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Category Archives: Books and literature

Spring into fall

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With the cooler, even cold temperatures of what seems like a premature fall, and distance from my surgery and permanent separation from Ignatius the tenacious fibroid, my energy levels have risen. During the past year or two, I seemed to spend several hours of every weekend in a torpor of deep napping. I still doze off every now and then, but usually not for entire wasted afternoons at a time. With my shoulder (impingement syndrome) feeling better after a couple of bad days earlier in the month, this weekend I was able to collect and toss the trash, clear junk off the coffee table, stay on top of the dishes, clean the bathroom, vacuum, and take care of laundry. It may not sound like much to a normal person, but for me it was quite an amazing feat. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the place is straightened up, clean, or presentable.

Last Sunday, the 4th, I met J. at the Homewood train station. But I didn’t meet just J. He called to tell me that G., the disabled man he drives to church and Caribou Coffee, was still with him because, when he had tried to drop him off, they’d found the house deserted and locked. Because someone was expected at 2:30 p.m., we went to a bagel place to kill the time. G. could have come with us — we were headed to an art fair at Swallow Cliff Woods — but J. would have had to drive north, then south, then back north again. Waiting worked out, and G. even got a bowl of chili out of it. He’s diabetic and sometimes seems to have wildly fluctuating glucose levels, so J. is reluctant to provide him with anything other than coffee for fear it will have an effect on his numbers. Chili may not be healthful, but I figured it wouldn’t make his glucose spike, either. He enjoyed it, and I appreciated feeling free from guilt.

Finally, we took G. home, then made for Swallow Cliff Woods via Wolf (“Woof” in J.’s lingo) Road. Along here are still some cornfields, old farmhouses, decaying outbuildings, and remnants of rural culture. Parts of it could pass for southern New York or the flatter bits of central Pennsylvania. Sadly, however, more corner signs have sprung up advertising lots for sale — that open field bordered by trees is probably doomed to become another strip mall because there just aren’t enough of those in the Chicago area.

Further north, although I am not sure exactly where, we came across a place where the fields had been converted into a McMansion development. The houses are so large that J. thought surely some of them must be apartments. But no — I’m certain they are single-family homes. I can’t fathom why people choose to live in enormous houses on relatively small plots of land squished together. For the money, I’d rather have a more modestly sized house on a few acres, with a little breathing room outdoors as well as in. The style of these dwellings added to their strangely mass produced ostentatiousness — from the glimpses I had of the materials and look, I thought they were intended to mimic European country chateaux. That is, if country chateaux were clumped together on dimes of land in suburban subdivisions. A man’s home truly is his castle — minus the estate.

After a few wrong turns here and there — thanks to Google Maps on the iPhone, at least we avoided driving into cul-de-sac traps — we arrived at Swallow Cliff Woods. The sun was peering out intermittently, throwing a little cheer and warmth across the field where the artists had pitched their tents.

After picking up some honey, J. settled in at a tent where what he called “fuzzies” — hand-crafted Christmas decorations and the like — were sold, while I wandered ahead. As happens periodically, I found myself tempted to buy a block of amethyst — it looks so magical, and reminds me of my late aunt — but as also happens I resisted. Instead, I headed for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County tent, where they were attempting to find people to recruit as volunteers. I had to break it to the friendly woman that I’m unable to serve, but we had a good talk about invasive species and what volunteers do. I mentioned Volo Bog State Natural Area, which is touted as the only quaking bog in Illinois. In a show of competitiveness, she hastily pointed out that portions of one of their bogs also quake. J., who had appeared, duly noted one of the places she mentioned as a good spot to visit.

The find of the day was Joe Nowak (For the Love of Nature), a wildlife photographer who prides himself on his unretouched photos, taken with a 35mm camera on Fujifilm. His photos are amazing — a red-tailed hawk illuminated by a ray of sunshine, a great horned owl so blended into the tree bark that it takes several efforts to find, a deer scratching its ears with a hind hoof. He and his wife told us that the owl photos are possible thanks to a woman they call the “owl whisperer”; she has an uncanny ability to sense and spot owls and their nests even while driving full speed down the highway. She’d found the camouflaged owl on a golf course and alerted them. His photos and their conversation were delightful.

