Captain Marvel

Usually, the best super hero films are about origins.  Captain Marvel (2019; dirs. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck) is definitely an origin story.  But it’s not as straightforward as most: it uses jumbled chronology and suppressed memories.  It’s about the main character discovering who she was in the past as well as who she is in the present.  She remembers nothing of her past. It’s also about her discovery of her super powers, which are considerable. This makes the film more interesting than I would expect.  It’s also delivers a not too subtle message about political points of view and oppressed minorities.  In this case, the Kree, an alien race to which the main character belongs, is attempting to exterminate the Skrulls. The plot is more involved than I’ve made it out to be, so I’ll stop the summary there. 

Captain Marvel is so powerful that there’s hardly any question as to who will win in her various conflicts in the film—her side always wins, though because she doesn’t initially know how to use her powers, what she can do to her enemies isn’t always exactly clear.

Captain Marvel is a woman.  Not many super heroes are. The film deftly avoids assigning stereotypical female traits to her. She is firm, self-assured, and forceful. She shows little emotion, although she does show anger and concern about the alien race in danger of extermination.  The film ensures that she is attractive in her super hero suit.

What will our hero do after this film ends? We see her briefly in The Avengers: Endgame, but she departs before she can defeat Thanos, leaving that to others of the group.  She definitely doesn’t fit in as well as other Avenger members, and tin one brief scene other members of the group talk her into joining them. The fact that she doesn’t employ all her powers to destroy Thanos just doesn’t make sense.

The digital effects are extensive and spectacular.  DGI technology has advanced so far that you hardly notice the fantasy and the comic book universe.  The colors and visual design of this film are distinctive. It was fun to watch and entertaining overall.

Samuel Jackson plays Nick Fury, Captain Marvel’s close ally.  He’s been digitally altered in the film to look like a man in his 30s.  The transformation is convincing, yet his character seems artificial in a certain way, especially his face. The jive turkey lines he delivers don’t help.

8 1/2

Fellini’s great film 8 1/2 (1963) is a dreamlike, surreal vision of a director, Guido Anselmo (Marcello Mastroianni), at mid-career and mid-life.  He fears he has exhausted his creative impulse and that he has nothing left to say.  His marriage is a shambles, and his wife is ready for divorce. When the film begins, after a dreamlike scene in which he is trapped in his car filling up with gas on an expressway, while everyone in the cars around him stare at him ominously, he is staying at a sanatorium or a rest home.  Either he recovering from nervous exhaustion or is an alcoholic trying to dry out. Though he is there for a rest, to recover, his entire film crew seems to have accompanied him, especially his producers, who are pressuring him to make decisions and to choose a cast for a new film.

Everyone is pressuring Guido—guilt about his marriage, memories of his parents and their extractions, childhood memories, women he has slept with or is sleeping with.  These figures appear and disappear, mostly in Guido’s fevered imagination, sometimes in reality.

Everyone is trying to compel Guido to do or be something he is not.  That struggle between the expectations and desires of others, in conflict with his own self, is at the core of the film.

8 1/2 doesn’t distinguish among dreams, memories, hallucinations, fantasies.  One can sometimes tell the difference, but not always, and such distinctions are irrelevant in the film—all these impressions and sensation, real or imagined, make up Guido’s life. He contends with them all.

Guido’s struggle is with his authentic self and his impulses.  As a director, he is constantly creating fictions, illusions, lies.  He lies to everyone constantly, including his wife, his producers, and women he wants to seduce (he suggests that there is a role for them in his films). He lies to himself.  The film he is being pressured to make involves a rocket ship and a plot about people in a post-atomic apocalyptic world escaping to another planet.  It’s not entirely clear to me whether the film is a genuine plan or a kind of inauthentic joke, the sort of commercial film his producers believe will earn money.  He doesn’t seem to think much of the film itself, but he feels pressured to make it. Symbols and images of fiction abound: masks, backdrops, portraits, clowns, the huge artificial launch tower from which the movie rocket ship is supposed to launch.

It’s difficult not to suppose that 8 1/2 is Fellini’s self-critique.  I don’t know  whether there is a factual basis for that notion, but Guido’s role as a famous director like Fellini supports the idea. The film that Guido is trying to make (or avoid making) is his own self-critique as well.  It uses material from his own life, his marriage, his doubts.  So that 8 1/2 is a meta film twice over: a director’s critique of his life and vocation in the form of a film about an artist making a film that is his own self-critique.

