Review: Billie's Kiss by Elizabeth Knox

I first stumbled upon Elizabeth Knox through her first novel The Vintner's Luck. I'm not sure what about it captured my imagination--okay, I'll admit to being shallow and tell you that sharing her last name was the first impetus for picking her book up at the bookstore--but something about that cover copy and the picture (plus her name) grabbed me and I ended up taking the book home with me. I absolutely wallowed in it. It was exquisite and I knew I would obsessively buy her books as I saw them come out. So when I found this one, I immediately snapped it up and promptly stowed it on a shelf to be forgotten in the mists of time. Seriously, I've owned it unread since 2002. But it seemed like the right time to blow the dust from the top edge and actually read it. I was hoping for another transcendent reading experience. Sadly I was disappointed. That is not to say that it isn't a good book, after all, how many times in one life can an author be transcendent, right? But I wanted to be blown away here and there was something holding me back from that sort of over the top reaction.

Billie is a young woman traveling with her very pregnant sister and brother-in-law to his new place of employment as a cataloguer for Lord Hallowhulme on a remote Scottish island. The trip has been long and rather arduous given pregnant Edith's desperate sea-sickness. Just minutes from landing, Billie and her brother-in-law kiss and Billie jumps from the ship. A heartbeat later, the ship explodes and many of the people on board are drowned, including Billie's sister Edith. Murdo Hesketh, a distant kinsman of Lord Hallowhulme's, undertakes an investigation into the explosion, initially convinced that Billie has had a hand in sabotage. While the mystery of the exploding boat weaves desultorily through the novel, the book as a whole is more a character study of Billie and Murdo, examining their past lives, ferreting out the secrets that have formed them into the remote, solitary beings they are in the pages of the novel.

With a narrative akin to swimming through layers of viscous liquid, this is a slow moving and awkwardly paced novel. Knox has pegged the desolation and spare beauty of the setting very well. The spareness is echoed in the characters' interactions with each other and the personal connections between them, main characters and supporting characters, needed more to make them real. A few of the drowned characters, those closest to Billie and Murdo, are given backstories but for the most part, even with backstory, they remain almost as enigmatic as the main characters do. After a languid investigation, the truth about the explosion comes out. Unfortunately it comes out quickly and cursorily, which leaves it at odds with the pace of the rest of the book. It also rather comes out of left field, disconcertingly enough. Despite these problems, Knox is clearly an impressive writer, having a lovely way with words. She submerges her reader deeply into the narrative and has recreated beautifully the turn of the twentieth century, drawing characters who exist comfortably within their time period. This may not have struck me the way that The Vintner's Luck did, but I will still look for Knox's other works (maybe even on my own shelves again?).

Reading My Name Challenge

I always think the Reading My Name Challenge is fun. Plus it lets me count alternate spellings of my name if I want. It's like being back in elementary school again where I used to experiment with other spellings or nicknames or whatnot. The first time a paper was returned to me with my (misspelled) name circled on it in red, that was the end of that experiment, teacher's pet and rule follower that I was. But for this challenge, this is totally all legal. Here's Callista's explanation:

Your challenge if you choose to accept it is to read at least two books by authors that share your name or part of your name OR book titles with your name in them. They can share your first name, middle name or last name. They can share your nickname or online name or email name. They can share a form of your name. If you have a very rare name, just do your best to get as close as you can. (e.g. If your name is Raina, then Rain or Rayne would be okay.) The character can have the same name as you too.

For example, my real first name is Kathleen. I could also read books by a Kathy, Katherine or Katie as these all come from the same name. Even Cathy, Catherine and Catie. I could read a book by a Callista (online name) or someone who shares my middle or last name. Or any of those names in the title.

That's five months to read two books. To join please comment below. You don't have to have a blog to participate but if you do and you post about the challenge, please leave a link in the comments. You don't have to make a list beforehand, you can just make a post stating your intention to participate.

My choices are:

1. Billie’s Kiss by Elizabeth Knox
2. Water Wings by Kristen den Hartzog

Review: The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker

Subtitled A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon, this is not the sensationally lurid read that it might appear. Using the story of Isabel Grameson Godin, the gently reared South American wife of a French geographer who makes a treacherous and seemingly impossible journey through the amazon to re-join her husband on the other side of the continent as a frame, this is actually far more about the political and scientific basis for the expedition for which Jean Godin worked than it is about Isabel's journey.

