Regency Romance: Georgette Heyer

I’ve been reading Regency since I was ten which is exactly how old I was when I first read Jane Austen; starting with the gateway book, Pride and Prejudice.   I got a set of all Jane Austen’s books for my birthday and spent that year devouring them.  Since then I’ve read a veritable ton (pun intended) of historical romance novels set in this era, including books by Loretta Chase, Mary Jo Putney, Amanda Quick, and Stephanie Laurens,  But somehow, despite all that reading, and sometimes re-reading, I never managed to read anything by Georgette Heyer who, it turns out, is the matriarch of that sub-genre.  Well, after Jane Austin that is.

The Regency Period: This was the period of the Napoleonic wars, the period of Mad King George having given way in 1811 to his son becoming Regent until his father died (hence the term for the period).  Prinny, aka the Prince of Wales, aka also George, reigned as Regent until 1820.  

It was an era of  decadence, lavishness, lasciviousness; the era of Byron, mad, bad and dangerous to know.  The era of romantic Shelley of the Faerie Queen.

But it was also the period where the industrial revolution, having grown strong roots, was firmly embedded and growing in momentum. The social ills that Dickens would write about in the Victorian era were plentiful during the Regency; slums, poverty, disease, child labour, high taxation, post war economic difficulties, crime, gaming hells and prostitution, the Corn Laws, suppression of the population, all existed along with some limited, incremental reform successes.

After the Regency period, George reigned for another ten years and then there was a fair amount of royal turnover in the top job until eventually the Crown fell onto the head of Victoria which led, naturally, to the Victorian era.

Marriage at that point in history was still very much a matter of economics - well it still is, but in those days it was just more open, especially within the aristocracy.  Arranged marriages based on dowry on the one hand from the female’s family and land/title and settlements from the male side of the equation (sometimes the other way if there were no more male heirs on the female side).  Love in relationships was not the fashion.  It wasn’t really until the 1950s and later but that’s probably another post.

And now back to Georgette Heyer who was a prolific writer. And, more specifically, on to The Toll Gate published in 1954; (I read the ebook version from Kobo).

[She also appears, on a purely superficial note,  to have been a kickass flapper, if the pictures are anything to go by. (I’m partial to that 20s look though I would not have had the patience to maintain it].

Synopsis:  Captain John Staples, the hero of the story is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who, having returned from the Battle of Waterloo, doesn’t have much patience for the ton and their ways.  He takes off from a weekend affair at his cousin’s estate  across country to visit a friend.  He leaves his valet behind to accompany his mother home thus setting up the opportunity for him to engage in the mystery/adventure ahead incognito.

Miss Stornaway, the heroine, is an orphaned daughter, 26 years old, who having had a failed Season as a Long Meg, returned home in relief to act as the right hand for her grandfather who is the Squire in the area and has been doing this for a sufficient period of time that she is seen as being the authority in the District.  Her brother Jermyn was killed in the war.  There is a dissolute cousin, now the heir, who has returned home with a mysterious and dodgy companion.

There is a toll gate on a country road that is being manned by a young eleven year old boy whose father, Bearn the gatekeeper, has not returned from a mysterious outing one evening. Captain John Staples (aka Jack) decides to stick around to try and figure the mystery out, as he's been looking for an adventure and Miss Stornaway has captured his attention.

So that's the set up.

Dialogue and Cant: Reading this book made me think about Stephanie Lauren’s regencies and how she doesn't really have very much of the "downstairs" folks in her stories.  The servants in Lauren’s books - which, to be honest, are the bulk of the Regency that I have read - don’t really participate either in the action or in the narration.  They are peripheral and might get only one or two lines here and there in the book at best.  Lauren’s “upstairs” servants have a bit more of a role. In fact, the relationship in By Winter’s Light is focussed on the governesses and tutors but for the most part the underclass is invisible, except as background.  

In Heyer’s The Toll Gate, however, the story takes place away from London, in the countryside near Sheffield.  The servants play a key role in this story, the old governess, the groom, the grandfather's valet etc. As a result of being in the country, the relationships between the servants and upper class are also seen as being more "relaxed" and informal. And so there is much more ability in this story to engage in interplay between the Queen's English and other dialects. In fact, it was the extent of the dialogue and the use of cant that made me notice this difference between the two authors.   

I don’t know if it holds for her style overall, or if it is just peculiar to this novel, as I haven’t read anything else by her yet, but there is a lot of dialogue.  The characters are chatty, chatty and have long conversations with each other and about each other.  One chapter is essentially just the two main characters driving from the toll gate to the village with lines of dialogue going back and forth between them.  

Again, just an interesting contrast to other writers where the narrator may be doing more of the exposition on the nature of the character or allowing the action to build the reader's understanding.  In this book, the characters engage in exposition on the nature of other characters through conversations with each other.

The extended dialogue, as noted above, also provides a real opportunity to explore the cant of the working class.  In some of the conversations, that concept of language as a separator out of the gentleman from those of working or middle class is consciously present i.e. the characters talk about it as part of whether or not they find it believable that Captain Staples is a cousin of the gatekeeper.

For the most part the use of cant works well to differentiate when Jack is "in character" as the gatekeeper or engaged with those who are playing along with the guise but there are one or two spots where there is an entire page of dialogue at the end of which I probably had only understood half of the phrases. It was enough for me to get the general gist of what the conversation was about but still lots of it passed me by. 

The Relationship:  Heyer was writing her books back in an era when, I am presuming, writing about sex explicitly was taboo.  So for those of us who are used to the slightly racier relationships in our romance reading (not leveled up to the Lora Leigh mistress level but at least the Stephanie Laurens' version of racy) the relationship on a physical front left a little something to be desired (pun intended totally).

The descriptions of physical encounters left me mostly wanting to double check whether the heroine might need the attendance of a good country doctor.  In one scene (and there were only two or three in the whole book) that I recollect, I think they were kissing. I "think", not because I can't remember but because when I was reading it the references were so obscure I wasn't actually quite sure what they were doing.  But, nonetheless, the "passion" of that moment was telegraphed to the reader by indicating when it was over and Nell emerges that she felt her ribs might be bruised.  And I was left thinking - geeze either that was the best first kiss ever or the worst first kiss ever but either way can we get a doctor in the house.

My quibbles with the writing of the physical aspects aside, the relationship itself is fairly typical of more modern regencies with an independent, outside the norm heroine who is quite capable, thank you very much, of managing the entire district on her own.  Jack then fits himself into that structure in a helpful and protective way as the mystery unfolds.

The interesting thing, in this story at least, is that the relationship appears to build through conversation and actions/interactions only; maybe because the writer couldn't get into very much about sex; but I don't think at the HEA stage that I had much of a sense that these two were physically compatible.

Age Differences:  In The Toll Gate there is only a 3 year age gap.  In addition, because of the nature of the heroine and hero with Nell's role filling in as the Squire in the District; not a typical debutante kind of heroine, has loads of experience in managing, directing, has lots of agency, etc., she meets Jack as an equal and he sees and treats with her as one.

But I also read a couple of other books by Heyer in addition to Toll Gate (April Lady and Pistols for Two, a short stories collection) where I found the age differences created some kind of ick dynamics.  I disclose my own bias as a reader is to like more modern regency writers because there is not the same tendency to build in a massive age gap and differential in economic and other forms of power between the heroine and hero.

