Hallo, it's me, Laura King. The theme of this week's newsletter came about in two ways:
I recently bought a trench coat that I think makes me looks very beautiful and mysterious (though admittedly, exactly like all the other trench coated women in Dublin city centre)
In recent weeks I've read not one, not two, but three novels that I thought were going to mostly be about spies and agents and intrigue, and then I thought they were going to be romances, and then they turned out to be about a secret third thing. I'm not sure if this is a theme, but it happened three times and that's good enough for me.
It started with Teddy by Emma Dunlay. It comes out on 4th July and you just know already it's going to be the hottest accessory in everyone's suitcase going on holidays this summer. The novel is set in 1969, mostly in Rome, about a thirty four year old Texan woman called Teddy who has recently married David, a respectable businessman working in Rome who offers a fresh start and a chance at the glamourous romantic life Teddy always wanted for herself. However, David doesn't open doors to the glitzy parties with famous faces Teddy imagined, but brings her further down a dangerous path she had unwittingly embarked on years before.
This is a really enjoyable novel, and the political intrigue that always seems slightly out of Teddy's grasp is so interesting - Hollywood stars turned Ambassadors, Russian diplomats who wear many faces, and a deep paranoia under a facade of confidence and glamour that could be equally about the concerns of the Americans in Europe or women suffocated by their traditional gender roles in the 1960s. Unfortunately, while the mystery of this novel has a lot of potential the pacing just didn't work for me and it at once stretches itself thin over the months it spans and condenses at the same time, and I'd have preferred it set over a longer timeline. Still I had a good time reading it, and I'd recommend it as a fun, stylish summer read.
My next read on this theme was The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The book takes place mostly in Vietnam as well as other countries in South East Asia in the 1950s, during the decline of the French colonial power there and towards the beginning of America's involvement there. It is narrated by a jaded, opium fuelled English reporter, Fowler who has been stationed there for many years. Fowler meets a kind of rival in the young, earnest Pyle, an American "businessman" over to promote trade in Eastern Asia (he is very obviously there with the CIA), very powerful yet very naive, who falls in love with Phuong, the young Vietnamese woman living with Fowler.
There is a love triangle, of sorts, here, but everybody involved is in it for very different reasons, and is getting something very different out of it. Phuong is characterised as an innocent girl to be spirited away to the new world by Pyle, and a wiley woman who understands her power and currency by Fowler. The love story feels like the main pull of the novel but it's also a useful way to tell a story about desire and greed and the games that large nations play with countries and people - even their own people - who are just pawns. There is a lot here about guilt and culpability, and particularly in how Fowler experiences and deals with this over the years as a reporter, but one who always has the option of going home to England, and is always very well looked after as he watches the violence unfold and tear through the country. More than anything else, it's really a novel about the rise and fall of different powers: Fowler is the English Empire in decline as America rises ever more as a superpower on the world stage. It is also a work of incredible care and attention and the depictions of the places Fowler visits are at turns understated and breathtaking.
The setting of this novel was particularly interesting to me as some of the wider historical context overlapped with what I learned while visiting South East Asia this spring, and it was also, coincidentally, somewhat in conversation with the novel I just recently finished, the Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. A woman of Cambodian and British heritage, known only to the reader as The Bridge, takes a top secret job in the new Ministry of Time. She's quickly told, with no fuss or fanfare, that the British government have discovered time travel and have “rescued” a number of people from the past just before they were about to die. She is paired with one “expat”, Commander Graham Gore, who is a real historical figure, an Arctic Explorer who died in 1846. Gore and his cohort are from a wide range of historical periods (for example, he becomes friends with a young man who died in the trenches in World War 1) and they spend a year grappling with present day life, being monitored by their “Bridges”, who are Ministry agents living with and reporting on them.
As they grow closer over the year and blur their professional boundaries irrevocably, the Bridge is torn between her duty to the Ministry and her new loyalty to Gore. She blinds herself to growing unease and suspicion between her colleagues at the Mystery, perhaps knowing she will one day have to choose between protecting her life with Gore or her position within the powerful and far reaching Ministry. Bradley is unflinching in how she treats the protagonist, who is avoidant in the extreme, while still narrating the book in a way that seems very frank, but also strangely defensive too. On reflection after finishing, I thought a lot about what the book has to say about individual responsibility even in the face of overwhelming power (like the Ministry) or in the face of other larger systems (in this book, racism and climate change), and even in day to day lives with our friends, family, colleagues and loved ones.
The underlying theme is that of displacement - the Bridge’s Cambodian mother displaced after atrocities in her home countries is somewhat aligned with Commander Gore displaced from his native time. Bradley also points to a vision in the future that we unfortunately can guess is really coming, which is the increase of displaced peoples as climate change makes more and more of our land uninhabitable. As Bradley writes so beautifully, “The rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history”. I wish I had read this book as a physical copy to give it my full attention, instead of just a little time before bed, but I still think it will be one of my favourite reads of the year
Reading Update
I’m scheduling this post a little earlier in the week in the hope to get a lot read over the long weekend instead, so I’m just reading the same books as last week. I also had the privilege of accompanying a friend to the Opening Night of Circle Mirror Transformation at the Gate Theatre, which gave me loads to think about, as well as just being a really fun experience. It’s a very funny play that draws a lot from the expressions and body language of the cast of actors, playing amateur actors in a weekly workshop, but it has moments of real beauty and emotion too.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me next week for a new instalment of LauraEatsBooks… Service.