Cinematography is a major aspect of this film.  Fellini especially favors long shots down hallways or in a forest or an enclosed square. I never fully appreciated Marcello Mastroianni until I saw this film: he inhabits his character fully. Nina Rota’s score is a strong element as well.

The final scene is intriguingly glorious. This great film alone justifies Fellini’s reputation. It has influenced such filmmakers as Robert Altman, David Lynch,  Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, and many others.^[1]

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^[1] See https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/8-films-inspired-8

Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

Orwell describes this book, published in 1933, as a study in poverty. By this he means his own poverty while living as a young man in Paris and next in London. He does not explain the reasons for his plight, nor does he suggest how he ultimately extricates himself from the situation. This is effective: the focus falls solely on his own experiences within a particular span of time.  Presumably he is a struggling writer, because he mentions several writing assignments he has had in the past.  In Paris he is most concerned with finding work at a restaurant or hotel.  His goals aren’t high.  In London, after a period of unemployment, he finds work looking after what he refers to as a “moron.” As it turns out, Orwell deliberately placed himself in poverty-stricken environments during the late 1920s so that he could experience living in poverty; at points he actually did lack funds.  In any case, the narrator of this book is a semi-fictional version of the author.

Orwell’s descriptive powers are striking. His descriptions of the rooms he rents in Paris and the restaurant he works in, the flop houses where he stays in London, are vivid.  No one would eat at a Parisian restaurant after reading his account of the place where he worked as a dishwasher and errand boy. The flophouses where he stays in London in conditions of deplorable squalor seem straight out of the 18^th century. Numerous character portrayals occur throughout the book.

Although Orwell seems to be flirting during this period of his career with socialism or communism, he does not stress any particular viewpoint.  Instead he emphasizes the helpless plight of the poor, ignored by government, exploited by charities and religious groups that supposedly care for them, taken advantage of by anyone with more money or privilege.

Casual anti-semitism frequently surfaces.  Individuals may be referred to as “Jews” and are described with stereotypical Jewish characteristics.  One could write this off as the endemic anti-semitism of the times in which Orwell lived, though he did not resist expressing it.

Avengers: End Game

In this three-hour film, Avengers: Endgame (2019; dir. Joe Russo, Anthony Russo), the first hour is relatively slow. Then things speed up. The film picks up some years (five?) after the end of the last installment, Avengers: Infinity Wars (2018), when half the population of the earth, including many Avengers, vanished into dust, the consequence of Thanos’ desire to improve the planet by depopulating it. The agenda of this film is three-fold: bring the plot-line of the Avengers series to an end, resurrect those who were dust bound at the end of the last film, and allow graceful ways for certain of the characters—Ironman (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and others to exit the scene. (Surely the actors must be sick of these films). A lot of loose ends are tied together and, perhaps unfortunately, readiness is made for a new series.

The film is entertaining. The plot is absurd, but absurdity is not the point here. Numerous high-production value, enhanced CGI action moments hold your attention. Quantum mechanics come briefly and unscientifically into play—pay no attention to scientific inaccuracy. The loose-end tying becomes tedious. One character throws herself off a precipice so that her partner can return to his family. Another character time travels into the past, marries his sweetheart, and returns to the future (the present-time) an old man. Ironman’s artificial heart wears out after a prolonged battle with the forces of Thanos. To show that this is a film which respects diversity, a group of superhero women go on the attack against Thanos. Characters from Black Panther (2018) also appear, and there’s a brief glimpse of Stan Lee. The film left me exhausted and stuporous. The ponderous funeral for Ironman, which allowed all the surviving characters to reunite one last time. Last time, that is, before the next series of films begins.

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by Douglas Brinkley

American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, by Douglas Brinkley (2018), interweaves a biography of the president with the history of American interests in space and of the Apollo moon.  Kennedy’s speech about choosing to go to the moon “because it is hard” is one of his most famous.  His advocacy for the Apollo program in Congress and with the American people certainly got the program funded and underway, even as the budget for NASA expanded and became a matter of controversy. Kennedy was not an advocate in the beginning. When he became its champion, he did so because it would advance his campaign for the presidency.  But for Kennedy the race to the moon also represented an effort to show the world that American democracy was superior to communism, event though in the 1950s and early 60s the Soviets appeared to lead the Americans in the exploration of space.  In contrast to the secretive Russian program, the Apollo program operated in a relatively open manner, and details about the program were regularly shared with the public. 

