January was an OK reading month overall—not great, but with some highlights.

I started with two of the books I picked up at Bookmark’s Boxing Day sale: Vincent van Gogh’s For Life and For Art, which is one of those sweet little Penguin Archive editions. It fell a bit flat for me. I chose it because I was curious to get some insights into van Gogh’s creative process, and there are certainly some interesting passages. One example:

The work is going fairly well. I’m struggling with a canvas I started a few days before my illness—a reaper. The study is all yellow, extremely thickly painted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. For I see in this reaper—a vague figure toiling for all he’s worth in the midst of the heat to finish his task—I see in him the image of death, in the sense that humanity might be the wheat he is reaping. So it is, if you like, the opposite of the sower which I tried to do before. But there is no sadness in this death, this one takes place in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.

In other places he talks quite a bit about how he uses paint, something to which (to be honest) I have paid a lot more attention since I started doing jigsaw puzzles, which often require minute scrutiny to colour and texture. Much of the book, though, which is all letters (mostly to his brother Theo) are about pretty mundane stuff, like art supplies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But van Gogh’s paintings are so strange and extraordinary that I expected the same here.

Then I read Kathy Page’s In This Faulty Machine, which is a memoir about her diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease. Again it fell a bit flat, which feels like a terrible thing to say about a book that is so personal and also recounts such a profoundly difficult experience. In this case too there are passages that made me pause with appreciation, such as this one about find words for what she is going through:

In times of great loss, meaning flows back into apt but outworn expressions and they seem true again. So it’s possible, even likely, that as my difficulties become more acute, I will find that plain ordinary words; roughly fitting, well-used phrases; and even squirm-inducing metaphors are good enough—perhaps at times better—than nuanced and original phrasings that draw attention to themselves. After all, sweating, terrified, I’m unlikely to waste my time gazing at the approaching forest fire while I struggle for alternatives to ‘wall of flames’ or choose an original way to convey the ghastly, devouring sound it makes. Since I want to communicate, somehow, anyhow, whatever it takes, I may perhaps be glad of whatever first comes to mind.

Perhaps. Maybe. Meanwhile, I have good reasons for being very passionate about words, and I am not on any kind of journey.

A lot of this book is about Parkinson’s – the symptoms, the treatments, the challenges. Near the end Page says that she wants “my account of these five years to be of use to others,” and I think that intention may be why there’s a fair amount in it that is quite literal, not a how-to guide or instruction manual but, in spirit, a bit of an ‘introduction to.’ Page is a good writer: I was interested in the book in the first place because I really admired her novel Dear Evelyn, which I reviewed for Quill & Quire when it came out. And This Faulty Machine is fine, especially when she meditates on illness and its effects on self and identity and creativity. I’ve just read some memoirs recently that really lit me up—I’m thinking of both Sarah Moss’s My Good Bright Wolfand Claire Cameron’s How to Survive a Bear Attack—and I just did not feel the same about this one.

I bought one more book at that sale, Maria Reva’s Endling, which I had been excited about reading ever since hearing her interviewed about it on Bookends. I am sorry to say that at this point this one is a DNF for me, though I hope I will try it again some day. The metafictional turn it took (which I knew was coming, so I did go into this with my eyes open) quenched my already faltering engagement. YMMV.

I followed up on a recommendation on Bluesky and read Joseph O’Connor’s My Father’s House. This one was high on the “readability” scale and also felt unhappily topical, as all books about resisting fascism do at this point. I didn’t feel compelled to read it at all closely, though, and in fact at times I skimmed along because I was more driven by curiosity about what would happen than I was taking pleasure in its language. It has already gone back to the library, so I can’t quote from it.

A friend leant me Antonia White’s Frost in May, which I have had on my mental TBR for probably decades, given its status as the first-ever Virago Classic. I quite enjoyed this one (although again it has been returned, so I can’t quote from it—such are the hazards of not blogging each book properly as I finish reading it!). My friend commented, and I agree, that it is perhaps a bit too detailed about the religious aspects, but Nanda is a very appealing protagonist to follow along with during her ‘coming of age,’ and I liked White’s prose a lot.

Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker would have been a DNF if I hadn’t been reading it for my book club, and as it was I petulantly turned every page after about the first 150, rather than diligently reading it all. As with Endling I have mostly myself to blame for getting into this one: we read Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know last, and decided we’d like something with some similar themes (e.g. environmentalism, climate change, investigation) but with a more plotty plot, a bit more excitement. Venomous Lumpsucker was one of the books I put on a menu of options and it sure sounded like it would be all kinds of madcap fun. Nope. For me, anyway, Beauman just spent waaaaay too much time filling in all the details required by his concept. It dragged soooooo much. I’ll be quite curious to know how my book club friends got on with it.

