The Alice Network and The Lotus Eaters

Greetings. It feels like I have been away for a long while. I went to Southern California a couple weeks ago to visit my folks and I haven’t posted on the blog since. Things just got away from me this month, but I’m glad to be back and share some of my photos (at left and below) of my time there. California was really lovely, both the desert and the beach. And it must have rubbed off here too because we’ve had great weather in Canada the past couple of weeks, which makes me happy. Fall can be such a gorgeous time of year, and Halloween is supposed to be clear and nice so we will gear up for the trick-or-treaters. 

Meanwhile in recent book news I see that Northern Irish author Anna Burns won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel “Milkman,” which isn’t even available in North America till Dec. 11. Hmm, it seems obscure, but it beat out Richard Powers’s novel “The Overstory” and Rachel Kushner’s “The Mars Room” as well as Esi Edugyan’s novel “Washington Black,” which all made the shortlist among a couple others. That isn’t too shabby competition. Hail to Graywolf Press for its plans to put out the book, which was inspired by the author’s own experience growing up in Northern Ireland. Apparently it’s a dark, experimental novel about a “bookish 18-year-old girl harassed by a paramilitary figure called the milkman during the Troubles in Northern Ireland,” according to The Post’s Ron Charles. What makes the book memorable apparently is the funny, alienated voice of this girl who “refuses to join in the madness,” so writes The Sunday Times. She sounds like a cool character so I’m game to check it out.  Meanwhile I will leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately. 

My latest reads were both big sagas — historical fiction that took my mind far away.  First, Kate Quinn’s 2017 novel “The Alice Network,” was my choice for the plane flight to California, which didn’t disappoint as the pages fell easily by the wayside. The book is still amazingly popular as currently there’s 260 holds on 49 copies at my library. But I almost didn’t pick it up because of one critical blog review, but I’m glad Judy’s review at the blog Keep the Wisdom and my sister steered me to do so. It’s an entertaining, sweeping yarn of a story and otherwise I would never have known about this real life spy network that operated during World War I. 

“The Alice Network” is a novel that alternates chapters between two time periods — from 1915 as Eve is recruited to be a spy in France during World War I — and then in 1947 when 19-year-old Charlotte (or Charlie) goes searching for her cousin Rose after WWII. Both stories come together in a fairly swift-paced saga — as a pregnant, yet single Charlie teams up with the curmudgeonly Eve (and Eve’s ex-convict chauffeur Finn), who she thinks might know where her cousin is. Eve though has some baggage and scores of her own to settle, so the journey turns out to be quite a goose chase. And while the link and bad guy between the two timelines was a bit of a stretch for me, I went with it. 

What interested me most was the exploits of the Alice Network, which was based on a real spy operation during World War I and the woman who ran it: French secret agent Louise de Bettignies (also known under the pseudonym as Alice Dubois). Carefully weaved together in the story are a few characters who are based on the real spies and the events that happened to them while others are fictitious. I hadn’t known much about WWI spies or how Resistance fighters were able to intercept German information, so this story intrigued me in that aspect. The courageous feats these women spies pulled off to acquire and pass information along about German military maneuvers — at grave danger to themselves (even to the point of sleeping with the enemy, yikes) — kept me on my toes.

“The Alice Network” is not a dense read nor a powder puff read.  There are some light-ish, romance parts  to it — as well as violent deaths too. It reminded me a bit of Jojo Moyes’s novel “The Girl You Left Behind” and Kristen Hannah’s “The Nightingale” — the same kind of reading perhaps. If you enjoyed those yarns, you’d probably like this. I thought the author did a thorough job of research — as well as having a keen interest and enthusiasm for the history behind it, which she writes about in some notes at the back of the book. For a plane flight and vacation read, it was just the right thing.

Next up, I finished the audiobook of Tatjana Soli’s 2010 debut novel “The Lotus Eaters,” which I was curious about after reading her recent historical novel about George and Libby Custer called “The Removes.”  “The Lotus Eaters” is quite a bit different from that but is also inspired by real people — in this case female war photographers such as Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy who spent time working in Vietnam during the war.  This story is about a female war photographer named Helen Adams who comes to Vietnam in 1965 in the hopes of documenting the war that took her brother’s life. There she gets involved with Sam Darrow, a prize-winning photographer who shows her the ropes. Helen, Sam, and his Vietnamese assistant Linh turn out as the main protagonists of the story, which follows their lives as they become deeper entangled in Vietnam, each other, and their jobs during the war.

Oh my, it’s quite an involved saga. It hit me as being like a “Dr. Zhivago” of the Vietnam War — in that it’s epic and includes a bit of a love triangle. It’s chock-full of the war experience from 1963 to 1975 — from the streets of Saigon, to the missions into the interior, the scorching of villages, the soldiers’ fatalities, to ultimately the final days of the American evacuation and even into the Cambodian killing fields. Most of it is explored through Helen’s eyes and how she becomes taken with the country and the violence and risks that come along with being a war photographer.  The character of Linh too is intriguing, as he’s lost his family and must weigh conflicted loyalties between his heart and his homeland. 

The stories’ themes are plentiful: about war and destruction and its affects on people; the beauty and culture of Vietnam; the adrenaline of photojournalism; trying to find humanity despite the horrors; and about making sense of what happened there. I found quite a bit of the novel’s writing beautiful and a few parts of the action riveting. It wasn’t an easy or light book as it goes off in various tangents and is lengthy — a true saga about Helen’s career and loves and of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam — but I liked much of its truths about the country and the human condition. The author really got under the skin of these characters and I felt by the end they were quite real; they had all gone through so much! Kudos to the author who apparently spent 10 years writing the book, which showed in her depiction of its vivid details. This was my second novel of hers and I’ll be interested to read what she puts out next.

Lastly, I saw the movie “First Man” a few weeks back about the life of astronaut Neil Armstrong and his mission to the moon in 1969. It stars Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy as the Armstrongs. Wow it’s quite a somber and serious movie, which I guess I wasn’t totally expecting. For those who aren’t totally into NASA or space films, you might not find it completely entertaining … though it’s quite interesting but not exactly a light, happy film. This isn’t a Disney version. Both Gosling and Foy are good and seem to play down their star status for the roles. 

It’s a movie with relatively not a lot of dialogue but the cinematography makes it seem quite real.  A few scenes of shaky, spinning aircraft and propulsion, which go on for what feels like too long, might make you feel sick. I certainly was ready for those parts to end, yet I’m glad to have seen the movie. It made me feel how the odds were stacked against the astronauts’ endeavor and yet the moon landing was miraculously persevered and accomplished … despite the old technology back then and all the other hardships they faced. It was enough to make you realize their momentous feat in history. 

That’s all for now.  What about you have you read either of these authors or seen this movie and if so, what did you think?