About Grace - Anthony Doerr

Another great read.

Doerr, Anthony. About Grace. New York: Scribner, 2004

“He called them dreams. Not auguries or visions exactly, or presentiments or premonitions. Calling them dreams let him edge as close as he could to what they were: sensations—experiences, even—that visited him as he slept and faded after he woke, only to reemerge in the minutes or hours or days to come.” (7)

Not exactly a story about the inevitability of the things that happen to us in life, About Grace nevertheless touches on the themes of fate, chance and the sentiment expressed so well in the paeon by Henley, “Invictus,”ⁱ that we all ponder from time to time. Winkler studies and photographs snowflakes and is amazed that despite them all being different (something we all learned in science class in elementary school), those that fall intact always have six points—not four, never five, always six.

Winkler’s friend, Naaliyah, becomes fascinated with small things as well and studies insects at university in Alaska. What governs the events of insects’ short lives? What governs ours?

And as indicated in the quote above, Winkler’s story turns on his observation that dreams he has—detailed and dramatic—are coming true. For instance, he dreams that a woman in a supermarket line-up will drop an object and he will pick it up. He dreams that a man is run over by a bus. The events happen shortly thereafter, exactly as he dreamed them. 

His conundrum is whether or not the predicted event has to happen, or if he has power to change or prevent it. In this light, the core event of the plot—a dream that their home will be flooded and that he will attempt to carry his young daughter to safety but will accidentally drown her—leads him to run far from home so that the instrument of his daughter’s death in the dream (himself) is not available to fulfill what he dreads.

Unfortunately, being far away in the Caribbean, he’s unable to know whether his flight has saved his daughter or not. The remainder of the story is reminiscent of the picaresque novel (although with relatively little humour) as Winkler begins a search for a lost family through the Caribbean, the contiguous states of the USA, Canada and Alaska. The journey is captivating; the characters encountered along the way memorable.

Because it leans so heavily on the reality of premonitions, many readers may have to suspend disbelief or assume they’re reading what’s called “magic realism.” I’ve had one experience that led me very briefly to the David Winkler conundrum. A high school friend stayed at my house on a weekend because we’d planned a trip to a national park. He related a dream to me as we drove. He’d been driving his truck (which he had to hot wire because the boarding school didn’t allow student vehicle use without special permission), had rolled the truck at the railway crossing and dented the roof. He’d searched for and found a jack to force back the dent in order to prevent detection.

A week later, my friend and his date were killed in a car/train accident at a that crossing.

I became convinced later that my mind had switched the sequence of events and that I myself had dreamed of my friend's dream after the accident. 

The shape of snowflakes, the life cycles of insects are determined in the structures of their cells. The butterfly cannot come before the caterpillar, the snowflake cannot have five points. I am a skeptic of things magical, like Winkler, particularly because of the observation that, in the human mind, these orders and laws don’t necessarily apply. Memory can reorder events as if we were living in a universe of magic realism. Hysteria, mental disease, even stress can cause the mind to imagine a universe so vividly that we can do nothing but take for granted that it’s reality.

And yet, like Winkler, I’m aware that this view of the universe might also be the result of a mental aberration.

And like Winkler, I want to know what laws govern events, what events are random. Chaos theory provides a good description of the way chance events change everything, all the time. That old idea that if one had stopped to talk to a friend for one minute longer, the accident would (or would not) have happened. Some people place God in that niche as the one who governs chance events; the overwhelming evidence, however, is that the suspension of stable, universal laws governed by the miniscule behaviour of cells, atoms, molecules, neutrinos, etc. are never tampered with by outside forces. If God is a handler of puppets, a controller of events, that control must most certainly be confined to the mind, the consciousness, of people and the actions that take or change courses as a result.