In the April Lady there was something very 'Professor and Eliza Doolittle' about the whole thing that I found a bit off-putting actually.  The older, wiser hero helping the young ingenue heroine mature into herself was bleech ... Here's a chart from the interwebs that looks at the age gaps in the Heyer novels.  Obviously it is not true of all of them but definitely in the April Lady and in all the short stories in Pistols for Two.

Analysis of Heroine/Hero Age Gaps in Heyer Books

I think the reason that I find it off-putting is not the actual age gap itself but that there is a real power differential in how the heroine is in relation to the hero.  In the April Lady the economic dependency of the very much younger wife is underlined by the nature of the plot which is focussed on a dissolute family, some bad financial decisions and the consequences flowing from those as a result of financial dependency.  The heroine is on an quarterly allowance and is treated as a financial dependent, and that is just ick, no matter that there is an HEA.  Laurens' books generally manage to set her heroines up with financial independence, either through marriage settlements that are independently managed or because the heroine has inherited something that gives her independence so that the economic ick factor is lessened.

Plot:  Typical regency plot structure in that it is focused on a mystery that must be solved. In this case a missing man, some highwayman shenanigans and some bad actor/dissolute reprobates who need to be stopped.

Overall:  Interesting to go and read earlier regency, that came between Austen and modern day regency authors.

The writing is strong. The dialogue and cant are really quite remarkable in the sense that conversation does not seem to form as a big a part of modern writing at least not the kind of in-depth conversation that is part of The Toll Gate.

The plot, while a typical regency mystery, is enjoyable and has some suitably delicious gothic moments.

Pace was a bit slow - I have to admit that I got a bit impatient where one of the earlier chapters was just a conversation between the hero/heroine on the way from the toll gate to the village - but this may be necessary in a book that can't describe the physical connections/attraction between the characters. It also made me realize my own bias as a reader to seeing who a character is through their actions and not having their character explained to me by either the character through long, drawn out conversation or exposition from a narrator.

Silence, Space and Listening for Wisdom: Mark Nepo's Seven Thousand Ways to Listen

So there is a cluster of books that I have on my bookshelf that have been signposts along my path, companions on the journey toward greater and greater humility.  They are:  Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What is Sacred by Mark Nepo, The Wisdom of Listening - a collection of essays edited by Mark Brady, The Ragged Edge of Silence - a memoir by John Francis,  Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr and Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes by Bob Krull.

The book that I am currently re-reading first is Seven Thousand Ways to Listen. In his introduction Mark says the following as he is settling in to sleep, with his Lab breathing beside him and the wind blowing outside: 

"There, in the silence that's never quite silent, I realized that if there are at least seven thousand ways to speak [referring to the # of languages in the world], there are at least seven thousand ways to listen.  And just how few we know.  

The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years.  To enter into deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning.  I've had to lean into all that I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear."

Over the last five or six years, I am more and more coming to the realization that my quick and impatient nature means that I don't slow down enough to listen well.  Even when things are on the written page, my brain scans it really quickly, processes it and moves on to the next thing on the list of things. Only later, when I have, for whatever reason, to go back - do I realize that I have missed a nuance or simply completely misread something.  

In order to listen, I have to:

• slow the breath down, 
• focus on now, and 
• be present.  

Some days are better than others.  

As Mark states later in his introduction to the book: 

We must honour that listening is a personal pilgrimage that takes time and a willingness to circle back.  With each trouble that stalls us and each wonder that lifts us, we are asked to put down our conclusions and feel and think anew.  Unpredictable as life itself, the practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous and challenging art forms on Earth.  Each of us is by turns a novice and a master, until the next difficulty or joy undoes us.

The book is structured as a series of practices where the author reflects on a particular spiritual topic and how he has experienced this in his own life.  The reader is then offered a series of personal reflections and a series of reflections to share with others.  As an example, in the chapter that I am working through now, In the Presence of Sages, the author asks the reader to journal about the following questions:

1. Along the way, we discover a Wisdom Lineage we are a part of; a family of beings we are most at home with. How would you describe the Wisdom Lineage you are a part of?  What tribe of beings do you belong to?


2. Identify one constellation of your Wisdom Lineage by naming three beings, living or from the past, that you feel a spiritual kinship with and share why.


3. What is it about each - their life and work - that you count as part of your foundation and wisdom worldview?


4. If you don't know your Wisdom Lineage: Who are you drawn to?  How will you find out more about them? Go and find your teachers.

And so I'm off to do some journalling ... I'll blog more about The Seven Thousand Ways to Listen as I move through it and then come back to the other books that I referenced in introduction to explore their wisdom.

Ransom Riggs: On Photographs, Children and Peculiarity

I originally looked at Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children when it was out in hardcover on the new releases table at Indigo.  I was intrigued by the concept of how Ransom Riggs found his inspiration for the story in the vintage photos he collected, where often the really peculiar photos were of children.  I was intrigued, though not enough to pick it up in hardcover.  So a few weeks ago when it came out as trade, I decided "why not?"  

I'll wait until I'm done reading to post the whole 'review' but wanted to capture my thoughts partway through because, sometimes by the time I get to the end I have forgotten my initial emotional response.

Book the First Half

It is a book about a boy who had a peculiar grandfather, who may or may not have been a peculiar child, who tries to warn his grandson about the monsters in the dark.  In the beginning of the tale, it is not clear whether the grandfather is suffering from dementia, delusions from trauma having been the only family member to survive the Holocaust or whether, perhaps, just maybe, there are monsters lurking in the woods.

In unravelling the mystery of his grandfather's past as a way to reconcile himself to his grandfather's death - Jacob finds his way to a remote Welsh island where he explores the orphanage that took his grandfather in after his escape from the WWII and finds a little more mystery than anticipated.

I'm about 1/2 way through the novel so far and it's not a bad read but I am not WOWED.  This is a book where I read a chapter here, I read a chapter there but don't feel compelled to commit. It did not suck me straight in and then spit me back out the other end when it was all done.  I'm trying to figure out why.  

It's perfectly well written.  So far the story is not bad.  Nothing particularly oomph in terms of the dialogue but it's okay.  It's not my normal fare in terms of YA.  I tend to prefer dystopias but I'm not sure that would account for my mediocre reaction ... hmm ... 

I am a little confused at the moment on how the "science" of the world of the peculiars works. But that in itself would not be sufficient to explain my meh reaction. If I start to poke even a tiny bit at Pacific Rim or Loopers or Inception the "science" doesn't hold up and I LOVE those movies passionately. Hmm ... 

I'm also not sure that I really relate to Jacob as the protagonist. I am trying to figure out why. He's a kid who is actively engaged in figuring things out. His parents are both a bit on the annoying side so I completely get his response to them. What I'm not sure on, is my response to him. Maybe I'll figure that out in the latter half of the book.  We shall see. 

Book the Second Half

My reaction to the book didn't change much through the second half. It's an interesting concept, the photos are woven in with the text so there's an rich visual dimension to the reading experience, however, the science of the world continued to nag at me.  

As best as I could figure out the rules/science on which the story operates, the loops are accessed via a portal - in the case of the Welsh island, a burial cairn - which accesses the same place as the earthside/nowside of the portal, into an alternative version that loops a single day over and over.  It is part of what preserves the peculiars from aging - except the "science" shifted at the end where the loop failed to reset. That would mean that the alternative loop is not stuck on a single point in history but somehow the peculiars have intervened with the time in that dimension to keep re-setting it ... 

