Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier.

In brief: Four words: Alfred Hitchcock’s Jane Eyre. Now, how could you possibly go wrong with that?

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Rebecca, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Moonraker (1955) by Ian Fleming.

In brief: Like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Moonraker is an inquisitive piece of genre fiction hiding behind the legacy of a title that it shares with a film adaptation so outrageously removed as to be parodic at best. Having read Fleming before, what took me by surprise was not the cynical-realist, gadget-free James Bond who doesn’t always get what he wants, but the novel’s quotidian portrait of an off-duty Bond on home soil. Ironically, the novel is at its most dreary and predictable when it turns from character-building to the series’ better-known draw, the standard plot of the megalomaniacal master plan.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Moonraker, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006) by Eoin Colfer.

In brief: The fifth entry in Colfer’s “Die Hard with fairies” series for young adults is an enjoyable and fast-paced romp, but it exhibits ominous signs of a series creaking under the combined weight of its established conventions and already-resolved conflicts. Colfer must either raise the stakes in a substantial fashion—merely boosting the violence and fireworks won’t cut it—or let Artemis Fowl make a graceful exit before he, and all his friends, become serial shadows of their former selves.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony, keep reading below.)

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At twenty-four minutes past ten o’clock in the p.m., I was listening to a special broadcast on CBC Radio Two—a special three-hour broadcast devoted to a composition by Olivier Messiaen, as performed by Simon Docking.

At precisely the same time, I was reading a ripping good novel by Ian Fleming. (Which one? Stay tuned to the Wednesday Book Club, where it will be featured soon enough.)

Why are they playing Messiaen, I wondered? Oh, of course. It’s the centennial of his birth.

Why are the cover redesigns so splendid on the Penguin paperback reissues of the Fleming novels? Oh, of course. It’s the centennial of his birth.

(I was shaken.)

And what, might I ask, is this piece by Messiaen? The seven books of Catalogue D’Oiseaux.

And who, might I ask, was the namesake of Fleming’s hero James Bond? An ornithologist.

(I was stirred.)

Have I been wrong about God all along? No, Serendipity, but that was a nice try.

This week’s selection: The Manticore (1972) by Robertson Davies.

In brief: The second novel in the Deptford Trilogy never quite attains the the ambitious moral order and dramatic unity of its sublime predecessor, but it doesn’t need to, as it is a very different book tailor-made for a very different narrator. The story on the surface (a rationalist lawyer exorcises his personal demons with the aid of Jungian psychiatry) is not by itself earth-shattering. Where Davies’ genius shows its hand is in his depth of vision and talent for expository voice, best displayed when the book interlaces its characters and events with those of the previous volume. The Manticore stands independently, but with diminished elegance; I recommend it as essential reading for anyone who loved Fifth Business, which should or will be all of you.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Manticore, keep reading below.)

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