My dad occasionally wanders into my room with that look on his face communicating the depth to which the books he borrowed from the library have disappointed him, proceeds to the shelf where my to-read books live until I devour them, and borrows a book before I read it. That happened with The Night Circus. Afterwards he commented that it reminds him of World of Wonders. I can see why. Both books are set, at least partly, in a circus/carnival even stranger than most. Both are about the convoluted relationships of several central characters. But The Night Circus is much more overtly fantastical, centred as it is around a magical duel of surprising subtlety.

Celia and Marco are proxies, pawns in a challenge conducted between two magicians of incredible longevity and power. This is the latest—and apparently the last—such challenge, which ends only when one of the two players’ proxies dies. But it’s no ordinarily duel, magic or otherwise. Celia and Marco are not supposed to interfere with each other; instead, they compete in displays of their magical prowess, attempting to show the other’s methods and abilities are far superior. For the challenge’s venue, Prospero and his counterpart, the mysterious Alexander, arrange the creation of a circus like the world has never seen. This is the eponymous nightime circus, moving from town to town with no schedule, no warning. Within this circus, Celia and Marco compete to prove themselves the better magician.

And what a circus! The book straddles the transition into the 20th century. Set amid the decline of Victorian England and the rise of the United States of America, it has that particular atmosphere of sepia-toned photographs, gas lighting, and quaintly dressed couples in the autumn air. The circus is similarly romantic, a combination of impossibly efficient and magnificently mysterious. Some of the tents have performers: acrobats, fortune tellers, even an illusionist. Others are far less conventional, including labyrinths of ice and wish-granting trees. It truly is a world of wonders.

The circus is the brainchild of one M. Lefevre, but its success and vitality is due to Celia and Marco. Gradually, the circus changes from setting to material for their duel. Marco lights an eternal bonfire that allows him to watch and manipulate the circus from afar, for he is usually in London while the circus is on the road. Celia is the one responsible for the train that transports the circus to each new destination, not to mention whatever magic enables its setup and takedown. In between these more quotidian tasks, they find time to design new tents and attractions. At first they work separately, designing and implementing their own creations. But once Celia and Marco discover each other’s identity as their opponent, they begin to collaborate—and their sponsors are none too happy with such fraternization.

That this is a love story should come as no surprise. It’s advertised as such in the dust jack cover copy, and even if it weren’t, then every rule of storytelling would still demand it! Celia and Marco’s romance is not sappy, but it isn’t particularly well-realized either. For one thing, there’s Isobel. Marco meets her long before he meets Celia—long before he properly begins the challenge, even, though he has been training almost his entire life. Isobel reads tarot, and they develop a comfortable but not necessarily passionate relationship. Indeed, Isobel clearly wants (or needs) Marco more than he does her, to the point that she volunteers to join the Night Circus so as to spy on Celia for him. Later, when all is said and done and it’s clear that Marco has chosen Celia, Isobel’s reaction proves to be a major turning point, sending ripples throughout the circus. Yet Isobel bears no malice toward Celia, and while this is refreshing, I kind of wish she had gotten mad, at least at someone.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there never seems to be a serious obstacle between Celia and Marco being together. There’s a notable one during the climax, of course, but even the solution to that was rather predictable. Theirs is a storybook romance without the troubles that should accompany any two literary characters’ attempts to make it work: where are the disagreements, the arguments, the fights? Where are the misinterpreted phrases, misconstrued glances, and awkward moments? It’s not sappy and not overdone, but Celia and Marco’s relationship is still just a little too smooth.

This glossiness translates to other areas of The Night Circus, including the magic that Celia and Marco perform. Its products are amazing but the magic itself is not as flashy: Celia can alter her gown colour at will! Marco can write stuff in his notebook! Actually, I’m going to disagree with some reviewers who express their disappointment that the duel is not so much a duel as a talent show. I loved this aspect of The Night Circus. I like that Morgenstern took it upon herself not to make this some kind of conflict related to force, or even to wits. Rather, it is a conflict of stamina. Celia can feel herself slipping as the strain of managing the circus begins to become too much. Marco has been keeping the circus performers from aging, not to mention carefully managing the mind of his employer, M. Lefevre. The magic takes its toll on both of them—but they can’t give it up, for they have been bound to this challenge by the magic of those who would see them dance until one of them drops.

I wish we had learned more about the pasts of Prospero and Alexander. It’s implied that they are extremely old, on the order of centuries at least, but that each of them is beginning to reach his limits: Prospero traps himself in a ghost-like state after attempting to achieve true immortality; Alexander remains corporeal but is feeling the weight of his age more than ever. This is to be their final challenge, one more game for old times’ sake. The point of the challenge, if it has one at all, seems to be to gauge which theory of magic is better—Celia’s almost psychokinetic manipulation of the world around her, or Marco’s textual, wordbased sorcery. Yet with so little background on these characters, we are left without a mythology for The Night Circus.

Finally, I just have to add how much I enjoyed Bailey’s story. His subplot progresses asynchronously with Celia and Marco’s challenge, but he becomes an integral part of The Night Circus and its resolution. I found Bailey a much easier character to identify with than Celia, Marco, or any of the others associated with the circus. His conflicts in life were real and recognizable, with the lure of the circus a classic juxtaposition. Along with Herr Thiessen, Bailey is one of those supporting characters who make a novel a lot better than it might have been if the author had chosen only to focus on the main plot.

My review is somewhat more lukewarm than I thought it would be after finishing The Night Circus. I really enjoyed reading this book. Erin Morgenstern’s prose is poetic to the point of seductiveness. In my descriptions of this book to people I have tiptoed around the term magical realism, for it connotes an idea similar to what comes to mind when I consider The Night Circus. But the fantasy in this book is overt; I suppose I might call it magical surrealism for its use of illusion and the subtlety of its magical acts. Although the relationships between the characters are not the highest point of this book, I think it’s definitely worthy of the acclaim and hype it seems to be receiving so far. Instant classic? No. But something to consider if you too are disappointed with your choice of library books.

N.B.: Although I was planning to read it anyway, this book's inclusion of Indigenous perspectives made it an appropriate choice for my final assignment (a book review) in my Aboriginal Education class. As a result, I have written this with a focus on how this book furthered my understanding of Indigenous issues and applies to my teaching. I hope you find this perspective valuable even if you aren't a teacher. This is a rough draft, so comments are welcome. And be forewarned it's slightly more formal, with a lot more quotation-lifting than I usually practice in my Goodreads reviews..

