Quiet Sunday

 Tana French: The Keeper

This book is too long. There is a detective story in it but the author seems much more interested in describing the complex relationships among dozens of inhabitants of the little Irish town where Cal Hooper, an American policeman, has retired, but where he gets no peace. I forced myself to read to the end. By the time the one and only death in the story was explained, I didn’t really care.

Occasionally, I found some amusing mentions of food in the book, especially raspberry jam that one of the women puts up in little jars and gifts to several other women, an action that becomes enmeshed in the plot. Detective Cal likes to cook: “even though he only took it up out of a belief that Trey [his daughter] needed to eat something other than hamburgers and grilled cheese and whatever boiled-into-submission stuff her mother came up with. Now he tries fancy things all the time, and mostly they work out.” (p. 180)

At a cafe that’s central to the action, the food isn’t very good, mostly fried eggs and “toasties,” but the cozy atmosphere is important, especially in contrast to the nastiness that is a big part of life in the town (and not just the mystery part). It’s a depressing town, as exemplified here:

“The townland is scattered with these places, homes emptied by famine in the 1840s, orphaned by emigration in the seventies, left behind in the millennium rush to easier city jobs. Mostly no one bothers to knock them down.” (p. 356)

I’ve read all of Tana French’s earlier police and detective stories, and I think I liked them better than this one.

The Power Plant

Besides reading, we took a Sunday afternoon walk along the Huron River.

Review © 2026 mae sander 

Watching TV and Reading Two New Books with a Sense of Place

What I watched this week

Biden made Speaker Johnson squirm!

Photos from the New York Times

Reading

I’ve been reading two very recently published books by two authors I like: Tommy Orange and Tana French. While the two books are very different in most respects, I have been struck by how each of them is permeated by a sense of place and by a community in this place. The Native American community in Oakland, California is the focus for Tommy Orange. A rural hamlet in the wilds of Ireland is the focus for Tana French. Both authors have written about these communities in previous books as well, and I looked forward to reading these sequels. Although each book is about much more than one topic, I’ve concentrated on the sense of place in each one.

The Hunter by Tana French

Tana French: The Hunter 
(published March 5, 2024)

This is a huge book with lots of rambling descriptions of the small community of Ardnakelty in a backwoods area in County Mayo, Ireland. As a reader, you either have to be very patient or very tolerant of long descriptive passages to enjoy these colorful passages for themselves alone, rather than as prologue to any suspense that the author might decide to build. You have to enjoy the slow portrayal of a bunch of individualists with a huge back story and relationships and rivalries going back to their school days and even to their grandparents. You have to enjoy finding out which ones know and tell all the gossip and which ones can keep it to themselves. You have to empathize with the Irish people who find a dry summer heatwave unfamiliar and agonizing: and it lasts until almost the final chapter of the book.

In this mix is Cal, a stranger, a former Chicago policeman, who has lived in the town for two years and was featured along with the rest of them in the earlier novel, The Searcher. And the central character is Trey, who is fifteen and trying to control her chaotic environment.

While one expects a Tana French novel to be some sort of murder mystery, no murder happens until halfway through: it’s all personalities and an emerging story of a possible con by a recently-returned native son and how he winds up the locals who have never left. As one of the characters says: “I’ve been local all my life.” (p. 244) They know each other well: another character explains, when asked to identify the accent of some unknown men: “Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.” (p. 302) And when there’s finally a murder and a detective he turns out to be a Dubliner — and you should hear what they say about Dubliners.

The main characters’ faithful dogs have a major role in depicting life in rural Ardnakelty.
I found these photos of some of the famous Irish dog breeds, though the dogs in the story are mutts.

Two dogs show up on the first page, and accompany their two masters, the local girl Trey and the American ex-pat Cal, throughout the book. Dogs are an integral part of community life in Ardnakelty. Just about every important character in the book also has at least one dog, and the dogs relate to one another in a kind of mirror to their people. Right from the start we learn about Trey and Cal’s two dogs:

 

“Her dog Banjo lollops in wide circles off the path, snuffing and burrowing among the thick heather, which is too brown-edged and heavily scented for July. … Every few minutes he comes bounding back to tell Trey, with small happy puffs and moans, what he’s found. Banjo is a mutt, black and tan, with a beagle’s head and body set on the legs of something stubbier, and he’s a lot more talkative than Trey is. He got his name from a banjo-shaped patch of white on his belly. … Cal Hooper, the American who lives down near the village, has Banjo’s litter-mate and named him Rip, and if a plain name is good enough for Cal’s dog, it’s good enough for Trey’s. Besides, she spends much of her waking time at Cal’s place, meaning the two dogs spend much of their time together, and it would sound stupid if they didn’t match.” (p. 1)

