Tag Archives: Gladiola Overdrive

Charles Portis – Truly Gritful

Charles Portis’ True Grit, which was published in 1968, is considered a classic American Western, and that’s a shame because in reality it’s a classic regardless of genre. The story is narrated by the flawless Mattie Ross. Now to be clear, the only thing that’s flawless about Mattie is her storytelling.

Mattie is an old woman when the book opens. It’s the 1920s, and the Old West is long gone. Mattie is a smart woman. There are only two things in the world she loves: her church and her bank. But she doesn’t want to talk about them. She wants to talk about her quest to avenge her father’s “blood over in the Choctaw Nation when snow was on the ground.” It was in the 1870s, and Mattie was 14 years old. Her father, the “gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived,” was gunned down by Tom Chaney, a hired hand on her family’s Arkansas farm. Mattie travels alone to Fort Smith to finish her father’s business and start a little business of her own. She’s going to bring Chaney to justice, dead or alive.

But Chaney has escaped to the Indian Nation, which is just over the Arkansas state line in Oklahoma. That territory is a “sink of crime” but that’s not the Indians’ fault. They’ve been “cruelly imposed upon by the felonious intruders from the States.” The local sheriff has no jurisdiction in Indian territory, so Mattie needs the assistance of a U.S. Marshal. She asks for references and settles on Rooster Cogburn, a “pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.” He’s a man with grit. A Texas ranger, LaBoeuf (pronounced LaBeef) is also looking for Chaney because he killed a state senator. This odd trio goes into the Indian Nation searching for a killer. What’s the worst that could happen?

This isn’t Disney’s version of the Old West. There are no singing cowboys on horseback. Actually, LaBoeuf does sing some, but you get my point. Mattie can recall “when half the old ladies in the county were ‘dopeheads.'” I never heard anyone in the Apple Dumpling Gang say that. There’s a high body count, and no one returns unscathed.

Rooster Cogburn is an iconic character in American literature, but the story is a classic because it’s told by Mattie Ross. Her voice is matter-of-fact, unintentionally humorous at times, and indelible. “I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked though often useful.” You’ll remember Mattie Ross for a long time. She’s the one with true grit.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Stardust Casts a Spell

Neil Gaiman describes his short novel, Stardust, as a “fairytale for grown-ups.” That’s apt but not helpful. All his novels are adult fairytales, and that’s a good thing. There’s something appealing about a writer who finds the world magical, and it makes Stardust an enjoyable read.

The story opens in the village of Wall in England when Queen Victoria was young. That’s vague but helpful because Queen Victoria was old far longer than she was young. As the name suggests, Wall is a solid fixture firmly set in our world, but the walled town borders Faerie, which is each “land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there.” As a result Faerie is fantastical and huge, and Wall is there to keep the two worlds separate. But as every fairytale reader knows, walls are useless against magic.

And magic is everywhere, because the Faerie Market, an event that happens once every nine years, has arrived just outside of town. All sorts of enchanted items are for sale. At one stall, Dunstan meets a beautiful faerie girl who’s been enslaved by a witch. And as every fairytale reader knows, faeries be horny. Dunstan and the faerie spend an aerobic night together. Nine months later a bundle arrives outside the wall, and it has Dunstan’s name on it. He names the boy Tristran.

We jump ahead 17 years, and Tristran is single and ready to mingle, particularly with a pretty village girl named Victoria, but she refuses to even kiss him. When they see a falling star land in Faerie, Victoria agrees to grant Tristran anything he desires if he brings her the star.

Quests are perfect plot devices, because they have a way of changing people and what they think they desire. Every fairytale must have a quest, so here we are. Tristran walks into Faerie “too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed.” Faerie is beautiful and treacherous, and Tristran isn’t the only one searching for the star, who has transformed into a luminous young woman. Her name is Yvaine. A witch has deadly plans for Yvaine, and a Machiavellian nobleman needs the enchanted amulet in Yvaine’s possession. They’re prepared to kill anyone who interferes.