You can’t visit Swallow Cliff Woods without walking up the old toboggan run stairs. For some people, this means making dozens of trips up and down in the pursuit of fitness. For me, one round trip, with many rest stops on the way up, then broken by a walk in the woods before heading down cautiously, tests the limits of my worn knees and aching back and lungs. Later, on the long way down, we were passed, back and forth at least four or five times, by a determined woman who almost bounded effortlessly. From the bottom we watched her slightly splayed stride, which looked easy. An older man, who also made the round trip several times, did so much more laboriously, soaking his shirt with perspiration. That was me after one trip up.

This time at the top we veered down a path to the left instead of taking the main trail straight ahead. While more level and less of a challenge to walk, it was more interesting visually, with tree-covered ravines that reminded me of New York and Pennsylvania. This seemed to be the way less traveled, a little more hushed, except for a few people like us walking along and the lone cyclist who couldn’t, wouldn’t, or didn’t read the sign prohibiting bicycles and who flew toward and past us with a cheery whoosh.

I remember the summer evening we were at Swallow Cliff Woods after dark, when thousands of fireflies lighted intermittently, transforming the familiar into the magic. Now the fireflies are long gone, having taken summer with them.

Later, we undid all the good we’d done our bodies with dinner at Hackney’s in Palos Park.

The following Saturday, the 10th, J. called me in the morning — unusual for him. I deduced correctly that he’d worked overnight. He wanted to go to Bonjour, and we arrived in time for him to order the breakfast special — Madame or one of her helpers even threw in a drink sample and a miniature croissant. While we chatted, I amused myself by watching people walking away from the neighborhood’s annual book fair with bags, boxes, and carts of books. (The next day, I encountered a young woman on the Flamingo’s elevator who “just wanted to get some groceries” but had succumbed to the allure of the printed word, buying a bag full of bargain books that was clearly weighing her down. “Now I have to go back,” she lamented. “For food.”)

While J. mailed his taxes, I shopped the biography and poetry sections. I found a two-volume biography of John Adams, a volume of Catullus, and some other treasures. I saw, but didn’t buy, a multi-volume poetry set inscribed in spidery writing with a woman’s name, “Bryn Mawr College, 1903.” I doubt many of my college books, not nearly so beautifully bound, will resurface in such fair condition at a 2085 book sale.

While I cleaned the bathroom, I let J. sleep for an hour or so, the off we went to the Chicago Botanic Garden. We shopped; checked out the orchids, which strike me as ranging from sexy to sinister; and walked around the nearly dead rose garden, the English walled garden, and the waterfall. The walled garden reminds me of The Secret Garden, naturally. Oh, to have a private walled garden retreat where magic at least seems possible. Walled gardens and waterfalls — where dreams are real, or reality a dream.

This time, we found Blind Faith Café without too many detours. The menu had changed, so J. chose a Native American-inspired entrée while I opted for black bean tostadas, both vegetarian. We also picked up baked goods, etc., to go. He’d commented earlier that some of the wall quilts seemed to have disappeared, while I noticed that the merchandise — T-shirts and the like — were missing. J. had better hold onto his old Blind Faith Café vase, as it could soon prove to be nearly one of a kind.

And so home, tired, sated, and happy for a time. Outdoors, among the trees, I come alive.

Book review: Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life

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Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Shirley Foster. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. 480 pages.

A tale of Manchester working life set in the 1830s, Mary Barton begins as bucolically as any gritty urban novel can. The Bartons, who are expecting an addition to the family, meet the Wilsons, who are carrying their infant twins, at Green Heys Fields. The charm of these low, flat, treeless tracts lies in their rural contrast to “the busy, bustling manufacturing town [he] left but half an hour ago.” The couples adjourn to the Barton home for tea, where Gaskell lovingly describes every modest luxury such working folk can manage — the bright green japanned tea tray with its scarlet lovers, the cupboard of crockery and glass of which Mrs. Barton is so proud, and the hodgepodge of furniture (“sure sign of good times among the mills”). In honor of their guests, the Bartons send young Mary out for fresh eggs (“one a-piece, that will be five pence”), milk, bread, and Cumberland ham.