Kennedy based his advocacy of the space program on the premise that the Soviet Union had considerably more nuclear-tipped missiles than the U.S.  The Soviets were more advanced in rocketry, he argued, and the U. S. had to catch up.  It was a matter not only of national pride but of strengthening the U. S. position in the world. The so-called gap was a myth, a fabrication, as Brinkley convincingly shows. As his presidency moved forward, Kennedy came to embrace the space program as a great adventure, as a scientific effort, a research program, and a transformational step forward in human history. Publicly, Kennedy spoke of the space program as a civilian effort, not a military one, and throughout his short presidency he continually resisted efforts by the Air Force to take control of NASA. Privately, he knew that the benefits of NASA research in rocketry, space, and related fields would benefit the military.

Lyndon Johnson was also a fierce advocate for the space program.  He had his own political motivations, but he also believed in the Apollo program as a scientific project.  His support and lobbying helped secure funding in Congress.  Kennedy took credit for the space program in its early stages, but Johnson deserved credit too.

The book seems extensively researched: Brinkley had previously written books about Kennedy. He relies on interviews with members of the Kennedy administration and the space program, letters, tapes and transcripts, study of Kennedy and NASA archives and the works of other scholars. Still, the entanglement of Kennedy’s biography with the story of the American space program doesn’t entirely succeed.  The account of Kennedy’s life seems fairly basic, and the discussion of the race to the moon lacks much scientific detail. A certain shallowness results. For a detailed biography of Kennedy or history of the moon program, one must look elsewhere. 

Bumblebee

The New York Times review suggested that Bumblebee (2018; dir. Travis Knight) was, at last, a “good” entry into the Transformers film franchise.  That’s setting a low bar.  Bumblebee is entertaining on a certain level, especially a kid’s level. In Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the main character Charlie, it offers a winning actress.  It’s a modern-day film about a teenage girl coming to terms with her father’s death and her mother’s marriage to a new husband (who is something of a geek). It also breaks conventions: Charlie is a so-called tomboy who is repairing her dead father’s Corvette, trying to make it run.  She doesn’t care about clothes and she’s not boy crazy. She does become friends with a young man recently arrived in her neighborhood.  There might be a future relationship between them, but it’s clearly in the future, beyond the end of the film. She rebuffs his attempt to hold her hand at the end of the film, explaining that “It’s too soon.” Charlie wants her own car and when she runs across an old and battered VW in a local junkyard, she takes it home and soon discovers that it is an Autobot, sent to Earth by the Autobot leader (I assume Optimus Prime) after a major defeat in battle by the Decepticons.  One can predict the plot from there.  The Decepticons detect the lost Autobot’s signal and head to Earth to destroy it.  The autobot, whom Charlie names Bumblebee because of the hive of bees living in the car when she found it, summons the other Autobots to help defend the Earth, their last hope for survival.  And so on. The special effects are good enough.  The action is more or less constant once we’re midway through the film.  Hailee Steinfeld is a relatively good actor. And everyone chips in to defeat the nasty Decepticons.

The story of a young person who befriends an alien recalls the film E. T.: The Extraterrestrial, and the loose parallels between the two films are evident throughout, enough so that I recognized them before reading about in the NYT review.^[1]

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^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/movies/bumblebee-review.html

Ralph Breaks the Internet

I liked Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018; dir. Phil Johnston and Rich Moore) better than the original Wreck It Ralph. Both are about 1980s video game characters with real world problems.  Ralph (John C. Reilly) is best friends with Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), a driver in a children’s racing game.  She grows bored with her life and wants excitement and goes looking for it on the Internet.  Ralph is sympathetic but also hurt that she needs more than their friendship.  He accompanies her to the Internet, where she looks for her true calling. I would say first of all that this film gives a witty and fairly acute visual introduction to what the Internet is and how it works.  Many cultural references and inside jokes keep the film interesting for adult viewers.  There’s a lot of action, speed, and tension, which keeps it interesting for all viewers. In a sense this is a buddy film.  It’s also about a character who wants to break free from her old life and find a new one.  And finally, it’s about friendship.  How does one friend who is happy with his life exactly as it is honor his friendship with a friend who wants something new? The film takes the view that friendships must be pliant and accepting of change, and that two friends don’t necessarily have to share the same physical space all the time.  Ralph and Vanellope become long-distance friends. 

