Brunswick Gardens, by Anne Perry

A friend and I were sitting at an outdoor table in Kuala Lumpur, sharing a pizza and some wine, and I mentioned Peter Jackson's film, Heavenly Creatures.  It's a remarkable film, based upon a true story about two New Zealand girls who formed one of those fierce, exclusive, almost mythical friendships that seem to be part of the turbulent terrain of female adolescence.  In what was probably one of her first film roles, Kate Winslet played one of the girls. When faced with separation, they concluded that murdering the single mother who would separate them was well justified.  They invited the mother out for a picnic and beat her to death with a brick.

"Mmm, she writes mystery novels now," my friend said.
"Who does?"
"The girl who helped her friend murder her mother.  She got out of prison, moved to the UK and writes mystery novels under the pen name of Anne Perry."
"I suppose she's especially qualified, but it's still hard to believe. Are you sure?"  I tried to imagine a middle-aged ex-convict penning murder mysteries, occasionally pausing to ask herself, does that ring true? I had to find one of her books. Just had to.

New Zealanders, psychiatrists, criminologists and the simply curious (including me) are still puzzling over this crime, and articles about it are still coming out over fifty years after the murder. This begs the question: If I had no idea of Anne Perry's history, would this book have had the same impact?

I try to step back and look at Brunswick Gardens on its own terms. It's set in Victorian London; Inspector Thomas Pitt is called to Brunswick Gardens to investigate the death of a young woman in the house of a clergyman. The household, rather than the staid establishment one might expect, is instead a roiling mess.

Reverend Ramsey Parmenter, the head of household, is losing his faith. The young woman who lies dead at the foot of his stairs is Unity Bellwood, a beautiful and intelligent scholar of ancient languages (the skill for which Ramsey had hired her) but also a proponent of that new and most vexing science, Darwinism. Rev. Parmenter's young and repressed son is hell-bent (so to speak) to get to Rome to pursue his own career in the Catholic faith. His high-strung daughter Tryphena was as enamoured of Unity Bellwood as Anne Perry once was of her youthful friend, and she wastes no time in speaking out against everyone in the household who might have taken Unity from her. The other daughter, Clarice, is steadfastly devoted to her father; although she speaks her mind (often to the horror of her mother), she is by and large very practical. Finally, there is Dominic, a young and very handsome cleric with a dodgy past but with profound and genuine gratitude to Ramsey Parmenter for redeeming him. Vita Parmenter, the Reverend's wife, is petite, refined and politic, the perfect Victorian lady of the house.

At the beginning, the clues suggest that Rev. Parmenter pushed Unity down the stairs after a heated argument in which she used Darwin's science to demean his religious faith. Their torrid arguments are not academic in nature; Parmenter agonises over the new ideas, realising that they challenge his very foundation. The younger Unity, who quite possibly never held any religious faith, assumes the intellectually caustic role and simply ridicules him, leaving him to struggle on his own. Today we take one side or the other -- religion vs. science -- and we forget the tumult of the thinking religious man of Darwin's time who tried valiantly to integrate the two.  After Unity's death, Ramsey Parmenter describes his anguish to Dominic.

"Now science seems to be everywhere, the origin and the answers to everything. There is no mystery left, only facts we don't yet know. Above all, there is no one left to hope in beyond ourselves, nothing greater, wiser, or above all kinder." He looked for an instant like a lost child who suddenly knows the full meaning of being alone. Dominic felt it like a physical pain. "I can admire the certainty all these old bishops and saints seem to have had," Ramsay went on. "I can't share it anymore, Dominic." He sat oddly still for the emotions which must have been raging inside him. "The hurricane of Mr. Darwin's sanity has blown it away like so much paper. His reasoning haunts my mind. During the day I look at all these books." He waved his arm at them. "I read Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and every theologian and apologist since. I can even go back to the original Aramaic or Greek, and for a little while I am fine. Then at night the cold voice of Charles Darwin comes back, and the darkness engulfs all the candles I've lit during the day. I swear I would give anything I possess for him not to have been born!"

Inspector Thomas Pitt is married to Charlotte, a woman who does not hesitate to contribute her own thoughts to the cases he's investigating. Pitt resists the temptation to tell his wife to stay in her place, largely because when Charlotte starts snooping, she uncovers useful bits of information. Her instincts, although different than his own, are quite keen. One day Charlotte drives off for lunch with her Aunt Vespasia, a stately matron with a sharp mind. Largely out of boredom, Vespasia asks Charlotte for the details of Pitt's latest case. It amuses her to think about motives and details in her spare time. Although she is unlikely to have any blood on her own very white, soft hands, Aunt Vespasia has some very definite ideas about what drives one to murder. Again to his credit, Pitt does not disregard her thoughts, either.

Pitt could imagine Vespasia saying that. He could see her still-beautiful face clearly in his mind. She would probably be dressed in ivory, silver-grey or lilac, and she usually wore pearls in the daytime. She was right. People killed because they cared about something so fiercely they lost all sense of reason and proportion. For a time their own need eclipsed everyone else's, even drowned out their sense of self-preservation. Sometimes it was carefully-thought-out greed. Sometimes it was a momentary fear, even a physical one. Seldom was it revenge. That could be exacted in so many other ways. On rare occasions he had come across crimes resulting from blind, insensate rage. But as Vespasia said, it was always a passion of some sort, even if only the cold hunger of greed.

Who, however, felt enough passion to kill Unity Bellwood? No one seemed to stand out as a likely suspect. Dominic's past is checkered, but it seems that he has genuinely found his vocation now. Tensions grow in the house at Brunswick Gardens as everyone within begins to question everyone else. Dominic walks in the garden with Clarice, who has adopted a remarkably clear and pragmatic view. She envies that his ministerial duties call him out into the community to visit members of the congregation while she loiters about the house. She captures perfectly the tension of the situation.

