Captain Alatriste/Purity of Blood

Since I was a kid watching reruns of "The Mark of Zorro" with Tyrone Power, I've been a sucker for a swashbuckler.  I was a big fan of Rafael Sabatini's novels when I was ten years old - Captain Blood, Scaramouche, The Sea Hawk.  For the most part, it's a dead genre in literature, with one glorious exception: The Captain Alatriste novels of Arturo Perez-Reverte.  One of Spain's best mystery novelists, Perez-Reverte has written four novels about his enigmatic swordsman, a soldier, sword-for-hire, and man of honor in 17th-century Madrid.  Quick to take offense, loyal to a fault, and skeptical of corrupt authority (including the Church and the deadly Inquisition), Alatriste is the kind of man who is a valuable friend and a frightening enemy.  

Okay, it sounds corny. It's not.  Alatriste and his closest friends come to vivid life on the page because Perez-Reverte takes the time to reveal their histories, and describe the political and cultural turmoil of this specific time in Spain's history.  The stories are told by Inigo Balboa, the son of Alatriste's dead comrade-in-arms, as he looks back from old age at his violent and tumultuous youth.  This enables Perez-Reverte, through his narrator, to put the actions of Alatriste, with his friends and enemies, into a deeper historical - and emotional - perspective.  Think of To Kill a Mockingbird, and how Scout looks back from maturity at the events of her childhood, and how that adds to the depth of her - and our - appreciation for her father's heroism.  The same dynamic holds here (I grant, in a wildly different context).

I don't mean to makes these novels sound too serious.  They are truly literature, but that doesn't mean they aren't a lot of fun.  Swordfights, duels, massive battles, daring rescues, evil seductresses, witty comrades and one great villain - these books are packed with the kind of action that brings out the 10-year-old in guys of all ages.  Yes, I think these are guys' books.  Alatriste is what used to be called a "man's man," and I don't know many women who would be interested.  But no matter what your gender, if you stay up late because TCM is running an Errol Flynn swashbuckler that you have to see just one more time - the Captain is for you.  I've read the first two novels - can't wait to start the third.

The Road

There are many post-apocalyptic novels, but few are love stories.  Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road presents a world of unequivocal hopelessness, where nothing remains but ash, desolation, hunger and (yes) cannibalism, and the knowledge that mankind's future is a certain descent into extinction.  And yet, and yet - what remains with you is its protagonist's love for his son, and his battle to leave the boy with some sense of what humanity meant before humans committed suicide.

The narrative is simple - a man and his small son walk down the road, scavenging what they can after a nuclear war that has destroyed civilization and poisoned the planet.  Nothing grows. Nothing is safe to eat or drink that doesn't come from a can.  There is no fuel, no comfort, no safety and no hope.  Mankind is in its last days.  As they move, pushing a fragile shopping cart with their worldly possessions, they encounter horrors beyond the imagination of most writers -- although not, of course, McCarthy's, the creator of Anton Chigurh.  The father fights beyond the limits of endurance, not only to keep his son safe, but to keep his young soul intact amid the savagery.

That struggle is what raises The Road to a level of almost Old Testament revelation: If all was to end, if we do the worst and destroy everything, what will be left, if only in the best of us? What is the best of us?  Why are we worth caring about, even with all the evil we inflict on each other?  The Road is one of the few novels in my recent memory to struggle with the biggest questions of all.

Throughout the novel, the boy and his father reassure each other with these words: "We're the good guys."  Defining what that means is the true purpose of The Road.  Mission accomplished, with terrible beauty.

We Were The Mulvaneys

The first book I ever recommended to a book club was We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates.  It was our group's first book, and I don't think the club ever forgave me.  We Were the Mulvaneys is a devastating experience, as tragic and painful to read as King Lear is to see.  The next five books we read were all comic novels, as if we had to purge Mulvaneys from our systems.  So, how can I recommend it?

Because as brutal as it is, Oates' novel is also ultimately redemptive - well, that may be too strong a word.  Maybe the word is forgiving, for the members of the cursed Mulvaney family - those who survive their long ordeal - are able to forgive, and go on as a family.

The plot is simple: An American family - imperfect, but happy - suffers an horrific event; the rape of their teenage daughter.  The rape is the catalyst of a series of actions that rips the family apart, tearing it along the fault lines that always existed, but that remained stable until the incalculable stress of the tragedy.

I'm not a fan of much of Oates' novels: Too often, her characters seem constructs, created to represent a moral position or philosophical concept.  But in the Mulvaneys, Oates creates some of the most vivid, real personalities in modern fiction.  Corinne and Mike are a living, breathing couple, and the disintegration of their marriage - of their love - is like watching a beautiful estate slide slowly over a cliff.

Anyone who has ever survived a family tragedy knows that things are never the same afterward; that the innocence of the years before the tragedy haunt you forever; and that somehow families, fractured and fragile, live on.  There is grace in this, although not an easy grace to accept.  Endurance is never rewarded with a return to paradise; at best, there is a return to some sort of peace, with the world and within the tribe.  We Were the Mulvaneys captures all the horror and grace of tragedy.  You'll never forget the Mulvaneys.

The Long Goodbye

"I stared.  She caught me staring. She lifted her glance half an inch and I wasn't there anymore. But wherever I was, I was holding my breath."  You know as soon as you read it that Raymond Chandler wrote that sentence, or maybe someone aping Chandler who got the rhythm right.  The concise declaratives, the baroque similes, the dangerous blonds and the heavy air of corruption - Chandler's style has become a cliche, except when it's Chandler writing it.  Chandler took pulp style and transformed it into something much more sophisticated, but without removing the tension of impending violence and barely veiled perversity.  A half-century later, you still can't put his books down, no matter how late it's getting.

The Long Goodbye is not the best of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels to read first, but it's my favorite.  Its flaw is also its greatest strength - it rambles.  It goes down one path, hits a dead end, and then takes the long way round bringing you back to its central plot, so it doesn't have the narrative drive of earlier Chandler novels.  But I love it because its meandering takes you down some pretty fascinating roads, where you'll meet the long cast of memorable characters - thugs, cops, dishes, quacks, drunks, and rich phonies (the worst in Marlowe's book) - that populate Chandler's amoral cesspool, Los Angeles.  And in contrast to them all stands Terry Lennox, a weak and despairing drunk who Marlowe meets accidentally and helps tragically.  In Marlowe's mind, Lennox comes to represent the pale light of honor in a dark, rotting world.  

When Lennox is killed, his reputation stained with a particularly brutal murder, Marlowe can't give up on proving his friend's innocence.  Learning what drives Marlowe to clear Lennox - even if it's only to himself - is what raises the novel above its predecessors.  Marlowe reminds me of Kurosawa's samurai - men of honor in a world where honor has lost its value, except to these few who remain committed to the code.  Lennox, like Marlowe, is one of this dying breed, and Marlowe needs to believe - to know - that he remained true to the last.  Every encounter he has in the novel, with characters increasingly perverse and corrupt, pushes Marlowe closer to despair than he has ever reached before.  Yet he endures - no Chandler hero ever really triumphs - and receives some reinforcement that his code is worth his commitment.

In a time when corruption and dishonor have driven our country to near ruin, Chandler feels more relevant than he might have a decade ago.  But don't read this for political enlightenment: Read The Long Goodbye - and read it slowly - to revel in the mastery of style and character that make Chandler the best genre writer of the past century.