Reviews and Comments

Chinese Primer Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, and the Great Helmsman followed eight months later. After a brief tussle between factions, the Gang of Four was disbanded, and the era of China after Mao began. Putting it in extremely rough terms, the two principle actors after Mao were Deng Xiaoping, who was responsible new directions in economic development, although he was also responsible for China’s disastrous incursion into Viet Nam, and Xi Jinping, who was responsible for political reorientation and re-enforcement, although he was also responsible for the Belt and Road Initiative global-development program.

China After Mao presents China’s chronological development from 1976 to 2018 in two- to four-year chunks per chapter. The book brings up to date Dikötter’s sequence of books on China’s history from the Chinese Revolution in the mid-twentieth century to 2018. Analysis is primarily focused on economic development with secondary interest in social and political issues, which, given the log-jam at the top of the Chinese Communist Party, consists mainly of local economic subversion for personal gain and dissident protest respectively. Dikötter shows how Marxist-Leninst, Stalinist and Maoist fetishes, coupled with an ignorance of basic economics and an inability to learn from mistakes has given China a shaky boost to the upper reaches of world power.

The subtitle raises the question: in what sense is China a superpower? Apart from a chapter on the Tiananmen Square massacre and scattered mentions elsewhere, Dikötter doesn’t address China’s military, or its adventurism with respect to Taiwan or the Asian sphere. The rare discussions on foreign policy are at high and gauzy levels, and presented largely as idiomatic. That leaves economics, a reasonable path to soft power, but the book’s domestic focus tends to undercut China’s attempts at becoming important in world economics. There’s no discussion, for example, of the Belt and Road initiatives or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), nor is the thinking behind such actions covered (the Belt and Road Initiative proper and the AIIB began towards the end of the period covered by the book).

Dikötter is content to point out how socialism with Chinese characteristics has failed the people. There’s nothing wrong with that thesis when taken as an assumption rather than a conclusion, but Dikötter leans toward the latter rather than the former. Perhaps, after writing books about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, that’s an unavoidable bias, but at this point in the timeline it’s also redundant (the only map of China in the book labels Russia as the Soviet Union). Yet facts, of a kind, remain: China did advance from the bottom to the top of the list of economically developed countries in a couple of decades. How did that happen? China After Mao only addresses the question indirectly when it’s not contradicting it directly.

An Italian traveling to Naples has his ship commandeered by an Ottoman fleet and is taken as a slave. Incidental medical knowledge and some simply treated injuries lets him pass as a doctor, and he works his way into becoming a pasha’s favorite. His pleas for freedom are ignored, but he gets handed off as the personal slave of a man with whom he will work on important projects. The Italian finds his new master to be his double, but no one else seems to recognize the similarity. Their success at various projects brings them to the sultan’s attention, although the Italian’s refusal to renounce his Christianity means he remains in the background while his double gets the attention.

The tale seems commonplace; it begins with a note about a manuscript found in a box of forgotten documents. Pamuk turns the tale into an extended meditation on story telling and identity. At first the problem is physical, an apparently unremarkable resemblance. Eventually the pair exchange stories, orally and in writing, and the problem becomes deeper: is who you are what you do, or can you think your way to an identity? Pamuk has an answer, and loads the tale towards his preference, but then complicates matters by questioning the possibility of identify at all.

A never-named man receives grace from the sky. Well, actually, he receives severe head trauma from the sky; grace comes later in the form of £8.5 million from the guilty party. Between those two events he relearns many of the things knocked out of his head, such as how to walk and eat. Remainder shows how and what happens when he tries to recover the things physical therapy left out.

At first he's at sea, in possession of an unfamiliar persona and an unfathomable amount of money with no idea of his next step. The poles of his choices are sketched by two friends at an impromptu celebration of his recovery and good fortune; one friend suggests an unlimited debauch of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the other suggests African philanthropy. He, however, makes a third choice. At another party he finds a crack in the bathroom wall. From that crack the rest of the story grows. It also establishes a more conventional part of the story: he's in a locked bathroom at a party, contemplating the crack, sketching it, trying to place it in his mind while ignoring the banging and pleas from the other side of the door.

McCarthy's writing is regular and orderly so that the story can be original and, at the end, violent. One of McCarthy's skills is keeping the reader from dwelling too long on the thought: he's acting like one of those malevolent seven-year-old boys in a Twilight Zone episode. But the mind still wants purchase on the story, so it scrambles off in other directions, perhaps to experimental novelists like Robert Coover or Peter Handke (knowing the story isn't necessary, the title will do: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), or maybe to Nicholson Baker's early novels, except Remainder is more fraught, and more solidly embedded in a literal metaphysics.