I especially liked the cheeky way in which Ralph Breaks the Internet makes fun of Disney characters (this is a Disney film).  In one scene Vanellope finds herself alone with all the Disney princesses—from Snow White and Cinderella to Pocahontas to Belle.  They are all preening narcissists, as one might expect, but in the end they rise to the call of sisterhood. It’s good to see a Disney film with a sense of self-referential humor.

The Library Book, by Susan Orleans

One way to describe Susan Orleans' The Library Book (2018) is obsession.  Another is free association.  The catalyst for the book is the fire that destroyed much of the Los Angeles Library in 1987, burning or damaging some 900,000 books.  Obsession or free association, this fascinating book touches on or explores the place of libraries in society, especially American society, their history, their nature.  It examines the lives of the directors of the library, one of whom in particular, Henry Lummus, is a fascinating if not bizarre American figure.  Other topics are arson, the role of women in libraries, criminal investigations, street people.  Orleans weaves in aspects of her own life, especially her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and who died midway through the book’s writing.  Libraries are a cultural memory.  They preserve the record of a culture when memories disappear because of disease or death. For this reason, Orleans associates the burning of a library as a heinous act which destroy those memories.  She notes how dictators have used the destruction of libraries as a method of oppression.  She cites the Nazis, who destroyed as many books of Jewish culture, religion, and history as possible in its campaign to eradicate Judaism.  She also focuses on the character Harry Peake, briefly arrested as a suspect in the library fire.  She examines his life in some detail and the argument for and against his having started the fire.  She cannot decide herself.  She notes that the science behind arson is suspect, and that arson is often a cause resorted to by investigators who can’t find any other explanation for a fire.  (She notes that shaken baby syndrome has been used in a similar way).

Margaret Louise Caruthers Ruppersburg

Margaret Louise Caruthers Ruppersburg died on February 22, 2019, at the age of 91. Most recently she resided at St. Anne’s Terrace, Atlanta, where she had lived for nine years.  For much of her life she lived in College Park, Georgia, where she raised her six children: Hugh Michael Ruppersburg of Athens (Tricia), Margaret Anne Watkins (Joe) of Sandy Springs, Karen Lynn Keenum (Ty) of Sandy Springs, Nan Renee Hudson (Tom) of Black Mountain, NC, Luke Caruthers Ruppersburg of Sugar Hill, and Elizabeth Finley King (Bill) of Elkins, WV. She had fifteen grandchildren: Bill Watkins, Michael Ruppersburg (Sarah), Emily Hudson (Bryan Quintana), Chris Keenum (Ann), Claire Watkins (Adam Dwyer), Margaret Hudson, Charles Ruppersburg (Chelsey), Patrick Keenum (Caroline), Andy Watkins (Amanda), Camille Hudson (Bryan Simmons), Max Ruppersburg, Elizabeth King, Luke Ruppersburg, Jr., Walter King, and Julia Ruppersburg.  She had seven great grandchildren. During her last days, she called her children and grandchildren “my crowning glory.”

Margaret was born on July 2, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas.  She was the only child of Luther Lawrence Caruthers (a crop duster and later a pilot for Delta Airlines) and Gussie Maxwell Caruthers (a schoolteacher and mother). As the daughter of a pilot who dusted crops across the southeast, Margaret moved often during her childhood.  She remembered attending thirteen different schools in one year. In 1939, her family settled in College Park, Georgia.  At the age of 12 she attended the premier of Gone with the Wind and wrote a short article about it for a local newspaper. She played the accordion and once a week rode the bus from College Park to Atlanta to play with a large accordion choir for young women.

During World War II Margaret volunteered for the Red Cross. She attended Richardson High School and then College Park High School, where she graduated first in her class in 1944. She went on to study journalism at the University of Georgia, graduating in 1948.  At UGA she belonged to Pi Phi sorority and served a year as president. She was inducted into Mortar Board, Pi Kappa Phi, and Alpha Lambda Delta honor societies and was a staff member for the college yearbook, newspaper, and magazine. After graduation she worked several years for Davison’s department store in Atlanta and edited the company newspaper.  The Magnolia Tea Room at Rich’s was one of her favorite places.