Maybe it will get articulated more clearly in the second book as they continue their voyage from the island back to the main coast of Wales to chase down the wights.

It's a debut novel as well - so I expect the writing will continue to get stronger and some of the other elements discussed above will hopefully get sorted out.  

An entertaining, even if not riveting, read.

Carol Berg's Lighthouse Duet

August 5, 2013

At some point earlier this year, Carol Berg announced that she was finishing up Dust and Light, the opening novel in her Sanctuary Duet.  You would have to understand how deeply and immensely I LOVED the Lighthouse Duet, the original two books set in Navronne, in order to understand with how much giddy glee I danced at the news that there would be two more books set in that world.

And so, in preparation for the upcoming release of Dust and Light, I have decided to re-read the Lighthouse Duet as it has been a few years since I turned the pages in either tome.

As part of the preparation for going back and re-reading, I've been looking at some of the reviews at the time the books were released and it's fascinating to me that the emotional resonance that these two novels had for me, has little, if anything, to do with what the reviews highlighted.  Reviewers spoke about the books as a "coming-of-age" adventure and about "a troubled world full of politics, anarchy and dark magic."

While both those reviews are 'true' in a surface sense, for me, the books went much deeper than just a generic boy comes of age fantasy tale.  The novels were about the bones of civilization, about the threads that bind and what happens when they start to fray.  The works spoke deeply to me about the nature of memory and, in the process of determining what should be preserved about a civilization, what it tells us about who we are, and our place and time in the river of history.


I am reminding myself that as my spiritual home, my roots are in history, literature, and archeology so those themes would have resonated more powerfully with me.  I'm interested to see how that may or may not have shifted for me, in re-reading Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone three years later.  Looking forward to seeing what remains behind for me on this immersion into the world of the Danae and the Navronne.

This was also the first time that I really loved the cover art for Carol's books.  The artwork moved away from standard fantasy art fare to something much more evocative and ethereal which really suited the stories.  

The cover artist is Luis Roya.

And here is the first excerpt from Light and Dust.  I have read it and am happy to report that it has set my expectations high that I will love Sanctuary in the same way I loved the Lighthouse.

Myke Cole: The Warrior Wordsmith

I started reading Myke's books because I have a soft spot for veterans, especially those who have served in Iraq/Afghanistan and I have a soft spot for folks in the reserves.(Myke continues to serve his country as a reservist in the US Coast Guard as a search and rescue warrior). 

However that, in and of itself, would not have been enough to keep me turning the pages on his debut series Shadow Ops  or recommending him as an author because, let's face it, there are more than a few veterans who are now writing, and not all of what is being written is worth the death of the tree upon which it is printed. 

No, I kept reading Myke's books because he is a damn good storyteller and writer. 

The Shadow Ops series is classified as Military Fantasy. [Get it? Evil Grin]. For some reason that makes my brain go xxx-rated places but that's the sub-genre so I guess I'll just have to deal with the fact that it's a little more PG than some of the other military fantasies that might be on my TBR pile :p. 

I wasn't sure that I would like the series.   In some weird, uninformed, prejudiced way I had initially thought that the premise seemed a bit RPG. I have no idea why I thought that and, even if it had been, there's anything wrong with RPG - it's just not part of my own personal nerd experience. 

Digression Alert

I will say that I uber loved watching Myke Cole and Saladin Ahmed Co-DM a Keep on the Borderlands D&D game at Epic Confusion in Michigan in 2012.  You can read Myke's blog about RPG's and what they meant to both him and other authors as well as the experience of being Co-DM for a group of RPG'ing epic authors here.

You can watch the 2012 game video  here.

And they did it again in 2013. To view click here.

And I fully endorse Wil Wheaton's definition to a newly birthed nerd girl about why the nerd/geek word and world is awesome. If you haven't seen that video, put everything down and go watch it immediately here, and then tell me if that from-the-heart blessing from Wil does not just break your heart right open!

And finally, Pat Rothfuss hosted an episode of The Story Board focused on video-game storytelling which has started to re-educate my sense of the story in gaming.  You can view that here. The bottom line is that I suck at role-playing and that probably just makes me jealous of those who can throw themselves into it without self-consciousness ... :)  

End Digression Alert

So, to get back to the regularly scheduled review of Myke Cole as author as opposed to Myke as Co-DM.

You can read Michael Jone's book review for Control Point on Tor's site here.

and a review of Fortress Frontier (also on the Tor site) by Stefan Raets here.

The main character in the initial book Control Point is a POC.  It amazes me how unusual this is.  But Oscar Britton is no token POC.  He is not there to make some kind of diversity point.  Oscar is just Oscar and he happens to be a POC. I did wonder, though the book was published prior to the actual event, in a world of Floridas and Travyon Martins, in a world of one percents vs ninety-nine percents - if the reason that Oscar went AWOL after he is captured when his latent magic of Portmancy bursts into uncontrolled life, was in part due to his knowing how he would be treated as a black man.  Guilty until proven innocent, and perhaps, guilty even then.

I loved Oscar Britton as a fully realized, complex dude with a complicated father-son relationship (which for some reason reminded me of the relationship between Ben Meecham and his father, Lt. Col. Wilbur "Bull" Meecham, in Pat Conroy's The Great Santini ... a book that I LOVED when I first read it in high school).   

Bottom Line I:  Great storytelling, great multi-dimensional characters (pun intended), solid world-building, and great dialogue.

Bottom Line II:  Myke Cole's Shadow Ops series is well worth investing in and immersing yourself in.  Currently under production is the third novel, Breach Zone.  Myke has a contract for an additional three novels in the series and the fourth, Gemini Cell is coming out in 2015.

Click here for Myke's site.  You can also find him on FB here and twitter here.

Cover art is by Larry Rostant.

[Editors Note: Apologies for the font size issues - I'll try to get them sorted out but for the moment don't have time to go into the coding to fix ... ]

[Editor's Comment:  August 18, 2013 - It is weird but there are lots of folks out there who have a real hate-on for Oscar.  I get what they are concerned about - that at the first sign of trouble he broke and ran.  That he ended up through certain choices he made with lots of collateral damage all around him but I guess my anti-authoritarian and libertarian streaks saved the character for me as I probably wouldn't have trusted the government further than I could spit into a cross-wind either.]

Neil Gaiman: Come Away oh Human Child, to the Waters and the Wild

Yes, Neil Gaiman makes me think of Yeats.  Specifically of those poems that Yeats crafted, filled with the soul of all that is mythic in Eire. Gaiman is a consummate myth-creator and an interpeter and tracker of the journey of the human soul, from origin to origin to origin and back again across the Veil.  Neil is the Travelling Storyteller.  Some days, I wonder if he is Taliesin Ben Beirdd, Chief of Bards, reincarnated.  He is, there is no doubt, of the Bardic Blood; a Druid in blue jeans.  You have only to read his wonderful piece of poetry The Instructions, to understand that Gaiman is the Guide to those of us on the Fool's Journey. Or better yet, listen to him provide those instructions here.  He knows the rules for surviving in the worlds of the elder gods.  