The 7th of March, 2011 was the 100th International Women's Day, and The Globe and Mail commemorated the occasion by running two contrasting columns on the front page. One, by Stephanie Nolen, discusses the ongoing struggle for women's rights in the developing world. Next to it was Margaret Wente's piece, in which she argues: "The war for women's rights is over. And we won." She seems to be employing George W. Bush's definition of "mission accomplished here. I have no doubt the juxtaposition of these two articles was an intentional bit of sensationalism on the Globe's part. Yet it also emphasizes the privileged, white perspective the Globe expects to share with its readers. Nolen discusses the developing world as a far-off place, while Wente refers to "Western women" as a single, homogenous group, saying, "If you are a woman reading this newspaper today, you are singularly blessed. You belong to the freest, most educated, and most affluent group of women in all of human history." Her choice of words is stunning and only increased my incredulity at the entire article. Wente has some very interesting, very restrictive ideas about the type of women reading The Globe and Mail. And she couldn't be more wrong. The world may look very rosy from her seat at the table, but the war for women's rights—indeed, for the rights of women, Indigenous people, the poor, and ethnic and racial minorities in general—is far from over. Her claim that women have won the war echoed eerily in my mind as I read this passage from Feminism FOR REAL:

We're not really equal when we're STILL supposed to uncritically and obediently cheer when white women are praised for winning 'women's rights,' and to painfully forget the Indigenous women and women of colour who were hurt in that same process. (12)

In Feminism FOR REAL, Jessica Yee has collected the thoughts and expressions of a diverse group of people, attempting to combat the idea that feminism is a movement best left in the classroom and best left to affluent, white academics.

Feminism FOR REAL challenges the received wisdom of academic feminism. It does this in form as well as in content, for it is more than just a collection of essays. It contains informal articles that at times feel intimate and confessional; it has letters, conversations and interviews, and poetry. As Erin Konsmo says, "We choose to have a conversation in spirit of deconstructing academia and challenging the forms in which knowledge is accepted" (23). I find this appealing for several reasons. Firstly, discussions of contemporary feminism have become mired in theoretical frameworks that can do as much harm as good, for they contain biases and expectations that may not be realistic. Secondly, as a future teacher I believe it is important to challenge the way we teach and explore alternative methods of teaching, which might include "Two-Eyed Seeing" approaches that teach traditional Indigenous Knowledge alongside the Western curriculum. Yet I am also learning to recognize that an eagerness to decolonize Indigenous Knowledge and employ anticolonial teaching strategies can, if done improperly, lead to further appropriation and colonial behaviour. This is something Yee and her contributors are aware of as well.


As its subtitle states, Feminism FOR REAL wants to "deconstruct the academic industrial complex of feminism." Several contributors remark upon the gulf between theory and experience. In particular, the expectations of academia when it comes to discussing feminism can also be exclusionary, as Krysta Williams observes:

If so called 'radical' or 'progressive' people don't hear enough 'buzz' words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. (30)

This is an issue I have been encountering quite often lately as I think about feminism and also about education. Megan Lee talks about how she saw "the same token superficial analyses of racism and classism" (85) in her women's studies classes. Coming from a poor background, she was conflicted about her participation in an institution that reinforces privilege, and notes that her mother "feared that I would become like the many privileged young professionals … who claim to understand the experience of being oppressed by virtue of their education and rely on the authority of their education to silence and ignore the actual experiences of oppressed people" (87). Although I do not share Lee's background, I also have concerns about my heavily theory-based education. I love theory and abstract thought, and I majored in mathematics not just because I love it but because it is a refuge from the real world. Yet I did not choose to go into an abstract career; I am going to be a teacher. I will be interacting with real people, each one unique in background and experiences, and I will be in a position of authority. Feminism FOR REAL and other books like it remind me that, while a useful component of study, theory can only get you so far.

The idea that a movement like feminism, which is supposedly all about equality, can actually be a vehicle of oppression and exclusion is troubling, to say the least. Of course, it is exactly the perception of feminism as a homogenous, unified movement that Yee and the contributors to Feminism FOR REAL want to dispel. Many of her contributors discuss this heterogeneity in the context of Indigenous rights. Reading about how some feminists reject the inclusion of Indigenous issues under the umbrella of feminism reminds me of Leanne Simpson's experiences with journal editors: "editors have consistently removed references to colonialism from my manuscripts because it is 'too off topic'". Similarly, Theresa Lightfoot takes exception to how non-Indigenous feminists often

treat being Indigenous as an "add-on".… Native women get the typical "oh those are Native issues" response, or we hear things like, "colonialism and its hang ups are too vast and broad for our scope and thus don't warrant inclusion." (106)

There seems to be remarkable resistance in the academic industrial complex to including Indigenous perspectives as a valid part of movements, fields of studies, and academic disciplines. We are content now to acknowledge that such perspectives exist, but we treat them as a separate field, as something "other." There is a latent expectation that Indigenous people will shelve their "Native issues" for the duration of discussions of women's rights, as if being Indigenous is a state one can suspend or put on hold when convenient. Referring to "2nd wave, white, middle-class feminists," anna Saini says,

What they cannot understand they discount, instead of ceding their control and leadership of the movement to play a supporting role empowering us to fight for our own self-determination (96)

and I think this is true of people in authority over movements in general. Jessica Yee labels this a form of "neo-colonialism" (96), and I would have to agree.

Feminism FOR REAL emphasizes that colonization, appropriation, and exploitation are not obscure phenomena relegated to our past. They are ongoing. Equality does not mean we treat everyone as "the same," especially when "the same" is all too often a code phrase for "everyone is white." Even when society acknowledges the Indigenous perspective (or any non-white perspective), it makes few attempts to accommodate that perspective, something that Golshan Abdmoulaie captures well in her poem about Muslim women when she says, "None of your dreams fit me" (71). It is with this awareness that I consider how I will confront these issues, especially as a teacher. I consider myself a feminist in the sense of Latoya Peterson: "(If) I think (about gender, access, and equality), therefore I am (by definition, a feminist)" (43). However, I am also a white male. In challenging racial and gender inequality, my goal is to be what Krysta Williams and Ashling Ligate call "an Indigenous ally (someone who supports you, and also challenges their own complicity in the system that produce [sic] harm)" (155). Hence, coming from this perspective, for me the strongest message of this book is that discomfort will be a natural part of the struggle to be an ally. It will not be abstract, theoretical discomfort: it will be real. It will be a part of my life and of my teaching.

