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A Review of A Passage to India by E. M. Foster

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 70: A Passage to India by E. M. Foster (1924)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

A Passage to India is an uncomfortable read. It is a story set in India under British colonial rule and is a story of multiple cultures that do not communicate effectively with each other. There is the British citizens who view themselves as people bringing civilization to the people of India and view the Indian people as inferior and dangerous. Even among the Indians there are the divisions between Muslim and Hindu Indians. Two women come to India, Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Adela Quested, to visit Mrs. Moore’s son, Ronny who is the magistrate for the fictional city of Chandrapore. Both women hope to experience India while they are there, but the English citizens in India, especially the women, keep to the safety of their compounds. Mrs. Quested is also trying to decide if she will marry Ronny Moore, and initially she is inclined to break off the engagement, but in a stressful situation she agrees to marry Ronny. Later the two women go on an outing to the Marabar Hills with Doctor Aziz, a Muslim Indian doctor who attempts to meet the expectations of these English women. Yet, Adela Quested in a moment of being overwhelmed in the cave first, unknowingly, insults Doctor Aziz and then later accuses him of assaulting her.

The English, except for Cyril Fielding the headmaster of a small government run college for Indians, are convinced of Doctor Aziz’ guilt, and the Indians rally around the Doctor. Eventually in the trial Mrs. Quested withdraws her accusation and Doctor Aziz is freed, but animosity remains between all the characters until almost the end of the story. It is a story of miscommunication and varied expectations between cultures. English, Muslims, and Hindus in the story often have no interest in understanding one another.

I cannot say I enjoyed this book. I understand why it is an important book, especially when it was published in 1924. Even though E. M. Foster attempts to be sympathetic to the Indian characters in the story, there are times that I cringe at the way he portrays them. Part of this may be that I live in an area with a large Indian population and although their level of education and their exposure to western society is different that what colonial India would have experienced in the 1920s, there are times when the colonial attitudes the book is attempting to critique still come through.

Review of Rabbit, Run by John Updike

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 76: Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Rabbit, Run is the story of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom a former basketball star who now feels trapped in a meaningless job and an unsatisfying marriage. Coming home after a brief experience on the basketball court with some younger boys he looks at his life with his wife Janice as a trap and he initially makes a run in his car planning to leave for the south, but then returns to the area and seeks out his old basketball coach. His former coach lost his job in a scandal and soon connects “Rabbit” with Ruth Leonard who was a prostitute at the time. Harry moves in with Ruth for several months and starts a new job as a gardener which he enjoys. Harry has developed a relationship with the Episcopal priest in town who gave him the connection for the new job but is also attempting to reunite Harry with his wife. Harry leaves the now pregnant Ruth when he learns that his wife Janice is having their second child and attempts to restart his life with his wife and a job at his father-in-law’s auto dealership. Harry’s newfound devotion is short lived and his harsh words for his wife and departure cause her to return to drinking and leads to the accidental death of their newborn daughter by drowning. During the funeral “Rabbit” runs again attempting to find some feeling that he seems incapable of holding on to.

I understand that the book attempts to point to the emptiness of the middle-class life of the 1960s for husbands expected to be the provider for wife and children with little concern for their own happiness. Yet, Harry Angstrom was a vapid character for me. He seems completely unable to consider the consequences on anyone action and expects everyone to pick up the pieces as he walks away. Anytime things get difficult he runs and attempts to find someone new to take him in. Rather than the emptiness of the middle-class life of the 1960s I felt like John Updike left us with an empty man as his main character.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. For me the main character, Harry Angstrom, is an empty man-a person with very little dimension and depth who is driven by his instincts and who has no concern for the consequences of his actions on others. From the moment “Rabbit” runs and leaves his young son I lost my sympathy for him. I struggled to want to spend much time with any of the characters and the plot of a man who runs away rather than attempt to find a way through the struggles was also not appealing to me.  Others will enjoy John Updike’s writing or the way he pokes fun at religion, familial structure, and overall loss of meaning at the beginning of the 1960s. For me the primary emotion it evoked was disgust at the main character. That may be the intent as it looks at empty men like “Rabbit” but that makes for a difficult book to stomach.

