Three narrators, three stories, one city.

Rupert Thomson’s latest fiction arrived on my desk with high praise from Colm Tóbín, Philip Pullman, and Andrea Wulf. The publisher bills Barcelona Dreaming as a novel, but it is three long stories with several linked characters. Significant characters in one story are minor or peripheral in another.

Barcelona Dreaming is Thomson’s thirteenth work of fiction (he’s also written a well-received memoir, This Party’s Got to Stop). He was born in Eastbourne in 1955, took the Cambridge entrance examination at 16, and studied medieval history and political thought. After college he taught English in Athens, wrote advertising copy in London, and has lived and worked in the U.S., Italy, Japan, Australia, and Spain. His first book, Dreams of Leaving, earned Thomson positive reviews, the sale of film rights, and $50,000 to write a screenplay. “And by the time that money ran out,” he said in an interview, “I had published a second novel and so from very early on I could be a full-time writer.”

I have no idea how long Thomson lived in Barcelona, but Barcelona Dreaming gives the impression that, as Philip Pullman says, Thomson “knows every corner of it and every kind of human being who might live there.” The stories are narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcohol-dependent jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love. 

The English woman, Amy, has lived in Barcelona for twenty years or more is in her late 40s, is long-divorced, has a daughter attending university in England and a settled life until she finds a troubled young Moroccan man sobbing in her building’s parking garage in the middle of the night. She takes him to her apartment, gives him tea and him cab fare home. He returns a few days later with all the fixings to make her a Moroccan dinner to thank her. They become friends. Then lovers. It ends better than I expected as the story was winding up.

The 64-year-old pianist, Nacho, connects with and becomes a friend of Barcelona soccer star Rinaldinho, as much as one can be a friend of someone who is half your age, who is an international celebrity, is awash in admirers and hangers-on, and who earns more in a month than you will in a lifetime. Nacho is divorced, has a long-time live-in girlfriend, and the woman he once loved and performed with has died. This is a marvelous meditation on aging, on missed opportunities and bad decisions, and the corrosive effect of celebrity. By the end of the story one has a feeling that Rinaldinho has passed his athletic peak and has no idea what happened.

Let me quote the first paragraph of the third story to give you a sense of Thomson’s style and command of detail: “The first time I saw Vic Drago, he was on his own. I was waiting at the bus stop outside my building when the glass front door swung open and a stocky man with thinning black hair emerged. He was wearing a maroon jacket, a black shirt, and black trousers with sharp creases. A gold chain bracelet glinted on his left wrist. He stopped to light a cigarette, then strode off along the street, smoke flowing over his shoulder as he exhaled.” 

The translator is working on a French novella; he outlines its story and one of the many pleasures of Barcelona Dreaming is the way Thomson is able to have themes and incidents resonate off one another. Another pleasure is seeing a character in one story appear in another. And third is Thomson’s use of language and his perceptions. Here, taken almost at random, is the jazz pianist describing times with the woman he loved:

“There were moments during live performances—in Paris or Cologne or Amsterdam—when I would chance on harmonic progressions or melodic lines that rode along with her voice, and her eyes would meet mine across the sparkly half-darkness up onstage, amusement on her face, and a gentle pity, and even, sometimes, a glimmer of mockery or malice, at the thought that I might have the nerve to follow her, because she knew she could sing herself right out of where she stood, she could leave me for dust if she wanted to.”

In a March 2013 interview in The Guardian newspaper, Thomson is quoted as saying, “Fiction essentially teaches you to understand and empathize with other people. That's important. I think fiction is related to ethics in that you step out of your skin and become someone else for the period you are reading the book. And it is a short step to extrapolate from that to the teaching of compassion. As Amos Oz said, 'the person who imagines the other is better than the person who does not imagine the other'. For me, that is exactly the strength and raison d'etre of fiction. Film doesn't, and art doesn't, and music doesn't do it in the same way.”

Barcelona Dreaming takes a reader willing to go with it out of her skin and become someone else. 

Enough to make me an LRB subscriber

Hilary Mantel has been reviewing books for and writing essays for the London Review of Books since, I believe, 1987. Her recently-published collection, Mantel Pieces, is subtitled, “Royal Bodies and Other Writings from the London Review of Books.” So in one sense what you’re reading here is pretty thin stuff: a review of a collection of reviews. Worse, Mantel is a better writer than this ink stained-wretch.

Mantel is the author of the Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, both Man Booker Prize-winners, and The Mirror & the Light—The Wolf Hall Trilogy, which The New York Times claimed “is probably the greatest historical fiction accomplishment of the past decade.” They are the story of Thomas Cromwell, who born to a working-class family becomes the right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in 1527 and manages to retain Henry VIII’s favor after Wolsey is executed. He assists in the king’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn and break from Rome and establishment of the Church of England. 