As an example of how discomfort appears in teaching, consider the controversy in the United States over a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that replaces the N-word with "slave." The publisher argues that the former word makes modern readers uncomfortable with the book. I think such censorship absurd. Can you imagine if we skipped sections of Canadian history because the way European colonists treated Indigenous peoples makes us uncomfortable today? Challenging inequality in any form and learning to be an ally "is not easy, nor should it be. It is uncomfortable, and sometimes it hurts" (156). This is the most pragmatic and important lesson that Feminism FOR REAL has for me. Depending on your background and your experiences, you may find different lessons in this book—but I can guarantee you will find lessons. Like some of the contributors have confessed, I am not well-read when it comes to the canon of popular academic feminists, so I am not qualified to label this book "refreshing" or "revolutionary." But it is eye-opening, thought-provoking, and it does what it says on the cover: it is real, as in authentic, and that makes it worth your attention.

Race-conscious and class-conscious but with a young, street-smart cast of characters, What We All Long For should have been amazing. It should have deserved every bit that “Globe and Mail Best Book” seal on its cover. Dionne Brand should have wowed me with her portrayal of first-generation Vietnamese Canadian Tuyen versus Tuyen’s immigrant parents and sisters. The troubled relationship between Carla and her kid brother, Jamal, should have opened my eyes to the subtle difficulties of living in a city where the colour of one’s skin still creates certain expectations and raises certain obstacles. Nature versus nurture, class versus conscience, youthful rebellion versus the wisdom of one’s elders … these are all motifs in What We All Long For, and Brand squanders each and every one of them.

As one might expect from a notable poet, Brand’s prose is beautiful. Although, in the end, I did not enjoy the story itself, the act of reading this novel was still pleasant. Brand has a very good grasp on the conceptualization of space in a way that makes it easy for me, as a non-visual reader, to appreciate. Not only does she conjure images and sounds, but she pays close attention to textures and smells. Environments are an important component to her scenes, from the artistic chaos of Tuyen’s apartment to the contrasting refuge from the world of Carla’s next door. There’s a great deal of pathetic fallacy and other literary devices that authors less devoted to the craft of writing occasionally omit from their novels. What We All Long For is disappointing, but it is beautifully disappointing.

I’m going to be hard on this book because it starts out with promise. I picked it up for free on a whim from a table at the university where such free books occasionally manifest. I had not heard of Dionne Brand before, and to be honest, the back cover copy makes this book sound like what it turned out to be: an unremarkable and somewhat mediocre story centred around identity, family, and Toronto. It’s the same sort of bland fare that gives CanLit a bland name. But I decided to give it a chance, because I like to keep an open-mind about books and authors I haven’t encountered before. And What We All Long For starts off strong, with a child lost while emigrating from Vietnam, and another child lost after she grows up and decides she should move out.

Vu Tuan and Vu Cam lost their son Quy as they fled Vietnam. In the decades to follow he would grow up in Thailand and Malaysia, becoming a criminal out of necessity and then because he knew nothing better. This part of the book is a fascinating look at the effects of environment on a child’s upbringing. Quy’s chapters are in his own voice, and they communicate the careful pragmatism that a child in his situation has to adopt. Unsavoury people use him for their own ends, so he learns to use them in return. For him, crime is not a question of morality or ethics; it’s business and survival. The fact that he once had a family, and that his parents might still be looking for him after all these years, is largely immaterial—an afterthought against the overriding need to keep moving and keep innovating before someone else does.

Most of the novel, however, follows Tuyen, Carla, Jackie, and Oku. Four twenty-somethings living in Toronto, they all have their twenty-something problems and their conflicts with their parents. Also, their racial heritages—Tuyen is Vietnamese, the others are from various Black communities, and Carla’s mother was White—play an important role in the story and these characters’ conflicts. Tuyen has embraced the life of an artist free from obligations; against her parents’ wishes, she moved out from the family home and in so doing feels that she has escaped from beneath their thumbs. Their persistence in trying to find Quy seems like her to be grasping at straws from the past. Meanwhile, Tuyen struggles with her relationship with Carla, her best friend—except that Tuyen would like it to be more.

Tuyen’s obsession with Carla borders on creepy:

Carla had made it clear to Tuyen that she was straight, but Tuyen could not quite believe her. If she made herself useful enough, if she listened and coaxed enough, maybe Carla would come around. Straight women were never as straight as the put out, Tuyen figured. She had, after all, slept with numerous straight women. They merely had to be convinced.

Straight ladies, is this true? (I somehow doubt it.) I realize I shouldn’t identify everything Tuyen says with what Brand believes, but this did nothing to help me sympathize with Tuyen as a character. For someone who likes to think of herself as artistic, creative, and open-minded, she is awfully self-centred. Yet I suppose there is a small element of the romantic idea of unrequited love here: Tuyen loves her best friend, who does not by a quirk of her biology return that affection on the same level. But the creepiness goes deeper than that:

And there had been a few times, after one of their parties, when she had found herself in Carla’s bed, cuddling on the pretext that they were both high and drunk. Which was pretext enough for Carla to pretend that nothing had happened and to pull herself away from Tuyen’s sleeping body quickly in the morning.

… so far her entreaties had been rebuffed and she’d had to settle for near-unconscious probings and feels when Carla could claim drunkenness or drug-induced forgetfulness.

Consider that for a moment. Tuyen is so wrapped up in this idea of Carla’s hidden sexuality that she pushes Carla when she is under the influence. If that doesn’t seem creepy, imagine if this were the same scene, but with a man in Tuyen’s place. Yeah.

Oh, but What We All Long For does have a man experiencing unrequited love. Oku has feelings for Jackie, and while Jackie has been good enough to have sex with him once or twice, she doesn’t feel the same way for him. To be fair to Oku, he doesn’t approach this the same way Tuyen does with Carla. But his approach is also clingy, and if not creepy, it walks that fine line between sweet and stalking. Oku strikes me as a nice guy genuinely trying to find out what he wants to do with his life: he dropped out of graduate school in literature but wants to avoid the life of manual labour that his father believes is the only acceptable career path. As with Tuyen’s unrequited love, though, I’m not so comfortable with how Oku pursues Jackie.