I finished Volume 3 of Woolf’s diaries: this is a case in which I have too many passages flagged to do this reading experience justice in this quick recap. She’s working on The Waves for much of the last part of this volume and it is really fascinating watching her think it through. One thing that really comes through in the diaries is that she was never content to sit in one place as a novelist: she was always asking what else she could do, or how better she could create fiction that reflected the ideas and experiences she wanted to convey. I have started Volume 4 and fully intend to do better at posting about it regularly (she says boldly).

Finally, I had heard good things about Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent so I grabbed it up when I happened upon it on the ‘rapid reads’ shelf at the library. It is also very readable, and also smart and subtle and touching. Its epistolary approach made me think of Jane Gardam’s Queen of the Tambourine, although it has been so long since I read that one that I don’t know how much beyond their form they have in common. I pulled the Gardam off myself and added it to my actual TBR pile: I enjoyed it a lot when I read it back in (checks blog archive) 2011. 2011! That’s a long time ago.

And now it’s February, a new month, a short month, a (probably) pretty busy month. One reason I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been so tired after the work stuff is done: it has been a dreary time at work administratively, with budget cuts and internecine wrangling and lots of doom and gloom ‘what if’ conversations, fiscal as well as curricular. Honestly I’m surprised I even read this much (which isn’t that much, by some standards) in January. I’m enjoying my actual classes, though, and I hope the students are too—although if the current forecast holds we may have our third Monday in a row cancelled for snow. Did I mention I’ve been tired?! Still, we are working through the final part of The Mill on the Floss in the George Eliot seminar and that, of course, is genuinely great reading, and Friday’s class in the Brit Lit survey was on “Goblin Market”—what larks! (We start Great Expectations soon, too!)

This post is a re-done version of my previous January 2026 update to correct a number of odd things that happened when I tried to use the latest incarnation of the ‘classic’ editor. Time to learn how to use blocks, I guess–which is what I did here.

Will I survive a bear attack? I’d been asking the wrong question. Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death, but the bridge between those two things is love.

After this investigation, my recommendation is to spend your time falling in love with the people and the world around you. Don’t let a fear of death eclipse your life. Run towards love, fight for it, and die for it.

When I was a child, my family went camping most summers, often at Saltery Bay, a significant drive (and two ferry rides) up B. C.’s optimistically named ‘Sunshine Coast.’ I wasn’t – and still am not – particularly outdoorsy, and I am irrationally afraid of starfish, and, less irrationally, of barnacles, so I am not sure I ever swam in the water off the rocks where we hung out day after day. I loved the tidal pools, though, full of mussels and crabs and tiny fish, and I loved staking out our favorite picnic table, the only one with any shade, early in the morning with my dad (the other families must have hated us!). We played Scrabble there, and painted rocks, and colored in our coloring books. Back at the campsite after dark, we played card games and colored some more and designed outfits for my beloved paper doll Hitty (named for and patterned after the wooden doll in this book) and sang songs by the fire when my dad played his guitar.

Every so often on these trips my dad would make a joke to my mother about bears. I am morally certain, now, that she never found them funny. I don’t remember ever taking bears seriously myself. I also don’t remember any particular precautions that we took to keep them at bay. But the elegant and informative B. C. Parks website (no such thing existed during my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, of course) does say that “bears, cougars, wolves, and other potentially dangerous animals may be present,” and gives advice about how to keep yourself safe.

We were more wary about bears when we camped at Manning Park, I guess because it’s in the mountains and bears were known to roam there. In fact, I think I remember us all getting into the car once because we spotted a bear in our vicinity, though I am not 100% sure about this.* If we did, it can’t have helped my mother’s anxiety about these burly threats to her family. As Claire Cameron is at pains to emphasize in her new memoir How to Survive a Bear Attack, bear attacks are vanishingly rare. The couple whose grim deaths on a camping trip in 1991 are the anecdotal center of her story were, statistically speaking, in much greater danger on the drive to Algonquin Park; as she also points out, the woman of the pair was – again, statistically speaking – more likely to be killed by her male companion than by a bear. Still, if you are the rare target of a charging bear, those statistics are not going to feel reassuring, and if a bear does actually attack you, you are in extreme danger.

