Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

The books by JK Rowling as Robert Galbraith keep getting better. We travel from Camden and Little Venice to Westminster Palace and Newbury Racecourse, following a variety of well-drawn characters. The cast includes spoiled rich people, angry political protesters, predators in three-piece suits, and penniless chancers. Great to watch the flawed Cormoran Strike and his intrepid sleuthing partner Robin Ellacott evolve and tackle their personal challenges. And I learned that lethal white is not a drug, but a rare equine genetic defect.

Seven Sacred Truths by Wanda John-Kehewin

The words of Wanda John-Kehewin contain powerful medicine, for herself and for those who read this book.

This volume contains a mix of spiritual wisdom amd vulnerable self-revelation, sprinkled through with the humour that has helped this courageous woman to rise above the violent abuses practiced on her and her people. We need to "take our designer blinders off," and consider the life of this "First Nations Woman with brown skin, a brown mind, who lost her mother to alcohol."

She does not despair; instead she hopes the Elders who have died with their wisdom unspoken will return "in art, words and resolution and send us an army of youth who will cry for the past, sing for the future," so that "we may one day be able to die peacefully."

Her cultural perspective is wide and her indictment of consumerism memorable: "Once something becomes a commodity, it is destined to run out and become a greedy man's lifeline..." On the other hand, "when your only toys are books, paper and #10 gray pencils, you could only see in black and white, wrong and right."

She does not spare herself, but examines her writerly calling with ruthless realism, observing herself as she sits "on the floor amid the clutter and consumer righteousness." Deep inside her the little girl she used to be is still "cowering in the corner," while the adult poet splashes her "feeble, useless fury onto recycled paper while another twenty trees lie dying by the side of the road," just so she can have a "paper voice." Sipping from a paper cup on which is printed 'Save the Trees,' she savours the precious water, sharply aware of how we are consuming our entire planet.

In a poignant "Letter to my Nine-year-old Self," John-Kehewin speaks these words of consolation to the traumatized and despairing child she once was: "I can tell you just how strong you were and how that strength would be shared with your own children one day." Though the babies born to the poet are not as big as the babies born to the white women, the hospital nurses are awed by her five-pounders. "'I pack light,' she says, and leaves them "wondering whether to laugh or take out Canada's food guide."

In Geometry, the final poem, she ponders how to bridge the gap between the different cultures she must negotiate, and concludes that some values are universal. After listing some of the things she does not know, she invites the reader to "Let me tell you what I do know." The list that follows includes these crucial things: "You should never hit a woman," and "You should never oppress a child, or tell them they are stupid and limit their chances to thrive." Reminded by this powerful indirect reference to all she has come through, readers are deeply impressed, and thankful she survived to grow, thrive, and share her wisdom.

Choir music season brings Willan plus concert at St. John's

Willan and two other choirs welcome all choral music fans to our concert on Tuesday, November 27 at 7:30 pm in St. John's Shaughnessy, 1490 Nanton Avenue (Granville and Nanton.)

We'd love to sing you the songs we've been practising all term, and look forward to seeing you there!

Conducted by Patricia Plumley, our concert features Eric Hominick on piano and baritone soloist Desmond Cooper.

Admission by donation and all are welcome.

Russ Froese: a journalistic assignment as a Red Cross delegate

Russ Froese points out the scale and location of the undersea quake. Photo courtesy of Patricia Sandberg.

Russ Froese addressed Canadian Authors -- Metro Vancouver at our November Literary event. An award-winning television reporter, producer and documentary maker who hosted the Journal on CBC, Froese is a trained delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In Getting the Story out, he described how information was organized and shared during the enormous disaster caused by the 2004 undersea earthquake off Indonesia, 9.1 on the Richter Scale. The ensuing tsunami devastated northern Sumatra. Smashing inland, it contaminated wells with salt, wiped out a city of 60,000, and killed half a million.

Along with the challenges of hosting the international media people who flooded into the disaster zone, Froese and his colleagues had to cope with local politicians and others who got in the way of the coordinated disaster response. Then there were the NGOs who built unsuitable housing which failed to meet the long-term needs of the people (wooden houses that got eaten by termites). ICRC also had to figure out how to bring in buffalo by boat for the feast of Eid.

In spite of the challenges, there was some good news. The story Froese kept going back to as he reported on the evolving situation was the amazing resilience of the people. He was also glad to tell his audience that after the tsunami, the civil war that had been waged by guerillas in the area had faded away. And unlike before the disaster, the area now has a land registry and an early warning system for tsunamis. Canadians made generous contributions, and the Red Cross ended up building more houses than they had planned. They also assisted with the trauma, including the reburial of bodies found up to two years after the event.

In the Woods by Tana French

Novelist Tana French bucks the trend to shorter, simpler stories. This first tale about the imaginary Dublin Murder Squad is a gripping psychological thriller 592 pages long.

Rob, the narrator, slowly unveils how his life was derailed by the sudden and violent disappearance of his two best friends at age twelve. In an effort to protect their son from the publicity of having survived whatever fate caused his pals to vanish, his parents moved house, sent him away to boarding school in England, and changed his name.

