The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much
by G.K. Chesterton
read: 2013

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a collection of short mystery stories fitting the typical pattern: a crime is uncovered, numerous suspects appear, and a genius - title character Horne Fisher, in this case - pieces things together at the end. The stories in this collection have two twists on the normal formula, however. First, while Fisher is an expert in many fields, it's usually his understanding of human psychology that leads him to the criminal's identity, not his ability to spot evidence. In one story, he determines that a peasant superstition about a place is true and the modern skepticism false, noting "Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority." In another story, he determines that a famously bad shot fired the fatal bullet, as his shooting follies so absurd that Fisher concluded they could only have been done by a great shot pretending to be terrible.

The second difference that sets The Man Who Knew Too Much apart is that the wrong-doers are rarely brought to justice. Fisher walks in the circles of British high society, and frequently the killer is someone untouchable, someone where accusing him of a crime would damage England. This provides an interesting dimension to the stories and gives Fisher a world-weariness and cynicism that makes the character memorable.

The Known World

The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
read: 2013
Pulitzer Prize

The Known World, the second novel I read for Black History Month, has a great hook: apparently there were a small number of free blacks who owned slaves before the Civil War. The story centers around the plantation of slave-owning black Henry Townsend, both before and after his death. By making the slaveowner black, author Edward P. Jones forces us to confront slavery divorced from racism, something I'd never done before. To me, slavery was always something blacks did to whites, and I could draw a line from the dehumanizing oppression of slavery to the Jim Crow laws of the early-to-mid 1900's to the more subtle racism that exists today. The Known World forced me to consider the tragedy and absurdity of slavery as an institution. A runaway slave is stealing from his master; he's stealing himself. This point is made most absurdly when we see Broussard, a murderer, conducting the sale of the slave Moses from the jail cell where he awaits trial. The prisoner on death row has more rights than the slave; he still has near-absolute dominion over the slave.

One of the themes that runs through the novel is the psychological damage slavery does not just to slaves but to slaveowners, and even non-slaveowners in the community. Some examples: William Robbins, the wealthiest man in the county, loves his slave Philomena, but he can never really know if she loves him back. Robbins has a daughter by Philomena, Dora, and a white daughter by his wife, Patience, but the girls are denied sisterhood because of the barriers slavery erects. One of the many mini-narratives in the story involves a depressed man named Morris, who as a child staved off his sadness through his friendship with the slave Beau. But Morris and Beau can never be friends as adults the same way they were as boys. Even John Skiffington, who does not own slaves, sees his duties as Sheriff more and more consumed by chasing runaway slaves, to the detriment of his health and sanity.

Professor Amy Hungerford gives two fascinating lectures on some of the metatextual elements in The Known World: the left-to-right symbolism, the fragility of the written word versus the stability of the plastic arts, the power and failures of words to evoke imagination. The narrative voice is godlike and omniscient: it travels back and forth through time, takes a minor character and gives his life story in just a few paragraphs, explodes with minute details, peers into people's heads, and withholds judgement for all. I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines in poetry, Tennyson's "Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours / With larger, other eyes than ours / To make allowance for us all." The narrative voice has this feeling, of absolute knowledge, and understanding, and even pity.

In her final lecture Professor Hungerford describes how Jones worked on this novel for a long time, reading and researching and formulating and re-formulating the narratives and mini-narratives and minutiae, all while writing very little, so that by the time he finally put pen to paper he had entire sections virtually memorized. Professor Hungerford notes that Jones' mother was illiterate, and this suggested to a young Jones the mystery, power, and fragility that pervade the written word as a symbol throughout The Known World. Professor Hungerford wonders aloud at one point about how Jones must have felt carrying the weight of the novel around in his head. I have an idea for a novel myself that I've been thinking about for nearly a year. I think it's time I started actually working on it.

Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds Are Forever
by Ian Fleming
read: 2013

So James Bond meets up with his female contact, and it turns out she's a smoking hot babe! Who saw that coming?

The fun thing about the books is that you get inside Bond's head a bit. As he's contemplating a life with Tiffany Case, he imagines that, due to being gang-raped as a teenager, her trust in the first man she sleeps with means things will have to be forever. At the same time, he realizes that, as a member of the secret service, he can only truly be married to "M." Bond never reaches a resolution, but glimpses like these into his mind give the character an emotional depth he doesn't have in the films.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been reading books on being black in America for Black History Month. The first two books I read dealt with slavery, and after reading those and books like Beloved and Black Boy, I had a conclusion: "Novels on the black condition," I told wife, "are all depressing."

Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably depressing also; certainly protagonist Janie is beset by misery throughout her life. But the tragedy is different than in the other books I mentioned; it's not tragedy brought on by being black, it's the universal tragedy of love and death and loss and sacrifice and pain. This isn't a book where a black protagonist is oppressed by whites throughout her life. White people and white society exist outside the narrative, as a boundary condition almost, a natural force like the hurricane provides the novel's climax. Their Eyes Were Watching God doesn't ignore racism - we can see it in Tea Cake getting conscripted to bury bodies and in Mrs. Turner's contempt for those with darker skin - and the legacy of slavery still has ripples in the lives that the protagonists create. But those are just parameters within which the characters are trying to build a life and find happiness. Black culture has a life all its own. The guitar-picking, singing, dancing, cooking beans and cornbread, gambling, and other cultural affects aren't reactions to white society, even in spite of white society. They have nothing to do with it.

I think the male / female relationship in the story parallels the black / white one. Janie pretty much goes along with her husbands even in the face of mental and sometimes physical abuse, and she never really considers breaking out of traditional gender roles. She dislikes her second husband Jody and likes her third husband Tea Cake, but she is mostly subservient to both. Janie never transcends societal gender roles, but that is no barrier to her finding peace and fulfillment in her life. Her quest is apart from the constraints society puts on her.

The courtroom scene towards the end of the book, where Janie stands trial for murder, makes more sense in this light. From a narrative perspective, this is one of the book's most pivotal scenes, with Janie's life hanging in the balance, but Hurston relates it in just a couple pages. This seems out of proportion, but Their Eyes Were Watching God isn't the story of what happens to Janie; it's the story of her finding herself despite happenstance. Ultimately, the white women who assume her innocence and the black men who assume her guilt cannot judge her. The (all-white, all-male) jury - "Twelve strange men who didn't know a thing about people like Tea Cake and her were going to sit on the thing" - is even more incapable of judging her. Only God can judge, and in this life only Janie's own opinion of herself really matters. In that sense, the courtroom scene is given only the ink it deserves.