Turbulent times, indirectly rendered
The Temple of Music
By Jonathan Lowy
Crown, 325 pp., $23.95
Tamburlaine Must Die
By Louise Welsh
Canongate, 160 pp., $18.95
Dark Fire
By C. J. Sansom
Viking, 498 pp., $24.95
A friend who grew up poor in New Jersey and became rich on Madison Avenue pulled me up short some years ago when I said that I came from a working-class town. "You mean low-income," he insisted. I didn't. My father worked; his income was not low. Like most euphemisms, this one was both insulting and inaccurate. In the new "ownership society," my sensitive friend would probably say "middle-class," the honorific bestowed by our leaders on hamburger flipper and CEO alike.
How bracing, in this age of doublespeak, to return to a bare-knuckle time when class lines were anything but blurred and when oratory still packed a punch. For instance: "We put the rings in the noses of the hogs so that while they were getting fat they would not destroy more property than they were worth," presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan tells Chicago factory workers in 1896. "And then it occurred to me . . . that one of the most important duties of government is to put rings in the noses of hogs." Bryan is running against Republican William McKinley, one of the major characters in Jonathan Lowy's invigorating new novel, "The Temple of Music," which spans the years 1873 to 1901 and ends with the assassination of McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz.
Lowy prefers the skewed to the mechanical approach. Instead of launching the assassin and his target on a collision course and indulging in some Doctorow-like flourishes along the way, he shifts between points of view -- chiefly those of McKinley; his invalid wife; his manager, "Dollar" Mark Hanna; William Randolph Hearst; anarchist Emma Goldman -- weaving back and forth in time, taking us inside the tenement and the mansion, onto the factory floor and the campaign trail, into the minds of characters who were elevated or destroyed in the so-called Gilded Age.
"They're gittin' the best damned president money can buy," Hanna declares, having squeezed $20 million out of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and other industrialists for McKinley's 1896 campaign. Meanwhile, Czolgosz, an immigrant laborer, learns that Andrew Carnegie makes $25 million a year, Marshall Field $600 an hour, while a factory worker earns perhaps 5 cents an hour and 11 million families live on a dollar a day. He hears about the "Great Strikes" of 1877, "America's almost revolution," and is galvanized by seeing Goldman speak in 1901.
By then, McKinley has learned that "the public loves nothing like a war" -- in this case the Spanish-American War of 1898 -- and American triumphalism pervades the World's Fair in Buffalo, where "pickaninnies" dance on the "Old Plantation," while inside a fake Indian tepee, "Geronimo has washed the war paint off his face, and Red Cloud has removed his feather headdress, something he never wore when he ruled over a nation that no longer exists."
The novel's clarion style is modulated by such intimate details, which allow characters to be far more than mouthpieces for imperialism or revolution. Even Goldman, who has suffered every fictional indignity short of being played by Bette Midler, emerges as fully human here. Equally memorable is Hearst, who sums it all up when he says of Hanna, the corrupt kingmaker, "He understands football."
The hero of Louise Welsh's novella "Tamburlaine Must Die" warns that "if you are men like us you will learn nothing," a prediction confirmed not only by Lowy's portrait of the McKinley era but also by Welsh's lively sketch of Elizabethan England, where political corruption, religious extremism, war, and torture converge in the life of playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe.
"We live in desperate times, where loyalty is all," Marlowe observes when called before the Privy Council in 1593 to explain seditious pamphlets signed by Tamburlaine, the hero of one of his plays. In three days he will be dead, killed in a brawl, according to the official inquest, but Welsh's feverish depiction of his last days suggests a murkier end. When we meet Marlowe, after all, he has just been bedded -- none too gently -- by Walsingham, the queen's spymaster and Marlowe's erstwhile handler. Is Walsingham behind the Tamburlaine pamphlets? Or is it Marlowe's lover and protegee, Thomas Kyd?
"You're safe as long as they can use you," the Newgate jailer tells Marlowe, who is soon asked by a faction of the Privy Council to betray Sir Walter Raleigh. Why? This tightly compressed suspense novel, dominated by the mysterious Marlowe, provides only hints, not answers.
"Dark Fire," by C. J. Sansom, has the opposite problem. Set in England in 1540, this novel of intrigue, narrated by Matthew Shardlake, the hunchback lawyer from Sansom's first novel, "Dissolution," leaves little to our imagination. As Shardlake is bullied by Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's vicar general, into tracking down a legendary incendiary weapon, he describes the fetid streets of London, England's political and religious intrigues, and the Crown's commonplace brutality, but his descriptions seem dutiful and unconvincing. Language, as always, is to blame. When Shardlake and his sidekick trade wisecracks, you picture them wearing jeans, not tights, and quickly realize that "Dark Fire" is a by-the-numbers crime novel dressed up as historical fiction.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times.
