Customs

The Disenchantment by Celia Bell starts off slowly despite the setting of 1680 France and volatile politics. Characters make the mistake of expecting their lives to unfold much as they always did, but a few poisoning cases put spouses, aristocracy, servants and police on edge. Grudges lead to accusations and informants who lie to give police what they want and avoid torture, trials and brutal executions.

Men control households, finances and their children’s destinies. Baronne Marie Catherine de Cardonnoy lives with the shame of holding her deceased mother in low regard throughout her childhood, due to her lower-class background. “She had thought that her mother cared for nothing but money and clothes, but perhaps she had simply looked at her child, destined for the convent school, and known that her daughter would grow up a stranger to her.” 

Trapped in an unhappy marriage to an older man with higher social prestige, Marie Catherine spends freely, too, distracting herself with new dresses, new furniture, vases and perfumes, orange trees and horses – “anything that would remind her that the money was hers, even if her person was not.” 

Throughout marriage, Marie Catherine loves and misses her volatile father, because he controlled her life, mixing kindness with whippings. His advice to her: “You may think whatever you want in private, my dear, but do your duty and keep those beliefs that might upset decorum to yourself. Your spirit is free, but your speech and your conduct must be ruled by custom.”  

She ponders how to “cross that gap, into the mystery of another human,” one who may feel as she does about rejecting social conventions.

A busy social life and popularity with aristocrats who appreciate her storytelling skills shield Marie Catherine from her husband's wrath. She pretends the stories are from her mother rather than inspired by the nursemaid who raised her: “If her mother had never told stories, then she’d simply invent a different mother.”  

The wealthy, including her friend Victoire de Conti, worry less about rules and convention. The two women become lovers after a furtive drunken encounter at a soiree, and Marie Catherine wonders how Victoire had the courage to take the first step, without worrying about another individual’s desires

Victoire occasionally moves around town freely in male attire, visiting Marie Catherine. A servant sees a kiss and blames an artist painting her portrait. Servants beat the man nearly to death, and the husband threatens his wife with the loss of their children and banishment to a convent. 

That same evening the baron is assassinated. Servants and police suspect that the killer sympathized with Marie Catherine for being trapped in an unhappy marriage. Marie Catherine poses questions to learn the truth and concocts a tale to evade questions and prosecution. But others lie, too. 

Before her husband's murder, Marie Catherine meets Mademoiselle de Scudery who writes about a land where women hold power and asks, “Do you ever believe that your life would have been happier if you had not imagined that land and had it to compare with this one?” The woman insists that life would have been much worse without the imaginary land. Imagination is the first step to finding freedom and changing old customs that might hold us back.

Acting

 

Daisy is an actress, talented yet not successful, in The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh, and her husband, Craig, aspires to write a novel. For the couple’s third anniversary, Daisy, a fixer, arranges a stay at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, hoping to improve the marriage and end Craig’s wandering eye. The program’s goals are simple: relax, swim, walk and talk – and each day, answer a short, simple question, the first being “Would you change for me?” 

At first, Craig scoffs. “That’s the whole experience? Just a bunch of questions to answer every day?” 

Of course, the questions become more challenging, especially as Daisy and Craig each keep secrets. More accurately, they lie. The book reveals Craig’s lies at the very start, when he arrives at the cabin with packed bags in the trunk, ready to let Daisy know he is leaving her and flying to Cabo with a lover. But then he procrastinates about telling Daisy his feelings, preferring to avoid the uncomfortable conversation and missing his flight. 

Daisy’s secrets are dispensed far more slowly. 

First, she knows that Craig cheats on her, but keeps that information to herself. She understands that he constantly seeks affirmation, one foot at the door, ready to leave: “Craig longed for someone impetuous, someone surprising, someone fearless. Someone who made him feel like she could help him become the better version of himself that he had long since lost faith in but that he still yearned to be.” 

Second, she knows they are become parents after long advising him that would be impossible.  

Finally, Daisy appreciates how Craig does not press Daisy about her background. All he knows is that she is from the Midwest, attended theater school on the East Coast and arrived in New York City to act. He knows nothing about her history of violent abuse, the reason she loathes surprises. If anything, Craig seems incapable of surprising her and as far as she’s concerned, that makes them a perfect match. “Each of them [is] exactly what the other person needed. For her that’s ideal. That’s love.” 

She appreciates life, freedom and the normal problems that come with Craig. She also appreciates his support for her career, regularly pressing her to pursue more prestigious acting roles in film and television. But she is desperate to remain hidden. “She always felt of herself like a pool ball, her life’s trajectory continually altered by violent collisions. She considers how she’s been forced to ricochet, changing cities, changing names, feeling fearful and helpless, just a random pool ball looking for a pocket to fall into, a dark refuge in which to feel safe.” Even so, she longs to be a fearless, carefree wife. So, she eventually accepts a small role on a popular crime show, allowing the couple to afford the expensive cabin and week of marriage therapy.