Tristran finds Yvaine first, but she was injured in the fall. How will he get her to Wall when two powerful adversaries are in quick pursuit? Perhaps that unicorn will help.

Gaiman knows how to cast a spell. He seems to believe life is a gift and the world, though it can be cruel and dangerous, is full of wonders. At one point, Tristran writes a note to his mother. “Have been unexpectedly detained by the world. Expect to see us when you see us.” Is this Gaiman speaking for himself or for all of us?

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Get Me the Slow Horses

If you like spy novels and you’re not reading Mick Herron’s Slough House series, what’s wrong with you? Are you consumed with self-loathing? Are you mean to children? Not obnoxious children. I have no problem with that. I’m referring to nice children. Do you enjoy treating nice children badly?

This isn’t me asking. It’s my neighbor. She loves this series, and she has excellent taste. I love the series too, but my taste is suspect.

Spook Street is the fourth installment in the series. It brings back Jackson Lamb, the delightfully acerbic and misanthropic head of the slow horses, a group of British MI5 spies who’ve fairly or unfairly been relegated to Slough House because they’re misfits, losers, or nuisances. Slough House is “where they sent you when they wanted you to go away, but didn’t want to sack you in case you got litigious about it.” When there’s an emergency and national security is at risk, no one yells “Get me the slow horses.”

Still, national emergencies happen in Britain and somehow the slow horse get tangled up in them. Much to the reader’s relief, that’s what happens once again in Spook Street. The story opens with a bomb going off in a London mall on January 1st. Forty people are killed including the suicide bomber. It should be a straightforward investigation for the real spies at MI5, but it looks like a group secretly funded by a MI5 legend, who’s now retired and has dementia, might be involved. Slough House is pulled in because the MI5 legend is the grandfather of a slow horse.

The slow horses are now on Spook Street, and “When you lived on Spook Street you wrapped up tight: watched every word, guarded every secret.” These are things the slow horses aren’t good at, and MI5 desperately wants to keep all of this a secret. But here’s the “First law of Spook Street. Secrets don’t stay secret.”

Spook Street is another fast paced installment in the Slough House series, and it’s a pleasure to read. But beware, these stories have a body count, and Mick Herron has no problem sending slow horses out to pasture with a bullet.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

The Children’s Crusade

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim. He’s an American born in 1922, but he’s a senile widower who has “come unstuck in time” when we meet him. He can revisit any moment in his life as if he’s watching a video, and the novel consists of non-linear video clips of Billy’s life, including the time he was kidnapped by aliens, brought to Tralfamadore, and put in a zoo.

The Tralfamadorians teach Billy about time and how it’s like looking at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. ”All the moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Except for their habit of putting humans in zoos, the Tralfamadorians are pretty cool dudes. ”They can see how permanent all the moments [of time] are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” So people die, but they also continue living in all the prior moments, which will always exist. That’s either comforting or distressing. It depends on how much love and happiness you’ve experienced in your allotted time – things you may not have much control over.

Billy blinks and it’s 1945, and he’s a chaplain’s assistant in World War II. In his first battle he becomes a prisoner of war, and he’s sent to a German POW camp where he and his fellow American POWs meet a group of English POWs, who were captured early in the war. The English POWs look “stylish and reasonable, and fun” so their German guards love them. The Americans are wrecks. They don’t make war look stylish, reasonable or fun, so the Germans send them to Dresden to sweep the streets. They’ll be exhibits in a different zoo.

Dresden looks like a “Sunday school picture of Heaven.” The Allies have bombed nearly every other German city, but Dresden is unscathed because it serves no military purpose. Less than a month after Billy’s arrival, the Allies inexplicably bomb it turning it into “one big flame.” 135,000 people were killed for no reason at all. Billy is one of the few survivors, and he traverses the demolished landscape looking for someone new to surrender to. 

