Show Time

My review of Show Time by Phil Harvey appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books today:

Phil Harvey has crafted a psychological thriller that takes reality shows, and in fact much of our popular culture, just one step further into a realm of true horror. His novel about the ultimate survivor program places seven flawed individuals on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan as winter approaches.

Each one who survives wins $200,000, but the producers clearly expect that not all will collect the money. The individuals ― four men and three women ― are carefully selected for not being well balanced, in the assumption that this will lead to sex, violence and other action that will boost ratings.

Television viewers follow the fate of the seven participants through a series of cameras and mics mounted on the island, as well as shots from an orbiting satellite and a drone that passes over the island. The seven (victims, one is tempted to say) are each given a certain amount of food, which is not enough to last the seven months they are to stay there, as well as varied tools ― a flashlight for one, a map for another, a couple of rifles with a few dozen bullets.

Ambrose, a compulsive gambler who enters the contest to pay off his debts, emerges as the natural leader of the group. Though married, he pairs off with Cecily, who is also married and who had the good sense to put on several extra pounds before beginning the contest. Other contestants include a Navy Seal who communicates in two-word mumbles, an African American who has made his way through society conforming to racial stereotypes, a bisexual woman who maintains a regimen of exercise and yoga, a model with certain nymphomaniac tendencies and a tightly wrapped young man full of resentment who refuses to cooperate in joint survival strategies.

The novel realistically conveys a certain preoccupation with sex among these seven nubile people in survival mode. Maureen, the model, plays a key role for the participants as well as for the show’s audience. No matter how titillating the sexual expression of emotion may be for the viewers, it is, in Harvey’s skilled hands, simply a natural mechanism for coping with the need to survive.

The narrative becomes increasingly chilling ― both literally and figuratively ― as the mild autumn days, when the participants have ample food from their stocks and the island’s wildlife, give way to the cold and ice and snow of a Michigan winter. Under Ambrose’s leadership, the survival crew develops a strategy for rationing supplies, sharing game and even creating a “clear zone” where they can disable enough of the mics and cameras to have a place for meetings that are not overheard by the producers or the audience.

That is how they are able to hatch a staged drama of their own to play a trick on the producers and get some measure of revenge for being exploited. Their deception  works until a careless remark on a hidden mic gives it away; the producers then violate the terms of the contract by intervening in the action and guiding the situation to their satisfaction.

While there is some mystery in all this, the author reveals in the opening chapter that one of the participants has died, creating the inevitable dilemma of every survival drama in which  people are faced with starvation. Part of the suspense is how the other six contestants reach that point and how they resolve it.

But it is mostly Harvey’s skill in delving into the psychology of the individuals that keeps the reader turning the pages. And he does it not through any heavy-handed interior monologues but through the dialogue and interaction of the individuals. The book would easily lend itself not only to a successful movie script but to an intense stage play.

The reader comes to know these individuals, to sympathize with them in spite of ― eventually even because of ― their flaws, and to root for them in their fight against not only nature but also the unnatural culture that has put them in their situation.

The producers, led by Janice, who is a virtual sociopath, remain cardboard foils for this action. They are simply part of the hostile environment challenging the contestants. One or two of the plot twists require a heavy dose of suspended disbelief from the reader. Harvey maintains a quiet buildup of suspense, but the climax and denouement may not reach the intensity expected by some readers.

So don’t expect fireworks. There is plenty of drama in this novel, but it remains subtle. There is catharsis, but it is not complete. In this sense, the novel is more realistic than its somewhat contrived plot, or even some of the reality shows it is based on, might suggest. It is a thinking reader’s psychological thriller and as such a thoroughly entertaining read.

The Lost History of 1914

My review of this book appeared today in the Washington Independent Review of Books:

With The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began, Jack Beatty has written not so much an alternative history of 1914 as an amplified history. There are things about the year leading up to and into World War I that we have forgotten or lost sight of in the accepted narrative that war was inevitable because of the ineluctable dynamic of Great Power politics. But Beatty contends that war was not inevitable.

Much like alternative history, the book offers many “What ifs … ?” In the author’s view, history is a game of inches and war could have been avoided if certain events had gone slightly differently. Beatty cites, in particular, not only the shot that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, but also the bullet that killed the editor of Le Figaro in March, shot by the betrayed wife of peace-loving Joseph Caillaux, who might have become the premier of France only a few months later.

