Review: Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom

Fans of C.J. Sansom's Tudor-era detective Matthew Shardlake may appreciate this 20th-century Spanish interlude, written between Sovereign and Revelation but set some 400 years and 800 miles distant from Henry VIII's London. Or they may wish he'd stuck with the Renaissance series instead of switching to a nearly contemporary thriller about the intersecting lives of three British public school classmates who, improbably, meet again in Franco's Spain--one of them a Communist p.o.w., one an amoral profiteer, and one an increasingly disillusioned traditionalist who only wants to do the right thing.

I liked the book right up to the thrilling denouement, and then I wasn't so sure. Like Shardlake, Harry Brett is an observer in a world gone mad. The principal action takes place in 1940, after Franco's coalition has won the civil war and is attempting to rebuild a flattened country. Ideologues have turned murderous. Factions have split into warring sub-factions. The established church is collaborating with evil. Honesty is not necessarily the best policy, for nothing is as it seems.

Somewhat too-frequent flashbacks give the backstory: class resentments, romance, a war injury. English characters--the three men, a female nurse, various embassy employees--are well developed; Spanish characters less so. Knowing next to nothing about the Spanish Civil War, I found myself consulting old history textbooks and Wikipedia to try to understand the references (this slowed down my reading, but I learned a lot). And once I was up to speed, I was drawn into the story's romance, intrigue, and terror.

Sansom, a professional historian, knows how to bring other times, other places alive. Historical and geographical detail illuminates but does not blind. As I read, I found the same thought going through my mind that haunted me as I read the Tudor books: Something like this could happen here. Bitter antagonism between ideological enemies; willingness to harm others for the sake of political beliefs; powerful deal-makers enriching themselves at the expense of the people they govern--is our fractious society preparing once again for similar horrors?

Near the end of the book, one of the main characters says something striking:

"The people, the ordinary people, it looks like they've lost but one day, one day people won't be manipulated and hounded by bosses and priests and soldiers any more; one day they will free themselves, live with freedom and dignity as people were meant to."

This affirmation of hope jumped off the page, probably because I've just read a forthcoming book by Desmond and Mpho Tutu called Made for Goodness. Confidence like this--in the Tutus' case, bolstered by faith in God--kept Archbishop Tutu going during apartheid. But by book's end, Madrid's confidence seems to run out, replaced by cynicism. That is no reason to avoid the book, however. It's a good read, and very thought provoking. I'd like to know what thoughts it provokes in you.

Good-bye, Daddy

Fifteen years ago next week, on my mother's 85th birthday and exactly one week before Ash Wednesday, my father died.

Some months later I wrote a short memoir about my parents, death, dying, and faith. I say I wrote it, but at the time it felt like I tore it out of my chest. It is the most real thing I have ever written. U.S. Catholic magazine published it for Ash Wednesday 1996. Today, the day before Ash Wednesday 2010, I share it with you.

To dust you will return

From U.S. Catholic (March 1996), pp. 34-36, © 1996 LaVonne Neff

The deacon dipped his thumb in the ashes and marked my forehead with a cross. It was Ash Wednesday 1995, and I was having no trouble remembering my mortality. Less than 24 hours earlier, I had buried my father.

Nine or ten years ago, my father began showing signs of forgetfulness. Nothing serious, I thought. I have trouble remembering things myself.

A year or two passed, and his memory lapses became more noticeable. “I may have already mentioned this,” he would say, and I would cringe, knowing he was about to embark on a story he had just finished telling five minutes ago. Maybe he needs his thyroid checked, I said to myself.

In 1989, when my parents were 79, my husband and I flew 2,000 miles to help them close up their condominium and move into a retirement apartment. My father met us at the airport. He could not remember where he had left the car, and on the way home he got lost three times. As we packed and moved their things, we continually ran across small portents: a comb neatly tucked in a shoe, a pan lid on the bookshelf. In the pantry, next to 17 jars of Metamucil, were 37 bottles of hand lotion. And everywhere were reminder notes scrawled in my father’s hand: “Harold phoned.” “Go shopping.” “The bread is in the refrigerator.”

African Lent

Here’s an idea for Lent that will do more good than giving up desserts: Read a book about contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. It's not a penance, though it can hurt. And seeing how much of the rest of the world lives sure does put a lot of my minor irritations and even major problems in perspective.

Consider a novel or memoir by an African, such as

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Nigeria)
Athol Fugard, Tsotsi (South Africa)
Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone (Sierra Leone)
Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (Zimbabwe)

Or read a journalist's first-person account, like

Dave Eggers, What Is the What (Sudan)
Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains (Burundi)
Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun (post-colonial Africa)
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families (Rwanda)

If you'd rather watch a movie, try one of these:

The Devil Came On Horseback (Sudan)
Tsotsi (South Africa)
War Dance (Uganda)
Hotel Rwanda (Rwanda)

+  +  +

Folks who live near Wheaton, IL, can kick off their African Lent next Saturday, February 20, 2010, by coming to A Night of Hope and Music, the fifth annual benefit concert by Chicago-area professional musicians in support of a medical clinic in Renk, Sudan. Previous concerts have provided the clinic with lab equipment, medicines, and a midwife's salary.