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine a time when highly respected scientists argued over the shape of the earth and how to measure latitude. In the 1720's this very debate was raging though and the most respected scientists of the day chose sides, defending their positions virulently. Did the earth bulge at the poles and cinch in at the equator or did it bulge slightly at the equator and how in the world could either of these theories be tested? Enter the French Academy and the team of geographers they assembled and sent off to what is now Ecuador in an effort to map the region and prove the shape of the Earth decisively.

Whitaker details the scientific background and the political climate both in Europe and in South America as backdrop to the story of the La Condamine expedition. This takes up a large chunk of the book, as do the methods and actual events of the expedition. Aside from in the opening chapter, it is only late in the tale that Isabel and her determination to rejoin her beloved husband enter into the recounting.

The scientific expedition is quite interesting itself and incredibly impressive given their meticulous and still accurate measurements but I thought I was going to be reading a book with the bulk accounted for by the true tale of a gently bred woman's impossible trek through the dangerous amazon. When Isabel became the focus, late in the book, this is what I found but her story, perhaps from lack of historical textual evidence, only makes up a tiny portion of the narrative.

Ironically, having recently read of Teddy Roosevelt's trip down an amazon tributary (see The River of Doubt), the natural history of the area and its flora and fauna struck me as repetitive. This is not a fault of the book itself, but rather of the strange synchronicity of my reading. Unfortunately it did impact my enjoyment. I also found myself having to re-read some of the scientific sections of the story because my head clearly checked out in the midst of them. Perhaps a more scientifically-minded reader would have been riveted but I must admit to a bit of boredom and the desire for a tad bit more summarizing. Well-written and historically accurate though it was, I had hoped for a more engrossing narrative of a different sort.

Review: Marriage: A Duet by Anne Taylor Fleming

Two novellas that explore the art of marriage, specifically after one partner has cheated, make up this slim volume. The first part, entitled A Married Woman, focuses on Caroline, who is sitting by her comatose husband William's side in the hospital. He has been in a persistent vegetative state for days as Caroline keeps vigil, reflecting on their long marriage and William's affair with a friend of their adult daughter. Caroline waded her way back into her marriage but it never had the same complete and overpowering sense of wholeness, oneness, that it had before William's affair. And as she sits at William's bedside waiting for him to die, she refects back on the pain and struggle of surviving betrayal and surviving the brutal reconciliation. In the second novella, entitled A Married Man, Fleming takes the flipside's view and presents the story of Marcia and David's struggle to maintain their marriage in view of Marcia's affair. Rather than facing the end of life, they are the parents of young children, trying to maintain a good face for the neighbors (all of whom know about the affair anyway), and to let go of the anger and bitterness and alienation each feels. They go to see a marital therapist who has become famous by counseling others after affairs, as he himself worked through an affair and reconciled with his wife. Much of the second novella is centered on David's feelings and the way that he cannot help the petty digs and snide comments that make him feel a small sense of control over his clearly guilty but slightly less than repentant wife and this marriage gone so off track.

Taylor has drawn characters who are clearly the wronged partners in their relationships but who aren't certain they can battle back to whatever intangible it is that makes maintaining a marriage worth the time and effort and emotional comnmitment. She has showcased the desire for revenge, the inability to forget even if forgiveness is offered, and the rupture that occurs in the case of infidelity. This is not an easy emotional read, with characters so raw and damaged. And her view of marriage, at least the marriages in these stories, is far from positive. But the complexity of each marriage and how infidelities changed the stories of the marriages is well drawn and cutting. Her writing highlights harsh truths and challenges the reader to delve deeper into the surface of conventional looking marriages, to see into the murky depths and to really experience the hard disconnects just under the surface.

This is a hard book to pin down with a tepid, I liked it or I didn't like it. It made me uncomfortable and certainly made me examine what I think are the truths of my own marriage, both the truths others see and the truths we live every day. I didn't love the characters, so wrapped up in their own senses of betrayal that they couldn't come across as terribly sympathetic but I understand why she's drawn them the way she has. I felt pity and scorn for them but never really connected with them or liked them, tiring of the all-consuming focus on their partners' affairs. But I think this is probably true to the interior lives of the wronged partner in a marriage so Fleming has created what she intended with these two well-written novellas. If you want to read about train wrecks, this tough little book will suit perfectly.