Daily Archives: March 22, 2017

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Stories that save you

We all have stories that save us.

I’ve used this phrase a few times here, dear readers, and I really do believe it.  We’ve all had a person who came into our lives precisely when they were most needed, and gave us a new direction, some advice, or perhaps some comfort, and made an indelible difference on our lives.

Books can be like that, too.

Recently, Stephen Fry recorded the entire Sherlock Holmes canon for Audible.com.   You can hear a sample of it in the clip above.

…and let me assure you, the rest is just as glorious.  The best part is that he also wrote and recorded a series of introductions for the various books of stories, talking about the history of the stories, of Conan Doyle’s life (and his friendship with Oscar Wilde!), and Fry’s own relationship to Sherlock Holmes’ adventures.  In one of these introductions, he talks about how Sherlock Holmes saved his life.

And I kind of know what he means.

I found my first Sherlock Holmes story when I was twelve years old.  For some reason, my sixth grade teacher had a copy of six random Sherlock Holmes stories bound together–I know for a fact that “The Sussex Vampire” was the first I read, which is why, even though I know it’s really not one of the better stories, it’s among my favorites.  “The Blue Carbuncle” was in there, as well, which is also one of my all-time favorites.  I brought that book with me on a god-awful camping trip that they made all the sixth-graders take to “build character” and “bond socially”.  I got lost in the woods and nearly drowned, neither of which really helped my intense feelings of awkwardness, which were largely brought about by being taller than everyone else and not having a clue about how to fit into a group of my peers.  But at night, while everyone else was building their character and bonding socially, I hid in my sleeping bag and read about Sherlock Holmes.  Holmes, too, was an outsider; a man who admitted to not having many friends and not fitting in–and who was taller than most people.  And he, with all his weird quirks and socially awkward manners, was the hero of his story.  I also think I learned how to be a good friend by watching Watson.  Watson didn’t try, at any point, to be something he wasn’t.  He expressed everything he felt clearly, and he showed up when he was needed.  When we got back from that hellish trip, I used my savings to buy a huge collection of Holmes stories, which included A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, and all the stories up to and including “The Final Problem”.   Having those two around got me through what turned out to be one of the hardest years of my growing up, with bullies and mean teachers and the outdoors all conspiring against me.

Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock.

By high school, I had read and re-read the entire Holmes canon multiple times.  I actually made a few friends who had read a bit about Sherlock Holmes as well–admittedly, not to the same obsessive level that I had, but who were willing to keep up a conversation with me, or watch the Jeremy Brett adaptations with me.  But college is when Holmes really stepped up to help me out.

I did my junior semester abroad in London, and trust me when I tell you I was living in the creepiest, most unsanitary, and poorly insulated dorm room you can imagine, with some of the least personable people this side of a sitcom.  But I had Holmes.  And I had David Timson’s recordings.  Timson, for the record, is a marvel.  He created a different voice for every character in the entire Holmes world.  And played them all accurately.  I saved up my tiny stipend once a month to buy a new CD collection of stories, and listened to them at night to help me fall asleep in my weird, dingy dorm.  No matter how bad things got, Holmes could set them right.  There is no story that doesn’t end with order being restored, and when you’re living in a place of disorder, that can mean everything. During the day, I learned to navigate London by the walks that Holmes at Watson took in the various stories.  I got hopelessly lost one day trying to get home from Oxford Street, and was about ready to cry when I remembered that Mr. Henry Baker walked from Tottenham Court Road to Goodge Street after his Christmas festivities in “The Blue Carbuncle”, and replayed the scene in my head as I walked.  I made it to the Tube in time to catch the last train home.

In grad school, I became slightly notorious for bringing Sherlock Holmes into every class I took.  Because to know Sherlock Holmes means to understand the tensions within the British Empire.  It means understanding a bit about the Victorian legal system, about social customs and attitudes, and about gender relations.  It also means understanding the impact of railways and travel on the average person in history.  And I made my students read a few Holmes stories for themselves, because they are more fun than a textbook, and more enlightening than my lectures in many respects.  In every case, Holmes was a kind of security blanket for me, easing me into a new, and potentially scary situation by being that familiar, that constant friend, that fixed point in a changing age.

Heck, I even, tangentially, got this job at the library because of Sherlock Holmes.  When I moved back to Peabody, I joined the Library’s Classics Book group in order to make a few friends.  The first book the group read with me as a member?  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I kid you not.   It was those stories that kept me coming back to the Library, and they haven’t gotten rid of me since.

And today, when anxiety crops its ugly head, I plug in my earbuds, or pull out that same battered old volume of Holmes stories, and transplant the angry, insecure voice in my head with Watson’s calm narrative, and Holmes’ practical problem-solving.  These two friends have been with me for twenty years now, helping me through every change in life, and every rough patch that I’ve hit along the way, from practical advice about growing up to navigating a foreign city, from intense historic analysis to calming stress-relief.  Those are the stories that have saved me.

I hope you have some, too.

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Private Eyes…They’re Watching You, Watching You…

When I was little, I wanted to be a spy.

I also want to be “the lady who worked at the Library”, so I think I’m doing a pretty good job on the life goals, all around.