Trey — in her relationship to Banjo and to Cal and with the rest of the characters — is a perplexing teenage mystery to those around her, especially Cal and Lena, a local woman who is Cal’s romantic partner. They constantly — maybe repetitively — react to her combination of insight and immaturity:

“He can’t be sure, any more, what she’s capable of. When he thought she had none of the artifice other teenagers develop, he was wrong again. She’s just been saving it, and tailoring it, for when it matters.” (p. 313)

“Lena spent the whole drive looking for the right way to go about this, but all she found was the looming, intractable sense that she’s out of her depth. Someone else should be doing this, Noreen or Cal or someone who has a bull’s notion of how to deal with teenagers; anyone but her.” (p. 406)

While I enjoyed the local color, the relationships among the characters, and the build-up of events, ultimately I found The Hunter to be disappointing. All in all, it was too rambling and too long. While it didn’t exactly lack focus, it also didn’t exactly stay focused either. For much of the novel, the plot centers on two men who intend to trick a number of local people out of a lot of money through a get-rich-quick scheme, but then this con falls apart, and the focus changes. Much of the plot depends on knowing the ending of the previous novel, and the main revelation (which I can’t say because it would be a spoiler) is in my view kind of a let-down. The novel, in my interpretation, turns out  not to be a police procedural or a detective story at all: more of a social history. As the New York Times reviewer says: “The secretive village is a trope as old as mysteries — as old as humanity itself.” (link)

Ireland is always a focus for American celebration,
especially Saint Patrick’s Day which is coming up soon.
My neighbors already have their holiday banner up.

 Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

“Walking around Lake Merritt you see all kinds of people in Oakland, the hipster, the homeless, the homeless hipster, the mixtape mixed-race CD-pushing rapper, the serious runners and the casual runners, the joggers, the stoners, the casual blunt smokers, the power walkers, the slow walkers that talk endlessly, the stroller pushers, and then just so many young people with blankets on the grass. It didn’t used to be like this around the lake, people always walked it, but now it is a kind of scene, with food trucks in tow.” (Wandering Stars, p. 184)

Tommy Orange’s new book has much more history than his earlier book There, There. In the early chapters it goes back much further to the lives of the Native American ancestors of the modern residents of Oakland who were in There, There. These predecessors were above all survivors, who managed to dodge the official efforts to exterminate the Indians, and who evaded annihilation in a variety of determined ways. In Tommy Orange’s view: “all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.” (p. 102)

Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars 
(published February 27, 2024)

Oakland became the home of Native Americans who were victims of the vicious Indian schools that deprived children of their heritage in the early twentieth century — including the ancestors of the main character of the book: a teenage boy who is being raised by his two grandmothers, Opal and Jacquie (as they are viewed by Native Americans; actually they are sisters and one is literally his grandmother). Oakland played a role in the way Opal thought about meeting his grandfather. In her mind, she relives this:

“You will think he is white or part white but he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories.” (p. 113)

As the reviewer in the Washington Post expressed it: “As ‘Wandering Stars’ sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is. But then, about halfway through the novel, we arrive in 2018, more than 150 years after the Sand Creek massacre. Here, Orange flares his wings and touches down for good in the home of Orvil Red Feather, the teenager wounded at the climax of ‘There There.’” (link)

 Now Oakland is the center of life in the novel, and appears in many of their thoughts. For an adopted dark-skinned child of rich parents, who befriends Orvil:

“Anyone’s skin color in a place like Oakland, that could be okay, that could be nothing to mention, normal even, but Oakland had a lotta sides to it. And it had these hills, these Oakland hills, as they were called in code, meaning not the flatlands, meaning not the east, meaning there was money up there, real estate value, multimillion-dollar views of Oakland.”

For Orvil, aware of being a child of several generations of Oakland Native Americans, the local neighborhoods in the poorer part of town were critical:

“The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland, but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to tell anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.” (p. 157)

Opal and Jacquie, the grandmothers, have many memories; for example a conversation about the Mormon temple in Oakland:

“You remember Mom used to tell us the Mormon temple was Disneyland?” 

“She told us a lot we knew not to believe,” 

Opal says. “You didn’t believe her?” 

Jacquie says. “I did. Enough that I looked it up later. You know Walt Disney got his inspiration from Fairyland way back when? And Frank Oz, who was one of the other main Muppet guys, he came out of Fairyland too? All that magic in the world, that came from Oakland.” (p. 187) 

The main character, the young boy Orvil, has a lot of promise. The two grandmothers have high aspirations for him. But circumstances lead him to become addicted first to painkillers and then to worse. It’s sad, but at the end. he describes his painful path to recovery, creating his identity, and eventually can go back to Oakland. 