"But nice to be out," she said perceptively. "I wish I had some reason to escape. Waiting is the worst of it, isn't it?" She turned away and stared at the lawn and the fir trees. "I sometimes think hell is not actually something awful happening, it's waiting for something and never being absolutely sure if it will happen, so you soar on hope, and then plunge into despair, and then up again, and down again. You get too exhausted to care for a while, then it all starts over. Permanent despair would almost be a relief. You could get on with it. It takes so much energy to hope."

Dominic assures her that Inspector Pitt is working on the case and will surely uncover the truth of the matter. Clarice does not share his faith in a conclusive ending. She has reached her own conclusion.

"Pitt may find the truth. He may not. We might have to live like this forever. I know that." Her mouth curved very slightly, as if mocking herself. "I have already decided what to believe, I mean what I shall live with, so I don't lie awake at night torturing myself, turning it over and over in my mind. I have to have a way to function." Half a dozen starlings flew up out of the trees at the end of the lawn and spiraled upward on the wind, black against the sky.
"Even if it isn't true?" he said incredulously.
"I think it probably is," she answered, staring ahead of her. "But either way, we have to go on. We can't simply stop everything else and go round and round the same wretched puzzle. It was one of us. That is inescapable. We can't run anymore; we are better accepting it. There is no point in thinking how dreadful it is. I have been lying awake a lot, turning it over and over. Whoever did it is someone I know and love. I can't just stop loving them because of it. Anyway, you don't! If you didn't love someone anymore because they did something you found ugly, no love would last. None of us would be loved, because we all do things that are shabby, stupid, vicious from time to time. You need to love from understanding, or even without it."

This passage struck me as remarkable, especially in contrast to Ramsey's shattered faith. Unlike her father, Clarice is willing to consider that good people may be driven to do evil things, and we must accept all facets of those we love. Ramsey cannot integrate the faith of the saints with the science of Darwin -- for him, it's either/or. Clarice seems to be the one with the grasp of agape, the profound, selfless love at the core of Christianity.

If I knew nothing of Anne Perry's history, I would never have guessed it from reading this novel. With her own past in mind, however, I can appreciate her insights into the social roles allocated to women. Their restrictions and limitations find outlets in devious behaviours or even violence. As Aunt Vespasia noted, "People killed because they cared about something so fiercely they lost all sense of reason and proportion," and it's difficult to find a sense of proportion when one is limited to a very small and regulated social sphere. Surely Aunt Vespasia's observation would have applied to the case of the young Anne Perry, as well.

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, by Hilary Mantel

This, Hilary Mantel's third novel, is not her best, but it's still vastly better than most authors can manage, and it sustains my belief that the woman is purely incapable of writing a bad book.  I reached for this as the press was bubbling with Ms. Mantel's comments about the Duchess of Cambridge, and as Prime Minister David Cameron castigated her without bothering to read her full speech to grasp the context. Well, I suppose he's a busy man. About the only thing I could think to do in a defiant gesture of moral support was read another of her books.

Jeddah Rooftops,
watercolour by Dorothy Boyer

Published in 1988, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street tells the story of British expatriate Frances Shore who comes to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when her husband takes a job there with a construction company. The Shores have lived abroad for years, living and working in Africa in challenging conditions. They are not rookie expats, but very little, Mantel suggests, can prepare one for life as a foreigner in the Kingdom.

Unlike so many of Mantel's characters and narrators, Frances Shore does not speak in a grounded, authoritative voice. Of course one expects Thomas Cromwell to be resolute, but even the suburban, middle-class Londoners who peopled Mantel's earlier two novels spoke with more force. Gradually, especially as Frances' experiences in Africa are revealed, I realised that she is not a vague or passive person -- she just can't get her bearings in Saudi Arabia. From the opening scene in which Frances is on the plane, overhearing the conversations of other Saudi expats, the hair on my arms began to stand up in that way it does when I'm in a place that is not right.  I may not be able to verbalise precisely what's not right about it, but I know I don't want to be there. The genius of this novel is in the subtle, visceral unease.

I know first-hand that as a foreigner, one can expect various degrees of welcome in different countries, ranging from open arms to loaded and cocked ones.  From my friends who have worked in Saudi and the Emirates -- in a range of capacities -- I know that all outsiders, regardless of nationality or field of work, are classed as foreign workers. There is no question of enjoying or integrating with the local culture. There is no question of permanent residency: Whether you are pouring cement or doing neurosurgery, you are there to do the work that is required of you (and for which your employers pay you handsomely), and then, when they deem it appropriate, you will leave.  You will at no time consider yourself one of their peers.

Those of us who grew up enjoying the rule of law tend not to appreciate it until it's not there. Frances learns almost immediately that the Saudis not only require a visa for entry to the Kingdom but also that one may not leave without a specific exit visa, which must be applied for and granted by the authorities. In the interim, one must adhere to the Law as established by the Q'uran and the Al Saud family. The standard advice to foreigners? Keep your head down, and be quiet. If you attract the unfortunate attention of the authorities, do not expect your employer to help you.

When the Shores arrive in Jeddah, the great boom is waning. Budgets are contracting.  They are given an apartment in a 4-storey house on Ghazzah Street, which they share with a Pakistani couple and a Saudi couple. There is a vacant flat just above the Shores', and there is some nefarious business happening there. Gossip presents a few different theories, and Frances concocts a few more in her spare time.

Frances has nothing but spare time, since she cannot get a work permit in Jeddah. Her Muslim female neighbours invite her for tea and inquire when she plans to have children and marvel at the amorality of women in the western workplace, consorting with men as they do.  She can't go out for walks without being harrassed by Arab men and choked by dust and sand, and there is not always a driver available to take her elsewhere. This is the plight of the expat wife -- especially the educated and skilled one -- who follows a husband abroad and is then relegated to life as an accoutrement while he goes off to work. In the case of the Shores, however, he is consumed by his construction project (or more accurately, the increasing obstacles to its completion) and she has the free time and intelligence to intuit that something is very, very wrong in their building.