Date: Saturday, February 20, 2010

Time: 7:00pm - 9:30pm

Location: Barrows Auditorium, Wheaton College, 501 College Avenue, Wheaton, IL

Suggested donation: $20
Special guests: The Lost Boys of Sudan (singers and dancers)

For more information, see this Facebook page.

The Lenten Experiment Blog

In January of 2009 Mr Neff and I began a Lenten experiment. We wanted to see if we could eat adequate amounts of tasty and nutritious food on a food-stamp budget. We also wanted to see what we might learn from the attempt. I recorded the experiment in fifty almost-daily posts here on Lively Dust. Trouble is, it's awkward for anyone to go back and read them, because blogs always put newest posts first.

To make them available to Lively Dust readers in a more accessible format, I set up a new blog, The Lenten Experiment, and arranged the posts in chronological order from "1. Please advise us on our Lenten plans," written several weeks before Ash Wednesday, to "50. The Lenten Experiment: Analysis," written the week after Easter. In between are dozens of posts with recipes, menu plans, money-saving ideas, and cheap wine recommendations.

Ash Wednesday is less than a week away. Maybe after this year of continuing economic recession, Congressional stalemates, a monster earthquake, and paralyzing snowstorms, we don't need a spiritual discipline to remind us that we are dust and ashes. On the other hand, maybe the simple act of trimming our food expenses for 40 days would help those of us in affluent countries to be grateful for what we still have, and mindful of the needs of others.

David Lodge: Deaf Sentence

Mr Neff thinks he has read many books that he has actually never touched. This is because I have the annoying habit of reading their funny bits to him while he is trying to concentrate on some morally uplifting theological work (or to snooze with it sprawled across his chest). No doubt he thinks he has read Deaf Sentence.

Desmond Bates, a "tall, bespectacled, grey-haired man" in his mid sixties, has been hard of hearing for 20 years. Four years ago he took early retirement from the university--he was a professor of linguistics--because his deafness was interfering with his teaching, and now he feels vaguely useless. His 89-year-old father probably should not be living alone in London, half a day's journey from Desmond's house, but with his repetitive stories and unreliable bladder, he's no joy to have nearby either. Desmond himself is drinking far more than is good for him. Meanwhile, Desmond's wife, Fred, has opened a home decor shop, and business is thriving.

Enter Alex Loom, a narcissistic American sociopathic graduate student with long blond hair and attractive boobs, who begs Desmond to help with her research ...

No, it really isn't that kind of book, though I cringed through quite a few pages before Desmond figured out he was being duped and developed some backbone. For the first 250 pages it's a comic novel about deafness and old age and drunkenness and dementia and suicide--and then, without warning, it turns serious.

I'd give examples of how David Lodge, who himself is hard of hearing, makes each of those topics hilarious, but he rarely throws off one-liners. I'd have to quote whole pages, as I did to the long-suffering Mr Neff; and he thinks you'd enjoy them more if you just read them yourself, in context. Don't miss chapter 16, "Deaf in the Afternoon," in which Desmond and Fred join friends at a resort called Gladeworld, Desmond is reminded of Dante's Inferno, and a bizarre accident in an outdoor shower renders Desmond profoundly deaf and panicked.

The tone changes, however, in the untitled chapter 18. There is little badinage in the rest of the 291-page book as Desmond, on a speaking tour in Poland, visits Auschwitz and comes home to find his father in hospital following an incapacitating stroke. "Deafness is comic," Lodge writes, but "death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable.... You cannot experience it, you can only behold it happening to others, with various degrees of pity and fear, knowing that one day it will happen to you."

The shift in tone might well irritate readers who had hoped to laugh all the way to the end of the book. Not that there aren't plenty of tonal shifts in the first part. Lodge merrily stirs up a brew of third-person fiction, journal entries, linguistic analysis, philosophy, slapstick, erotica, and literary allusion (he is, after all, the author of The British Museum Is Falling Down, a 1965 novel in which he intentionally mimics the styles of ten famous authors and alludes to a number of others). Still, chapter 18 comes as a shock. Lodge's trademark comedy vanishes, peaking out again only briefly before the loose ends are tied off and Desmond returns to his muted, vaguely useless, but perhaps now more interesting days. "You could say that birth itself is a sentence of death," Desmond observes. "Better to dwell on life, and try to value the passing time."

I read Deaf Sentence because I enjoy comic novels and David Lodge, and I was not disappointed. Given the book's subject matter, it could also be a good read for Lent.

Married for money: the unnatural union of government and business

This week's Economist, a conservative journal from the U.K., looks at "the backlash against big government." Using Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts as their starting point, the lead article ("Stop!") admits that "this newspaper's prejudice is to look for ways to make the state smaller." Their suggestions for the U.K. and the U.S. governments: slim your workforce, cut public-sector pay and pensions, cut back entitlements, and get rid of agricultural departments.

