dog books. I wouldn't even call this a dog book. It's a book about 20th century America, and about how an image can influence a culture. And it's a story about the incredible bond between a lonely man and the puppy he rescued on a World War I battlefield. Many twists and turns, with several side trips into related but separate storylines -- yet Orlean keeps it all together and keeps it moving and coherent. Brilliantly done.

The rest of my top five in nonfiction, in no particular order: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (who knew James Garfield was such a good guy? Certainly not me). She-Wolves by Helen Castor, about the women who ruled, or tried to rule England before Mary. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, about the rediscovery of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and how that poem helped usher in the modern world. The Magician's Book by Laura Miller -- my favorite kind of literary writing, where she tells the story of the book and of the book's impact on the culture in general and on her, as a reader, in particular. If you were a Narnia kid, and I was, this book feels like it was written just for you. Honorable mentions to Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great and Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm.

With the holiday boost in ereader sales, I expect we will be seeing even more of the essays predicting the death of literature, of reading, of writing, of culture, of life as we know it. Perhaps I am fooling myself, like a newspaper journalist circa 1998, but I don't think so. The modes are changing, the economics are changing and who gets published and what sells may change. But people appear to have a thirst for narrative, for stories in the form of the written word, that is spurring the production of plenty of good (and lots of terrible) books that are now available in all kinds of forms. It's certainly an unnerving time to be a publisher, or an aspiring writer, or, in some ways, a librarian. But as a reader I feel confident that the well is nowhere near running dry. On to 2012!