Monster Midway by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham admiring the midway

William Lindsay Gresham's first novel was his most famous. Nightmare Alley was published in 1946 and adapted into a movie in 1947. An unsuccessful and now forgotten second novel followed in 1949. It was seven years after the publication of Nightmare Alley, in 1953, that Gresham published his third book, Monster Midway, a non-fiction collection of essays about the world of the carnivals. His most famous novel had, in fact, been born of a lifelong fascination with carnies, psychics, and magicians. Gresham shared that fascination in Monster Midway.

Review

Perhaps the most notorious passage from the novel and both movie versions is the sequence where Clem Hoatley explains to Stanton Carlisle how a geek is made. In the opening pages of Monster Midway, Gresham tells us how he learned this bit of carny lore. Gresham, like many young men in his generation, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As he was waiting to muster out of the conflict, he got to know a fellow American who shared his interest in carnival life. "Clem Faraday was a sergeant of medics and my immediate superior... And he was also an old-time carny." The real Clem, it turns out, had worked a ten-in-one in the South that featured a geek show as a blowoff. (If I just confused you with some of that carny lingo, don't worry; the book includes a glossary.) When Gresham pressed for more information about the geek, Clem launched into the explanation of how you find an alcoholic or an ex-soldier who's addicted to morphine and use his addiction to gradually lure him into full-on geeking. That speech went straight into Nightmare Alley.

Each chapter in the book details a different aspect of carny life. Early in, Gresham goes into some detail describing the business side of running a carnival, which I admit I found a little boring; but he quickly moves on to describing the rides, the games, the freaks, the gypsy mind-readers, the motordromes and hell drivers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, snake handlers, and other exciting sides of the carnies. He devotes a long chapter to Houdini and other escape artists. (Houdini would be the subject of Gresham's next book.) Throughout, Gresham treats the reader to glimpses behind the scenes, explaining how it all works, and even revealing the secrets of some of the gaffs and grifts. Want a roadmap for doing the psychic mind-reader act? Gresham gives it to you.

All of his stories are backed up by interviews with real-life carnies, whose names Gresham shares. The chapter on freaks is revealing because it's clear that Gresham had gotten to know many of them personally, and many wisely used the money they earned in the carnies to build comfortable, normal lives for themselves afterward. Gresham also shares tales of how he tried out doing mind-reading and magic acts on his own, gaining some first-hand experience. It all adds up to a fascinating memoir of a world that is long gone. The carnivals, fairs, circuses, and amusement parks that exist today are far more wholesome and legit than the shows that would scrounge their way across America back in the days of the Depression and the War.

The Girl in the Trunk by Bruce Cassiday

The only picture of the author I could find

I read this book as an old paperback that was published by Ace Books in July 1973. It appears to have been recently been brought back into print, after 40 years of being out of print, by a POD publisher called Bold Venture Press.

Bruce Cassiday got his start as a script writer for radio dramas, and then he became western and crime fiction editor for pulp magazine publisher Popular Publications. He also wrote for the pulps, eventually graduating to the paperbacks, cranking out not only his crime novels but novelizations of movies and TV series, as well as a bunch of Flash Gordon novels. A working-stiff writer, he even wrote how-to, diet books, and celebrity biographies.

Review

The Girl in the Trunk begins with a mosaic of events presented in short chapters. An earthquake off the coast of Chile starts a tsunami that will, in a few hours, sweep across Hawaiian beaches with destructive force. The naked corpse of a young woman is found in the trunk of a car abandoned at the Honolulu airport. The head accountant for a local firm is discovered to have embezzled half a million dollars and disappeared. Two muggers attack a drunk only to discover that he's not drunk at all but, rather, a violent cop hellbent on meting out physical punishment. Meanwhile, the daughter of the head of the police force is having a love affair with a man he hates, the leader of the Hawaiian secessionists. All these seemingly disparate threads and more, however, will smoothly merge together by the end of the novel as the action builds into a deadly race against time.

I can't claim this book rises above its time and its genre, but Cassiday does deliver a clever, fast-paced, old-school police procedural. I enjoy this sort of thing and can happily read an old Ed McBain or a recent Michael Connelly with equal pleasure. One thing I appreciate about the older, vintage American crime novels, though, is that they are usually short and action-oriented and can be easily read in a day or two, all of which describes The Girl in the Trunk.

