We all want to think of ourselves as honorable people. Honor, however, is a concept, like faith or tradition, that can easily be misappropriated. In Thrity Umrigar’s Honor, the people who have the least of it are those who claim it the loudest.
This is a love story situated in the present time in rural India where two idealistic young people, one Muslim and one Hindu, marry in the hope that their love will overcome the hatred and prejudice of their communities. It does not. The leader of the bride’s village considers their union such an affront to God, not to mention his own domination, that he persuades her brothers to burn them alive. They kill the young husband and badly maim the wife. While most of the village including the police shrug, a city attorney represents the surviving widow and charges her brothers with murder.
An Indian American journalist reluctantly returns to India to cover the story. She has bitter memories from her childhood when her brother and she were accosted by a mob of their neighbors. Their father, a Hindu scholar who was a Muslim, was a symbol of the tolerant future their family hoped for. It was not to be; they were the wrong religion and driven out.
The journalist’s weekend in India stretches into weeks as the verdict is delayed. Luckily, she has been assigned a handsome sensitive driver, and their story, juxtaposed with the first, saves this novel from too depressing a tone. Misogyny, pride, and vengeance are not overcome.
A person would expect a book told from the point of view of a cocker spaniel to be a light charming tale. Well, Flush is charming, but the author is Virginia Woolf, so expectations rise. She doesn’t disappoint; her Flush is a very perceptive dog.
The book is not written as a cartoon; Flush does not speak. His observations and feelings are sensitively conveyed by a warm-hearted dog lover.
Like Woolf herself, Flush is an aristocrat with all the fine points of his breed. He is happy as a puppy, romping outside chasing hares. A great change comes to his life when his owner gifts him to Elizabeth Barrett and he must live inside her darkened room as she convalesces from a long illness. Things improve greatly when Barrett secretly rekindles a romance with Robert Browning and elopes with him to Italy. Of course, Flush goes along.
He astutely compares his upper-class life in London with the poverty he sees around him. Flush is grateful for his comforts, but respectability has its price. There is no more running free to visit the little spotted dog or their offspring. He must walk on paths on a chain. What a great metaphor. Woolf, that is Flush, has other pointed observations to make about London society both in Barrett Browning’s Victorian time and Woolf’s WWI.
In real life, both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf owned cocker spaniels. Woolf, whose spaniel was named Pinka, read about the Brownings’ dog, Flush, and was moved to memorialize him (and the Brownings) using the behavior of her own Pinka. The resultant dog is a delight.
Mystery writer Anthony Horowitz both wrote A Line to Kill and appears as a lead character in it. In the novel he is also a writer, one who has formed a partnership with an ex-detective named Hawthorne. Hawthorne solves the case; Horowitz writes the “true crime.”
They are invited to a writer’s conference on Alderney, a small island in the English Channel, to promote their newest book. Horowitz looks forward to it. For once, they will be in his territory, and it will be Hawthorne who is out of his depth not him. Yet, Hawthorne is mysteriously enthusiastic about attending.
They are at the conference only a couple of days when the first murder occurs. Which one of this eclectic group of writers is not who he or she seems to be? Or – maybe the murders are about local politics. Only a few residents are in favor of the planned electric line that will connect England and France but ruin scenic views and desecrate WWII war graves.
Alderney is a real place and Horowitz has given his novel an historical basis. Ten miles from France, it is the only part of England that was occupied by the Nazis, who used it to build four concentration camps. The lingering menace makes a good setting for a present-day mystery.
Very coincidentally, on the day I finished the book, the New York Times published an article about Alderney and its place in World War II, “This Small Island Has a Dark History.”
When Martina Pullman is murdered in Hawaii at a conference on same sex education for girls, there is no shortage of people who wanted her dead. In Kate Flora’s Death in Paradise, we learn how Martina takes credit for the work of others, casually breaks promises for funding, plays a cruel joke that ends in an attempted suicide.
Thea Kozak, helping to run the conference, has flown in from the East Coast hoping for some Hawaii sunshine but already missing the hot lover left behind. She has a habit of involving herself in murders and is on the island only one day when she discovers why Martina has not been answering her door. Thea’s hope for time off disappears.
I’m always excited to hear about a new mystery writer and Flora has given us a well plotted novel as well as a romance. On the minus side, there is too much exposition. Actions occur and then are repeated when one character tells another what just happened. She also has Thea give information about herself too often – “I’m a take charge person, a go-getter; I hold up well in a crisis.” At the end, possible murder scenarios are reviewed and discussed by the characters. This repetition does help the sleepy reader keep up, but the new-to-me author is not thumbs up or thumbs down, but in-between.
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The world of religious conflict has such a long history. Unfortunately it continues in the current century with Muslims and Christians continuing to oppress each other. A sad state of affairs.
.
HONOR sound like an “important” book. Bur I’ve been reading several intense books and FLUSH strikes me as a better choice for me right now.
Ann
Exactly so. HONOR is the unpleasant reality and FLUSH the charming antidote.