Thus Mary Barton commences with a self-conscious air of cautious prosperity, but underneath the pleasure of the occasion are hints of despair to come — Mrs. Barton’s distress over the disappearance of her sister, and the Wilsons’ “little, feeble twins, inheriting the frail appearance of their mother.” In chapters I and II, Gaskell sets up the end of abundance and joy for the Bartons and the beginning of misery for their entire class in the mill city of Manchester.

Mary Barton is a novel of contrasts. While the Bartons take homely pride in their furniture and wares, the Carsons live in a “good house . . . furnished with disregard to expense . . . [with] much taste shown, and many articles chosen for their beauty and elegance.” As Carson’s former employee, Ben Davenport, lies dying in a filthy basement in the company of his wife and children, who are “too young to work, but not too young to be cold and hungry,” Carson’s youngest daughter Amy tells her brother and father that she “can’t live without flowers and scents” and that “life was not worth having without flowers.” They can’t live without food and shelter, and she thinks she can’t live without luxuries. Perhaps the most terrible contrast is between the “listless, sleepy” Carson sisters and the tragedy that interrupts their idle chatter.

The contrast and conflict between the rich and the poor, the men and the masters, is not conventionally based on envy or even class; Carson was once no better and no richer than anyone else. The men don’t aspire to wealth, at least for now. They want to feed their families and perhaps to enjoy the simple comforts the Bartons once shared with the Wilsons. What keeps masters and men apart is not class or money, but a more fundamental unwillingness to acknowledge the other’s humanity. Mr. Carson can’t be bothered to recall who Ben Davenport is, other than one of the many faceless men who worked for him for many years, or to give Wilson more than a useless outpatient order. Instead of approaching the masters, the men, who are powerless as individuals, join groups and send delegates like John Barton to London and Glasgow to try to gain government support for their cause. On their own, they fail.

Neither side is willing to break the communication barrier. Ignoring one of their number who wisely notes, “I don’t see how our interests can be separated,” the masters choose to hide the conundrum they face from the men, who are described as “cruel brutes . . . more like wild beasts than human beings.” Even as the omniscient narrator shows the just causes for both groups’ anger toward one another and tries to avoid demonstrating a preference, she can’t resist retorting parenthetically, “Well, who might have made them [the men] different?” It takes a murder and a near miscarriage of justice merely to open the door to redemption for the man in each side’s leading role.

Mary becomes the fulcrum of the characters and plot, connecting the Bartons to the Carsons, the unforgiving John to the repentant Esther, the worldly men and the more spiritually minded women. Through positive and negative models like Alice, Job, Margaret, Esther, Mrs. Wilson, and Sally, and through her true and patient if frustrated lover, Mary avoids Esther’s fate and is transformed from a heedless young girl into a courageous woman who is able to withstand the pull of her divided loyalties.

Confronted with the undeniable humanity of John Barton and the relentlessness of his unfamiliar poverty, Mr. Carson finally recognizes the need for change. As guardian of the old institutions, however, he struggles with his ambivalence toward taking action. Meanwhile, Mary Barton simply leaves the dead and the past behind to embrace an entirely different kind of future in a new country.

Mary Barton lacks some of the psychological depth and nuances that make Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters more interesting and engaging; here, the characters behave consistently and predictably. Despite the ease of its characterizations and assumptions, though, Mary Barton is a surprisingly stark, unvarnished look at the poorer, seamier side of urban industrial life. Gaskell accomplishes what the masters and men have failed to do — she recognizes the humanity in each of them and hints at its potential if only it is discovered and embraced.

16 September 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

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A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. New York: Broadway Books. 2003. 560 pages.

To me, the sciences are fascinating but elusive. The concepts are marvelous and compelling, but the details are difficult and tedious, especially if your grasp of mathematics is as tenuous as mine. I grew up with a love for what I knew of astronomy and the underlying physics, and an interest in such things as geology, paleontology, and meteorology. These subjects are taught badly, if taught at all, and I never understood them well enough for my curiosity to deepen into understanding.

