Our Moon (Science) by Rebecca Boyle, 2024

As the title of this book hints, author Rebecca Boyle wants to impress upon us how important the moon is to our life on this earth. It affects – even controls – our lives in ways many of us have never thought of.

You probably know that the moon’s gravitational pull causes the oceans’ tides. But here’s something else: the gravitational pull of the moon also stops planet earth from wobbling uncontrollably on its axis as it travels around the sun. Maybe you knew this already. I didn’t.

The book provides a lot of other fascinating thoughts about the moon. As for its creation, we get the hypothesis that, some 4.5 billion years ago, a planet dubbed “Theia,” about the size of Mars, collided with the earth as it used to be, resulting in planet earth as it is now. The moon is the offshoot of debris from the collision. Ms. Boyle also tells us that the moon can be credited with launching the evolution that led to our arrival as a species. Powerful tides caused by the moon meant that some sea creatures were stranded in shallow pools when the tides receded. The creatures that survived had mutations that allowed them to develop lungs to breathe air and bones that would enable their fins to become limbs for locomotion on land. Lo and behold ... along came humanoids further down the line.

Although Ms. Boyle, a science journalist, clearly knows a great deal about moon science, I wasn’t always able to follow her explanations of scientific matters. (A lot of science writers seem to think that many things are obvious to the average reader – including me – but they aren’t. Science writers make jumps in their thinking that leave some of us behind. I guess that’s because some readers have non-scientific mind sets.) Her explanations about the different paths of the earth’s orbiting of the sun and the moon’s orbiting of the earth weren’t clear for me. She goes into great detail about how a knowledge of the moon’s phases helped prehistoric humans to predict the seasons and how this enhanced agricultural planning. In other words, humans started to form calendars, thanks to their observations of the moon. Although Ms. Boyle gives extensive descriptions of the archeological remains of these calendars, I was never able to understand how they worked.

Still, Ms. Boyle’s re-telling of the Apollo missions to the moon, especially the landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, in 1969, is suspenseful, even if you already know the story. Also quite engaging is her telling about her visit to examine the preciously guarded moon rocks that have been brought down to earth. The book ends with sober reflections about the future of the moon. Ms. Boyle notes that international agreements about moon exploration and mining are iffy, so we need to be vigilant that this planetary buddy, which has meant so much to us, isn’t damaged irreparably.


Long Island (Novel) by Colm Tóibín, 2024

To make a coherent account of this book, we have to say a bit more about plot than we usually do here at Dilettante’s Diary.

Eilis, an Irish woman, has married into an Italian family living on Long Island. She and her husband, Tony, have a teenage daughter and son. They live in a sort of enclave, surrounded by the houses of Tony’s parents, and his brothers and their families. They’re all very welcoming, very kind to Eilis, but there’s no question that she stands out as somewhat of an oddball among them, their culture and their lifestyle being so different from the one she grew up in. When trouble develops between Tony and Eilis, she heads back to Ireland to visit her mother whom she hasn’t seen for 20 years. While she’s there, relationships from the past come alive again; people become embroiled in very complicated situations.

And here’s where we have to reveal a key plot point. (It comes up very early in the book but, still, I wish a reader could discover it on his or her own.) Eilis has learned that Tony, who is a plumber, has impregnated a woman whose house he was working in. The woman’s husband insists that he will have nothing to do with the baby when it is born. He is determined to deposit it on Eilis and Tony’s doorstep. But Eilis is just as determined to have nothing to do with the baby. That’s why she heads to Ireland to think things over while the Italian side of the family tries to decide what to do about the baby.

Mr. Tóibín creates a vivid and realistic picture of life in the small Irish town where Eilis was raised. It’s a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business – or tries to. In this respect, the novel is something like a soap opera. There’s a constant ripple of gossip and rumour running like a brook under every pub and shop, kitchen and street corner. It wasn’t until well into the book that you get a clear indication of the era, but you gradually realize that this is all taking place some time ago. Ireland seems a bit old-fashioned, compared to the US. Everybody still goes to mass on Sunday. Lots of people, not having phones, have to resort to pay phones in public places. (The cover blurb says that it’s 1976, but I steer clear of cover blurbs when I’m intending to read a book.)

The best aspect of the book – apart from the social feeling of the town – is Mr. Tóibín’s attention to people’s inner lives and how they can differ from what the people say. Very often, in fact, people’s feelings are too complex to allow for speech. When it comes to speech, it’s as if there’s an inner stage director consulting with each character about what should be said and how it might best be said.

From a writer who has written some outstandingly good novels, this one might seem a bit slight at first, but Mr. Tóibín does build the final sections of the book to a very suspenseful situation. You keep wondering how the hell things are going to work out for Eilis and her acquaintances. The wonder of it is that Mr. Tóibín ratchets up the drama very quietly and subtly.