The program’s organizers’ goals for couples are simple: Seek happiness while learning what the other is willing to do for the relationship. And the organizers also warn the couple to “keep your eyes and ears open. Be prepared for any possibility. Let yourself be surprised.” Daisy has another goal – luring an abuser who stalked her for years, ending her need to hide.  

A skilled liar, Daisy presents a pleasant version of an unreliable narrator. Accustomed to working in small theaters, she is humble and hardworking. No task or role is too mundane. Never breaking character, she practices at going beyond words to communicate. “The dialogue is rote, the lines already known, so the challenge is to find surprise and spontaneity and electricity in a pause, an inflection, a glance. It’s all about the moments around the words, between them, the crackle of implied meaning, the feint and parry of unspoken intent. People call it acting, but isn’t this just what we all do every day? Play a role, be who we know someone needs us to be, recite our expected lies, all while searching for some clue as to the other person’s real meaning, their honest motivations?” 

Daisy is convinced that Craig is “Someone who wanted to be worthy of her. Who believed that she was someone who was worth being worthy of.” He had that shred of, not exactly hope but possibility, and she wanted to believe in them as a couple. She spent years resisting entrapment and exploitation and resists trying to control Craig. She understands that, for relationships, the carrot produces much better outcomes than the stick.  

Daisy strives to orchestrate every detail of the week at the cabin, am elaborate production with her and her husband as star players. She knows they are on a stage and he does not, so surprises are inevitable. Like the couple in the original Garden of Eden, like couples everywhere, Daisy and Craig are flawed, in a relationship marked by multiple lies and misdirection. But the two pass the toughest of tests, forming a bond and discovering trust that allows them to be completely honest with the other.

Readers must suspend disbelief to appreciate this book, but then how else do liars convince others that their tales might be true?

Loss

With aging comes loss, and for Tom Kettle the protagonist of Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, life is essentially over. Retired as a policeman, he lives alone. His wife and two adult children are dead. Friends are few, though on good days, he has visions old friends, acquaintances and maybe even some ghosts. 

Both he and his wife grew up with abuse from priests, notorious in Ireland’s Catholic orphanages. With his memory slipping, Kettle is an unreliable narrator both for himself and others. Pleasant memories, vague and dreamy like fog forming over the sea, are difficult to retain; negative ones prick deep and mean like sharp ice. The stories he recalls often seem incomplete, with additional circumstances and context shared later. He recalls his past with any activity, any trip: “Every single place… a peg with a memory hanging from it.” And when he returns to the city, “memories are lying in ambush everywhere.” 

Like memories, his surroundings serve as both reminders and distractions. “If he were looking for citizenship, it might be of this miraculous bay. Child of nowhere, he could claim rights over this, this vast vacancy queerly filled, both empty and full. He was just an old policeman with a buckled heart, but if he had known how, he would have sucked the whole vista into himself, every grain of salt and sand and sea, swallowed it whole… All this blue and different blue and greens and acres of blown white, and the mysterious golds and silvers of after-rain. He knew he knew he was in trouble, he could sense the trouble with his copper’s instinct and didn’t yet know its shape, but the bay also released him somehow, let him go for a blessed minute into some wild freedom, so that his heart and soul were both shaken and renewed, in the same moment, in the same breath.” 

After being away from the job, two colleagues from his station visit, claiming to need his help on an old case involving “the priests in the sixties.” Kettle, old and vulnerable, responds spontaneously: “The absolute suffering. There was no one to help me.” He immediately regrets using the word “me” rather than “them.” The old policeman cares about the child victims of the abusive priests, not quite realizing that the others regard him as suspect. 

The investigators seek his DNA, intent on resolving an old case, the murder of a priest known to both Kettle and his wife. But Kettle had long been part of a system that masked scandals, covered evidence, to protect reputations.     

Kettle varies between wanting to be useful and left alone, between companionship and solitude. Once the two leave, he misses his inquisitors: “he was stunned to discover, missed them like his own children, a huge ache of loss, which was not logical at all. They had a nice time together, despite everything, but that was all. But he felt it like a bereavement. He had enjoyed the talk. He had. A mystery. Their warmth and kindness. He wondered should he do more of it. Human contact. He wasn’t sure. It was a disturbing thought somehow, like he was betraying a secret, but whose?” Before long, he comes to realize that “He was less confused even if he was confused.” 

The old policeman knows who killed the priest, but divulges nothing without manipulation or lies. Instead, he drifts among multiple tragic memories, some of the experiences surely instigated and compounded by his family's history of abuse. That a murder of a priest could take precedence over the systemic abuse of dozens or hundreds of children, by “a murderer of children’s hearts,” is deplorable. And that may partly explain why, besides his loneliness and dementia, Kettle initially fails to realize the purpose behind the visits from investigators. 