That’s where The Short History of Nearly Everything comes in. Bill Bryson explains much of what we know and how we came to know it through an abundance of examples and similes, not through formulas and theories. Not surprisingly, he’s at his weakest in the most difficult areas. He tries to explain particle physics but is forced to fall back, fairly enough, on, “The fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don’t know . . . The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.” When it comes to string theory, he throws up his hands helplessly, which is understandable since most physicists seem to find it nearly impossible to articulate. Bryson is on firmer ground with Einstein’s theories, which make more sense to me now — gravity is not a force, per se, but “a product of the bending of spacetime . . . no longer so much a thing as an outcome.” Even here, though, he admits, “Our brains can take us only so far because it is nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space to one part time, all interwoven like the threads in a plaid fabric.”

Where Bryson shines brightest is on terra firma, geology and the earth as well as ocean sciences. As Bryson shows in numerous cases, once upon a time, science wasn’t just for scientists. Charles Smithson of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was not just a figment of author John Fowles’ imagination, but representative of a Victorian spirit of scientific interest and discovery. Even Einstein, at the time he published his special theory of relativity, had attended only a four-year course “designed to churn out high school science teachers” and was working in the Swiss patent office — not exactly the type of credentials associated with today’s Nobel Prize winners. The 1800s were an especially fruitful time for dedicated amateurs represented in literature by characters such as Smithson and Roger Hamley of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. There was Roderick Murchison, who “became with rather astonishing swiftness a titan of geological thinking,” or fossil collector and seller Mary Anning, who was the first to discover a plesiosaurus (not, as Bryson puts it, to “find the first plesiosaurus”) and who “could extract [fossils] with the greatest delicacy and without damage.” Lest we think the entrepreneurial spirit of science dead, however, Bryson introduces Reverend Robert Evans, who, from his home in Australia, had as of early 2003 discovered 36 supernovae. To help the reader comprehend the magnitude of this feat, Bryson provides ample context.

Science is often focused on the numbers, but it’s difficult for the human mind to grasp the very large and the very small that are well outside our physical perception. If my teachers had used comparisons and analogies like Bryson’s and his sources, I and my classmates might have understood the significance of all those swirling numbers and formulae. For example, most of us have seen the typical solar system chart neatly tucked into a textbook or displayed on a poster. But the planets don’t come one after the other at “neighborly intervals.” If Earth were the diameter of a pea, “Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway”). Bryson adds that the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be nearly 10,000 miles away at this scale. It’s easier to appreciate the size and wonder of the universe when presented in a tangible way rather than as a bunch of 10s with superscripts.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — astronomy, earth science, oceanography, physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, origins of man, and even the microbes that keep us healthy and make us miserable. Earth and its life depend on delicately balanced systems and processes, with the potential for natural or man-made disaster ever present. The chapter on the Yellowstone supervolcano (“Dangerous Beauty”) would keep any nervous soul up a few nights, while humbling chapters like “Lonely Planet” reveal how much of what we rely on is beyond our control — the molten nature of Earth’s interior, our moon that is just the right size and orbit to keep our planet stabilized, the position of the Earth relative to the sun (five percent closer or 15 percent farther, and we would cease to exist as we know ourselves). Bryson reminds us that we are a hair’s breadth from unpredictable and/or unpreventable disaster, whether from space or from within our own home.

As we live day to day, going to work, shopping, eating, sleeping, spending time with friends, even vacationing with the family at Yellowstone, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of more than a neighborhood, a city, or even a country. We’re also part of the complex systems that sustain us, our planet Earth, and the universe around us. If you have, A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything may help you to recall the wonder and the fragility of it all.

17 May 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. New York: Simon & Schuster. 2003. 608 pages.

As the Founding Father who spent most of the American Revolution in France, Benjamin Franklin often seems more caricature than patriot in today’s American imagination. In children’s cartoons, he’s portrayed as an eccentric old man flying a kite in a thunderstorm. Adults think of him as a lusty old man charming the ladies of Paris. In Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson attempts to flesh out a man who defies description — a printer turned writer turned postmaster turned inventor turned Enlightenment scientist turned patriot turned diplomat. Franklin, a man of the “middling class,” did as much to establish the American dream as to define American democracy.

