DEAD LINE by Stella Rimington

Two months ago (two years after it was released in the UK), Dead Line, Stella Rimington’s fourth spy novel about MI5 officer Liz Carlyle, was published in America. The book is a study in looking for something without knowing precisely what it is. Carlyle’s attempt to uncover a deadly plot designed to disrupt a Middle East peace conference is just that kind of puzzle, as is her search for Mr. Right, which serves as the novel’s subsidiary plot.

Just weeks before multiple heads of state are to arrive at Gleneagles in Scotland for a Mideast Peace summit, MI6 (Britain’s rough equivalent of the CIA) relays intelligence to MI5 (Britain’s rough equivalent of the FBI) suggesting that two undercover operatives with ties to Syria have hatched a plan to disrupt the high-level gathering and scuttle any hopes for peace. Carlyle gets the case and uses both systematic investigation and intuition to narrowly avert disaster.

Carlyle is searching in earnest on the romantic front as well. But wouldn’t you know it, the available men in her life are unappealing boors, while all the good ones are taken. Yet by novel’s end, Rimington hints at a budding romance. Something to look forward to in book five?*

Every protagonist needs a sidekick. Lord Peter has his Bunter, Don Quixote his Sancho Panza, and Liz Carlyle her Peggy Kinsolving. Peggy is as literal minded as Liz is intuitive, and together they cover the territory. Perhaps they also represent two sides of Rimington’s personality.

I was introduced to Rimington by John Wilson’s August 16 Books & Culture podcast. Rimington, I learned, was the first woman to serve as Director General of MI5. After 27 years in the spy trade, she settled into a directorship at Marks & Spencer and began to write books about spooks. Since I am drawn to authoritative writers, I wanted to read espionage fiction by someone who wasn’t making everything up.

Stella Rimington’s writing is competent, though it lacks the breathless thrills often associated with the genre. No matter. With a steady hand, she paces her satisfying plot step by methodical step.

Next up for me will be Rimington’s nonfiction memoir of her MI5 years, Open Secret. It’s due back at Wheaton College’s Buswell Memorial Library in just five weeks. I’ll make a note to pick it up
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*Rimington's earlier Liz Carlyle novels are, in order of publication, At Risk, Secret Asset, and Illegal Action. The fifth novel, Present Danger, is available in the U.K.

JIGSAW: AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION by Sybille Bedford

In a house that is anchored and insulated with books, a book occasionally goes missing for its entire lifespan. Someone must have given me Sybille Bedford's Jigsaw some ten years ago, right after the 1989 novel was reissued with a new introduction. I found it last week in my bedside bookcase, brand new, untouched, and out of print.

"She is one of the best writers in English, and Jigsaw may be the best of her books," said the Boston Globe reviewer quoted on the cover. Well, maybe, if the reader has high tolerance for erratic punctuation and destructively haphazard lives. It is hard to put this book down, just as it would be hard to stop watching a train bearing down on a car stalled on the tracks.

The story starts in about 1913 with the narrator, still in her pram, being asked to sleep through one of her mother's infidelities. It ends less than 20 years later, by which time the mother has destroyed her own health, sanity, and relationships. She has apparently not destroyed her daughter, the narrator, though the young woman is in a precarious place.

The reason we suspect the narrator will survive and thrive is because Jigsaw is not really a novel, even though the cover says it is. It is Bedford's coming-of-age memoir, billed as fiction only to allow her certain liberties with names and events. "What I had in mind," Bedford wrote in her introduction, "was to build a novel out of the events and people who had made up, and marked, my early youth.... It had to be a novel in which the events had actually happened and happened largely as described; to invent, such was my instinct, would have been pointless: it mattered that these things had occurred."

Born to an eccentric German baron and his German-English-Jewish wife, Sybille spent her earliest years with her eccentric father in a crumbling castle in southern Germany. Later she joined her peripatetic mother for months at a time in Italy and in the south of France, and for several years she lived pretty much on her own in London - all before she was out of her teens.

You can learn more about Sybille's life from her obituaries in various newspapers - the Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph - but you will quickly note that dates and places are far from uniform. I'm guessing the fictionalized story in Jigsaw is closer to the truth than some of the supposedly factual obits.

Why might you want to read Jigsaw? Let me count the ways.

