Virgil Wander, by Leif Enger. Grove Press, 2018

After sliding on snow and sailing off the road into Lake Superior, Virgil Wander finds many of his memories, some fine motor control, and a lot of words are missing. Wander lives in a small town, though, so there are lots of folks willing to help him, especially as he seems to have had a personality transplant along with his amnesia.

Greenstone, Minnesota is a town that’s hit the skids. The mining is long gone. The ships no longer put into their port. There is very little money coming in, and a lot of people have left for good. So Wander’s home and business, the Empress movie theater, where he shows old movies, is doing poorly to say the least. Enter Rune, a Norwegian senior citizen who makes kites in unlikely forms: a man, a dog, a cast iron stove… Rune (who is possibly Odin- or Santa) is there to try and find a son he never knew he had until a short time ago. Sadly, the son is long gone- presumed dead- but he himself left a son, now a teenager, who Rune hopes to get to know. Wander invites Rune to stay in a spare room- Wander can’t quite be left alone for a bit or he’s apt to leave the tea kettle on until the place burns down or something. Meanwhile, we meet the quirky population of Greenstone as Wander tries to orient himself in a place he doesn’t quite remember and Rune seeks his son through the memories of others. And then there are the animals: a tame raven, a pet raccoon who is reverting to feral- possibly because of rabies- and a huge sturgeon who lures a man to his death. Oh, and the frogs that rain down during one storm, but they aren’t really personalities so much as a plague. It’s part Lake Woebegon, part Red Green, and possibly a bit of Discworld.

There is not much in the way of plot. It’s about finding oneself, it’s about being kind to others, it’s a novel of place as well as character. The writing is beautiful, and makes you cheer for the characters. It’s not fast paced but it does keep you pulled in. It’s warm in feeling but certainly not a ‘cozy’ story. It’s full of symbols and myth. Four and a half stars. 

I received this book free in return for an honest review from the Amazon Vine program. This did not influence my opinion.

The Science of the Magical, from the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Super Powers, by Matt Kaplan. Scribner, 2015

 

“The Science of the Magical” is exactly what the title sounds like: explanations for things people have called ‘magic’, both in the past and present. The book ranges widely; he covers transforming into animals, healing pools, oracles, animals with uncanny behaviors, berserker warriors, near death experiences, Captain America, things from ancient history to modern days.

Kaplan is a science writer, and as such has a lot of contacts in all areas of science, which helped a lot in his investigations. Some things are fairly easy; hot springs made people feel better simply by being warm in areas and times that were really hard to stay warm enough in. Hot water helps many cases of sore, aching joints. No real mystery there. Predicting the future by watching the movements of birds was a little harder, but he makes a good case for birds being able to sense which way the winds are prevailing. It turns out that shifting currents can mean a winter either colder or warmer than usual, depending on which way it’s moving, much as El Nino/La Nina means for us in the Pacific Northwest. The birds are just following the winds. The Oracle at Delphi has been pretty well explained before; the cave she did her prognosticating in had a crack in the floor that exhaled toxic fumes that caused oxygen starvation in the brain. Super soldiers close to existing, between amphetamines to keep[LB1]  soldiers awake and provide focus, steroids to enhance strength, and drugs that increase red blood cell count and thus the amount of oxygen present in the blood- shades of Lance Armstrong there!

The author writes in a clear, accessible style. He always stays respectful of the culture from which the magical belief comes from. He’s very witty as well as well educated. The book reads like what you’d get if Terry Pratchett actually wrote a science book (instead of teaming up with science writers)- especially in the footnotes. Fast and fun to read. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- Amazon will give me a few cents. 

This in no way influenced my review.  

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 [LB1]

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Borzoi, 2015

“The Buried Giant” doesn’t tell its story simply. On the face of it, it’s a simple tale. An elderly Briton couple- Axl and Beatrice- not valued by their little ‘village’, decide to pay their son a visit in the village nearby where he lives. On the way they meet a Saxon warrior and his injured charge, a knight, ogres, a swarm of nasty pixies, monks with deadly intent, boatmen who ask an awful lot of questions before ferrying his charges across to islands, and more. Many of these characters are not who they seem to be at first. The knight is Sir Gawain, despite King Arthur being long gone. The boatmen, despite working a real river, are the ferrymen of the dead. Even Axl isn’t the peasant he appears to be.

Axl and Beatrice are in love with and devoted to each other. Beatrice addresses Axl as ‘husband’ and he calls her “princess” – I’m afraid to say that I did laugh a bit at this, being put in mind of ‘The Princess Bride’. They never want to be more than a couple of steps apart.

An odd mist lies over the land; it brings forgetfulness, both of recent events and those long past. It lies in patches, so that sometimes Axl and Beatrice can remember things they previously couldn’t. This leads them to wonder: if there were bad things in their past, would they be better off forgetting them? No, they decide. Those events made them who they are today. But while remembering is good for Axl and Beatrice, it isn’t best for everyone. Sometimes it’s best to let the past be shrouded in forgetfulness for the sake of happiness and peace. Axl and Beatrice can forgive- have forgiven- their past errors; that’s a lot harder for large groups of people.