The man could suffer no greater loss than that of his wife and children, and a sort of weightlessness accompanies such knowledge. “There was a fire of freedom in it. There was a curious wash of something freely called happiness.”

Words as weapon

A well-placed falsehood can instigate murder.

In  Kabul, a woman named Farkhunda was kicked and beaten, run over by a car, and then burned to death by attackers who accused her of burning a Koran, reports Sarah Kaplan for the Washington Post. Witnesses agree that "she got into an argument with a man who sold amulets in front of the Shah-Do Shamshera shrine," Kaplan explains. Islamic scholars disagree about whether amulets, even those inscribed with quotes from the Koran, are permissible for adherents.

Before long, another man claimed she tossed copy of the Koran into a fire pit. Kaplan continues:"Farkhunda argued that she didn't burn anything - and authorities later said they were unable to find a 'single iota of evidence' that she had set fire to the Korean - but the mob ignored her."

Authorities were at the scene, and the public is divided about whether the members of the mob should be investigated and punished. But as Kaplan concludes, at the very least, Afghans are questioning and debating the morality of Farkhunda's death.

As explained in a previous blog post, an antagonist in Allure of Deceit plots to destroy a rival in his life:

All he "had to do was point out that Rose was an atheist who had once desecrated a copy of the Koran - and yet the Western woman continued to enjoy the rewards of travel and vast wealth. [He] casually passed along cash and copies of a newspaper photograph of Rose to three young men. The most desperate of the three, a young man by the name of Qasim, managed to travel to India.

"The bomb had been intended for Rose alone."

Mishandling of any object does not justify murder under any circumstances. Yet those intent on a criminal behavior and power can concoct a rationale and spread a false rumor to convince others to attack and destroy a fellow human being. As American shipping magnate Alvin Adams, 1804 to 1877, once said, "Appreciate the power of rumor, often malicious, no matter how preposterous, within the local populations you are seeking to help."

Image  of lithograph of Afghan  shows foot soldiers at the entrance to the Valley of Urgundeh in 1841, courtesy of the British Library and Wikimedia Commons: "Amulets, relics and little bags full of texts and prayers were tacked about their clothes.... The men depicted here belonged to a British regiment called the Rangers, which was raised in Kohistan under the command of Lieutenant Maule of the Artillery, who said that he had his hands full trying to impose discipline among these 'wild, unruly, merry fellows.'"

Heartbreaking

In Allure of Deceit, an antagonist incites murder of a rival by finding extremists and suggesting the woman destroyed a copy of the Koran.

Farfetched? Not really.

"Six-hundred people were charged today for the gruesome murder of a Pakistani Christian couple accused of desecrating the Quran in Punjab province," reports the Economic Times in India. The man and his pregnant wife, in their 30s and parents of four, were beaten and burned alive in a brick kiln where they worked after announcements in "two mosques of the village that Shahzad and his wife had committed blasphemy by burning pages of the holy Quran."

Entire families take on debt to work in such kilns. "According to the U.N., 21 percent of the population of  Pakistan lives below the poverty line and some are left with no choice but to take out loans in exchange for labor," reports the Borgen Project, which urges global leaders to make endign poverty a priority. "These loans can have very high interest rates, creating a cycle of bonded labor. Workers labor in the hot sun to pay off their debt and, many times, their family’s debt, which can be passed down through the generations."

Lies can be a form of self-defense or a motive for murder.

Photo courtesy of the Borgen Project.

Women who murder

"Forced marriages are at the root of many of the murders committed by women in Afghanistan," reports Sohaila Weda Khamosh for Inter Press Service News Agency. "The number of Afghan women being jailed for murder has been increasing every year, officials say. More than a quarter of the 700 women in prison are serving murder sentences."

Poverty, forced marriages, inequality and narcotics abuse contribute to the violence.

The women in Fear of Beauty, though, are comfortable with arranged marriages: "Our village, like others, had a tradition of sending women to other communities for marriage. The groom provided gifts, based on a daughter’s beauty and skill, in exchange for a bride, and paid for the wedding. The system worked and kept families stable. Sending us off alone, to adjust in far-off villages, increased a young woman’s dependence on her husband. The system reduced gossip about the prices paid for women, and men understood from the start that the women of their own village were out of reach."

Perhaps the mothers of sons are more comfortable with arranged marriages than the mothers of daughters.

Troop Scoop reports on US efforts to improve prisons in Afghanistan, including Zabul Prison, and establish a consistent and fair system for the rule of law: 

“'The Rule of Law project is central to a safe and secure Zabul,' said 2SCR trial prosecutor, Capt. Harrison Kennedy, about a delivery of basic supplies to Zabul Prison to equip guards and improve living conditions for prisoners. Whether it's providing blankets for inmates or forensic training for judicial prosecutors, the Rule of Law program is making great strides in helping the GoA establish a justice system that ensures the rights for the people of Afghanistan."

Photo of a security assignment outside Zabul Prison, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and US Staff Sargent Brian Ferguson.