Trying to calm herself, Frances reflects on her years of living in other countries and cultures. She sanely recognises that our most intrinsic demons stow away in our luggage, but we also accumulate skills to adapt to new environments. Once you get over the initial shock of the new place, it's much the same routine as the old.

After all, she said, comforting herself, there's only the world. Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought you had left behind in one country catch up with you in the next, and old problems resurface, but if you are lucky you carry as part of your baggage the means of solving those problems and accommodating those habits, and you take with you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere.

Her experiences as she begins to settle into Jeddah life, however, suggest something quite different. She meets the neighbours, has dinners with other expat couples and wanders off on a couple of solitary ventures. None of them turns out well.

She keeps a diary and also writes letters to family members in the UK, quickly discovering that the latter is an exercise in futility. She fails to describe the vague but unsettling atmosphere, and then she realises that the recipients don't really give a damn about life in Saudi Arabia.  If anything, they just want to hear how badly things have gone awry and to gloat.  "It never would have happened if you'd just stayed home where you belong..."

By and large people at home are not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.

Frances' husband and his colleagues tell her to ignore her suspicions about whatever may be happening in the vacant apartment upstairs, but dark hints keep crossing her path every time she steps out of her apartment, which is already feeling claustrophobic.  (The claustrophobia peaks when the landlord materialises and tells her that they're renovating and painting, and could she please keep her shutters closed for some weeks?) Her husband mentions over dinner that an Indian psychologist has just completed a study of his country's workers in the Kingdom, and he determined that they all followed roughly the same series of phases, not unlike Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' stages of accepting impending death, albeit in reverse:  acceptance fades to anxiety, which deteriorates into paranoia and incipient madness. This at least assures Frances that she's not alone in her feelings of acute distress.

Why do people stay?  Why not simply apply for that exit visa?  It's the economy, stupid. The Saudis pay lavishly, and once accustomed to a stream of hefty salary vouchers, it's hard for expats to imagine life without them.

They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs. No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin -- as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department.

I happened to glance at some on-line readers' reviews of this novel, and one man remarked that he never did quite understand "what happened". By the end of the book, a man is dead (possibly the result of an accident, and possibly not), a woman has been arrested trying to leave the Kingdom without approval (of her husband, never mind the Saudi authorities), the Shores' apartment has been robbed and ransacked in a peculiar fashion, and something wicked has occurred in that darned vacant apartment involving a shipping trunk. It is not clear, any of it. It's not clear to the reader, and it's not clear to Frances. The authorities will never publicise what happened, and any sensible foreigner who happens to have information will keep his or her mouth well shut. The Saudis see no need for their foreign servants to be aware or involved. The reader will find no more sure footing than the characters.

In the end, the construction company finds the Shores an apartment in a different compound, one which is almost exclusively occupied by expat workers. Will they settle more comfortably there? Will the husband put his wrists into the "golden handcuffs"?  At least this apartment has windows which look out upon something other than a high cement wall (which had totally surrounded the house at Ghazzah Street).  As the novel ends, Frances surveys the new view.

I look out through the glass, on to the landscape, the distant prospect of traveling cars. Window one, the freeway; window two, the freeway. I turn away, cross the room to find a different view. Window three, the freeway; window four, the freeway.

The Once and Future King, by T. H. White

One of N. C. Wyeth's luminous illustrations for
The Boy's History of King Arthur, which,
despite being a girl, I adored.

I was immersed in Arthurian legend as a child, and then later, on a slightly more highbrow level in college, paddled through Malory, Chretien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Tennyson and others. I'd developed a been-there-done-that smugness that my reading on the subject was complete, or at least adequate.

Then my favourite literary list-maker, Anthony Burgess, tossed the four novels of T. H. White's tetralogy onto his Best Novels list and into my path:  The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and The Candle in the Wind.  Bless 'im.  I instantly saw that this version of the legends is like no other.

For one thing, it's damned funny. White has a gentle humour -- never scathing or sardonic. His characters have foibles galore. They may be mythical, but they are far from super-human. The future King, at first a bumbling lad known only as the Wart to those in his adoptive father's household, wanders off into the forest in search of an escaped falcon and comes home with Merlyn in tow. The boy has at least enough sense to grasp that Merlyn has some exceptional qualities and would likely be a good tutor for King Ector's son Kay and himself. He presents his new friend to Ector, and what ensues is the all-time best transcript of an employment interview.

"Oh, sir," said the Wart, "I have been on that quest you said for a tutor, and I have found him. Please, he is this gentleman here, and he is called Merlyn. He has got some badgers and hedgehogs and mice and ants and things on this white donkey here, because we could not leave them behind to starve. He is a great magician, and can make things come out of the air."
"Ah, a magician," said Sir Ector, putting on his glasses and looking closely at Merlyn. "White magic, I hope?"

"Assuredly," said Merlyn, who stood patiently among the throng with his arms folded in his necromantic gown, while Archimedes [the owl] sat very stiff and elongated on the top of his head.

"Ought to have some testimonials," said Sir Ector doubtfully. "It's usual."
"Testimonials," said Merlyn, holding out his hand. Instantly there were some heavy tablets in it, signed by Aristotle, a parchment signed by Hecate, and some typewritten duplicates signed by the Master of Trinity, who could not remember having met him. All these gave Merlyn an excellent character.
"He had 'em up his sleeve," said Sir Ector wisely. "Can you do anything else?"
"Tree," said Merlyn. At once there was an enormous mulberry growing in the middle of the courtyard, with its luscious blue fruits ready to patter down. This was all the more remarkable, since mulberries only became popular in the days of Cromwell.
"They do it with mirrors," said Sir Ector.
"Snow," said Merlyn. "And an umbrella," he added hastily. Before they could turn round, the copper sky of summer had assumed a cold and lowering bronze, while the biggest white flakes that ever were seen were floating about them and settling on the battlements. An inch of snow had fallen before they could speak, and all were trembling with the wintry blast. Sir Ector's nose was blue, and had an icicle hanging from the end of it, while all except Merlyn had a ledge of snow upon their shoulders. Merlyn stood in the middle, holding his umbrella high because of the owl.
"It's done by hypnotism," said Sir Ector, with chattering teeth. "Like those wallahs from the Indies. But that'll do," he added hastily, "that'll do very well. I'm sure you'll make an excellent tutor for teachin' these boys."