For me personally there was an added element of interest in the fact that the novel was set in 1970s Hawaii. Having spent a fair amount of time in Hawaii myself, I was impressed with Cassiday's knowledge of the culture, locations, and idiom of Oahu. He also clearly delineates the tensions and prejudices that exist among the Pacific Islanders, Asians, Whites, and hapa who make up most of the populations of the islands. The Hawaiian sovereignty movement, which is still around, was especially strong in the 60s and 70s.

The racist language used by some of the characters (remember, the Vietnam war was still ongoing) may be a bit hard to swallow for current readers, but it is true to the times. So, unfortunately, are the sexism and misogyny. But, to paraphrase the way Walter Cronkite would end his evening news broadcasts back then, that's the way it was. If you enjoy vintage crime novels (Macdonald, McBain, etc.) or gritty 70s crime movies, The Girl in the Trunk will likely fall into your precinct.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay

Trebizond is the English name for the Turkish city of Trabzon, which is situated on the coast of the Black Sea along the old Silk Road. Rose Macaulay's novel, The Towers of Trebizond, describes the experiences of a small group of English travelers -- the narrator Laurie, her aunt Dot, and an Anglican priest with the unlikely name of Father Chantry-Pigg -- in the post-War years. 

Review

This meandering novel could easily be mistaken for a travelogue, and indeed much of it is autobiographical. Laurie, Dot, and the Father are all members of the British aristocratic intelligentsia who loved to explore the Levant (and other remote places of the world) and write down their impressions. Throughout the story, Laurie keeps running into other Brits who are writing their own "Turkey books," as she and her aunt Dot (aka Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett) are planning to do. Aunt Dot has also come to Turkey because of her conviction that "Moslem" women are treated badly and that they would be more liberated if they converted to Christianity. Father Chantry-Pigg has come along because he's convinced the best form of Christianity to which they can convert is Anglicanism. The two of them have vague ideas about setting up an Anglican mission. Meanwhile, Laurie just wants to see a bit of the world and do some sketching.

Part of the pleasure of reading books like this is not just that they take you to exotic parts of the world, they also take you to distant time periods that you can never visit in person, and Macaulay does a wonderful job of transporting you to both. The novel is set during the time that the Iron Curtain had just descended over Eastern Europe. The situation along the border between Turkey and Soviet Georgia is hostile, and tourists are often suspected of being spies for one side or the other. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tension, Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg are determined to slip over into the Russian-controlled state to satisfy their curiosity about conditions on the other side. They manage to do so, which means that for the rest of the novel Laurie is left on her own. Well, not completely on her own. Aunt Dot owns a camel, which becomes Laurie's responsibility. She does ride the camel across much of Turkey and eventually gets it back to London.

Laurie's journey, which takes center stage in the second half of the book, is both geographical and interior. While she is on what is ostensibly a sort of missionary trip, she wrestles with her own feelings about religion and the High Church. On top of all that, she is involved in a love affair with a married man (identified only as Vere) with whom she eventually has a rendezvous in a yacht off Iskenderun. She is tormented by her belief that having an affair with a married man is basically stealing from the wife, while at the same time believing that she and Vere are meant for each other. No matter what, she never wants to let go of their relationship. This, in fact, very much echoed Rose Macaulay's situation in real life. 

I've seen this novel described as "farcical" and "high comedy," which it really isn't. It's charming, and it's laced with humorous observations and absurd situations, but it is the sort of book that will at best make you chuckle once in a while rather than laugh out loud. (Well, okay... I admit the part with Mr. Yorum did crack me up.) It's not all fun and games, though. The ending will likely throw you for a loop. By all means avoid reading anything about how the book ends because it sneaks up on you unawares, and I believe it is all the more powerful for that.

When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

 

To call anything nonfiction is probably naive.

I found it hard to put this book down to deal with the everyday things life puts in our way to keep us from reading.

Review

Despite my poor grasp of mathematics, I've had a nearly lifelong fascination with the discoveries of theoretical physics -- from reading George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity as a teenager to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos a few years ago. When We Cease To Understand the World reads like a series of biographical essays on the lives of the most crucial thinkers in modern physics, but the book's chapters are really fictional constructs that use the registers of nonfiction to arrive at deeper truths.

I honestly don't know how this book will strike you if you don't have a passing familiarity with names like Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger. It is, however, beautifully written and focuses on human stories, so it probably won't matter if you've never heard of a Schwarzschild radius.

I really want to emphasize the quality of the writing itself. The book was originally written in Spanish (as Un verdor terrible), but Chilean author Benjamín Labatut speaks fluent English and collaborated closely on the translation.

