Ignorance

The greater the period of time left behind us, the more irresistible the voice inviting us to return. This phrase has the look and feel of evidence, but all the same it is untrue. As one gets older and the end nears, each moment becomes more and more precious, and one no longer has time to waste on memories. One has to understand the mathematical paradox of nostalgia: it is more powerful in the throes of youth when the volume of life lived is completely insignificant.

                                                                                                                  Milan Kundera, L'ignorance

Watching this pretentious quilt of a film a while back, I was reminded of an old (and incorrect) saying: judge not the act for the place in which it occurs. Paris, a place I have never been able to get over, makes the most trivial of acts and banal of conversations seem more profound and life-changing. It colors the shades of my twilights, the reflections upon a citied river, the dappled incongruity of the houses and brasseries that have no comparison in any other city, the weather that always seems to enhance our rising emotions. Yes, readers of these pages know my weaknesses, and one of them is surely for the metropolises of Northern Europe. Strange that, as my ancestors hail from all corners of the Mediterranean; perhaps it is my conscious effort to overcome my bloodlines; perhaps, and more likely, it is among these northern lights – Paris, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Moscow, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Stockholm, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Helsinki – that my soul has found the balance of culture, language, art and humanism that will forever nourish its dreams. And should memory serve me well – and it is usually a docile hound – I first flipped through this book on the ground floor of this bookstore several years ago. 

Only the German translation was available, and a few pages of random reading (my usual method of selection) suggested that waiting to acquire the original would probably be a better idea. Memory has yet to yield any data regarding that brief dalliance apart from the plot blurb on the back, which I seem to remember verbatim, and a few scattered thoughts about one woman's rather melodramatic and tragic return home (home, in this case, being this breathtaking city). The result is an odd novel, more a pastiche of the author's memories than anything else, and proof positive that where something takes place undoubtedly influences how we view what takes place. Our protagonist – well, our initial protagonist – is a Czech émigré called Irena, now living in Paris with her adult daughter. Like many of her compatriots Irena fled her homeland when the Red Army decided to practice tank manoeuvres in downtown Prague. Twenty-one years later, when the wall of ignorance between East and West was finally torn down, she was faced with a choice: return to a country she no longer knows or remain in another country where she will never truly be at home. It is a choice that every émigré and political refugee faces once another tyrant has been destroyed (we have, thank Heavens, only a few left), and there are no advantages to making a decision that has already been made by history. As our omniscient narrator comments: "But what can a man who has come to see the country of his past think of, if not of his past?" And here is where Irena wades through the waters of oblivion and finds some shells and artefacts she did not expect.

She goes back in time to her ex-husband Martin, now held against the light of the most typical filters of the past: her current lover, a Swede by the name of Gustaf, and "the one who got away," a Czech émigré and veterinarian called Josef. Martin dies after several years in France and with him dies her last opportunity to speak her native language on a daily basis, her daughter predictably preferring the new to the old. Gustaf is the very opposite of Martin: loud, almost rambunctious, unbeset by sadness and nostalgia (like many Scandinavians, he felt "limited" by the smallness of his country), and callow in the ways of the Iron Curtain. When the Berlin Wall does tumble, it is Gustaf who immediately suggests that Irena go back and take a look around – with him, of course, as a willing accomplice. Since he has never lost his country or the occasion to return to it, he could not possibly understand what leaving the ones you love for good might signify. His blithe, almost troglodyte manner is belied by the heaviness in Irena's eyes. Irena, we are told early on, is very much like the most famous wanderer in literary history. Indeed, given the twenty-year hiatus and the irretrievability of so much of the past (Odysseus and Irena both leave around the age of thirty-five), Ignorance provides a true account of Ulysses, because unlike Joyce's masterpiece, we witness a departure, period of absence, and return. The return is more important than the wanderings because the wanderings mean nothing if they cannot end; this is not to find fault with the metaphor Joyce borrowed but rather to underscore Kundera's closer approximation. And like Odysseus, who returns to his beloved Penelope after two decades away, Irena feels little of what she thought she might feel upon her touching Czech soil anew. So much so that Kundera offers an analysis: "If I were a doctor, I would issue the following prognosis in his case: 'The patient suffers from an insufficiency of nostalgia.'" This prognosis is quickly amended to: "'The patient suffers from a masochistic deformation of his memory.'" What is amusing about such a remark is that it no longer refers to Irena, but to the man she re-encounters twenty years later, Josef.