He navigates this world, and all the worlds in between, and he opens the doors for those of us who may not know, or who may have forgotten, how to cross-over, how to walk the in-between.  Gaiman is a virtuoso of the darkness that lurks beneath the fingernails of our civilized selves.  He gives voice to the shadow of the wolf on the wall behind us, as she throws her head back and howls to the moon when the chain-makers and cage-crafters threaten her path of freedom.
  
I could give you reviews of American Gods, or of Stardust, or of Coraline.  But others, much more versed in such things, have given reviews much better than I could write because, in all honesty, it's been a while since I have read them.  I have read everything he has written, with the exception of the Sandman graphic novels.  They are on my list of graphic novels, at the top of that list, to be clear.  I am just trying to clear the backlog on ye olde TBR pile before giving myself over to the visual delights of graphic novels.  

So instead, I'll give you the review I just wrote of the Neil himself's last book The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

I don't often write reveiws, but Neil Gaiman asked folks if they had read the book to review it; to boost the signal if they liked it.  And so, because this may be the book I have loved the most on reading it for the first time and the third time; a fall straight into love with it, a plummet straight over the edge of "I love this book so much I am buying it in hardcover" love, I am boosting the signal. 

I'm not sure that the Neil needs a signal boost, but the man did ask.  And he is a lovely man who loves libraries and who spins a yarn that will transport to you to all the best of the dark places of childhood. He writes a lovely tale of terror and redemption, of memory and forgetting, of truth and wonder, of belief and knowing, of adults and children, of living and death, of the old ones and the proper respect that must be paid. All these things. And many other things but those are the ones that remain with me lo these many weeks after reading.

If you want a better more literary review you could check out author A.S. Byatt's review in The Guardian here.

Or you could google Pat Rothfuss and the title Ocean at the End of the Lane - though I have to warn you - his review is also a song of praise and love ;) :p [Also, if you are too lazy to google, I did embed the link to Pat's review in the previous post on Pat's books]

For those of you who have children who like to read about the things that go bump in the night and how even when we are little, with the right help, at the right time, in the right way, we can come through the other side of the night, a little wiser, a little older, a little stronger - buy them this book. If this is true for you, even though mayhap you are not so young any more, this book is still for you :)

One other thing to note of interest about Neil.  He was recently involved in a creative project on the launch of Blackberry10 called the Keep Moving Project.  Here's the spiel from Neil's project page:

Neil Gaiman asked fans around the world to help him tell a new kind of story. A few weeks, thousands of Tweets, twelve stories and a galaxy of art later, A Calendar of Tales was born. 

It’s now ready for the world to see, in a beautiful digital book. Have a look, see who contributed, or watch Neil’s videos to find out more about the making of A Calendar of Tales. 

A huge thank you is due to everyone who took part in this project. Your energy and imagination inspired Neil, and now, can inspire the world.

You can check out Neil's website here. 

Pat Rothfuss: Fantasy of the EPIC Kind

The Kingkiller Chronicles are a trilogy written by an awesome and friendly giant with an epic beard. To date, books the First and the Second have been published.  They are beautifully written, lyrically crafted and rendered; they are a storyteller's story.  They are catnip for readers who love the story.  The first is The Name of the Wind, the second is A Wise Man's Fear.  To quote: “There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in a storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

We all wait impatiently for Book the Third entitled The Doors of Stone.  But we know that Pat Rothfuss, to paraphrase Neil Gaiman's defense of George R.R. Martin, "is not [our] bitch." So some of us wait more patiently than others - because craft and art ought not to be rushed.  Like a good stew, it should be cooked slowly, with great care, allowing the flavours to burst and the meat to melt as they are savoured.

The books are epic in the same sense as Lord of the Rings or George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series.  Pat's books I double-down on and have both the e-version and the mass market.  Some people triple- or quadra-down by also purchasing the hardcovers and the trade, but I don't love anyone that much :p ...



Pat also has two deliciously dark and dangerous, wonderfully illustrated "not for children children's stories." The first is The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle (The Thing Beneath the Bed), illustrated by Nate Taylor and published by Subterranean Press.  It has three different endings, each deliciously more subversive and dark.  If you don't like the dark side of childhood terrors :), well then maybe you are not for the Princess and the Princess is not for you.  The second book, in colour, The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: The Dark of Deep Below, is due out from Subterranean later this year (2013).  To order, click here:



The other squee thing to note is that Pat's Kingkiller books have now been optioned by Fox (not the news station but the movie studio).  With the success of HBO's version of GRRM's GOT, I am hoping that the adaptation of Pat's books will be equally professionally executed.

If you can't tell by how much I have written, Pat is one of the authors in the SFF tribe that I adore - if one can adore a stranger :p ... He created Worldbuilders, a charity where he leverages his readers and his fellow authors to raise funds for Heifer International (HI).  To read more about his charity and about HI click here:  here.  

He is also a feminist - one of a tribe of author brothers who are ... This gives me hope (along with John Scalzi and Jim Hines as other, though not the only, notables in this regard).
And so, his blog is one that I read regularly.  I love the fact that the blog is a celebration of being human and being a father to Oot (not the offspring's official name :p) [To read his blog, click here].  Pat is on Facebook and has interacted with me once or twice. Look him up.  I cannot remember whether he tweets but I suspect he does.  

I love when he gets giddy over meeting Neil Gaiman.  I love the book review he wrote on Neil's latest book on goodreads. To read that paen of love under Patrick's Reviews to Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, click here.  You can also, obviously, read other reviews of books by Pat at that link but the Gaiman one is the best.

He also has a great Google+ Hangout, The Story Board, that he does on Felicia Day's Geek & Sundry Channel on You Tube where he hangs out with a bunch of different author tribespeople and talks writing whatever the genre or medium ... The hangouts are approximately once a month for about an hour (or longer) and he's had some awesome talent on.  Eight episodes so far (up to March 2013 - the season might be over now.  It's not clear.) - Click and view here.

And not quite last, and definitely not least, Pat Rothfuss is the man who finally lured me onto the Kickstarter site to support a project.  To be specific THIS project. - Originally, the goal was $10,000 but we are loyal and devoted and mayhaps even fanatical minions and the project ended up being subscribed to the tune of $589,660.  Yes.  That's right.  That's how much I want a pack of playing cards based on the Kingkiller Chronicles even though I don't play cards. Or dice.  I may have to start :p

I urge you to read everything that Pat writes - including his blog.  I will be perfectly honest.  I urge you to do this for purely selfish reasons.  I want Pat to keep writing and if I can add readers to his stable of minions then he can keep being the creative, madly genius crafter of words and story that he is.

Book Series and Author Recommendations

So a number of friends ask me for recommendations of books/series/authors to read. I believe that it may have something to do with the fact that I read on average around 180 to 200 plus books per year. 



Some of these are books where I go in to the store and make the floor dude go down to the back room even though it is 9 a.m. on release day to get me a copy NOW. I have also been known to look on the shelving cart, even after they tell me they can't find the book. Just. In. Case.



Some of the books are ones that I download at midnight on my e-reader on release day, just so that I can get to it right away. And then I go buy the mass market because it so deliciously good that I need to have it on my shelf as well as in a "to-go" format.



Some are my "I really enjoy this writer but I can wait until the next time I'm in the 'hood to pick it up at the bookstore" books while others are the "I'm waiting until my favourite author releases his/her next in the series book and you are an enjoyable way to pass the time until then" books.

