Reef – Romesh Gunesekera
The novel begins with a boy of eleven coming to work for a wealthy Sri Lankan named Mister Salgado. Initially he does menial jobs; but later, when he’s a young man, he has taken charge of the entire house (at this point he’s given the name Triton). Cooking becomes his speciality, and the book is filled with descriptions of the preparing and eating of exotic dishes. Triton respects Mister Salgado greatly, and he makes an effort to be the perfect servant (he’s even intuitive to Mister Salgado’s moods). Though Triton is the first person narrator, he comes across only as an appendage of Mister Salgado. This man (who he refers to as “Sir”) is intelligent, refined, kind, remote. And mostly indolent. He’s an expert on coral reefs, and for a while he’s employed in a study of their disappearance, but he lacks the commitment to push for change. His quiet, bookish existence ends when he falls in love with Nili. (Triton, who’s still a virgin, seems to be in love with her too – is this another example of his subservient role?). During the affair Mister Salgado opens up socially, and his home is often filled with guests. I found these worldly friends to be jarring, especially their vulgar language; they didn’t seem the type of people that the reserved Mister Salgado would tolerate; even Nili is too flighty for him. Lurking in the background is the growing political unrest in Sri Lanka. When matters disintegrate into violence, and the relationship with Nili ends, Mister Salgado and Triton move to England (by this time they’re middle-aged, though Mister Salgado is still “Sir”). More uneventful years go by; then Mister Salgado learns that Nili has fallen onto hard times, and he returns to Sri Lanka. Before he leaves he sets Triton up in a small restaurant. How Triton fares on his own isn’t explored. But in the brief opening section (what follows, the entirety of the novel, is a flashback) Triton comes across as a melancholy man still holding onto memories of Mister Salgado. This story of a relationship is an intriguing read. Since no sexual feelings emerge, and the two never become friends (they’re always master and servant), I couldn’t understand what emotional ties bound Triton to Mister Salgado. I wasn’t bothered by my lack of comprehension; I only felt how unhealthy it was. I was left wishing that, at some point, Triton could have broken free to become his own man.

They Hanged My Saintly Billy – Robert Graves
The words of the title were spoken by William Palmer’s mother. The son she laments was certainly no saint. Rather, in Graves’ account, from his teens on he was involved in every sort of vice and criminal act – except, possibly, murder (though his entanglement in many questionable deaths – especially his brother’s – makes him suspect of that crime too). The book is based on a notorious case that took place in England in the mid 1800s. By assuming the voices of various people who knew Palmer, Graves gives us a contradictory picture of the man. Seen in the worst light, he was a monster; in the best, a charming scoundrel. He wanted to live the high life, but he was always short of money, always juggling debts; to get by he resorted to lies, forgery, theft. Trained as a physician, he abandoned that profession and turned his attention to owning and betting on race horses, a precarious activity in which shady dealings abound. In this story of a dissolute life there’s one issue about which Graves expresses a passionate opinion: he believed that Palmer’s trial was a miscarriage of justice. The accusation was that Palmer murdered John Cook by administering strychnine. But the credible medical community was united in the opinion that strychnine could be detected in a corpse, and no trace of it was found in the autopsy. Graves is convinced that the insurance companies, which would have to pay up if Cook had died of natural causes, rigged the trial (with the assistance of the Lord Chief Justice). And so, at age thirty-one, William Palmer went with silent dignity to the gallows (in front of a howling crowd of some thirty thousand people). In his Forward the author states that “In reconstructing Palmer’s story, I have invented little, and in no case distorted hard fact.” But the sources he cites are few, and most are confined to the trial. This is a highly fictionalized account, but it’s Graves’ skill at writing fiction that enabled him to make the many voices that give commentary vivid and real. That said, there are too many voices; the reader is overwhelmed by names. Adding to the confusion is the detail with which Graves goes into money matters. Still, the good outweighs the bad. Upon finishing the book I was left not knowing what to make of William Palmer. I don’t think Graves knew either. Yet he closes things by making an attempt to humanize the man. It comes in the form of a letter the mother receives after her son’s execution, and suggests how Billy Palmer, at age eighteen, was first compelled to embark on a disreputable path of life. I’m almost certain that this letter never existed, but so what? As fiction it succeeds in making one think.