Review of At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 9: At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien (1938)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

At Swim Two Birds was more a book to be read as a concept than as a story for me. There is a story being written within the story and we are introduced to the three characters in the story being composed: Pooka MacPhellimey a devil, John Furriskey a character who emerges from the writing of the fictional writer Dermot Trellis, and adaptations of Irish legends mainly Finn Mac Cool and Mad King Sweeney. Yet, there are significant breaks where the writer introduces the writer of this story as a college student living with his bachelor uncle, rarely attending class, drinking stout with his buddies, and laying in bed. There is a strange, disjointed nature to the novel because of this back and forth between observation of the writer/narrator reality, for example pausing to describe the color of a persons suit or attitude, and the occasional glimpses into the story of the characters. As a concept I can appreciate the attempt to transcend the boundaries of the literary genre and the walls between the artist and the art. As a story I found the narrator/writer hard to care about and I can acknowledge that has a lot to do with my own culture. I thought the poetry of Mad King Sweeney was the best part of the work, but the characters themselves felt cardboard and not well developed and the plot never held my interest.

I struggled to make it through this relatively short novel because neither the plot nor characters were compelling to me. When the book was first published it had a few very positive reviews by famous authors but generally received cool reviews in publications and sold less than 240 copies before the unsold copies were incinerated during the bombing raids of England in 1940. This is a book that the readers who loved the work kept pushing it into republication and recommending it, but it also seems to be something that many readers fail to appreciate. I obviously am in the later group as a reader. I can appreciate the concept but as a story it fails for me.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. As I mentioned above, the character of the writer/narrator as a lazy individual who appears to do the minimum (although he achieves good test scores at the end) rubs hard against the Texas rugged individualism, Protestant work ethic, and persistent American optimism of a child of the 1970s. There is a vast cultural gap between the depressed economy of the 1930s and the lack of opportunity of that time and the time of my youth and I know that shapes a person. I appreciate that in At Swim Two Birds the author can probably use the narrator to be self-deprecating without lapsing completely into cynicism or nihilism.

Review of Animal Farm by George Orwell

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 5: Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s allegorical parable that portrays the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 by telling the story of a farm that the animals drive off their human masters and rule themselves. It is a clever little story with the crafty pig Napoleon consolidating power over the Animal Farm, and even changing the commandments of animalism as he and his pig and dog minions establish control. By the end of the story the pigs who control the Animal Farm, renamed Manor Farm by the end, are indistinguishable from the humans from the surrounding farm. It is a poignant story about the loss of history in a dictatorship that controls the narratives, and the way idyllic communities can be corrupted by their leaders.

This short novella has endured well as both a story and a political commentary. Even without a direct connection to the Russian Revolution the parable graphically illustrates the proverb that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The use of animals who lack the literacy to critique the changes to the practice of animalism and the manipulation both the written records of the commandments and the revolutionary song the animals sing (the forbidding of the singing of the Beasts of England) continues to be a warning of the ability to manipulate the opinions of the population by controlling the media.

Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

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2   All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
3   American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)

5 Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946)

7   Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret. by Judy Blume (1970)

8 The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (1957)

9 At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien (1938)

12  The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood (1946)
13  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
14  The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)

18 Call it Sleep by Henry Roth (1935)

25  A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951)
26  The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)

27 Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

28  A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958)

40  A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

43  Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)

44 Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

46  I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)

49  A Light in August by William Faulkner (1932)
50 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950)

53  The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)

54 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)

55  Loving by Henry Green (1945)

70 A Passage to India by E. M. Foster (1924)

73 Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990)
74  The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1939)

76 Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)

83 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

85 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)

92 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1929)

94  Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969)

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Review of Possession by A. S. Byatt

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 73: Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

S. Byatt’s Possession is exactly the type of treasure I hoped to discover when I embarked on reading through the Time Magazine top 100 novel list, a truly gorgeous work in its use of the English language, method of telling the story, and its truly rich characters. There were several times I would stop and remark how beautiful a poem, letter, or dialogue was. I could identify with almost all the characters in this book and see a portion of myself reflected in each of them. It is a novel of stories within stories that is often told by the imagined writing and correspondence between the characters. It begins when Roland Mitchell, an underemployed scholar of the fictional poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers in a volume Ash used two drafts of a letter to an unknown woman. Roland retains the letter and begins his quest to discover who this unknown woman is and to see if their relationship, whatever it may be, sheds any light on the work of Ash. Once his investigation leads him to the poet Christabel LaMott he is introduced to Maud Bailey, a feminist scholar with a keen interest in LaMott both as a writer and as a distant relative. Together they discover a collection of letters between these two poets which leads them into a re-evaluation of the lives of both the poets the study and themselves as they both become captured in this quest to uncover the story of this previously unknown but highly impactful relationship. Although Roland and Maud have not published their discovery, rumors begin which also brings Maud’s former lover and scholar Fergus Wolf, English Ash scholar and Roland’s boss James Blackadder, American Ash scholar and collector Mortimer Cropper, American feminist and Cristabel LaMott scholar Leonora Stern, and a scholar who studied Ellen Ash, Randolph’s wife, Beatrice Nest into the pursuit of the correspondence, Maud and Roland who disappear for a time, and the truth of this previously unknown relationship.

Possession is a phenomenal story, but the creation of the poetry of both Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMott as well as a beautiful set of letters between them is incredible. This was a joy to read. The narration evoked a rich sense of the people and the landscapes they encountered. Some of the best use of descriptive language I have ever read. The correspondence was frequently as poetic as the actual poems created and it made me wish I could read more of both poets. There were surprises all the way to the end of the book and I was awestruck with this incredible piece of literary artwork. I loved this book.

Review of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 83: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Snow Crash is a dystopic view into the future from the early 1990s when the internet was emerging to an imaginative world of a United States that has devolved into corporate, religious, and ethnic enclaves and the metaverse, the virtual world created by hackers and populated by avatars, becomes the escape from reality. Hiro Protagonist and Y.T. are the two primary protagonists that are navigating this chaotic world where they are exposed to a plot which threatens to grant control to all humanity to the mysterious L. Bob Rife and his religious front Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates. The plot moves from technological to religious to philological speculation about the original human language being similar to the binary language of computer language. Through infecting hackers who have learned the machine code and using their blood to create a drug which allows his followers to practice glossolalia, the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues which is also for the book the base language that was shattered in the story of Babylon. In a plot that involves the Central Intelligence Corporation (formerly CIA), the Mafia, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (a multinational business franchise), the muscle bound and menacing Raven who carries his own nuclear device, the Raft (a conglomeration of ships centered around the U.S.S. Enterprise and a tanker) the plot is inventive if excessive.

Science Fiction is probably the toughest genre to write an enduring story within because as time passes the technology evolves in ways that can undercut the story’s credibility. Snow Crash is one of those rare novels where its concepts become the language of future technology: for example, the metaverse and the popularization of the term avatar. It also provided a fertile base for other works that would project a future where the metaverse becomes the escape from reality like Ready Player One. The religious and philological speculations were a part where, because of my background, I had trouble suspending my own knowledge to accept the premises of the novel and the devolution that the novel foresaw into commercialized interests thankfully never occurred in the United States in the way the book envisions. Yet, in the thirty years since the publication of this book there are areas where the author was accurate as we live in a time where they are beginning to construct an alternative reality and a corporation which rebranded itself Meta is one of the leading forces in creating this metaverse. Unfortunately, the book is accurate that there are many people who escape from the real world into the digital world and what was envisioned as a dystopic reality is at least partially being adopted as normal.

Review of the Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

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I received an advance readers copy of the Warm Hands of Ghosts and I am a fan of Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale series as well as her middle grade series Small Spaces. The Warm Hands of Ghosts takes the reader back to the historical fantasy genre of The Bear and the Nightingale, but this time the environment is primarily the hellish environment of Belgium in 1917 during the World War I battle for Passchendaele. Katherine Arden does a phenomenal job of presenting the environment of a world at war through the eyes of Laura and Freddie Iven. Laura begins the narrative home in Canada after several years as a field nurse for the medical corps, while her younger brother Freddie later joins the Canadian army in the trenches near Ypres. There is both a spiritualist and an apocalyptic framing of the war (particularly in a Jehovah’s Witness sense) and into the soul stealing space of war enters the beguiling but also devilish Faland. There are some similarities to the Smiling Man of the Small Spaces series, but the devil in a different context calls a different tune and plays a different game.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a story of humans caught in the inhumanity of war, of men and women who will sell their souls to forget what they have endured, of love that allows broken men and women to slowly rebuild their shattered lives, and of the death of a world as it gives birth to a new one. Laura and Freddie are both believably broken and yet still heroic characters who struggle to embrace this world at war instead of becoming ghosts of their former selves. It is the story of an ugly era of history beautifully written, of love struggling against the demons both outside in the world and the ones that dwell in the shattered hearts of the characters, and humanity trying to come to terms with the inhumanity of World War I. I appreciate the careful way she narrates this war that saw the advent of modern technologies like aircraft, long range artillery, submarines, and machine guns which was still primarily fought using the tactics of the 1800s and the disconnect between the experience of the soldiers at the front and the generals making their plans in houses miles away from these hellscapes. Even in this place of devils and destruction love still exists and it is the only hope for the lost men and women who journey to hell and back again for one another.

Review of Loving by Henry Green

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 55: Loving by Henry Green (1945)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Loving is set in an aristocratic household of the Tennants in Ireland early in World War II, but in an unusual manner the main characters are the servants in the household and not Mrs. Tennant who is the matriarch of the household. Mr. Raunce assumes the role of butler at the beginning of the book when the previous butler dies and now, he is responsible for the management of the household. Throughout the story he is balancing his new responsibilities in the household with his budding relationship with Edith, one of the other servants in the household. There are several small and large scandals that are a part of the life of the household: from a peacock killed by a visiting cousin to the affair between Mrs. Jack (the daughter-in-law of Mrs. Tennant) and Captain Davenport (the next-door neighbor) while her husband is at the front, to a missing sapphire ring. The conversations between the servants of the household can be humorous and enlightening but this little world is disconnected from the big events occurring in the world around them.

The plot of Loving proceeds at an unbothered pace as it slowly reveals the scandals underneath the stolid surface of this world which is nearing its end. I can see why many people enjoy the dialogue and the gossip among the household but this world caught in its own little troubles only tangentially aware of the struggle for survival going on in the battle for Brittain. The war and the Irish Republican Army both make occasional appearances, but that is far removed from this world of old ways and old money. Ultimately Henry Green’s gift for dialogue was not able to keep me engaged in the meandering plot of mundane events. Like Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, this one was not for me but others have found this work incredible powerful so please make your own judgments, these brief reflections are merely my consolidation of my thoughts on each work.

 

Review of the Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

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Five Star Book Review

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

Erin Morgenstern is the author for two of my top ten all time books: The Night Circus and The Starless Sea. I read the Starless Sea when it came out in 2019, and this was my second journey through this incredible world. She writes in a way that is as beautiful as the magical worlds she describes in her two novels. The Starless Sea is not a book that everyone will love because it is like a nesting doll: stories within stories and worlds within worlds. If you can hold these multiple stories which all allude to the central storyline within your imagination and you want a journey to a fragile but magical world then this is the story to take you into a world where acolytes record the stories they hear buzzing in the air around them, keepers maintain and care for the world of stories on the harbor of the starless sea, and guardians attempt to guard the world. It is a world where fate falls in love with time, where the moon arrives in a great storm and interrupts the world of a lonely innkeeper, where a pirate in prison tells stories of sweet sorrows to a young woman who brings his food. The parliament of owls, bees, key collectors, swords of prophecy, a story sculptor, two lovers lost in time, and more surround the story of Zachery Ezra Rollins, the son of the fortune teller, and Dorian the former member of the Collectors Club as they are brought by doors painted by fate to the magical world of stories.

“To seeking” is the greeting of this world and the proper response is, “to finding.” This sentiment is appropriate for a book that invites you deeper and deeper into this magical world as you are invited into the experience of Zachery as he discovers the mysteries of the world at the end of its life and the dangers of those that attempt to defend it at all cost. It is a multi-tiered world of harbors along the sea full of stories and myths where lovers are torn apart and reunited. Is the book occasionally confusing as the characters attempt to muddle through the broken magic all around them, yes, but I also found myself content to linger as the strings of the plot from the various stories converge into the ending of a world and the beginning of a new possibility.

As one of the stories in the book tells us, this is a book, “For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.” There is something spiritual in the Zachery’s quest into this world, and it is a world I want to continue to explore. Reactions to the Starless Sea seem to be polarized-some find it confusing and hard to finish and it is very different than most fantasy. It is a love story to stories and imagination and it is not your traditional linear story, but as a lover of stories and magic it was a beautiful journey into a place that I didn’t know I was homesick for. The harbor on the starless sea could be at times troubling, at times incredibly comfortable, but always with an edge of the unexplained and magic. The book is a door that opens into a magical world and if you choose to open it may what you are seeking find you.