strange and random happenstance

The Secret Life of Mrs. London by Rebecca Rosenberg
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: January 30th, 2018
Format: Paperback, 348 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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Charmain London loves her husband Jack, the famous author, but sometimes their marriage feels like a boxing match both literally and figuratively. He longs to be surrounded by his comrades and friends while he holds court at his agrarian utopia, Beauty Ranch, while Charmain, his Mate-Woman, longs to be alone with him. She longs to share the same bed, feel his arms around her, but instead he uses his mate as he sees fit, even if it's fodder for his new book, The Little Lady of the Big House. He seems to be pushing her into the arms of their friend Lawrence all for his narrative needs. But when Charmain finally succumbs their world comes crashing down. Because that's the night that she not only betrayed her husband, but the night Wolf House, Jack's dream home, the monument to his success, what they had scrimped and saved and slaved for for years burned to the ground. Did Jack set the fire himself realizing what he drove his wife to? Or did Lawrence set the fire because he knew Charmain would never be his for more than a few moments? All this and more hangs over the couple when someone new enters their life. One night they go to see Houdini perform in San Francisco and Charmain is brought on stage to assist Houdini and his with Bess with their "Metamorphosis" act. Afterwards the two couples go out for dinner and Charmain and Bessie form a friendship over the struggles of loving men who are larger than life. Their friendship just begun must soon be tried as Jack's ill health returns and Charmain decides to take him to Hawaii, where they were happiest. Hopefully the magic will return to their marriage. Only she can't help thinking of another magic man... Houdini has worked his way into her heart and he will be there for her when she needs him most. But is it right to fall for her friend's husband? And who is she without Jack?

There are certain shared experiences that everyone connects to. A historical event you remember, a book you read, a movie you saw. These events make up our collective unconscious. Let's take The Call of the Wild. Every schoolkid growing up in America has in all likelihood read Jack London's The Call of the Wild or White Fang. In fact they're probably the only books your teachers made you read that you rather enjoyed. For me it was The Call of the Wild in seventh grade and I can still remember Buck's journey as being an escape from the drudgery and crippling amount of schoolwork. We all have Jack London's second wife and subject of this book, Charmain London, to thank for championing him after his death and making sure he became a part of our collective unconscious. Though for most of us it's been years, perhaps decades since we read these books and therefore the power of Jack London's writing is forgotten amongst his narrative. Recently I was rewatching Northern Exposure and I was reliving my main obsession with the show, which was my love of the ex-con DJ Chris Stevens, when I had the delightful surprise of Chris reading from The Call of the Wild. During the season three episode, "The Three Amigos," the words of Jack London served as a counterpoint to Maurice and Holling journeying out into the wilderness to bury their friend. But what struck me was the lyricism and power of London's writing. Sometimes just reading a book doesn't give you the full experience, you have to hear it aloud to fully appreciate it.

This new appreciation of London's writing was one of the reasons I was drawn to The Secret Life of Mrs. London and signed up for this blog tour. Rebecca Rosenberg's book deepened my admiration of London as she has begun each chapter in the first two parts with a quote from London's writing, whether novel or letter. It's a bold choice for a first time author. Because no matter what, the reader is going to compare her writing to London's, whether that was the intent or not. Whether her writing holds up... that's another question. Rosenberg tells her story plainly and interestingly, but she never reaches the lyricism of London. Yet this works in her favor. London's writing, while beautiful, can be a bit inaccessible. Sometimes it's so dense that it takes several readings to understand what he's getting at. Whereas Rosenberg's writing is accessible. She never hides her story behind verbose verbiage. This helps to mirror and bring home to the reader the loving yet somewhat antagonistic relationship between Charmain and Jack. Charmain is so relatable and Jack is a bit enigmatic, his motives even questioned by his wife, so that as a reader you can't help but root for Charmain. She is our heroine. Whatever happens, wherever she goes, whatever decisions she makes, both sound and slightly insane, by using London's own words against him we modern readers will always side with Charmain. She is our avatar to this world of literary wonders and she's able to make it real in a way London's writing doesn't for today's audience. No matter how much he was trying to capture the real on the page.

