The Puzzle Women by Anna Ellory

There are three narrative voice in this novel: Lotte, a young girl with Downs syndrome; her older brother Rune, whom she calls Roo; and the ghostly voice of their mother that comes to them only in words written long before.

To give a rapid sketch of the novel without giving away too much, it moves back and forth between Then, January 1989, and Now, 1999. And from West Germany to East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall.

Mama has tried to escape with her children many times, running from her abusive husband. But he is a powerful person in the West German police, and he uses his influence each time to drag her back home. Finally, in desperation, she flees to East Germany to find an old friend who runs a home for battered women, and she takes with her documents of her husband’s that she will use as bartering tools with the East German communist leaders to find safe passage for her and her children.

Rune and Lotte are incredibly close, and Roo vows to care for her always. He, being older, remembers much of the abuse that his mother (and eventually he as well) has suffered from Papa. Lotte, only five when they make their escape, loves her Papa, and believes him to be her protector. 

When a strange package appears in the mail with a notebook and many pages of drawings, Papa, in a rage, tears it all into tiny pieces and tells Lotte that it is all lies from her whore mother. Lotte manages to gather together all the pieces and tries to make sense of these words from Mama whom she has been told is dead. When she reads of a group of women who are trying to reconstruct documents shredded in haste by  the East German secret police as it became obvious that the wall would fall, she decides she has to find these puzzle women to help her reconstruct Mama’s words meant for a her and Rune. 

Saying, as her brother and her mother have always told her that she is more than her Downs and that she is inde-pen-dent, she sets off on her own to go to Nuremberg  and the Puzzle Women.

Turns out Lotte is incredibly good at putting together the fragments of her mother’s pages, and several of the women take her under their wing and help her with the task. Sweet, kind Lotte is loved by most who meet her and look at more than her medical condition. 

Slowly, the mother’s voice emerges in wonderfully poetic strings of words meant for her loved children. The more or less stream of consciousness words of Mama are often hard for this reader to follow and make sense of, but there is a wonderful, poetic beauty to her words.

‘Mama, Roo says…’ Lotte started, hair across her face and her cheeks pink from sleep; disheveled, more a baby when awoke from sleep than any other time. She’s growing up so fast. 

The innocence of her wrapped around me and swelled in the room like a sunrise: expansive, hopeful. Her pajama bottoms scrunched up on one side, hair in a tangle. Moo Bunny under her arm, the cold morning light at her back, but standing in front of me was the warmth of my child fresh from sleep.

A light within light. 

Awoke from bliss, to the world … and into a world that has changed.

Rune is a wonderful artist who begins his artistic career as a graffiti-ist , but who has great talent in portraiture and other forms of art. Hoping in 1999 to escape from his abusive father and take Lotte with him, he applies to an art institute that would provide housing as well as a stipend. Alas, his father manipulates behind the  scenes and makes sure that his application for admission is rejected, in spite of the fact that the teachers are very impressed with his portfolio. 

While this is primarily a novel about spousal abuse, there is much about the two Germanys both before and after the fall of the wall. Mama and her children do find refuge in the East, and the novel is quite fair regarding the good things about East Germany. But Rune is drafted into the Pioneers, and made to inform on his neighbors and even on the remarkable woman who runs the shelter. The poor boy carries with him tons of guilt over not having been able to save his mother, his inability  to keep Lotte safe, and finally for the consequences of his informing on others. 

While this novel is difficult to read, both emotionally and because of its form, I think it is a wonderful novel, and recommend it to all serious readers. I don’t think it lends itself to piecemeal reading. 

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 percent of the human race.

This quote from the author’s note about her novel The Pull of the Stars set the scene for this gripping and beautiful  book. Many of you will know about Emma Donoghue because of her novel, Room, which was made into a movie. I was very impressed with that novel, but honestly have found other of her novels even more impressive. Donoghue is a writer of immense talent and a huge heart. 