If Thomas Jefferson bequeathed us with lofty philosophical prose, Franklin left us with his streamlined homilies and plans for personal improvement. Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey would have felt at home with the practical and prudent Franklin, who, naturally did not always live up to his own standards. At times Franklin’s business practices seemed questionable, his friendship with men many but shallow, and his marriage breezily detached. Strangest of all was his relationship with his son, William, who was firmly ensconced on the British side of the conflict. Each time William reached out to his father, the normally conciliatory Franklin rebuffed him, his loyalty to colonies and cause stronger than bonds of blood. Conscious of his place in history and eager to shape the future’s opinion of him, Franklin intentionally distanced himself from William — yet positioned his autobiography as a letter to his son.

For the most part, the discoveries and inventions that established Franklin among his Enlightenment peers came in the prime of middle age, after his retirement from business. His accomplishments raised him in society, especially in France, above his middle-class roots. Compared to his fellow Founders, Franklin was well traveled and well connected. With his extroverted personality, pragmatic approach, and cachet as a scientist, Franklin was the natural choice to represent the rebellious colonies and to woo allies to their cause.

Franklin spent most of the war in France and did not have much face-to-face interaction with his fellow rebel leaders except those sent to Paris to assist him or to keep an eye on him. Isaacson cites numerous passages from his correspondence, describes his rocky relationship with the somewhat dubious John Paul Jones, and recounts highlights from his friendships with luminaries such as David Hume, Joseph Banks, Beaumarchais, Voltaire, and the duc de la Rouchefoucauld, yet Franklin and Franklin, both man and biography, seem distant from the action. As Isaacson notes, however, he was “instrumental in shaping the three great documents of the war: the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, and the treaty with England.” Indeed, one of Franklin’s small edits to the Declaration altered its tone; Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be sacred” became Franklin’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Benjamin Franklin illuminates much of what is fascinating about the birth of American-style democracy; a unique combination of personalities, backgrounds, beliefs, and temperaments came together to define and strive for freedom, with no consensus on what that meant. Washington brought natural leadership; Jefferson, an understanding of and appreciation for Enlightenment philosophy; Sam and John Adams, passion and fire; and Franklin the practical sensibilities of the middle class blended with worldly knowledge. They did not always get along (John Adams: “That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow.”) Contrary to current popular belief, they did not agree on democracy. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts declared, “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” while Roger Sherman of Connecticut said the people “should have as little to do as may be possible about government.” Franklin, according to Isaacson, “favored direct elections, trusted the average citizen, and resisted anything resembling elitism.” His constitution for Pennsylvania “was the most democratic of the new states’.” Years after Franklin’s death, John Adams “even cast Franklin’s lack of religious commitment, which he had once derided as verging on atheism, in a more favorable light: ‘All sects considered him, and I believe justly, a friend to unlimited toleration.'”

Franklin, the middle-class espouser of middle-class virtues like prudence, frugality, and temperance, used his gifts to rise above his station, but didn’t lose sight of it. When today’s pundits talk about the intentions of the Founding Fathers (as though they were agreed on anything) and try to force an uncomfortable marriage between capitalist greed and religion, they might consider the real Benjamin Franklin, not the caricature: A self-made man who moved with ease among the ranks of the noble and the wealthy but never joined them and who believed in every man’s right to practice his own religion in his own way.

15 March 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

In all, not the best place for the comma

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At 2:15 a.m., I couldn’t understand this sentence from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

In all, the internal turmoil particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges.

After a few moments I mentally moved the comma:

In all the internal turmoil, particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges.

Only Bryson and his editor know whose choice it was to (unintentionally) misplace the comma, given the sentence’s meaning. It makes it read like a bad foreign language translation.

And so to bed. Again.

Elizabeth Gaskell — writing passion

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Most mainstream Victorian authors like Elizabeth Gaskell generally aren’t known for the sensuality of their writing, but the Brontës weren’t the only ones who could write about passion. Here are some evocative quotations from Gaskell’s Mary Barton, a novel about the working class in 1830s Manchester:

. . . triumphant fire . . . sent forth its infernal tongues from every window hole, licking the black walls with amorous fierceness . . .