Kay may be the King's son, but Merlyn expends most of his tutoring efforts on the Wart, turning him into various kinds of fish, birds and animals so the boy can learn the wisdom of other species. This is not an endlessly gratifying project, and Merlyn is often irate with his student's thick-headedness.  I don't remember any other Arthurian writer suggesting either that the young Arthur was a bit dim nor that Merlyn's exasperation with him ever produced untoward results.

Merlyn took off his spectacles, dashed them on the floor and jumped on them with both feet. "Castor and Pollux blow me to Bermuda!" he exclaimed, and immediately vanished with a frightful roar. The Wart was still staring at his tutor's chair in some perplexity, a few moments later, when Merlyn reappeared. He had lost his hat and his hair and beard were tangled up, as if by a hurricane. He sat down again, straightening his gown with trembling fingers.
"Why did you do that?" asked the Wart.
"I did not do it on purpose."
"Do you mean to say that Castor and Pollux did blow you to Bermuda?"
"Let this be a lesson to you," replied Merlyn, "not to swear. I think we had better change the subject."

The second novel, The Queen of Air and Darkness, opens on a more somber note with an introduction to Queen Morgause -- a lackadaisical witch (possessing nowhere near the conjuring genius of her sister, Morgan le Fay), exquisite and unfaithful wife of King Lot of Orkney and mother to his four sons, Gawaine, Gaheris, Gareth and Agravaine. These are the Gaels, the "Old Ones" of Britain, as contrasted to the Anglo-Saxons of the south, including Arthur. The clannish Old Ones settle matters by violence and blood feud and sorcery. When Arthur establishes his court, endorsing justice and chivalry, the sons become Knights at his round table, but their loyalties are always uncertain. While he is dealing with them in his newly peaceful realm in the south, the bumbling southern King Pellinore and his companions wash ashore in Orkney, and the somewhat insatiable Morgause toys with the idea of seducing them. She comes to see that it's a lost cause.

The Queen had recognized the impossible. Even in the miasma of her Gaelic mind, she had come to see that asses do not mate with pythons. It was useless to go on dramatizing her charms and talents for the benefit of these ridiculous knights ...With a sudden turn of feeling she discovered that she hated them. They were imbeciles, as well as being the Sassenach... [Gaelic term for 'Saxon']

Arthur embraces the motto "Right, not Might", but he employs warfare as an acceptable means of getting his point across. As he prepares for a battle with the Old Ones, he realises that war is largely a sport for the nobles. The peasants (kerns, or villeins) are incited to fight and die by their overlords, who usually escape unharmed. This is but one of the seemingly (and depressingly) eternal truths that White illustrates. War is a game of rich old men sending younger, poorer men off to fight and die.

Between the armies there was a serious racial enmity. But it was an enmity controlled from above -- by nobles who were not sincerely anxious for each other's blood. The armies were packs of hounds, as it were, whose struggle with each other was to be commanded by Masters of Hounds, who took the matter as an exciting gamble. The nobles of the inner circle on both sides were in a way traditionally more friendly with each other than with their own men. For them the numbers were necessary for the sake of the bag, and for scenic purposes. For them a good war had to be full of "arms, shoulders and heads flying about the field and blows ringing by the water and the wood." But the arms, shoulders and heads would be those of villeins.

The Ill-Made Knight is hardly how most Arthurian writers would characterise Lancelot. Everyone knows that he's the golden boy -- handsome, debonair, blond. Not in T. H. White's book, he's not. He's homely bordering on ugly. He is driven by his love of Arthur (and later of Guenever) to become the best knight in the world. Finally, he is just a bundle of moral conflicts. White brilliantly remarks that it was not simply a triangle between Arthur, Guenever and Lancelot, but actually a quadrangle, with God in the fourth corner. And it was the relationship between Lancelot and God that is perhaps the most complex. Arthur is a decent man; Guenever is to be loved. Lancelot's lot is to wrestle with his moral bearings.

On top of this stain there was the torture of knowing that Arthur was kind, simple and upright -- of knowing that he was always on the edge of hurting Arthur dreadfully, although he loved him. Then there was pain about Guenever herself, the tiny plant of bitterness which they had sown, or seen sown, in each other's eyes, on the occasion of their first quarrel of suspicion. It was a pain to him to be in love with a jealous and suspicious woman. She had given him a mortal blow by not believing his explanation about Elaine instantly. Yet he was unable not to love her. Finally there were the revolted elements of his own character -- his strange desire for purity and honour and spiritual excellence.

White consistently shows Arthur as a simple man, but always in a positive light. He has his blind spots, to be sure, but he tries to think things through, as his childhood tutor had taught him. He is far from a witless cuckold. And maybe, White hints, he's the wisest one in the book.

Arthur was not one of those interesting characters whose subtle motives can be dissected. He was only a simple and affectionate man, because Merlyn had believed that love and simplicity were worth having.

Arthur realises that his utopian society is still somewhat violent and contentious, and he decides that the best channel for these energies is a religious quest:  "What I mean is, that the ideal of my Round Table was a temporal ideal. If we are to save it, it must be made into a spiritual one. I forgot about God."  And so begins the quest for the Holy Grail.

On a few occasions, White tells readers that he's not going to discuss this or that in great detail, and if the reader wants detail, he can reach for Malory.  Details of great battles, he says, are like reading an account of a cricket match long past -- interesting only for the cricket fanatic. If you want details on all the travails of the Grail quest, he says, Malory is your man. White plants himself in the castle with Arthur and Guenever, waiting for the survivors to return and tell their tales. Gawaine comes home and tells that his warring ways were ineffective. Lancelot got close enough to see the Grail but was not pure enough to get nearer than that. The knights whose spiritual purity let them achieve their goal (including Gawaine's son, Galahad) were never seen again -- perfection disappears, Arthur sadly and sagely concludes. Meanwhile, Lancelot, whose spiritual purity allowed him at least a glimpse of the Grail, finds life at court a bit vacuous in comparison to the spiritual retreat of the Quest.