While reading The Secret Life of Mrs. London one can't help but think of 2016's much talked about and lauded book about Beryl Markham by Paula McLain, Circling the Sun. These are both women who were true originals, they were free spirits that didn't quite feel of their time. Adventurers that broke with conventions. What I find interesting is that many great writers live within these bubbles that are out of sync with their times and embrace free love. While Kenya was the haven for this kind of bed-hopping behavior, any community of artists would come under this kind of scrutiny and notoriety. They were known for standing out from the crowd and throwing convention to the wind. Rosenberg does a good job though in grounding Charmain within this lifestyle. This solid footing makes Charmain far more sympathetic and her actions understandable, not a betrayal to her husband. Being raised by her Aunt Netta she was exposed to a lifestyle that was fluid when it came to love, as Netta had two men in her life. Therefore when Charmain became London's lover and subsequently his second wife she understood that he was liable to wander. Being a very sexual being herself she understood this, but her dalliance that commences the book almost seems indulged in because it's what Jack wanted. He was playing a game with his wife for his own literary means. Yet she heavily feels her betrayal and when he betrays her in return it's just pain heaped on pain. They are by no means a functional couple, but they have a symbiotic relationship. They need each other, but at the same time they need more.

What Charmain ends up needing is Houdini, her Magic Man. What is so interesting about The Secret Life of Mrs. London is that it shows how truly messy love is. Jack is everything to Charmain, her home was where he was, and yet, despite him saying that she was his everything in return, it was clear through his infidelities that she wasn't. You can spout free love, but the truth of it was, Charmain wanted to remain loyal to her husband but her heart and her needs took her elsewhere. I don't know if the same could be said of her husband. Because she was willing to give him all the he got elsewhere, yet he never compromised and gave her what she needed. I couldn't help thinking about Hamilton while reading this book. Their wives, despite not having perfect husbands, are the ones who carried on their legacies, told their stories. Would London and Hamilton be this well remembered to this day if not for their beleaguered spouses? To an extent even Bessie Houdini carried on her husband's torch, holding a seance for him yearly after his death, just as he requested. All this is so interesting to me in that it's all about these women whose lives were in the shadows, yet were remarkable in their own right. History is putting them rightly back in their places and examining what their impact was. Charmain was Jack's editor and typist for years, her thoughts, her ideas, spun into his stories, and yet she is only remembered as Mrs. London. Living her life through these great men while never really living a life of her own. The end of the book gives you hope, but at the same time, she still, to this day, is only known as Mrs. London. Hopefully this book will help redress this wrong.

But now I must nitpick... Writing historical fiction that actually includes real historical figures as your leads is tricky. You are fictionalizing their life, to an extent. You have to get in their head and tell the story you want to tell but within the framework of their life, and I'm not convinced that Rebecca Rosenberg fully succeeds. The biggest problem I have is moving the burning down of Wolf House, Jack London's dream domicile, two years into the future so that it happens at the same time as the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. You can not do that! These are very specific set events! It's like saying, hey can we just move the start of World War I so that it fits my narrative better? Your narrative has to fit events not the other way around. Rosenberg admits that she condensed the timeline to be two instead of five years, but from my point of view she really didn't need to do this. The narrative could have easily spanned more time. The only reason I can see that this was done was in order for Charmain to think she was pregnant, father unknown, when she met the Houdinis. Which was, in my mind, unnecessary. But I'm sure Rosenberg would justify this with comparing the once fertile Charmain with the childlike Bessie... But back to my main point, Rosenberg has lots of weird time anomalies, some of which, such as the burning down of Wolf House I previously mentioned, I'm pretty sure she's aware of, as well as certain Houdini stunts that were shifted, while others are "words from the future." Yes, she uses words that are anachronistic to the time. Guess what? Pheromones didn't exist as a word until 1959, four years after Charmain died. A good editor should have flagged this... but editors, and good ones, are a dying breed. So authors, if you don't want your audience being temporarily taken out of the narrative, double and triple check everything.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Blog Tour, Charmain London, Circling the Sun, Hamilton, Harry Houdini, Jack London, Northern Exposure, Rebecca Rosenberg, San Francisco, The Call of the Wild, The Secret Life of Mrs. London, White Fang

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: July 28th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Beryl Markham would go down in history as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, but her story began when she was just four-year-old Beryl Clutterbuck and her family came to British East Africa so that her father could train horses. Within a year her mother and older brother returned to England but Beryl stayed with her father in Africa. She grew up wild and free, in love with the horses, the land, and the natives. Over the years her father attempted to tame her with governesses and schooling, but Beryl was too willful and wild. That would change when her father announced that he was being forced to sell their farm. He couldn't afford to keep it and had agreed to take a job in South Africa. At sixteen Beryl had a hard choice to make. She could either go with her father or she could accept the proposal of marriage that their neighbor, Jock Purves, had put on the table. Beryl reluctantly agreed to marry Jock, hoping that her life would continue on in much the same why it had. She was wrong. Beryl bucked at the constraints of marriage and soon took off. She left her husband behind and took to training horses, eventually becoming the first licensed female racehorse trainer. She had many ups and downs in her career training horses and in her love life. But it was the love triangle between her, Karen Blixen, and Denys Finch Hatton that shaped her most. Denys was the love of her life and he was the one who first showed her how to fly. And oh, how she soared.