Carla’s plot is probably my favourite after Quy’s. Her childhood was troubled: her father was living with another woman, Nadine, when he met her mother. And he continued to live with Nadine after Carla and Jamal were born. Eventually, this took its toll, leading Carla’s mother to commit suicide. So Carla and Jamal moved in with Derek and Nadine, and they were one awkward family unit. Then Carla moved out, Jamal started boosting cars, and Derek continued to ignore his paternal responsibilities. Carla has become Jamal’s bail-person and surrogate mother, but she has no idea how to rescue him from the vicious circle of crime into which he has fallen. Every time she gets him out of jail, he quickly finds a way to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Like so many other disadvantaged youth, his story is a mixture of racial discrimination and poor judgement, a dangerous combination that puts him at risk for prison time on the order of decades or life—if life on the street doesn’t kill him first. There is no right answer, no easy solution, to Carla and Jamal’s quandary. And I really like how Brand explores that from its various angles, including the emotional confrontation that Carla has with her father. Blame flies around like it’s on sale; tempers flare; and Carla storms out and commits the act of a child punishing a parent.

What We All Long For would not be all that bad were it not for the ending. I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice it to say, two disparate plotlines don’t converge so much as collide in such a contrived way that it made me almost—almost—throw the book across the room. I don’t know what Brand was thinking; I guess she thought the coincidence was poetic and particularly ironic as a way to end the book. But the effect is cheap and tawdry, and it undermines what little good will her socially-conscious politics had otherwise incurred. And then, of course, we never get to learn about the aftermath. The “violent, unexpected encounter that will alter forever the lives of Tuyen and her friends”, as the back cover copy promised it, certainly does just that—not that we ever get to see how it alters their lives.

Good book? Bad book? What We All Long For is well-intentioned, I suppose, a brilliant attempt that falls short of the mark. It’s burdened by clumsy characterization and poor plotting. This is regrettable, because we need more novels like this—authentic, Canadian novels with main characters from visible minorities, novels written by authors who aren’t white guys trying to sound multicultural. So I wish I could have given What We All Long For the praise it seems to have earned from everywhere else … alas, its provenance does not excuse its flaws, which are too numerous to ignore.

Much like The Burning Glass, I don’t think it was a good idea trying to read this during the school year. After four days I got less than 60 pages into the novel. Just no traction whatsoever.

The romance aspect of this novel was not enough in evidence for me to comment on it—we hadn’t even jumped back to the Tudor part yet. I mean, Celia and Richard’s relationship was shallow and fraught with tired, clichéd appeals to “destiny”. Despite the unfulfilling characterization, however, Green Darkness is probably of superior quality and research to the average historical romance.

Am I going to come back to it? Honestly? Probably not. I don’t remember why I added this to my to-read shelf in the first place—did someone, knowing my affinity for novels set in Tudor England, recommend it to me? It is tempting, but I have many other books I am much more excited to read. I will likely pass this on to someone who will find more enjoyment in it.

I take GPS for granted. I don’t use it that much personally, because I don’t tend to go anywhere, but I’m sure all this technology I love to use makes use of GPS. Thanks to GPS, we can forget that calculating longitude without the help of a network of satellites is difficult and requires great mathematical and engineering expertise. GPS might not be great at giving directions, but that doesn’t mean you’re lost.

In the days—centuries—prior to GPS, you could get lost. Really lost. I’m not sure how to describe how lost you could be, out there on the ocean, no longer in sight of shore. Latitude was relatively easy—well, easy enough once you dealt with the pitching deck, the storms, and the scurvy. Latitude corresponds both to the sun’s altitude in the sky (at noon) and to the altitude of certain stars (if you are in the Northern Hemisphere, Polaris is a good choice) at night. So you could figure out how far away from the equator or the poles. But how far away were you from the nearest charted island? And were you to the east of it, or the west?

Longitude, or rather the “starting point” for lines of longitude, is entirely arbitrary. The only way to calculate longitude is to measure the difference in time between two points: the reference point (e.g., 0° longitude) and your current location. That sounds easy enough: just take a watch with you that’s set to London time, and at noon at your current location, check what time the watch reports.

Much like our skill at flinging sophisticated pieces of technology into orbit has advanced, so too has our ability to construct watches. For the longest time, the solution to calculating longitude eluded mariners because no one could construct a clock that was both accurate enough and durable enough. The constant changes in pressure, humidity, and temperature played havoc with the fine mechanisms that allowed clocks to keep time. Without accuracy, a watch is useless as a method to calculate longitude.

This problem consumed great minds for centuries. It eventually came to a head in 1714, when the English Parliament authorized the creation of a Board of Longitude to disperse prizes for new ways of accurately calculating longitude. The grand prize was £20,000—or $12 million in today’s currency. Longitude was a big deal.

I knew the gist of the John Harrison story prior to reading Longitude, but Dava Sobel goes beyond the accomplishments of this single man and charts the course of the problem, and all its proposed solutions. She sets up a context against which the true scope and power of Harrison’s achievement might be measured. As I explained above, the general solution to calculating longitude was long in evidence, but no one could think of a way to effect it. Galileo had some good ideas related to his observations of Jupiter’s moon, but they were hardly practical for marine navigation. Later, Newton and other English scientists were convinced that astronomy held the key to calculating longitude—and the king agreed with them, establishing the Royal Observatory for the purpose of cataloguing the stars. More than a simple puzzle that made academics scratch their heads, the problem of longitude affected society and the economy. It drove scientific inquiry and technological innovation. Watching this unfold through Sobel’s storytelling is breathtaking and inspiring.

Harrison’s origins read like something out of a fairy tale or a superhero book. His father was a carpenter, and he was trained as a carpenter, not as a watchmaker. Yet this craft fascinated him, so he trained himself to build clocks. In fact, he built a clock entirely out of wood, a clock that required no lubrication owing to the way he had constructed it and the type of wood he had used. John Harrison was not just a tinker or dabbler; he was a creative genius. So he decided to solve the longitude problem. And he did. But when he went to London for his reward, he was met with scepticism, animosity, and belligerence. Thanks to the politics of London, the Board of Longitude was populated by representatives from the astronomy camp, and they were none too keen on Harrison’s mechanical marvel. For the rest of his life, Harrison would improve upon his prototype and receive stipends from the Board, but that recognition and prize money lay beyond his reach.

I personally think we tend to put too much stock in the “great individual” approach to history. I can see why it is appealing for stories, and for works of popular history: our ability to turn history into a biography boils away our dislike of dates and dry facts and lets us focus on the relationships and motivations of the characters. The central conflict of Longitude is not the need to calculate longitude but the antagonistic relationship between the Harrisons and the Reverend Maskelyne. Maskelyne championed the “lunar distance” method of calculating longitude. It just so happened, too, that later on in his life he became the Astronomer Royal, and therefore a member of the Board of Longitude. That didn’t go over well for Harrison’s chances at being awarded that prize.