About a third of the way through the novel, Josef hijacks the narrator's attention and we are thrown headlong into his world. Josef also left his family behind, although he was unmarried and began a family in his new homeland, Denmark. Unlike Irena, however, Josef selected another small country as his destination; he would not melt into the ethnic stew that France was becoming in the 1960s, but stick out rather prominently in still-homogenous Copenhagen. Here we find a wonderful passage on the much-maligned "small country complex":

To be ready to give your life for your country: all nations of the world have known the temptation of such a sacrifice. The enemies of the Czechs, as it were, have also known it: the Germans, the Russians. But these are great nations. Their patriotism is different: they are exalted by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was rife with glory but because it was unknown; not because it was great and elevated, but because it was small and constantly imperiled. Thus their patriotism signifies immense compassion for their country. The Danes are the same. It was not by chance that Josef chose to emigrate to a small country.

The details of Josef's youth after he discovers his old high school diary and is astonished that he didn't bother to take it along with him might remind the Kundera connoisseur of the author himself. After all, we are regaled on the usual tales of skirt-chasing, music, and Romanticism that is kept alive by Kundera's own digressions on figures such as this poet and this composer. Amidst these digressions is a tapestry of beautiful images, failed dreams, and tainted memories that can only come from a long life of reflection, art, and moral intuition. In one great passage, Josef spots his watch on the wrist of his brother, and then compares his return to that of a dead man returning from the grave twenty years later and finding his possessions divvied up among his survivors; another passage features the bittersweetness of nostalgia as "the captive, conquered present overcome by the past." That is not to say that the world of Kundera – who turns eighty-five today – is not tinged with hope: he remains, in fact, incorrigibly optimistic about the future of art while rightly attacking the trendy nonsense with which the twentieth century was saturated. Long-time Kundera readers have realized that each successive work seems to be a summary of his previous output, at once more precisely tied to his experiences and more abstractly philosophical, and we read and are transported to all the right points of the past. Even if most of them aren't really there anymore.

Asylum

The history of mental illness is curiously coterminous with the history of psychology, a fact which proponents of such therapy claim is a testament to its importance. Without belaboring the matter, I will say that retroactive imputations of mental illness to famous figures in history is not so much outlandish as proof that this type of approach engenders silly speculation befitting computerized minds. There are some prominent movements afoot that revile psychiatry, and the more one knows of the subject the more one is inclined to heed such warnings. Ultimately, we will have to understand that a small segment of our population – much smaller than pharmaceutical companies and their agents would care to admit – is truly ill and in need of medication and perhaps occasional inspection. The rest of us can jolly well fix our own problems, which brings us to this delightfully gloomy novel.

Our narrator is Peter Cleave, a senior psychiatrist at an asylum redolent of Victorian Gothic and situated in the British countryside. The year is 1959, a watershed for English mental institutions by virtue, we are told, of the passing of the Mental Health Act. The intergalactic weapon known as Google informs me that this piece of legislation trumped the "1890 Lunacy Act" (surely a glorious feat) and more or less provided a legal framework to detain mental patients in appropriate institutions against their will. This stipulation will become important on more than on one occasion in Asylum, but let us briefly step through the brambles of the plot. A new deputy superintendent, Max Raphael, his voluptuous wife Stella, and their plump, generally ignored ten-year-old son, Charlie, have been getting accustomed to life in this dreary if lush pocket of existence. Cleave is skeptical about this arrangement from the very beginning:   

Stella .... was the daughter of a diplomat who had been disgraced in a scandal years before. Both her parents were dead now. She was barely out of her teens when she married Max. He was a reserved, rather melancholy man, a competent administrator but weak; and he lacked imagination. It was obvious to me the first time I met them that he wasn't the type to satisfy a woman like Stella. They were living in London when he applied for the position of deputy superintendent. He came down for an interview, impressed the board and, more important, impressed the superintendent, Jack Straffen. Against my advice Jack offered him the job and a few weeks later the Raphaels arrived at the hospital. 