Beryl Markham is an interesting character to read about for those intrigued by Kenya during it's heyday. Because she arrived in the colony at such a young age with her family and stayed there for much of her life her story is like getting the best of Elspeth Huxley and Isak Dinesen. You get the pioneering beginning and the decadent lifestyle Kenya became notorious for all with one person. Add to this that it is written by a modern writer, Circling the Sun has more approachable prose than the dense morass of pretension that tended to flow out of Isak Dinesen. This book is a good starting off point for those wanting to know more about this fascinating time period, but I can only hope that after dipping in they'll dig deeper. Because for everything this book gets right it gets ten things wrong. It presents an easily digestible and palatable version of events that doesn't uncover the whole truth. Circling the Sun is like the Lifetime Movie version of what really happened in Kenya, stupid framing device and all. Yes, it is hard to get at the truth of what really happened during this time period seeing as the Happy Valley Set were all highly literate and writing their own skewed version of events, but there's just something so flat about this book in the end that you can't help wanting there to have been something more, some insight.

For someone who broke all the rules and was a woman ahead of her time McLain's depiction of Beryl is just flat. There is no passion, no life breathed into her. You forge no connection to McLain's subject. She never becomes alive, forever staying as ink on a page, a dry dusty woman who would have been forgotten by history if not for Ernest Hemingway's interest in West with the Night. At the beginning of the book with Beryl's childhood you feel an inkling that this will be an epic story full of insight, up there with Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika. But as the book progresses it starts to rely heavily on telling us not showing us, the death knell of any story. As Beryl is trying to regain control of her life it almost feels as if McLain is channeling this desire for control to the point where the construct of Beryl is not even letting the reader in. This makes the book become flatter and flatter and more atonal as you progress. What little interest you had in Beryl is completely gone as she is written out of significance by McLain's bland storytelling. At the very end of the book there's a last ditch effort by McLain, perhaps realizing that she had failed to do Beryl justice, where she speechifies about freedom, but it's too late. It comes across as preachy and fails entirely to get the point across she was attempting to make.

Yet what I did find interesting is that McLain was actually, for a time, able to make topics that I would normally hate interesting, IE horses and flying. McLain might not have captured Beryl, but she did capture the spirit of horses and racing that predominated Kenyan society. I have never been a horse person, and never will be, though I will admit to liking the spirit of the races that grip the country every May with the Kentucky Derby. The horses and how Beryl rehabilitated several and got her license, that was all oddly fascinating. What I found bizarre though was that for a woman known for flying there was a disproportion in the book. McLain lavishes so much on the training of the horses by the time she gets to Beryl and her flying it's kind of like, there's no time left, I'm wrapping it up, story's over. Say what? I just read hundreds of pages about mud near a certain lake and how it could help a horse with injured limbs yet Beryl gets up in a plane and it's all, whatever, you don't need to know about this. Seeing as Beryl was forever seeking freedom, wouldn't that translate well into writing about flying? Not to mention her freakin' book she wrote on it!?! But as I said before, for every one thing that was right another ten things were wrong.

What I found most wrong and strongly objectionable was the depiction of Karen Blixen, who most people will know by her pen name, Isak Dinesen. Because of her book Out of Africa people have this very romanticized version of Karen Blixen that lives in their head. This wasn't helped by the movie. Personally, I don't get it. The book isn't well written. Period. This isn't a point I'm ever going to argue with people because in my mind just pick up the book and read it and if you can actually finish it, I'm sure you'll come around to my POV. Sure, the movie might be pretty, but Redford? Really? The reason I mention the reverence for the book and it's author is that it felt like McLain had a need to preserve the integrity of Blixen instead of telling the truth. She handles Blixen with kid gloves, Beryl is always talking about how wonderful she is and how guilty she felt for being trapped in a love triangle with her. Here's the truth. Everyone in Kenya couldn't stand Blixen. They viewed her as a pretentious pill who always thought she knew better than everyone else. This isn't just from all the history books I've read, a family friend knew her. So I would have far more preferred a bit of truth-telling than coddling the image of an author that in my mind doesn't really even warrant that title.