Originally I was thinking of doing this by genre but I have a hard time sorting out: "Is author/series x or is it y?" So I tend to blur it all together - like nutella and peanut butter on a cracker. My peeps on the Book of Face arrived at a compromise between the alpha vs. genre sorters.  I have been requested to go with the alpha but have the genre in (brackets) beside the author's name or the series name.

And then I started to write the note and realized that I am not so much providing a review:  Score x on plot, pacing, character development, worldbuilding, continuities etc., but rather I come at author recommendations from a place of love (or hate - but I'm not likely to post publicly about those). So my first "review"/"recommendation"/"love song" is for Pat Rothfuss.  Stay tuned and read long and prosper.

The Peace and Conflict Reading List So Far (2006 - 2013)

Read so far:

• Kabul Beauty School (Afghanistan) - by Deborah Rodriguez
• Opium Season (Afghanistan) - by Joel Hafvenstein
• Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army (Afghanistan) - by Christie Blatchford
• Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of its Participants - edited by Kevin Patterson and Jane Warren
• Canada in Afghanistan: The War so Far - by Peter Pigott
• On the Road to Kandahar (Afghanistan) - by Jason Burke
• The Prince of Marshes (Iraq) - by Rory Stewart
• The Places in Between (Afghanistan) - by Rory Stewart
• The Forever War (Iraq) - by Dexter Filkins
• The Things They Carried (Vietnam) - by Tim O'Brien
• Off to War: Voices of Soldiers' Children (Afghanistan/Iraq) - by Deborah Ellis
• The Long Walk Home: Paul Franklin's Journey from Afghanistan - by Liane Faulder
• Enduring the Freedom: A Rogue Historian in Afghanistan - by Sean Maloney
• FOB Doctor: A Doctor on the Front-Lines in Afghanistan - by Capt. Ray Wiss, M.D.
• A Line in the Sand: Canadians at War in Afghanistan - by Capt. Ray Wiss, M.D.
• A Solider First: Bullets, Bureaucrats & the Politics of War - by Gen. Rick Hillier
• The Unexpected War: Canada in Afghanistan - by Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang
• Clearing the Way: Combat Engineers in Kandahar - edited by Maj. Mark Gasporotto
• On Assignment in Afghanistan: Maritimers at War - by Chris Lambie
• Kandahar Tour: The Turning Point in Canada's Afghan Mission (Afghanistan) - by Lee Windsor and David Charters
• Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War (Iraq) - by Matt Gallagher
• Witness to War: Reporting on Afghanistan 2004 - 2009 - by Adam Day
• A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (Afghanistan) - by Atiq Rahimi
• Earth and Ashes (Afghanistan) - by Atiq Rahimi
• The Patience Stone (Afghanistan) - by Atiq Rahimi
• BeLonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (Poetry) - edited by Niloufar Talebi
• Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership and Brotherhood (Iraq) - Donovan Campbell
• Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War (Mid and Far East) - by Megan Stack
• War (Afghanistan) - by Sebastian Junger
• The Patrol: Seven Days in the Life of a Canadian Soldier in Afghanistan - by Ryan Flavelle
• The Savage War: The Untold Battles of Afghanistan - by Murray Brewster
• Highway of Heroes: True Patriot Love (Afghanistan) - by Pete Fisher
• War Reporting for Cowards (Iraq) - by Chris Ayers
• The Taliban Don't Wave (Afghanistan) - by Rob Semper
• First In: An Insider's Account of how the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan - by Gary C. Schroen
• First Soldiers Down: Canada's Friendly Fire Deaths in Afghanistan - by Ron Corbett
• Lethal Warriors: When the New Band of Brothers Came Home (Iraq) - by David Philips
• Pale Blue Hope: Death and Life in Asian Peacekeeping - by Ron S. Poulton  
• Paradise General: Riding the Surge at a Combat Hospital in Iraq - by Dr. Dave Hinda
• On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story - by Cdr. Richard Jadick
• Rule Number Two: Lessons I Learned in a Combat Hospital (Iraq) - by Dr. Heidi Squier Kraft 
• Not on My Watch: The 21st Century Combat Medic - (Iraq/Afghanistan) by Josh Peters and Josh Fansler
• Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front in the Words of U.S. Troops - edited by Andrew Carroll

Tales of Afghanistan

April 2008

So I just finished reading The Places in Between by Rory Stewart, Kabul Beauty School by Deb Rodriguez and Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein.

The Kabul Beauty School deals with an attempt to give Afghan women access to an income and some degree of independence economically through providing basic training in hairdressing and esthetics. My ambivalence about the book may in part be the economic project selected. In some ways it makes sense to provide women with training and access to these services as, after years of being targeted by the Taliban religious police who wanted to ensure that women were not wearing any visible make up such as nail polish or lip gloss etc, all the beauty salons had closed and the skills required to reopen these types of business were no longer in the City. In addition, as with all memoirs these days, there is some controversy around the publication of the book in terms of the potential danger that the author may have created for the Afghan women that are woven into the story and there is some controversy around the degree to which the author may have exaggerated her own role in the process.

Leaving all of that aside, it does provide an interesting if very skewed picture into the world of women in Aghanistan that the other two authors don't provide. In part, I presume that Stewart and Hofvenstein have a more limited view into the world of Afghan women as it would have been dishonourable for their male Afghan counterparts to talk about their wives with other males.

I read Stewart's The Places in Between next. I think it is fair to say that Rory's writing style is sparse. The narrative tends to have a very matter of fact almost terse approach to storytelling - a sort of "then I went here and then this happened and then I saw this".

I've listened to interviews that Stewart has given and he is thoughtful, funny, articulate and has a really good storytelling approach as an orator but weirdly that doesn't translate, at least for me, in his written word. Perhaps it is that I am spoiled by the lush storytelling traditions of authors like Pat Rothfuss or Juliet Mariller but there just didn't seem to be much of the author in the book beyond the recounting of his presence and I'm kind of used to my heroes/protagonists being a bit more emotionally present. :)) I don't know that at the end of either of his books (the one on Afghanistan or the book that describes his time with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, The Prince of Marshes that I really had any understanding of how either country had impacted him emotionally. This even after an incident where he had been shot at and realizes that Mullah Mustafa, who has tried to shoot him, has just entered the dwelling that Stewart took refuge in, along with the rest of his armed gang.

At another point in the book he describes sitting down to write a "long letter" to his parents in case he was killed but there is no emotional context about the issue of mortality or the distance between him and his kin. Instead he talks about the content of the letter in terms of telling his parents how the walk has related to other parts of his life and reflects that perhaps his walk is like the Dirvish dancing and he was happy and went to sleep.

WHAAAAT ... As a reader that just leaves me hanging in the wind. I want to know how did his walk relate to other parts of his life. Why did thinking that his walking was a form of mystic connection like Dirvish dancing make him feel peaceful [And I'm really stretching that one because it's not actually what the author said]. ARRGHHH ... I HATE hanging in the wind. It makes me GRUMPY.

I don't know ... maybe it's some weird stoic Scottish Highlander thing - mmm ... except I think he might be a lowlander, Perth somewhere or other - are they stoic emotionally too - I'll have to check with my Mum.

The entire book is about his walk from Herat to Kabul and yet in some weird way in 297 pages he is almost not there.