With this unsubtle introduction, it is clear that we will soon encounter someone who is Stella's match, and probably also Max's opposite. This task falls to Edgar Stark, a large, muscular psychopath who fancies himself to be a bit of a sculptor (what he did to his wife, a disgusting crime that landed him in lockdown, will tell you all you need to know about his artistic capacity). In any case, Stark is certainly attractive in a brawny, Lord Byron sort of way, and Stella has been "more or less celibate" for the last several years. How does a "cultured, beautiful woman," who also appears to be a fine cook and homemaker, end up so neglected that she confesses her feelings at a dinner party? It is one of the odd conceits of the novel that Max's lack of imagination is blamed; in fact, this lynchpin is so dubious as to cast enormous shadows on all that is to come. To wit, if you have a wealth of ambition and a dearth of sensuality, why would you ever marry a beautiful woman whose curves gain her the nickname from one of the characters of "Rubens"? Not only is her ability to play hostess untested and unlikely, but a buxom bombshell will raise more than eyebrows regarding Max's maturity. And when Stella willingly allows Edgar's advances to conquer her whole, the novel skids down some rather implausible slopes.

Yet this is again to the credit of McGrath, who excels when he writes about his native England, but is far less successful with his American-based works (despite that he has long been a New World resident). Stella and Edgar fornicate, spend hours thinking themselves unwatched amid the sprawling hospital gardens – or, I should say, Stella alone believes this nonsense – and enjoy probing each other's physical and emotional limits. Then one fine day, Edgar has the impudence to seduce her on her own bed then make off with some of Max's clothes. Escape from an asylum, observes the usually purblind Max, requires two things: clothes and money. How nice of Stella then, when Edgar asked a week or so before, to have "given him everything she had in her purse." Edgar, to no one's surprise except Stella's, absconds to London where the second act begins, with Stella joining her lover and the latter's henchman Nick in an urban warehouse loft she will come to fear. Here we get scenes as plebeian as the raw and unfinished surroundings, and it is also here that Stella tries to refashion Edgar – who has hitherto come off as merely an unctuous, self-serving beast, at least to us – into the lover she really craves, not unlike Edgar's desire to sculpt her head:

She knew the thread was unbroken; even in his worst fits of aggressive jealousy she felt him straining for her, she felt the passion, only it was confused and misdirected, it was as though it had been shunted off down some passage from which it emerged monstrous and unrecognizable. This was his illness. And she said that it was during the two days she spent with Nick that she attempted what she called her heart's prompting: she tried for the first time, not intellectually but emotionally, to separate the man from his illness, and yes, she could do it. Oh, it was easy, she was more than equal to the task: she imagined him clutching his head as the storm raged in his poor benighted mind, but the storm wasn't him! The storm would pass, he would recover, he would be himself again. But for his sake she must avoid him while he was mad; later she would go back to him.

As Cleave duly notes, Stella has learned little from living among psychiatrists. Her few weeks in London are Bohemian in that very banal manner so commonly incident to lesser novels – which seems precisely like what has entrapped Stella. Edgar's "benighted mind" eventually gets the better of him, as it always has, and Stella makes her fallen way back to the familial country home alongside the titular institution.

