In my view, summer is a time for excess. Lots of lobster. Indulging in more carbs and sweets, bingeing on television series, and reading beach books as well as serious literature. This past week, the Chief Penguin and I devoted morning and evening hours to The Americans and Crownies while I also included an atmospheric historical novel (The Tea Planter’s Wife) midst my reading of Lincoln in the Bardo.
VIEWING
Legal Fix—Crownies (Acorn)
If like me, you became addicted to the Janet King series and you are a big fan of Marta Dusseldorp, then I can recommend the predecessor series, Crownies.
The Aussies like their slang (witness a recent article in the WSJ about the heated debated over “parma” versus “parmy” for chicken parmiagiana), and “crownies” are young lawyers working for the Department of Public Prosecutions in Sydney. Janet King is a character here and there are other familiar faces, Richard, Erin, Lina, and Andy, plus Tony and Tracey, to name just a few. Janet is more senior in rank and the others are getting their feet wet in preparing briefs and going up before the judges.
Filmed beginning in 2011, it’s looser and has a lot more sex than Janet King, but the cases it presents are serious and complex, making for intelligent and absorbing viewing. Interestingly enough, some reviewers loved this series and found Janet King somewhat boring and tame. Others felt just the reverse. I think, on balance, I prefer the greater seriousness of JK. Crownies, with characters like Tatum who is always dressed more for partying at a nightclub than for work and acts it too, can be tediously sophomoric at times.
Spies in DC—The Americans (Spoiler alert)
While overall, I think there are more excellent British and Australian series than American ones, this series, The Americans, is simply brilliant! We just binge watched season 6, the final series and it’s so well done.
We get the unraveling of Elizabeth and Philip’s lives as spies, Stan’s curiosity and puzzlement changing to downright suspicion, Paige’s tutoring by her mother and Claudia coupled with her idealistic view of what they are working to accomplish—all set against a changing world. The end of the Cold War is at hand, Gorbachev is coming to the U.S. for the summit and in 1987, the spy game is changing.
Philip is out of the business, mostly, trying to succeed as a businessman at their travel agency, his and Elizabeth’s relationship is strained and broken, Paige is allied with her mother, and Philip is the parent who pays attention to Henry away at school. How it all ends, how Stan caves, how the Jenningses get away, and who stays behind as the family is fractured is compelling drama.
RECENT READING
#16 The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies
A historical novel set on a tea plantation in Ceylon, Jefferies’ novel is lush and atmospheric and filled with mystery, love and lust. It’s perfect for whiling away a rainy afternoon. At just nineteen, Gwen goes out from London to Ceylon to join her new husband, thirty-seven year old Laurance Hooper, a widower she married after a whirlwind romance. Attracted to the beauty and scents of this new world, Gwen has questions about her husband’s late first wife Caroline, is confused and uncomfortable with the shabby treatment of the native workers, and unhappy over the continuing presence of Laurance’s sister Verity in their home.
When she gives birth to twins, she faces a difficult decision and the resulting secret plus secrets from the past will haunt them all: Gwen, Verity, Laurance, and her servant and almost friend Naveena. (~JWFarrington)
#17 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
In my limited reading experience with several Man Booker Prize winners, I have found them to be some of the most offbeat and unusual novels and the most challenging to read. Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for this, his first novel, and it’s hard to find appropriately punchy adjectives to describe it, but I’ll start with weird, inventive, bizarre, strange, and haunting. To gain the most from this work, it’s helpful to have a working definition of bardo. One can infer from the novel that it’s a state of being that is sort of between life as we know it and complete death. Or to quote from a recent article by Pema Rinpoche:
In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive. The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo. But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.
Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died at the age of eleven in 1862 and Lincoln visited the cemetery late at night. In Saunders’ novel, the graveyard is populated by ghosts who interact with one another and who observe Willie’s burial and the visit by the president. These ghosts appear not to have gone fully over into death or at least they don’t fully realize that they are in fact dead.
The novel is structured like a Greek chorus with a series of voices in a continuous stream each spouting his or her lines and each speaker identified by name. Interspersed with the fictional ghosts are snippets quoted from real historical works. These excerpts add color, context and factual detail. The ghosts run the gamut in their speech being coarse and ribald, argumentative, reflective, or even philosophical. Together the lead threesome of Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins iii, and the Reverend Everly Thomas, collaborate to try to bring Lincoln together with his son one last time to provide him solace and to ease Willie’s transition to the next world.
This description makes the novel sound all very matter of fact, when it’s anything but that. Rather it’s a somewhat mesmerizing experience that caught this reader up in its momentum, so that while I found it initially off putting and weird, I also found it awesome and compelling. It truly is a novel unlike any other I’ve ever read. (~JWFarrington)
Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved)
One thought to “Maine Time: Of Spies and Ghosts”