I read this book over about 24 hours; when I would take a break I needed to shake my head to clear the mists out. The story enchanted me, in the same way that Arthurian legend and Tolkien’s word does, despite being told in plain language without the flourishes or old fashioned language of many myths. I loved this book. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents. This in no way influenced my review.

Ragnarok The End of the Gods, by A.S. Byatt. Canongate, 2011

This small book is a retelling of the Armageddon of the Norse myths, Ragnarok, as framed by the mind of the ‘thin child’. This thin child- pretty obviously Byatt herself- has been evacuated with her mother and sister from London to the English countryside. She picks up a book of Norse myth, and finds herself swept up in it, finding it the perfect reading for how she feels about her own life- she does not expect to see her father come back from the war alive, she is aware that her parents feel as helpless as she does, she finds the Norse gods more fitting than the Christianity that is taught each Sunday. She finds an odd solace in the idea that the end is written already, no matter what the gods do to prevent it.

Byatt, curious as most children are (or used to be), presents Loki in a more favorable light than most tellers do. He is the curious one; he wants to know what lives in all the dark corners of the earth and sea. Thor and the other gods are not curious or noble; they seek to torture and destroy Loki’s children simply because they exist. They write their own future destruction.

Inserted into this telling is an ecological warning; that the abundance of plants and creatures that thrived in the English countryside of Byatt’s youth is disappearing. Humans, like the Norse gods, are writing their own doom.

When I picked this book up, I thought it very different from the author’s other works. I didn’t realize it was written for a series of myths retold by famous authors; that explains my feeling that the book was not up to Byatt’s usual many-layered, ornamented style. As a novel, it’s not great; as a myth telling, it is. 

John Saturnall’s Feast, by Lawrence Norfolk. Grove Press, 2012

‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is set near the start of the English Civil War. John is the child of a woman who is a sort of outcast; an herbalist and midwife, she lives on the outskirts of the village and doesn’t go to church. Of course this means she is thought of as a witch. When a plague runs through the village, she is blamed and they are run out of town. They take up living in a deserted house in the woods, living on late season fruit and chestnuts. She is dying, of both starvation and disease, but before she dies, she teaches John to read from a book about a strange feast held in Buccla’s Wood. It encompasses every form of food; fish, fowl, vegetables, sweets, mammals are all included, and the feast is for everyone, not just the rich as is the way of the land at the time. At her wish, after her death, he is taken to Buckland Manor where he is put to work in the vast kitchens. 

John’s life changes totally. Used to being alone or with only a couple of people, he is now constantly pressed by people on all sides. He works every minute of the long day and falls directly into a sleep that never seems to be long enough. Still, given the time and place, it’s a good situation. Food is abundant here, he’s living inside, and after awhile he gets to learn cooking. He’s in a better place than a lot of people.

This is primarily a love story; a love that crosses classes and is forbidden- preserving estates and titles takes precedence over love. It’s also an adventure story; the kitchen staff marched with the lord of the manor when he went to war supporting King Charles, and they were expected to fight with the soldiers. I liked the characters. They are not likable all the time; they do stupid, human, things sometimes. But, in the end, it’s a story about food.

We might think that cooking back in those days was fairly primitive, but it wasn’t. It was actually very sophisticated. One of the culinary trends back then was to create dishes that looked like something else – parts of animals and birds sewn together to create a mythical beast, meat in pastry to look like a bird, sugar creations in the shape of just about anything. Cooks vied to create the most elaborate and surprising dishes- a sort of Iron Chef, Stuarts edition. Most of the year, the diet was rich and varied; the manor supplied fish from its own ponds, poultry, eggs, dairy products, pork, honey, wheat, fruit and vegetables (they did eat their ‘sallets’) and much was stored for winter. A stable trade system meant the upper classes enjoyed sugar and spices. The sheer amount of person power it took to feed a manor was incredible- most workers were specialists, turning the spits in the kitchen, washing the endless stream of dirty dishes, plucking fowl, managing the fish ponds, the dove cote, the hen houses, the spice room, making the salads, cutting up the meat… and all those people had to be fed, too. You can see how a book can be created around a kitchen of the era! The food, and John’s relationship to it and how he uses it to speak to the lady of the manor, is lovingly detailed, much more so, really, than the people.

Food was not always plentiful, however. It was easy to starve back then. The stark difference between the incredible plenty of the start of the story versus what they have to deal with when the Roundhead soldiers steal the food from the manor and destroy what they cannot take shows how dramatically life can change. John falls back on how he and his mother lived in the woods, and on what he learned from the book of the Feast. He is the hero of the tale, for all the people living on the manor.

What the Feast was is never made clear. It’s like a myth of a Golden Age, when all were equals and food was plentiful. Was it a pagan community that had existed in the woods before Christians arrived? Was it a myth to comfort the reader, a dream to hold onto? Did it have a direct bearing on John’s ancestors? Was the book a semi-magical teaching aid that allowed John to excel in the manor kitchens later? In the end, it doesn’t matter. It allowed John to hold on and to save the manor.

‘John Saturnall’s Feast’ is a story of cycles and renewals, both earthly as the wheel of the year turns and spiritually, as human hope and happiness comes up again and again.