Although I have not seen all of the doggedly faithful screen adaptation, I will permit myself use of its less complimentary reviews. While the film has been loathed in particular for Stella's abrupt stupidity, the novel's original improbabilities are greatly magnified by the casting choices, especially with this late actress as Stella. Richardson is sadly ten years too old and, unfortunately, not enough of a bimbo to make this work – and herein lies our greatest trouble. Our narrative, while gripping, will evolve in guarded steps; indeed, McGrath has never written more beautifully or more accurately. The premise of its stemming from the pen of an elderly psychiatrist bestows the semblance of an ornate clinical report. What happens to Stella and Charlie and Max in the third act, which begins in some downtrodden Welsh village called Cledwyn Heath, indicates that Edgar is not the only ailing soul among the dramatis personae. Max, as usual, does not quite catch on:

The house seemed too large for them, and they drifted about it like strangers in an empty hotel. Max was unable properly to begin his punitive campaign, perhaps, she thought, because the magnitude of her guilt awed him. That she should still eat, and drink, and move from room to room, burdened as she was with sin, this struck him dumb with amazement and even a sort of admiration. He could not quite believe that she wasn't crawling about on her hands and knees, begging his forgiveness.

Stella does nothing of the kind, and Max keeps her around with the old excuse that a child needs a mother. Now, a child certainly does need a mother, but not one like Stella. Not one who has succumbed to "those large emotions that by their very nature tend to blaze freely and then die, having destroyed everything that fed them." Well, almost everything.

The Invisible Man

It is wonderful how little a man can do alone!  To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

According to internet sources a film bearing the title of this classic novel might be released in the near future, although one will be disappointed to learn that it has been initially retooled as a wartime sequel.  What is so remarkable about the original work is the blueprint it sets for almost every action movie subsequently created.  It is fast; it is furious; it is never for a moment dull.  And unlike the crash-and-bash vehicles that have littered our cineplexes for decades, it holds together in perfect, if demented logic.

Demented would also describe the feverish state of mind of our protagonist, a scientist by the name of Griffin.  That Griffin already denotes a mythological creature should not surprise the astute reader; that the whole plot recounts an old parable with brutally modern terminology must qualify it as an astounding work of genius.  Griffin spends the first half of the novel rumbling about the small town of Iping, whose inclusion as a haunt for a being of his powers can be seen as both advantageous and wholly inconvenient.  Later information from Griffin himself suggests that the choice was motivated in no small part by the superstitions so rampant among country folk (a bias that would probably have checked off a few boxes on Wells's agenda).  Our first scene has a bandaged stranger taking a room in a backwater inn.  He has arrived without luggage and his demeanor cannot be construed as anything less than vicious.  Still, he is a paying customer, and the element of mystery is not lost on his hostess, Mrs. Hall: 

He held a white cloth – it was a serviette he had brought with him – over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason for his muffled voice.  But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall.  It was the fact that all his forehead was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose.  It was bright, pink and shiny just as it had been at first.  He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck.  The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable.  This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

Griffin may have calculated in his creeping madness that simple people would truckle to his whim and word; yet one would think that Iping would be precisely the type of newsy, closely-knit village in which rumor of such an amazing visitor would bring him sustained harassment.  When Griffin finally settles down to relate his story, we come to see that London is hardly too cosmopolitan not to suspect a freak of science.  But London also possesses a far greater allotment of policeman, thieves, dogs and other obstacles to a happy, invisible life.  And, perhaps most importantly, London does not have Griffin's old university chum, Dr. Kemp.

It is just in the middle of our novel that Griffin finds Kemp, likewise a man of science and a respected physician, and as hardened into skepticism of all oddities as any allegedly enlightened mind can be.  The methods of his introduction are brusque and unswerving, and Kemp, despite his hesitation, obliges himself to talk to the wafting air from where an old, familiar voice is ventriloquized.  Griffin provides his former colleague with a detailed and supremely exact method of how he came upon the faculty of invisibility, his experiments on an unfortunate feline, the suspicions and antics of his immigrant landlord, and, most relevantly, the tribulations of the public exercise of the greatest scientific discovery of all time.  The results were not what he had hoped for: 

The more I thought it over, the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an invisible man was – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilized city.  Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages.  That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.  I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable.  No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they were gotten.  Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?  What is the good of the love of woman when her name needs be Delilah?  I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.  What was I to do?  And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man?

