The Man Who Lost His Wife - Julian Symons

 Julian Symons (1912-94) was an eminent crime writer and reviewer of the second half of the Twentieth Century.   A big hit of his, which I read when it came out, was The Blackheath Poisonings (1978).   In America he was published by Harper under the legendary Joan Khan imprint.   In Britain he was probably best known as a critic in all the most respected journals.

The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) was one of the novels Khan published in America.   Hers was a crime/mystery list, and yet there is no crime in The Man Who Lost His Wife (although the protagonist thinks he might have committed one and certainly intended to) and precious little mystery.   What we have, in fact, is the story of a man undergoing his midlife crisis.

Gilbert Whelan is a stuffy London publisher, who lives in the suburbs with his second wife.   Whelan never wanted to be a publisher.   His father built the firm but he and Gilbert were not close.   As a young man Gilbert dropped out with his first wife and their son and joined a back-to-nature cult of the kind which preceded hippiedom on both sides of the Atlantic.   But Gilbert couldn't keep up his rebellion and slowly slipped back into conformity.   He is middleaged now (we don't know exactly how old) and resigned to his fate.   Then his wife Virginia tells him she needs to take a holiday without him.   Which she promptly does.

In her absence Gilbert finds himself subsumed into a messy world of American novelists, buy-out offers, parties and dubious night clubs.   In search of breathing space he decides to go abroad, track down Virginia and save his marriage.   Only Virginia isn't in Dubrovnik where she said she would be.   She was there but left, hotel staff believe, for Sarajevo.   Gilbert follows, on the way becoming involved with more dubious folk, a roguish English travelling salesman and an American hippie couple.   In Dibrovnik he also had a passionate fling with a tour guide and now wants to dump Virginia and marry her.   In Sarajevo he also has to deal with a famous Italian author who his (Gilbert's) racier business partner has recruited for their list.

It's a really good novel, albeit I don't see how it can classify as a crime or mystery novel, though that is indeed what Pan claim it to be.   I picked up another Symons work in a twofer offer with this - a non-fiction book about famous disputed murders - and am enjoying that two.   Symons is duly added to my list of authors I must revisit and read more of.   I must admit I'm really keen on finding his biographer of his brother A J A Symons, author of The Quest for Corvo (which I am also keen to read).

Butcher - Joyce Carol Oates

 Joyce Carol Oates has to be a living literary phenomenon.   I have been following her work for over fifty years and she is still going strong, still getting better and better.   Butcher is as recent as 2024.   How could she possibly bring herself to undertake a massive task like this?   In her stride seems to be the answer.

She has never been better.   It is as if the awfulness of her subject matter (the early, gruesome years of male physicians' attempts to understand women's minds and bodies) spurs Oates on to greater heights.  Dr Silas Aloysius Weir, who until 1851 had been repulsed by women's gynological processes, finds himself the director of the Women's Lunatic Asylum in Trenton New Jersey.   Eager to make a name for himself he experiments on the women supposedly in his care and so builds himself a national reputation as the Father of Gyno-Psychiatry.   I know from my own research how close Oates's Weir comes to the ghastly truth; frankly, it continues today with so-called specialists needlessly mutilating women for no other reason I can fathom save sadism and mysogyny.   

Ten years on, Weir's patients strike back.   For a man, these scenes are equally horrific, but for a (hopefully) balanced man, you have to say it's deserved.   And yet I was quite moved with Oates's depiction of Weir in his later years - retired, reclusive, refusing to discuss what happened and flatly disclaiming any knowledge of who was responsible (although we know that he knows).   I found this a masterful and at the same time compassionate use of dramatic irony.   Oates never at any stage loses sight of the humanity of any of her characters (which, of course, is precisely what Weir has done with his patients).

A modern masterpiece but not for the fainthearted.

Polostan - Neal Stephenson

 I've been reading about Stephenson for a while and wondering where to start with him.   This seemed (and was) the perfect place, one of his latest (2024) and the first in a new series (Bomb Light).   I liked it a lot and found it surprisingly accessible.   The picaresque story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in Montana but largely raised by her Ukranian Communist stepfather in Soviet Russia where she's known by her patronymic and the Russian version of her first name, Aurora.  As a teenager she slips between nations and identities and ends up - for this volume - spying for Beria in Moscow in 1934.   She is bilingual and smart but her special talent on both sides of the political divide, is polo - hence the title.

The story is dense but fairly races along and Dawn/Aurora is always great fun to be around, whether she's advertising sensible shoes at the World's Fair in Chicago or being tortured by Stalin's goons in Siberia.   This being the early Thirties, she has a fascination with Bonnie and Clyde and reference is made to her time with the Borrow Gang - but that is clearly for a future instalment; we don't see it here.   And this is how Stephenson really hooks us.   By chopping locale and timeframe he introduces us to things that have happened to Dawn or Aurora before they actually happen, for example, the question of a child she says she had and 'lost'.

I know Stephenson has published a second instalment - called simply D, so no clues there) and I can't wait to read it.   Meanwhile, I'm keeping an eye out for work from his back catalogue.