But back to the main point–I wanted to be a spy.  I adored watching re-runs of Get Smart on tv, to the point where I may have written Maxwell Smart a fan letter.  Although I did realize, at some point, that I wasn’t going to be able to work for Control, I really never outgrew a love for spy fiction.  Some of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories were the ones where we got to meet “international agents” like Eduardo Lucas, who managed to be an internationally recognized tenor and a super-spy.

In college, I found the James Bond novels, and found them…sexist and ridiculous, to be honest…but amidst all the feeding people to sharks and men who grew fur during the full moon, Ian Fleming managed to create a world where being a spy was a high-paying, classy-as-all-getout job, complete with trips on the Orient Express, and classic whiskey, and designer weaponry.   This was a Cold War that was fought civilly–with barbed discourse and knives concealed in tuxedo jackets, rather than atomic bombs and mass murder in the developing world.

On the other end of the proverbial spectrum, you had the books of John Le Carre.  LeCarre’s books showed a much more realistic, seedier, and honest view of spywork–a world of betrayal and cynicism and crushing bureaucracy (anyone who remembers the archivists from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will know what I mean).  While James Bond could saunter around with his martinis, Smiley and his crew were doing the real work, averting disaster, and suffering the very real consequences.

But then the Cold War ended.  And the spy novel got really quite boring.  I read a few books about industrial espionage, but, after you’ve flown on a jet with Bond, or slunk through the shadows with Smiley, or tried to talk in the cone of silence, rifling a filing cabinet just isn’t that stirring, and the high visibility violence  of the War on Terror took any pleasure out of reading about spies in the modern world for me.  These spies weren’t upholding civilization–they were witnessing its demise.  Sure, spy novels were published, but they were bleak and depressing and clearly suffering the same heartbreak over the lack of post-Cold War peace and harmony that I, as a reader, felt (read some of John LeCarre’s later works to see what I mean).

Stop manhandling women, James Bond. Thank you.

It was around this point that we saw the rise of the historical spy novel, with classics like Robert Harris’ Enigma, which focused on the code-breakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and Alan Furst’s novels about spies across Eastern Europe during the second half of the twentieth century.  In these books, it was clear that the tension and the dingy glamor of the Cold War still hadn’t worn off.  Moreover, in this nostalgia, it was very easy to see a longing for a time where things were black and white, and it was relatively easy to know your allies from your enemies.  Time moved a little more slowly, and information flowed at a speed that the brain could take in.  These novels celebrated the social aspect of the spy novel–it boiled complex, terrifying, real-world scenarios into manageable sizes, and provided us with a few heroes and heroines who could set the world to right through their wits and courage.  For all the nifty gadgets and smarmy phrases of our favorite spies, the goal of each novel was always to keep the world familiar, and therefore, safe.

And now, with the world getting bigger and scarier and more confusing seemingly hour by hour, the spy novel is making a comeback, playing not only on our need to believe that a few intrepid humans can make things right, but also feeding our increasing hunger for technology…wouldn’t Maxwell Smart have a field day with an iPhone?!

So here are a few suggestions for some terrific new books on conspiracy theories, undercover investigations and international intrigue, perhaps to take your mind off…conspiracy theories about covert agents and undercover investigations and international intrigue.  I can guarantee you these suggestions have much, much better plots that then ones on the news….

Slow Horses: Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series (also known as the Slough House series) is one of my favorite spy series of all time, and with the recent release of the fourth book, things are only looking up.  The ‘horses’ of the title are all MI-5 agents who have failed.  Colossally failed.  But rather than being booted from the organization, they are moved to Slough House, and left to shred paper, troll the internet, and generally waste away in obscurity.  But the folks at Slough House aren’t about to go quietly into that good night, and keep finding cases that no one else wants to take–or knows how to take–or knows about at all.  Herron has a wicked sense of humor, and writes stories that are linguistically surprising, intricately plotted, and just plain fun.  Plus, I’m in love with River Cartwright.  There.  I said it.

Jack of Spies: David Downing’s Jack McColl novels are historic spy fictions set around and after the First World War.  He channels some of the great writers of First World War spycraft, like Somerset Maugham, to create a world that is big and complex and fragile, and where alliances are made–and broken– in heartbeats.   These books are well-thought out and feature phenomenal period detail, not the least of which is the real threats that menace our hero McColl from every side–from Irish revolutionaries to Chinese intelligence agents, to his own lover, McColl’s world is full of the same complexities as our own, but everyone is better dressed.  And he is just the man to try and put it to rights.

The Journeyman Tailor: I think we’ve mentioned this book before, under a different category, but it deserves mention here, again.  Gerald Seymour, who also wrote Harry’s Game, does a magnificent job here showing the very real, gritty, and often terribly mundane world of British spies who were working to bring down the IRA during the height of its bombing campaigns.  When a new recruit is brought in to infiltrate the IRA in the mountains of Northern Ireland, he quickly learns that this is not an assignment where men earn glory, nor is it s a place capable of being saved, no matter how much he or his eccentric colleague might try. It is also a deeply complex tale about those IRA fighters, their families, and their communities, and takes a very hard look at the effects of this war on both sides, making it one that is tense, deeply unsettling, and haunting.