The Song of the Jayhawk by Jack Marshall Maness

Before there were red states and blue states, there was Kansas. A place that divided the nation like never before, or since. A place where mayors were generals and journalists were terrorists. A place where drunken guerrilla armies roamed the prairies, threatening farmers and rigging elections. A haunted place where mysterious beasts led settlers into undiscovered countries.

Follow two young families as they struggle with rattlesnakes, tornadoes, ice-storms, childbirth and morality in a war-torn land. A growing love between them, built over holiday ham and whiskey, is threatened as they are drawn into the territory's cycle of political violence. They must ultimately decide if they are friends or foes, and it isn't long before they all have blood on their hands.

This is a story of loyalty and betrayal, courage and despair. Set in the 1850s, the dilemmas faced by the Dugan and Hawkins families are similar to those faced by every generation in a long-divided America. It asks how ordinary people cope with extraordinary times, why they sometimes turn to violence, and more importantly, why they usually do not. 

Goodreads description

I have to confess that, although I studied history at university, I know precious little about America in the 19th century and the run-up to the American Civil War. I therefore came to this novel with a great deal of ignorance and had no idea what a catalyst Kansas was in the tragic turmoil that hit that great country. 

The book's introduction starts with the statement It has been widely noted that one cannot comprehend American society without a fundamental understanding of the Civil War. But can you enjoy a story set in that time without such an understanding? The answer is yes, I did enjoy The Song of the Jayhawk. I found myself emotionally involved with the Dugan and Hawkins families. Jack Marshall Maness, to his great credit, shows accurately the complexity and ambiguity of real people facing difficult choices. To fight or not, to protect family or the wider community, to help or to fight your neighbours. He shows that both families have come from difficult backgrounds and want to build a new future and he also shows that within families there are clashes between younger hot-headed members and their more experienced pragmatic elders. 

Whilst the point of view of the novel stayed with the various family members, this reader was engaged with the story. However when on occasion the narrative parted from that point of view and showed political developments on the wider stage, I found myself feeling frustrated. From what I have read in the introduction to the book Mr Maness is a historian and I sympathize with his desire to clearly set his protagonists' story in its historic context, but...

The magic realism in the book comes mainly in the form of the appearance of a mythical bird of the Kanza Indians, the Mialueka, which the author associates with the infamous Kansas jayhawk. The Mialueka was said to have lured people to their destruction, and appears at times of crisis to the Dugan brothers. Other magic-realist elements include the river changing location and some magic powers belonging to Patrick Dugan's wife. The latter are not fully developed narratively, although I expect they will be in subsequent books. It should be noted that the story does rather break off at the end of the book, as this is the first in a series, so if you are someone who likes everything resolved when you read the last page, be warned. 

I received this book free from the author in return for a fair review.

The Grass Dancer by Susan Power

Back in the 1860s, Ghost Horse, a handsome young heyo'ka, or sacred clown, loved and lost the beautiful warrior woman Red Dress. Since then, their spirits have sought desperately to be reunited, and it is the ceaseless playing out of this drama that shapes the sometimes violent fate of those who have come after them. Now, in the 1980s, Charlene Thunder, a teenage descendant of Red Dress, is in love with Harley Wind Soldier, the dashing traditional dancer of Ghost Horse's lineage. When Harley's redheaded soul mate, Pumpkin, dies in a crash, Charlene guiltily suspects her own grandmother, the notorious witch Anna Thunder, of causing it - as she well may have caused the collision that claimed Harley's father and brother, which even today obsesses him. Charlene and Harley each strive in solitude to make peace with the ghosts of the old ways, while they contend with the living: Jeannette McVay, an eastern college student who has been studying the tribe; Crystal Thunder, who must escape the reservation in order to understand her past; Herod Small War, whose spiritual guidance is both revered and resented; Margaret Many Wounds, Harley's grandmother, who walks on the moon.