But there's a lot of truth omitted in this book... This is in fact where I finally lost patience with Circling the Sun. I felt like McLain was forever circling the truth but was never brave enough to come out and say it. She kept Blixen the paragon her readers believed her to be and made Beryl a little more... I don't know how to say this, relatable by bending the truth? Palatable? Because McLain makes Beryl a hard working woman who occasionally falls prey to her desires, and that's not true. The scene that really got me was Beryl's disgust at Idina Sackville's sex party. Beryl was actually a very promiscuous woman. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, especially given the time and the climate of Kenya, it was basically expected, and she might indeed have had issues with Idina's party. Yet McLain makes it seem that Beryl is a bit of a prude. Which is anything but the truth. The truth is she had sexual relations with many of the men in her life, yet here the truth is bent to make her relationships with these men seem just friendships. Oh, and the straw that broke the camel's back? Yes, McLain discusses in detail the abortion of Denys's baby after their first sexual encounter. But does she talk about the later abortion? The fact that when Denys died she was pregnant again? Nope. McLain doesn't. And in the end that one final omission made me throw up my hands and view this book NOT as historical fiction of a real person but pure fantasy. That isn't what I read this book for. I wanted insight, truths, to get under the skin of Beryl. If that's what you want as well, look elsewhere.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Africa, Backlog Bonanza, Beryl Markham, Circling the Sun, Denys Finch Hatton, Elspeth Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Kenya, Out of Africa, Paula McLain, West with the Night

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
Published by: Ballantine Books
Publication Date: July 28th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Paula McLain, author of the phenomenal bestseller The Paris Wife, now returns with her keenly anticipated new novel, transporting readers to colonial Kenya in the 1920s. Circling the Sun brings to life a fearless and captivating woman—Beryl Markham, a record-setting aviator caught up in a passionate love triangle with safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and Karen Blixen, who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic memoir Out of Africa.

Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature’s delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships.

Beryl forges her own path as a horse trainer, and her uncommon style attracts the eye of the Happy Valley set, a decadent, bohemian community of European expats who also live and love by their own set of rules. But it’s the ruggedly charismatic Denys Finch Hatton who ultimately helps Beryl navigate the uncharted territory of her own heart. The intensity of their love reveals Beryl’s truest self and her fate: to fly.

Set against the majestic landscape of early-twentieth-century Africa, McLain’s powerful tale reveals the extraordinary adventures of a woman before her time, the exhilaration of freedom and its cost, and the tenacity of the human spirit."

I am a sucked for all things Kenya, especially during this period. I should note though that Out of Africa is the exception to this rule. I hate that book.

The Complete Chi's Sweet Home Part 1 by Konami Kanata
Published by: Vertical Comics
Publication Date: July 28th, 2015
Format: Paperback, 480 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"Chi is a michievous newborn kitten who, while on a leisurely stroll with her family, finds herself lost. Seperated from the warmth and protection of her mother, feels distraught. Overcome with loneliness she breaks into tears in a large urban park meadow., when she is suddenly rescued by a young boy named Yohei and his mother. The kitty is then quickly and quietly whisked away into the warm and inviting Yamada family apartment...where pets are strictly not permitted.

The Complete Chi's Sweet Home collects Chi's Sweet Home vol 1, Chi's Sweet Home vol 2 and Chi's Sweet Home vol 3 and includes never before translated comics from Konami Kanata in a new larger trim size!"

I adore Chi so much, this little kitty is infectious in her awesomeness. This would be a great edition to anyone's library who hasn't checked her out yet.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Published by: William Morrow
Publication Date: July 28th, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
To Buy

The official patter:
"The #1 New York Times bestselling author’s ultimate edition of his wildly successful first novel featuring his “preferred text”—and including the special “Neverwhere” tale “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back.”

Published in 1997, Neil Gaiman’s darkly hypnotic first novel, Neverwhere, heralded the arrival of this major talent and became a touchstone of urban fantasy. Over the years, a number of versions were produced both in the U.S. and the U.K. Now, this author’s preferred edition of his classic novel reconciles these versions and reinstates a number of scenes cut from the original published books.

Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London businessman with a good heart and an ordinary life, which is changed forever when he is plunged through the cracks of reality into a world of shadows and darkness—the Neverwhere. If he is ever to return to the London Above, Richard must join the battle to save this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it."

Sentimentally my favorite Gaiman book. Also I'm very excited that the short story about the Marquis is included.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Beryl Markham, Cats, Chi, Chi's Sweet Home, Circling the Sun, Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen, Kenya, Konami Kanata, Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, Out of Africa