The first section, called "Prussian Blue," is nominally about the chemist Fritz Haber and tells the stories of, among other things, cyanide, arsenic, chemical warfare, Zyklon-B, and the use of drugs to make German soldiers in World War II into fighting machines. (Along the way, we learn that the pigment for Prussian Blue was derived from cyanide salts.) Haber is known as the father of chemical warfare and was responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people horribly with his chlorine gas in World War I. He also figured out how to extract nitrogen from the air to create the fertilizers that support half the world's populations today. (This is all true, by the way. Only the last paragraph of the story is fiction.) So, from the outset, we understand that these scientists' inner lives will be torn by the exigencies of war, loss, and doubt, and that the moral valences of their work may be hard to determine.

Of course, the intrusion of fiction into these accounts is bound to leave you wondering which parts are real and which are made up. In an interview, Labatut said that he thinks those who bother to do their own research will be surprised to find that many things which sound incredible really happened. "I'm using fiction to get people interested in things that are unbelievable but that are true."

While the work has been described as a non-fiction novel, the author says that he doesn't think of it as a novel at all. A collection of interrelated stories may be a better way to describe it. Certain themes wind through the book, and the final autobiographical section brings them together nicely. Whatever you call it, When We Cease To Understand the World is a gripping read and I highly recommend it.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I first read Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama around 1974, about a year after it came out, while I was still in college. I enjoyed it, but my interest in Clarke was beginning to fade a bit by that time. As a kid and a teenager I'd loved his short stories and the cosmic novels like The City and the Stars and Childhood's End to the point that Clarke's work pretty well embodied what I thought science fiction ought to be. His novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out of a collaboration with Stanley Kubrick based on an old short story called "The Sentinel" (1948), was published at the end of the 60s and was his last novel before this one. Each of them featured what has come to be known in science fiction circles as a Big Dumb Object (i.e., the monolith in 2001 and the cylinder in Rama). The term, which was invented by a sf fan/critic and is meant to be a bit derogatory, refers to huge, inexplicable devices created by alien technologies at which humans can only marvel.

Having heard that Denis Villeneuve is planning to adapt the novel into a movie, I decided to reread it.

Review

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, a cylindrical object passes through the solar system. At first assumed to be an asteroid, which they name Rama, astronomers soon come to realize it is actually a constructed artifact -- a spaceship perhaps, or a probe -- that is 12 miles wide and more than 30 miles long. (There is no doubt in my mind that the speculation surrounding ‘Oumuamua as it passed through the solar system in 2017 was in part sparked by this book.) In the Clarkean near-future of the novel, humans have already built colonies on the moon and nearby planets, so they have the ability to send a manned expedition out to rendezvous with Rama and examine it up close. 

The explorers manage to find a point of entry into Rama and discover that it is cold and dark and apparently dead inside. It does have a breathable atmosphere though, and, because of its spin, it has gravity along the outer surfaces of the interior. As the object nears the sun, it begins to heat up and come to life inside. Gigantic lights illuminate the interior, a body of water that forms a ring around the midpoint begins to melt, and weather patterns develop inside the enormous habitat.

Lifelike entities emerge and begin to perform tasks, paying no attention to the human visitors. The entities appear to be an amalgam of biological and mechanical components, and the human visitors can't decide whether these are actual Ramans or merely the programmed servants of the Ramans. As Rama gets nearer the sun, the visitors have only a short time to explore as much as possible before they must abandon it. As they explore, making ever more puzzling discoveries, some of the massive processes that happen inside Rama get dangerous.

This is the kind of science fiction adventure at which Clarke excelled. There are no villains or monsters to contend with -- there are only the powerful dynamics of physics and the inscrutable ways of alien intelligences far beyond our own. After all, it was Clarke who famously predicted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The ultimate goal of the novel is to provoke a sense of wonder at the possibilities that may await us "out there." Inevitably, it feels a bit dated nearly fifty years later, but for someone approaching it with the right frame of mind, I think it would still serve that purpose well enough today.

2001: A Space Odyssey did pretty much the same thing. Reviewers of the movie often described it as more of a "trip" than a movie because, instead of the usual Hollywood plot devices, character development, and conflicts, 2001 offered audiences a thought experiment on human evolution and cosmic destiny. If he handles the material right, Villeneuve may be able to do something similar for 21st century audiences. Will it fly today? Only time will tell.