Claire Cameron was not attacked by a bear. The title of her book is not exactly misdirection: in fact, How to Survive a Bear Attack is full of information about bear attacks and how to survive them. The sections have titles like “When to Play Dead,” “When to Fight,” and “A Time to Surrender.” Cameron had turned to the wilderness after her father’s death from cancer,  and had found courage and strength in the beauty of the Canadian landscape and her own active engagement with it, hiking, climbing, paddling, and camping. Anyone with these interests has to think about bears, and Cameron often had. A turning point in what became a “full-blown bear obsession” was a close encounter with one when she was planting trees in Northern Ontario. She knew the story about the couple who had died in Algonquin Park, but the cinnamon bear she saw on that expedition was  an “apple-eating bear” smart enough to pry the lid off the Tupperware container he’d taken out of her backpack (which the bear had lifted from a van when someone foolishly left the window down a bit) and eat the peanut butter sandwiches inside.

Over the years, Cameron had been plenty close to bears – and also “stood close enough to mountain lions, and jumped over rattlesnakes.” It was only practical to know something about what to do in the event that a bear saw her as a threat, or as prey. But it had never come to that, and then at 45, she got a diagnosis that changed everything. “It was only now,” she says, “that I realized how foolish I was. I’d been preparing to fight a bear when the thing that would most likely kill me – my own DNA – had been lurking in a place much closer.” What she is fighting is cancer, specifically the rare and threatening form of melanoma that led to her father’s death at only 42. At the time of her own diagnosis, Cameron was 45.

Some of the strongest writing in the book comes in the passages where Cameron reflects on how it feels and also what it means to understand that “nature” is not a setting for our lives but that our lives are themselves natural. In the wake of this frightening news, she and her husband hold each other, wonder what to tell their kids, and contemplate a future without the “false sense of security” that comes from the walls we build around ourselves. “Every now and then,” she says,

something happens. A reminder. The mask of control slips to the side and there is a glimpse of what lies behind. We are subject to natural forces. We are delicate, vulnerable creatures, no matter how much time we spend telling ourselves otherwise. Our teeth are blunt, our skin is thin, and our hearts flutter close to the surface. We are subject to the pull of the moon; we can be shifted by the tides and pushed by the wind.

Later, in the context of the deadly bear attack in Algonquin Park, she will note specifically the vulnerability of the backs of our necks: “a person approached from behind with force stands little chance.” This, she thinks, is how Carola died – instantly, at least, unlike her partner Ray, who seems to have fought with everything he had. (Fair warning: parts of this book are quite graphic about the damage bears can do.)

What does a bear attack have to do with cancer? Is it just a metaphor? Yes, partly: the book is about Cameron’s illness and her desire to survive it, and so the section headings (especially 12, “How to Live”) take on dual meaning. But Cameron is also, still, obsessed with literal bears, and just as her turn to the outdoors helped her come back to life after her father’s death, so her strong and initially inexplicable fixation on finding out what exactly happened at that campsite in 1991 helps her find purpose, motivation, and eventually meaning after the surgery that, provisionally anyway, removes her cancer but leaves her weakened and unmotivated. The quest starts with an anomaly, perhaps a mistake, in a note she’d written about the case for her earlier novel The Bear. Suddenly “every hour became urgent”:

By that time, I had lived three years longer than my dad. This felt like borrowed time. I made a list of questions. I was sore and tired. I suspected I might be dying, but finding answers became more pressing than fear.

The next big shift comes as she pursues those answers and comes across a photograph of the killer bear. She had always focused on the people, the victims, the search party, the mourners, herself. Only at that moment does she realize there’s another point of view: the bear’s. Bears “are individuals. They do individual things.” To complete her story of that fatal meeting, she “needed to understand this bear on his terms, not mine.”

The bear’s story becomes the third strand in the narrative Cameron weaves, which combines her personal story, the story she puts together (including various testimonies and evidence) about Carola and Ray’s horrific final day, and sections from the point of view of the bear that attempt to portray him as a character in his own right – personality, curiosity, hunger, all as far as possible conveyed as aspects of what we might call bearishness. I admit I found these parts not completely convincing, not so much because they are inevitably speculative but because, well, it’s a bear. Cameron knows, and tells us, a lot about bears, including how smart they are, but this bear thinks, remembers, and plans to a degree that seems improbable. I think the idea probably was to make explicit what in reality is more implicit or instinctual; the risk is anthropomorphizing him, and while I think Cameron makes a valiant effort not to do that, still, well, it’s a bear. I still found it very interesting to learn so much about a bear’s life, though! And I liked the connections Cameron makes to Beowulf, one of the stories her father had loved to share with her. Toni Morrison, in an essay on Beowulf, “makes the point that nowhere in the story do people ask questions about why Grendel was hell-bent on eating them.” “When I followed Morrison’s thought,” Cameron explains, “I understood that the bear wasn’t beyond comprehension . . . It felt like trying to reach out and touch Grendel.”