Decades later, Detective Rob Ryan is back in Knocknaree, working with his partner Cassie Maddox on a murder that took place close to where his friends vanished years before. The child victim is found in an archaeological dig, soon to become a highway. Could that be a clue?

Partners in policing, Rob and Cassie enjoy a deep and trusting friendship. In every way that matters, they have one another's backs. They have the good cop-bad cop routine down pat, and Rob sees their mutual trust as more profound than first love, which is "nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other's hands." But when the present case seems to interweave with the cold case from his past, he begins to unravel, and so does this ideal partnership. Once convinced that he was "the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide" carried off his friends, he must face the reality that psychologically, he "never left that wood."

The housing estate where he once lived, and where the murder took place, has a social hierarchy. Conscientious mothers at the middle-class end forbid their children to visit the rough end. As an investigating officer, Rob is filled with apprehension when he senses the world of the estate filled with "private, parallel dimensions," with "the dark strata of archaeology underfoot." A fox outside his window reminds him of a city that "barely overlaps" with the one he inhabits.

Through the perceptions of the troubled detective, French plunges the reader into the recent past, a time when "people held onto their innocence" tenaciously, and parents allowed their children to play in the woods without worrying. Rob then he pricks his own bubble, referring to the burden of "all we now know about" things once seemed to be "only unthinkable rumours" that took place elsewhere. In Ireland, Missing Persons is "jaded from taking too many reports on children kept after school or lingering over too many video games." This touches on a wider loss of a social "innocence," a deep alteration in the social contract that has followed the erosion of trust.

Over a shared dinner, the detectives take a break from the case to discuss big questions. Humans need a belief system, says Cassie. As trust deserts the traditional bulwarks of church and politics, people make a religion of money, which is now confused with virtue. Only half-joking, she adds that another contemporary belief system is in bodies. Like the religion of money, a perverse faith in the body accords physical behaviours and health choices the status of good and evil. Her explanation: because in order to make daily decisions, people need something to believe in. "All this bio-yoghurt virtue and financial self-righteouness," she says, "are just filling the gap in the market."

A teen Rob once knew is a potential witness. Visiting him in jail to do an interview, the detective decides he's "a casualty of the eighties," whose life was blighted by an economic time when an entire generation "fell through the cracks." Along with such telling scenes, French salts other trenchant bits of social commentary with humour, like when Rob judges that his grandparents having started work at sixteen takes "trumps in the adult stakes, way above any number of piercings and tattoos." Or when he explains that though he dislikes beer, he drinks it in his father's company, because his dad "gets worried if I ask for anything else" and "considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality."

In O'Kelly, the police chief, we see the social programming of rigid sex roles and toxic masculinity, for instance, when he alludes to migraines as "womany shite." The elderly Mrs. Lowry, a potential witness, represents a generation that is "compulsively competitive about generosity." When the cops bring her some shortbread, she feels compelled to "get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam," unwillingly to relax "until we had each swallowed a sip of tea." 

Three teenage toughs form a brotherhood, thinking of themselves as three musketeers. Of course, such a gang mentality inevitably generates violent behaviour. One boy, Jonathan does not condone this, but "lost somewhere in the wild borderlands of nineteen, half in love with his friends with a love passing the love of women," he does something his more mature self will regret deeply. When this memory is triggered many years later, he will apologize, however indirectly, to the woman on whom he helped his friends practice an unconscionable violation. 

Situating her book in the epicentre of our contemporary social atmosphere, French also raises the issue of allegations. Both an innocent female police officer and a man with a shady past are made to suffer the ignominy that inevitably follows allegations, which have to be checked out, "no matter how baseless they may seem." About such allegations, "neighbours always know...and there are always plenty of people who believe there is no smoke without fire." One is reminded of Stephen Galloway. Recently, he filed suit against Caralea Cole, the 48-year old artist whose name was protected by privacy rules while her unproven accusation of rape cost him his job.

After Detective Cassie's experience with a psychopathic boyfriend in college, would she label victimism as another quasi-religion? If so, it isn't the approach chosen by Halifax columnist Lezlie Lowe. Recently, she turned the darkly vengeful side of MeToo on its head. Without naming, shaming, or describing herself as a victim, she wrote a column about a man's disrespectful violation of her stated wishes. The incident happened many years before, and she'd long since got on with her life. However, reading her column, the male who'd misbehaved recognized himself and telephoned her with a sincere apology.

Though the problems portrayed are universal, the narrator insists that this is a peculiarly Irish story. With the book set on an ancient site about to be destroyed amid a maze of financial greed, political skulduggery, and crooked land deals, Rob cynically comments that in his country, "Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained in us." His countrymen continue to struggle over "that primal, clicheed Irish passion, land." Sam, another detective, loses his innocence over anonymous related threats carried out by a politician uncle he had previously admired.

This novel is larger than life, and far larger than the local Dublin setting. Many casual observations made by French's characters point out our contemporary social challenges, as well as portraying a recent but utterly vanished past. I'm currently listening to another audio book about the Dublin Murder Squad, and look forward to more tales from this skillful storyteller.