Such misfortune explains why Griffin is continuously found cursing – at least ten times in the book's first third, and usually at either his beakers or the Iping natives – a pun on his malediction.  The Iping half also features an outrageous gaggle of dialects, probably because the overly class-conscious Wells could not bring himself to put his delectable prose in the mouths of the uncouth.  More than a century on, The Invisible Man remains the greatest action novel ever written, in the macabre stream of action novels, not those of spy and spymaster.  Apart from the disastrous transcripts of local expression, his prose has the ease and beauty of the highest literary art, and the novel would be utterly unappealing were it rendered in the hard-boiled style of modern screenplays.  Even if, as Griffin readily admits, invisibility is ultimately good for only three things: approaching, getting away, and killing.  Some things, it would seem, are better left undiscovered.   

Atonement

Literary reviews as a rule do not behoove the person to know anything about the work he is reviewing.  He may revel in some of the trendier devices and philosophy, but in time first-rate novels end up branded with the same nonsense that tattoos the maudlin vulgarities of bestseller kiosks.  Why is this?  Perhaps because there is only so much we can say without context; perhaps because publishers are wise enough to know what type of citation makes a reader feel good about himself (there is no small psychology in such measures); perhaps because, for all our differences, each one of us desires a basket of similar goods – peace, prosperity, love, remembrance, fidelity, hope, and redemption.  The commonality of our themes bespeaks an undercurrent of basic human values all too often downplayed by those who like relativism, which eschews societal responsibilities for a desert bungalow where anything can and will happen (you may have heard such drivel before).  So when we read the decorous praise embedded in the usual display of the reviewer's past readings we discover nothing about its mechanisms.  A literary review has its destination, that of literary context, broadly bent across its brow and nothing more.  The careful reader knows better than to wallow in bibliographies, however luminous they may seem, as in this famous novel.

The structure of Atonement derives its power from its immediate surroundings.  An interbellum British country home; the attendant snobbery and trivial worries; a looming war with a surging and malignant juggernaut – all these are simple tools of fiction from the autoclave of longtime practitioners.  What makes them lovely is the patience with which they are rendered familiar.  Our family are the Tallises, father Jack (conspicuously absent), mother Emily (conspicuously valetudinarian), son Leon (conspicuously unambitious), and, the real stars of the show, two sisters a full decade apart, Cecilia and Briony.  The summer is 1935, a whole generation after Europe was massacred yet sufficiently ahead of fascist hellfire to have us believe that happiness is not only possible, it is also enduring.  For a short visit anyway, the Tallises have been beset by Emily's niece Lola and twin nephews Jackson and Pierrot, names so hideously cacophonous as to shed great doubt on their mother's concern for the well-being of their owners.  Briony's best method for coping with these interlopers is to focus on the visit of the very un-prodigal son, Leon.  In his honor she, an intellectually precocious thirteen, writes a play that she intends to have her cousins act out (the plan ends in non-performance and humiliation).  The other distraction is the tall, handsome, and intelligent creation called Robbie Turner.  A Cambridge graduate just like Cecilia, whom he has known all his life, yet least of all when they attended the same university, Robbie plays an unlikely role in the Tallises' existence in that he is the sole offspring of their beloved charwoman Grace.  The two have heard nothing of his father for seventeen years now, so it has been the self-imposed task of Jack Tallis to see to Robbie's education.  He smartly studied literature at Cambridge; he then also smartly determined that he had little literary talent and has now become greatly interested in a medical degree, again to be subsidized by Jack.  But the figure of particular interest is a coeval of Leon's, another tall man by the name of Paul Marshall.

Marshall smells war – the rotting flesh, the smoke, the taste of dirt in every orifice – but he also smells the spoils.  He knows what will happen because it has already happened (one of the advantages of writing about the past), yet at the same time senses that what his father's generation suffered was not conclusive.  With the confidence of someone who knows that he has enough money never to appear boring, he speaks at length of his wartime plans to fabricate fake chocolate energy bars for every British soldier.  That this foodstuff bears the name "Amo bar" might recall what is stroked into each rifle and machine gun, as well as a certain Latin conjugation (Lola suggests the latter).  Yet for all his millions and "cruel good looks," Paul is ultimately a typical part of Leon's world:     