Slaughterhouse-Five is a success on all levels. It’s a comic opera that skewers American-style capitalism and consumerism. ”Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” It’s elite science fiction that explores what time means and how that affects our understanding of life and death. But at its heart, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the all-time great anti-war novels. As fantastical as the novel is, it won’t allow you to ignore a fundamental truth: wars are fought by babies. Every war is a children’s crusade, and it’s the children, our children, who suffer most the brutal consequences of our tragic inability to get along.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

A Tribute to Unknown

So many people have created stunning art, and we don’t know their names.  Many more have committed full frontal assaults on humanity, and because they’re impossible to shame, everyone knows their names.  In terms of literature, some of the most provocative and enlivening works were written by history’s most prodigious writer:  Unknown. 

It’s Unknown who wrote the Old Testament, as it’s called by Christians.  Jews call it the Torah, which means Jesus Christ!  Quit coopting our stuff.  You do this all the time.  It’s also Unknown who wrote Pearl, Sundiata, El Cid, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Fifty Shades of Grey (The Geriatric Years), Beowulf, and many more masterpieces that give bone and flesh to the human condition.

We don’t need social media to notify us that Fame is fickle. We don’t need more grieving parents to remind us that Equity and Justice have never lived here. Time destroys everything we treasure, so it’s a blessing these works have survived in any form.  Even if the poets’ names are lost in the dank cellar of Antiquity’s library, their voices have survived . . . thus far.  Remember hexed Sappho, her name survives but insensate Time has denied us so much of her voice. 

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Loot: Imperialism Gets a Slap on the Wrist

Tania James’ Loot opens in Srirangapatna, Mysore in 1794. The French are its colonial rulers. Abbas is 17 and a gifted woodcarver. He’s sent to Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a brilliant French engineer and watchmaker. They create a wooden automaton depicting a tiger devouring a British soldier. It’s all good fun, and the finished marvel delights Tipu. Du Leze returns to France.

French rule is weak, and Britain’s East India Company invades with its army. The battle is bloody; Tipu is killed; the city destroyed and renamed Seringapatnam; and its precious artifacts are looted. The automaton is awarded to Colonel Selwyn, who sends it to his country estate in England. His wife collects artifacts taken from all the territories the East India Company had conquered.

Abbas has lost everything. He leaves for France, which is a long journey around the African continent. He makes it and discovers Du Leze is dead. Fortunately, Jehanne, Du Leze’s beautiful, half-Indian, adopted daughter, is alive. Romance buds, but they’re poor. Jehanne learns where the automaton is located, so she and Abbas travel to England to steal it and become rich.

Wow, Gladiola, this synopsis makes Loot sound like an exciting global adventure; historical fiction at its best. Yes, it could’ve been, but here’s the problem. James knows all the necessary elements of the hero’s quest. She mechanically checks them off, as if this is an exercise in a graduate-level creative writing program, but she’s created a heartless automaton, which is a shame because the story does have potential.

Abbas travels around Africa in 1802, but the horrors of the slave trade are fleetingly acknowledged. India is being looted, but imperialism’s greed gets a slap on the wrist. Literally. Loot is a card game Jehanne plays with Selwyn’s widow. When Lady Selwyn, who’s surrounded by all the treasures her husband looted, pulls the winning card, Jehanne reflexively slaps her wrist.

Imperialism’s misappropriation of cultural artifacts has been a hot topic globally for decades. Loot was published is 2023, but James barely mentions the issue, which is all the more surprising because Abbas is Indian and Jehanne is half Indian. Loot dutifully marches to its banal happy ending, but the reader is left with a nagging sense that this is a superficial novel full of missed opportunities.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Child of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is set in the mountains of eastern Tennessee around 1965. It opens with the county auctioning off Lester’s home. “Lester Ballard never could hold his head right after that.” Then he’s falsely accused of rape. After several days in jail, the sheriff determines Lester is not guilty (he’s certainly not innocent) of this particular crime and he’s set free.