"Arthur, you mustn't feel that I am rude when I say this. You must remember that I have been away in strange and desert places, sometimes quite alone, sometimes in a boat with nobody but God and the whistling sea. Do you know, since I have been back with people, I have felt I was going mad? Not from the sea, but from the people. All my gains are slipping away, with the people round me. A lot of the things which you and Jenny say, even, seem to me to be needless: strange noises: empty. You know what I mean, 'How are you?' 'Do sit down.' 'What nice weather we are having!' What does it matter? People talk far too much. Where I have been, and where Galahad is, it is a waste of time to have 'manners.' Manners are only needed between people, to keep their empty affairs in working order. Manners makyth man, you know, not God. So you can understand how Galahad may have seemed inhuman, and mannerless, and so on, to the people who were buzzing and clacking about him. He was far away in his spirit, living on desert islands, in silence, with eternity." 

In stark and painful contrast to Lancelot's upright courage is Mordred, King Arthur's hate-filled bastard son with Morgause. Arthur forces himself to respond to Mordred's venom and scheming with justice and forbearance, but it's clear to all that the monster will not stop until he's destroyed everything the King achieved. And here it is again, that sense that might may, after all, prove right in the end.  The older, cruder and more primal tribes will always likely prevail over the more advanced and cerebral ones, and they'll be relentless gadflies in the meantime.

Small flecks in the iris of Mordred's eyes burned with a turquoise light, as bright as the owl's. Instead of being a foppish man with a crooked shoulder, dressed in extravagant clothes, he became a Cause. He became, on this matter, everything which Arthur was not -- the irreconcilable opposite of the Englishman. He became the invincible Gael, the scion of desperate races more ancient than Arthur's, and more subtle. Now, when he was on fire with his Cause, Arthur's justice seemed bourgeois and obtuse beside him. It seemed merely to be dull complacency, beside the savagery and feral wit of the Pict. His maternal ancestors crowded into his face when he was spurning at Arthur's ancestors whose civilization, like Mordred's, had been matriarchal: who had ridden bare-back, charged in chariots, fought by stratagem, and ornamented their grisly strongholds with the heads of enemies.

At the end of the fourth and final book, A Candle in the Wind, as he's preparing for the final battle with Mordred, a weary and old King Arthur sinks into a  reverie so poignant that my heart aches to think of White as he wrote it.  

...long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred. He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might -- to have ended it -- to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent.

Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. 

So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better.

Ultimately, in the light of one last moment of universal truth, Arthur considers the twin responsibilities of leaders, whether good or evil, and of the people who put them into power.

Was it the wicked leaders who led innocent populations to slaughter, or was it wicked populations who chose leaders after their own hearts?

And on this bleak, haunting note, Arthur concludes his reflection. 

What was Right, what was Wrong? What distinguished Doing from Not Doing? If I were to have my time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in a monastery, for fear of a Doing which might lead to woe.  

Sea Room, by Adam Nicolson

My dear friend Mark is an Englishman who lived in Kuala Lumpur for 20+ years and has now shifted to Edinburgh. When he comes back to visit KL, we invariably spend a lot of time talking about books, but also about the nordic topography of his chosen home, Scotland, and my native place, Maine.  He insists that these harsh and beautiful places will always have a powerful emotional grip on us, no matter how far away from them we wander. Sea Room was one of three books he gave me for Christmas last year, saying that it's good "winter reading".  Even though January and July are indistinguishable in Malaysia, Mark maintains that we northerners have a deep-seated need to mark the passing of seasons, and if it's not snowing outside, we should evoke some snow and chill in our imaginations.

Adam Nicolson inherited the Shiants, three islands in the outer Hebrides off the Scottish coast, from his father, Nigel, who had bought them in 1937.  Adam spent his adult life cherishing visits to and studying the history -- natural and human -- of the islands.  He recorded all of it in Sea Room in preparation for deeding the islands over to his own son, Tom.

I love how he tries to appraise the value of this property, acknowledging that some real estate expands one's mind and soul much more than it expands one's net worth.

At times in the last two decades, these islands have been the most important thing in my life. They are a kind of heartland for me, a core place. My father bought them over sixty years ago for £1,400, he gave them to me when I was twenty-one, and I shall give them to my son Tom when he is twenty-one in four years' time. This is not, as cynics have sometimes said, for tax reasons. The Shiants seem scarcely to do with money and, anyway, they have been a catastrophic investment. For the same amount, at the same time, my father could have bought a Jacobean manor house in Sussex or a two hundred-acre farm of prime arable in Cambridgeshire. Each would be worth a million or more by now. As it is, if I sold the Shiants, I could perhaps buy a two-bedroom flat in Fulham.

This was never a question of financial riches. My father bought the islands and gave them to me because as a very young man he had felt enlarged and excited by the ownership of a place like this, by the experience of being there alone or with friends, by an engagement with a nature so unadorned and with a sea- and landscape so huge that it allowed an escape into what felt like another dimension. It was a way of leaving home, a step into a different world. 

The Maine coast is also dotted with islands, some inhabited, many not.  People who grow up and live on islands are different from mainlanders, and Nicolson, although he has never dwelt full-time on the Shiants, does a fine job of capturing the aspects of island life that change those who cross the water. Nicolson's account of his first solo sailing trip to the Shiants, complete with fears of navigational failures and foul weather, is a perfect illustration of the perils of choosing to live on islands:  Especially in cold, harsh climates, there's an inherent risk in simply getting there, and once there, the resources for survival may well be limited. That sense of isolation can be alarming, exhilarating or both in turn.

