Murder or suicide? In the end, who cares?

A friend gave me Martin Amis's 1997 mystery Night Train. If you intend to catch up on the Amis backlist, you should stop reading right now because I'm going to include spoilers.

Amis is, of course, the British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter best known for his novels Money and London Fields. By the time he published Night Train, he'd published nine works of fiction and three of non-fiction, so it's not an early work by an inexperienced author. 

It's hard to say what it is. I have a sense that Amis said to himself something like, "I'm going to write an American noir mystery and construct it to confound reader expectations."

Totally suspend disbelief

The first paragraph begins, "I am a police. That may sound like an unusual statement—or an unusual construction, But it's a parlance we have . . .." Does anyone believe American police officers anywhere call themself "a police"? So from the book's first sentence we're required to  suspend disbelief totally. 

The novel is set in an imaginary American city, so there's no way to check what the local cops actually call themselves. I prefer my books set in real places unless, like The City & The City they are unabashedly set in an alternate universe. It's one of my complaints about the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels; why not use New York, Chicago, Los Angeles? Or Baltimore, Miami, Boston? Make us think this might have happened. It's part of the pleasure.

The narrator introduces herself as Detective Mike Hoolihan, a recovering alcoholic, a woman whose name is not short for Michelle or Michielia or another female name, just Mike. Get used to it. She's single, but she's got a live-in boyfriend.

Suicide is a night train

Mike lives in a building that shakes every time the night train passes nearby; there are also references to Duke Ellington's recording of "Night Train." But the book's title comes from a metaphor: "Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness."

The crime Mike investigates is an apparent suicide. But the lovely young dead woman was seemingly happy,  left no note, and managed to shoot herself in the head with a .22 pistol three times. Suicide or murder?

The body's father is Colonel Tom Rockwell, someone who in the space of ten years "made lieutenant as Shift Commander, then captain in charge of Crimes Against Persons, then full colonel as head of CID." Does any police force in America call their chiefs "colonel"?

And the victim isn't just any victim, she's someone Mike as known "since she was eight years old. She was a favorite of mine. But she was also the favorite of everybody else's. And I watched her grow into a kind of embarrassment of perfection." All of which means what?

It's only suicide

So we read about Mike, her alcoholism, her relationship with the Rockwell family, her relationship with her boyfriend, suicide (its causes and cures), crime in this imaginary big city (none of which I believed for a moment), and on page 74 of the 175-page paperback we read: 

"[Jennifer[, your right hand had undergone cadaveric spasm. Or spontaneous, and temporary rigor mortis. The curve of the trigger and the patterning of the butt were embedded in your flesh. That's how tight you gripped. Jennifer, you killed yourself. It's down."

Amis spends the next hundred pages tap dancing around this conclusion. The reader—this reader anyway—keeps waiting for the snap that will suddenly shift the entire picture as we realize that no, it wasn't suicide after all. But the snap never comes. 

There's mystery in this book except in the sense we are all mysteries to one another and often to ourselves. No murderer. No larger meaning I could find. A lot of outstanding sentences. Some interesting observations by Mike about crime and suicide, some of which I can buy, some of which I can't.

In the end, I read Night Train as an entirely artificial construct, Amis's attempt to write a hard-boiled mystery while creating a unique and hard-boiled detective. In the end, I didn't believe in Mike, the Colonel, the city. And I didn't care that this "embarrassment of perfection" had killed herself.

John Donne: His life, times, and poetry

Many years ago I was given a Modern Library edition of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. I do not recall ever opening book, but, in pruning the bookcases before a move, I never thought to discard it. It was a gift. The words would wait. Donne was someone with whom I would eventually become familiar.

Donne, after all, is responsible for "Goe, and catche a falling star . . . " "Death be not proud . . ." and ". . . send not to know or whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." Anyone who can write something still current 450 years later probably offers other treasures. Which is why I checked out John Donne: The Reformed Soul by John Stubbs. 

Readable and engaging

Stubbs "was born in 1977 and studied English at Oxford and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate in 2005. He was awarded a 2004 Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for John Donne: The Reformed Soul as a work in progress." His biography of Donne, published in 2007, is a 478-page work of scholarship with notes, bibliography, and index that gives an account of Donne's life, times, and evolving thought. 

It might be scholarly, but the book is so readable and engaging I could not help but think of Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, the fictional life of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. Sir Thomas More, a Catholic, refused to swear an oath accepting the Act of Succession, recognizing the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn as legitimate and breaking with Rome, was executed in 1534. More was also Donne's mother's great uncle. So Donne was born 1572 into a Catholic family at a time when Queen Elizabeth was trying to stamp out Catholicism in England.

Tumultuous times

Donne's father was a London ironmonger who died when Donne was four; his mother a life-long Catholic eventually fled to France; his uncle headed an underground Jesuit mission, was caught, imprisoned, and  exiled; his younger brother died from the plague in 1593 while being held in Newgate Prison for harboring a seminary priest. Donne converted to Anglicanism around age seven.

In other words, Donne's times were tumultuous: Religious conflict between Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans; regime change when Elizabeth died and James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain, foreign threats from the Spanish, and of course a plague. 

His mother remarried. Donne was able to attend Oxford, studied law, sailed as a gentleman adventurer with English expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, and, in 1597,  became a secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper of England. In Egerton's service Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Ann More, secretly marrying her in 1601. The marriage not only lost him his position, it blighted his chances for advancement at court.

In fifteen years of marriage, he and Ann had a dozen children, the last dying shortly after birth with Ann immediately following. (There are no pictures of Ann, no surviving letters.) Through all the vicissitudes: Donne wrote poetry, bawdy verses for friends as a young man, poetic letters to friends, commissioned poems for patrons, and eventually deeply religious works. At King James's urging (demand?), Donne became an Anglican priest and eventually the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

The forceful preacher

Stubbs manages to convey enough history of the period to put Donne's decisions into a context (the English court sounds like "Game of Thrones" without dragons), the religious debates (adding to the Catholic/Protestant conflict, there's Calvin in Geneva propounding the idea of predestination), and Donne's evolving thought as he evolves from a randy young man into a forceful preacher:

"We are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombs, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within large walls, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death."

One of the things that struck me about Donne's poetry is, as the sentence above indicates, the use of symbol, metaphor, and simile. Take the famous Holy Sonnet 10:

"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadfull, for thou art not soe;/ For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow/ Die not, poore Death, nor yet canst thou kill mee./ From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,/ Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,/ And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,/ Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie./ Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,/ And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,/ And poppie, or charms can make us sleepe as well/ And better than thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?/ One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally/ And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." 

What an interesting idea, that that death itself shall die.

Given the archaic spellings, uncommon words, and unfamiliar thoughts, Donne is not an easy read. Which is why Stubb's John Donne: The Reformed Soul is such an engaging and useful introduction to him.