I also found the narrative a bit disjointed though this is probably a reflection of the disconnected nature of Afghanistan's rural villages. Stewart uses the reflections of the ancient emperor Babur as a narrative construct through the whole book, by weaving in Babur's reflections about the places that the author was in to bind the book as a whole. But in the end the style irritated me enough that I turned it into a sort of "Where in the World is Rory" quest and went to find other things that he had written to see if I could figure out what in the world drives this guy and stumbled across an article he wrote for Prospect magazine (UK political mag) in 2005. More on that in another note.

... [A little later - Editorial Addition: Ahhh crap - now I'm feeling guilty. I don't really know what it is about the way that Stewart writes that makes me want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him and say "yes, but how did that make you FEEEEEL?" But there you have it. The books are still definitely worth reading and his perspective is interesting and informed re what went wrong in Iraq and the lessons that can be applied in Afghanistan. And if you listen to his interviews on You Tube or TVO's Big Ideas he really is funny!]

And so on to my favourite of the three, Opium Season, at least - on to that after Battlestar Galactica. Back in an hour :))

Can I just say on a complete tangent that Battlestar is fracking ROCKING so far this season. Gaius is turning into a weird and mental prophet. Starbuck is losing her marbles. The President is dying again and the Cylons are having arguments about the higher and lower life form rights of their own species - without any sense of irony. And I am back to loving Six - she is one COOOOLD yet sensitive mamma :) - and I love her alliance with the Eights and Leoben - those three always were my favourites :))

... back to the regularly scheduled note ...

Now Joel, on the other hand, is a storyteller's storyteller. His story is not happy in terms of outcome as 11 of the staff of the project were murdered in Helmand Province. But as an author he has a created a story where he invites the reader to travel with him and emotionally experience Afghanistan through his eyes and fall in love with it as he did before the tragedy and hardship at the end make you cry.

(at 47) "I had been looking forward to the Shamali scenery and was disappointed at first to find the foliage almost entirely hidden by walls ... The patches of green we did see were visually overwhelmed by the parched brown mountain ridge that towered on the western side of the plain. We sped through drab terrain until mid-morning, when the road dropped precipitously away into the valley of the Ghorband River and the landscape was transformed. From this height we could see over any wall, and the broad river basin running away to the east revealed itself as an unbroken expanse of fields, trees and vines fed by a silver skein of canals. I had never lived in a desert before, and I was caught off guard by the intense pleasure of being suddenly immersed in green.

Now there is lots of intensity packed into that paragraph. It is filled with colour, action and emotion and I'm right there with him as a reader. I can vicariously feel the pleasure that fills him as he sees the lushness of the green valley below after the seared desert.

And sorry but I'm back to picking on Rory again but by contrast here is the paragraph describing his arrival in the Bamiyan valley close to the end of his journey. It is the place where the immense statues of Buddha were blown up by the Taliban.

(at 253) The caravans dispersed around the remnants of the baazar, which was a new kind of ruin - not with solid walls and blackened rafters but with craters and shattered silhouettes that mark an aerial bombardment. A pale brown sandstone cliff hundreds of feet high rose sheer from the northern edge of a valley broader and more fertile than any I had seen since Herat. Cut into the cliffs to my left were two niches, two hundred feet tall, with rubble at their bases. For fourteen hundred years, two large Buddhas stood in the niches. But seven months before I reached them, the Taliban dynamited the figures. This valley of Bamiyan, at eight thousand feet, was once the Western frontier of the Buddhist world.

From a descriptive perspective they are not that different, but I know what Joel experienced - anticipation, then disappointment and then a renewed and more intense pleasure at the unexpected. Rory ... man I'm still trying to figure him out. I know what he saw. I just don't know if it made him feel anything and so as a reader I'm left feeling a little like I am reading a tourist brochure description.

Okay - I now solemnly swear that I will not unfairly compare these two authors anymore. And I reiterate that both The Places in Between and Opium Season are both in their own way, well worth reading and provide timely and insightful perspectives on Western involvement in Afghanistan at different points in time.

Kabul Beauty School ... I'd wait for the movie - and I'm actually not kidding - I think I read a rumour somewhere that it was being turned into a movie. It's okay - but it's a bit light in terms of understanding Afghanistan within its broader historical and cultural context.

Postscript, April 14, 2008

I am laughing hysterically because I have just found out that Italy was given responsibility for building Afghan capacity in its court system and Germany is responsible for police reform :)))

It's all coming clear to me now ...

The Germans and police - meh. But the Italians and the court system - are they fracking out of their minds. The Italian governments are notorious for corruption and problems with their courts. Seriously WTH were they thinking. On the other hand, ... :) ... maybe that's WHAT they were thinking :)

Tales of War: Fact, Fiction and Stories in Between

Sept 21, 2008

So I have been slowly making my way through my various books on the quagmire that is mid- and far-east geopolitics. 

Given the way that I read (i.e. five or six books at the same time) it can take me a while to get to the end of anything quickly simply because I am too ADD or commitment phobic in my approach.  However, I read Outside the Wire sitting at my favourite restaurant in Toronto - the Bloor Street Diner and then at my favourite Starbucks at the Manulife Indigo store in less than 1 day.

I point out the locations because both are in one of the more affluent areas of Toronto, a prosperous city, and looking at the people around me (including myself) spending $30 bucks on dinner and $10 bucks for a couple of lattes at the coffee shop was in marked and stark contrast to the lives of desperation and survival that are described by Canada's soldiers as they write about their experiences during deployment at various stages in the Afghan mission

Outside the Wire is a collection of writings by deployed Canadians in Afghanistan (some in Kabul early in the mission and others by soldiers in Kandahar). The foreword by LGen Romeo Dallaire is especially thought provoking, as, having read his account of the UN mission in Rawanda (Shake Hands with the Devil), his reflections were a poignant reminder, to focus not just on the "now" of the stories, the immediate moment, but also on the aftermath faced by Afghan veterans when they return to Canada.  It is edited by Kevin Patterson & Jane Warren

Whether one agrees with the mission in Afghanistan or not (and I'll put my bias on the table as being in support of the UN state-building mission for that country - even if it didn't start out as state-building) - the fact is that the military deploy where their political commanders send them [more on this below in my comments on The Unexpected War] and it is important to understand that dimension in reading the accounts, as well as understanding that those of us who have had the privilege of living in the developed world have little understanding of the desperate circumstances in which the vast majority of the world live out their lives.

I'll post more on specific vignettes that struck me as being particularly touching and or important later ... 


Sept 27, 2008

So I know that I actually haven't finished my thoughts on Outside the Wire but I have just finished reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and was- to use a bad pun - blown away. O'Brien is a Vietnam vet and while some of his war fiction has been around since the late 70s - I've only just stumbled across it. The Things They Carried is a series of stories told from the perspective of a 3rd person narrator who is a Vietnam vet. The stories weave back and forth so that in each retelling you see a slightly different variation of the same experience. He uses the things that each soldier carried as a way to enter into their experience of combat and the device ends up creating an oddly poetic flow to the story.

For example:

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. ... Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April ... Because the land was mined and booby trapped, it was SOP for each man to carry a steel-centred, nylon covered flak jacket, which weighed 6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat, groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.

I thought this war novel did an amazing job of reflecting on the nature of the experience of war from the perspective of both the ordinary soldier and the (in the case of Vietnam) young commanding officer from the distance of memory as the narrator tells the stories in the novel from 20+ years after the conflict.