I have felt at times, and perhaps this is a kind of delirium, no gap between me and the place. I have absorbed it and been absorbed by it, as if I have had no existence apart from it. I have been shaped by those island times, and find it difficult now to achieve any kind of distance from them. The place has entered me. It has coloured my life like a stain. Almost everything else feels less dense and less intense than those moments of exposure. The social world, the political world, the world of getting on with work and a career -- all those have been cast in shadow by the scale and seriousness of my brief moments of island life.

Nicolson describes the Shiants'  flora and fauna,  predominantly birds (although his chapter on the island's rats is great fun to read. From a distance.)  His sense of solitude when there obviously fails to take account of the birds. The book actually has a subtitle:  "The story of one man, three islands, and half a million puffins."

Ludicrous and lovable puffins! Their sociability is as stiff and predicable as an evening in an Edwardian London. Gestures of deference are required for any newcomer, and a little accepting dance of stamping feet is made by those already settled with cigars around the fender...  They are more capable of looking embarrassed than any bird I have seen. So polite is this world, in fact, that most of its members seem struck dumb by their sense of propriety. Puffins remain monogamous... throughout their extraordinarily long and stable lives: up to forty years of politeness and tedium, the whirring of wings and the ritual stamping of little orange feet.

He also explores the islands' human history, bringing a team of archaeologists to excavate the earliest sites of human habitation and poring over what written history he can find. In the 18th century, there may have been as many as 40 families living on the isles, but by the early 1800s, only one family lived there to tend the sheep for the owner. Nicolson is quick to dispel any silly romantic notions about this life being anything but brutally harsh and crushingly lonely. In one haunting account, he tells of the husband who lowered his wife over the cliff's edge by a rope so that she might harvest the sea birds nesting there.  She had reached out and snapped the necks of a half dozen birds or so, securing the dead birds in her belt, when the rope broke.  She plunged into the water, but didn't drown -- the bodies of the dead birds acted as a life-buoy, keeping her afloat.  The current in the Minch, however, is fierce, and husband and wife could only look helplessly at each other as she was swept rapidly out to sea, never to be seen again.  At the same period, Nicolson points out, well-off aesthetes were coming by and remarking upon the stark beauty of the place. It's a jarring contrast, but it reminds me of my own travels to harsh and impoverished lands.  It's a lot harder to see the beauty in the place when one is totally consumed with struggling for survival there. Nicolson cites an English poet who waxed lyrical about the remote splendour of the islands and was then equally revolted when he saw the living conditions for the shepherd's family.

Life was arduous without friends or neighbours. The women and children had to struggle with the boat on the beach, with the spades in the ditches and ridges of the lazybeds, with anything going wrong and the limitations of their own company, with no contact or friendship outside the constrictions of the family circle. Life on the Shiants, which for centuries might have felt like a blessing, would now have been like a prison. It was like a cloud closing over the sun...  But the period is drenched in irony. Just as isolation and loneliness were making the Shiants a kind of hell, the first dreamy-eyed travellers from the south were coming to see the islands as a vision of earthly beauty. As the place became difficult and empty for the Hebrideans, it became beautiful and empty for outsiders.  

Adam Nicolson  reflected much on the responsibilities and joys of owning "his islands". He is careful to give local mainlanders the access to them that they've customarily enjoyed, whether for grazing sheep or fishing. He resisted the efforts of British conservation groups to take control of the islands figuring that no one would better limit access and protect the environment than he and his father had done.. He was a vigilant caretaker, a curator and a trustee of the Shiants. What a colossal gift to give a son:  three islands, and this book.  Fortunate Tom Nicolson!  

The 5 Love Languages, by Dr. Gary D. Chapman

I edited this audio book for the Malaysian Association for the Blind and ended up listening to it in full. Self-help books are not my favourite genre.  Heaven knows I could bear improvement in many areas of my life, but given the choice between a marriage counselor and Edith Wharton, we know which book I'm going to choose.  Now and then I stumble across a self-help volume, however, that lives up to its promise.  I think The 5 Love Languages should be required reading for every couple, and I'm likely to wrap up a copy the next time I need to give a wedding gift.  As for me, it helped me reflect upon and diagnose why my own relationships did not survive.  The author recorded this audio version of the book, and I found his gentle North Carolina drawl very soothing, avuncular and matter-of-fact.

The title is a bit misleading:  This is not a Mars-Venus type book on how to communicate with a partner of opposite gender.  It's only peripherally about spoken communication at all.  This book is directed at every one who has ever said, "My partner doesn't love me.  Oh, he says this, or she does that, sure... but I just don't feel loved."

Dr. Chapman has identified what he terms the 5 love languages by which we communicate our feelings for our mates.  The problem? Our mate may not share the same primary means of showing love, so he or she is waiting for some other type of demonstration.  The languages are:

1. Quality time
2. Words of affirmation
3. Gift-giving
4. Gifts of service
5. Touch

Quality time:  She says, "Sure he is a good man and a good provider, but we never do anything together." He says, "I'm always busy working to provide and then doing chores around the home; how can she possibly say I don't love her?"  Answer:  He's showing his love in a way that doesn't meet her emotional needs. Prescription:  set aside time to do mutually enjoyable things with the focus on each other.  Watching TV does not count, nor does playing tennis when the focus is on the game itself. Setting aside 15 minutes a day for an attentive conversation may do the trick.

Words of affirmation:  He says, "I always tell her how wonderful she is, but she never says anything like that to me. She doesn't love me."  She says, "I kiss and hug him all the time, and we have a great sex life. How can he possibly feel unloved?"  Some of us need to hear the words out loud, and if the partner is not necessarily comfortable speaking of emotions and issuing compliments, says Dr. Chapman, get over it! Love is about giving, so if you know your mate needs to hear loving words, you make a habit of saying them.