We are individually elements in the lives of every other being. The fact that we exist deflects the course of life for everyone else, sometimes infinitesimally, sometimes hugely, wonderfully—or catastrophically. We watched It’s a Beautiful Life a few days ago. The protagonist played by Jimmy Stewart concludes at one point that his family would be better off if he were dead. It’s this conundrum writ large that faces David Winkler in About Grace; what would we give up to save the life of a loved one? Jesus said, Greater Love hath no Man than this, that he give his Life for a Friend. (John 15:13)

Is it by design or by chance that we find ourselves in families? Have we the courage to take upon ourselves the nurturing of our families when only we can provide it, and at what expense? And how much are we prepared to give to gain back what chance has deprived others of?

For me, About Grace is a parable about family, about courage, about winning and losing and the indomitable perseverance of love. A terrific read.

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i It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The Shell Collector

Doerr, Anthony. The Shell Collector. New York: Scribner, 2002

A high school student once asked me, “So when is a story a ‘short story’ and when is it a ‘novel?’” I explained that it didn’t have to be either, that there were stories called ‘novelettes’ that fell somewhere in between and that lengths were arbitrary. I added that a ‘short story’ is a story that is short. No good. We finally agreed that a short story was one written to be read at one sitting and compared it to a movie which we watch all-at-once versus a series (like Downton Abbey) that we come back to a number of times. That seemed to satisfy students, but not me necessarily.

Anthony Doerr’s ‘short stories’ range from ten to thirty-five or so pages so at a modest reading speed of 300 words-per-minute, the shortest would take about twelve minutes to read; the longest about forty minutes. For slower readers—say 200 wpm, the range would be about eighteen minutes to around seventy.

So ‘short story’ fits.

Anthony Doerr’s books have fetched general acclaim and prestigious awards including the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light we Cannot See. I actually haven’t read any of his novels—yet—but About Grace is on the coffee table here at my daughter’s home in Panama, and will be my next read. Other novels by Doerr include Four Seasons in Rome and Memory Wall.

Reviewing a short story collection can become something akin to reviewing eight novels: what seems true about “The Shell Collector” needn’t be true about “July Fourth.” My choice is to talk a bit about one of Doerr’s stories, namely the last in the collection, “Mkondo.”

The plot follows a man by the name of Ward Beach who has been sent by a museum to Tanzania to collect a fossil of a rare, prehistoric bird-dinosaur. During his sojourn there, he meets Naima in the most bizarre of encounters; she’s running down the middle of a road so that he’s unable to pass her with his Land Rover. She finally stops, jumps onto the hood of his vehicle and says, “Keep driving, I want to feel the wind!”

Her wild energy captivates him and he begins to “court” her, driving over rough roads to the hut where she lives with her parents. But courting her isn’t easy; every time he visits, she challenges him to catch her and she takes off through paths in the forest with him in pursuit. She always outruns him; she’s too fast and there are too many trails criss-crossing. He goes on a fitness regime to the point where he can almost keep up with her until one day she leads him to the edge of a cliff where her footprints cease. Beach falls over the cliff and finds himself in a deep pool at the bottom where Naima awaits him. He asks her to marry him and she consents. It’s as if she wouldn’t have him until he proved himself able to take “the final step.”

But this is only background. This beautiful, wild creature doesn’t fare well in Ohio. Like a plant in a drought, she wilts from grief at the loss of the Africa she feels she’s left forever, the loss accentuated by the tamed grayness of Ohio. Finally, her despondency is so intense that Beach no longer tries to reach her, she no longer invites him to reach out to her.

Until she discovers photography, that is, a medium through which she reacquaints herself with clouds and skies, light and shadows to the point where she is obsessed with the possibility of reclaiming a world she’s left behind. Mastering the intricacies and excelling in the art she’s discovered gives Naima the courage she needs and she takes herself back to Tanzania and the house in which she grew up.

The story doesn’t end there, but as is typical of other stories in the collection, Doerr avoids the gratuitous supplying of meanings and outcomes, causes and effects, a skill that separates the seasoned storyteller from the amateur.

Doerr’s diction is highly accessible and evocative.

“The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle of vines below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was nearly hyperventilating (185-6).”