And yet, I was left with a question about the book: why was Eilis so hostile to the illegitimate baby? Is this how any woman in her situation would feel? I don’t know. At any rate, Mr. Tóibín didn’t help me to understand her attitude. And what about the baby’s mother? Was it taken for granted that she had no say about what was going to happen to the baby? Maybe that was a factor of the time period. Maybe in those days it was assumed that a woman in her situation had no rights, that it was the husband who called all the shots.


One Perfect Couple (Mystery/Thriller) by Ruth Ware, 2024

Lyla is a British virologist whose boyfriend, Nico, wants her to accompany him on a tv reality show that purports to find the “perfect” couple among five competing couples. Nico’s a struggling actor and he figures this may be his big break, so Lyla reluctantly agrees. They and the other contestants are ferried to a resort on an idyllic island in the Indian Ocean. It’s a brand new resort that hasn’t yet had any guests. That’s how the tv producer got this place cheaply. There aren’t any staff on hand other than the production crew for the tv show. It turns out to be something of a shoe-string operation. All these limitations are important in terms of the plot of the book.

It’s interesting, for a while, to see how the contestants are handled by the tv crew, to see what restrictions and rules there are and how the contestants adjust – or not – to being filmed all the time. However, the talk among them is so vapid and the schmoozing is so phony that it would be hard for a reader to endure much of this if Lyla’s first-person narration weren’t conveying her deep-seated skepticism about it all. Even so, I had to keep wondering how this could have been written by Ruth Ware, who has authored some excellent, suspenseful and tightly plotted mysteries.

What keeps a reader hooked here, though, is the warning that trouble is looming. From the outset, we’re getting short blurbs – these are inserted as flash forwards – that are effectively transcripts of radio calls from the island, reporting on disaster and pleading for help. And yes, disaster does eventually strike. Any pretense of a tv show is abandoned and the story becomes very much a Lord of the Flies scenario. (It’s not especially clever of me to make that reference, given that one of the characters in the book does.) There’s bickering over leadership, control of the group, rationing and such. At one point, we start to get excerpts from a diary that someone is writing. At first, we don’t know who the writer is, but what’s more puzzling is that the diarist’s account of the situation contrasts – sharply in some ways – with the one that we’re getting from Lyla. In the end, there’s a good explanation for this. As for an explanation of what was happening in a general way on the island, we find out that there were wheels within wheels, so to speak.

Although it’s a well-plotted novel, I skimmed through much of the second half, not bothering with descriptions, soul-searching and agonizing. I just wanted to find out what was happening. The book was satisfying in that respect, if not as much as some other Ruth Ware books. But I did appreciate a little joke Ms. Ware makes. When the people on the island are trying to start a fire, one of them tears pages out of a book called The Woman in Cabin 10. That happens to be one of Ms. Ware’s bestsellers.


Something’s Rotten (Theatre) book and music by Karey Kirkpatrick, Wayne Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell; directed and choreographed by Donna Feore; music directed by Laura Burton; starring: Juan Chioran, Olivia Sinclair-Brisbane, Jeff Lillico, Mark Uhre, Henry Firmston, Steve Ross, Starr Domingue, Dan Chameroy; Stratford Festival, July 28, 2024.

We’re in 16th century London, England. Two brothers, Nick and Nigel Bottom, are struggling – with massive lack of success – to produce plays. They’re deeply in debt to Shylock, a money lender who’s pressuring them to pay up. Trouble is, the theatre-going public is enthralled with the work of the egotistical William Shakespeare. To get the jump on him, Nick and Nigel consult a soothsayer who tells them that Shakespeare’s next hit is going to be about an Omelette and it’s going to have something to do with Danish pastry. Strangest thing of all, says the soothsayer– it’s going to be a “musical” – whatever that is. Faster than you can crack a slapstick, Nick and Nigel are trying to upstage the Bard.

Here we have a show that’s something like a farce, a Christmas panto and Monty Python on steroids. You’re not going to come away with any insights into life, no deeper understanding of what it means to be human, but it’s the most theatrical thing I’ve ever seen. The singing and dancing are out of this world. A couple of the numbers are literally showstoppers. Some theatre friends who attended this performance with me said they’ve never seen this before: two standing ovations in the middle of a show.

To give just some of the feel of the show ... there’s the song “It’s hard to be a Bard.” (How could we avoid that, given the rhyming potential?) One example of the craziness afoot would be the staging of the rivalry between Shakespeare and Nick Bottom as a tap dancing duel. Bawdy references and ribald humour are sprinkled throughout the show like pepper on an omelette. For instance, a Puritan dad who rails against his daughter’s involvement with these theatre people keeps inadvertently emitting double entendres with gay overtones. But a lot of the smutty stuff goes by so fast that older people who might be offended aren’t likely to catch much of it. Kids probably wouldn’t understand most of it. Other things that might be missed – by someone who isn’t completely conversant with Broadway history – would be some of the affectionate jibes at musicals, but surely everybody can catch some of the jokes about Cats, The Phantom, The Sound of Music, the Little Shop of Horrors, Les Miserables and the like.

Every cast member is superb, but if a trophy had to be given for the best performance, it would have to go to Dan Chameroy, as the soothsayer. With his timing, his mugging and his exquisite vocalizations, he gives a brilliant demonstration of the classic comic acting that has been one of the great pleasures of the Stratford stage since its inception in the 1950s.

At first I was a bit resistant to the show, largely because of the audience reaction. You felt that the laughter, right from the get-go, was about people congratulating themselves on getting the Shakespearean references. And maybe we didn’t need a 16th century wife who was determined to go out and show that she could do any work that a man could do? But the spirit of the show was so good-natured that we couldn’t begrudge that touch of 21st century political correctness. Besides, the issue of reversed gender roles turned out to have a delightful twist in the resolution of the plot.


12 Dinners (Theatre) by Steve Ross, directed by Jan Alexandra Smith; starring Ben Skipper, Jane Spidell and Geoffrey Pounsett. Here For Now Theatre, Stratford, Ont. July 27th, 2024.

This was my first taste of the fare offered by a relatively new theatre group in Stratford, Ont. Here For Now Theatre, in its flourishing fifth season, is producing five full productions and several smaller events. A feminist company HFNT, focuses on new or underproduced plays and performs in a tent on the grounds of the Stratford Museum.

Since a member of my family is involved in 12 Dinners, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to offer an actual review of the show, but that doesn’t mean I can’t mention it here. The play consists of a young man’s visits (Ben Skipper) to his mom (Jane Spidell) and dad (Geoffrey Pounsett). Thanks to the son’s wry wit – he addresses the audience a lot – there’s humour in these encounters but we sense, early on, that there’s some conflict simmering in the mother-son relationship. When it gradually boils over, we hear things that we’ve never heard before in the theatre. The resulting drama makes for some of the hardest scenes I’ve ever had to sit through.


Think Twice (Mystery/Thriller) by Harlan Coben, 2024

Myron Bolitar and his long-time friend, Win, are confronted by the FBI with startling newsnews:: the news:DNA of a former client of Myron’s has been found at a murder scene. But the client is supposed to have died a few years before. So the feds want to know where Myron and Win are hiding him. Not hard to imagine that this will make for some intriguing story-telling. Which it does.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that, now and then, we get a chapter that reveals the actions and the thinking of a serial killer. (We don’t know who it is, though.) This person has an ingenious skill for setting up murders in such a way that the evidence points conclusively to somebody else as the guilty party. The perpetrator thus gets pleasure from the killing and from ruining another person’s life. I haven’t encountered that in a mystery before this.

However, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as most of Harlan Coben’s books. That’s partly because there’s so much back-tracking and filling in about what happened years ago. The suspect in the case that the FBI bring to Myron and Win, a champion basketball coach, was the player who delivered the injury that ended Myron’s career as a basketball player. I found the re-hashing of the basketball history tiresome. Also, there were a lot of former spouses and lovers and children who were or were not their parents’ biological offspring. Hard to keep track of the connections and to care about them. What bothered me even more was the cutesy sexual joking between Myron and his wife. Was the author trying to convince us that some people can have sweet, fulfilling relationships in spite of the grime and grit in the lives around them? An admirable message, except that it didn’t ring true to me. Another disappointment was the character of Win, Myron’s colleague. In previous books – especially the one eponymously named after him – he was an outstanding, unforgettable character. There’s still some of his wit here, his intelligence, his love of luxury and his commitment to paid-for, unemotional sex, but he seems a pale shadow of the man in the earlier books that featured him.


Toxic Prey (Thriller) by John Sandford, 2024

Usually, I categorize a John Sandford as a mystery/thriller, but this one is unquestionably more thriller than mystery. There’s no doubt about who the bad guys are. They’re a group of people who believe that humans are killing the earth, so they’ve decided to try to kill off about half the human population in order to save the earth. They’re going to do this by means of spreading a lethal virus they’ve created by combining a measles virus (for communicability) with a Marburg virus (for deadly results). Their fiendish aim is to infect airports and places where lots of people gather, so that the virus can spread around the world as quickly as possible.

Lucas Davenport, one of John Sandford’s long-time heroes, and his daughter Letty are heading up a team that’s trying to find the plotters and stop them. We don’t get much of the flavour of Davenport’s character or his humour, except for his reaction to the affair that’s developing between Letty and a Brit from MI5 who has joined the team. The team heads to northern New Mexico where the plotters are thought to be hatching their plan. There’s a great deal of shuffling among various locations, with lots of violence along the way. At times, Letty and Davenport are working at different sites, which can make it difficult to keep track of them. Near the end of the book, there’s so much scurrying back and forth among different highways and back roads, that a reader almost needs a GPS to follow what’s going on. The narrative is taut, suspenseful and well-constructed, but it’s more of an action movie than the kind of thing I want in a Sandford novel.


Breaking and Entering (Novel) by Don Gillmor, 2023

Bea, a woman around 50 years old, and her husband, Sang (short for Sanger), live near the University of Toronto, where he’s a professor. Bea has a small art gallery that doesn’t get much business. Their son, Thomas, is at university in Montreal. He was a sweet child but now he’s taciturn, not very communicative. Bea and Sang’s marriage looks like it’s dying. They meet with university friends for dinners where everybody follows the same old conversational treadmills. Bea tries to pay as much attention as she can to her mother who’s in a seniors’ home. Bea’s sister, Ariel, who lives in western Canada, doesn’t do much for their mother but constantly finds fault with Bea’s caring for her.

This might seem like a “kitchen-sink” drama about a contemporary woman’s drab life in a world where dreams and youthful enthusiasms seem to have expired. Except there’s something quite unusual about Bea. She’s become keen on picking locks. (She joined a club whose members have the same interest.) So she starts breaking into people’s houses and apartments. She doesn’t take anything much. She mainly just looks around, trying to get a feeling of what the residents’ lives are like. Sometimes she finds out who they are and then follows them around town as they go about their lives.

Is this just a kooky gimmick on the author’s part to make Bea interesting? Is it simply a way to make this novel different from anything you’ve read before? Well, it certainly does stand out in that respect. But I don’t think Bea’s penchant is just a cheap trick on the part of the author. There’s something about Bea’s wandering around in these houses, her becoming familiar with them, her noticing details about the occupants’ lives, that helps us to know her as an observant person, someone who’s thoughtful, someone who’s interested in what life is like for other people.

The author endows her with intriguing insights. She thinks about couples who trudge through life jointly, “moving toward death like hamsters sharing a wheel.” When thinking about the proliferation of drugs in our society, she worries about the fact that “80 percent of oncoming traffic consisted of drivers who either were on something or had forgotten to take their meds.” She watches a man pick up a woman’s hand and examine it “like one of those people on the antique shows, turning it over, assessing its worth.” Thinking about how love doesn’t last, she wonders if it was her generation “that needed instant gratification, everyone believing they deserved a happiness that came in the shape of an uplifting movie.” Still, she knows that, no matter how evident the problems in a marriage, “there was still a large, dark territory between a bad marriage and splitting up.” She reflects on the fact that falling in love can happen so quickly, but falling out of love was “more protracted, subtler, the slow decay of radioactive material, cooling quietly, that toxic landscape.”

Obviously, I found Bea a person worth spending time with. Occasionally, her story included incidents that seemed to jar with the contemplative tone of the rest of the book, incidents that seemed too sensational – for instance, a traffic jam that led to a shooting that Bea witnessed. But those things can happen, even in a quiet, introspective life, can’t they? Frequent reference to unbearable heat in the Toronto summer seemed a bit excessive. And I wasn’t entirely sure how things stand with Bea and her husband at the end of the book. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe there’s no conclusive ending in real life, as opposed to novels. Maybe we’re always adjusting, never really ending. Maybe that’s what Mr. Gillmor wants us to learn from Bea.


This Plague of Souls (Novel) by Mike McCormack, 2023

After a few years in prison, Nealon returns to his farmhouse in West Ireland and finds that his wife and son (about six years old) aren’t there. No sign of them. We don’t know why Nealon was in prison except that he was awaiting a trial that kept being deferred. Eventually, the prosecution dropped the case. Nealon starts receiving anonymous phone calls from someone who says that Nealon needs to meet him for a chat. The caller hints that some kind of legal scam was involved in Nealon’s release.

The brief blurb about this book in the New York Times called it a “metaphysical thriller.” And a quote from Anne Enright on the cover of the book calls it “metaphysical and moving.” It’s hard for me to say what genre the book belongs in. It’s certainly not a conventional novel. There’s a touch of what might be considered sci-fi in it. Metaphysical? Maybe. The word ‘surrealist’ also comes to mind.

This is one of those books that you can’t say much about, for fear of giving away too much. Let’s just say that, in the second half of the book, we’re getting a take on Nealon’s life that’s far from the picture of the forlorn husband we started with. We’re taken into territory where we’re hearing about fantastic plotting and ingenious strategizing that has international implications. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about all this is that we’re not getting any clear assurance that any of what we’re hearing is true.

Quite apart from the details of the story, there is a quality to the writing that I found strange. One could almost say that it’s over-written, not in terms of too many adjective and adverbs, not in a plethora of metaphor and other literary devices, but rather in the sense that the descriptions of the characters’ feelings and thoughts go way deeper than what we expect to encounter in most writing, or, for that matter, in any people we know. When Nealon’s listening to the events described on the radio news, “ ... he does not relate to them now, they do not affect him in any way whatsoever. He does not belong to them, nor they to him. They are birds of a different sky, tracing different arcs through this blue day. The engaged tone of the speakers now baffles him. How can you be so involved, he wonders as a correspondent quotes figures on hospital overcrowding and underfunding. Does this really affect you?” Surprised at the wild growth that grew up around the house while he was in prison, he realizes that he thought time should have stood still or moved more slowly while he was away. “The idea embarrasses him. It comes from a part of him that is ever prone to such nonsense; a soft place in which he has often lost his footing.”

At one point in the book, Nealon thinks of himself as “a man who skilfully came at the world from a different angle.” Later he thinks that he “seemed to have been born to the margins of things, prowling around the edges, looking in from the darkness.” A reader who was prone to the execrable habit of making notes in the margin of a book might well have jotted: “That’s for sure!”

None of which is to say that the book doesn’t contain some marvellous writing. When Nealon’s thinking about putting his hand on his little boy’s head, he realizes most observers would see it as an expression of affection. But it wasn’t that. “The feel of the child’s head under his hand was his assurance that he was real and not some construct of light and wishful thinking, some being who had come to stand at the intersection of his own longing and life in the world.” A description of a helicopter landing has the immediacy and reality of a Stephen Spielberg film: “ ... a tremendous buffering force hammering off the windows. The whole space throbs with concussive noise ... [my elipses] ... it hangs in the grey light, so weighty and improbable at this distance that it consumes all astonishment in the room.”

So what about the book’s “metaphysical” or “surrealist” qualities? Does its strangeness make any sense in the end? I can’t say whether or not the book succeeds in this respect. We certainly get a noir-ish picture of a man who’s ill at ease with his sense of himself and his place in the world. As for the ‘plot’ of the book – I’m not sure it’s so compelling. If the author is laying out some kind of ‘thesis,’ it didn’t particularly convince me. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get the point.

[note: Avoid the description of the book on the fly leaf of the cover; it tells far too much of the story]


Mrs. Plansky’s Revenge (Novel) by Spencer Quinn, 2023

When it comes to telephone frauds, you know the shtick: you get a call from your supposed grandchild claiming that he or she is in terrible trouble and needs your financial help and, most importantly, you can’t tell anybody else about it. That’s the kind of call that caught Mrs. Plansksy in the middle of the night. A lady in her seventies and living in Florida, Mrs. Plansky begins to realize, over the following days, what happened to her. When the full brunt of it comes over her, she packs her bags and heads to Europe to wreck justice on the perpetrators.

It’s hard to say exactly what kind of book this is. Comedy? Adventure? Mystery? Satire? It has elements of all those genres. It also has a lot of the features of a picaresque novel, in that you’ve got someone plunging into new territory, having weird experiences along the way. In a picaresque, though, the main character is usually a bit of a rascal, a “low class” fellow; Mrs. Plansksy is anything but. She’s prosperous in her retirement, thanks to a successful business that she and her deceased husband established. In a picaresque, the hero often comes close to crossing the line between acceptable conduct and criminality. That’s not quite Mrs. Plansky, but she does find herself engaging in certain tactics that she previously considered improper. And her story evolves in the same episodic way that a picaresque does; she more or less stumbles from one development to another.

Mrs. Plansky’s qualities are the most beguiling aspects of the book. She’s someone we feel we can know and like. She frequently has thoughts that run counter to what’s acceptable but she keeps them to herself and voices the kind of thing that a respectable woman like her is supposed to say. That helps us to feel that we’re “on the in” with her. Often, a shocking thought will come to her and, a second later, she’s not sure whether or not she has spoken it out loud. Little lapses like that help us to identify with an older person who isn’t teetering on the brink of dementia but whose mind isn’t functioning as efficiently as it once did. Sometimes, she carefully works out what would be the correct thing to do, and then – like all of us at times – does the opposite. Not that she doesn’t have a canny self-knowledge and a shrewd assessment of her strengths and weaknesses. At one point, she’s surprised to notice that something she said “sounded like it came from someone who knew what she was doing.”

Another aspect of Mrs. Plansky’s personality that helps us to bond with her is her undying love for her deceased husband. Without being saccharine or maudlin, she recalls many happy moments with him, comments of his that pleased or amused her; even his quirks and foibles are fondly recalled. It’s not often that a novel gives us such a clear statement of indubitable married happiness.

The jacket flap tells us that the name given as the author’s – “Spencer Quinn” – is actually the pen name for Peter Abrahams, who has written several mysteries under his own name. I haven’t read any of them but this book shows the work of a writer who knows how to handle narrative with expertise. Scenes are developed with a life-like authenticity. You can feel the progress of the dialogue, the movement of the characters’ emotions as though you were watching a scene in a movie or a play. Another outstanding quality of the book is that it follows the “bad guys” as the best mysteries sometimes do. In this case, we get to know the people who have perpetrated the telephone scam. We don’t exactly feel sympathy for these crooks but we do begin to understand how people can get caught up in this kind of racket.

Some readers I’ve talked to have found the book’s ending somewhat implausible, even contrived. Yes, it is. So is much of the book. There’s a lot of coincidence and good luck in play. You might even say the ending is a bit fanciful. But it’s not Ibsen. It’s meant to be entertaining. And it is.