Even people who don’t like historical fiction (we exist) or who don’t like long books or who don’t like long books of historical fiction respond to the trilogy. Mantel Pieces suggests why. She’s a terrific writer, a thorough researcher, and a clear thinker. (Her ability to think clearly may explain why she’s such a clear writer.)

The reviews extend from a 1988 review of Shere Hite’s third book on the sex lives of American women to a 2017 review of a biography of Margaret Pole, who was beheaded in 1541. Review subjects include John Osborne, Madonna, Christopher Marlow, Jane Boleyn (Anne’s sister-in-law), Eunice Williams (a Massachusetts settler taken by Mohawk Indians in 1704), Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, and Théroigne de Méricourt (“a woman washed up on the [French] revolution’s inhospitable shore”).

These are not quick summaries that conclude with a couple of judgmental sentences. Mantel brings in research from other books, other reading. She does not give a book a one to five-star rating and move on, but puts it into a context and provides enough information for the reader to draw her own conclusion. For example:

“Susan Higginbotham’s carefully written book [Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower] comes with a misleading cover puff: ‘At last, a biography of one of the most fascinating women of the Tudor period’, who has ‘too long been overlooked’. But Margaret Pole, one of the great magnates of Tudor England, is not overlooked. In The King’s Curse (2014) she was ground up by the great fictionalizing machine that is Philippa Gregory, and in 2003 she was the subject of a major biography by Hazel Pierce: Margaret Pole: Loyalty, Lineage and Leadership. Pierce’s book is thorough and scholarly, and her work is acknowledged in Higginbotham’s biography which is less detailed, but serious and judicious. Based in North Carolina, Higginbotham is a lawyer by background and has written several novels, spanning different eras . . . .”

In addition to the reviews, Mantel Pieces includes three interesting essays, an account of first meeting her stepfather as a six-year-old written in the voice of a six-year-old (and worth therefore studying as a piece of writing; it was almost enough to send me to my computer); an account of a medical procedure that sounds as if went wrong and almost killed her; and the piece that apparently provoked a tempest in England, “Royal Bodies: From Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton” (2013).

Mantel says in her introduction that ten days after the piece appeared in the LRB, reporters were scouring her village looking for comment. Her husband told her “the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were denouncing me. Neither, I believe, had read my lecture. Very few people had read it, but I was still Monster of the Month.”

She reports attending an event at which the Prince of Wales handed out a  literary award. She had never seen him before, “and at once I thought: what a beautiful suit! What sublime tailoring!” A little later she went to a book trade event at Buckingham Palace. As the queen passed, “I stared at her. I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner.” 

Her reaction, says Mantel, was not toward a person but to the monarchy, “a thing which only had meaning when it was exposed, a thing that existed only to be looked at.” That began to change in 1980 “with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs.” Diana, she says, was more royal than the royal family. “Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief” but in the end England did not change.

She writes about Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s need for an heir. She reports on a paper that speculates that the king had Kells positive blood. “When a woman who is Kells negative conceives by a man who is Kells positive, she will, if the foetus itself is Kells positive, become sensitized; her immune system will try to reject the foetus.” If so, it makes the history of Henry’s reign a biological rather than a moral tragedy. 

She concludes by asking whether monarchy is a suitable institution for a grown-up nation? She writes that the English are happy “to allow monarchy to be an entertainment, in the same way that we license strip joints and lap-dancing clubs.” No wonder she became Monster of the Month.

The reviews and essays are separated by letters to and from Mantel and her editor at the LRB; these talk about the work at hand and works in progress. In November 2005, Mantel wrote about Thomas Cromwell, “Oh, the joy of having a main character who’s not neurotic! I wish I’d thought of it before.” Mantel Pieces is enough to make me a LBR subscriber. 

Almost too clever by half, but fun

Anthony Horowitz, in addition to writing The Word Is Murder, is the author of more than two dozen books for children, as well as a prolific screenwriter and the author of multiple crime novels, including two Sherlock Holmes novels authorized by the Arthur Conan Doyle estate, plus two James Bond novels authorized by the Ian Fleming estate. 

Recently he adapted his mystery novel Magpie Murders for a TV miniseries. He was the creator and writer of the Foyle’s War mysteries and has written a number of the Misomer Murder scripts. He is an exceptionally productive and creative writer.

The narrator of The Word Is Murder is named Anthony Horowitz who is a London-based mystery writer, creator and writer of a TV series called Foyle’s War, and whose last book was The House of Silk, a Sherlock Holmes novel. The narrator shares a number of other attributes with the author: they are both happily married; they both have a literary agent named Hilda Starke; they both have their books published by HarperCollins in the U.S.  In other words, Horowitz would like readers to think that the story he tells is not fiction but something else. A memoir or true crime story perhaps.