Jem felt a strange leap of joy in his heart, and knew the power she had of comforting him. He did not speak, as though fearing to destroy by sound or motion the happiness of that moment, when her soft hand’s touch thrilled through his frame, and her silvery voice was whispering tenderness in his ear. Yes! it might be very wrong; he could almost hate himself for it; with death and woe so surrounding him, it yet was happiness, was bliss, to be so spoken to by Mary.

Meanwhile, her words — or, even more, her tones — would maintain their hold on Jem Wilson’s memory. A thrill would yet come over him when he remembered how her hand had rested on his arm. The thought of her mingled with all his grief, and it was profound, for the loss of his brothers.

What were these hollow vanities to her, now she had discovered the passionate secret of her soul?

This quotation from a tale told by old Job Legh is about passion of a sort, and it’s a marvelous image that captures the imagination:

So says she, quite quick, and stealing a look at her husband’s back, as looked all ear, if ever a back did . . .

Erotic treasury’s journey

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A couple of months ago, I bought an ex-library copy of An Uninhibited Treasury of Erotic Poetry edited by Louis Untermeyer and published in 1963 from Andrew Halldorson Books through AbeBooks. Tonight when I was putting a cloth dust jacket on it, I noticed there was a slip in the old-style library pocket. It was due back to the Lansing, Michigan, library on January 15, 1968 — 41 years ago, when I was six years old. In all this time, no one had removed what was possibly the book’s final due date slip. Had this copy been retired after only five years?

Beyond the written words, I wonder how much history is in that book.

Book review: Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery

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Who Murdered Chaucer? A Medieval Mystery by Terry Jones, Robert Yeager, Terry Dolan, Alan Fletcher, and Juliette Dor. London: Methuen Publishing Ltd. 2003. 420 pages.

Geoffrey Chaucer was justice of the peace, knight of the shire, friend of the king, and “greatest living poet.” Abruptly, around 1400, this “public man of affairs” was never heard from again. Who Murdered Chaucer? stems from a coroner’s inquest into Chaucer’s disappearance staged at the Sorbonne in 1998 for the New Chaucer Society Congress. The resulting book is a smart, often irreverent layman’s probe into the fate of the man who, through The Canterbury Tales and other works, helped to establish English as a literary language.

Even at a 600-year-old crime scene, context is everything, and the authors explore the efforts that Henry IV and his allies may have made to obscure Chaucer’s memory. Painstakingly sifting through the clues that remain, they develop a convincing case that Chaucer was murdered for his political loyalties, religious leanings, and advocacy of the written English language.

The authors set the stage on which Chaucer played a number of roles, describing the progressive court of his patron, Richard II, and the turmoil that conflicting values and change invariably bring. On one side were John Wyclif and his followers, trying to make the Bible and God accessible to the people and to shame the church into reforming itself. On the other were the conservative barons and church leaders who stood to lose money and power in a world in which art and discourse might take the place of conflict, and the common man might be empowered to question age-old beliefs and practices. With the usurpation by Henry IV and the return of Thomas Arundel as Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer became a prominent man who suddenly stood on the wrong side of the important questions.

Much of the initial focus here is not on Chaucer, but on the history surrounding Richard II and the nature of his court, the barons’ rebellion, and the Peasants’ Revolt, and Henry’s usurpation. Later, the authors examine Chaucer’s surviving works, including The Canterbury Tales and illustrations, as well as the writings of his contemporaries, for clues as to how he may have antagonized the new regime and how he may have met his end. For example, they speculate that Hoccleve’s eulogy hints at an end that is both untimely and violent: “Death was too hasty to run at you and rob you of your life.” Puzzled by the discrepancies between Chaucer’s text and the Ellesmere manuscript illuminations, the authors examined the art microscopically and discovered that some of it had been clumsily altered, then speculate why.

Academics and historians may chafe at such conjectures, but generally they make sense. Occasionally, though, they do not. According to the authors, the Peasants’ Revolt “presented the royal faction with a tempting opportunity to eliminate the baronial opposition,” but they offer no feasible explanation for why Richard II turned on the rebels after he “signed their pardons and granted their requests.” Without understanding what happened and why Richard acted so treacherously and brutally, it’s hard for the authors to make a solid case, as they try to do, that Richard was not the unpopular monarch portrayed by Henry’s chroniclers. Later, they mention the “persistent rumours that Richard was still alive . . . the kind of rumour that would only gather round a figure who enjoyed strong support and even affection.” Yet the same type of rumours surrounded Hitler, as much from fear as from “support and even affection.” The case for Richard’s popularity is weaker than the one for Chaucer’s murder.

Although not addressed directly, one implied issue stands out — the importance of separation of church and state. Thomas Arundel and Henry IV need each other to usurp their respective positions, and their combined power, with no checks or balances, emboldens them to repress political foes and “heretics” with terror and torture. The danger of such of a broad spectrum of power concentrated in such ruthless, self-serving hands is clear — as Chaucer must have observed.

Well researched, engaging, and passionately and wittily written, Who Murdered Chaucer? shines a spotlight at a different and revealing angle on a turbulent time in English history and a definitive one in English literature. Whatever your interest in this period, Who Murdered Chaucer? will make you look at The Canterbury Tales and Geoffrey Chaucer in a more appreciative light as part of a greater story.

29 December 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story

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Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story by Leonie Swann. Translated by Anthea Bell. London: Transworld Publishers/The Random House Group Ltd. 2006. 352 pages.

As flock animals who can be herded to their own deaths (see Thomas Hardy), sheep are easy to look down on — that is, until you meet the individuals who make up the flock in Leonie Swann’sThree Bags Full. From the clever Miss Maple (a tip of the hat to Agatha Christie’s demure spinster detective) to the enigmatic black Hebridean ram, Othello, with a mysterious past, Swann’s crowd is full of unforgettable characters.

This fable begins with the murder of their shepherd, George Glenn, whom they find run through with a shovel. Although the flock can’t quite forgive him his habit of wearing Norwegian wool sweaters, they agree that he was a good shepherd and that they would like to know who did him in and why. Miss Maple, reputed to be the cleverest sheep in Glennkill (and possibly the world), takes the lead in trying to nail the killer.

This is no easy feat for a flock whose contact with the outside world is restricted, whose primary human frame of reference is an outcast from his own herd, and whose humorous interpretations of abstractions don’t lead them as far astray as might be expected — for example, their belief that the term “God” and all that humans associate with God refers to the village vicar.

As the story of George’s complicated life unfolds, so do the inner lives of the sheep and the inner workings of the flock. Miss Maple is almost single minded in her pursuit of justice, which the sheep believe is something that can be found in George’s caravan and that needs to be outed. She also asks pointed questions such as, “What does George have to do with drugs? What are drugs anyway?” Othello is haunted by his lonely, violent past and a voice that seems to taunt him with aphorisms like, “Sometimes being alone is an advantage.” Zora daydreams of the depths and heights, of the abyss and the cloud sheep that sometimes fill the sky. Mopple the Whale, the fat “memory” sheep who forgets nothing and understands little, makes a lasting impression as “a plump young ram staring in bewilderment out of the car window and eating George’s road map.”

The humans, too, are vividly drawn, from the frightened “God” to the fearsome butcher, Ham. None, however, is more clearly portrayed and more enigmatic than the late George Glenn, the “Goblin-King” who read romance (“Pamela”) novels to his herd and received mysterious visitors in quiet black cars. George, “who usually said things in a way that a sheep could understand,” proves to be beyond the ken of sheep and humans alike.

Three Bags Full has the elements of a classic detective story — a gruesome death scene, an enigmatic victim, a village populated by likely suspects with secrets, a plot complete with red herrings, and a clever detective whose human understanding falls short. So does the ending, which introduces another ovine character who appears to be more clever than Miss Maple because he lives among the human herd that George left behind. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about people, cleverness and intelligence, and herd mentality and individual reason. It’s lost in the convolutions of the plot, the side tracking, and the contrived resolution. By the last page, with Othello contemplating mating season, the individuals who had captured my heart with their ruminations accompanied by mindless rumination seem to have been reduced to just another flock, doing what typical sheep typically do. In this case, the destination doesn’t satisfy nearly as much as the journey.

27 December 2008
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

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