Doubling down on my plans to stick to award winners: here is In the Woods, Tana French's 2007 mystery debut that won the Edgar. This was a paperback that my daughter-in-law left here in July and I let it sit on my bedside table, thinking it was going to be some rehash of the Broadway play Into the Woods. So when the weather was bad and I was too fagged out to even make it to the library on a Saturday, I picked it up.
And it was difficult to put it down, even given other pressing deadlines like tax filings. 429 pages long ... how many other mystery writers have that much of plot twists to master. One villain did emerge clearly after page 300 or so, but my then I was so caught up in the detective team, their personal prior lives, and how that past biased their investigations.
And did I mention it is set outside Dublin? Just enough turns of phrase and idioms to make you know it is Irish but enough contemporary world issues that it still came off as current and timeless. (See I am still thinking like Heaney, having finished that short shrift blog in the last half hour.)
So I am analyzing the plot for its poetry in taking the intensely personal and making it resonate universally. Here is the murder of a child being investigated by a man who assumed another name and identity after his two best friends disappeared in the same "wood." As I am beset by having my staff and collaborators sign conflict of interest forms before the analyze information or negotiate with organizations, I question whether the real intent is to swear one won't profit from their assignments when it is impossible not to be influenced by what you know, the background and experience you bring to your desk, the very talents and past I pay highly for.
While investigating political corruption and suspected child abuse, French depicts another poignant subplot, paralleling the relationship between Rob (the surviving child of the 1984 crime), his partner Cassie and the newbie in the detective room, Sam, and that blissful childhood of Rob, with Jaime and Peter. Those three children at 12 were living an idyll, children on the cusp of boarding school; the three policemen have a similar care free equality in looking into the crime. Yet Rob cannot see the investigation leading to a parallel breakup of camaraderie. Rob's past is recreated in his withdrawal and trauma suppressed in the new investigation. Cassie can't successfully express her own earlier sufferings and studies to inform and convince the rest of the team.
The story makes cops human, well intended, yet still capable of well intentioned oversights. This is a mystery I will leave with my retired friend and book club founder as soon as possible, mystery junkie like myself. I will immediately go on the Net to see if the library has French's other books.
Saturday, April 9, 2016
The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney
Well, more than I month since I wrote, but have done some reading, not enough but all I have the energy to do after challenging days with the new bureau.
So here is the best book I've read all year, maybe longer. Finishing up my delving into Heaney's works, I tackled his Literature Nobel Prize, a series of ten lectures at Oxford, The Redress of Poetry. Wow. Maybe the rest of my year should be devoted to prize winning books.
Flat out, Heaney composes as beautifully in prose as poetry. He makes me think about how much I miss reading for structure, voice, and intent instead of plot. He makes me break out old high school literary magazines when we were challenged to tackle a particular meter, style, voice or some little used challenging device and like eager Catholic teenagers in the mid '60s, we did. I can only quote verbatim and at length because these sections are not only thought provoking but exquisite.
"... Plato's world of ideal forms also provides the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions .. whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure with their own and their readers' sense of what is possilbe or desirable, or indeed imaginable ... It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality ... This redresssing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential ... denied or threatened by circumstances."
"...where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience..."
"... reminded of a remark once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document, "This ... is a minor point of major importance." In a similar way, the successful outcome of any work of art depends upon the seemingly effortlessness and surefingeredness with which such minor points are both established and despatched."
Some of Heaney's lectures focus on one or more poets, Marlowe, Wilde, Hopkins, but he always elevates his interpretation of them into something like this when he writes about his early love to Dylan Thomas: "...Thomas had gradually come to represent a longed-for prelapsarian wholeness, a state of the art where the song of the autistic and the acostic were extenive and coterminous, where the song of the self was effortlessly choral and its scale was a perfect measure and match for the world it sang it."
Heaney does quote entire poems or whole sections to make his points on how readily a poet creates redress. His lecture that I read at the same time I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a translation of pyramid hieroglyphics,a chapter entitled Joy or Night about man's understanding of life and death, included all of Yeats' The Man and the Echo, that drew a marginal note of WOW. I never heard of much less read Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, written in 1780 and still echoed loudly in the demeanor of the Irish women I encountered beyond the pale 200 years later.
I am passing this book on to my most literate book club members and then leaving on the shelves within easy reach to reread almost like seasonal psalms.
So here is the best book I've read all year, maybe longer. Finishing up my delving into Heaney's works, I tackled his Literature Nobel Prize, a series of ten lectures at Oxford, The Redress of Poetry. Wow. Maybe the rest of my year should be devoted to prize winning books.
Flat out, Heaney composes as beautifully in prose as poetry. He makes me think about how much I miss reading for structure, voice, and intent instead of plot. He makes me break out old high school literary magazines when we were challenged to tackle a particular meter, style, voice or some little used challenging device and like eager Catholic teenagers in the mid '60s, we did. I can only quote verbatim and at length because these sections are not only thought provoking but exquisite.
"... Plato's world of ideal forms also provides the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is wrong or exacerbating in the prevailing conditions .. whereas poets are typically more concerned to conjure with their own and their readers' sense of what is possilbe or desirable, or indeed imaginable ... It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality ... This redresssing effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential ... denied or threatened by circumstances."
"...where the co-ordinates of the imagined thing correspond to and allow us to contemplate the complex burden of our own experience..."
"... reminded of a remark once by an Irish diplomat with regard to the wording of a certain document, "This ... is a minor point of major importance." In a similar way, the successful outcome of any work of art depends upon the seemingly effortlessness and surefingeredness with which such minor points are both established and despatched."
Some of Heaney's lectures focus on one or more poets, Marlowe, Wilde, Hopkins, but he always elevates his interpretation of them into something like this when he writes about his early love to Dylan Thomas: "...Thomas had gradually come to represent a longed-for prelapsarian wholeness, a state of the art where the song of the autistic and the acostic were extenive and coterminous, where the song of the self was effortlessly choral and its scale was a perfect measure and match for the world it sang it."
Heaney does quote entire poems or whole sections to make his points on how readily a poet creates redress. His lecture that I read at the same time I was reading The Dawning Moon of the Mind, a translation of pyramid hieroglyphics,a chapter entitled Joy or Night about man's understanding of life and death, included all of Yeats' The Man and the Echo, that drew a marginal note of WOW. I never heard of much less read Brian Merriman's The Midnight Court, written in 1780 and still echoed loudly in the demeanor of the Irish women I encountered beyond the pale 200 years later.
I am passing this book on to my most literate book club members and then leaving on the shelves within easy reach to reread almost like seasonal psalms.
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