The first chapter reads like the beginning of a conventional mystery. A wealthy woman of a certain age (although apparently healthy) visits a London funeral home in the morning to arrange for her funeral. Nothing particularly mysterious about that; it can be a prudent preparation. But that afternoon she’s murdered. Which, following her morning’s visit, is unusual.

In chapter two, the narrator who I will call Anthony is contacted by a consulting detective named Daniel Hawthorne. Anthony had met Hawthorne a year earlier when the detective helped with the technical details of a TV crime drama Anthony had written. Hawthorne wants Anthony to write a book about him, which I would not be surprised has happened to Horowitz the author more than once. 

The deal is this: Anthony will tag along with Hawthorne as he works to solve the murder of the woman who had made arrangements for her own funeral the morning of her death. The Met has no clue and called Hawthorne in as a consultant. They will split the profits fifty-fifty. 

It sounds like writing true crime and Anthony turn him down. He explains to Hawthorne he’d rather write fiction: “I’m in control of my stories. I like to know what I’m writing about. Creating the crimes and the clues and all the rest of it is half the fun. If I were to follow you around, just writing down what you said, what would that make me? I’m sorry, I’m not interested.”

Still . . . he can see an opening chapter in that woman’s visit to the funeral home and her murder. And after a woman fan asks Anthony why he’s not interested in writing about the real world he decides to team up with Hawthorne.

He writes a first chapter, the one that actually begins The Word Is Murder. Hawthorne rips it apart, starting with the first sentence:

“Just after eleven o’clock on a bright spring morning, the sort of day when the sunshine is almost white and promises a warmth that it doesn’t quite deliver, Diana Cowper crossed the Fulham Road and went into a funeral parlour.” 

Hawthorne’s investigation has established that she didn’t cross the Fulham Road. The bus she must have taken (she’s caught on CCTV) stops on the same side of the street as the undertaker. “So what would you want me to write?” Anthony asks, not unreasonable. Hawthorne has already scribbled something:

“At exactly seventeen minutes past eleven, Diana Jane Cowper exited from the number 14 bus at the Old Church Street (HJ) stop and retraced her steps twenty-five metres along the pavement. She then entered Cornwallis and Sons funeral parlour.”

Anthony says it reads like a police report. “At least it’s accurate.,” says Hawthorne.

It seems to me that Horowitz is doing a number of things in The Word Is Murder. He is playing with reader expectations. What’s real? London is real. (I’ve been there). HarperCollins is real. (They published a couple of my books.) I will accept that Hilda Starke, named in the Acknowledgments is real. (Or did until I Google searched her name and found this in The Los Angeles Review of Books: “I looked up his literary agent and am sad to report that it is not the delightfully no-nonsense Hilda Starke, who steals every scene in which she appears.”)

He is critiquing the mystery genre while simultaneously writing a mystery in the genre. Diana Cowper’s murder is followed on the day of her self-plotted funeral by the exceptionally brutal murder of her son, a movie actor on the brink of stardom. I suspect that one of the differences between writing a murder mystery and researching and writing true crime is that in fiction all the parts have to fit together. There cannot be an effect without a cause. The moment a reader says “That could never happen” within the context of the story, you’ve lost her. So Hawthorne displays remarkable powers of observation and ratiocination but he cannot read minds or time travel.

True crime is often messy, illogical, incomplete. We want the world to make sense, a sense that feels consistent dependable. True crime is filled with ambiguity, accident, coincident, and loose ends. Who wants to read a book in which you don’t know the villain’s punishment—or reward for that matter?

Finally, Horowitz has written a wonderful book about the writing life. I may not believe that there is a London consulting detective named David Hawthorne (I don’t), but I believe absolutely that everything Horowitz writes about being a writer, from Anthony’s meeting with Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg to the discussions of what to call the book. (Hawthorne Investigates loses to The Word Is Murder.)

Nevertheless, for all the cleverness and inside winks, the members of the mystery reading group to which I belong and I almost unanimously enjoyed the book. Horowitz has created an interesting character in Hawthorne and has a three-book contract to fulfill. The second in the series The Sentence Is Death was published in May 2020, and the third, A Line to Kill is due out in the fall of 2021.

How Nebraska became a Republican stronghold

Like many East Coast liberals, I find it hard to understand why Midwesterners—particularly rural Midwesterners—continue to accept the former President's lies, resent and resist any government intrusion in their lives (while accepting farm subsidies), and hate government-mandated health care. Ross Benes has written an outstanding book, Rural Rebellion: How Nebraska Became a Republican Stronghold, to help me understand. 