Indeed, echoes of the great rivalries across the ages surface in Longitude, reminding us that science is never as simple nor as objective as we like to think. Invention is partly innovation, partly inspiration, and part imitation. Sobel is careful to stress that Maskelyne was not the villain in this piece, merely the antagonist—like the feud between Newton and Hooke, the feud between Harrison and Maskelyne was a dispute between two men who knew their stuff. But where ego is concerned and establishing primacy is often necessary for the money and prestige that follows a discovery, tempers will flare and harsh words will be exchanged.

So with this centuries-old problem juxtaposed against a feud between a rural carpenter-turned-watchmaker and the Astronomer Royal, Sobel turns Longitude from a history book into an exciting story. The trick to making any historical account interesting lies in exposing the details and connections that a casual reader, like myself, wouldn’t necessarily know. Sobel does this by charting the connections between Harrison and luminary contemporaries, including Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and Christopher Wren. She does this even with the considerable handicap of lacking much evidence about Harrison’s early life.

Sobel also goes into the intricate inner workings of Harrison’s successive marine chronometers. The genesis and evolution of the marine chronometer, particularly once it had spread to other watchmakers, gave us not only an accurate way to calculate longitude but other useful horological innovations! As Sobel describes the clever devices he designed to solve the limitations of sea clocks, all I could think was, “I have no idea what she is trying to say. This book could use pictures.” Lo and behold, as I reached the middle of the volume, I stumbled into the glossy inset that includes diagrams of a grasshopper escapement and photos of Harrison’s portrait and the chronometers H–1 through H–4. It’s amazing that these timekeepers (with the exception of H–4) continue to run today.

I wish Longitude were longer, but at the same time I love the size of the book as it is. My edition is a nice little paperback copy with a beautiful, high-quality cover. It is compact and deceptively slim for such an interesting history. Yet it is also definitely just a survey. I’m not sure, given the lack of details, how much longer Sobel could have spun it out. But the episodic nature of the chapters, and the abbreviated way she communicates the stories of the testing of H–3, H–4, etc., by Captain Cook and others, seems to indicate that there is more here to tell. Or is that another story?

Oh well. I really liked Longitude. It has the perfect mix of narrative, character, and scientific explanation to make it a fascinating work of history of science. Dava Sobel weaves a fascinating tale set against a problem centuries in the solving, one that vexed astronomers, clockmakers, and mariners alike but whose solution led to advances in all three fields. I, personally, rely on my GPS devices to find my longitude. But it’s good to know that if the GPS network ever goes down, there is at least one museum I can rob for some high-quality longitude calculation devices.

Now excuse me while I draw up some blueprints….

I am not Liz Dunn, though I do identify with her. Obviously, I don’t have a twenty-year-old son whom I gave up for adoption. But I can understand her almost ascetic obsession with solitude. I too am a solitary person; I tend to prefer the company of a good book and its characters to the company of good people. Unlike Liz, though, I must confess to having a social life. I have friends, though I may not “hang out” with them as often as most people do. And while some people may question its validity, my online interactions are a large part of my social matrix as well. So I enjoy being alone, but I am not lonely per se.

Loneliness and the often unexpected connections between people echo throughout Douglas Coupland’s works, but they come to the forefront in Eleanor Rigby. Liz has carefully ensconced herself in a bubble, fending off all but the most resilient of her relationships. And even these are routine, predictable affairs: her mother badgers her and tries to interfere with her life; her sister pities her for not wanting the life that her sister has but isn’t happy with; her brother accepts her but is wrapped up in a family and business of his own. The only wildcard in Liz’s life was the child she had while she was still in high school, a child who shows up twenty years later, precipitating a crisis of loneliness in Liz’s life.

One reason I enjoy Coupland’s novels so much is that his characters always feel like people. They talk like people who are close to each other talk, in meandering conversations that branch into multiple topics as each person’s words spark new connections in others’ minds. It’s not at all like the straightforward dialogue of most novels, wherein dialogue is mainly a mechanism for advancing the plot. And it comes with a challenge, because of course fiction isn’t real life, and so one must balance the realistic dialogue with the needs of the story. It’s this ability to strike an equilibrium between the craziness of real life and the need for fiction to be believable that makes Coupland so compelling for me.

This is a stark contrast to Coupland’s plots, which make very little sense and are always coated in a glossy layer of absurdity. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Take the relationship between Liz and Jeremy for example. Jeremy’s reappearance in Liz’s life comes with a fatal complication: multiple sclerosis (MS). There is no happily ever after for these two, and Liz must face the fact that their reunion will be short-lived and complicated. I find it interesting that there is never any tension between these two. Liz accepts Jeremy’s reorganization of her life with equanimity. Similarly, Jeremy does no wrong. For a kid who had a rather rough time of it in foster homes, he seems to be largely untroubled. He doesn’t seem to have an ulterior motive, doesn’t seem to want to just take advantage of Liz, steal her stuff, and leave. Despite his awful luck in the foster home lottery, he somehow managed to turn out as a decent individual.

Similarly, in the real world, Liz’s incident at the Frankfurt airport would have much more serious consequences than a slap on the wrist and a thorough decontamination. In Coupland’s novels, bad things happen, but they always seem so carefully calibrated to some precise degree of badness. This is how I know Coupland, for all his caustic observations of modern society, is an optimist and not a cynic. His endings are happy endings—not for every character, and maybe not even for the main character. People experience loss and sadness and death, but by the end of the book, something has changed for the better. Coupland’s novels are sneaky reminders that it’s never too late for hope, not even after an apocalypse, or peak oil, or the return of one’s twenty-year-old son.

And then we come to the ending, which is, for me, the least satisfactory part of the book. It’s just dumb: Liz flies to Austria to meet someone she barely remembers from her past, and then they fall in love. I’m almost tempted to conjecture that Coupland lost a bet and was forced, as a condition of his loss, to write the ending this way. But I’m sure he had his reasons, not the least of which is the need to rectify Liz’s loneliness, which has returned since Jeremy’s death. Still, I think he could have done better.

Coupland is renowned not only as a writer but as a visual artist as well, and I think this influences his writing to a great extent. That is to say, his books often seem to make more sense when viewed slightly from a distance, as a whole and complete entity, rather than viewing them up close and in a sustained, linear fashion. Paintings, unlike stories, are not meant to be read from left to right, page to page. And actually, I would probably say Coupland’s novels are more like sculpture or an installation piece than any two-dimensional art: different when viewed from different angles, with little jaggy bits sticking out.