The bear is a bear; the bear is Grendel, embodiment of our oldest and deepest fears; the bear is cancer; the bear is nature. They are all, in their own way, wild – and the wilderness is not somewhere else, separate, held back or “conserved” within inside the arbitrary boundaries of a park:

The wilderness has never been empty. It doesn’t have borders. It’s a word that defines a relationship between the people, the wildlife, and the land. It’s ancient and will be here long after I’m gone. I can’t control where or how it goes. It’s under the carpet, in the alley behind my house, in the lake, inside a glacier, and on an island in Algonquin Park. It’s inside the mind of a black bear.

It’s also much closer. It lives in my cells. To some, those cells might have a mutation. To me, they are cells inherited from my dad. I have cancer. It’s wild inside me.

Cameron completes her investigation and writes her account of what happened, to Carola and Ray, to the bear, to her father, and to herself. There is ultimately no comforting answer to the question that once preoccupied her: “If I’m attacked by a bear, will I survive?” None of us survive, so the question, the preoccupation, is itself misguided, she concludes. “Being alive is one big risk and it will end in death”; instead of running away from bears (which, just by the way, is not a good move in the case of a literal bear attack) we should “run towards love, fight for it, and die for it.” The lesson might seem a little pat, even trite, but the urgency and the poignancy of it are real for Cameron, which gives it power, and besides, things are often trite precisely because they are true. There’s a reason a story as old as Beowulf can still speak to us, can still give Cameron the words she needs to face the end: “I’ll let go then, of all my holdings, my throne, my carefully guarded bones.”

---

*I checked with my parents and my mother confirms: “The night before, a bear prowled around our tent. At lunch the next day when many were enjoying themselves by a stream at a picnic site, a bear wandered in and I was the only one who made my family get in the car.” That seems a very sensible precaution to me!

They belonged here. Of course. It was obvious. They belonged here and they should be here. Why not? Why on earth not? Why should she and Polly leave the Point to a land trust rather than to the people who had loved it the longest? Her heart pounded. It had taken her her whole life to see it, but now that she did, nothing could be as clear. The simple truths are always hidden in plain sight, only veiled by the complications of the human mind.

I read almost all of Fellowship Point‘s 575 pages in a single day, which is a testament to how engrossing I found it. That said, by the time I finished it I was disappointed in it: although it is admirably smart and ambitious and encompasses a lot of people, events, and themes, there’s a central plot “resolution” that I found very artificial, not satisfying in any way except as a planned revelation to pull things too neatly together. Furthermore, the final resolution about the future of the land known as Fellowship Point, while the right answer in probably every way, nonetheless felt awkwardly didactic as it actually played out. (Note that I avoid saying exactly what that plot point is or what happens to the land: this is partly because I consider it a courtesy to avoid spoilers here, but also because if you do go on to read the novel itself, I don’t want my stamp of disapproval to mark these elements too prominently. My guess is that you’ll recognize them in any case, but you may well respond to them differently!)

Fellowship Point is like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel if it were written by Elizabeth Strout: it’s a family saga that sprawls across generations, and it’s a close-up study of two idiosyncratic older women, Agnes and Polly, long-time best friends, whose lives are intimately connected to their neighboring family properties on the coast of Maine. These two women are the best part of the book, and since they are a big part of it, that’s a good thing! Agnes is the most Strout-like of the two, acerbic, independent, uncompromising, unmarried—a grouch with a heart of gold. Polly is kinder, gentler, easier, more accommodating. She is married to a Casaubon-like scholar, a retired philosophy professor struggling to sustain his self-esteem and sense of purpose now that he’s cut off from formal academic life. I had to laugh at his response to Polly’s helpful suggestion that “until his next book came out he write a weblog to express his opinions”:

“Are you serious?” He frowned. “A weblog, on the computer? I’d be laughed out of the profession. . . . ” He’d adopted blog as a catchphrase rather than an activity. “Time to work on my blog,” he’d say for all kinds of transitions—when he repaired to the bathroom, for example.

OK, fair enough! But Polly’s ideas aren’t in fact foolish ones, in this case or in other circumstances, and much of the novel is about her learning to trust herself and her judgment, to stand up against his and then her sons’ tendency to belittle or dismiss her, often in the condescending guise of loving concern.

Agnes, in contrast, has to get out of her own way, to stop guarding her secrets and make space in her life for love and forgiveness. This means reckoning with a traumatic incident from her past, which we learn about through the device of a long series of letters she wrote to her dead sister, which she eventually decides to share with the novel’s third protagonist, Maud Silver, an ambitious young editor eager to convince Agnes to write a full and frank memoir.