The Tragic Comedians - George Meredith
Meredith’s prose tests one’s intelligence. Can you follow the intricacies of his sentences to the end, or will you lose the strand of thought and find yourself sinking in the bog of your own ignorance? The book’s first sentence – though not as formidable as many – can serve as an example: “An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her web is for the devouring lion.” Despite the difficulties, his words are elegantly arranged, and they do lead somewhere. The problem with this novel, taken as a whole, hinges on where we ultimately wind up. Meredith presents us with Alvan, an all-powerful male figure, a brilliant Adonis. He’s also noble: his aim is to raise up the consciousness of the lower classes. This forty-year-old man meets Clotilde, a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl/woman; they fall in love at first sight. Of course it’s no ordinary love but one that scales the Alpine heights. Alvan wants to marry her legally; she begs him to run off with her. The problem, which she perceives and he doesn’t (he believes he can overcome any obstacle), is her brutish parents; they abhor this Jew, this demagogue, and they will do anything to prevent the marriage. The battle lines are drawn halfway through the novel, and though there’s almost no action – just speech, thoughts and feelings – I was interested in who would prevail. But, as I neared the conclusion, what I got were flailing histrionics and preposterous plot twists. My reaction: All that intelligence and then this? In his introduction Meredith asserts that the “fantastical” elements of his story are based on fact; such a man as Alvan existed and “was of a mighty nature.” Nothing, he claims, is invented, including the “lurid catastrophe” at the end. Really? I don’t buy it. It’s Meredith who injected the gargantuan aspects; the characters, as depicted by him, never walked this earth.

Collected Short Stories - Robert Graves
How could the author of the magisterial I, Claudius turn out such fluff? Apparently Graves didn’t take the short form seriously (though he did care about honing his prose, which is inventive and lively). In the introduction he writes that “Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range.” In keeping with this statement, he’s a participant or an observer in the stories that he categorizes as English and Majorcan (he lived for a time in Majorca). Of these, the best – “A Toast to Ava Gardner” and “Treacle Tart” – rise to the level of pleasant diversions. A third group are set in ancient Rome; I read only one of them and found it to be silly.

John Barleycorn - Jack London
These “Alcoholic Memoirs” have merit beyond their considerable entertainment value. London begins with his early years, but he provides no pleasant boyhood reminiscences. Instead he recounts how, at age thirteen, he worked in a cannery – ten hour days, six days a week, for a dollar a day; he rebelled against this life and also formed his socialistic views, seeing our capitalistic system as a gristmill in which human beings are ground down. More than half the book is devoted to the period from ages fifteen to seventeen, when he became an oyster pirate. He was on the water, free, engaged in high adventure, associating with larger-than-life desperados – men he admired and emulated. Though I didn’t believe London was the swashbuckling figure he depicts himself to be, this section is significant in that it marks the start of his serious drinking. He stresses that he had no physiological inclination for alcohol. He drank only to be accepted by the people he hung around with; outside that social context he didn’t drink because he had no desire to do so. He covers his gold-seeking venture in the Yukon in one page (all he got out of it, he states, was a case of scurvy). He’s sketchy about his rise to success as a writer, and the life he led subsequently is not examined in any depth. It needed to be, because it was when he was seemingly blessed with every advantage – money, a wife and children – that a psychological need for alcohol grew in him. He personifies his problem in an entity he calls John Barleycorn. London’s outlook, once robust and positive, becomes subject to John Barleycorn’s “White Logic,” which sees all beliefs and values as attempts to make a meaningless existence bearable. He became plagued by disillusionment and despair. But London doesn’t treat John Barleycorn for what he is: a self-destructive force inside himself that, for whatever reasons, gained dominance. To make those reasons comprehensible would have required him to reveal much more about intimate personal matters, and this he refuses to do. In the pedantic last chapters London turns social reformer and philosopher. He ends things on a hopeful note, but it’s half-hearted. Crouching in the shadows is John Barleycorn, who will prevail. The author died three years after this memoir was published, at age forty-two. The cause of death was uremic poisoning, a condition aggravated by alcohol.