Monday, July 25, 2016

Restless by William Boyd

How wonderful it is for an old chronic reader to continue to discover that there are exciting writers out there whom one has never read. Thanks to a dear reader friend, I recently discovered the British writer, William Boyd, and I am already deep into a second novel of his. Today, I want to tell you about a deeply satisfying spy thriller, Restless. In just the past few weeks, and by happenstance rather than plan, I have read several novels about the years leading up to WWII. This novel takes the reader back and forth between 1976 and 1939. The star character is a woman with the delectable name of Eva Delectorskaya. Rather than than simply skipping over the rather tongue-tying name once I had read it, I found myself stopping to savor the exotic name each time it occurred, and since The Story of Eva Delectorskaya is returned to again and again in the course of the novel, I said the name to myself over and over.

Since this is more-or-less a mystery novel, I will not reveal much to you as potential readers. But I can tell you that the novel begins with a woman handing over to her daughter a manuscript.
’I’d like you to read this’ she said.
I took it from her. There seemed to be some dozens of pages—different types, different sizes of paper. I opened it. There was a title page: The Story of Eva Delectorskaya.
‘Eva Delectorskaya,’ I said, mystified. “Who’s that?’
‘Me,’ she said. ‘I am Eva Delectorskaya.”
The daughter, who has always seen her mother as a rather bland, ordinary woman who lives sheltered away outside a tiny village in the heart of England, soon comes to realize “that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life…”  She has been hiding under a new name, a marriage and family for forty years, but she is still afraid, "always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reasons.”

While the spy-thriller theme keeps the reader on edge and turning pages, I found this novel to be most interesting for its richly developed characters (especially Eva), and for the clever ways in which the past and present are finally merged so that mother and daughter are united in common struggle.

Few male writers manage to convincingly write through the eyes of a woman lead character, but in this novel both Sally Gilmartin (a.k.a. Eva Delectorskaya), and her daughter, Ruth, a single mother who is trying to make sense of her own life, are developed patiently and slowly by the author, so that they are believable and deeply interesting human beings. While Eva’s past is certainly more glamorous and thrilling, Ruth’s life as a teacher of English as a second language is a great counterpoint to Eva’s. Both women are in many ways outwardly cool, and there is little physical or emotional warmth between them. Still, as Ruth learns more and more about her mother’s past, she is able to understand both her mother and herself on a new and much deeper level.

Eva is recruited into the British Secret Service as a way of trying to retaliate against the killers of her younger brother at the hands of British fascists.  She is sent to New York to work for the B.S.C. (British  Security Coordination) whose job it is to plant stories in American journals that are aimed at drawing the United States into the war against Germany that is raging in Europe. She is eventually sent to New Mexico in an attempt to circulate a fake map indicating German plans to occupy South American and control the Panama Canal.

Acting under the injunction of the man who recruited her, “Never trust anyone!”, Eva is left to her own devices when she is about to be killed by German sympathizers, and those devices lead to acts that have on the run for the rest of her life.

Although I knew nothing about Boyd when I began this novel, I’ve since read a good deal about him. It is obvious that his novels are superbly researched, so besides the intriguing stories of Eva and Ruth, the reader leans a lot about the extensive British spy networks working in the U.S. trying to tip America into the war. I am now reading another of his novels, Sweet Caress, that is as different from Restless as can be. He obviously has rich and varied talents. I intend to read all of his fiction, and to look at his non-fiction as well. His command of the language is amazing, and he shows a lovely heart as well as an excellent intellect. Once I started this novel, I couldn’t put it down, and read it in two days.

I think he is a superb story-teller, and I think you will think the same once you read him. My hunch is that any of his many novels you start with will grab your attention and lead you to read more of his work.

Monday, July 04, 2016

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Instead of reviewing a work of fiction for you today, I’m going to talk about an astounding work by the scientist writer Elizabeth Kolbert, entitled, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Published in 2014, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015.

Kolbert explains to the reader that until the late 1700s it was believed that prehistoric mass extinctions had never occurred. It was believed then that just as specification occurred gradually over immense periods of time, so too, extinctions must occur only gradually, so gradually that given the tiny time period of homo sapiens, it would be unlikely that even a single extinction could be witnessed. However, as geology has developed, it has become clear in the fossil record that there have been five catastrophic periods of mass extinctions. In the course of the book, she describes each of these: one caused by the earth being hit by a an asteroid, others by glaciation and or global warming.
Very, very occasionally in the distant past, the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. When it is still too early to say whether it will reach the proportions of the Big Five, it becomes known as the Sixth Extinction. 
[…] mass extinctions are defined as events that eliminate a ‘significant proportion of the world’s biota in a geographically insignificant amount of time’
She continues: "Conditions changes so drastically or so suddenly (or so drastically and so suddenly) that evolutionary history counts for little."

While there is always a background rate of extinction, it is nothing like the rate of mass extinctions. For example:
Today amphibians enjoy the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered class of animals; it’s been calculated that the group’s extinction rate could be as much as forty-five thousand times higher than the background rate ... extinction rates among many other groups are approaching amphibian levels. It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. 
What makes the sixth extinction stand out is that it is being caused by a single species of animal, human beings. Summing up in her final chapter, Kolbert says:
Right now in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.
From what I have said so far, it may seem that this is a horribly depressing book to read, but in fact, Kolbert’s writing is so clear and her travels while writing and documenting her claims so incredible that I came away from the book feeling like I have a much firmer grasp of evolution than before. Not since Stephen Jay Gould’s Ever Since Darwin have I learned so much about the continually unfolding story of the evolution of life on earth.

Each chapter presents the latest beliefs in geography, biology, astrophysics, but in a language even the lay person can grasp. While the book is clearly a warning, it is not a warning of what will come, but a description of what has been happening for at least the last two hundred years. Kolbert quotes with admiration the Stanford ecologist, Paul Ehrlich: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.”

As she meticulously lays out her case for the Sixth Extinction, she points out many interesting little facts about earth’s history, for instance, in explaining why there is so much diversity in the many incarnations of the Amazon rainforest, some version or other of which has existed for millions of years, lots of time for diversity to accumulate,

By contrast, as recently as twenty thousand years ago, nearly all of Canada was covered in ice
a mile thick. So was much of New England, meaning that every species of tree now found in Nova Scotia or Ontario or Vermont of New Hampshire is a migrant that’s arrived (or returned) just in the last several thousand years.

Kolbert has packed into three hundred pages an amazing array of statistics and descriptions of scientific projects that left this reader on the edge of his chair turning pages as if reading a mystery thriller. It is a great book, and one that we can all read, and should all read.