Benes has written for many media outlets including The American Prospect, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, The Nation, New York, Rolling Stone, Slate, Vice, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s the author of Sex Weird-o-Pedia and The Sex Effect, which was described as “Freakonomics without pants.” He’s a lively writer, a diligent researcher, and is not afraid to include himself in the story when it helps the reader understand how he’s come to believe what he believes.

He spent his first 19 years in Brainard (pop. 420), a village in eastern Nebraska, and attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which is about 40 miles to the southwest. He had a brief stint in Detroit, moved to New York City where he worked for Esquire magazine. He has stayed in New York, and his book traces how his political views “evolved as I’ve shifted from being a right-wing small-town Nebraskan to a card-carrying member of the East Coast ‘fake news’ media.” The book is about “the dissonance of moving from one of the most rural and conservative regions of America to one of its most liberal and urban centers as the two grow further apart at a critical moment in our country’s history.”

Abortion is evil

Start with abortion. “In Brainard,” says Benes, “we will support anything Republicans do as long as Republicans say that abortion is evil.” The right to life trumps all other issues: income inequality, basic health care, environmental degradation, immigration, and more. What’s more, the issue is non-negotiable. If you believe that a woman’s egg becomes a human being the moment a male sperm enters it the subject is closed and any talk of a woman’s right to control her body, or back-street abortions, or human misery is irrelevant. 

So in Nebraska, Republicans support life while Democrats are baby killers. “Across Nebraska, billboards featuring Jesus and babies decorate cornfields that grow so tall that you can’t see past the country road intersection.” Nebraska school children look for ideas for pro-life poster they draw for school or their Catholic church. “They probably won’t realize that they’re advertising someone else’s politics. When you’re isolated in a depopulated area that consists almost entirely of people who look like you and share your beliefs, you don’t really question these things,” which is a theme that runs through the entire book. 

As a result, state and local Nebraska political candidates must avoid any discussion of abortion, any hint that a woman has the right to decide whether to carry a fetus to term or not. As one state senator told Benes, “If you’re talking about abortion, you’re losing.” And be careful about the way you talk about immigration while you’re at it.

Immigrants go away 

Nebraska actually has a record of accepting record number of refugees. Nevertheless, Benes writes that “city councils push ordinances aimed at making life unlivable for illegals despite their economic dependence on migrant labor. State legislators try to take away government funds for immigrants’ prenatal care even though these lawmakers ostensibly oppose abortion.” 

Growing up in Brainard, Benes says he drank the Kool-Aid (invented in Nebraska): he wanted fewer illegal immigrants in the country; he wanted them deported; he wanted stricter border patrol. “Our safety depended on it. We law-abiding citizens didn’t deserve to be exposed to those who don’t respect the law.” With immigration, however, there may be room for negotiation.

He interviewed the mayor of Schuyler, a town that changed considerably when Cargill expended its beef plant and used migrant laborers to fill low-paying jobs, jobs Cornhuskers did not want to take at the wages offered. “Now Schuyler has the demographics benefitting an international municipality.” Immigrant businesses like The African Store, Chichihualo Supermarket, Novedades La Sorpresa clothing store, and Paleteria Oasis ice-cream stand help keep the town alive. “I’ve been to a lot of withering towns in Nebraska that would kill to have as many operating businesses as Schuyler has.” 

Of course, there have been growing pains. A local man Benes talks with is unhappy that the golf club is the only place in town these days that serves a decent meal. While “an international ag corporation decided to expand its beef operations, now there is nowhere in town to regularly get a good steak because of it.” Blame the immigrants.

Then there’s health care. When you are used to “doing whatever you damn-well please on your own property, forcing people to participate in a massive health-care marketplace feels restrictive of personal liberty.” People in Brainard generally embrace principles like personal responsibility, fiscal restraint, limited government, respect for authority, and individual liberty. 

Republicans are great marketers

Benes writes that the Republican Party “has done an incredible marketing job convincing people in rural areas that it values these ideal and that it’s the only party doing so.” You don’t want the government sticking its nose into your business until there’s a tornado, a flood, or a pandemic—and for many people not even then. Benes has suffered a number of medical calamities, and the benefits he received from Obamacare “made me reconsider other ways the government helped my life.”

So what’s the answer? There is no one answer. Because a single party controls the system, many actions that would make the state less hidebound are impossible: end gerrymandering, reform campaign finance laws, open primaries, ranked voting, improve secondary and higher education. 

At the same time, Benes believes change is possible. With the right messaging, he says, “there’s an opportunity for Democrats to win some rural voters with health care.” And rather attack the immigrants, “redirect their ire at the corporations who, through consolidation and union busting, drove wages down so far that the only people who will take their jobs any more are the people they recruit from other countries eager for a new life.”

Rural Rebellion is an insightful and useful book. Benes is a splendid writer who has added prodigious research to his personal experiences to help readers understand how Nebraska (and by extension other red states) became a Republican stronghold.