Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane

Thank you to Walter Giersbach for sharing this review with me! You can also find it on Goodreads.

Take This Writer Very Seriously

It’s presumptuous to think my review of “Since We Fell” will add anything to Mr. Lehane’s stature.  But I’m compelled to say that the first two-thirds of the novel gave me insights into agoraphobia, acute anxiety and fear of the world around us.  I could say, “Yes, I know what your character feels because I’ve been there,” and isn’t that why writers write?  To communicate as well as entertain.

It doesn’t help that our current times add to everyone’s dis-ease and anxiety.  I come by my neuroses (not yet debilitating like Lehane’s chief character, Rachel) with valid credentials: Recognition of my mortality at age 77 and grief over losing a wife of 46 years.  This story delves deeply into character that seems very familiar.

Writers of crime fiction often aspire to be taken seriously.  Chandler felt this.  Philip Dick wanted to be taken “seriously.”  I believe Lehane now can legitimately join the ranks of major authors interpreting our trying times.  Not the crimes, but just the difficulties of coping with one day after another and fear that the wolf is overtaking you.

Take this passage as Brian’s partner Caleb says, “When we were young, at a crucial time in the development of our selves, Brian and I were great friends.  Now he’s where he is and I’m where I am…and I’m not sure who we are anymore.  When you spend so much time in the skins of others that you don’t recognize the smell of your own anymore, maybe the only allegiance you owe is to the people who remembered you before the makeup and the stagecraft took over.”

Then — surprise! — the last third of “Since We Fell” races ahead with “reveals” that Rachel was not irrational in suspecting her husband of lying and infidelity.  There’s a magnificent $75 million scam taking place under her nose.  People die violently.  Rachel and her husband are on the run as the very bad guys close in.

This is also an urban-centric novel.  Many of Lehane’s novels center on the Boston area.  He’s a Boston boy the way Raymond Chandler was a Californian, Faulkner a Mississippian.  I feel a kindred spirit for Boston because of that year I lived in Cambridge.  Boston is, like New York and a few other cities, a personality in its own right.  Robert S. Parker knew that when his heir apparent Ace Atkins set Lullaby in that city and included a street map in the frontispiece.

This is the 10th Dennis Lehane novel I’ve read and it’s by far the best of the best.

posted to Goodreads 6/30/17

Thank you Walter! I have some catching up to do!

The Violins of Saint-Jacques

Patrick Leigh Fermor. The Violins of Saint-Jacques. Introducton by James Campbell. NY: New York Review of Books.

This novella can be read in one relaxed reading-filled day, but it is packed with good solid words, both English and French. Fermor uses at least a handful of words that I haven't come across before, such as "orgulous" and "unarmigerous." Each sentence is made up of wonderful consonants, hard and soft, that find their way into the small vacant spaces in one's brain. I wanted to write down and record every sentence as I was reading. Here is an example -- you should read it out loud to get a feel for these words.

"The orgulous record of their gestures - the carnage they had wrought among the Caribs and the English, their Christian virtues, the multitude of their progeny, their valour in attack and their impavid patience in adversity, the suavity of their manners, the splendour of their munificence and their pious ends - was incised with a swirling seventeenth-century duplication of long S's and a cumulative nexus of dog-Latin superlatives that hissed from the shattered slabs like a basketful of snakes" (p. 20). (so many v's!)

Fermor, is a travel writer, and he does excel at description. In this novella, the narrator is a traveler who has landed on a small Greek Island after traveling in the Caribbean. The novella opens with a brief history and description of the island, Saint-Jacques, located on the "sixty-first meridian," a "few leauges windward from the channel that flows between Guadeloupe and Dominica and well to the south-east of Marie Galante, where it hung like a bead...." It's disappearance from the maps is "no mystery," but the reader doesn't learn of its fate until near the end of the novella.

The narrator tells its story as he hears it from an aging artist who, in the 1890s made her way from France to St. Jacques to serve as a governess to distant relatives. The story is one of opulence, class and racial division, colonial privilege and eccentricity -- as though the inhabitants of St. Jacques were rare species that had evolved in isolation from others of their kind. What seemed distasteful  to me in the everyday practices of St. Jacques is related by the narrator without flinching or signs of distaste. Fermor published the novel in the 50s, so I don't know whether this acceptance of privilege and racial division is truly unremarkable to the author, or if the tone of the novel is ironic. I think it could interpreted that way.

The main event of the story told within the story of the novella is a Shrove Tuesday ball hosted by the Serindans, the great family of the island. Fermor minutely describes the Serindans' preparations, the food, the costumes and elegant dress, the activity of the family and the guests, and the heightened emotions of the day.

To learn about the fate of St. Jacques and its inhabitants, you'll need to read this novella for yourself. Set aside a little time and take it in all at once if possible -- or several bus rides if an empty day doesn't present itself to you. It is truly enjoyable to take in Fermor's writing and the story's climax is a surprise.

Put your feet up and slip off to an imaginary island and settle into a few beautiful hours of reading.