"The Rise" by Ian Rankin

The Rise is a luxury residential building facing London’s Hyde Park. Units start at about 10 million pounds. To no one’s surprise, while all of its residences are owned, few are occupied. Corporations own a few for investments. Foreigners own a few as safe havens. The developer lives in a penthouse on the top floor. 

When the body of the security guard (called a “concierge”) is found in the lobby, the suspects look to be a relatively small group of people. A Middle Eastern princess and her bodyguards. The building’s developer. The wife of a known and much-sought gangster. A young actress whose best days may already be behind her. A Russian oligarch.

 

Detective Sergeant Gish pulls the night call for the murder. She’s working with Detective Inspector Jack Milton, a few months from retirement. Their investigation takes them into the worlds of art, gangsters, crime, affairs, and more. And it is Gish who will slowly but methodically discover what happened. 

 

The Rise is a short story by acclaimed Scottish writer Ian Rankin, author of the Detective John Rebus stories. While it’s described as a short story, it might be more accurate to call it a short-short novel. At 86 pages, it’s one long short story.

 

Ian Rankin

Rankin is an international No. 1 bestselling crime novelist and the author of 40 books, including John Rebus novels, short stories, non-fiction, and other works. He’s received an Edgard Award, a Gold Dagger Award for fiction, a Diamond Dagger Award for career excellence, and the Chandler-Fulbright Award (an international award funded by the estate of detective writer Raymond Chandler). He lives in Edinburgh.

 

Short story or short-short novel, The Rise is an entertaining and gripping story. One wonders if it’s the beginning of a new detective series. If so, it will be something of a branching out from Rankin’s home territory of Scotland, the setting for his Rebus stories and novels. It has the classic Rebus touches – the plodding and exhaustive police investigation, the back alleyways those investigations can discover, and something of a surprise ending.

 

Related:

 

Ian Rankin’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave.

 

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Gaza Hostage Crisis is an American Hostage Crisis – Armin Rosen at The Free Press.

 

Murders for October – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine on new mystery novels. 

 

Watney Market and Watney Street, Shadwell – A London Inheritance.

"Blue Moon" by Aviv

It’s a fairy tale of sorts, a tale of two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness. 

A beautiful, kind princess lives in the Kingdom of Light, and her life is filled with the kind of lovely things you’d expect. Across the shared river is the Kingdom of Darkness, ruled by a prince. One day, as the princess and her court picnic on the riverbank, she looks across and feels an almost irresistible attraction – for what, exactly, she’s not sure. She starts swimming. The members of the court think she’s merely doing a short swim, but this time, she swims to the other side.

 

The prince of Darkness, for his part, has also been feeling an attraction. The two meet, and the rest, as they say, is fairy tale history. Almost. There is more to come, much more, and what is coming will threaten everyone.

 

Aviv

Blue Moon: A Love Story Between Darkness and Light is the first short novel, in fact, the first story published by an Israeli writer who is simply calls himself Aviv, a name that I believe translates into English as “Spring.” What we know about him is he was born in the 1970s and that he’s long been an enthusiast about myths, fairy tales, and legends. And with Blue Moon, he’s written one, and it’s delightfully illustrated by Shani Atzmon.

 

You can take the story at face value and read it as a love story between two people and told as a fairy tale. You can also read it as a metaphorical exploration of the human psyche, with all of us being composed of darkness and light. You could also read it geopolitically, but I don’t think that’s the author’s intention. Instead, he’s told a story, and you are to make of it as you will.

Some Monday Readings

 

Blue sky – poem and artwork by Sonja Benskin Miller.

 

Walking England’s Coast Part 1: From Dover to Romney – Chris Arnade at Walking the World.

 

Ernest Hemingway survived 2 plane crashes. His letter from it just sold for $237,055 – Jennifer Ludden at NPR. 

 

Dreaming spires? Arnold’s Oxford – Nicholas Shrimpton at New Criterion.

 

 

“Andy Catlett: Early Travels” by Wendell Berry

When I was almost nine years old, I did something that very few people in my extended family had done. I flew in an airplane. It was a Delta Airlines flight from New Orleans to Shreveport, and I would be spending a week with my grandmother. 

It was a big deal, most of all for me. I’d never gone anywhere before without one or both of my parents. And here I was, on an airplane! The stewardess (that’s what they called flight attendants back then), sat with me for a time, looking at my penny collection (I brought it with me), chatting nicely, likely worried about an unaccompanied minor on his first flight. She figured out I thought this was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to me, and she soon returned to her regular duties.

 

I was reminded of that trip when I read Andy Catlett: Early Travels by Wendell Berry. Andy is nine years old, it’s the week between Christmas 1942 and New Years 1943. And for the first time ever, he will be riding a bus to visit both sets of grandparents in Port William, Kentucky. It’s not a long trip, but it’s an exciting one for a boy to take by himself.

