Recent Reading

Rebecca West; a hard-boiled Halloween

The below are excerpts, sometimes elaborated, from my reading journal.

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Radio Treason, by Rebecca West

A strange read for such a sane, solid book. This is a portrait of William Joyce, or “Lord Haw-Haw,” a British fascist who ran his mouth on behalf of Germany in WWII, and from within Germany itself. Just republished this year by McNally Editions.

Most of the action of this book, initially at least, depends on the hinterlands of citizenship through which William Joyce wandered. Born in the USA to a naturalized American father, who was actually Irish and married an ethnically Irish Lancashire woman, Joyce was raised in Ireland and England and yet, legally, remained an American his whole life. His father hid this fact. It’s a fact that could have saved Joyce from being hung as a traitor. Instead, Lord Haw-Haw insisted on his Britishness, re-upping his British passport regularly. He was the penultimate man hanged for something other than murder in England.

Joyce’s whole story is odd and sharp-elbowed. He impressed some, but annoyed and irked most. Even his family history, with his father an English-loving Irishman, is filled with uncomfortable catty-corners of violence. His father’s house was burned down by Sinn Féin, even though he wasn’t an informer. Or perhaps he was some kind of traitor to Ireland more indirectly (wonders West)? Why else hide his American identity and the (legal) Americanness of his children?

West is unflappable in her ability to condemn the very stupid, which is often how she characterizes the very evil. Irish revolutionaries burning other people’s houses for no reason is foolish. Antisemitism is pernicious, but also contemptible in its intellectual shallowness. Joyce himself she seems to snub for his classless manners, almost as if she’s content to employ the bludgeoning bat of classism that England enjoys so much. But she also points out, repeatedly, how the class frustrations of England must’ve driven Joyce’s search for a worthy outlet for his ambition and intelligence. Indeed, she’s clear that he was not only bright, but an enthusiastic and gifted tutor and teacher.

I shouldn’t be surprised by West’s singular balance of the waspish and the train-like. Here come her facts, one after another. Don’t be lulled, though, because the sting is at your ear as you watch. I especially shouldn’t be surprised by a West outing all about the aftermath of WWII, told through a character study that knots together political threads of national identity and patriotism turned into criminal opportunism. But it does feel a lot wiser in retrospect than it did while I was reading.

One thing that stood out while reading, and which stands out now, is West’s confidence as a detective. All writers are a kind of detective in their pursuit of information, even if the pursuit is quite different for the novelist than it is the journalist. West combines both gifts. Her inventions on behalf of Joyce’s inner life are always accompanied by evidence—his disposition at trial, the words of some neighbors who knew him, or snippets from his own broadcasts or publications—but she nonetheless routinely and confidently veers into territory more usually occupied by the fiction writer.

When she peeks into his skull, she uses phrases like “this must have been the first time he realized he was a comic figure in Britain,” instead of, “this might have been the first time,” etc. She outlines his inner life brick by brick, moving carefully from each stone to the next, so that when she does make an authorial leap, it feels justified. Joyce is never a sympathetic character. Her sense of the moment and belief in objective narrative is too strong. In fact, it was bracing to read a story that refused to wallow in the wickedness of an obviously wicked man, yet which also managed to avoid any shallow moralizing by not turning him into a case study of the weak trying to hurt the weaker. West’s moral sense is too refined for such hand-waving.

The man supported the greatest criminal of the 20th century, telling his beloved England that it deserved the blitzkrieg even as the blitzkrieg threatened to murder his own parents. What a damnable act of treason. What a fascinating skein to unwind.

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Dark Harvest, by Norman Partridge

The best hard-boiled Stephen King Halloween book that Stephen King never wrote.

Enough pulp the juice splashes on you if you read too close. Grim and serious in that old-fashioned way that’s so damn fun; or at least gripping.

A parable about boys being drafted to Vietnam—or any war, but the story takes place a year shy of that conflict—or possibly a parable about how the blood of WWII buying the peace of the high-rolling 50s and early 60s was always a shaky foundation. The latter is probably the richer symbolic reading.

Also, to be clear, a book about a pumpkin-headed vine monster that comes alive every Halloween in small town in America. It has to get to the church before the bell tolls midnight. Roaming the streets are hoards of teenage boys let loose for the sole purpose of killing the monster—if it is a monster—and often killing and looting and vandalizing whether or not they see the creature called the Halloween Boy, or Sawtooth Jack.

There’s an evil “harvester’s guild” and nasty authoritarian figures wasting young men’s lives in the most literal ways. It’s a corn-king myth plopped in Peoria. Whatever bargain with the cornfields demands the October Boy’s night of killing is never centralized, and it’s unclear how such a dingy town could be benefiting from this pagan cycle gone psycho killing. Which makes the book even better. You’re born into a rough world, and you either get chopped or get out. Oh, and no one has ever gotten out.

This is a tale about boys’ needs and their fathers’ failures. It’s about doing right, as a boy yourself, by the kid you’d most like to beat into a pulp. I haven’t read a book that took male responsibility, and the reality of male anger, so seriously in years. The novel pivots on a post-Angela Carter narrative inversion that is pulled off without pumping the breaks on the screeching, violent, silly, awesome, say-it-with-a-cigarette-on-your-lip throwback language that gives this creature feature so much style and attitude. Happy Halloween.