Resurrection Walk (Mystery) by Michael Connelly, 2023

This is billed as a “Lincoln Lawyer Novel”, which is appropriate in that Mickey Haller has the starring role. But Harry Bosch, his half brother, has a major role too. Haller has decided to take on wrongful conviction cases. Bosch is looking through all the requests that come in, with the intention of trying to find ones that would be worth taking on. “Resurrection Walk” is the term Haller uses to describe the release from prison of a person who has been wrongly convicted. He says that witnessing such an event is the high point of his life as a lawyer.

Here, he’s decided to pursue the case of a woman who was convicted of killing her husband, a cop. He was shot on her front lawn, after storming out of her house following an argument. She claims that, on his departure, she went inside and slammed the door. When she heard the shots, she hid in a safe room with their son. But the tests conducted by the cops who arrived on the scene found that she had gun shot residue on her hands. Her lawyer convinced her that, since the evidence against her was so strong, she should not contest a charge of manslaughter; that would result in a sentence of about five years, whereas a murder trial might lead to life imprisonment. But, as her plea to Haller makes clear, she still insists that she’s innocent. Bosch finds flaws in the evidence against her, so he and Haller take the case.

As expected, you get the intricate plotting and steady narrative drive in a Connelly book. Throughout the book, Haller comes across as feisty as ever and, as usual, his management of the courtroom hearing – an attempt to nullify the woman’s acceptance of the manslaughter conviction – is rivetting. The judge hearing the case is a notable person: wise, shrewd, fair but with human limitations. (In a movie, this would be a plum role.) By way of bonus, an amusing twist at the very end puts Haller in an odd situation. Bosch, however, seems to be declining a bit. A couple of times, it’s mentioned that he’s looking older. The cancer therapy that he’s been undergoing seems to have been successful but he lacks something that made him such an engaging hero in so many books.

In fact, there’s a faintly valedictory quality to this book. At the end of it, Haller is thinking that maybe the time has come for a major change in his life. And, in the author’s acknowledgments, Michael Connelly offers thanks to the readers “who have stuck with me for thirty-plus years.” He says that his “amazing life as a story-teller”wouldn’t have been possible without his readers. Is he hinting that his story-telling is coming to an end?


Family Meal (Novel) by Bryan Washington, 2023

Prior to this novel’s catching my eye on the library’s “recommended” shelf, Bryan Washington caught my attention with some New Yorker short fiction that conveyed the startling and somewhat brutal reality of life for some young gay men in the US.

Family Meal, set mostly in Houston and Los Angeles, tells about the lives of three gay men. Each section of the book is narrated by one of the men. First there’s Cam, who has come back to Houston after a long absence; he works in a bar but he takes great delight in cooking and baking. There’s Kai, who was Cam’s lover. (We know that Kai’s dead now, but never mind.) Then there’s TJ, whose Korean family owns a bakery in Houston. He and Cam more or less grew up together because TJ’s family took in Cam as a sort of foster child when he lost his parents. Having come back to Houston after Kai’s death, Cam didn’t get in touch with TJ right away. That makes for some awkwardness when they meet again.

Cam, in the section that he narrates, comes across as a wise-cracking, larger-than-life personality. He has a shrewd take on human nature and a sardonic sense of humour, liberally sprinkled with self-deprecation. At times, he comes across as self-centred but he’s kind and helpful to his employer’s troubled son. Cam’s behaviour is outrageous at times, but maybe that’s because he’s grappling with the loss of Kai. To say that Cam goes in for a lot of indiscriminate sex would be like saying that the pope really digs religion. Via cell phone apps, Cam teams up with almost any man, any time, any place. He drinks too much and pops a lot of mood-altering pills. It may not be revealing too much plot to say that he seems to be heading for a major breakdown.

Kai’s sections of the book are more poignant and wistful – not surprisingly, given that he’s dead. We see him as a beautiful, sensitive person which makes his death – the result of a horrendous injustice – all the more tragic. The passages dealing with his impressions introduce lovely black and white photographs, sometimes of buildings and neighbourhoods that he may be referring to, but mostly of flowers and plants. I suppose this is intended to give us some of the feeling of Kai’s spirit.

TJ’s narration centres on his work at the bakery. A few plot elements are stirring: his mother is thinking about selling the bakery; he’s having an on-again-off-again affair with a man who is engaged to a woman; TJ is also developing a relationship with a non-binary “they” employee at the bakery (who turns out, eventually, to have a penis). Apart from those elements, however, there’s a lot of coming and going at the bakery, with short sentences of dialogue between people we may or may not know or care about. I found a lot of this boring. Maybe the problem is that TJ’s voice isn’t as engaging as Cam’s or Kai’s. It lacks humour, for one thing.

It may be fair to say that the book is something of a literary experiment. There’s certainly an “arty” touch to it. Besides the photographs, we get several pages that are empty except for one, two or three lines of text. I think this is meant to signal that we have to treat this book differently from the way we would a typical novel. It’s meant to convey character, mood, situations, moments more than a “story.” Some readers might find the accounts of these lives pointless and desultory, but the book does lead to some appreciable truths. One of the men says he’s learned that “we need everyone.” He also lands on the fact that “just being is the gift.” And it’s hard to quibble with this one: “with every single person we touch, we’re leaving parts of ourselves.”