You might think Lester is a little pissed off now, and you’d be right. But not to worry, Lester is a “child of god much like yourself perhaps.” And like you perhaps, Lester becomes unmoored, feral – though in fairness he was probably always feral. He starts collecting things: stuffed animals from the fair, women’s clothing, female corpses. You know, the standard stuff anyone would collect after losing everything.

So the sheriff gets involved again, but Lester has disappeared into the mountains. The sheriff represents what passes for civilization in this “dead and fabled waste.” This is obvious because he wears “pressed and tailored” chinos, and his name is Fate (no one ever accused Cormac McCarthy of light-heartedness or subtlety). So Fate is chasing Lester in a place the “good lord didn’t intend folks to live in.” Some things just don’t change in Cormac Land, and when the sheriff is asked if he thinks people are meaner now compared to the old days, he responds predictably. “I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

Lester is a precursor to McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. He’s just not as compelling as those superbly nihilistic killers. These novels share other Cormac tropes too: wild and brutal landscapes, men comfortable with random acts of violence, and civilization fighting a losing battle against viciousness.

But back to Child of God. I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise, but people die. And when someone dies, we call it fate even though fate had nothing to do with it. So fate does eventually catch up with Lester, but Fate doesn’t.

What makes men like Lester Ballard, Judge Holden, and Anton Chigurh so vicious? Is it the inhospitable environment? Something inside them? The devil? I hope you aren’t so naive as to think Cormac McCarthy is going to answer that for you.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Down by the River: Not your Great-Granny’s Ireland

Edna O’Brien’s Down by the River opens ominously with a road in a verdant and decaying rural Ireland. “The road is silent, somnolent yet with a speech of its own, speaking back to them, father and child, through trappings of sun and fretted verdure, speaking of old mutinies and a fresh crime mounting in the blood.” Hey, wait one hot second, Gladiola! Yes, dear reader. This is all wrong. My great-grandmother was born in Ireland, and I went there last year on a golf trip. Where are the wee folk and the pints of Guinness? The songs about unicorns? My apologies, dear reader, but this is a story by Edna O’Brien. She’s Ireland’s William Faulkner. Or, perhaps better put, William Faulkner is America’s Edna O’Brien. She writes about Ireland in all its melancholy and sordidness, so fear and superstition appear on every page – song too, but no wee folk; no unicorns.

Mary (that’s a loaded name in a predominantly Catholic country) is 14 years old. Her father is James. He loves horses, but he’s a cruel man who believes in “might before right.” He’s been raping Mary for quite some time now, and she is desperate to get away from him. She and her sister, Elizabeth (another loaded name), visit a remote shrine and pray for their father to be cured of his “epilepsy”. They speak in code, because the truth is too awful to say, even to God.

There’s another truth too awful to say: birth can be a brutally violent act. Mary witnesses this when her father helps a mare give birth. “Mare and foal, though of the same flesh, are warring, two warring things, not like a mother and its young, each fighting the other, except that the foal is stronger, her energy and her thrusting prodigal now.” Soon after, Mary becomes pregnant. When James finds out, he attacks her with a broom stick trying to cause a miscarriage. He was kinder to the horse and foal.

This is Ireland in the 1990s. Abortion is illegal. Bishops control the medical profession, and society decries the “abortion holocaust” taking place in England. Mary concludes suicide is her only option. Betty, an older cousin, rescues Mary from the river and figures out her secret. She helps Mary get to England, but a neighbor discovers the plan and alerts the authorities. Betty and Mary are brought back to Ireland before the abortion occurs.

Now the bishops and lawyers get involved. Mary becomes public property, and the public presumes to know what is best for the born and unborn. But the public only knows Mary as the “Magdalene” so how could they know best.