In 1949 Margaret married Hugh Ruppersburg of College Park.  Her good friend Lucille, Hugh’s sister, had introduced them.  Children began arriving in 1950.  The marriage ended in 1976.  Margaret raised her six children on a tight budget, but she made sure they could pursue their interests.  She saw that they had music lessons, played sports, took ballet lessons.  She took them to the local library often and encouraged their reading. She attended any event in which they had a part.  She welcomed their friends into the house and gave them a place to sleep if they needed it.  She befriended neighborhood children. She was president of the PTA and often a room mother. She was good at tolerating, overlooking, and forgiving the various foibles of her offspring. She especially stressed education: all of her children graduated from college. Long after they had grown up and left home, she continued supporting and encouraging them. Later in their lives, they did their best to thank her. 

Margaret had a warm sense of humor and was a model of courtesy and grace.  She loved playing bridge with her friends. She enjoyed reading, socializing, baking, and following the news. She was a lifelong Democrat but generally kept her politics to herself, except among her children. For most of her adult life she attended First Methodist Church of College Park, where she taught Sunday School and kept the nursery. For several years she was a substitute teacher at Woodward Academy, where she also volunteered her time.  After her father’s death in 1967, she managed his four greenhouses and grew orchids which she sold to local florists. She kept books for her husband’s business and then for her son Luke when he took it over. She sewed clothes, knitted sweaters and stockings, and smocked dresses for her grandchildren.  She was a serious fan of crossword puzzles and Jeopardy.

Each summer for more than 40 years, Margaret’s children and grandchildren vacationed with her for a week on the Florida Coast, first at Destin Beach and then on St. George Island.  She enjoyed the fun and uproar of these gatherings.  She loved sitting on the beach, sipping a glass of Chardonnay.

Margaret was the heart of a family that loved her dearly and cannot begin to imagine her absence.

The Green Book

The controversy surrounding The Green Book (2018; dir. Peter Farrelly) mainly centers on how the film enacts a pattern often seen in films and fiction about race in the United States.  The typical scenario in these films concerns a black character (usually a man) who works for or with a white character (of either gender).  The white character is usually a person with more power and wealth than the black character. At first both characters are suspicious of each other, but over a period of time, they become friendly, and their friendship helps the white character escape his racism or solve other problems.  Sometimes such narratives are termed black redemption or black messiah narratives.  Examples include Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Defiant Ones (1958), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), The Secret Life of Bees (2008).  The Green Book has frequently been compared to Driving Miss Daisy, in which an elderly racist Southern woman gradually becomes friends with the black man whom her son has hired as her driver. In the final scene of the film, Daisy, senile and living in an extended care facility, tells Hoke that he is “my best friend.” (The scene uncomfortably anticipates an extended scene in Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls (1997) in which a feeble and elderly George Wallace describes his affection for the black man who has been hired as his caregiver.) These black redemption narratives are supposed to make white viewers feel better about their racist past.  Critics argue that they don’t reflect the reality of racism in America and that they tend to focus on the white characters rather than the black ones.

The Green Book reflects this pattern.  But there are also significant differences.  The driver is a white working-class New Yorker (Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga, played by Viggo Mortensen) and the man whom he is hired to work for (both as driver and body guard) is an accomplished black classical pianist, Don Shirley (played by Mahershala Ali).  Shirley is the person in power.  He looks down on Tony as uneducated and crude.  Tony, in turn, doesn’t know much about black people and is as a result a casual racist.  In the film, the pianist helps his driver learn about black men as human beings, introduces him to racism in the South, and helps him appreciate classical music and friendship.  In turn, the driver helps introduce the pianist to black culture in terms of soul food and the blues (why a New York Italian would know much about the blues and soul food isn’t explained). The scene in which he changes his mind and visit’s Tony’s apartment, where he is welcomed by family and friends, seals the deal between these two different men.  It is also one of the most questionable scenes in the film. This scene is certainly possible, but it’s difficult to imagine that it would happen.

There’s another issue.  Neither Tony nor Shirley is characteristic of the group he represents.  Tony has little knowledge of African Americans.  His racism is evident but not especially strong.  He’s an Italian New Yorker: not a Southerner. Shirley is a talented, highly accomplished pianist—wealthy and privileged. Although he lives in a racist time, his money and talents insulate him from a lot of it (though not all).  He’s also gay, and he suffers for that when he is caught in a public restroom with another man.  (Tony convinces the police not to arrest him, explaining to Shirley that he’s seen a lot in the bars he’s worked, and he doesn’t seem especially surprised or shocked). My point: both characters are more complicated that it might first seem, and they fit as a result uneasily into the identities many critics assign them.