Priscilla (Movie) written by Priscilla Presley, Sandra Harmon and Sofia Coppola; based on the memoir by Priscilla Presley; directed by Sophia Coppola; starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Ari Cohen, Dagmore Domincyzk, Tim Post.

Why watch a movie about Elvis Presley’s marriage? Wouldn’t you be buying into the Hollywood fan culture with its lurid speculation and trashy gossip? Maybe, but not completely. In the first place, you can be pretty sure that a movie by Sophia Coppola is going to have something significant to say about life. And, after all, you’re dealing here with one of the major cultural icons of the Western world in the 20th century. Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to find out what his wife had to say about life with him?

So, yes, this movie does appeal somewhat to the side of you that wants to binge on a bit of tabloid-style voyeurism. But it also paints a picture of a time when things in our society were changing. In the person of Priscilla Presley (neé Beaulieu), we see a woman who gradually realizes that the role of a wife may not be what her husband expects it to be. It seems that Elvis wanted his wife to be a sort of doll that he could have on his arm – or a rose in his lapel, if you want to put it that way. He dictated what kind of clothes she should wear, what colour her hair should be. His sense of ownership had him constantly referring to her as ‘baby’ and ‘little one.’

There’s no doubt, though, that he loved her, in his way. The early scenes, where they meet in Germany while he’s on military duty, show how he was drawn to this ingenuous, quiet American girl who wasn’t fawning over him the way most fans did. Barely 15 years old, she wasn’t even outstandingly pretty, just nice-looking, in an ordinary way. That seemed to make his approach to her honest and direct, human-to-human. He could confide in her about his grief over his mother’s death. His affectionate overtures, not to mention his glamour, made her almost helpless to not love him. Once she became caught up in his world, she tried to become the sort of kewpie doll he seemed to want but she eventually realized that her true personhood was being usurped.

Not that it was easy for him. While being bossed around by the Colonel, he was struggling to stay on top in the face of competition from upcoming groups like the so-called “Beatles.” He was immersed in a world of pop culture that wasn’t gifted with astute insights into marital relations. How was he supposed to understand what was going on with Priscilla? The drugs that nobody was trying to stop him from taking weren’t helping matters.

In a movie bio, does it matter how much the stars look like the real-life people they’re representing? Maybe not much, as long as they can capture enough of the feel of the characters. Jacob Elordi is far more handsome than Elvis. In fact, Mr. Elordi is about as god-like as any human male could be. He seems much taller than Elvis and we never see any sign of the weight gain that plagued Elvis. Still, Mr. Elordi looks a lot like Elvis much of the time; he has the rogue-ish smile and the twinkle in the eye, but there’s something a bit too prince-like about him. He lacks that slightly trashy quality that made Elvis dangerous and exciting. In short, he doesn’t have Elvis’ charisma. (But how could anybody but Elvis have it?) I don’t know whether or not Cailee Spaeny is anything like Priscilla but she gives a credible – maybe even an unforgettable – portrait of a sincere woman caught in difficult circumstances. The fact that she lacks a sort of starry quality makes her performance all the more convincing.

The movie left me with one question: those seven or eight men – Elvis’ entourage – who surrounded him everywhere except in the bedroom. Who were they? Why were they there? Were they on his payroll? Maybe the movie assumes we all know so much about his life that their presence doesn’t have to be explained. Not me.


Cat Brushing (Short Stories) by Jane Campbell, 2022

This collection seems to be based on the premise that readers are accustomed to hearing about the erotic urges of older men, so why not older women? And that’s what we get here. Not that there’s anything terrifically hot or spicy – let alone pornographic – on offer, but we do get a convincing sense of an older woman’s sexual interests – both in memory and in the present. Just one episode made me cringe a bit – some sexual kissing between an elderly woman and her female nurse – but maybe that’s just the conventional prude in me coming to the fore, rather than any misstep on the part of the author.

For the most part, the stories don’t show a strong narrative drive. You might say that most of them are mood pieces or character studies. The title story is just a lovely collection of an older woman’s thoughts as she brushes a cat in her son’s house where she’s living now, reviewing her past loves and wondering what’s going to become of her and the cat.

The author – and the elderly women who are her main characters and narrators – have a knack for seeing things in people that most of us might not notice. On a train journey, for instance, an elderly woman begins to take an interest in a nice-looking gentleman, about her own age, sitting across the aisle. “She had been thinking that he looked sad like her father had been sad; a soft sentimental pensiveness that had turned her heart over when she was a child and probably ever since. And here it was again; a sort of wistfulness that he could not possibly have been aware of.” Later, talking to the man about childhood, she realized that the adults had been peripheral: “... essential, of course, supplying context and depth to the family pictures but only in so far as their roles offered a background chiaroscuro to the brightly lit foreground of the younger members.”

Among the stories that do have some plot, one of the ones that I liked best told about an older woman’s trip to a conference in Africa, in the hopes of seeing a man she had had an adulterous affair with many decades previously. A story entitled “Kindness” packs in some fiendish plotting with macabre results that give us an ironic twist on the title that is, perhaps, intended as a black joke on the concept of the nice little old lady.

In a collection of sensitive writing like this, it might not be surprising that some of the author’s intentions could be so fine, so elusive, that you can’t quite catch them. In a story called, “The Question,” a woman in hospital realizes that her nurse is a man who had participated in a therapy group that she conducted years ago. He’d been through a traumatic experience but what he told the therapy group about it was quite different from what he’d told her privately. As she’s leaving the hospital many years later, she and the nurse have a cordial parting, even though she’s not sure that he remembers her from the therapy sessions. She tells us that she would never have asked him the critical question. “I am sure I know the answer anyway,” she says. But I don’t know the answer. I don’t even know the question.


Throw Me to the Wolves (Mystery) by Patrick McGuinness, 2019

If you’re a fan of police procedurals – which this book is supposed to be – you may be wondering what you’ve gotten into here. Yes, a murder has occurred and yes, the detective who’s working on the case is our narrator, but it takes a lot of reading to find out what the case actually is and how the police are handling it. The book reads more like a brooding, angst-ridden, existential reflection on our compromised and sullied lives, as seen by the detective narrator.

The book starts with a moody chapter about boys who were fascinated by a bridge near their school. The murky water under the bridge seemed to have an ominous appeal to them. Then comes a chapter with an elderly man reminiscing about his childhood. Along the way, our detective narrator happens to let us know that he, the detective, believes in ghosts that haunt us: “The haunters are still versions of us, they’ve just gone over to the other side.” He says we’ve invented them to replicate our actions. Then come the memories of a couple of boys about life in the school where that elderly man taught. (Later, we’ll learn that our detective was one of those boys.)

Eventually, we find out a bit more about the murder. A young woman’s body has been found dumped in a ditch near England’s river Thames. The prime suspect is a retired man who taught at a boys’ school in the area. The murdered woman’s DNA has been found in his car and his apartment. He admits that they had a casual friendship, that she had been in his apartment and that he had given her a ride in his car. But he’s an odd bloke: aloof, somewhat detached from people, not very social, an afficionado of culture and the arts. He’s the one who was reminiscing about his childhood when first interviewed by the detectives. He seems evasive, expatiating on topics that don’t have anything to do with their questions. So they’re keeping him in custody until they can find enough evidence to charge him with the murder.

Although that quest isn’t proceeding very well, we soon realize that we’re in the hands of a gifted writer/narrator whose observations about life and about human character are in keeping with the finest literature. Ander, our detective, notes that when neighbours are questioned about the murder victim, they “try out various frowns of sincerity” and that one woman who’s questioned shivers in a way that she hopes will convey “palpable distress.” A woman thinking about her husband who died in bed remembers that the paramedics were referring to “the body” as if death “took his personal pronouns away.” Thinking about dealing with elderly people, Ander notes: “They are so thin that when you help them back into the car it is like folding a deckchair.”

One the many characters who stand out as fascinating is Gary, Ander’s partner in the detective work. He’s a younger cop, brash, crude, impatient and inclined to road rage. “He doesn’t want to be mistaken for the kind of person who orders olives or wasabi peas in bars,” Ander tells us. “He is also kind. But because kindness is not part of his self-image as a coarsened, cynical cop with no life beyond the job and a tabloid-swagger turn of phrase, we have an unspoken agreement to pretend he isn’t.” Ever heard of a more interesting cop? It’s especially satisfying to watch how Gary’s cast-iron certainties about a case can gradually change.

The story takes only four days. A large part of the book shows how the press attacks the suspect, digging into his past and coating him in guilt. The papers pay huge sums to people who can provide memories that make the man look suspicious. Day after day, more damning headlines about the suspect appear. Is this a custom of the British tabloid press? Perhaps it’s the kind of thing that made Prince Harry’s life in England intolerable. It seems to me that we don’t get that unbridled venom from the press in Canada. And yet, Mr. McGuinness shows us that the journalist leading the charge against the suspect is an intelligent, conscientious professional who understands exactly what she’s doing. “I don’t make things happen,” she says. “I’m just the way they happen. I’m the form they take. That’s all.”

Among the book’s charms are little side roads that the author takes us down. For instance, he takes his little niece to visit an elderly lady whose husband recently died. Through their visits, you keep wondering: what do these moments have to do with the mystery? Nothing, as it turns out. It’s just the author’s way of conveying the fullness of Ander’s life, especially when we finally learn how these visits started. Mind you, there’s still the mystery about the murder. The way that Ander and Gary solve it is professional and painstaking but there isn’t anything particularly brilliant or surprising about it. That might be disappointing to die-hard mystery fans but it’s perfectly in keeping with the sense of the book as a realistic, believable insight into the life around us.

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