Thinking About…

Any system of slavery must be abolished. It had seemed simple in England; yet in Ohio that principle was chipped away at, by economic arguments, by personal circumstances, by deep-seated prejudice that Honor sensed even in Quakers.

Honor has traveled from her home and family in England, hoping for a new life in the new world. Her sister is engaged to be married to a man who works with his brother in their general store in a small Quaker town in 1850 Ohio, and Honor has decided to go along with her. Circumstances change quite a bit between the sisters leaving home and arriving in Ohio, and Honor finds herself living a very different life than what she intended.

Ohio is not a slave state, but slavery is very much a part of the political landscape, and runaway slaves regularly make their way past Honor’s house, on their way to Canada and freedom. As a Quaker, Honor feels quite strongly that slavery is evil, and she must do her part to help the runaways along their way. She is confused when her family and neighbors there are not as dedicated to following their inner consciences as she. She is also confused by her strong feelings of attraction toward Donovan, the brother of her new friend Belle. Donovan is about as far from a Quaker as he could be. He is a slave-hunter, and takes great pleasure in tracking runaways down and bringing them back to servitude. He is also very attracted to Honor, Quaker ways and all. That she is helping runaways on their way complicates his attraction for her, but not as much as you might think.

Tracy Chevalier’s newest novel is quite an accomplishment. Her writing is gorgeous, luminous, much as in her previous work, Girl With a Pearl Earring. It’s compelling enough that the story touches you and pulls you in, even while there is not much action from chapter to chapter. Honor’s Quaker beliefs and quiet personality means that she finds much meaning in her interior world. She looks forward to the deep spiritual experience she finds sitting in complete silence at Meetings every Sunday. It is fitting then, that the book has a sense of contemplation, of inner working, even while events are transpiring around Honor.

I really enjoyed The Last Runaway, and the feeling of a specific time and place that it gave me. It almost made me want to quilt. OK, not really, but it did give me a new appreciation of the art, as well as a deeper appreciation of the people involved in very small ways with the Underground Railroad.

picture found here

PARSIFAL IS DEAD. That is the end of the story.

The technician and the nurse rushed in from their glass booth. Where there had been a perfect silence a minute before there was now tremendous activity, the straining sounds of two men unexpectedly thrown into hard work. The technician stepped between Parsifal and Sabine, and she had no choice but to let go of Parsifal’s hand. When they counted to three and then lifted Parsifal’s body from the metal tongue of the MRI machine and onto the gurney, his head fell back, his mouth snapping open with no reflexes to protect it. Sabine saw all of his beautiful teeth, the two gold crowns on the back molars shining brightly in the overhead fluorescent light. The heavy green sheet that they had given him for warmth got stuck in the guardrail lock. The nurse struggled with it for a second and then threw up his hands, as if to say they didn’t have time for this, when in fact they had all the time in the world. Parsifal was dead and would be dead whether help was found in half a minute or in an hour or a day. They rushed him around the corner and down the hall without a word to Sabine. The only sound was the quick squeak of rubber wheels and rubber soles against the linoleum.

Sabine stood there, her back against the massive MRI machine, her arms wrapped around her chest, waiting. It was, in a way, the end of Sabine.

After a while the neuroradiologist came into the room and told her, in a manner that was respectful and direct, the one thing she already knew: Her husband was dead. He did not pluck at his lab coat or stare at the floor the way so many doctors had done when they had spoken to Parsifal and Sabine about Phan. He told her it had been an aneurism, a thinning in a blood vessel of his brain. He told her it had probably been there Parsifal’s whole life and was not in any way related to his AIDS. Like a patient with advanced lymphoma who is driven off the freeway by a careless teenager changing lanes, the thing that had been scheduled to kill Parsifal had been denied, and Sabine lost the years she was promised he still had. The doctor did not say it was a blessing, but Sabine could almost see the word on his lips. Compared to the illness Parsifal had, this death had been so quick it was nearly kind. “Your husband,” the doctor explained, “never suffered.”

Sabine squeezed the silver dollar Parsifal had given her until she felt the metal edge cut painfully into her palm. Wasn’t suffering exactly the thing she had been afraid of? That he would go like Phan, lingering in so many different kinds of pain, his body failing him in unimaginable ways–hadn’t she hoped for something better for Parsifal? If he couldn’t have held on to his life, then couldn’t he at least have had some ease in his death? That was what had happened. Parsifal’s death had been easy. Having come to find there was no comfort in getting what she wanted, what she wanted now was something else entirely. She wanted him back. Sick or well. She wanted him back.

Sabine fell in love with Parsifal from the day he called her up onto the stage to assist in a trick, and spent the next 20 years as his assistant, longing for a love that was out of reach. Parsifal loved Sabine, but as one might love a sister. Parsifal was gay. He spent the last 5 years of his life with his lover, Phan, a wealthy silicon valley type. When Phan dies from complications of AIDS, Sabine moves in with Parsifal to care for him. Parsifal is also infected, and wants to take care of Sabine, wants her to be his widow. And when he finally dies, suddenly, of an aneurism, rather than the slow, protracted death that had been promised, she is left behind to figure out what his life meant, and if there is any meaning at all to her life without him.