As an amateur writer, my favourite passage is the following where O'Brien through the narrator reflects on the nature of storytelling:

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

O'Brien also spends a fair amount of time in the novel, reflecting on the nature of stories and truth and, through the narrator, posits the theory that we do not tell stories about our experiences so as to accurately catalog the detail; rather the process of telling and re-telling our experiences, nuancing how we describe something, adding detail that may not be accurate, is that the story telling is our way of attempting to create meaning from the experience rather than history. And it is our search for meaning and understanding that shades the way in which our experiences are recounted to others. As a storyteller myself - I have always thought Oprah went a bit overboard in her beating up on Frey's nuancing truth in his memoirA Million Broken Pieces - and this is one of the best expressions I have found as to how he ended up where he did on Oprah's pale yellow couch - apologizing for the fact that his story was not a clinical recounting of his time as an addict. We tell stories, not for their truth but for their meaning - to us and to others - this is true both for "true" accounts and for fiction.

In fact, O'Brien specifically dwells on this nature of storytelling in the chapter titled How to Tell a True War Story where he describes the death of a friend who has been playing catch in the shade with another soldier and, as he steps out into the sunlight, he steps on a mine and is blown up into the trees and killed. The truth of the story is that the mine killed him but as the author reflects he says:

Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon's face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from the shade into the sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must've thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow re-create the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must've been the final truth.

The stories become apocryphal. They are weighed down not with their truth but with their meaning. In every telling, as we seek mastery over our past experiences through telling and retelling, the weight of meaning becomes increasingly more important than the recitation of "true" "facts". In the end, as the author says, our stories are all true stories that may or may not have happened. It is in their emotionality and meaning, not their factuality and rationality, that these stories are true as we journey toward understanding through our stories - the ones that we tell to each other and that we tell about each other. 

It's a story well worth reading.


Oct 10, 2008

Back to the non-fiction version of war - I have started reading Christie Blatchford's Fifteen Days which is an account of the 21st Century Canadian military experience as it has played out on the battlefields of Afghanistan. I'll update as I go but so far my favourite story is of a Newfoundland lad who was the gunner in an LAV and, out on patrol, leaned down to get a cigarette from someone in the LAV. As he was bent down inside, an RPG cut through where he would have been standing, only seconds before. He apparently, "dined out" on his story of "how smoking saved his life." I laughed my ass off, dark celtic humour - smartass in the face of mortality - what the Scots and Irish do best.

And I'll also try and give my review of Outside the Wire which I realize that I have not got back to yet.

11:54 p.m. Dammit ... she made me cry ... and that's just by the second chapter. I kind of, sort of, almost cried during the first chapter so clearly I am going to have to pace myself reading this or I'll have to invest in more Kleenex than I currently have.

And then I feel guilty because even though in the back of my head, I know how many have died, I realize I actually have no idea how many have been wounded, severely or otherwise.

And guilty because of how I allow myself to be distracted by the everyday mundane pace of life, and how busy I get with being irritated by the little stuff - incompetent people or difficult decision-makers - and as frustrating as all of that can be - it's not life and death - it's not the survival that most of the world struggles with daily - and I'm not even sure that it qualifies as anything as bold or honourable as Dalton McGuinty or President Obama make out. It's not really even sacrifice though it is public service. My public service requires no real risk beyond the political or relational. My public service day ends with watching Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert making fun of the kind of people that I work for every day. Maybe that's why I've been so restless lately and why I want to go somewhere that public service makes the difference in the struggle for life as opposed to the spoiled, selfish, over-indulged life that citizens of the West treat as an entitlement. It's not that I want to go and live somewhere that life is desperate, after all, as my family would tell you - they have yet to be able to get me to go camping (I'm sorry - how high is the thread count in those sheets?) - it's more the ingratitude of Ontario's citizens that makes me really angry. Our focus in so many ways, is so self-centred, self-serving - no broader perspective or vision than "what's in it for me" and "what have you done for me lately." It's not that I think that public service isn't important - it is - in a way it is testament to "good government" that we get to whine about things like wait times and ambulance response times and set performance targets for surgery. And yet when was the last time we ever heard citizens express gratitude for the things that Canada or Ontario gives them, security, peace, stability, due process, rule of law, health care, education, social services, freedom for arts and culture, human rights, an independent judiciary, balance between state secularity and freedom of religion, academic freedom, unions, free and democratic elections. And that's just the short list. 

Ontario citizens don't disappear in the darkness of night. We aren't tortured by our government officials. Our prisons, while not without issues, are far more humane and balanced than those in most of the world. Our police are independent of politicians. Our politicians don't, as a general rule, syphon off public money into private bank accounts in offshore jurisdictions (even if we don't always like how they spend our money). We have strict standards of non-partisan public service, conflict of interest rules and independent auditors. 

Yes there are times where our police screw up, where individuals are racially profiled and unfairly treated, where our politicians make bad or poorly thought through decisions, periods where our markets implode, and days where we wonder why Bloor is ALWAYS under construction! However, the fact of the matter is that we don't appreciate that our politicians are probably far more professional and less corrupt now than they have ever been, transparency and accountability are greater than they have ever been and that Canadians are privileged to live where they do. We don't appreciate the fact that while our wait times may result in not having instant access to the health care we want on demand, the vast majority of humanity has no health care at all beyond what is provided by emergency NGOs and humanitarian organizations. We don't appreciate the fact that our maternal mortality rates are lower than the vast majority of the world, that our female children are growing up, largely ignorant of the fact that there was ever a time in their country where they were not considered equal. We don't appreciate how far men in the West have changed with us in terms of behaviour and values, so much so that the misogyny in heavily patriarchal cultures is as abhorrent and alien to many of them as it is to women. 

We spend so much time striving for what still remains to do, that we fail to stop and express gratitude for how far we have come and how much we have.

Don't get me wrong, Canada is far from perfect. We continue to struggle with First Nations issues, poverty, human rights, integration of immigrants, tolerance, equal rights. I get that. But like clinician's illusion, if all we are focused on is the sick, we forget that there is health beyond our focus and things that we OUGHT to be profoundly grateful for.

So far that, thanks Christie - your writing reminded me of what sacrifice actually looks like. 

Thanks to all members of the military and their families for reminding me to be grateful for the nation that I call home, and to be grateful for my other home - Scotland - which taught me about resilience, independence, justice and history. And thank you to all the Canadian soldiers who are or were deployed and to those who have lost their lives or were injured fighting to bring Afghan women, children and men the room and stability to grow their own version of a brighter future.

Feb 14, 2009

Just finished The Forever War by Dexter Filkins - a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. It's an interesting read and is written, like Christie's book as a series of episodes or vignettes. Filkins starts out in Afghanistan and then the narrative moves to Iraq where he provides first hand accounts of his experiences of the war in Baghdad and Fallujah. The most poignant paragraphs are contained, for me, in the final few pages where the journalist reflects on his return home and I thought it was worth reproducing in its entirety as I think I don't often think about the effect of what being a witness to war does to a journalist who is there to bring the conflict home for those who are not there to witness directly:

When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule, circling in the farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space. Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer keeping time. Home was far away, a distant place that gobbled up whatever I sent back, ignorant and happy but touchingly hungry to know. And then I was back, back in the world with everyone else, looking back on the ship myself though not returning all the way, still floating like Laika, through the regular people in the regular world.