• You enjoy memoirs
• You're interested in the Roaring Twenties, the "lost generation," the Jazz Age
• You like to read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, the Bloomsbury Set
• You feel better when you read about people whose problems are much worse than your own
• You have a clinical interest in dysfunctional family systems

Less than a  year before her death, Bedford wrote a book she called a memoir, Quicksand. According to a review in the Observer, it tells pretty much the same story she already told in Jigsaw. Both books describe a childhood in an environment of failed marriages, serial adultery, child abandonment, haphazard education, gambling addiction, drug addiction, financial ruin, narcissism ... in short, nearly every kind of dysfunction and codependence imaginable, more than 50 years before pop psych popularized those terms. I would have expected Sybille to die young and tragically.

Instead, she began writing for publication when she was middle-aged. Her works include the 832-page Aldous Huxley: A Biography as well as several novels, books on travel, and accounts of court trials. According to her obituary in the Independent, she

was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature - elected one of the society's 10 Companions of Literature in 1994 - and was appointed OBE in 1981. She was also an active member of the English Pen Club, and its Vice-President in 1979. Her joie de vivre expressed itself in an abiding curiosity about human beings, a deep love of nature, and a lifelong interest in wine.

She died shortly before her 95th birthday.

There's no such thing as a split infinitive

I am so tired of politics. And religion. Especially when they crawl into bed with each other and start shouting. So today I'm going to forget about them altogether and revolutionize English grammar instead. English-speaking friends, it is impossible to split an infinitive.

Not that most of us care. If asked what's wrong with Star Trek's aim, "to boldly go where no man has gone before," we're likely to point out its sexism, not its placement of the word "boldly." But if you harbor any residual guilt about split infinitives from long-ago English classes or from several decades of of copyediting, here's good news.

Structurally speaking, it makes no sense to say that the infinitive in Star Trek's mission statement is "to go." Nope. The infinitive is "go." Just plain "go."

In other European languages, the infinitive is one word, not two. "Go," for example, is aller in French. "To go to France" is aller en France. But the French, like the English, often use little words like the English "to" when a sentence has two verbs. "He begins to read" is il commence à lire, and "she decides to leave" is elle décide de partir.

Why then do English speakers say that the infinitive is "to read" and "to leave," while French speakers do not say it is à lire and de partir?

Well, one explanation is that in French, depending on the sentence, the same infinitive may require "à" or "de" or no preposition at all. In English, by contrast, the "to" is always required ... except that it isn't.

Yes, we always say "I want to go," never "I want go," and even though le prince du Danemark said "être ou ne pas être," the original Hamlet said "to be or not to be."

But we never say "I must to go" or "I can to go" or "I may to go" or "I had better to go" or "I should to go." And in all of these sentences, the second verb is most definitely an infinitive.

So why should even the most rigorous grammarian have "to go boldly" when he or she "can boldly go"? No reason at all : the infinitive, even though often coupled with "to," is simply "go." You can split it from its preposition, but you can't split the infinitive itself.

Blair Shewchuk, CBC News Canada's Senior Editor of Journalistic Standards, would probably disagree with my analysis (everyone does). He quite cheerfully approves separating the "to" from the verb, however, and that's what counts. In "To Boldly Split Infinitives," a delightful summary of the debate, he tells of one author with the right spirit:

In a letter written in 1947, U.S. author Raymond Chandler put it this way: "Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split."

I like that. It's bold.

EAT PRAY LOVE, the movie

No, the Eat Pray Love DVD isn't out yet, but if attendance this afternoon at Cinemark Seven Bridges is any indication, it won't be in theaters too much longer.

Not that it's an unpleasant movie. I believe the nine of us middle-aged ladies in theater 7 all had a fine time. Some of us even talked back to the screen. Nobody snored, even though there was not a single chase scene.

It's just that there's nothing in the movie to warrant the adulation that has kept the book of almost the same name (commas extra) on the New York Times best-seller list for 184 weeks. Not even Julia Roberts, who at 42 is about 10 years too old to play Liz - though if you need a reason to see the movie, girls, Javier Bardem could provide it. My friend and I had been making mmmm, mmmm noises during the preview of the upcoming George Clooney film, but as soon as we saw Javier, we completely forgot about George.

Still, Bardem, 41, is about 7 years too young to play Felipe, the Brazilian to whom Liz eventually succumbs. This is delightful, actually, since so many movies pair nubile young things with actors past their prime and expect female viewers to suspend disbelief. It is not at all hard to believe that Roberts could fall for Bardem.