Eleanor Rigby the linear narrative is contrived and somewhat disappointing. Eleanor Rigby the work of art is stimulating and moving. It’s the perception of this difference (whether conscious or not), perhaps, that makes it possible to be a fan of Coupland. Because people who pan his books as contrived or curiously constructed are entirely right. This isn’t literature so much as it is visual art translated into the written word. The fact that this appeals to me is ironic, because I work at an art gallery but do not take much time to look at the art.

I suppose this hasn’t been a review of Eleanor Rigby so much as a kind of rumination on my Coupland fandom. Try as I might, I’m finding it hard to pick out specific parts of Eleanor Rigby to praise, despite being able to find a few things I could criticize. I suppose I really enjoyed Jeremy’s newfound interest in selling mattresses. I don’t know if that’s just because it feels so quotidian and Couplandy, or if I secretly yearn for a series of novels that follows a mattress salesman. Mostly, though, I think Eleanor Rigby crystallized some of my conflicting thoughts and attitudes towards Coupland. He’s a better storyteller than he is a writer, but for all their flaws, his stories always seem to have nougats of truth.

It’s never a good sign when the first thing you do after finishing a book is to go to its Wikipedia page and scrutinize the plot summary for some hint of what happened.

For some reason, I always choose to read a complex or very “literary” type of novel on what turn out to be my busiest weeks. When I started In the Skin of a Lion, I was neck-deep in my unit planning for my English instruction course. (I developed a unit for Grade 9s studying A Wizard of Earthsea.) Even my impressive ability to find time to read was put to the test, and it didn’t help that Michael Ondaatje’s prose and narrative are both incredibly stylized and poetic. I’m starting to develop a guilty conscience for not liking books like this more, because there is nothing wrong with being stylized or poetic, so I can understand why Ondaatje’s writing appeals to some people. But my mood and the timing were such that my heart just wasn’t invested in this book, and that makes it very difficult for me to separate my apathy toward the act of reading it with any apathy I might feel as a result of the story itself.

I just didn’t pay attention to what was going on in this book. The narrative mostly follows one character, Patrick Lewis, son of an explosives expert. It jumps sometimes to a few other characters, such as Nicolas Temelcoff, with all of these characters related to Patrick’s narrative in some way. Ondaatje portrays the poor-to-abysmal quality of life of the lower class that laboured to construct some of Toronto’s greatest early twentieth-century achievements in city infrastructure. In the Skin of a Lion is a novel of blood, sweat, and tears of the immigrants who helped build one of the hubs of our nation. It’s ambitious, and in some sense I would agree that Ondaatje realizes his ambition.

Alas, I couldn’t quite stay along for the ride. Ondaatje plays fast and loose with flashbacks, and maybe this says something about my limitations as a reader, but I prefer a straightforward internal chronology. It would have helped if there were a single character to anchor me to the narrative, but they all feel interchangeable, even Patrick. There is no protagonist because there is no conflict, just the faceless shuffle against the background the inequity of life. Patrick seems to do things, once in a while, including some fairly risky actions with explosives, but I was too disengaged to be able to speak intelligently about why he might have done this.

The back cover bills this as a love story. A love story between whom? Patrick and Clara? Patrick and Alice? People and Toronto? There are times when it feels like one or all three of these … but those times are difficult to distinguish from each other. There is just an oppressive sense of bland sameness to every chapter of this novel such that even though I’m sure things happened, it never felt like they were happening. The present tense submerged the plot and did not let go until all its limbs had quite thrashing and, finally, went limp. And I never quite understood Patrick’s motivation—why was he so interested in digging into everyone’s past?

I am dissatisfied not with the book but with me. In my review of Napier’s Bones I talk about letting a book down, and now that sentiment has returned. It’s not a case of a book failing to live up to its hype; rather, I feel unable to judge effectively whether it did or didn’t do that. When I dislike a book, I want to be able to present cogent reasons why. I hate feeling like one of those people who just completely missed the point of the exercise. Yet the prospect of re-reading this book when my mind is less taxed does not particularly excite me.

Such is the ultimate refuge of subjectivity, I suppose: we readers are humans, not book-devouring robots. (I know, I know, hard to believe!) We have moods and phases, and sometimes a perfect storm of time and tasks and not-the-right-book combine to throw us off our groove. I can neither recommend this book nor caution others against it. It’s definitely beautiful, in its own way, and I can see why it has attracted acclaim. But it is not universally accessible: it demands a certain amount of stillness, to channel Yann Martel for a moment, that I couldn’t quite provide this time around.

I have another Ondaatje kicking around somewhere. Maybe the second book will be easier than the first. But that is for another week.

Suppose the United States never gained its independence from Great Britain. Instead, George Washington and King George III forge an alliance that results in the North American Union. Instead of a war that weakens Britain’s grip on North America and contributes to the gradual decline of its world-spanning empire, peace ushers in an era of near-total British domination of North America, Africa, China, and Australia. Only Russia, and the Franco–Spanish “Holy Alliance” can possibly challenge it.

Against this altered historical backdrop, we have Thomas Bushell, a colonel in the Royal American Mounted Police. Bushell is in charge of security for the iconic painting The Two Georges during its time in New Liverpool. When it gets stolen on his watch, presumably by a group of “patriots” called the Sons of Liberty, Bushell has to find The Two Georges before the Sons destroy it and before King Charles arrives in America. If time runs out, the symbolic blow to the relationship between Britain and its colony would be disastrous.

So the stakes are high, and the world is quite different from what we are used to. In these respects, The Two Georges is both a satisfying mystery/thriller and a fascinating work of alternate history. Yet as much as Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove try, the novel never rises above mediocrity. The characters and their actions are predictable, right down to Bushell’s relationship with Kathleen O’Flannery. The dialogue is oddly stilted, reflecting a culture that seems to have stagnated since the late eighteenth century. Finally, while Dreyfuss and Turtledove create a fascinating portrayal of an alternative America, I’m at a loss as to how it could possibly have gotten into this configuration. This is not a dealbreaker, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Let’s talk about the alternate history first. The book literally opens by establishing we are in an alternate universe through the preponderance of airships that has become the trope of alternative worlds (TVTropes!). Oh, and the internal combustion engine has still not supplanted steam-powered cars. (Indeed, it seems like this is a world from which the “innovation” of the mass assembly line is absent.) Everyone drinks tea and coffee, and black people are equal but still called Negros and tend to do office work. Feminism as we know it was never invented, and if a woman has a job then she is also promiscuous.