Goodreads description 

I loved this book and could hardly bear to put it down. In fact it is now one of my favourite magic realist books, which is saying a lot (this is the 116th review on this blog). There are some books that you should read in one sitting or as near to one as you can get. This is one such book. Each chapter in the book is almost a separate story, narrated by different characters at different times (it is important to make a note of the year that appears under each chapter heading). This patchwork of stories comes together to form the larger picture. This structure is why it is important to read the book rapidly, because you can lose your way if you take too long. I felt very much that I was dreaming when I read the book - experiencing a series of instances, visions, references that came in and out of focus, until at last they formed one vision. 

Dreaming and visions are at the heart of this book. The full story of Red Dress does not come until towards the end of the book, but she appears in the dreams and visions of the characters throughout the book. I read somewhere that that is how Susan Power got the idea for the book - the woman in a red dress appeared to her. The line between the real and the dream is constantly blurring. Which is real - the dream or the waking? Power makes it clear how central dreams were and are to Sioux culture. I can't help thinking that they should be more important to the culture of the white man (and woman in my case). It seems to me that we have lost something when we forgot to take our dreamworld as seriously as our waking. 

There are some memorable characters in this book - the most notable being the awful and awesome Anna (Mercury) Thunder. She could so easily have been a stereotype, but Power gives her a back story that shows that she was not always the witch she becomes and also explains why she changed. Of course the book's structure of telling characters' stories in reverse makes the revelation of Anna Thunder's past tragedy all the stronger.

If I have one criticism it is that there are perhaps too many characters to keep track of, especially as the book's chronology jumps about so much. One of the reasons for my confusion was that the storyline is structured almost as a series of variations on a theme, with incidents reappearing through the generations.  In this I was reminded of Alan Garner's books, which so influenced me as a child and which also feature legends that reappear in the present day.

I have read a number of excellent magic realist books dealing with the complexity of life of modern Native Americans in a predominantly white society, but none have shown mixed marriages and mixed parentage as this book does. The different generations (apart from Red Dress's) all feature inter-race relationships. And yet this book shows the native "magic" as very much a part of accepted everyday life. On the reservation magic just happens and everyone accepts it.  This is contrasted with the attitude of the white schoolteacher who comes to live with and study Anna Thunder.  Despite being around Anna and supposedly respecting Sioux heritage and culture, she is shocked and scared when she realizes that Anna can actually work her magic.  As Anna affirms: I am not a fairytale. 

No Anna you are not and nor are your beliefs and nor is magic realism.

Winter's Tale by Mark Halprin

New York City is subsumed in arctic winds, dark nights, and white lights, its life unfolds, for it is an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built, and nothing exists that can check its vitality. One night in winter, Peter Lake— orphan and master-mechanic, attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side.

Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the love between Peter Lake, a middle-aged Irish burglar, and Beverly Penn, a young girl, who is dying.

Peter Lake, a simple, uneducated man, because of a love that, at first he does not fully understand, is driven to stop time and bring back the dead. His great struggle, in a city ever alight with its own energy and besieged by unprecedented winters, is one of the most beautiful and extraordinary stories of American literature.

Amazon.com description

This book is epic in vision, ambition and size (673 pages of relatively small type in my edition). And a few days ago I very much doubted that I would hit my target of reading a book a week, but I finished it today, having spent all of yesterday reading. I did read the Lord of the Rings in two days (and all through one night), so I suppose finishing Winter's Tale wasn't a complete surprise. Whether I would have finished this book without the challenge is questionable. I might have given up, which would have been a shame as the book is worth the effort, I am grateful to my challenge for keeping me reading.

The book ranges in time from the late 19th century to the eve of the 21st. It is set in a fantasy New York, heaving with the poor dying in their hovels and gangs of thugs, overseen by hugely powerful newspapers and their magnates, full of energy, hope and despair. As someone who has never been to New York and who is unlikely to go, I felt that I missed a lot of the book's richness. There is a rave review from the New York Times review link here which gives you a New Yorker's take on the book.