In Leon's life, or rather, in his account of his life, no one was mean-spirited, no one schemed or lied or betrayed.  Everyone was celebrated at least in some degree, as though it was a cause for wonder that anyone existed at all.  He remembered all his friends' best lines.  The effect of one of Leon's anecdotes was to make his listener warm to humankind and its failings.  Everyone was, at a minimal estimate, a "good egg" or "a decent sort," and motivation was never judged to be at variance with outward show.  If there was mystery or contradiction in a friend, Leon took the long view and found a benign explanation.  Literature and politics, science and religion did not bore him – they simply had no place in his world, and nor did any matter about which people seriously disagreed.  He had taken a degree in law and was happy to have forgotten the whole experience.  It was hard to imagine him ever lonely, or bored or despondent; his equanimity was bottomless, as was his lack of ambition, and he assumed that everyone else was much like him.  Despite all this, his blandness was perfectly tolerable, even soothing.

One may complain that the rich violence of genius is generally lacking in McEwan; that his subjects are bereft of any spirituality and for that reason sink more deeply into oblivion; that his abuse of the comma borders on the egregious; but this passage is perfect.  It gives us every nuance of those lads we all know that joke, backslap, and carouse their way into middle age without tasting anything akin to structure or system.   And what becomes of these merry men is little different in fiction than in reality – but here I digress.

I have said nothing of the plot because the plot is patently ridiculous.  This is, however, to McEwan's credit.  Robbie and Cecilia share a few scenes that while appropriate for an equally admirable film, have little initial effect since they are based on nothing but supposition.  That two people who grew up near one another in different social strata could fall in love remains one of art's most tested clichés, but we see little run-up to this great affair whose passion will suffuse Atonement with lyricism and regret.  Despite this early blunder, the rest of the novel is magnificent in its pacing: half of it is allotted to two nights in the summer of 1935, because these will be the greatest and the most horrible nights in Cecilia and Robbie's young lives; a fifth – perhaps a symbolic bottle of liquor – advances us into the Second World War and wisely relents before we are overwhelmed by its stench and banalities; and a final thirty percent are devoted to Briony and a series of morally repulsive decisions.  By dint of repetition, by blooding its characters to the wickedness of the world within and without their own private spheres, by ensuring the reader that what lies before him could very well be a fairy tale, McEwan leads us to believe in the vision of a thirteen-year-old girl, in her machinations, her fears, her wonderlands.  Seeing the film might corrupt some details in the reader's mind (including the physical appearance of one of the characters which plays better on-screen but yields yet another problem of plausibility), but we are never engaged in mystification.  What is told to us actually occurs, in the way it is described, and then is set aside to be reexamined when we remember an incongruity.  Briony does write a play, she does see what she saw at the fountain, in the library, under the cover of night, except that everything to which she bears witness cannot be readily understood by the adolescent mind.  I suppose that expiates her actions to a certain extent, although two characters will spend their entire lives promoting the contrary, even when Briony has decided that sacrifice and kindness are not alien to the artistic mind.  And, as we know, literature has never been kind to chocolate manufacturers.

The Rescue Artist

In our languorous days of globalization, a movement into a planet that will not be uniform so much as on allegedly equal footing, one may wonder why the theft of art has become increasingly popular.  Is it because everything now has a price tag, as if there were no object worth contemplating for its beauty and mystery alone?  Or does knowing something about art mean having good taste?  Without refuting either one of these cynicisms, one should remember not to place the art before the course – that is to say, good taste will necessarily involve a knowledge of our most brilliant and sublime creations.   Now it may be overmuch to ask our government to spend millions to protect our artistic treasures when it could be earmarking that same sum to ensure the safety of our citizens.  After all, who but the most self-indulgent aesthete would claim that saving a painting is more important than saving a human life?  A point strategically omitted in this well-known book.