For me, it was the letters that began to sap the energy of the novel. They felt like a device, for one thing, an answer to “how do we get this backstory in?” Agnes as shown through the third-person narration is a more vivid and engaging character than Agnes in their first-person voice, too. And the backstory itself took way too long to unspool. I was curious about it, but after a while I was tempted to skim through the letters so I could just find out what the big deal was. Once I knew and I began to suspect how the other pieces fit together, I got somewhat irritable about it all, even though I liked Agnes and Polly enough to want to know how it all turned out.

Thematically, the most substantial issue in the novel is people’s relationship to the land they live on: how ideas about ownership or stewardship, about belonging or sharing or developing or loving the land, affect how it is treated and reflect other, broader, values about how we live in the world. In her acknowledgements, Dark says

As a child I learned that I lived on land where indigenous peoples had lived for hundreds of years. I never stopped thinking about this and wondering what to do about it. The question found its way into this novel. I hope we all find a just answer.

I think the novel does offer “a just answer” to its own specific scenario, but it comes across as pat, rather than as artistically satisfying. It’s true that clues about what that answer might or should be are present from early in Fellowship Point, and maybe if I reread it I would find that this thread (political, ethical, and thematic) is interwoven more richly than I noticed. Maybe, too, it’s thematically appropriate to keep the better alternative to the two options that are more overtly the novel’s central conflict out of sight until nearly the end: it makes sense, I suppose, that the third option wouldn’t even occur to Agnes, loving Fellowship Point and its family history as she does, until quite late—indeed, almost too late. Maybe this answer was meant to feel disruptive of our expectations, especially given the novel’s otherwise familiar genre. All I can say is that I wasn’t convinced by it, however just and right it is in principle, as the right ending for Fellowship Point or, to look at it the other way around, Fellowship Point didn’t read to me like the right novel for that ending. There’s just too much else going on in it that doesn’t really tie in to it.

I also wasn’t in love with Maud’s plot, and I really didn’t like the Big Reveal about it . . . but enough criticism. Really, it’s strange that I have so many complaints about the novel, considering how immersed I was in it in the moment. It is very readable, clearly. I don’t mean that as damning it with faint praise: it’s a lot! Many novels don’t achieve even that much. I appreciated, too, the obvious ambition of the novel, even if, in my judgment, its ambition is not matched by its achievement. Before I read it, I was surprised that my local independent bookstore has it filed under “fiction,” rather than “literature.” I’m always amused by their confident distinction between these two categories and I’m often tempted to challenge them both on the concepts and on their choices about what goes where. Now I think that in this case, they got it right—which isn’t to say it isn’t a good novel, but I am not at all convinced that it’s a great one.

In my mind are all the tides, their seasons, their ebbs and their flows. In my mind are all the halls, the endless procession of them, the intricate pathways. When this world becomes too much for me, when I grow tired of the noise and the dirt and the people, I close my eyes and I name a particular vestibule to myself; then I name a hall. I imagine I am walking the path from the vestibule to the hall. I note with precision the doors I must pass through, the rights and lefts that I must take, the statues on the walls that I must pass.

Piranesi is a strange, wondrous, mysterious novel, the kind of book that makes me marvel that someone ever had the idea to write it, much less carried it out so that a reader like me could be moved and transported by it. By training and inclination I am (more or less) a realist; the two genres I always have the least success with reading are fantasy and science fiction. I gave up on Clarke’s earlier novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – not just gave up, but gave it up, donating it to the book sale after a couple of failed attempts to get into it. Now I wish I still had it, because if Clarke is good enough to make the weird world of Piranesi feel real to me, I trust her enough to try it again.

I’m not going to say much specific about Piranesi, mostly because it’s such an intricately delicate construction that describing or explaining it seems unlikely to do it justice – and might, worse, spoil its carefully unspooled revelations. Most of it takes place in a kind of labyrinth made up of halls and vestibules, populated with statues and skeletons and one solitary living person, the man we know, and who knows himself, only as ‘Piranesi’ – until we learn more about him, that is, and he too is brought to confront some elusive truths about himself.

The story of who he is and what he’s doing in this place is the novel’s central plot, and it has elements of an actual mystery, even a thriller, with clues and an investigation and a climactic face-off with a villainous antagonist. In a way it is even a horror story, or at any rate things about it are horrible. The oddity of Piranesi, though, is how beautiful Piranesi’s weird world is and how lovingly he studies and tends to it. It isn’t our world but it has things we are familiar with, including tides and sea birds and seasons, all of which are vividly evoked. Although Piranesi is essentially (we learn) a captive in this place, it’s not a story of suffering. He feels taken care of; in his isolation, he has created meaning through rituals and through relationships that are real and valuable to him. When the truth is revealed and he has to choose which world to live in, it’s not obvious where he will really be better off. Or, at any rate, the right choice may be obvious but it clearly comes with costs, with losses.

I wasn’t really sure what to think about Piranesi as I read it, partly because both Piranesi and his labyrinthine world are so captivating and partly because it takes the whole novel to really understand what is happening in it. It is a fantasy novel of a sort; it is perhaps a kind of parable; it may or may not be saying something about the imagination, or art, or religion, or mythology. I think it’s about freedom in some way – about whether a life can be a good one, for example, if it is lived under duress (even unknowingly), or whether a life stripped down to its bare elements might have a kind of purity that is some compensation for what has been taken away or sacrificed. It is about human needs, including for love, and the way they find outlets wherever they can. It is incredibly sad, but by the end it is also quietly hopeful.

Happily, other people have written smart things about it, including Teresa at Shelf Love, whose post was one reason I had made a mental note to read Piranesi for myself even though I thought it sounded a bit far out for me (which it is). I also appreciated Ron Charles’s review, and this one by Ilana Teitelbaum in the Los Angeles Review of Books – I don’t know the Narnia books well enough to make the connections she does, but I found them really interesting. The title of the novel of course tells us to make connections to Piranesi, who in turn was an influence on M. C. Escher: these allusions are good visual cues, but whether they help much with interpreting the novel I’m not sure. In any case, because Piranesi is at once so memorable and so enigmatic, I know it will linger with me for a long time.

They are worth more to us than the empty human shells we have taken them for; they were children who cried for their mothers, they were young women who fell in love; they endured childbirth, the death of parents; they laughed, and they celebrated Christmas. They argued with their siblings, they wept, they dreamed, they hurt, they enjoyed small triumphs.

Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five admirably fulfill’s Rubenhold’s stated ambition for it: to restore “their dignity” to five women whose individual life stories have been subsumed by the horror of their deaths and the horrifyingly glamourous mythology of their murderer. These women, the “canonical five” victims of Jack the Ripper, have long been cast as bit players in his drama, in parts that, Rubenhold shows, reduce or misrepresent who they actually were.

I’m not going to reiterate the life stories Rubenhold has (somewhat astonishingly) managed to reconstruct in The Five, partly because it’s the sheer accumulation of detail that matters to the book’s effectiveness. At times I did wonder if we really need so much detail—Rubenhold risks bogging us down in minutiae, and I admit that sometimes I found myself starting to skim, looking to reconnect with a storyline, to regain some forward momentum. But even as I did that, I was aware that I was going against the grain of the book, which is by design anti-narrative.

What I mean by that (and of course this is just my theory about Rubenhold’s approach) is that we already know something crucial about each woman: we already know how their stories end. For too long that one thing has been considered enough to know about them, or at least the most important thing to know about them, and it has been used to make assumptions about what came before—and about who these women were. In order to undo that ending, to refuse it as the defining moment in their lives, Rubenhold has to repress it almost completely, even as each step of each of her five biographies takes its subject closer and closer to it. It’s a really interesting conceptual challenge.

She is also committed to undoing the sensationalism around her subjects’ lives and deaths: I think that’s another explanation for the way she writes the book. She avoids all the obvious kinds of narrative manipulation: she creates no suspense, she does not set a foreboding tone, use foreshadowing, or create melodramatic scenarios or dramatic climaxes. This is one way The Five differs from Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: although I did not find his treatment of this murderer’s victims exploitive, Jobb does enjoy dramatic irony and foreshadowing, and overall he  tells a more melodramatic and grisly tale. He also, obviously, focuses on the killer, whereas Rubenhold refuses to give Jack the Ripper any more attention than is absolutely necessary. (For instance, there is no speculation at all in The Five about who he was.)

This is not to say that The Five is a dull, plodding, or wearily studious book, though it is very much a work of social history. It gets its considerable energy from Rubenhold’s frankly feminist perspective on her subjects’ lives, deaths, and posthumous treatment. “The courses their lives took,” she says early on, “mirrored that of so many other women of the Victorian age.” The book is really one long quietly furious riposte to the still too-common victim-blaming question about women who are assaulted: “what was she doing there in the first place?” She answers that question five times, recounting how one by one these women were worn down by social constraints, by economic struggles, by lack of education, by lack of employment options, by their inability to control their fertility; she shows families broken by disease, by poverty, by alcoholism, and especially by the lack of support and resources to recover from any of these problems. The women she tells us about were not helpless victims of circumstance, but their world was hard, hostile, and often dangerous—and profoundly misogynistic. They ended up in vulnerable situations, not because they made uniquely bad decisions or were in any way “looking for it,” but because they had run out of other options.

And no matter how they came to be “sleeping rough,” they didn’t invite or deserve their horrendous deaths. The idea that any version of their life stories should mitigate our distress at the violence done to them—that in any way their murders open them up to that kind of judgment of their characters—is precisely what Rubenhold is crusading against. The epigraph for her conclusion comes from the judge at the trial of the so-called “Suffolk Strangler” in 2008: “You may view with some distaste the lifestyles of those involved,” he says, but “no-one is entitled to do these women any harm, let alone kill them.” Since the first inquests into their deaths, Rubenhold shows, her five have been dismissed as “only prostitutes,” perpetuating the familiar Madonna / whore dichotomy that “suggests there is an acceptable standard of female behavior, and those who deviate from it are fit to be punished.” She rightly points out how persistent this view is, to this day:

When a woman steps out of line and contravenes accepted norms of feminine behavior, whether on social media or on the Victorian street, there is a tacit understanding that someone must put her back in her place.

Never having read any “Ripperology,” I was shocked at the examples she gives of writers (recent ones!) about Jack the Ripper who casually degrade his victims and “elevate the murderer to celebrity status.” “Our culture’s obsession with the mythology,” she convincingly argues, “serves only to normalize its particular brand of misogyny.” Women shouldn’t have to be nice, good, perfect to be safe; men shouldn’t be able to use anything about women’s lives as justifications for violence against them. It might seem like a stretch when Rubenhold declares that by accepting the “Ripper legend” we not only perpetuate the specific injustice done to her subjects but “condone the basest forms of violence”—but if we understand them, as she wants us to, as representative rather than unique, as important because they are ordinary, not because they are outliers, then she is exactly right, and in that respect The Five is very much a book about the present as well as the past, and it is not just sad but infuriating.

‘Still, was it right, to take a child from his people?’

Thea shook her head and got up from the rocker. ‘You make me tired, Kay,’ she said. ‘You have a way of simplifying an argument that ignores the complexity of life.’

Marina Endicott’s The Difference was a near miss for me. It has a lot of elements and qualities that I usually enjoy, and that I mostly did enjoy in this case. It is meticulous historical fiction–though ‘meticulous’ is not my highest term of praise because it rightly implies that the novel made me a bit too aware of the care with which it renders its imagined version of a particular time and place. I prefer more exuberance, and The Difference as a whole only occasionally risks more expansive expressiveness.

When it does so, it is around the wonders of the sea and its creatures: it is very much a sea-faring novel, and while (again) this meant it was filled with good things, things I usually like (like vivid descriptions of water and light and dolphins, and plenty of neepery about sailing) often it felt to me as if we were proceeding at a speed a bit too close to real time on the Morning Light‘s voyage from Yarmouth to the South Pacific and around again. For over 250 pages (so, much more than half of the novel) The Difference seemed to be going nowhere in particular except on that literal voyage, which provides a deliberate, well-crafted, but rather protracted set-up for the problem that is supposedly the crux of the story and its themes.

The Difference tells the story of Kay, her half-sister Thea, and Thea’s husband Francis, the ship’s captain, as they travel the ocean on Francis’s trading route. Endicott’s account of both the trip and their many varied stops are full of fine detail and Kay is a well-developed character: young, thoughtful, unconventional (of course – she has to be, I guess, to be a protagonist), excited to be tutored in Greek.

Part of the backstory for both Kay and Thea is their father’s work at an “Indian” school, where conditions were harsh and the treatments punitive for the pupils who were taken away from their own families and cultures. It’s clear that Endicott means this large-scale wrong as a counterpoint to the specific wrong on which the book’s plot eventually pivots: about half way through the book, off the coast of a small island called Pulo Anna, the ship encounters boats full of men eager to trade – including, it turns out, one of their own number, a young boy whom they leave on the Morning Light in exchange for four pounds of tobacco. Thea, who has had multiple miscarriages, essentially adopts the boy, whom they call “Aren”; she delights in being his “mother,” and Kay embraces her role as his big sister. Aren adjusts with seeming ease to his new life but becomes ill with TB, and they end up stopping in New York so he can recover.

We pick up again about a decade later and much has changed. Most importantly, Aren has left his adopted family and is living a bit of a rough life in Halifax. Distressed and frustrated, both on his behalf and her own, Kay comes up with a plan to take him “home” to Pulo Anna. Once more we find ourselves on board ship and traveling across the seas. Although the next part of the book is as carefully and thoughtfully crafted as the first part, as I made my way through it, and even more so at the end of the novel, I found myself preoccupied with what Endicott had left out by not addressing the intervening years: a lot was missing, I thought, that would have illuminated both the action and, more importantly, the meaning, of the novel’s resolution.