Gift-giving:  She says, "When we were dating, he used to bring me flowers and chocolate, just little tokens to show affection. That dried up as soon as we were married, and now I don't think he cares anymore."  Gifts don't need to be extravagant -- people whose primary love language is gift-giving just need a token to demonstrate that their partners are thinking of them.  Again, for those who say they don't know how to pick gifts, get over it! Make a gesture. Give it a little thought and offer whatever you give with genuine love. For those who prefer to save and invest their money, Dr. Chapman asks, "Do you want to be wealthy and alone?   If not, make some small investments in your relationship."  (The cartoon above reminds me of an old Gary Larsen cartoon, picturing a wolf presenting a sheep with a bouquet.  The caption: "In the end, their relationship failed -- Irving worried excessively about what the rest of the pack would think, and Agnes just ate the flowers."  Clearly gift-giving was his primary language, but not hers.)

Gifts of service:  I struggled with this one, especially when the man said, "I work long hours at the mill. I come home and the house is a mess, the kids are a mess, there's no dinner anywhere in sight, the laundry is undone..."  I spat at the MP3 player, "For heaven's sake, do you want a wife or a maid?" Some people, though, do feel loved when their partners do things to help, and in fact, that's the primary means of demonstrating love for them.  A reverse case:  The husband complains that his wife spends hours in the kitchen preparing elaborate gourmet meals which he doesn't enjoy -- he'd rather they spent the time chatting with each other (i.e. spending quality time).  The prescription in these cases were, in the first case, the wife should view cooking dinner as a means of showing her love, rather than as an onerous chore, and in the second case, the wife should cook simpler meals and spend more time conversing with her husband. What if, however, the gourmet is cooking elaborate meals because she enjoys it?  I guess the answer is that she needs to find a way to give her spouse the quality time that he enjoys to keep him feeling loved.

Touch:  Dr. Chapman is quick to point out that sex is a physically-driven necessity for men, and we should not confuse the need for sex with touch as the primary love language.  One man said he had two primary love languages:  touch and affirming words.  Ah, but suppose your wife never told you anything complimentary, or she criticised you in front of others, but you still had a fabulous sex life together, would that work?  No, the man replied:  If she castigated me publicly, our sexual intimacy would dry up.  Then, concluded Dr. Chapman, you've just established that words of affirmation are really your primary love language.  For someone who's primary language is touch, the partner can wax poetic with praise, but if there's no affectionate physical contact, the verbiage is wasted.  If one spouse says, "Oh, but I'm not a touchy-feely kind of person!", Dr. Chapman's blunt response:  Learn to be one.  Do you want your partner to feel that you love her? Then you must demonstrate it in the language that she understands -- bringing her gifts may be your preferred way of expressing love, but it's not hers.

In the final chapters, the author helps readers to determine both their own and their partners' primary love languages, and then gives tips on learning to "speak" them.  Love is a choice, he reminds us (once we've moved beyond the 'in love' infatuation phase). We need to make conscious choices about the most effective ways to show our love. This is a marvellously down-to-earth, practical guide for anyone who has ever asked, "I love my partner, so why doesn't he (or she) feel loved?"

1984, by George Orwell

As I looked at the list of titles on my Kindle, I decided it was time to re-read this classic.  About 20 minutes into the book, I realised that I was reading it for the first time.  That is the extent to which Orwell's dystopian horrors have worked their way into the collective consciousness:  Big Brother, Double-Think, Newspeak, the thought police and the proles are so familiar to me that I was sure I had read the book before.  Surely it had been required reading for all of us in the Wellesley College class of 1984, which the administration had euphemistically dubbed 'the Utopian class'?  Evidently not, because I would have remembered such a ghastly story. I wish I had read it then, because I'd like to compare my reaction to the book in 1984 with that in 2013.

I suppose when readers first encountered Winston Smith in 1969, the Oceania (one of the world's three super-power nations) in which he exists seemed very futuristic, indeed, with two-way telescreens both spewing propaganda and doing constant surveillance. Technology is used to appalling ends, and normal human instincts and emotions are shunned.  This is how Orwell introduces Julia, the woman whose passionate involvement with Winston will lead to their mutual downfall.

Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her.

Although novel-writing machines might have seemed outlandish to a reader in 1969, the totalitarian government and the oppressed society that Orwell presents show the timeless, ugly facets of human nature.  Tyrants in all phases of history have used the power of hatred and collective rage to manipulate their citizens.

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

Winston and Julia are low-level Party members, working in the Ministry of Truth (which, the reader quickly realises, is the Party's means of generating propaganda and re-writing history to suit its single-minded goal of retaining power).  The proletariat, or 'proles', make up the bulk of the population, kept docile and heedless by a steady stream of mind-numbing amusements. As ever, just give them bread and circuses to keep them complacent.

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator...  no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations.

As for the Party members, the concepts of privacy and individuality are anathema. Winston, who has an unfortunate tendency to think about things and yet cannot discuss these thoughts with anyone, naturally begins to question his own sanity. 

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one... to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

I reminded myself as I read that Orwell's nightmarish vision of social re-engineering preceded the reign of the Khmer Rouge, but it was no doubt informed by Stalin's and Mao's efforts.

There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

 Winston comes into possession of a subversive book, allegedly written by the Party's arch-enemy, Goldstein. In it, he reads a summary of how the Party came to power and has held and will likely continue to hold its absolute power. As I read this passage in 2013, I of course consider the "enlightened and progressive" governments who find reasons to justify and euphemisms to explain systemic cruelties.

...practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

And the longer a tyrannical government stays in power, the more arrogant it becomes, having manipulated the people into a state of unawareness, ignorance and passivity. 

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

From this subversive book, Winston learns how power works, but he is left to ponder why.  To no one's surprise, including his own, he is arrested and taken to the Ministry of Love for interrogation and most likely vaporization.  His interrogator turns out to be O'Brien, the Party official who had slipped him the book to begin with, posing as an underground conspirator.  While intrigued with Winston's mind, O'Brien does what he must to destroy it, to stomp it into blind submission.  Along the way, he agrees to answer some of Winston's questions, one of which is that lingering Why?  For once, the higher level Ministry of Truth official speaks the truth.  