Back in the world, people were serious, about the fillings in their sandwiches, about the winner of last night's ballgame. I couldn't blame them, of course. For me, the war sort of flattened things out, flattened things out here and flattened them out there too. Toward the end, when I was still there, so many bombs had gone off so many times that they no longer shocked or even roused; the people screamed in silence and in slow motion. And then I got back to the world, and the weddings and the picnics were the same as everything had been in Iraq, silent and slow and heavy and dead. Your dreams come alive, though, when you come home. Your days may die but your dreams explode. Not with any specific recollections; they were more the by-products of the raw material I carried back. Rarely anything I ever actually saw. 

People asked me about the war, of course. They asked me whether it was as bad as people said. "Oh, definitely" I told them, and then, usually, I stopped. In the beginning I'd go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and I could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences. We drew closer to each other, the hacks and the vets and the diplomats, anyone who had been over there. My friend George, an American reporter I'd gotten to know in Iraq, told me he couldn't have a conversation with anyone about Iraq who hadn't been there. I told him I couldn't have a conversation with anyone who hadn't been there about anything at all.

A reminder that PTSD can affect all those with boots on the ground, be they civilian, military or journalist ...

February 15, 2009

I am taking the opportunity of the Family Day long weekend to try and catch up on some reading in my ever growing pile of mid-east and Asian politics tomes. I startedCanada in Afghanistan: The War so Far by Peter Pigott and am now completely depressed after the first 75 pages. And I haven't even got to the current mission post 9-11. The first section of the book deals with the geopolitics of The Great Game and all the various empires that have, throughout time tried to either bring Afghanistan to heel or prevent someone else from taking it as a strategic corridor in Asia. 

How in the world do you get from where they are to where they need to be to even start thinking about things like human rights and woman's rights? 

How do you build capacity in a nation of millions of multi-generational PTSD sufferers?

.... [a day later ...]

The reason I would recommend this book is that it is one of the first that I have come across where it actually talks in any detail about the work of the PRT teams [Provincial Reconstruction Teams]. And a reminder in the section, written by Capt. Tony Petrilli, a CF reservist engineer with the PRT, that 

We have to be willing to make the effort and pay the price. Afghanistan is not Disneyland nor will it be solved in a time frame that makes it understandable to us, be it a rotation, this year in time for Christmas, or before the next election.

Additionally he talks about a key project on the part of the Canadian PRT in Kandahar to secure ammunition so that it could be properly accounted for and distributed. It ended up being the largest secured ammunition "depot" in southern afghanistan. This may seem like an odd project for me to highlight, as opposed to say some of the others discussed such as education for women etc. but this one struck me as being critical as elsewhere in the book it discussed examples of village elders asking for help to rid the latrines of ammunition that had been "buried" there to prevent the children from playing with live rounds. 

So many children in Afghanistan are hurt or mutilated by the proliferation of landmines that this project might seem peripheral but it is project by project that security is built in situations like this so every mm or inch counts. [err ... I think my bias is showing again ;P]

February 16, 2009

Now I've finally started to read the Pulitzer prize-winning Ghost Wars by Steve Coll which is about Afghanistan as The Great Game played itself out between America and Russia during the 1980s. But I have to go and read something fluffy for a while because reading too much about Afghanistan and mid-east politics at one time is enough to drive a sane person to drink.

...


March 4, 2009

I think that Ghost Wars may end up being one of those books that I keep starting to read and then never finishing because it is just so utterly depressing from a long term strategic perspective. Makes you want to bang your head against a wall. So, instead, I went on to read The Road to Kandahar by Jason Burke, an "award winning" journalist for The Observer in Great Britain. In many ways this is like Dexter Filkins book The Forever War reviewed above. Both journalists are of an age (i.e. mid to late 30s) and have covered Middle and Eastern politics/war throughout their careers. Jason Burke is truly fascinating as a character in and of himself and the first chapter describes how he and a fellow Brit spent their gap year fighting with the peshmergas in Kurdistan - not, as far as I could tell, for any particular ideological reason but rather for the "adventure." Turns out they didn't get to do much fighting as the peshmerga paraded them around the "front" lines in Kurdistan as sort of "trophy" fighters to prove the cause was just ...

The rest of the book unwinds from there as Jason's career as a journalist takes him from one hot spot to another, following the trails of violence across a decade and through some of the most impoverished and destitute parts of the world. Like Filkins' book, there is a very episodic feel to the narrative where each chapter is a window into a particular time and place. The thread that binds the narrative as a whole across the various incidents, times and places is Burke's search to understand the evolving nature of radical violence and the ways in which it was tolerated or overthrown/minimized.

I think, I am still a long way from understanding, but every book I read on the current major conflicts/on the war (and I am reading books on both left and right) is helping me internalize the circumstances and threads in a way that hopefully at some point will lead to a glimmer of understanding.

I have also just started to read, The Unexpected War by Janice Stein and Eugene Lang. It is surprisingly readable after Janice's last mind-numbingly bad Cult of Efficiency so perhaps having a co-writer helped. It is engaging and provides, at least in the first 40 pages a sense of the swiftness with which events moved after 9-11 and through interviews with various decision-makers in Ottawa (Art Eggleton, John McCallum etc) a sense from the participants themselves of how things evolved from a small, support role by the Canadian Navy in the Persian Sea to a full combat mission in Kandahar.

March 5, 2009

Truly this may be one of the more interesting books on the issue of Afghanistan that I have read in my journey since September. It has a weird kind of overtone of gossip, or, well ... gossip isn't quite the right word. The authors clearly had some quite phenomenal access to folks in both the American and Canadian power circles, political and bureaucratic, and so they actually reconstruct conversations at various points pre and post 9-11. This gives the book a weirdly "fireside armchair conversation" kind of feel. It's actually an incredibly good, critical, in a neutral kind of way, analysis of the domestic and international events that led to Canada's role in Kandahar. Well worth reading, not just for the Afghan war analysis but also for a fascinating look at how the whole Martin v. Chretien dynamic/hatred ended up influencing the direction that Canada went from a foreign policy / international perspective. I'm not sure how I feel yet about the fact that the egos of men-children led to the deaths of 111 soldiers, 3 of them as recently as 2 days ago. Though I suppose how we ended up there doesn't detract from the importance of the mission currently to the future of the Afghan people but it shows how so very little of what we do, be it investing in stocks or making a decision about where to go to war, is a rational process, bounded rationality or otherwise. 

[Editorial Notes - Since 2002, 118 Canadian soldiers have been killed serving in the Afghanistan mission. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed. The DND has reported as of 2006 to 2009 more than 400 Canadian soldiers had either lost limbs or suffered horrible shrapnel wounds since the beginning of major combat operations in Kandahar Afghanistan and that number does not include those injured battling the Taliban in Kandahar and Kabul between 2002 and 2005.

The number of NATO/ISAF soldiers killed in the Afghan mission can be found at: Coalition Casualties in Afghanistan

The number of Afghan civilians killed or injured due directly or indirectly to combat operations since 2002 is not clear and attribution is often difficult and fraught with political complexities - estimates from 2002 to 2009 for direct & indirect civilian deaths range from: 10,960 - 30,557 depending on who is counting and what methodology is used in the estimate process.]

Further details on civilian casualties can be found at Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan