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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Despite this bibliographic premise, "The Shadow of the Wind" isn't really about books. Yes, Daniel does fend off a sinister disfigured man who covets his copy of the Carax novel, and later learns that someone using the name of a character in the book -- an alias, in fact, of the devil -- has been systematically burning Carax's books. But we learn next to nothing about novel's plot or about any of Carax's other works. The secrets that Daniel seeks as he grows to adolescence all concern Carax himself, a dashing, handsome and intelligent young man whose history includes murky parentage, a generous patron, a doomed love affair, a flight to Paris, an artist's garret and an ignominious death in a Barcelona alleyway. A sociopathic police inspector hovers over the proceedings, threatening the usual dire consequences for lads who stick their noses where they don't belong.
The past tugs obscurely at the fabric of Daniel's life; the further he immerses himself in Carax's story, the more his own experiences seem to follow a similar pattern. Ruiz Zafón's novel is elegantly constructed, but not self-consciously so, and there isn't a speck of real cynicism in it, a refreshing change from the average thriller's knee-jerk attempts at worldliness. "The Shadow of the Wind" believes in the power of youth to rebuild hope on the bitter, ash-strewn ground of history, and so powerful is the sway of this author's storytelling, that, for 550 pages at least, he makes you believe it, too.
-- Laura Miller
"Emma Brown: A Novel From the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë
By Clare Boylan
437 pages
Viking
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There is a strain of literature, both high and low, which can be summed up by the remark Thelma Ritter makes in "All About Eve": "Everything but the hound dog yappin' at her rear end." Multiply the hound dog into a pack and reduce the rear end to a small one and you have an idea of the relentless misfortune at work in "Emma Brown."
Clare Boylan's novel is described as based on an "unfinished manuscript" by Charlotte Brontë. This is generous. What Brontë left behind amounts to 19 pages, the book's first two chapters. Though Boylan has clearly attempted a work in the Brontëan spirit, incorporating lines from the writer's letters, it's Boylan who deserves credit for the heavy lifting here. She's fashioned a gothic orphan saga from what amounts to a suggestion, one that gives no hint of the complications she has envisioned from it.
The orphan whose posterior proves so tempting to the literal and figurative hounds is Matilda. Left at a boarding school run by two respectably poverty-stricken sisters, the withdrawn child is favored and pampered in expectation of her tenure providing a steady income. When the sisters find out that the man who left her is not her father, and their dreams of financial security evaporate, Matilda, like Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess, is cast into the attic. She's rescued temporarily by a local widow, Isabel Chalfont (who narrates part of the tale) and Isabel's friend Mr. Ellin, a local gentleman who proves to be almost as mysterious as Matilda herself. The rescue is temporary, however, and Matilda is soon cast upon the cruelties of 19th century London.
At times Boylan writes as a retrospective muckraker, outraged at the treatment of women and the poor in this time, and at times she overdoes it, as when the doll that a street urchin plays with turns out to be an infant's discarded corpse. That detail also suggests the perversity that is one of the strongest parts of "Emma Brown."
Like many 19th century tales of the downtrodden, "Emma Brown" is a masochistic wallow. Only the masochism is so aggressive that the book feels like anything but a chronicle of passivity. Boylan's tone combines the hot spiel of the pamphleteer with the slight distance of the social historian, all in the guise of crack storyteller. The result has a slightly guilt-inducing fascination (should we be hungry for stories that deal in misery the way this one does?). In "Emma Brown" Boylan speaks simultaneously from the soapbox and the easy chair in front of the fire.
-- Charles Taylor
"Kings of Infinite Space"
By James Hynes
362 pages
St. Martin's Press
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A cubicled office in a mid-level civil service agency in a featureless central Texas town may sound like an odd place to set a supernatural thriller, but it's part of the genius of James Hynes' "Kings of Infinite Space" that he makes you see that it is, in fact, the perfect setting for such a story. Very few novels can manage to be both hilarious and creepy, but this one does. Fewer still can show off their smarts without slowing down the plot, but this one does that, too. Hynes manages to combine an overblown comic-book conspiracy plot with the excruciating social satire of the BBC sitcom "The Office," and if you think that hybrid sounds unliterary, well, guess again.
Paul Trilby is a former literature postdoc ("almost a Fulbright," he keeps telling himself) turned temp typist in the General Services Division of the Texas Department of General Services, or GSD of TxDoGs, for short. The services provided by this department are, er, general. That is, they are vaguely delineated but have something to do with trucks. Paul lives in a residential motel and drives a decrepit Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, a purgatorial experience in a town where it hits 85 degrees by 8 a.m. He lives in dread of coming under the authority of Olivia, the ex-cheerleader occupying the cubicle across the aisle; as a vivid warning of what Olivia and TxDoGs can do to man, there's the pitiful wretch one cube down, whom Paul thinks of only as "the dying tech writer."