For extra fun after reading Remainder, watch the movie trailer. It's an excellent example of a movie, at least as represented by the trailer, completely misinterpreting a book even though McCarthy was involved with both. The movie also seems to be on YouTube.

When nerds collide. Salin Karadağ, a first-generation Turkish-American nineteen year old from New Jersey, starts her first year at Harvard in 1995. She wants to be a writer, and takes courses in linguistics, philosophy of language and Russian, apparently using the same logic that suggests becoming a heart surgeon to learn about love. And Salin wants to learn about love because she meets Ivan Varga in her Russian class. Ivan is a stereotypical math major, and a senior who will be moving cross-country to start graduate work: two strikes against. Salin, like an umpire not paying attention to the game, keeps missing Ivan’s third strikes, and doggedly pursues him. Which is fortunate because, to the extent that The Idiot has a plot, it’s how the relation between Salin and Ivan will turn out.

Otherwise The Idiot is a calendar year in the life of a first-year Harvard student. It might be a flânuer's novel, except Salin is a terrible flâneur, not only because she takes five courses per semester, but she also lives almost entirely in her overstuffed and idiosyncratic head. She has a flâneur’s observational skills, but not necessarily the skills to integrate observations into a larger scheme of things. She makes friends who are her intellectual or social betters (her friend Svetlana is both), but she fails to learn everything, or hardly anything, she could from them.

Salin is a tough bird to identify. Here she is in kindergarten:

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.

Here she is between her first and second years at Harvard:

“What did you bring your host family?”

“Chocolate.”

“Chocolate.” She sighed.

“I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,” I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate.

If you have that kind of discernment in kindergarten, you should be a supernova by the time you hit Harvard as an undergrad.

Almost no plot, a confounding main character, this leaves Batuman as the last hope. She comes through, even though the story's told in Salin's voice. Her writing is unobtrusive, leaving everything up to Salin. Except Batuman's in charge, so she gets to plant clues around and through Salin's narration. Salin's familiarity with bullies in kindergarten hints at a K-through-12 school experience that shapes her particularities at Harvard, as do her high-school friends that follow her there. Salin is frequently perplexing, but Batuman is there to bring to mind the importance of paying attention.

The Idiot is also funny in a fish-out-of-water way, particularly when Salin goes to Hungary to teach English during the summer. While in Hungary, she meets Ivan, who's Hungarian, and they go on a canoe ride along a river. Being in a canoe is a good way to think about The Idiot, except you're not on a river where a current can move you along, you're floating in the middle of a lake, watching unfamiliar birds and fish.

Content warning: Before writing this review I read Batuman's follow-up book about Salin's second year at Harvard. I've tried to weed this review of events that happened in the follow up, but I make no promises.

In The Voice of the Violin Montalbano becomes interested in a seemingly abandoned car. Frustrated in his attempts to learn more, he pulls a black-bag job, finds a corpse, and the story’s off and running. In The Sicilian Method it’s Auguello’s try at this bit, but, keeping in character, he’s fleeing a cuckold, out the window and down into the apartment below. Auguello’s body disappears, but is replaced with another, this time of a theatrical impresario/director and loan shark, and it stays around so Montalbano and crew can get some detecting done.

In every Montalbano story there’s a short bit, half a page or so, that I think of as the Three Stooges Bit, some slapstick between Montalbano and whomever’s around at the time (there’s probably a more dignified Italian term for it, perhaps opera buffa or commedia dell’arte). Here the bit’s slathered on all over the place, particularly at the beginning. It has some justification given Auguello’s balcony gymnastics, but a little of this stuff goes a long way, even when looking forward to it.

Montalbano the babe magnet is another recurring bit that gets overworked in The Sicilian Method. That sort of thing is fine as part of the story, but is tricky when used as character development, particularly for the protagonist. Not even Elmore Leonard handled the aging Lothario bit well, so expectation isn’t high for Camilleri; the disappointment is Camilleri leaning so hard and clumsily on it in Sicilian.

The main story is mildly complicated, split between loan-shark suspects and theater suspects. Given Camilleri’s background in theater and TV, it’s not surprising the theater side attracts most of the narrative. The dead man’s auditioning techniques are psychologically intense to the point of abuse, and a script in development provides some nudges. The secondary mystery involves young lovers, hostile families and a shooting. This story reads like a good short story plopped down amid the main story. The resolution of the main story, including Auguello’s missing body, is essentially by coincidence, although probably an inevitable one.

Andrew Livingston — Harvard man, banker, political operative — comes to grief in New York City. He settles the rest of his family with his sister and heads west to the Bad Lands in the Dakota territories. As he scouts for land and crew for a cattle ranch, Livingston meets Lord Machray, a newly established large-scale cattle rancher who has big plans backed by money from back east. Livingston also meets Yule Hardy, a long established cattle rancher and head of the local stockraisers association and its auxiliary, the local vigilante group. Livingston gets his ranch up and running, and finds himself front and center in the battle to determine the character of the territories in the final years before statehood.

A straightforward western, then, where newcomers clash with the established, which gets worse when the newcomers change from cattle ranchers to farmers (I expected sheep headers to show up to make matters extra nasty, but they don’t). Hall makes the story deeper and more complex by weaving in characters and subplots, chief among both is Machray, an extravagant and flamboyant Scottish adventurer who has a bagpiper, erupts in poetry and entertains his workers with highland flings. Women ably carry the story too. There’s a madam (of course) with an extremely sharp business sense who takes up with Machray, and Hardy’s daughter, who despises the Bad Lands and sees Livingston as a way out.

Hall tells the story vigorously, but at a measured pace. Livingston is also an artist, which lets Hall present the landscape (and occasionally people) with details and perspectives you wouldn’t expect from ranch hands or cattle barons. The subplots are laid out with varying degrees of subtlety. The fitness of the Bad Lands denizens for the life that’s coming gets leaned on a little too heavily. Livingston’s belief in organized and official channels of law and justice is slightly less tedious, saved by the ambiguity of his reaction to the failures of official channels after the malefactors in the final battle are handed over for trial (although the Afterword may resolve the ambiguity depending on your point of view).

You know that guy? Carl Sagan? That guy who said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”? Garry Wills knows that guy, or at least that quote, because before he can tell you why he’s a Catholic, he has to invent the Church, starting from the debate over which of Peter or Paul should be the foundational rock.

In the Introduction to Why I am a Catholic, Wills discusses his previous book Papal Sin, which I haven’t read. He divides the responses to Papal Sin into two groups. The first, less thoughtful, group wanted to know why he remains a Catholic if he hates the church so much. The second, more thoughtful, group wanted to know how he found the wherewithal to remain a Catholic after Papal Sin. It is mainly the second group to whom Wills responds in Why I am a Catholic. Keeping in mind a more accurate title, such as “Why I Remain a Catholic,” might be helpful in reading Why I am a Catholic, although I didn't find it so.

Why I am a Catholic has a triune structure. The first third covers Wills’ education and early career from St. Mary’s grade school to a National Review staff writer. The second third, roughly three-quarters of the book, is a selective history of the Catholic church from the Peter-Paul debate to Vatican II. The history can also be divided into thirds: before papal primacy, papal primacy and after, and Vatican II. The final third is a close reading and appreciation of the Apostles’ Creed.

The first part can be taken to answer the “why I am” question. And the answer is — to, um, paraphrase Richard Dawkins — religion is hereditary, you get it from your parents (The title of this part is “Born Catholic”). The novelty of Wills’ education may excite some interest in a comparative sense; otherwise occasional nuggets of interest pop up here and there. For example, Wills’ Chesterton-adjacent attempts to stick with his Jesuit training, or the casual mention that Renata Adler wrote for National Review.

The third part answers the “why I remain” question. And the answer is rooted somehow in his appreciation for the Apostles’ Creed. But in the introduction to this part Wills subtly changes the question to “what do I believe in if I remain a Catholic after Papal Sin?” The analysis Wills presents is the kind of thing he does well, but unlike previous efforts, the effort here is specialized and seems aimed at a specific audience.

The second, largest, part of the Why I am a Catholic is a history of the Church with an emphasis on the papacy up to Vatican II. Wills seems to have two objectives in this part. The first is to show the papacy had no primacy in the Church for a long time; in particular, it was not present at the beginning. The point seems to be the elaboration of some concerns that may have been raised in Papal Sin (again, a book I have not read). The other objective is to describe the unfair treatment some liberal Catholics received in matters around Vatican II. The point here seems unclear. On its face, doesn't seem to have much to do with why one is or remains a Catholic, nor does it seem to relate too deeply to the preceding Church history. Nevertheless, Wills’ writing is good enough to carry the skeptical along, assuming a sufficiently high tolerance to substantial diversions, or an interest in the subject.

Cho Jun-su is an eleven-year-old school boy in North Korea when he finds a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook. Written in English, the book remains an excessively wordy, not too interesting comic book until he gives it to a teacher. The teacher translates enough of the book to let them play a version they call the House of Possibility. This sets the course of the rest of Cho’s life. He becomes a poet, and as a teenager wins a nation-wide contest, besting another poet who will also have significant influence in Cho’s life. His success leads to attendance at Kim Il-sung University. At University he introduces his friends to House of Possibility, which starts the roller coaster that will be the rest of his life in North Korea.

For a short book (240 pages), Theroux puts together an interesting structure. He flashes the knife in the first few pages when he describes a leftist professor (“the world’s leading English-speaking expert in Juche thought”) and his son, who leaves the rulebook behind in a hotel room. Then he puts the knife away and turns to grade-school primers to describe Cho’s early life (the professor, and the knife, come back towards the end, but by that time he’s well out of the story). The change in tone disappoints, and becomes annoying right up to Cho’s witnessing a school-yard demonstration of the other side of the government’s hand. Thereafter the writing echoes Cho’s growth and maturation, although there’s a confusing crack in the narrative around the mid-point that foreshadows the end of the book.

Apart from the carpentry with which Theroux assembles The Sorcerer of Pyongyang, the story is carried by Cho and the North Korean government. Cho, despite his obvious intuition and imagination, remains modest and calm. One mark to lay against Cho might be his saintliness in situations that call for, at least, lacerating irony. Instead, he gets a grip on himself, thinks himself down, and responds with phlegmatic political cant. But even this behavior serves, adding credibility to Cho’s actions at the end of the story. Oddly, despite their butchery, the North Korean government provides much of the humor to be found in Sorcerer. There’s Dear Leader, being driven here and there, offering on-the-spot suggestions for improvement. There’s also the analogies, handled with a mercifully light touch, between the fantasy worlds constructed by dungeon masters and the government.

Women in Can Your Forgive Her? have trouble with marriage. Alice Vavasor, the her of the title, loved her paternal cousin, but sensed life with him would not be smooth, and broke the engagement. She recovered with a wealthy squire, but her senses now point in the opposite direction, and she breaks with him because she feared her life would be too smooth and featureless. In rebound she ends up back with her cousin, who has, in the meantime, become the scoundrel she sensed him to be.

Alice’s paternal aunt Arabella Vavasor married well-off and old, and was left a youngish, rich widow. She attracts two suitors, a prosperous, highly-self-regarding farmer and an impoverished, ne’er-do-well soldier. The two suitors battle it out, while the widow referees and tries to decide which, if either, of them she will marry.

Alice’s maternal cousin, Glencora M’Cluskie, the second richest women in Britain, is deeply in love with a spend-thrift wastrel. Her family, horrified, breaks up the couple, and marries her to the future Duke of Omnium, an extremely wealthy dry stick who’s almost entirely concerned with his future in government. Glencora’s unrequited longing for her first lover, and her husband’s emotional obtuseness, threaten to shake her to pieces.

These are the problems Trollope sets up in Can You Forgive Her? They seem like problems of love and marriage, and they are to some extent, but the real problems are the ones underneath, driving everything: money and the question of what a woman can do. All three women have enough money to make them independent: Alice comfortably so, Glencora fabulously so and Arabella somewhere between them. Their independence lets them reconfigure their relation with men to make it more equal and more responsive to their needs in the relation. In this sense the rankings are revised: Arabella is set fabulously, playing the game for all it’s worth; Glencora has nothing, crushed between two families; and Alice wavers between them, exercising her independence, but unable to decide and unhappy with the pressure to have to decide.

Trollope goes at all this with wide scope and fine detail. Arabella is brassy and right out in front; there’s no doubt what she’s doing. Glencora is equally relentless but more sedate, going after everything, especially her husband’s propriety, with petulant brattiness that is as amusing to watch as it is ineffective. Alice is the subtlest of the three, uncertain of her choices and of her decisions, requiring attention to the hints and shades Trollope puts around her to delimit her character. There’s plenty more going on in the story too; depending on how an e-reader handles it, the story is from 750 to over 800 pages long. Alice’s scoundrel cousin creates much plot: running for Parliament (Forgive is the first in the six-novel Parliamentary, or Palliser, series), fighting with his grandfather over inheritance, repeatedly confronting Alice’s other suitor. But despite the external ferment, the action takes place internally, where desires and social conventions grapple to reach a conclusion satisfactory to all.

Piketty has three objectives in presenting a brief history of equality. The first is to define equality, and describe its behavior over the past couple of centuries. The second is to determine the motivations and mechanisms supporting and opposing equality. And the third objective is to extrapolate supportive motivations and mechanisms into the future to extend and improve equality. There are a number of subsidiary objectives, the most important of which is to establish restorative justice for people and places ravaged by the economic and political systems set up to feed the growth of colonial and neocolonial empires.

The notion of equality shifts between equality of opportunity for intangibles, such as suffrage and education, and equality of outcome for tangibles, such as income and property. Measures of equality should be multidimensional (social, economic, environmental) to provide both broad determinations of equality and guidance for governance. The mechanisms are principally taxation, both progressive and confiscatory; a redistributive state, mainly in terms of welfare, but also for reparations and compensation; and democracy in social and corporate governance. The motivations, apart from the titular one, are the development of a transnational or global infrastructure to support continued progress, redressing past injustices and the downward and outward diffusion of power and resources.

A Brief History of Equality is a response, in part, to requests that Piketty write a concise summary of his other, more massive and detailed books (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century — none of which I've read). Given that motivation A Brief History of Equality is heavy on vision and light on details.

Piketty is a socialist, but not of the fire-breathing, smash capitalism kind. He's more of a social democrat, wanting to harness capitalism using taxes and democracy to evenly distribute capitalist benefits while ensuring that capitalist processes are always directed toward socially beneficial ends. Like Marxists, Piketty has a totalizing worldview, but one grounded in practical matters, such as finance and democracy, rather than in hypothetical armies (eventually) driven forward by metaphysical conceits. The grounding in practical matters adds weight and force to Piketty's ideas, as argued by the historical analysis in Equality. But even granting full credit to Piketty's analyses of cause and effect (which are light, and largely have the flavor of “after, therefore because” without further digging into the references), the scope of his worldview makes it hard to understand the mechanisms by which these matters are extrapolated into the future, and how they would work in the future to achieve their ends. The latter problem Equality handles by reference to democratic governance in corporate, transnational, and global scope; the former problem Equality does not handle at all.

One of Montalbano’s acquaintances draws his attention to a set of home movies, each showing the same view of a wall. Notes on each box indicate they were shot at the same time on the same day from 1958 to 1963. This piques Montalbano’s interest, and he promises to look into it. While that’s going on, a more serious situation develops at a local middle school when a pair of gunmen in Anonymous masks terrorize a classroom. There’s also some business about a Swedish-Italian film crew making a movie about love-struck kids in 1950s Vigàta. This business provides a couple of minor plot points, but seems to be in the story mostly to give Montalbano something new to complain about.

Montalbano’s informal investigation recalls his work in The Terracotta Dog: both require unraveling long-ago events, and both involve him staring at walls. The school case is Augello’s because Montalbano is up north with his girlfriend when it happens. As you might expect, Montalbano comes back and develops the intuition that breaks the case. The detection is typical Camilleri — intuition, dreams, timely revelation, folk psychologizing — enlivened with an extra dash of Catarella because computers figure in the school case. Camilleri apparently wants to complain too, because he has Montalbano go on about these kinds today and their damn computers and cell phones. Montalbano also speculates philosophically about the difficulty of providing protection come what may, establishing a thread, however thin, among the three situations in the story.

Both cases have muted endings. Montalbano decides it’s best to bury the results of his informal investigation into the wall films, and farms out the resolution of the school case to someone outside the police department. Although both resolutions make sense, the school case isn’t Montalbano’s to dispose of (technically I suppose it is because Montalbano is Augello’s boss). This goes undiscussed, which is a bit of a surprise because part of the story involves, as usual, friction between Montalbano and Augello.

Impastato was beaten to death, and then tied to the railroad tracks and blown up with tnt. His case was treated as a suicide until 1997, when it was reopened.

Fighting Sicilian Corruption, One Vine at a Time
by Marie Dozema in Gastronomica, Fall 2012

Camilleri occasionally indicates, in an Author’s Note, when the story was based on real events. He didn’t do that for this story, but he could have. There are two substories; the first is night after night of refugees from North Africa landing in Montalbano’s jurisdiction (the time is somewhere in the mid 2010s), and the second substory is a seamstress’s murder. The refugee story is apparently there so Camilleri can have his characters rile against the idiocy of national and super-national governments, although Montalbano does glean a clue from a knife fight between two refugees. After handing off the refugees to Augello, Montalbano spends most of his time working on the seamstress’s murder.

The murder story is fine, well constructed and not excessively complicated. The ridiculous bits of the story are ridiculous; for some reason I was willing to let them slide, but I can understand the hesitation to do so. The detective work, unfortunately, leans heavily on ancient Sicilian peasant wisdom. There’s usually a little of that in every Montalbano story, but here it’s all over the place, including, alas, a cat that keeps Montalbano on the job when he thought he was done. The ending is a mystery itself: did Montalbano put his foot in it, or did he “put his foot in it”? Recalling how Montalbano elegantly “put his foot in it” in The Patience of the Spider, it seems clear he put his foot in it in here, an ominous harbinger that is nevertheless consistent with Camilleri’s theme of age-related decline.

Clytemnestra weds Agamemnon, catching him on the rebound after being rejected by Helen, Clytemnestra’s sister. They become rulers of Mycenae, and have three daughters, including Iphigenia and Elektra. Agamemnon and the other suitors assuaged their disappointment at Helen’s rejection by pledging to defend her should anyone sully her honor. This sets a trap sprung by Paris, who flees with Helen to Troy. Keeping the pledge, Agamemnon assembles an army and sails off to the Trojan War. During preparation, Agamemnon betrays Clytemnestra and Iphigenia, leaving Clytemnestra prostrate with rage and grief that burns into an implacable urge for vengeance against her husband.

Elektra sees her father off to war and spends the next ten years pining for his return. Her mother tires to get her to understand Agamemnon’s betrayal, but Elektra finds her father’s conduct honorable and grows impatient with her mother’s insistence. Elektra also learns of the curse on Agamemnon’s family, and so on her. When Clytemnestra takes a lover connected with the curse, Elektra sets her course against her mother. Her father returns in victory, her mother has her vengeance and Elektra gets a turn at the family curse.

Cassandra, a princess of Troy, is fascinated by her mother’s spells of foresight. Ignoring her mother’s warnings, she becomes an Apollonian priest in hopes of receiving foresight too. Apollo obliges, but she rebuffs him when he tries to claim what he considers his due. Enraged, he curses her so no one will believe her prophecies. Her inability to convince anyone of the impending doom for the Trojans and for Troy slowly drives her mad.

Elektra is a story of the Trojan War as experienced by Clytemnestra, Elektra and Cassandra. The three stories are interwoven, chapter by chapter, with Clytemnestra carrying the majority of the story until Elektra takes over towards the end of the book. Clytemnestra has the motive, means and method to drive the story forward. Elektra is less successful, mostly being sulky and bratty until her mother is done, leaving her to drive the story. Even then she is sunk in her monomania to a degree that exceeds her mother’s. Cassandra is a puzzle. She is tangential to the Trojan War. She is unable to prevent it, or change it in any significant way, and ends up claimed by Agamemnon as a spoil of war. Her story is interesting allegorically — people who are disbelieved are still called Cassandras, usually by those who forget that the other half of Cassandra’s curse was to always tell the truth — but the connection between her and the Mycenian women is at best coincident.

For two of the three women, the Trojan War is at a remove; they hear of it only through messengers and the occasional returning combatant. For Cassandra the war is immediate, but as an observer until the end when she becomes a prisoner. This lets Elektra emphasize the women’s conflicts, both internally and externally: Clytemnestra and Elektra with each other, and Cassandra with everyone. Saint’s writing handles these currents well, delineating and distinguishing the three women, and exposing their inner drives. Readers familiar with the Trojan War may feel a tinge of guilt when Clytemnestra rages against those in on Agamemnon’s betrayal of her and Iphigenia. Saint makes a nasty little reversal against Cassandra sting: her father perceives she will act against the Greeks’ horse, and convinces some guards to stand alert to the possibility. Cassandra is thwarted when she tries to burn the horse; her father's successful prophecy places a final check on her attempt to react to her unheeded prophecies, sealing Troy’s fate.