I’m being tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I can’t help it. The America of The Two Georges is simultaneously intriguing and completely unbelievable. It’s as if someone took a snapshot of pre-Revolutionary America and added in some twentieth-century technology. Since I can’t determine the point of divergence from our own timeline (it seems that it must have been much earlier than the Revolutionary War era if France and Spain have teamed up in an unholy alliance), it’s difficult to understand how American society has developed the way it has. Speculation is all well and good, and to some extent it’s a mark of the mettle of an alternate history novel that it inspires such. Still, the attitudes and mannerisms present in The Two Georges largely feel incongruous.

Then there’s the characterization. To Dreyfuss’ credit, he seems to make the characters more multidimensional than those I have observed in my reading of Turtledove to date. Bushell is a dyed-in-the-wool King’s man, but after he experiences the conditions in which coal miners must work, even he manages to sympathize with those who would seek a different way of life and a radical politics to match. There are two sides to every story, and while some of the villains are one-note, the protagonists and even some of the antagonists, like Sir David Clarke, all have their strengths, flaws, and idiosyncrasies. Bushell is a thoroughly introspective protagonist who nevertheless remains ready for action and does not shy away from self-sacrifice.

Alas, Dreyfuss and Turtledove have to go and ruin it with their dialogue.

It’s easy to overlook until you see it, and then you can’t unsee it: all the characters have an insufferable tendency to explain everything to each other. Every action, every decision, is accompanied by a careful rationale that meets with hearty approval from all the likeminded men. (I say “men” because the number of women characters can literally be counted on one hand.) Dialogue plays an important, even essential role in exposition; Dreyfuss and Turtledove carry this to an extreme. This novel is far too long, mostly because every event is accompanied by lengthy explanation and analysis (yet we still have little sense of the politics of the North American Union, except that it has some kind of Governor General—Sir Martin Luther King, no less—and political parts). It took me far too long to read this book, because as much as I enjoyed the actual mystery, the writing left so much to be desired.

As far as the plot goes, The Two Georges is quite tolerable. It has everything a thriller needs: race against time, that hint of a traitor in the midst, cross-country trips complete with bloodshed and mayhem, etc. Bushell and his allies have to find the painting and uncover a plot to assassinate King Charles, and every time they uncover a new lead, they also discover that the mystery goes even deeper than they ever suspected. The story is layered, albeit no particularly nuanced. Unfortunately, I found it fairly easy to predict the identity of the trailer. Unlike my dad, my skill at deciphering mysteries before the final page is underdeveloped, so when I guess the killer (or the traitor), it’s seldom a good sign for a book.

Harry Turtledove is unquestionably a master at imagination. He has an intense creativity that he applies to examining history and deciding how it might change if something were different. I’m still not convinced he’s a very good writer. And his team-up with Richard Dreyfuss has not swayed me. The Two Georges is an interesting conception of an alternative America, and I’m not sorry I read it. But as a novel it’s little more than a mediocre mystery with characters who might as well be painted on canvas.

I first heard of A.J. Jacobs when he appeared on The Colbert Report in 2009. He talked, among other things, about the year he spent “living Biblically”. This intrigued me, so I decided to read the book he was pushing at the time. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, because I didn’t know what types of experiments Jacobs had performed. But the book is short, and his writing, if sometimes overbearing, is usually entertaining too. The Guinea Pig Diaries is genuinely interesting and enjoyable.

This is a compilation of articles that appeared, in one form or another, in Esquire. I considered talking about each chapter briefly, but with nine chapters, the detail I would like to devote to each experiment would make this review long and frightfully boring. I loved some chapters and didn’t like others. So I’ll give you the highlights.

The first chapter, “My Life as a Beautiful Woman” was one of my favourites. I spend a lot of time online. When I was younger, I was (probably wisely) relatively anonymous. Gradually I allowed that anonymity to evaporate, and now I use my real name everywhere. This is important to me, because I do not want to create a dichotomy of online/offline personae; I want to be me, whether I am on the Web or in person. But for other people, anonymity is a necessity or a desire. It’s a chance to escape, to gain voice, to explore an alternative identity. The fact remains that despite some legislators’ brutal attempts to curtail the fundamental openness of the Internet, it is very difficult to verify someone’s true identity.

In the case of Michelle’s online dating profile, Michelle was actually the user and participated on the site … but she had Jacobs ghostwriting for her. I loved Jacobs’ account of how this experience changed the way he saw some of these men and, in turn, what he thought about dating and dating sites in general. He expresses his disappointment when dates he has arranged for Michelle don’t go well. He exhorts men to be prudent in their selection of usernames: “topnotchlover” sends a very specific message…. I found myself wishing for more of this chapter, just because the story of this partnership between Jacobs and Michelle to navigate the waters of online dating was so intriguing!

Fortunately, “My Outsourced Life” also proved interesting. The idea of outsourcing one’s entire life sounds like—and usually is—a joke. Jacobs plays it up this way at first, making light of how he hired two different Indian companies to attend to his business and personal tasks, respectively. His assistants, Honey and Asha, did research for him, composed emails, placed delivery orders, etc. Jacobs has his assistants write emails to his boss, write apology notes to his wife, and even conduct a phone call with his parents! It’s all right-out-of-the-textbook hilarious. But as the chapter progresses, a theme emerges:

When I open Honey’s file, I have this reaction: America is screwed. There are charts. There are section headers. There is a well-organized breakdown of her pets, measurements, and favorite foods (e.g., swordfish). If all Bangalorians are like Honey, I pity Americans about to graduate college. They’re up against a hungry, polite, Excel-proficient Indian army.

It is a small and subtle observation of the culture of entitlement and complacency that belies the myth of the American dream that one can pull oneself up by the bootstraps. Other countries are trying that tactic too, and they are reaping the benefits of getting Bootstrap v2.0.

“The Truth About Nakedness” is a slightly underwhelming chapter. It is not, as the title and risqué photo that precedes the chapter might suggest, about Jacobs’ year of living nude. No, instead he discusses how Mary Louise Parker agreed to pose nude for an article she was writing for Esquire about what it feels like to pose nude. Parker said yes, but she wanted Jacobs, as her editor, to pose nude as well. And of course, being the human guinea pig that he is, he acquiesced. I was not that interested in his account of the details of the photoshoot and his feelings at the time. However, the coda to this chapter is a strong voice for critiquing media:

I can never look at a nude picture in the same way. I can still admire a nude photo, but I can no longer separate it from the context in which it was created. I can’t forget, as Mary-Louise put it, the loss of control and possible objectification.

Photography has this amazing power to capture a moment and keep it suspended with infinite potential: what is happening, and what will happen? The right photograph at the right time can be evocative and inspiring. Yet photography can also reduce a human subject to an object, something to be admired or lusted after. For a photograph to be inspiring and empowering, there needs to be that human connection. Jacobs underscores the idea that every photograph has a story, and when we look at a photo, we should wonder about that story.

There are other chapters that are well worth reading: he spends a month doing everything his wife asks; he spends time trying to act completely rationally; he spends a month dressed as George Washington. With each chapter, Jacobs mixes witticisms with genuine reflection, and he always manages to dig down to some kind of profound, albeit not earth-shattering, truth. Despite Jacobs’ engaging tone and the book’s short length, The Guinea Pig Diaries is not a light, fluffy bagatelle. Sometimes that tone bothered me—Jacobs writes with the smugness of someone who is being funny and knows it, and that sardonic self-awareness irked me. His writing has that feel of being smooth, practised, and edited, with the perfect parenthetical inserts and the oh-so-well-timed asides. But this is a minor complaint for what is otherwise a solidly entertaining book.

The subtitle of this book is My Life as an Experiment. I hope that most people’s lives are experiments of one sort or another. I don’t ghostwrite for women’s online dating profiles or live by the personal code of conduct of one of America’s Founding Fathers … but I like to think that even as an introvert, I manage my own little experiments quite well. You don’t have to be audacious and ostentatious in your experimentation if you don’t want to … although, who knows, maybe it means you have a book deal in your future!

I went into this book without high expectations. Not only did I know little about Margaret Drabble or The Seven Sisters but I acquired this from the same person who gave me Love the One You’re With, so … yeah. Provenance aside, this book turned out to be immensely satisfying. Drabble creates a main character and narrator who is fallible and sympathetic, and the story she tells is firmly grounded in realism even as she carefully interrogates the recesses of the human heart.

The back of the book informs me that this is a story about Candida Wilton. Without this context, however, I would not discover Candida’s name until well after the midpoint—or at least, if she mentions it in her diary before then, I totally missed it. By the time I first detected it, I was actively waiting for an occurrence. Drabble’s character is “she”, largely nameless, but not wanting in personality for it. Candida is an excellent narrator, balancing the need to tell us what happened with her thoughts and feelings about why it happened. She confesses to us her feelings about her divorce, about her social life, about growing old. Drabble has the form down: as voyeurs to Candida’s diary we’re privy to the most personal details of her life, but there’s also clearly a larger plot at work.

I suppose if I must summarize The Seven Sisters in a sentence, I would call it a story about a woman regaining her independence in her middle age. (Drabble refers to this as her “Third Age,” when her children have matured and left home and one can once again pursue one’s own lifestyle and agenda with a sense of newfound freedom.) According to Candida’s version of events, when she was not-so-happily married, she was very much “Mrs. Wilton,” and in that sense she reminds me of the diary-keeping Mrs. Bentley from As for Me and My House. Although she does not go into too much detail, Candida talks about her role as wife to Andrew Wilton, headmaster of a private school. Her social life is the carefully scripted one of a hostess, a fundraiser, a school asset. So as we meet Candida, she has begun the process of constructing a new identity, a new sense of self and self-worth. In Suffolk she was Mrs. Wilton. Who is she in London?

Watching Candida grow into an independent person and regain some joie de vivre is a pleasure. She’s not whiny, which is often the downfall of characters in need of such improvement. Occasionally she discusses her loneliness and the distance she feels from her family, acquaintances, and “friends”, but it’s more with regret than self-pity. And as the story progresses, we see Candida begin to make an effort to improve her lot. She reaches out, forges new relationships, and even attempts to rescue old ones. In the end she even has a fairly normal interaction with two of three estranged daughters—so good for her! Furthermore, Drabble gives Candida a voice that is opinionated without sounding too shrill or too haughty. She reminds me a lot of the characters that Margaret Atwood writes, such as Elaine from Cat’s Eye. Fans of Atwood might appreciate Candida’s similar wry takes on the effects of aging, both on the body and on one’s social life.

Candida also embodies the unreliable narrator in a very dramatic way. I won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say that Drabble drops two narrative reversals on us in quick succession as she changes the narrative perspective three times. The first such reversal made me go, “Whoa. Did not see that coming.” When the second followed hot on its heels, my exclamation was along the lines of, “You have to be kidding me!” It’s true that I’m probably more credulous than most readers—I tend not to predict the identity of the killer or see endings coming—so take it with a grain of salt when I say that Drabble blew me away with these games. What you can take to the bank, though, is my enjoyment over being surprised. Normally I tend to criticize unconventional narrative strategies; when it comes to literary style, I like established and familiar. But Drabble just shows that there are always exceptions to these preferences; it’s fine to shake things up if you can pull it off!

Drabble can. The back of my book also has blurbs, including one from the Montreal Gazette that calls Drabble “an uncanny literary intelligence.” Normally I make fun of these kinds of blurbs and explain why they are undeserved … but I can’t in this case, because I have to agree. Drabble takes a plot that could be, in the hands of a merely competent writer, run-of-the-mill and OK. And she transforms it, by adding layers of literary allusions and emotional resonance, into something remarkable. To say that Candida comes into some money and uses it to take some of her friends on a trip tracing part of The Aeneid—a story for which they share a common affection and admiration—does not do justice to the depth of this novel.

This isn’t about a bunch of middle-aged women bonding and finding themselves on a jaunt to the Mediterranean. There’s no fluffy romance here or quota of knowing glances as the characters trade stories among one another and laugh at all the right moments. Sure, sometimes it feels like the story is moving a little too smoothly, and despite a few instances of genuine suspense, nothing all that bad seems to happen. But as this unofficial Virgil tour group makes their way from Tunis to Naples, everyone comes of out of her shell, and we see her in a different light—Candida especially. Just as I was beginning to get comfortable with the somewhat meek but fascinating Candida of the diary, Drabble turns it all around and asks me to get to know her all over again. But it’s worth it.

Finally, I love the ending of this book because it’s so non-committal. It doesn’t contrive to make Candida live happily ever after—but it doesn’t doom her to a life of solitude either. She doesn’t miraculously make up with her daughters, but the lines of communication have opened, and she’s made a start. That’s what the end is: a new beginning, the true start of Candida’s new life after divorce. It’s hopeful without being trite, and it’s realistic without resorting to unnecessary grimness or grittiness that seems to be the hallmark of realism these days.

The Seven Sisters is very much a character-driven book. It’s light on dialogue and heavy on description and introspection. But it knocked me over, in more ways than one, with Drabble’s skilled characterization and nimble negotiations of narrative. Having finished this book, my only outstanding question is: which of her novels do I read next?