 

He stays first with his father’s parents at their farm. It has none of the modern conveniences, including an indoor bathroom. But that doesn’t matter to a young boy, who’s with people and a place he loves. A few days later, his maternal grandfather comes to pick him up, and he stays with his mother’s family in the town of Port William itself. They do have indoor plumbing.

 

The younger Wendell Berry

Andy is telling the story of both sets of grandparents when he himself is a grandfather, and “the only one left” of his own family. In retrospect, he sees the great divide bought by the war, the time before and the time after. He knows who will die in the war, and how that will change the families. His father’s family represents the fast-disappearing old ways, and his mother’s family the new, although they, too, belong to the old era. And he understands what links him to the old era, what he learned from that time, and the values he continues to carry because of it. Andy Catlett: Early Travels is a story about many things, but the one that keeps ever-present is gratitude.

 

Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.

 

Before I read this short novel, I first read a related short story, “Andy Catlett: Early Education.” I was not the mischievous boy trying to push adults to find their breaking line, but I had an older brother who did, as did my own oldest child. The story is a lough-out-loud story of a boy who finally meets his match in his mother.

 

The Andy Catlett short story and short novel evoke a time long past. And yet, as the older Andy would know, the past is never really past. I can still hear my grandmother re-fighting the Civil War. I remember sitting in companiable silence with a beloved uncle on the back step of his house, rifle at his side, waiting for one of the many cats living next door to jump the fence. I can still hear my aunt talking, as we rode the bus from her home in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans to the French Quarter to do research in the Louisiana Historical Library – and her non-stop conversation.

 

That’s what Wendell Berry is writing about in Andy Catlett: Early Travels, and it is something I will always treasure.

 

Related:

 

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

 

Wendell Berry and the Land.

 

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

 

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

 

The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry.

 

Nathan Coulter by Wendell Berry.

Some Monday Readings

 

Amazon Reverses Course on ‘Garbage Books’ After Public Uproar – Jason Nelson at Decrypt.

 

When scientific research is in crisis – Matt Ridley at The Spectator.

Poetry Prompt: Into the Cave -- L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"Small Things Like These" by Claire Keegan

William Furlong lives a good if not well-to-do life. He operates a coal and timber hauling business in an Irish town, providing a decent living for himself, his family, and the people who work for him. It’s now nearing Christmas, and his biggest concerns seem to be his youngest daughter’s negative response to Santa Claus and the usual rush of delivery orders that happens as the holiday approaches. 

Furlong might not have been expected to have achieved a good life and a sound family. He was born illegitimate. His mother was a maid in the big house outside town owned by a wealthy Protestant family. He never knew his father, although another man working for the family took him in hand and treated him like a son. His mother was unbelievably fortunate in not having been dismissed by her employer; instead, the matriarch seemed to go out of her way to help the woman and her baby. Which, of course, led to all kinds of rumors.

 

He's always wondered who his father was, but he’s never known for sure. But this is the mid-1980s, and DNA ancestry testing is not “a thing” yet. But as he ages, this unknown father helps feed a sense of unease and dissatisfaction, what he might consider as a minor mid-life crisis.

 

He finds himself delivering a load of coal unexpectedly early one Sunday morning to the local convent. The nuns operate the school his daughters attend, the convent itself, and a home for girls. The nun who usually meets him for the delivery isn’t there, so he finds his way behind the building to the coal storage bin, opens it, and discovers a young girl, shivering and terrified. He gets her inside to the nuns, discovering that he has stumbled into something else entirely.

 

Claire Keegan

When he’s cautioned by the nuns and people outside the convent, including his wife, not to speak of it, he finds himself growing more restless. He knows something is happening in the convent that shouldn’t be, and it’s as if the whole town, and even his wife, are part of a conspiracy of silence. But he’s reminded of the kindness of the employer to his mother and himself, and he realizes that kindness is a kind of redemption.

 

Small Things Like These by Irish writer Claire Keegan tells William Furlong’s story. The short novel, simply beautifully told, is a small window on what was then hidden but is now known as the national Irish scandal involving unwed mothers and the selling of their babies for decades. 

 

Keegan is best known for her short stories, which have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and The Paris Review, among others. Her writing has won numerous awards and recognitions, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the William Trevor Prize, and several short story awards. She studied English and political science at Loyola University in New Orleans, received a M.S. degree in creative writing at the University of Wales, and a M.Phil degree from Trinity College Dublin. She lives in rural Ireland.

 

You don’t get the full story of the Irish baby scandal in this novel, shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, but you do get a glimpse, not unlike the glimpse that the characters in the story get. And it’s enough to know that something is very wrong with the institution that is the very heart and soul of the town. But as William’s wife tells him, “This is not our concern.” William Furlong comes to realize otherwise.