“I was all about being from Oakland and being Native and feeling like I belonged to something older than the country. Opal never talked about the people who first lived in Oakland. And I hadn’t thought to look it up.” (p. 296)

Update March 16: For a really comprehensive review and interview with the author see the Guardian article titled “Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has has problems with addiction, including myself.’”

 

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Dogs dedicated to Eileen’s critter post.

A Little, Fleeting Spring

 Wordless Wednesday Photos

© 2024 mae sander

What is an English Breakfast?

What I'm reading: a definitive treatise on the English Breakfast.

The English Breakfast today is a popular choice for discriminating lovers of all things British. In London and other English destinations there are B&Bs, country inns, urban hotels, pretentious and unpretentious dining establishments, Harry Potter theme park restaurants (representing the Hogwarts dining room), and probably a few surviving country houses that still offer a menu that fits the description of this classic meal. You can even get an English Breakfast at some places in New York; cruise ship menus often have English Breakfast options, as do trains and car ferry restaurants -- providing they aren't stopped by pandemic closures 

If you order an English Breakfast, the expectation is that you will find a set choice of foods. The usual offerings would be tea or coffee, toast drowned in butter, two kinds of bacon, variously cooked eggs, a grilled tomato, a few mushrooms, several types of English-style sausage such as chipolatas; a dish of kedgeree; fish such as bloaters, smoked salmon, haddock, or kippers; black or white pudding, Heinz baked beans, marmalade, and possibly something or other in a white sauce. 

If you find a croissant, a blueberry muffin, or a Danish pastry in an "English Breakfast" your host has probably overstepped the traditional definition of this very English meal. An egg-white omelet would also be suspect. The English Breakfast flavors are traditionally mostly savory not sweet, and the choices are mostly fattening, not abstemious. 

Two items that were blamed for the demise of the English Breakfast in the 1920s were grapefruit and packaged cold cereal, which were more convenient and faster, and less dependent on domestic servants. The Americans were held responsible for these innovations, but that's not fair. After all, it was the American Heinz corporation that developed the canned baked beans that became a luxury item for country house breakfasts  before canned food was a cheap and easy choice and a required item on the English Breakfast list. In any case, the English Breakfast did not die, but was resurrected after the World War II rationing almost brought it to extinction.

"The English Breakfast is the national dish of a mythic and indivisible England, a repast that, despite differences in execution, binds its people together as one." (The English Breakfast, Kaori O'Connor, p 46). There are Welsh, Irish, and Scottish versions but there is one English Breakfast to rule them all.

The English Breakfast as many people imagine it now may take inspiration from literary versions of the meal. A century ago, detective fiction by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, A.A.Milne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others often set their imagined murders in a country house. The resident servants got up early to produce a lavish buffet with every item on this list and maybe more, to be consumed by hosts, guests, and possibly murderers and detectives. Versions of the English Breakfast still show up in current detective fiction by authors like Tana French, sometimes called a fry-up or a Full English. Such a breakfast in more recent detective fiction is rarely presented by a staff of servants in a serious country house, but still -- it survives in fiction as it does in real life.

While twentieth and twenty-first century versions are more familiar, the origin of the English Breakfast was actually during the Victorian era, when gentry living in country houses were a model of English propriety — and culinary correctness. The increasing wealth of the non-gentry created a new class: one that aspired to act genteel, but that had not been born into gentility nor inherited an estate. A real gentleman's estate would ideally stretch as far as the eye could see from the manor house. From these lands would come all the food served in the dining rooms and breakfast rooms of the stately home at the center of the property. The dishes that showed up on the table were the products of "one's own soil, rivers, forests and moorlands. The upper class fondness for venison, game and salmon springs from the fact that these are all specific products of country estates, once largely available only to those who possessed them." (p. 23)

For aspiring non-aristocrats, the Victorian era produced a large literature on how to act genteel even if you weren't born to it. Some of the challenges included training your domestic staff to cook and serve as they should, and setting tables worthy of the class to which you wanted to belong. O'Connor's book includes facsimile versions of three Victorian manuals on the ideal high-class breakfast -- that is, instructions on how to emulate the gentry in their country houses no matter how humble were your actual circumstances. To serve a proper breakfast required proper recipes for the foods, but also demanded the use of damask tablecloths, china place settings and serving dishes, silver tableware, utensils like a purpose-made scissors for cutting the top off a boiled egg, various types of toast racks, or coffee and tea sets with ewers, creamers, and so on. You needed a special diagram to know how to arrange all this on the table. Not to mention a big table. It wasn't easy!