The moral heart of the novel is the question of whether, as Kay very belatedly asks, it can have been right for them to take Aren away with them. Near the end of the novel, Thea reveals in a letter to Kay that when Aren was very sick, he yearned for his original family to “come to get me.” This is the first and almost the only explicit evidence we get that Aren did not in fact accept his new situation as placidly as it seemed, and while perhaps it should go without saying that his experience was traumatic, I can’t understand why that truth (assuming it is supposed to be the truth) was so completely suppressed in Endicott’s story-telling. Perhaps the point is to indict both Kay and Thea for taking his contentment for granted – an assumption as reductive to his humanity as the more overtly racist things people say to him or about him after he has joined their family – and thus to indict us by association if we haven’t questioned their points of view. Still, it seems odd to make the alternative perspective – a potential source of significant moral conflict – not just elusive but invisible almost to the very end.

It’s Kay who has the most chance to be a figure of resistance and an ally for Aren, as she is set up as a bit of a maverick or nonconformist from the start, but she doesn’t express any concerns until that late and quite muted confrontation with Thea, and her relationship with Aren is genuinely affectionate, and (as far as we are ever shown) mutually so. Only her tutor, Mr. Brimner, shows any shock at the crude transaction these kindly people have engaged in. “We’ll leave Thea to tell the tale of her purchase of this little fellow,” Francis says lightly, at which

Mr. Brimner’s eyes snapped up to Francis’s face, as if he checked for a jape or jollity, but he schooled his expression quickly to one of objective interest.

His reaction does cast a skeptical shadow over the family’s own account, which casts them as benevolent saviors (“One could not credit how desperate the people were,” Thea explains to Mr. Brimner), and perhaps that is supposed to be enough to drive a wedge between us and them, even though the novel proceeds to depict both them and Aren as carrying on quite happily together.

I wonder if Endicott decided not to show the actual years Aren spends with his adopted family (skipping ahead as she does to his eventual alienation and departure) because that actually avoids treating Kay’s question as one that presents a genuine moral problem. Is the idea that we should not even try to weigh the life he had against the life that, in some sense, he should have had, or that at any rate he would have had, if his brother (as it turns out) had not so cavalierly traded him for tobacco? If the question of whether he might not, by some measures, have benefited from the trade is simply inadmissible, than I can see that it would be wasted time, argumentatively at least, to lay out the results as if there is any value or meaning in doing so: as if the specifics of his experience of being raised as  part of Thea and Francis’s family could possibly make any difference to the absolute moral wrong of his having been take away in that way from his own home. (Does he consent? What would count as consent, for a child and in those circumstances? Would it matter if he did?)

Taking that initial trade as a kind of original sin, from which no good can come, there is a certain simplicity, rather than complexity, to the novel’s moral framework: no matter how kind you are or how good your intentions, you have no right (to answer Kay’s question) to take a child from “his people.” If that is the novel’s point, it approaches it quite circuitously and by omission, rather than inquiry or dramatic enactment. Why not more directly expose the inadequacy of Thea’s version of the story, for one thing? (“A benevolent God,” she thinks, “had given her the chance to save this one soul at least from poverty and starvation,” and she considers this repayment for, not duplication of, “the deaths of all those poor Blade Lake children.”) Why not show us, too, what exactly Aren gave up, what the loss is to him, which remains not just abstract but actually a bit hard to take for granted, because something else we learn on that final voyage is that “his people” have not survived: war and then famine have wiped them out. If he had never left, he would presumably have died with them; his body might well have been one of those found “littering” the beach. I guess what I missed as I finished the novel was clearer evidence of how (or, I guess, whether) the novel thought we should wrestle with these alternatives. Is the news of the island’s catastrophe actually evidence of complexity after all, because it is hard to say for sure whether Aren was, ultimately, better off for being spared this fate? Or, again, do the terms of his “adoption” make any further moral considerations moot as there’s nothing that can possibly compensate for or mitigate that harm?

Endicott’s acknowledgments suggest she intends the latter. The Difference was inspired by real events, and she says that she “heard Miss Ladd’s story of the boy bought for four pounds of tobacco with an instantaneous feeling of revulsion.” She also makes explicit the connection I alluded to between Aren’s story and “the terrible legacy of residential schools in Canada.” Kay and Thea both carry profound guilt with them for how their father’s pupils suffered; it is surprising that they do not more readily make this connection themselves, though Kay moves closer to it by the end. One of the reviews quoted on my edition of The Difference says that the novel shows “how many mistakes can lead to kindness.” To me, the thrust of the novel seems rather to be “how many intended kindnesses can lead to mistakes.” I just wish the novel had been more direct about both dramatizing and philosophizing about – making the arguments for – that theme.