"But always -- do not forget this, Winston-- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-- for ever."

While reading 1984,  I instinctively tried to put distance between the world of today and Big Brother's Oceania, consoling myself that we're not quite that bad. Not yet, anyway.  I stumbled across this article, which more precisely gives our current state in relation to Orwell's vision. The author's advice: "We should all be mindful of our technology and how it's used." I would add that we should question the source and the validity of everything that is fed to us on our various telescreens.

The Victim, by Saul Bellow

A friend, a Chinese-Malaysian man in his early 50s, caught me off-guard recently when he mentioned that his favourite author is Saul Bellow.  I respect this fellow's artistic sensibilities, so I cautiously admitted that I had read only one of Bellow's novels, Herzog, and... and... hadn't precisely loved it.  The truth: I loathed it, character, plot, prose and all, and after finishing, I planted Saul Bellow on my personal blacklist.  Listening to my friend rattling off the list of Bellow's novels that he's read and cherished, though, I reconsidered.

After all, my faithful list-writer, Anthony Burgess, included two of Bellow's works -- The Victim and Humboldt's Gift -- on his list of the 99 best novels.  The committees for the Nobel Prize, U.S. Book Prize, PEN/Malamud Award and Prix International obviously ranked Bellow as a great author.  Surely I had missed something.  I would give him another go.

I approached The Victim with a doggedly open mind, even a predisposition to admit my earlier mistake in judgement. I finished with the grudging concession that I disliked it only a smidgeon less than Herzog. Overall, my reaction to both books was very similar:  I neither enjoyed them nor admired them, and I'm still completely in the dark as to why so many others just love this man's work.  In fact, the character on the cover of the Penguin paperback edition pretty well sums up my feelings -- head in hand, wondering where I missed the boat.

I'm reasonably free-thinking when it comes to books. I may or may not agree with critics, literary prize committees, or fellow readers. I often admire books that I fail to enjoy. (Cormac McCarthy's novels come to mind here.) I ignore best-seller lists. So why am I tormenting myself for my failure to appreciate Saul Bellow's work?  Is it because I sense that to reject him amounts to anti-Semitism?  That is of course nonsense on one level -- the fact that I don't care for Paulo Coelho doesn't belie any antipathy towards Brazilians. On the other hand, in both of these novels Bellow presents me with protagonists, Moses A. Herzog and Asa Leventhal, who dare me not to roll my eyes and mutter, "Sheesh, what a putz."  They are not entertainingly bumbling, nor are they quite pathetic. If they progress from one state at the beginning of the novel to another at the end, it's small progress. Bluntly, I just find them both supremely annoying.

Equally vexing and unenlightening is Leventhal's nemesis in The Victim, Kirby Allbee.  Allbee is down on his luck -- widowed, drunk, unemployed -- and he appears to hold Leventhal responsible for his misfortune, or at least for his lack of employment, thanks to an incident in which Leventhal engaged in a raging argument with Allbee's former boss.  He now stalks Leventhal wanting... what? Compensation? Apology? Commiseration? Revenge?  Leventhal initially denies any responsibility for Allbee's circumstances, then comes to admit a bit of culpability.  Ultimately Leventhal allows his stalker into his home, having capitulated utterly to his demands, though he deeply resents every gesture he makes.  Each man feels himself equally victimised by the other. Allbee rails at Leventhal that "you people" are different and fail to understand the suffering of others.

"Because you've got to blame me, that's why," said Allbee. "You won't assume that it isn't entirely my fault. It's necessary for you to believe that I deserve what I get. It doesn't enter your mind, does it--that a man might not be able to help being hammered down? What do you say? Maybe he can't help himself? No, if a man is down, a man like me, it's his fault. If he suffers, he's being punished. There's no evil in life itself. And do you know what? It's a Jewish point of view. You'll find it all over the Bible. God doesn't make mistakes. He's the department of weights and measures. If you're okay, he's okay, too. That's what Job's friends come and say to him. But I'll tell you something. We do get it in the neck for nothing and suffer for nothing, and there's no denying that evil is as real as sunshine. Take it from me, I know what I'm talking about. To you the whole thing is that I must deserve what I get. That leaves your hands clean and it's unnecessary for you to bother yourself. Not that I'm asking you to feel sorry for me, but you sure can't understand what makes a man drink."

Leventhal does rather hold Allbee responsible for his own downfall. At least Allbee doesn't have to face a deluge of anti-Semitism every day.

You couldn't say you were master of yourself when there were so many people by whom you could be humiliated.

The two men wallow in their own private senses of humiliation until they part company after a sordid argument.  They meet again years later, and I sense that, although Allbee's material fortunes have shifted, neither man has changed; separation has simply allowed them to stop feeding each other's demons. 

To give credit where it's due, Bellow does write some gorgeous passages of description, immersing the reader in the sights, sounds and smells of 1960s New York.

He went down in the elevator amid a crowd of girls from the commercial school upstairs, largely unconscious of the pleasure that he took in their smooth arms and smooth faces. The elevator sank slowly in the musty shaft with a buzz of signals and a sparking of tiny arrowheads. On the street Leventhal bought a paper and glanced through it in the cafeteria. After lunch, he walked toward the river, passing through the sidewalk markets, between the sacks of coffee beans. The roasting odor was mixed with the smell of gas. The occasional piping of a tug or the low blurt of a steamer came through the trample and jamming of trucks, and booms bristled like the spikes of a maguey, dividing the white of the sky as the piers did that of the water.

Leventhal believes that the Gentiles who run New York's publishing interests maintain and circulate between themselves a blacklist of Jews who are bound to be trouble in the workplace, and none of his friends, also Jewish, can disabuse him of this notion.  As a reader, I have my own blacklist, but the late Mr. Bellow can rest assured that it's not racially driven. He's in very mixed company on my list. Still, I would welcome feedback from any and all readers who love this man's work and who would like to share with me what they see in it.