I agree with The Economist's analysis on many points, and I appreciate the article's fairness in acknowledging the major role George W. Bush played in increasing government spending and regulation. I wonder, though, if the popular backlash is against more than just big government. Last week I wrote in a Facebook update:

I understand why many people are afraid of Big Government. What I don't understand is why some of the same people seem unafraid of Big Business, which--if unrestrained--has even greater potential of doing harm.

After reading a long string of comments by my Facebook friends, I'd make just one change to my update: instead of "has even greater potential," I'd write "has equal potential." As Carla Barnhill wrote on my Facebook wall:

Since the two are about to become one, the differences won't matter much.

Government and business aren't supposed to be buddies, and they certainly aren't supposed to get married and set up a comfortable home for executives and lawmakers. And yet that is what has been happening in America and the U.K. for several decades. I suspect that many people who complain about big government--conservatives as well as liberals--are actually upset less about government than about the enormous power structure created when government and business effectively become one.

When the power of business is restrained by the power of government, and the power of government is itself divided into mutually suspicious segments (federal, state, and local; legislative, judicial, and executive), the system may look like a Rube Goldberg machine, but it is limited in the amount of mischief it can do. What happens, though, when business and government join forces--so that corporations, for example, may virtually buy candidates for legislative and executive office?

Made even easier by the Supreme Court's recent largess, influence peddling has been visible throughout the health-care debates. The President let pharmaceutical and insurance companies limit his proposals, and the Senate, by getting rid of the public option, offered insurers a huge gift. In the end, many liberals who initially favored health reform rejected the cozy government-and-business-together plan (see this interesting  interpretation of the Massachusetts election results). Liberal blogger Marcy Wheeler wrote last month, after the Senate eliminated just about every feature of the original bill that would have limited insurers' profits:

It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.

It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection). In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.

Bad, bad, bad--not because government is bad per se (it is morally neutral), but because in allying with business (which is also morally neutral) it risks abdicating its role as protector of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The solution, though, is not for government to disappear, but for it to return to its original purpose of preserving the common good. The Economist article submits that smaller is not always better: "As the horrors in Haiti demonstrate, countries need a state of a certain size to work at all; and more government can be good." Without government--local, state, and national--we would be unlikely to have adequate national defense, highways, education, justice, or care for those too old, ill, or poor to care for themselves, to name only a few areas where we function better as a community than as individuals.

Sometimes the common good is best served by limiting the government's powers. Sometimes it is best served by limiting the powers of corporations. Occasionally the government and business manage to work together for the good of all; The Economist points to Scandinavian schools and French health care as examples.

It is hard to see how the common good is ever served, however, by marriages between government and business, brokered by lobbyists, for the mutual enrichment of a select group of the already-rich.

Earth to Washington: baby steps won't help

Democrats, I love you, but please shut up. Stop talking right now about “incremental steps." Good grief, the current health bills in Congress, for all their mind-boggling verbosity, are incremental steps. They do not get at the tangled hairy roots of the problems we're facing.

If incremental steps worked, George W. Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit would have been a godsend. Instead, the original 2003 cost estimates of around $400 billion over a ten-year period escalated by 2005 to $1.2 trillion, and some analysts now say that real costs are closer to $21.9 trillion. Meanwhile, the plan's doughnut hole leaves many Medicare recipients without necessary medications.

Pharmaceutical companies, however, have made out like bandits: after persuading Congress to put no caps on drug prices, they began systematically raising prices on the most popular drugs. According to a 2008 study conducted by AARP, who initially supported the legislation, the average price of the most widely used drugs on the market between 2002 and 2007 increased 50.4%, compared to an overall inflation rate of 19%. In 2008 and 2009 brand-name drug prices increased by another nearly 20%. This week "the nonpartisan General Accountability Office said it found 'extraordinary price increases' for 321 brand-name drugs, with prices jumping by 100 percent to 499 percent - and in a few cases by more than 1,000 percent" since the year 2000. Apparently many pharmaceutical companies are raising prices yet again in anticipation of some sort of health-care reform.

As long as that reform is incremental, Big Pharma is unlikely to charge U.S. consumers what the rest of the world pays. As long as reform is incremental, insurance companies will continue to stay profitable by denying coverage or making it unaffordable to those who need it most. As long as reform is incremental, unnecessary but expensive procedures will proliferate in the suburbs, while the rural poor will have to travel great distances for medical care and the urban poor will die in crowded emergency rooms.

If we are going to provide basic, affordable health care for all--and even if all we aspire to do is to retain excellent, affordable health care for the affluent--we have to start from scratch. Congress must quit bickering and start studying what works (and what doesn't) work in other developed countries, all of whom have universal health care at much lower cost than ours (click here for further info about the graph). According to T.R. Reid in The Healing of America, Taiwan's government did this in the late 80s and early 90s. Switzerland's did it in the mid 90s. Both countries found ways of completely reinventing their health-care systems, ways that suited each country's particular needs.

We can do it too. Someday we will have to do it. Here's hoping we will decide to do it before ill-managed health care topples us into another Great Depression.