The crime was shocking, yet hardly unprecedented.  Painted when the city was still called Kristiania, one of the most heralded works of European symbolism or expressionism or something or other was stolen almost effortlessly from an Oslo museum on the eve of this event.  There is rampant hypothesis, in both this book and the sources it collects, that the action was planned as something anti-establishment – a somewhat mistaken point to which I will return.  What can be said is the following: On February 12, 1994, two men shimmied up a ladder and into a museum window, then exited about a minute closer to daybreak by the same means, leaving the ladder in its very compromising position.  One filched getaway car was exchanged for another, and by the time the Lillehammer Olympics were about to begin all of Norway was infected by scandal.  An Italian or Dutch work from centuries past would not have been nearly as painful.  No, this was ostensibly the most famous painting by Norway's most acclaimed artist, and one that had already become an icon equally in popular culture and among those of fine taste.  Edvard Munch's "Scream" was gone, and the police was as clueless as the reader staring wildly at his newspaper's headline.  A hero is needed, a hero who will brave all dangers and hoodlums to regain one of Norway's national treasures and one of the most influential paintings in world history.  And that hero is an Anglo-American detective by the name of Charley Hill.

We learn much, almost too much, about Hill, but the book is called The Rescue Artist for a reason.  Hill comes to Norway after a checkered career in just about every field he chose except the retrieval of stolen works of art.  His American father was a career serviceman, his British mother a dancer, and Hill bears both lineages in addition to being a stout casuist.  He fought in Vietnam, pounded a beat for Scotland Yard, and all the while talked back to every superior he had, not because of a lack of social skills but owing to his realization that any type of fettered, scripted existence would contradict the very chirpings of his soul.   Bureaucrats, Hill's mortal foes, are nothing more than "whingeing, plodding, paint-by-number dullards," which explains his attraction to crime.  It would have been easy to romanticize the roughs who steal paintings to trade them for money, drugs, or arms.  But author Edward Dolnick does nothing of the sort.  Using Hill and his aliases as a prism, Dolnick endeavors to peel open the lid on art theft (even though he claims police involvement of the kind enjoyed by Hill in his heyday is a thing of the past) through a survey of some of the more infamous twentieth-century thefts.  The large country manor appears as the obvious target, as does the moneyed nobleman too doddering or indifferent to count his masterpieces every last morning.  There is one amazing story about a French waiter and his mother's highly lamentable actions which I will not spoil, as well as a number of interesting factoids such as the ban in Luxembourg on undercover police operations, a clear legacy of the Second World War.  We also learn a few things about the particularly striking work of this Dutch master, about Munch's life and motives (larded, alas, with speculative psychobabble), and a few other bits of information that will serve the careful reader quite well at his next cocktail party.  Through it all our constant is Hill, who tries his best to come off as a refined gentleman but who really does possess all the characteristics of his underworld antagonists except the unwieldy conscience.

Which brings me to the matter as to why paintings and suchlike are stolen in the first place.  Dolnick has a concept of art that is distinctly that of the non-artist.  On two separate occasions, Dolnick uses cartoon characters as references to people's physical appearance; and while his catachresis does not extend into malapropism (one night in May is "winter," the next day is a late-arriving "spring"), his imagery and metaphors are often decidedly mixed.  Perhaps, given the time line, he was a bit worried that his story might not be nearly as exciting as he had first hoped.  Amidst this brand of forced journalese we find some magnificent observations ("Duddin's world and the conventional one are not self-contained.  They meet occasionally, as the lion's world sometimes meets the antelope's"; "He is, after all, a lone wolf, not a creature made to work in harness"; "No heavy lifting, except for the occasional glass of wine at a fundraiser"; "Physical courage turned out to be just a fact, like being six feet tall or having brown hair"), and Dolnick's perspective on why The Scream was lifted when it was suggests concord with Hill's much-belabored non-conformist attitudes towards, well, just about everything.  Yet Hill's portrayal as an eccentric could not really be farther from the truth.  As it were, the combination of a short temper, thuggery, competitiveness, intellectual capacity, and a taste for adventure all describe a certain type of man who in another lifetime might have been an explorer, but in our days is usually a sea captain.  A more revealing question would be: when does a thief want publicity?  Perhaps when he's afraid that no one really cares about what he has stolen.