Beatty’s thesis is that the war resulted as much from domestic crises that propelled the various parties to war ― or crises averted that would have hindered war ― as from any international alliance or strategy. He describes what he sees as five paths that would have forestalled war. However, after reading the author’s account of possible revolution or coup in Germany, the fragmentation of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the militarization of the United States in its Mexican intervention, the fragility of Tsarist rule in Russia and the festering sore of Ulster in Britain, along with that unruly domestic situation in France, the reader might be excused for thinking it was a miracle that war didn’t break out even sooner.

The fact is, for whatever reasons, the European powers were willing to countenance war because they had no idea just how terrible modern warfare would be. And, as Beatty so tellingly recounts, when its full horror became evident, the leaders of those countries lapsed into shocked denial and kept the details from the public, allowing the war to continue and take its terrible toll in lives and lost hopes.

The author saves his harshest criticism, though, for those leaders who have hardly been forgotten but who generally come across as callow and foolish in Beatty’s unflinching portraits. Not only Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II, both of whom history has treated unkindly, but U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, French President Raymond Poincaré and British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. Austria-Hungary’s emperor Franz Josef is portrayed alternately as senile, silly and monstrously self-centered.

At this distance, it is perhaps easy to see their folly, but Beatty might have been better served ― since his goal was to take us back and immerse us in the confusion of issues that led to war ― by drawing somewhat more balanced portraits. After all, the contemporary perception of these leaders, especially those democratically elected, could hardly have been so one-sided. Who would understand the enthusiasm at the time for President John F. Kennedy, for instance, if one had to go on what intervening history has taught us?

For many Americans, in fact, much of this history will not be so much forgotten as simply overlooked in the skimpy education we get regarding the rest of the world. There is the delightful tale of the Captain from Köpenick, for instance, and what it tells us about German attitudes to Prussian militarism. And the ultimately sad story about Joseph Caillaux’s too-numerous dalliances and how that sent his wife to shoot a newspaper editor, preventing Caillaux from becoming premier and appointing his colleague Jean Jaurès as a foreign minister who would have avoided war at all costs.

Even the history of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution, the Tampico Affair and the American occupation of Veracruz ordered by Woodrow Wilson is not likely to be familiar to casual students of American history, let alone how it predisposed the United States to enter the European war. Beatty also resurrects some of the early successes of Herbert Hoover ― notably his logistical achievements in providing food aid to Europe at war ― that most of us have forgotten in the wake of his hapless tenure as president.

Beatty is not an academic historian, but the extremely well-read news analyst for NPR’s “On Point” and a longtime senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly. He writes authoritatively about the complex domestic politics and international entanglements of the six major players in what was known as the Great War. It is not an easy task, and Beatty demands some engagement from his reader to follow the intricate details of people and events, many of which, as his title indicates, have been largely lost to history.

A war that was supposed to be over within weeks, World War I dragged on an agonizing four years. Beatty does not end his chronology with the beginning of the war in August 1914. Part of the lost history is indeed the failure of Europe’s ruling class to acknowledge their tragic mistake and to come clean with the public about what the war entailed once it became evident in those early months. Beatty leaves us with the dismal thought that it was Wilson’s belated entry into the war that prolonged it for an extra year ― giving us communism in Russia and a peace that led to fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany.

America’s much longer engagement in the two-front World War II has pushed this earlier conflict into the mists of time for us. Beatty’s book serves not only to recreate, in highly readable prose, some of the lesser known factors leading to World War I, but to recall vividly a tragedy whose lessons otherwise risk getting lost. Reading his account of the year the Great War began, we realize we cannot take peace for granted, we should not underestimate the costs of war and we must closely monitor our political leaders, for there is no guarantee they will do the right thing.

Darrell Delamaide, ddelamaide@aol.com, is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist. A former Fulbright Scholar in Germany, he spent several years as a foreign correspondent in Paris and other European cities. His most recent book, The Grand Mirage, a historical thriller, was published in September 2011.

An Evil Eye

My review of Jason Goodwin's An Evil Eye was published today in the Washington Independent Review of Books:

This fourth installment in Jason Goodwin’s mystery series featuring Yashim the investigator once again transports the reader to the fabulously exotic world of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire. As he did in The Janissary Tree, his Edgar Award-winning debut, Goodwin brings this literally Byzantine world to life with vivid descriptions, authoritative detail and informed understanding of the historical context. In An Evil Eye, he fully exploits the drama and beauty of Istanbul, a city that geography and culture have conspired to make one of the most fascinating places in the world.

Yashim is probably the first and only fictional detective who is a eunuch. As a lala, Yashim is able to live and operate alone in a culture that normally embeds everyone in a family. He is able to freely enter the inner sanctum of the palace, including the harem, barred to other men. And though it does not play a role in this book, Yashim’s condition does not prevent him from experiencing the romantic urges of other men.

