Bringing Up the Bodies. Henry VIII is tired of his second wife. He's already gotten into a pile of trouble with the pope and Europe's Catholic kings for divorcing his first wife and forcing her into exile just so he could exchange her for Anne Boleyn. Now, the sad fact is, he's just not that into Anne anymore. She's turned into a rather unpleasant piece of work: a pinched, sharp-tongued shrew. What's more, she can't seem to bear Henry a son, she may be sleeping around with members of the court, and, most important of all, Henry has the hots for a new hottie, the otherwise drab Jane Seymour. So he directs Thomas Cromwell, master of dirty deeds done dirt cheap, to make short work of Anne. No messy divorce or lingering exile this time around. Henry wants Anne's head in a basket. Cromwell, who has his own past scores to settle, sets about orchestrating the downfall of those among the uppity nobility who made the mistake of treading on his toes. He rounds them up, subjects them to some enhanced interrogation, gets the confessions he needs and, before you can say "bob's your uncle," they're all in the Tower awaiting execution for treason. Thunk goes Anne's head, Henry makes a beeline for Jane, and Thomas Cromwell ends up looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. Book Three in the trilogy—Wolf Hall was the first—still to come.
The Master. Henry James is "The Master" of the
title, a writer who devoted his life to keeping the world at arm's distance the better to observe and write about it in long novels full of labyrinthine sentences whose purpose seems to further protect James from the very world he describes. Colm Toibin directs the novelistic gaze back at James in this novel and the picture we get is of a man so deeply in the closet one wonders if James himself even realized he was in the closet. His father was overbearing, his older brother William was overbearing, his younger sister Alice was overbearing in a passive aggressive way, and his mother was cripplingly possessive and protective. Covering a few years of James's middle age at the turn of the 20th century, and reaching into the past, "The Master" shows James turning the real-life characters he observed in his own non-life into fiction. James himself pines for a few of the guys that cross his path, but his boy-crushes remained strictly platonic, according to Toibin, anyway. He's reminiscent of Warhol in this respect, who famously claimed he "preferred to watch" than participate. The Henry James depicted here, however, leaves you wondering if he ever had the experience necessary to make an informed decision on the matter. You have to figure that James would be horrified to find himself observed in this way, even if it is, by and large, a sympathetic portrait of a man who elicits in the reader more pity than admiration. Actually, that in itself would probably horrify the dignified, reserved, and almost always in control author.
The Fifth Child. Harriet and David are two of a kind. They both dream of getting married, buying a big house, and having a big family. The first four children arrive in rapid and happy succession; it's the fifth time that proves to be no charm. Ben, as they come to call him, is a problem even before he's born. He feels like he's practically trying to kung-fu his way out of Harriet's body. She's so exhausted, drained, and depressed trying to carry him to term that she practically begs her obstetrician to induce labor. When she finally delivers herself of her burden, Harriet feels a guilty hatred of her baby. He's no charmer either, not in looks or behavior. He's got a ferocious appetite, an unnerving stare, and he's growing by leaps and bounds. Not even a mother's eyes can rose-tint the picture: Harriet thinks Ben looks like an evil troll. Before long, he's terrorizing the family with his roaring demands, bad temper, and overall malevolent aura. Hardly a toddler, he strangles a dog. Harriet is persuaded that the best thing to do is send Ben away to an institution. Soon, though, riddled with guilt, Harriet eventually rescues Ben from this institution where she finds him warehoused with other misfit children. Ben lies in a cell, wrapped in a straitjacket, and perpetually drugged. Harriet brings her son back home and once again, to the disapproval and skepticism of the rest of the family, tries to "civilize" him. The rest of the family is right. Her efforts are of little avail. Ben grows larger, stronger, uglier. He becomes a juvenile delinquent. Harriet's other children decide to leave home, preferring to live with relatives rather than their brute of a brother. David and Harriet age beyond their years, grow distant from each other, and find that their dream of "a big happy family" now seems like one of life's cruel jokes when compared to the horror of their reality. Harriet comes to believe that Ben is an "alien," born as the result of some random DNA still in the gene pool and inherited from a time when other races walked the earth. She's felt this way to some extent all along and slowly but surely, first David, and then others in the family come to feel the same way. Harriet's convinced that the only ones that can't admit such a thing are the professionals—the doctors and bureaucrats and law enforcement officials—even if they, too, suspect something of the sort. On the surface, it seems a crazy theory—that non-humans walk among us, throwbacks from a time of trolls, gnomes, ice-giants, extraterrestrial and underground dwellers but it does seem to explain a lot about the state of the world, the origin and the persistence of evil. It helps explain bank executives, for instance, and such institutions as the U.S. Senate.
The Heart of a Dog. A starving mongrel on his last leg, shivering in the Russian cold, staggers from the scant shelter of a doorway to accept a sausage from the hand of a kindly stranger. It must be true: every dog has his day. Because in short order, the one-time scroungy cur is now the sleek, well-fed house pet of a prominent physician. But the good doctor has ulterior, less than altruistic motives. He doesn't want the dog for a pet so much as he wants him as a test subject for his latest experiment, implanting a human heart and pituitary gland into the poor beast. The operation is only a partial success: the dog becomes only partially human. By which author Mikhail Bulgakov satirizes the experiment of the Russian Revolution which, in his drolly reactionary, counter-revolutionary view, tried something similar by raising the proletariat up to the status of the educated, professional, and ruling classes with the unexpected and undesired result that equality was achieved all right—everyone was equally miserable. The dog-turned-man is brutish, cowardly, undisciplined, a slave to his baser appetites. As the story progresses, there seems no end to the havoc and chaos he causes in the doctor's once well-ordered and useful life. The moral, as it was in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is that man had better beware when it comes to fooling around with the natural order of things. Both doctors have created monsters—one from helpless corpses, the other from a common dog. Bulgakov's novel, published in the days when the pros and cons of the revolution could still be discussed without being automatically sent to the Gulag, is a lot more humorous than Shelley's grim cautionary tale, but considering the Stalinist purges that were soon to come, it was Bulgakov and intellectuals like him who had more reason to be terrified of what was heading their way on the day dogs came to rule the world.
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