Despite these shortcomings, especially the simplistic reflection of race relations in America, the film offers an entertaining and warm comedy about friendship. It gives a broad view of racism in the American south during the late 1950s. It doesn’t advance the examination of race and racism in American films.

The acting by Mortensen and Ali is excellent. Mortensen was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his role, while Ali was nominated for Best Supporting actor (he won).  Their roles are of equal importance in the film, and they share relatively equal screen time.  Why wasn’t Ali nominated for Best Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor?

The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

Maurice Bendrix is one of the angriest narrators I’ve encountered. He’s angry at his dead lover, Sarah Miles, for abandoning him.  He’s angry at her husband for his passive acceptance of their infidelity, even for taking him into his home as a flat mate after her death.  His anger renders all his judgments suspect.  In the end, he finds that he has misjudged and misunderstood Sarah.  He misrepresents her religious inclinations to the priest who wants to give her a Catholic burial.  As an agnostic, even an atheist, he resists to the end acknowledging that she had become a believer seeking to connect or reconnect with the Catholic church.

Despite his anger and his meanness, Bendrix is a powerful narrator.

The End of the Affair (1961) is a religious novel masquerading as a story about an adulterous affair.  For its time, it’s fairly graphic about the details.  The novel takes place during the Second World War.  While Sarah is with Bendrix in his flat, a V-1 bomb strikes the house.  She finds him under a fallen door and assumes he is dead.  She prays to God, whom she half believes in, to let him live.  The next moment he appears, covered with dust and alive. In her prayer she promised God that if he allows Bendrix to live, she would leave him because it would mean that God is real and that their affair is a sin.  She abides by her promise and returns to her husband.

The crisis of faith is first of all Sarah’s. Her lover’s survival of the bombing brings her to believe. But it is also that of Bendrix, who can’t accept Sarah’s conversion and who resists to the end acknowledging it or its possible meaning for him.  He becomes all the angrier when he reads her journal and discovers why she left him and that she still loved him. He is angriest of all, ironically, at the God in whom he doesn’t believe.

The End of the Affair was an intense, powerful novel.  Bendrix himself is a novelist.  A little research revealed that Greene drew for this novel from an affair he had with the woman to whom it is dedicated. He significantly changed some details.

My previous encounters with Greene were with The Power and the Glory (1940), which I barely remember, and The Comedians (1966), which did not impress me, though I read it at an age when I could hardly have appreciated it.  The End of the Affair convinces me to reread The Power and the Glory again and to read other novels by Greene. 

The Dry, by Jane Harper

Like many murder mysteries, The Dry by Jane Harper (2017) begins with a murder—a brutal triple murder:  a farmer, his wife, and their teenaged son. Adam, a former friend of of the farmer, returns to town for the funeral. Everyone in town believes that the farmer, Luke, killed his wife and son.  Certain details don’t make sense, both to the local police officer and to Adam, who is a financial detective back in Melbourne.  He stays in town for a few extra days to help with the investigation and gradually finds himself deeply drawn into solving the mystery of the murders.

Almost everyone in the novel has a back story.  Some of them are relevant.  Others are not.  A sub-plot that parallels the present-time plot involves Adam’s 16-year old girlfriend who drowned 20 years before the present time.  As her boyfriend, and because a note with his name on it found when her body was recovered, everyone thinks Adam killed her.  He and his father left town as a result. Now that he is back in town, the old suspicions return.  He encounters considerable hostility.

The novel is told in the present time with flashbacks to the past.  Possible leads turn out to be false. A character who seems to have been wholly uninvolved in the murder emerges in the last few chapters as the murderer.

The main interest in The Dry is the small town in which it takes place—a town in the isolated Australian outback, suffering a prolonged drought, in danger of fire.  A town bully and his friends intimidate everyone in town. They attack Adam on several occasions. The novel is well done but conventional.  It does its job as a murder mystery.

Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin

In Fever Dream (2014), by Samanta Schweblin, who knows what is happening?  It’s not enough to say nothing is what it seems.  There’s no baseline for what is or isn’t.  We can guess and speculate, and we can make assumptions.  It appears that the novel is a conversation between a woman named Amanda and a younger person named David.  David might be a child, or an adult.  He might be Amanda’s brother.  He might be real or imagined, living or dead. Amanda’s daughter is Nina, and as the novel moves on we deduce that she has disappeared or died.  Amanda herself is worried about dying.  She’s worrying about worms taking over her body.  Worms suggest death, mortality.  Amanda is in fact near death, dying in a trauma center.  David seems to be preparing her for death, and for other realizations. She’s the victim (we think) of poisoning, environmental poisoning or perhaps deliberate poisoning.  David was poisoned too, as was Nina.  David grew sick and nearly died, but a woman with certain abilities transferred half of his spirit into another body so he could recover.  This may have happened to Nina as well, or she may have died. Carla is Amanda’s mother, whom she reviles and loves.  Carla rescues David and takes him to the spirit changer.  She may have done the same for Nina.  The narrative really does have the quality of a fever dream, a hallucination or a delirious imagining.  It’s deftly, brilliantly executed.  The tension builds throughout, even though we’re not sure what generates it.  The novel is relatively short, fortunately so, because such a book couldn’t sustain this approach over a greater length.

Ghost Wall, by Sara Moss

A 17-year-old girl named Sylvie narrates Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss (2019). Her father is obsessed with the Iron Age of northern England some 2000 years in the past. This is the area north of Hadrian’s wall, which separated supposedly uncivilized inhabitants from the supposedly civilized invading Romans. The girl’s father rules over his wife and daughter with a tyrannical, abusive hand. His wife has been reduced to an almost faceless mass of subjugation while his daughter chafes against his domineering presence in looks for a way to escape. His wife often shows bruises, and if she violates his rules he whips her violently. The novel takes place during a two-week long vacation for the family, which the father has decided they will spend accompanying an experimental archaeology class from a local college on a retreat where they will try to live like prehistoric men and women might have lived 2000 years ago. They dig roots, hunt for edible vegetables, wear rough tunics, and otherwise try to live as ancient people. The point for the experimental archaeology class is to learn about ancient ways of life. The point for the father is to exercise his obsessions and to find further reason to dominate his daughter.

Ghost Wall reminds me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, James Dickey's Deliverance, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, all of which show supposedly civilized humans sink to a state of savagery. Moss frames this narrative in terms of patriarchy. It is no surprise that the father is obsessed with a historical period during which women were the chattel of men, subject to physical abuse and injury, and sometimes death. The men in this novel act out what they believe to have been ancient rituals and practices while the women stand off to the side, either looking on in astonishment and disgust or following the orders the men give them. The narrator's language reflects the brutal treatment she receives from her father, and also her upbringing in northern England.

In the final scenes the father and the professor leading the students decide to enact a human sacrifice, and they select Sylvie as the sacrificial victim. They don’t mean, at least at first, to harm her, but midway through the ceremony the father has already cut her with a knife. One of the students—the only woman in the group alerts local constables.  They arrive in time to stop the ceremony and arrest the father. They should also have arrested the professor who encouraged his students to take part and who did not try to stop the father’s numerous instances of abusive behavior.

This is a powerful and beautifully written novel. About halfway through, during a scene where the father and professor discuss human sacrifice and the burial of bodies in peat bogs, you begin to suspect what could happen. The novel’s opening scene, which describes the ritualistic killing of a young woman two thousand years in the past, suggested this possibility. Tension grows from the anticipation and dread the reader feels.

One might say that the father’s obsessive behavior and his abuse of his wife and daughter are simply examples of an extreme form of male behavior. But in this case, perhaps, the extreme becomes a way of defining the norm. It's also clear that the father's treatment of his wife and daughter stems from a disgust with female sexuality.

The ghost wall is a symbol that through the title envelops the entire novel.  A ghost wall is both an echo of the past, and a persistence of the past.  It’s a dividing line between past and present but because it’s ghostly (without form or matter) it’s no divider at all.  It links past and present. Through it the past is continuous with the present, and practices of the past persist into the present.  Hence the male characters become so involved in building the ghost wall, with its animal skulls reminiscent of the human skulls that might have sat atop it two millennia in the past.  Its ghostly nature signifies that male dominance over females in the prehistoric Iron Age persists in the present.  Sylvie who unhappily plays the pretended sacrificial victim in the ceremony is at the end almost an actual victim.  But she was a victim from the start.