“Another year passed. He dreamed of her. He dreamed she’d sprouted huge and glorious butterfly wings and circled the globe with them, photographing volcanic clouds rising from a Hawaiian caldera, tufts of smoke from bombs dropped over Iraq, the warped, diaphanous sheets of auroras unfurling over Greenland (212).”

What is true of virtually all the stories in The Shell Collector is the uniqueness of the characters. Griselda is a gangly, six foot something high school volleyball player who marries a metal eater (he swallows razor blades, armours and is purported to have eaten—piece by piece—a Ford Ranger) as a touring show. And there’s Joseph Saleeby, an escapee from the brutal civil war in Liberia who takes a job as a caretaker of a millionaire’s summer home . . . and forgets to take care of it. The title story “The Shell Collector” is centered on a blind collector of shells—a former professor in his field—along the beaches and shallows of a marine park in the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya. The development of believable characters—especially the eccentric kind—is difficult without losing verisimilitude. Doerr amazes with his ability to create characters that live, and with an economy of brush strokes: a rare thing.

I’ve always been partial to short stories. I find most novels too long and you don’t come across many published novelettes anymore. As Anthony Doerr has demonstrated here, the short story genre is able to deliver all we expect when we eagerly pick up a book.

Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell"

Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell:”America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002

I'd never thought about the 20^th Century as an “Age of Genocide,” but a reading of Power's book makes it even clearer that the last 6 decades of that Century were possibly the bloodiest 60 years in history. We begin with the Holocaust in the 1940s followed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge's brutal purge of intellectuals, former officials and civil servants and anyone not fitting their image of the worthy citizen of a communist society. Then Power retells the stories of the gassing and relocation of the Kurds of Northern Iraq by Saddam Hussein, the brutal Bosnian Serb purging of the country's Muslims and Croats (remember Srebrenica?), the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis by the Hutus of Rwanda and finally, the brutal murder and eviction of the Muslim population of Kosovo.

Had Power written this in 2015, we would no doubt have a chapter on ISIL in Iraq and Syria.

But “A Problem from Hell” isn't primarily a history of the genocides of the last century. Power is an Irish-American who teaches human rights and U.S. foreign policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia for the Boston Globe, The Economist and The New Republic from 1993-6. She is well qualified, therefore, to focus on what is her main thrust here, namely the U.S. responses (and non-responses) to the genocides. 

Not surprisingly, her country of adoption doesn't fare well and the thrashing she gives the Bush and Clinton administrations are at the core of her contentions that, a) the U.S. is by its history and placement the obvious world leader when it comes to foreign interventions and b), that the U.S. has repeatedly abrogated its responsibility to exercise that leadership when genocidal crises occur.

Obviously, any decision to send troops and military equipment across oceans to fight foreign wars is fraught with huge risks. In Power's assessment, the U.S. experience of defeat in Vietnam added to the reluctance to engage in Cambodia or Bosnia, for instance, and that's understandable since American politics is a near-continuous struggle for re-election and images of soldiers coming home in body bags don't function well in presidential or senatorial campaigns.

This represents the obvious risk.

But the risk goes both ways: if politicians are seen to be callous in the face of horrors occurring in, say Kurdistan or Kosovo, public opinion has been known to turn on a dime so that the juggling of risks becomes tricky to say the least. In Canada today, a single image of a Syrian child washed up in Greece has put the Harper government in danger of having its eyes blackened by public opinion.

Power has hopes that the reluctance to engage to prevent or mitigate genocides is not as marked as it once was, but that the interminable delays in acting quickly and decisively have cost hundreds of thousands of civilians their very lives. And if the moral, humanitarian reasons aren't enough, Power offers two good reasons for acting decisively when genocide looms its ugly head:

The United States should stop genocide for two reasons. The first and most compelling reason is moral. When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act . . . the second reason: enlightened self-interest. [Experts] warned that allowing genocide undermined regional and international stability, created militarized refugees, and signaled dictators that hate and murder were permissible tools of statecraft.(512)

In support of the first reason, Power offers a startling illustration: In 1994, Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days.(512)

Reading “A Problem from Hell” turned out to be a project for me. With 516 pages of densely detailed material plus 85 pages of notes, I had to renew the book at the public library to get it done. The nature of the content didn't help, but it's a dangerous world and I believe it's every citizens responsibility to arm himself with a knowledge of history; our collective futures depend on making wiser, timelier decisions.