Sabine falls into a depression, spending most of her days in bed, refusing to leave the house. She is visited in her dreams by Phan, who tells her that Parsifal is fine now, that he is happy in the afterlife, though he is so very sorry and ashamed that he did not tell her his deepest secrets. That he had intended to do so, but that he had thought he had more time. It turns out that Parsifal has a family, a family that he always denied, and that they are alive and relatively well in Nebraska. Sabine is left behind to try to get to know a bit more about the husband she thought she understood, through his family, and perhaps find out some things about herself, and humanity in general, as well.

I love Ann Patchett’s writing. Her phrases can be lyrical and graceful, and while at times I wasn’t sure the direction the book was taking made absolute sense, I was happy to be on the journey nonetheless. I think my favorite passages were her dream visits, first with Phan, and eventually with Parsifal. They were so comforting and sweet, and were lovely to read. I’d recommend this book highly, and I might even like it more than Bel Canto. But I’m not positive…I’d maybe have to read that one again to be sure.

Da gets up to go and he pats my dirty hair and I suppose I should be ashamed, but what do I care about anything anyway.  That’s part of being awful, not caring.  And then what’s part of it too is the thought that suddenly jumps into my head.  The thought that it could be a person’s own mother who might make a doll with her daughter’s hair and throw it into a fire.  She’d watch the flames eat it up and then she’d dance off to bed laughing and having sex and bleeding little drops of perfume all over the sheets as if there was nothing to it.  I wouldn’t put it past her.

But don’t get me wrong.  I love her.  This is another one of my secrets.

The thing is, I can’t love her, not in the real world.  Because this would be degrading to me.  To love someone who despises you, and she just might.  You should see her eyes on me sometimes.  Plus she’s not even a mother anymore, she’s just a planet with a face.  Da at least has hands.

****************

Helene was going to be a singer.  She was a singer.  There are recordings.  Da made them on his old tape recorder.  No one can listen to them now, they’re the most dangerous thing in the world.  On one of the tapes it’s Da singing some stupid song with Helene.  Both of them are laughing as much as singing.  If you listened to it now, it would be Da singing with a ghost.  The laughing would kill you.

Mathilda’s parents are so deep in mourning following the death of their eldest daughter, Helene, that their younger daughter, Mathilda, compares them to zombies. Her father is absent and withdrawn into himself. Her mother can’t bear to talk or think about Helene, and her way of coping is to stay drunk as much as possible. Neither of them are there for Mathilda, because they are too far gone themselves to be able to help her. They make cursory efforts. They feed her, they take her to a therapist, they are doing their best. But what they are unable to do is what Mathilda needs, which is to talk about what happened to their family, talk about Helene and how much they loved her. Talk about Mathilda and how they still love her, and how, even with Helene gone, they are still a family. Mathilda has had just about enough, one year in, and is starting to fight back. She is at turns cruel, wry, and sensitive. She wants to know what happened to Helene, how she ended up in front of a train in a station. So she starts sleuthing.

But this is no mystery story, though there is certainly the question of what happened and why. Instead, Mathilda Savitch is the story of a seriously dysfunctional family, full of pain and suffering, and Mathilda’s erratic and questionable attempts to do something about it.

I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

Hig has survived the end of civilization, brought about by a deadly flu that has killed everyone he knows, the survivors of which are locked in a battle to the death for scarce resources. Climate change has taken hold, and nature is suffering mightily as well. Millions of species are either extinct or on the border of it. The world may never see another elephant, another trout, another eagle. He is tormented by the death of his beloved wife, who was pregnant with their first child when she died. His best friend is his dog, Jasper, who serves as his co-pilot in the little Cessna, which Hig uses to patrol the perimeter of what he and his lone neighbor consider to be their land, their resources, their houses. They sometimes travel to visit a small community of Mennonites, the only people he has met in 9 years who have not tried to kill him. They are suffering from a blood disease, which is considered to be extremely contagious, which keeps them safe from those who would rob them of whatever crops they can grow. His flights are limited by the amount of fuel his little airplane can hold. Only once in the 9 years since the fall has he ever heard a voice over the Cessna’s radio, a voice from an airport that is beyond the point of no return.

Hig is a gentle man, trapped in a violent world. Though he bitterly misses his family and friends, he still marvels at the beauty of a tree, a stream, the stars at night. He clings to the hope that there may be decent people out there, somewhere, and that maybe he will be able to find them someday. All evidence is to the contrary. His neighbor’s position of ‘shoot first, don’t talk’ is different from his, ‘talk first, shoot only if needed’, but so far, his own position has nearly gotten him killed. He desperately wants more from life than this brutal existence. He needs it, to save his soul.

The Dog Stars is a remarkable book, full of small beauties, hidden amongst the many horrors of being left behind in such a world. Hig is a poet at heart, and the author, Peter Heller, has an MFA in fiction and poetry. I would say he has put both to remarkable use in The Dog Stars. I hope that he writes more fiction.  This was the kind of book that I could easily see myself reading again; though I got it from the library, I will probably buy it when it comes out in paperback.