An Evil Eye begins with the discovery of a murdered Russian in the well of an Orthodox monastery, skillfully highlighting Istanbul’s situation at the crossroads of continents, empires and cultures. The grand vizier, who runs the imperial government for the young new sultan, calls in Yashim to investigate. This is the role he has agreed to play for the government in exchange for freedom to live outside the confines of the palace.

As the action begins in 1840, the Ottoman Empire is in the midst of its long decline. Austria and Russia have chipped away at the edges of its territory, and Egypt has become autonomous. Russia, in particular, has had its eye on historic Constantinople with the idea of reuniting Orthodox Christianity with its original home.

But Yashim’s investigation does not take him in the direction of power politics. Instead, subsequent events lead him into intrigues of the harem. This legendary institution, designed to ensure a smooth line of male successors in the Ottoman dynasty, resembles less “a perfumed bathhouse full of naked odalisques” than “an old-fashioned girls’ boarding school,” as Goodwin notes in the acknowledgements.

In An Evil Eye, the sultan has moved to a new palace on the Bosphorus, leaving behind the maze of Topkapi Palace on Seraglio Point. Only the sultan’s grandmother, the valide, remains in the historic quarters, with a small retinue of other aging harem members.

Yashim, a longtime confidante of the valide, spends much of his time shuttling between the two palaces, trying to unravel the hidden connections between new additions to the harem, the harem’s aging female hierarchy and a young child mysteriously dropped in their midst. He must find out who has the “evil eye” that has resulted in one defective birth, a fatal hysterical pregnancy and a wasting sickness for one of the palace musicians.

Yashim is also trying to determine why the admiral of the imperial fleet, Fevzi Pasha, betrayed the sultan by sailing the fleet to Alexandria and handing it over to the Egyptians, exposing Istanbul to Russia’s “protective” embrace. Fevzi was at one point Yashim’s mentor, and he realizes that his earlier doubts about the admiral’s loyalty were justified.

Yashim pursues his investigation with occasional retreats to his apartment in Stamboul, where he recovers his equilibrium by preparing simple but authentic meals. (Goodwin offers the recipes for these Ottoman specialties on his website.) He visits his old friend, the Polish ambassador Palewski, who has become a man without a country after the German, Austrian and Russian empires divided up Poland and eradicated it from the map. And he relies on another friend, the transvestite dancer Preen, for sanctuary from prying eyes when necessary.

This is Yashim’s little world and remains constant throughout the series, which also includes The Snake Stone and The Bellini Card. Palewski, who functions as a kind of Watson to Yashim’s Sherlock, is less prominent in this new novel — which is welcome, because the author has not succeeded in making him a very interesting character.

An Evil Eye also departs from the formula established in the first three books in that Yashim does not fall in love or bed the beauty in the plot. Perhaps Goodwin has realized that this is perplexing to readers who do not understand the sex life of a eunuch.

The author has sketched the back story to Yashim’s condition, describing his castration as a child as part of an attack on his family by his father’s enemies. In this novel, Yashim comes across new information regarding this heinous deed. Goodwin gives intimations of Yashim’s anguish and ambivalence about his condition, but has avoided over the course of four novels adding any depth to the eunuch’s emotional life. He seems content to maintain the series as an Ottoman version of a murder mystery rather than pushing the literary envelope.

Ottoman is in. Jenny White has another popular historical mystery series, featuring Kamil Pasha as an investigating magistrate in a series starting with The Sultan’s Seal. While White’s lyrical descriptions of Istanbul are if anything more enchanting than Goodwin’s, her Kamil Pasha is a good deal duller than Yashim. Set later in the 19th century, White’s novels lose some of the exoticism of the earlier period. Yashim is still able to wear a robe and turban, while Kamil, living in a more Europeanized culture, wears a frock coat and fez.

English writer Goodwin, who studied Byzantine history at Cambridge, has succeeded in turning his fascination with the Ottoman Empire into an entertaining detective series. He started with a memoir of his walking trip across Europe, On Foot to the Golden Horn, and followed with a history of the Ottomans, Lords of the Horizon. It was his sister, television producer Daisy Goodwin, the author explains in the acknowledgments to The Janissary Tree, who encouraged him to take a detective-story approach to Ottoman history.

Though the award-winning debut novel is probably the better book, An Evil Eye is a perfectly good entrée into Yashim’s world of palaces and harems, bazaars and cafés, of caïques skimming across the Golden Horn and villains chasing heroes through Byzantine tunnels. An exciting read for any reader who wants to take a magic carpet ride to a world of Oriental fable.