Time is relentless, and a decision must be made. But who gets to make it. Everyone demands to be heard, but whose voice should be heard? It’s telling we don’t hear Mary’s voice until the end. It’s beautiful.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Voltaire and the Art of Gardening

Written in 1759 Voltaire’s Candide remains relevant. That’s quite a feat, so let me revise that lackluster opening sentence with this: the story is a timeless treasure; a garden of raucous flowers all with sharp edges. There, that’s better. Am I the only one sexually aroused now? Surely not.

Candide is a “young boy whom nature had endowed with the gentlest of dispositions.” He is “sound in his judgment” and has the “most straightforward of minds.” His tutor is the great German philosopher, Pangloss, who taught him “everything is for the best.” So when Candide is literally kicked out of a baron’s castle for kissing his daughter, Cunegonde, and ends up forsaken, cold, and hungry in a nearby town where he is “recruited” into the army on the eve of battle, he is not concerned. “Everything is connected in a chain of necessity, and has all been arranged for the best.” That’s comforting to know.

But then the prevailing army kills the baron, destroys his castle, gang rapes Cunegonde, drives Candide out of the territory where he encounters the Spanish Inquisition, plagues, earthquakes, and every other kind of human and natural disaster. Still, he remains indifferent. After all, Pangloss always said “Individual misfortunes contribute to the general good with the result that the more individual misfortunes there are, the more all is well.” I’m still sexually aroused.

Candide is a stunning satire that has you laughing at the most degenerate of humanity’s creations: war, religion, philosophy, civilization, government. The list goes on. Candide travels the world and everywhere his foundational belief in optimism is challenged and fails. Eventually he lands in Turkey where he abandons optimism as a “mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

But what philosophy can replace optimism? Don’t we need a philosophy to understand why humanity exists? When Candide questions a learned dervish why there is so much evil in the world, the dervish asks “What does it matter whether there’s evil or good? . . . When his Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?” My guess is no.

Leaving the dervish, Candide encounters a humble, but content, farmer who advises him to cultivate his garden because “Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

So cultivate your garden, my friend, and may you prosper from your endeavors. Still sexually aroused.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Tiger by the Tail

In Real Tigers, the third installment in his entertaining Slough House series, Mick Herron asks one important question. Can you tell the difference between a real tiger and a paper tiger? The answer better be yes, or you may end up dead, dead, dead. At least that’s what happens in this diverting page turner.

Slough House is where Britain’s MI5 dumps its slow horses, spies who are either cursed, incompetent, unlikeable, or addicted to something. Then it gives them nothing to do. The delightfully malevolent Jackson Lamb is the foul-smelling misanthrope in charge of Slough House. He is roused from his alcohol-aided slumbers when one of his team goes missing.

Catherine Standish leaves Slough House one intolerably hot evening and runs into an old MI5 colleague. She gets nervous because there’s no “friend falser than another spook.” Minutes later she is lifted from the street and thrown into a black van. Was that meeting on the street just a coincidence? Sure, why not?

Here’s another coincidence. Peter Judd, Britain’s home secretary, has hired a tiger team to infiltrate MI5 and test its internal defenses. Judd is a messy mop-haired scamp – a “public buffoon and private velociraptor.” If you’re thinking Boris Johnson, congratulations. You’ve connected the very obvious dots. He’s in a power struggle with MI5’s first desk and its second desk. They’re all rivals, and they hate each other. But he has a secret plan that will cage his rivals, and the tiger team is going to help.

Poor Judd. A few ex-soldiers on the tiger team have their own plans, and they don’t play ball with their corporate overlords. Slough House is brought in to help clean the mess or, in the alternative, be blamed for it. And they still need to find Catherine.

It’s best not to think too hard about the plot. It’s unnecessarily convoluted and doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. However, you don’t read Slough House novels for intense psychological drama and seamlessly constructed plots. You read them because they’re fun. The characters are deliciously petty and only begrudgingly helpful. As the story reaches its bloody conclusion, we learn who’s real and who’s paper.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor