Nona F

Readers of historical mystery novels will welcome the publication of Heresy by SJ Parris, a fast-paced novel of multiple murders at an Oxford college during the middle of the reign of Elizabeth I. Our detective protagonist is the Renaissance savant Giordano Bruno—excommunicant former monk and tutor in the study of memory to the King of France—whose latest move to escape the Inquisition on the continent is flight to England, where he becomes a somewhat unwilling spy in Walsingham’s secret service.

Charged with rooting out Catholic dissidents at Oxford, Bruno finds himself an outsider looking in, a good position for a detective, but a dangerous one for a foreigner and a nominal Catholic during this period of English history. The novel is cleverly plotted (it kept me guessing the identity of the murderer until the denouement), easily mixes historical with fictional figures, and gives a good sense of the intellectual and political atmosphere of the period. The Catholic threat to England’s stability as portrayed in the novel resonates with our own contemporary concerns regarding homeland security. Readers will need to be on the alert (or be able to flip easily back and forth) early on, when a number of characters are introduced all at once at Oxford. The ending implies that there will be additional books in the series, and I look forward to the author developing his major characters more fully in the future.

When Elizabeth Samet’s mother tells friends that her daughter teaches English at West Point, it is not unusual for them to reply, “You mean they read?” Though not as naïve or cynical as that about education at West Point, I found that I knew relatively little about this institution and what I learned about it from Samet’s memoir of her ten year experience there was fascinating.

“This is a story of my intellectual and emotional connections to military culture and to certain people in it, but the real drama lies in the way the cadets I teach and the officers with whom I work negotiate the multiple contradictions of their private and professional world, “she writes, and her analysis of these topics and individuals is as penetrating as the many analyzes of literary works on war which she draws on through her text. Though welcomed by her colleagues and the immediate West Point community, she remains a civilian, a woman, and a teacher of humanities who thus is able to maintain a certain critical distance for her (largely affectionate/sympathetic) observations.

As one who has had the opportunity of teaching English literature to undergraduates at a large Midwestern state university and to medical students (by the way, there is a surprising correlation between cadets and medical students, both of whom are at the very bottom of a strict hierarchy), I envied Samet’s classes (would I ever had had the opportunity to teach a course on the idea of London in literature?) and came to admire her and her students. At a time of life when most of their contemporaries are cutting loose on college campuses, these students willingly subject themselves to the most rigorous and iron-bound traditions and strictures, and commit their lives—literally in this time of war—to public service. Upon finishing Samet’s well-written book, I knew that West Point cadets and their faculty—both civilian and military-- not only read but they also think.

“I was taught a great deal of what it is to be a Chinese woman in the kitchen at my mother’s and grandmother’s sides. Cooking is at the heart of the Chinese family and for a Chinese woman it is at the very core of her identity.”

Helen Tse’s Sweet Mandarin tells the story of four generations of women in her family, though the great majority of the book concentrates on the life story of her grandmother Lily Kwok, the first to emigrate from Hong Kong to Manchester, UK where she opened the first of a series of restaurants owned by family members. The origins of the book and much of its content derive from family stories and rumors; one senses an unwillingness on the part of the author to delve into hard times or into topics that her family is shy to speak of (her grandmother, for example, is reluctant to speak of WWII; the narrative implies that she and her Dutch employers essentially collaborated with the Japanese in order to survive). This sensitivity (the people she writes about are mostly still alive) leads to a certain flatness and sense of incompleteness in the narrative. Curiously, this simplicity and detachment is even reflected when Tse speaks of what she has personally experienced—compare, for example, her description of experiencing Hong Kong for the first time with that of Martin Booth in Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. There is also a desire to view situations positively, though there is clearly ambivalence: one example is her father’s dedication to building his business and the consequent distance from his children while they were growing up; or her mother Mabel’s feeling that she (Mabel) had no childhood because of her responsibilities in Lily’s restaurant, a feeling echoed briefly by Helen about her own youth and then excused. This is an interesting story, made more so if the reader is in a position to compare it to other Asian American or Asian British memoirs, but in the end one comes away from the book feeling that one has only gained a surface knowledge of any of these individuals.