There are three main characters in this novel: a young nurse, Julia Powers, who works in a severely understaffed hospital in Dublin, where for three days she finds herself in charge of a unit for pregnant women who have come down with the dreaded flu, and thus have to be isolated from the other pregnant women. Bridie Sweeny, who is an even younger volunteer helper, and who finds herself quite suddenly in the middle of a rather chaotic scene with no training, but a deep need to be of service. And, finally, a rarity for the times, a woman Dr. Kathleen Lynn who is rumored to be a Sinn Fein rebel on the run from the police.

Nurse Powers can serve in the ward because she has already had the flu and is therefore immune.  The novel begins with her on her way to work, part way by bike and then by tram.

Children carrying suitcases were filing into the train station as we swung past, being sent down the country in hopes they’d be safe. But from what I could gather, the plague was general all over Ireland. The spectre had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip…(That word always made me think of a heavy hand landing on one’s shoulder  and gripping it hard). The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter, a poison brewed in the trenches or spread by all this hurly-burly and milling about across the globe. 

The chapters of the book are related to the course of the disease, Red, Brown, Blue, Black.

Well, I said, it starts with a light red you might mistake for a healthy flush. If the patient gets worse, her cheeks go rather mahogany. (I thought of the turning of the leaves in autumn.) In a more severe case, the brown might be followed by lavender in the lips. Cheeks and ears and even fingertips can become quite blue as the patient’s starved of air….

Bridie Sweeny asked, Is blue as far as it goes?

I shook my head. I’ve seen it darken to violet, purple, until they’re quite black in the face.

Most of the book is taken up with the particular stories of the three or four pregnant women who are isolated together in the small makeshift ward. 

While the nurses deal immediately with the pain and suffering of the patients, they have very little power, unable to administer  pain medications without the direct order of a physician, and not even allowed to use the medical equipment at hand. Dr. Lyon is a rare exception in that she tells Nurse Powers that she can use her own judgment in administering aspirin  and even opiates.

Although this is not a political novel, the asides on  the Sinn Feiners are perceptive and clearly show Donoghue’s  sympathies.  Dr. Kathleen Lynn’s character is based on a real life doctor, described by one of the the cynical orderlies as  “a vicar’s daughter from Mayo gone astray—a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand.” In spite of the severe shortage of doctors in the hospital, during one of the times of greatest need and chaos, she is summarily arrested and taken in chains from the hospital.

I learned a lot about maternity from this superbly crafted work and a lot about the sexism in the medical profession which, while somewhat improved  these days, is still very much with us..

Nurse Powers notes the ridiculous methods of prevention and alleged cures by the ignorant, not so unlike certain idiot’s responses to today’s covid. One young patient finds it hard to believe she has contracted the flu since she has been so careful. “Gargling with cider vinegar and drinking it to.”

Some placed their trust in treacle to ward off the flu, others in rhubarb, as if there had to be one household substance that could save us all. I’d even met fools who credited their safety to the wearing of red. 

Next we’ll be hearing of drinking bleach as a cure. 

The compassion and wisdom of Emma Donoghue shines forth in this novel, and while much of it is sad, there are also many moments of joy and bravery.  One of the pregnant women had been living in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and Bridie also has been raised in a Catholic orphanage. Nurse Powers learns that a woman who is cared for in one of these homes is expected to stay and work for a year after the birth of her child as payback for being allowed to be in the home during her pregnancy. 

I puzzled it through. So for the crime of falling pregnant, Honor White was lodging in a charitable institution where tending her baby and those of other women was the punishment; she owed the nuns a full year of her life to repay what they were spending for imprisoning her for that year. It had a bizarre, circular logic. 

And at the end of that year, the women were not allowed to take their babies with them when they left. 

Emma Donoghue is a giant among writers. I have read three other of her novels since reading The Pull of the Stars; each is utterly different from the other except for the power of her prose and the acuity of her mind. 

This is a novel you really need to read.