From O’Connor’s book: an illustration of how to set a breakfast buffet for twelve.

In a future post I'll describe more of the fascinating story of the English Breakfast as told in O'Connor's wonderfully detailed book.

Review © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

"The Searcher" by Tana French

The Searcher by Tana French (published last month) has many of the same features as her several earlier novels that I’ve read: suspense, violence (but not too horrible), well-developed characters with just enough Irish idioms in their speech, and lots of rural Irish color. The plot is straightforward: no subplots, no blind alleys. Writing a review is difficult, however, because almost anything interesting that I could say would be a really bad spoiler. I think I like some of Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad novels better, but this one is fine too.

Since I don't want to spoil the story, I'll just quote some of the food and local color paragraphs because I find them quite enjoyable. Right at the beginning, the love of the Irish countryside becomes a major theme, with the explanation for why the central character Cal, a retired Chicago policeman, has chosen to move into a decrepit cottage somewhere outside of a small town in Ireland:

"The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face." (p. 3).

The tiny town near Cal's cottage includes a grocery store that plays a big role in the plot:

"Noreen’s shop packs a lot into a little space. It’s floor-to-ceiling with shelves crammed with the essentials of life— tea bags, eggs, chocolate bars, scratch cards, dish soap, baked beans, batteries, jam, tinfoil, ketchup, firelighters, painkillers, sardines— and a variety of things, like golden syrup and Angel Delight, that Cal doesn’t understand but has ambitions to try if he can work out what to do with them. It has a little fridge for milk and meat, a basket of depressed-looking fruit, and a ladder so Noreen, who’s about five foot one, can reach the high shelves. The shop smells of all those things, with a strong underlay of some uncompromising disinfectant straight out of 1950." (p. 63).

Irish food, especially breakfasts, is a central food theme. Cal is always frying bacon, toasting toast, and feeding a few other people. Right at the start: "The frying pan is hot. Cal throws in four slices of bacon, meatier and tastier than what he’s used to, and once the fat sizzles cracks in two eggs." (p. 8). Or the menu offered to a guest who doesn't accept -- “I got toast with bacon and eggs, or toast without bacon and eggs.” (p. 350). Or the menu when he eats by himself:

"He fixes himself a big breakfast, bacon, sausages, eggs and black pudding— he hasn’t worked out whether he likes black pudding, exactly, but he feels he should occasionally eat it out of respect for local custom." (p. 287). 

Black pudding seems to be key to a full Irish breakfast. It is also English; in fact, it was mentioned in the latest episode of the Great British Baking Show. Black pudding, a type of blood sausage, was on offer at a B&B where I once stayed in Dublin -- the host said he would serve it to us, but only if we really wanted to eat it. Lots of Americans evidently left it on the plate, which he didn't appreciate. 

My Irish breakfast in a B&B where we stayed in 2011.
I could have had bacon and black pudding if I had wanted it!

French's character Cal, among other things, knows how to hunt. He spends a lot of the novel waiting until he has an Irish gun license, so that he can legally buy and use a new rifle to shoot a rabbit for a rabbit stew. Once the rabbit has been shot, cleaned, and readied as food, he fries it, first shaking "chunks of meat in a plastic bag of flour, salt and pepper" and then frying them in oil "with strips of bell pepper and onion and some garlic. ... 'If I had tomatoes and mushrooms,' he says, 'we could throw those in too, but Noreen’s tomatoes weren’t looking too perky this week. This’ll do fine. We’ll have it with rice.'" (p. 261).

Another feature of Cal's Irish rural life, along with the pretty woods and fields, is the cold and damp: 

"He goes out to his woods and spends a couple of hours collecting dead branches to stack for firewood. The cold has settled in, and a fine net curtain of rain hangs in the air. Whenever Cal leaves the house, even just to take out the trash, he doesn’t feel a drop hit him, but he gets back inside damp through. Somehow it seeps inside the house, too: no matter how long he keeps the fire burning and the oil heater on, his sleeping bag and his duvet always feel almost imperceptibly damp. He buys another heater for his bedroom, which helps some but not a whole lot." (p. 328). 

In sum, this is really a book about Ireland! Reading it made me want to go back and experience some of the things we've seen and done on several trips there. The old stone walls, the ruined cottages that people believe were abandoned during the famine almost 200 years ago, the villages where young people are leaving for the city or for America, and the long-standing relationships of the rural people are all beautifully portrayed against the background of an excellent Tana French mystery.

Blog post and original photo © 2011, 2020 mae sander. 

It Didn't Help

"In a year of terrible twists, one of the worst may be yet to come."
--(James Downie, Washington Post, Nov. 1, 2020)

Who isn't worrying about the election -- what disasters will we see Tuesday night, Wednesday, and on and on? Like everyone else, I've been trying to find a way to feel better and get my mind off the immediate future and the aftermath of the vote. When I'm not thinking about the election, I'm worrying about the rapid resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic, the decline of the economy, more and more racism and oppression, and the inevitable gap in effective government (or worse) that the election is bound to bring. 

Some destressers I've tried:

Candy? Helps for around 2 minutes.

Cooking? Usually helps. I made some roasted veggies. Still anxious.

Snacks? Another 2 minutes of feeling relaxed.

Popcorn takes longer to eat...

Wine? Doesn’t help much. Maybe I should drink more than one glass.

I got a new coloring book. Fun. But I’m still worrying.

Usually, I enjoy reading. I’m half way into an interesting history book, I just bought the new Tana French police procedural novel, and I have lots of articles picked out to read online. But it’s hard to concentrate! I had a friend who said if you were depressed you should go shopping, go out to eat, or get a new haircut. Nope, the world isn’t working that way right now. We can only hope — and worry.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.

Sequels

Recently, I've been reading sequels from a variety of mystery authors. Writing a full review post of every sequel seems a bit redundant, but here's a quick report on some recent ones. As I often do, I'm notably interested in the way these authors use food to tell their stories.

Sujata Massey's Rei Shimura

The second in the Rei Shimura series is titled Zen Attitude (published in 1997). I enjoyed it very much, for its many Japanese scenes set in several Japanese cities. Rei Shimura, the amateur detective who just happens to be around when murderers are busy, has become an antique dealer, with customers whom she must handle with Japanese tact despite her American upbringing. There's plenty of suspenseful detecting and escapes from dangers, as one would expect.

I particularly enjoyed references to special Japanese food and drink; for example, a woman customer asked:

"You drink mugi-cha, don’t you?” My hostess poured cool barley tea for me into a dark earthen-ware cup. (p. 41). 

Or another occasion when she slept at a friend's house:

"She showed me a thermos of green tea and a tiered basket filled with pickled vegetables and onigiri, fresh rice balls stuffed with pickled plums that I loved. I must have smelled them when she walked in and woke me up." (p. 166). 

If anything, I liked the second in the series better than the first one. I'm surely expecting to read more! 

Cara Black's Aimee Leduc

Black's Murder in Belleville is the second detective tale in the Aimee Leduc series (published in 2000). It's every bit as over-the-top violent and exciting as the first in the series, maybe more so. By the end of the first chapter, Aimee has been a witness to a fatal car bombing, has picked up the survivor (a friend who had phoned her for help), stolen a moped, dragged her injured friend onto the moped, and avoided an unknown but clearly evil-intending pursuer. She rides the moped down the steps of a Metro station, with her friend somehow on her back, avoids the enemy, and gets away. That's just the first chapter. Oh, yes, she also is always dressed perfectly for every scene. 

Not much more about this that I would want to say. Lots of bad guys! Really bad ones! Will I read another? Probably. Will I read all 20 of them? Probably not.

Tana French's Dublin Murder Detectives

The Secret Place (published 2014) is very readable despite its substantial length. It's well-crafted: the major action in the book, from the start of a new clue in a cold case until full explanation, takes place in less than 24 hours. Alternate chapters describe the events leading up to the murder that's under investigation. The scene is in a girls' school in Dublin, which is very well portrayed, although I think some of the teenage slang dialog may be a little forced and too much like TV.

I enjoyed the way that food is used to show emotional states, especially the food in the school dining room and the snacks the girls buy at a mall near the school. For example:

"Becca digs her heels into the ground, stares at her beef casserole and refuses to get pulled in. If they want to act like idiots, that’s their problem; they can fix it themselves."(p. 427). 

"A heavy girl with her back to me looked like she was lashing into her food, but over her shoulder I caught a full plate of chicken pie chopped into tiny perfect squares, getting tinier with each vicious cut." (pp. 232-233).  

Each of French's novels introduces a new detective in the Dublin police, except for The Witch Elm, which has an amateur detective. I have liked them all.

More Sequels

Quite a few other series that I've read in the past have new books available, such as the Armand Gamache series by Louise Penny and the Inspector Brunetti series by Donna Leon. I think I've missed several Inspector Montalbano novels in the series by Andrea Camilleri, who died last year but I think left some unpublished work. And I did recently write a full post on the recent sequel in the Cormoran Strike/Robin Ellacot series by J.K.Rowling. As there are several authors that I intend to try for the first time as well, I guess I'll have plenty to do!

Review © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

Six Feet Distanced

Snacks for our friends. Food shared -- but not shared. Bread, cheese with a clean knife,
a bowl of cherries, washed. All to be touched only by our friends. We had our own tray of snacks.

After a few months of isolation, we decided that in the beautiful weather we're having it would be safe to invite friends for a distanced but in-person visit. "Don't share food" is advice that appears when authorities talk about slowly returning to normal social life. I thought about it: sharing chips and dips is unsafe for sure. Sharing some peanuts or crackers means everyone's hand goes into the bowl. Sharing a salad involves touching utensils. We decided to prepare two identical trays of snacks, one for us and one for our friends who are also isolating together. First, of course, I washed my hands very clean!

Our friends sat over 6 feet away from us, at a separate
table with their own tray. We weren't too close, but it
was far more friendly than an e-chat.

We wrapped the bottles in a napkin to wipe them off after each pour.
And each of us poured our own wine in order to stay far apart.
Another not-shared snack idea: individual goldfish packs.

Together Apart

On a walk in the park we saw various examples of social distancing, like this couple.

Also 6 feet apart.

This group appear to be standing at the corners of a large square for their face to face meet-up.

Walking down the sidewalk not too close together?
Not quite 6 feet apart, though.

Besides maintaining my social distance on walks and participating in a family e-chat, I did a bit of reading this weekend: The Trespasser by Tana French, one of the Dublin Murder Squad series of mystery novels. I've enjoyed her books, but I find them somewhat longer than they need to be. This is no exception -- it drags in the middle though it picks up again at the end.

Tana French is adept at describing smelly places, for example: "The squad room has come alive. The printer is going, someone’s phone is ringing, the blinds are open to try and drag in the half-arsed sunlight; the place smells of half a dozen different lunches, tea, shower gel, sweat, heat and action." (p. 76)

Unlike in most mysteries that I favor, food in the Dublin police officers' lives is usually unappetizing. The woman detective narrator, for example, eats while doing several other things at home after work: "I should throw some dinner into me and crash out, but I hate wasting time on sleep even worse than I hate wasting it on food. I stick some pasta ready-meal thing in the microwave... . The microwave beeps. I take the pasta thing and my coffee to the sofa and open my laptop. ... The pasta thing has gone cold and slimy. I shove down the last mouthful anyway." (p. 167-169)

I really don't have enough to say about this book to write a real review.

Blog post and photos © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

Isolation

Taking a walk in my neighborhood, I noticed a hammock hanging high in a tree.
We're all in isolation these days, but if someone is sleeping up there, they have taken isolation to an extreme!
I've seen people using similar hammocks in parks and various remote places, but this seems to be a novel location.

I wonder how they get up to the hammock. Here's the other side of the tree.
No ladder here now. Maybe it's in the house.

Isolation has lots of meanings in this time of fear and avoidance. For me, it means a lot of reading and cooking and writing. My reading this week has been Tana French's book Broken Harbor, the fourth in the Dublin Murder Squad series, published in 2012. I found it a bit extreme, especially the way French explored (by coincidence) the theme of isolation. In Broken Harbor, isolation was the fate of a family victimized by the economic crash in Ireland a decade ago. Nevertheless, it speaks to our circumstances, perhaps too intensely.

Collectively, the motive to maintain our isolation is powerful. We talk to other people only at a distance. Many of us are wearing masks or bandanas over our faces. We are avoiding all public spaces, and most of them are closed down in any case. Here in a tree, I thought, is another way to be isolated.

Isolation -- my word of the day for Wordy Wednesday!

Blog post and photos © 2020 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

The detective who didn't like food (much)

Detectives and policemen in classic mystery stories usually love their food, if it's mentioned at all. Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot fusses over his tisanes as much as over his mustache. Robert Parker's Spenser has very refined taste, though he also likes a donut. Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn sometimes eats at the southwestern chain Lotaburger, and he also loves his wife's Indian stew. Mysteries set in Italy by Dona Leon and Andrea Camilleri, and in France by Martin Walker abound with descriptions of local food.

In contrast, in the novel In the Woods, author Tana French features a Detective Ryan, who does not seem to like food much at all. Many of the descriptions of what he ate or what he saw other people eat are downright unappetizing. As in many detective stories, Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox's long hours of hard work often include stops for food or watching other people eat, but here, food hardly pleases Ryan, who narrates the story.

Tana French, In the Woods.
First novel in the series Dublin Murder Squad.
Each novel features a different detective.

Dublin Castle is the interesting location from which the fictitious Murder Squad works; I remember visiting there on a visit to Dublin in 2011, which made reading the book more fun. I enjoyed the suspense and the tightly constructed plot as well as the psychological thriller aspects of this book: I've become quite a fan of Tana French.

While suspense and detection are the important elements of the book, I was amused by the nonconformist food descriptions. For example, unpleasant sandwiches seem to be a frequent topic of Detective Ryan's disgust. Some examples of food in quick shops or pubs or at home with his flatmate Heather:

"'I said I’m not hungry,' I said, hearing the whine in my voice, but I opened the sandwich anyway: Cassie had a point, it was likely to be a very long day. We sat on the curb, and she pulled a bottle of lemon Coke out of her satchel. The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper, and the Coke was warm and too sweet. I felt slightly sick." (In the Woods, pp. 59-60). 

"They were eating toasted sandwiches; the salty, chemical smell made me feel sick. Outside the window the rain bucketed down a gutter." (p. 288).  

"I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather’s low-fat cheese— I’d forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable." (p. 282).

Other people in the novel sometimes try to please Ryan with food including his mother and a potential witness named Mrs. Fitzgerald. They don't succeed:

"That weekend I went over to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner. ... 'Where’s Cassie today?' my mother asked after dinner. She had made macaroni and cheese— she has some idea that this is my favorite dish (which it may well have been, at some point in my life) and she cooks it, as a small timid expression of sympathy, whenever something in the papers indicates that a case of mine isn’t going well. Even the smell of it makes me claustrophobic and itchy." (p. 277).

"We stopped at Lowry’s and bought Mrs. Fitzgerald a tin of shortbread, to make up for the fact that we still hadn’t found her purse. Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too. ... "'Ah… turned out badly, did he?' Cassie said confidentially. 'Could I take another scone, Mrs. Fitzgerald? These are the nicest ones I’ve had in ages.' They were the only ones she’d had in ages. She dislikes scones on the grounds that they 'don’t taste like food.'" (pp. 300-303). 

Just once, under special circumstances, Cassie manages to give Ryan some comfort food:

"Cassie rummaged in the wardrobe, passed me a bottle of brandy and a glass. 'Have a shot of that while I make food. Eggs on toast?'...
"She turned from the frying pan to look at me, a wooden spoon in her hand. ... She switched off the stereo, popped the toast and piled the eggs on top of it. 'Here.' The smell made me realize how hungry I was. I shoveled the food down in huge mouthfuls, barely stopping to breathe; it was whole-grain bread and the eggs were redolent with herbs and spices, and nothing had ever tasted so richly delicious." (p. 396-397). 

Tana French is also good at poking a little fun at food fads and snobbery:

"Heather disappeared back into the kitchen, presumably to add horse-sized capsules of vitamin C and echinacea to her frenetically balanced diet. I went into my room and closed the door. I poured myself a drink— I keep a bottle of vodka and one of tonic behind my books, to avoid cozy convivial 'drinkies' with Heather." (pp. 104-105). 

"At 8: 17 p.m., according to the computer printout [of a phone tap], Andrews had ordered lasagna with smoked salmon, pesto and sun-dried tomato sauce. 'Jesus Christ,' I said, appalled." (pp. 417-418). 

"It had been well over a week since I had eaten an actual meal, with food groups and everything." (p. 433).

I'm aware that beyond the more traditional, suspenseful police procedurals and detective stories by authors like Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Martin Walker, Tony Hillerman as well as Tana French, there is a more recent genre of cozy mysteries. These often feature food to the extent that recipes are included, and frequently include characters who are in the food business as well. I am not much of a fan of cozy mysteries, so this blog post is not in any way about them. However this blog post IS copyright © 2020 by mae sander for this blog: maefood dot blogspot dot com, and if you are reading it elsewhere, it's been pirated.

"Faithful Place" by Tana French

"Breakfast was the full whammy: eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes. This was clearly some kind of statement, but I couldn’t work out whether it was See, we’re doing just grand without you, or I’m still slaving my fingers to the bone for you even though you don’t deserve it, or possibly We’ll be even when this lot gives you a heart attack. " -- Faithful Place, (p. 45). 

Undercover agent Francis Makey,  narrator of Faithful Place, is served this typical Irish breakfast on his first visit in 22 years to the extremely dysfunctional home of his parents and siblings. Obviously, he feels enormous pressure from them, and struggles not to be overwhelmed by the guilt they would like him to feel. His adult life includes a divorce, a fraught custody arrangement, and his success as a member of the police force ... but he can't completely turn his back on his origins.