The description in Goodreads and on Amazon (above) is misleading. Peter Lake may be the main character of the book, but he disappears for the central part of it, and the love story with Beverly although enchanting is actually a minor part of the book. With Peter Lake removed from the story, the focus shifts to a larger cast of characters. Don't expect subtle characterisation in this book. With the exception of Peter Lake and the elderly newspaper owner Harry Penn, Halprin's characters are symbols, vehicles for forces of love, truth etc. The good are good, the evil are evil and there isn't that much of a focus on the latter.

In some ways New York is the central character in the novel, whilst the storyline is the pursuit of the ideal city. "To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through . . . gates far more difficult to find than gates of stone, for they are test mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice.'' One gate is that of ''acceptance of responsibility,'' another is that of ''the desire to explore,'' still another that of ''devotion to beauty,'' and the last is the gate of ''selfless love.'' Does the ideal come at the end of the novel?

 This book has been lauded as a great feat of magic realism, and compared to the wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have to differ - it is not as great as Marquez's masterpiece and I don't think there was a lot of realism in the book to make it a great magic realism book.

I found the book overly verbose. Like one of his characters the author uses all sorts of unusual words, which I found got in the way of understanding rather than illuminating. Halprin applies layer upon layer of description to the point where it was possible to skip several pages without missing any of the story. At first I really enjoyed his descriptions, but after a while found them tedious and at times not even very good. 

It is nevertheless an impressive book, full of wonderful images, thoughts and imagination. The book reminded me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and like Pullman's book had me loving it in parts and leaving me nevertheless unsatisfied.

by Zoe Brooks

The Enchantress Of Florence by Salman Rushdie

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself 'Mogor dell'Amore', the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess: Qara Köz, 'Lady Black Eyes', a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, as two worlds are brought together by one woman attempting to command her own destiny...

But is Mogor's story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess?

Amazon description

Review

I have not read very much Rushdie and I was not sure what I would make of this book. Going by the reviews it seems to divide opinion, but I loved it.

The book is like an incredible tapestry, rich in imagery, history (it comes with a long bibliography), descriptions, themes and characters. Although a work of historical fiction, as Rushdie has said: "non-historians think of history as being a collection of facts, whereas actually it's not -- it's a collection of theories about the past. We revise our view of the past all the time, depending on our own present concerns."  
As rationalist westerners we see history through our realism focused eyes. But the worlds that Rushdie draws - the Mughal court and Renaissance Florence - believed in magic, enchantment and religion. It is therefore only right that a book set in such a world should share those belief structures. Accurate historical fiction is magic realism and that is what Rushdie writes brilliantly, for example the Great Mughal, Akbar, has a fantasy wife, who exists not only in the mind of Akbar but also on Rushdie's pages as an independent character.

Of all the characters the best drawn is Akbar, who is a mass of contradictions, a bloody tyrant who meditates on the role of kingship, religion and identity. The yellow-haired Italian stranger is less well drawn with good reason because we are viewing him through Akbar's eyes and Akbar cannot tell whether the stranger's story is true or not and he and we never know. We are shown at the beginning of the book how ruthless the stranger can be in pursuing his own interests. Rushdie has been criticised by some readers as being anti-women in this book, defining women by their sexuality, as whores or sexual enchantresses. Although a feminist and a liker of strong women characters this aspect of the book did not bother me. Rushdie is accurately depicting the world of the Mughals and Renaissance Italy and the place of women in it. The enchantress of the title uses her sexual beauty and force of will to bind men to her. The book closes with her saying to Akbar, "And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours." And Akbar thinking "Until you're not, my Love. Until You're not" for the Enchantress had always moved on from one man to another as their power to protect her fails. The power of men is shown throughout the book to be fragile and short, even Akbar's great palace is brought to dust. Perhaps, one wonders, the only power that survives is that of the illusion of the perfect woman.

by Zoe Brooks