Relative Fortunes and Passing Fancies by Marlowe Benn

Recently, it was suggested to me that I buy two novels as companion pieces; Relative  Fortunes, and Passing Fancies, both written by Marlow Benn. They are indeed companion novels, and so I am recommending them to you as a pair. 

While in one sense, they are light reading, in fact there is much substance to each of the novels. They take place in 1920s Manhattan. You should read Relative Fortunes first, and I suggest that you then move directly to Passing Fancies. The heroine is an elegant and fiercely intelligent character by the name of Julia Kydd.  She has returned from Europe to Manhattan in order to collect her inheritance which has been held in trust and meted out in increments by her much older half-brother Phillip. She is to gain control of the inheritance when she turns twenty-five, and there is much made in the novel about the ridiculous laws that make it difficult for women to control their own money without the need of a male (husband, father, relative) to advise and control. 

For some reason (and Julia really does not understand what it is), Phillip has decided to contest the will that his father made leaving a small fortune for Julia, who was born to his second wife. Phillip does not need the money, since he already has a much more considerable fortune, and yet he makes it clear he intends to challenge the interpretation of the will, and to deny Julia her portion.

Since she has no residence in New York, she is invited to stay at Phillip’s brownstone, and the repartee between the siblings is witty, intelligent and captivating. The two discuss events of the day, the foibles of so-called high society, and women’s suffrage.  Julia insists she is not political at all and she wants only to launch her own private press with the emphasis on the beauty of the books more than  the content. 

While Julia claims not to be political, when it comes to the treatment of women, she cannot and will not be quiet. When a famous suffragist, Naomi Rankin dies suddenly, and it is deemed a suicide, Julia is more than skeptical, and suggests to Phillip that she may have been murdered. This thread in the novel makes it read like a mystery, and the repartee between siblings reminds me a lot of Dashiel Hammet’s delightful Thin Man. 

The reader comes to discover that Phillip is, in fact, very sympathetic to the suffrage movement and to the emancipation of women. He is also (if somewhat secretly) really enchanted by his young half-sibling. He proposes to her that if she can prove that Naomi’s death was in fact a murder, he will drop his challenge of his father’s will.

Clearly,  author Benn is more interested in the history of the period than in  simply writing a good mystery. The combination of mystery, comedy, and serious social political content make this a delightful read.

Without revealing the twists and turns of the mystery in the first volume, let me turn to the second, Passing Fancies. The political content of this second novel is obviously the controlling theme. Julia’s desires to launch her publishing company lead her into what is now called the Harlem Renaissance, described on the novel’s jacket as “a literary movement…where notions of race, sexuality, and power are slippery, and identities can be deceptively fluid.’

This second novel, published in 2020, is remarkably relevant to current issues. Julia becomes acquainted with a singer, Eva Pruit, who has written a book that is rumored to reveal ”lurid details about the Harlem nightlife.” A nightclub owner is furious about the book, because he thinks his character is the inspiration for it. When he is murdered and the manuscript and Pruit are nowhere to be found, Julia Kydd steps in to solve the mystery.

During a police raid on the nightclub, Eva is treated very badly, and would have been treated worse if Julia and her brother Phillip had not been present. Julia’s friend Christophine is informed of the raid:

Christophine was angry but not shocked to hear of Eva’s treatment. The police she knew were not white-lady police.

It was a horrid term, crawling with implications. It suggested there was no such thing as what Julia had always referred to as simply “the police” (Didn’t everyone? Or rather, didn’t every white person of her acquaintance?). The definition she considered standard and universal—a helpful force for public safety and well-being—was apparently only one version of a widely varying realty. Even more unsettling to consider: Eva’s experience might be the more common, and Julia’s the more rare. The notion upended something foundational.

Eva is an African-American woman who has passed for white, but once she is outed, she is treated as simply another Black troublemaker. 

I hope I have not given away much of the intricate plots of either of these novels, and yet said enough to encourage readers. The greater distance I got from my own reading, and the more I heard from reader friends I passed them on to, the more I felt it important to recommend them to Old Mole readers.