“Mr. Nicholas” by Christopher de Vinck

Jim is a reporter for The New York Times. He and his wife Anna, an artist, live in nearby New Jersey. Jim is very focused on his career; he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize once and is determined to win one. He also likes sports. What he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to is his wife.  

Trying to draw Jim closer, Anna gets pregnant and has a child, a boy. He’s named JB, and he has Down’s Syndrome. Jim is so appalled that he can barely look at his son. Instead of drawing them closer, the child has driven them, and especially Jim, further away. Anna finally insists on a separation and counseling. JB is now 10, and shuttles between the two. Counseling is not going well; it’s hard to imagine that a person who’s supposed to be a reporter and ferret out real stories is missing the story of his own family. 

 

Christopher de Vinck

Jim lives near a hardware store run by Mr. Nicholas. It’s an unusual store in that it has everything. If a desired item is not readily apparent, Mr. Nicholas heads to the basement, and soon the product appears. People are always amazed. And a little suspicious. Children love Mr. Nicholas, but he’s so strange might there be something wrong with him?

 

Mr. Nicholas by Christopher de Vinck tells the story of what happens one Christmas with Mr. Nicholas, Jim, and JB. It’s a small story with a large-as-your-heart theme. The reader understands what’s going on, and JB certainly does, but what will it take for Jim and even Anna to understand?

 

De Vinck is the author of numerous novels and non-fiction works, including Ashes, The Power of the Powerless: A Brother’s Legacy of Love, Heart Speaks to Heart: Three Gospel Meditations on Jesus, Nouwen Then: Personal Reflections on Henri, The Book of Moonlight, and several others. He received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University and spent 40 years in public education. He’s also published essays in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. 

 

Mr. Nicholas catches the personality of a hard-bitten reporter exactly right. It captures the wonder and innocence of a boy who doesn’t know he’s not like anyone else, including his father. It shows the breakdown of a marriage, and its slow yet still miraculous rebuilding. And it tells a heartwarming story of Christmas and why we celebrate it.

Forgotten Classics: “The Moon is Down” by John Steinbeck

One of my most vivid memories of middle school was carrying a paperback copy of The Red Pony by John Steinbeck. It was required reading in eighth grade, along with Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and several others. Our reading teacher also assigned our class to read The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, but parents objected. We did what all good 13-year-old boys would do in such a situation: we read it on our own. 

Steinbeck’s novella was popular. The four connected stories were easy to read, and they were about a boy growing up on a ranch. The teacher encouraged us to read more of Steinbeck on our own, and a few of us did, tackling Tortilla Flat and The Grapes of Wrath (which was not as easy to read as The Red Pony).

 

Steinbeck (1902-1968) published a series of fictional works considered American classics, including Cannery Row, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. He’s best remembered for The Grapes of Wrath, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award in 1940.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“The Old American Artist” by Felipe Adan Lerma

Occasionally, you start reading a book and think you’re reliving a part of your own youth. 

Arturo is an artist. He’s living in Italy with his wife Rosetta. Their children are grown and busy at careers back in the States. Rosetta has also been there, visiting, but she’s now due back to Italy. It’s a big day and evening for Arturo – with the evening will come an exhibition of his paintings. Yes, it’s a small town, but it’s still a big deal.

The story of The Old American Artist by Felipe Adan Lerma happens over the course of a day. But it also happens over the course of more than three decades, stretching back to Arturo’s 20s when he lived in Galveston and was just beginning to discover his art.  The story of Arturo’s day, and the story of Arturo’s life, are interspersed to form the story’s narrative. 

The reader moves back and forth, ultimately realizing that one story is being told. And it’s a love story, both the love story of Arturo and Rosetta and the love story of Arturo and his painting. It’s a love story that doesn’t run smoothly. The couple face difficulties and separations. Arturo experiences times of artistic drought and doubt. A question even arises whether or not Rosetta is really returning for the big exhibition. 

Felipe Adan Lerma

The story is a work of fiction, but it is clearly based on Lerma’s life. The part of the story set in Texas is what’s personally familiar to me, with scenes from Galveston and Houston reminding me of my own 20s living in Houston. I know the freeways Arturo drives, and I know the malls where he sometimes sells his work. I even know the “east side” of town where Arturo meets Rosetta; I did volunteer work at a children’s home in that area. 

Lerma is himself an artist and photographer, not unlike Arturo. He’s also a poet, a novelist, a short story writer, and a mystery and thriller writer. He’s written a series of works on visiting Paris, including a day-by-day itinerary in how to visit the city in 5 ½ weeks. Like his fictional hero, he’s lived in Texas, Vermont, and Italy. The Old American Artist is the first of three short novels in a series, the second being Rosetta and the third being The Children.

The Old American Artist is a charming delight to read, the story of an older artist who understands his life and the depth of feeling he has for the two great loves of that life – his wife and his art.