But their romance is only part of the movie, and not the longest part. Before we ever meet sexy Felipe, we have to get through Liz's marriage, her subsequent boyfriend, her trip to Italy, her trip to India, and the first part of her trip to Bali. In an NPR review titled "The 'Eat Pray Love' Problem: How Movie Liz Ruined the Story of Book Liz," Linda Holmes writes:

Two hours and 20 minutes is simply far too long for this story. By the time Elizabeth Gilbert — or, rather, the person I will call "Movie Liz," to distinguish her from both Book Liz and actual Elizabeth Gilbert in real life — finishes up in Italy, the thought that there are two entire countries left for her to visit is like realizing at the close of a one-hour doctor's appointment that the doctor has only looked in one ear.

Too many shots of pasta, Holmes suggests. Besides, I would add, the food was poorly chosen. Italy has a marvelously varied cuisine, but from this movie you might think it was one long chain of Pizza Huts.

The whole Italy portion, in fact, is a rapid succession of clichés : primitive living conditions, lecherous young men, Neapolitan clotheslines, rude gestures. The Asian portions are equally stereotypical. In India we see squalid cities and a Bollywood wedding, while in Bali we meet expats and native healers.

Of course Liz, not the countries or the other characters, is the center of attention. Befriending people everywhere she goes - natives and other tourists - she shows that she's not really a narcissist (even though the conversations are all about her). She come uncomfortably close to looking like a colonialist, though, when she gives one grateful woman a house.

In the end, Liz thinks she has learned something, but I had a hard time telling what it was. I will grant, however, that her third man is better looking, sexier, and much, much richer than the first two.

When Eat, Pray, Love was published four years ago, readers either loved it or hated it. The ones who hated it aren't going to go to this movie anyway. Unfortunately, many of the ones who loved it are likely to walk out of the theater saying, "I'm going to have to go back and reread that book. I thought there was a lot more to it than that."

If that's what you plan to do, I'd recommend taking a look at Gilbert's next book too. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage got neither the rave reviews nor the astronomical sales of the first book, but it updates Liz's story and leaves her in a better place. My review of it is here.

THE POOR CHRIST OF BOMBA by Mongo Béti

If you're interested in African colonial history or cross-cultural evangelism or feminist sociology, or if you'd just like to read a good character study told from an interesting viewpoint, you might want to try to find a copy of Mongo Béti's shocking 1956 novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba. It probably won't be in your library, but you can get an English translation from Amazon or the original French from www.amazon.fr.

The Reverend Father Superior Drumont is a complicated man. He is a true believer, a Frenchman who has devoted over 20 years of his life to working in rural Cameroon. He is also a rigid moralist, a self-righteous minor despot, and a criminally negligent administrator. He knows something is terribly wrong, and he feels tired and confused and guilty. But he fails to understand his own role in a shocking web of corruption that comes to light during three weeks in February.

On the surface, The Poor Christ of Bomba is about Father Drumont. On the very first page Denis, the 15-year-old narrator, says that according to his father, Jesus Christ and Drumont are one and the same. The book's title probably refers to the priest, though it could be an ironic commentary on the collapse of the Bomba mission. Denis, however, does not foresee the impeding crisis. He is loyal to the Catholic church and adores Father Drumont. Through his naively admiring eyes, the reader comes to know the conflicted priest.

Besides being an engaging character study,  the novel is a trenchant commentary on colonialism. The setting is Southern Cameroon in the 1930s, a country that became a German colony in 1884 and then lived under French rule from World War I until 1960. Father Drumont has been trying to turn Cameroon people into Christians without understanding their traditional religions, their social systems, or their mores. At the same time his friend Vidal, a French administrator, is trying to turn the colony into a profitable venture without understanding or caring about the effects his actions will have on the indigenous people.

Reading the novel over 50 years after it was written, I was struck by its women. From the outset,  Drumont is unsympathetic to them. During mass he drags a woman to the altar and forces her to kneel in penance; the narrator has no idea what she has done. He demands that mothers immediately take fussy babies outside. He campaigns (unsuccessfully) against unwed mothers, and he insists that polygamous men abandon all their wives except the one they like the best.

By the end of the book, his rigidity has turned into something close to sadism, though Drumont doesn't see it that way. In fact, he almost seems to understand the sin he and the other men have been committing against women. Listen to him muse to another white priest:*

The indigenous woman, the docile little black woman - what an ideal machine! No need to oil her, you see! No need even to check from time to time to be sure she isn't rusting in the little garage we've stuffed her in.. .. She takes care of her own maintenance, and she  asks for work to do.... The worst thing is that we figured this out. Long before we came, the natives already knew that women make a fine machine; don't think for a minute that they're stupider than we are. So here we come - Christians, Christ's messengers, bearers of civilization. And what do you think we do? Do we give women back their dignity? Not a chance. Oh no. We keep them in servitude. But now we're the ones who profit.