Faithful Place, Tana French's 2010 detective novel, clearly offers much more than the obsessed search for a murderer.  It's the story of Makey's early life in the impoverished neighborhood in Dublin (a neighborhood called Faithful Place), of his hatred of his father, and of his efforts to get more and more information about who he is. Because the murder victims are both very close to Mackey, he's not officially involved in the police work, and in fact is constantly told to back off and let his colleagues do their job. He can't let it go: understanding what happened consume him until the quite dramatic ending where all is revealed.

Like many writers of fast-paced and suspenseful detective stories, Tana French often punctuates the flow of time with meals: especially breakfast. Indicating a new morning is always a way to make the reader feel the daily rhythm of the unfolding mystery -- as well as a way to create local atmosphere. Here's the narrator's version of breakfast the next morning:

"The streets were shining wet and empty, bells ringing for early Mass and nobody much paying attention. I found a depressing café full of depressed Eastern Europeans and got myself a nutritious breakfast: soggy muffins, a handful of aspirin and a bucket of coffee." (p. 147).

I enjoyed Faithful Place enormously, and admired the way it combined a self-portrait of the narrator with a well-crafted murder mystery. It's full of humor and word play, as well as zingers about the social condition of the narrator and the people around him. I enjoyed it especially because it reminded me of a couple of visits I've paid to Ireland; I really appreciated the list from the family's guilt-inducing breakfast: "eggs, rashers, sausages, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes." This was the exact menu in a Dublin bed & breakfast where I once stayed! And just as I was writing the review, my friend Sheila in England sent me the following parody of the classic breakfast:

Coincidently, here is Sheila's photo of "A Fool English Breakfast" which was in fact a dessert in a restaurant.
She explained: "The mushrooms were meringue, the bacon dried watermelon with a fat rim of some sort of jelly,
the black pudding was blueberry rice pudding and the egg made up of mango sorbet and panna cotta."

"The Witch Elm" by Tana French

The Witch Elm is a very enjoyable book. It's suspenseful with a tightly-wound plot. The main characters, including the narrator, are unusual, believable, mostly sympathetic, but not at all predictable. Descriptions and conversations are wonderfully vivid, including an unusual number of observations not only about what the characters ate, but also about how things in their environment smell --

• "a huge fragrant bag of Thai takeaway." (p. 91)
• "the casserole was good, rich with herbs and full of big hearty chunks of beef and potato and carrot" (p. 149)
• "experimental dinners full of ingredients I didn’t know how to pronounce, let alone what to do with (galangal? teff?)" (p. 156) 
• "It smelled like him, a faint comforting scent of wet wool and dusty old books and smoky tea." (p. 456). 

Right at the start, the narrator introduces himself -- a very lucky man, he says -- and the Ivy House, in Dublin, where most of the book's action is to take place: he ponders "what luck can be, how smoothly and deliciously deceptive, how relentlessly twisted and knotted in on its own hidden places, and how lethal." (p. 5). At the end of the book, it's up to the reader to evaluate the many times he says how lucky he is! 

The narrator's introduction to Ivy House is an example of much that I like in the writing:

"And of course there was the Ivy House. I don’t think anyone could convince me, even now, that I was anything other than lucky to have the Ivy House. I know it wasn’t that simple, I know all the reasons in intimate, serrated detail; I can lay them out in a neat line, stark and runic as black twigs on snow, and stare at them till I almost convince myself; but all it takes is one whiff of the right smell— jasmine, lapsang souchong, a specific old-fashioned soap that I’ve never been able to identify— or one sideways shaft of afternoon light at a particular angle, and I’m lost, in thrall all over again." (p. 4). 

The role of the house is fascinating: at the end, it became "this dim house where ivy crisscrossed the windows and all my clothes smelled faintly of mildew." (p. 457).

Reviewing this beautifully constructed book is a terrible challenge because the least discussion of the events in the book would be a real spoiler.  In Stephen King's review of the book in the New York Times, he put it this way: 

"As a reviewer, it’s my job to at least make a scratch at describing the plot of the novel, but as a fellow novelist, I balk at giving more than a few bare details. (In my opinion, the flap copy gives away far too much — when you know everything that’s going to happen in the first 140 pages or so, somebody went overboard.) A good novel, especially one that fits, however uncomfortably, into the mystery genre, is like an expensive Swiss watch. My job is to admire it, not overwind it."

I haven't read the earlier detective novels by Tana French, but they now seem very tempting.