If you've never heard the story of Raphael Lemkin (whom I mentioned in a post; click here), then a reading of the first 5 chapters alone would make a great project. Lemkin coined the word genocide and spent most of his life pushing the UN to adopt what became a convention on genocide, the foundation for legal interventions in, and trial of perpetrators of, genocide. In a recent visit to the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg, I noted a small display honouring the work of Raphael Lemkin.

Nadeem Aslam, The Blind Man's Garden

Aslam, Nadeem. The Blind Man's Garden. Toronto: Bond Street Books, 2013

“The West has dared to ask itself the question, 'What begins after God?'” (p. 319)
“'No one from here can know what the Westerners know,' the man says. 'The Westerners are unknowable to us. The divide is too great, too final. It's like asking what the dead or the unborn know.'” 
(p. 350)

Set in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the “War on Terror” following 911, Aslam's superb novel takes us into the land that no Westerner can know, “the divide is too great, too final.” We are on the ground in the land of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, militant arms of Islam running for cover as American helicopters roar overhead. It's a land also of moderate Muslims, lapsed Muslims, Christians. The faithful see the world through the eyes of ingrained belief and the others have placed their confidence in bullets and bombs.

As much as no resident of Heer in Pakistan can understand what makes Westerners tick, so the pilots in those helicopters, the raiding, bombastic American soldiers blindly trespass among the peoples of cultures about which they are effectively clueless.

For the “ordinary” citizen of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the violent turmoil succeeding 9/11 is unfathomable. Loyal to the idea of a brotherhood under attack, young men sneak off to battle zones to fight the infidel, there to be killed in battle action or captured and sold to the Americans for a ransom by warlords with their private agendas. In such a place and time, it's difficult knowing who is brother, who is traitor, who is collaborator. Speaking becomes dangerous; who knows where the words will go to come back through the barrel of a gun?

The story revolves around Rohan who suffers daily with the loss and guilt over his beloved Sofia whose last words to him were that she had lost her faith. Rohan has a son, Jeo, who makes an ill-advised journey toward Kabul to practice his newly acquired medical skills in aid of wounded soldiers. Jeo leaves behind his young wife, Naheed, who was married by arrangement to Jeo while she was deeply in love with Jeo's foster brother, Mikal. In the family also are Yasmin and Basie whose lives are made more than normally precarious by their employment in a Christian school, a place viscerally detested by jihadists and a handy target for hostage taking and attack.

Rohan and Sofia founded a school in Heer meant to be progressive in a regressive society. But since Sofia's death and Rohan's retirement, darker forces have taken it over and turned it into a training ground for what the West calls terrorists, but whom its students would call freedom fighters. Rohan and his family have been allowed to remain living in their house nearby, a house that adjoins a wonderful garden from which the title derives. It's Aslam's sensitive and poetic depiction of the garden and what it means to live among the trees, birds and flowers that forms a fitting counterpoint to the chaos and murder all around.

A poignant interlude in a fast-moving, changing story of the family has Tara—a seamstress and Naheed's mother—taking on the job of sewing an American flag “. . . large, about the size of four bedsheets” so that it can be burned in a demonstration. “'It's for after the Friday prayers next week . . . make sure that it's of a material that doesn't burn too fast or too slowly? The flames have to look inspiring and fearsome in the photographs.” (p. 99) As she sews, Tara wonders about the meaning of the red, white and blue and the complicated design. “Are the white and red stripes rivers of milk and wine, flowing under a sky bursting with the splendor of stars? Or are they paths soaked with blood, alternating with paths strewn with bleached white bones, leading out of a sea full of explosions.” (p. 100)

I am, of course, a Westerner. To the people on the streets of Kabul, Peshawar or Heer, my faith, my culture, my motivations must be as inscrutable as theirs are to me. Westerners need to read Aslam's book, if only to give them a little more of the feeling of what it's like to live in a place where every disagreement with the rest of the world looks like an attack on Islam. Ignorance breeds contempt for the unknown; in The Blind Man's Garden, this tendency is illustrated best when an American soldier is rescued from death in the desert and found to have the Arabic for INFIDEL tattooed on his back. To a devout Muslim, this pride in being an unbeliever is a slap in Allah's face, a thing that cannot possibly be explained or excused.

Like me, you might come away from Aslam's book wondering: what in God's name have we done and are we doing in the Arab world?

Radiance of Tomorrow - Ishmael Beah

Beah, Ishmael. Radiance of Tomorrow. Toronto: Viking, 2014

How much hate does it take to make chopping off a child's hands with a machete acceptable, even honourable? How callous does a company need to be to feel blasé about ruining the water supply of an indigenous village in order to establish a profitable mine? 

 How forgiving does one need to be in order to go on living after the atrocities against one's people and family have marched in endless progress up to the very borders of hell?

Ishmael Beah's second novel (A Long Way Gone was the earlier one) doesn't purport to answer such questions; it simply tells the story of a people trying with whatever resources they can scrounge together to survive in a Sierra Leone ravaged by brutal civil war and the savaging of their country by multi-national mining interests. Not a political novel, it paints a portrait of a people caught in the ravages of the turmoil that is Western Africa in troubled times, bringing matters down to the intimate, the personal, the what-it's-like-to-live-it level. 

 

The poignant opening scene has bedraggled survivors straggling back “home”after the civil war, a conflict that decimated and scattered their community. Led by a few returning elders, the survivors gradually rebuild a life as normal as they can with few resources and the constant haunting of the horrors they've all been through. One family now lives next door to a former child soldier who, under orders, inflicted on them the violent amputation of four out of their six hands.

At the centre of Beah's story, Bockarie and his family are followed through a series of transitions not of their devising. Bockarie is a teacher and as the village reestablishes a school, his occupation seems secured. But civil war and turmoil provide breeding ground for corruption as persons struggle to survive with all their confidence in the humanity of “the system” destroyed. Even fellow villagers can exercise fraud as a coping habit, teachers' salaries can be siphoned off by management and eventually the only option might be to work for the hated mining company—or starve.

Ishmael Beah sometimes writes a bit like Grandma Moses or William Kurelak paint. Particularly in the dialogue, the local patois is allowed to live as found, giving the scenes of encounter a homespun, naive-like quality (as art, that is).

“Good morning. Was sleep generous to you and your family? Has the world greeted you kindly this morning . . . ?” the children repeated to everyone they encountered (39).

But naivete is a concept only to those who consider themselves sophisticated in comparison to someone else. The wisdom of Beah's characters may not be the wisdom of science, knowledge and first-world sophistication, but what shines through it all is the wisdom of the ages, the deep, universal wisdom borne by story and the passing on of time-tested lore. It is about respect for the guidance of one's elders, a concept foreign to much of Western society. It's about obedience to inherited knowledge and humility and patience in the face of tribulation. 

It's about a wisdom that Western culture has largely dismissed as naive, unnecessary. 

Not that this wisdom isn't severely tested, even to those who live inside it. In a world in which profitability and economic growth provide the yardsticks by which all human endeavour is measured, even Mama Kadie's gentle wisdom may end up trampled into dust.

I am North American. I've never been to Africa. But as a “sophisticated” North American I know that my roots—anthropologically—are in Africa. But I also live alongside an aboriginal population whose culture was largely destroyed by the collaboration of Christian churches and economic interests, and the horror of “manifest destiny” thinking. Radiance of Tomorrow provided me with another window of insight into mine and West African's place in the world, mine and my aboriginal neighbours' relative placement on the planet.

The title, Radiance of Tomorrow, is an expression of hope from an elder:

“'We must live in the radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales. For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength. This is all I wanted to say.' [Mama Kadie] turned away form the crowd (167).”

It's what Christians call faith, or possibly hope . . . or both.

Punishment - Linden MacIntyre

Punishment

MacIntyre, Linden. Punishment. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2014

Punishment would make a great choice as background reading for discussions surrounding the Law and Order agenda that's become a trademark of the current Canadian government. Appropriately, it opens up a whole range of questions about guilt, innocence and the possibility that a justice system capable of actually dispensing impartial justice may be illusory. From the police on down through the court and penitentiary systems, anyone suspected of and/or charged and convicted of a crime is at the mercy of humans—not gods—and people carry baggage, preferences and prejudices that present a multitude of possibilities for guilt-escaping-punishment or innocence-paying-an unjust-price.

      The novel opens with an incident in the Kingston Penitentiary: prison guards know there's a rumble going on in a cell block but choose to ignore it, a prisoner is killed and a cover-up follows. One guard, Tony Breau, decides to tell a subsequent enquiry the truth, thereby becoming a “rat,” among his fellow guards. A prisoner, Strickland, feeds a bit of information to Breau, thereby making him a “rat” in the prison population. Both become vulnerable; both are “rats.” Breau takes early retirement and goes back home to the small town where he grew up; Strickland finishes his sentence and returns to his childhood home just down the road from Breau.              

     Punishment spins out a gripping tale of life beyond this point, two lives shunted toward inevitable “rough justice,” fueled by past suspicions, prejudices and the inbred vagaries of a small town that can't forgive and never forgets.

      I've no intention of retelling MacIntyre's story here; suffice it to say that it has all the ingredients of a dramatic who-done-it, including dogs barking in the night, isolated houses locked in the grip of Canadian winter, and smiles that hide sinister motives. The plot kept me reading but having admired Linden MacIntyre's investigative journalistic talents on CBC's Fifth Estate for many years, I kept thinking: “what were the occasions and the nature of the research behind this plot, these characters?”

      MacIntyre's book dedication provides one clue: In memory of Ernie Hayes, AKA Tyrone W. Conn, 1967 – 1999. I wasn't aware that MacIntyre and Fifth Estate producer, Theresa Burke, had written a book in 2002—Who killed Ty Conn—about the life and death of an habitually-incarcerated offender. Their hope was that given Conn's history of abuse and neglect in childhood and youth, the book would provide insight for dealing with juvenile offenders in a more empathetic manner than was the case with Conn. Quite likely, MacIntyre had memories of that book and his personal knowledge of Ty Conn in his mind when he created the character Strickland. Readers of this latest novel will want to check out the story of MacIntyre's and Burke's experiences with Conn leading to the writing of the earlier book by clicking here.

      But Strickland's story is a subplot, a sub-theme in Punishment. Tony Breau's life, like Strickland's, is complicated, including early adoption into a community of strangers, made-and-lost relationships and the very human longing for a comfortable place to be in a broken world. Broken cultures produce broken children who grow up to be broken adults; our justice and penal systems will always be overwhelmed with a responsibility for fixing the same brokenness that the system has caused. What we can do—and do do—is punish; what we are ill-equipped to effect is prevention.

      But it's not necessary to deal with global issues to be absorbed by MacIntyre's novel. Like all good novels it stands on its own as a tale of human struggle, defeat and survival—with enough of hope and redemption to balance the trials that are—in the end—the inescapable conditions of human life. I had flashbacks to another, older novel exploring similar themes to Punishment: Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment specifically. The guilt of Rodion Raskolnikov and that of Tony Breau bear similarities, but guilt is never black on white; guilt has precedents, deviance happens in an environment, human perceptions of events are partial, often foggy, and the response to deviance is driven by prejudice and rage as often as by cool rationality.

      Besides his work on Fifth Estate, Linden MacIntyre is probably best known for his novel, The Bishop's Man. It was awarded the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association's Fiction Book of the Year.