Drumont's understanding does not seem to improve his behavior, however. When he finally figures out that something terrible is happening on his watch, he summons over 50 women who live on the compound to tell him what is going on. Predictably, they are afraid to talk - they have already been repeatedly victimized and fear reprisals. So Drumont has them beaten until they give in. But when they finally tell him what has been going on, he sends them away, even if they have nowhere to go. Knowing that many of them are ill, he provides no medical care. They are at the bottom of the food chain, and it seems not to occur to Father Drumont that his whole approach to evangelization has created a truly hellish situation for his most faithful followers.

Mongo Béti's characters may be literally black and white, but this story is not about villains and saints. Father Drumont's perceptions change as the story progresses, and at times he is almost sympathique. The colonist Vidal is often likable. The narrator's sidekick, Zacharie, is both amusing and appalling. Only the catechist Raphaël comes across as totally corrupt, and he is African - though, to be sure, an African who works for white missionaries. Evil lies not so much in the individuals as in the way power is allocated and used in colonial Cameroon. And in the end, the women suffer more than anyone else.

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*I don't have a copy of the English translation, and neither does my public library. This is my own loose translation of a paragraph I found striking.

A different idea for Ground Zero

Here's an idea for people who are unhappy about having an Islamic Center near the site of the World Trade Center, especially if those people are Bible-believing Christians and/or defenders of the U.S. Constitution. What if American Christians got together and offered to build an interfaith memorial instead?

Since we follow someone who suggested loving our enemies and forgiving seventy times seven (which we tend to ignore when we rant against the Islamic center), this would allow us to be more literal about our faith. And since believe in our Constitutional rights of religious liberty and freedom to assemble (which we might jeopardize by refusing to allow the Islamic center to be built), this would allow us to be more traditional about our politics as well - all without making the Muslims pay for the building.

See, we could pay for it ourselves. It would be cheap: only 50 cents from every American Christian would do it. We probably wouldn't want to call it Córdoba, since that brings to mind a city where medieval Muslims gave a fair amount of religious liberty to Christians (something Christians at the time were not doing for Muslims in neighboring cities). But we might call it something like The Reconciliation Center - a very biblical term that evangelicals should like.

We could include separate worship rooms for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and every other faith held by victims of the 9/11 attacks. We could also include a multifaith meditation room for everybody, with pictures of the deceased and symbols of hope and peace.

Just as important, we could use the memorial to bring the community together now and in the future. I don't know what the neighborhood needs - apparently it's rather rich in strip clubs and sex toys - but how about a gym where kids of all faiths could play together? A food pantry staffed by and serving all people? A library with great works from many traditions? An auditorium where speakers, films, and concerts promoting reconciliation could be featured? A clinic offering free medical care for the homeless?

The only drawback I can think of in building such a center is that terrorists would absolutely hate it. They're already upset at Sufi Muslims such as Feisal Abdul Rauf, the man behind the Córdoba Initiative.Think how mad they would get if Christians co-opted his idea, improved it, and invited him to join them. They might even bomb the place!

But as Jesus said, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake."

Righteous imports: why it's OK for California food to travel to Illinois

"More evidence links pesticides to hyperactivity," says a headline from yesterday's Los Angeles Times, with similar articles in newspapers all over the world. Yet another good reason to be careful what we eat - and yet I've got to say it, righteous eating can be crazy making.

Going to the farmers' market isn't good enough : we have to ask every farmer where the food is grown, what fertilizers were used, whether it was sprayed with pesticides.

Just shopping at Whole Foods isn't good enough either (though it's generally more righteous than, say, Jewel)  : not all of their products are organic, locally grown, wild-caught, or whatever else we're told we have to look for. And we even have to be cautious at Trader Joe's, my favorite grocery store in the world. Thank goodness they are starting to stock a lot more organic foods.

Which is why I appreciated Steven Budiansky's op-ed piece in this morning's New York Times : "Math Lessons for Locavores." Budiansky, bless him, holds that

eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being. 

He gives the numbers to back up his assertion, too.

Budiansky is not in bed with Big Ag. He's a historian, journalist, and mathematician who blogs at Liberal Curmudgeon: Who Says You Have to Be a Conservative to Be Pissed Off? I like the way he thinks.

After reading his article, I feel much better about buying (organic) California strawberries and (wild caught) Alaska salmon, though slightly guiltier about driving to the grocery story four times already this week to get them ("A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy," says Budiansky).

Guilt is OK, in small doses : it's the manure of the soul. I'm just glad I don't have to spread it on my (organic) New Zealand apples.