The Janissary Tree Jason Goodwin June 2011

Korea was fifty years ago. MASH was done with its third series of reruns twenty-five years ago. Korea is old news – grandparent’s news. Time to move forward with world events.
Strange as it may seem by calendar dates, “The Janissary Tree“ may be far more relevant to today’s reader: Ottoman Empire; Istanbul in 1836 (see earlier picture below); Muslim Sufi sects from Turkey to Egypt; and the legacies of the early nineteenth century French and USA revolutionary period. (See last month’s review of “Island Beneath the Sea.”
This Janissary book is also a much better device (fiction) for dispensing background facts and figures. This particular author is a master cradtsman at weaving interesting historical tidbits into a murder mystery story.
And there are tittalating factors which I only now bring up, such as the subtitle of the book, “Yashim, the Eunuch Series -- #1.” OK, wait a minute; we got the #1 bit and that’s good – it’s going to be a series which all of us readers love, but what’s this other bit about the Eunuch – is the author going to explore into the history, beginnings, feelings, emotions, and love-life of a Eunuch.?.

Well Yes.
Yashim is sort of a mix between Sherlock Holmes’s deductive powers; Sam Spade’s street smarts; and Spenser’s savoir-faire, but of course as a eunuch, he adds a touch not found in any other male hero character. He is able to walk freely within the harem, all segments of cultured Islamic society; and also within the endless variety of homosexual men living in metropolitan Istanbul.
The plotline isn’t as complicated as one might assume with all these characters. The Janissaries, who were Sufi-led soldier regiments, not unlike Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army in Iraq, seem to be trying to become a political force again. Their sign is a series of bizarre murders. Yashim is called upon by what we’d call the Secretary of Defense to solve the murders and uncover any plot brewing. There are many sub-plots: relationships with Slavic ambassadors; Poles and Russians {the wife of one makes him tingle??(where); and friendship with the madam (male) of a boys dance troupe (erotic/exotic).
It’s always hard to get the frequency of foreign words just right in an historical novel like this: too many strange words becomes laborious and we set it aside; not enough and we feel that the proper research wasn’t done – the work’s not authentic. This author, Jason Goodwin, has hit a perfect balance. He has after all, penned a non-fiction history on the subject, “Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire.”
It’s like the difference between Patrón and Jose Cuervo tequila; Ottoman Empire or North Korea: smooth and easy versus hard and gritty. It’s your choice.

Nothing To Envy by Barbara Demick

Well here we go again.!.! Another magazine article, maybe a series in the Sunday supplement. We book club reader’s mostly crave literary fiction, not textbooks or magazine pieces.

{Literary fiction is a term that has come into common usage since around 1960, principally to distinguish serious fiction (that is, work with claims to literary merit) from the many types of genre fiction and popular fiction (i.e., paraliterature).}.
{{Paraliterature is an academic term for genre literature, such as science fiction, fantasy, mystery, pulp fiction and comic books, which is not generally considered literary fiction by mainstream literary
standards.}}

We rarely get any of this para-literature and we get way too many non-fiction works. I had to look up the “Samuel Johnson Prize.” Lo and behold, it’s not just a non-fiction prize, it’s a British journalism prize selected by fellow journalists. Actually almost all of the prior ten selections, 2000 to 2009 looked pretty good to me. They seemed to go off the deep end with this one, though. I’ll pass this “Samuel Johnson Prize” blurb around.
As a journalistic piece of writing, this is an excellent story: well researched; taught me a lot I never knew before; it even got us involved with some of the characters, whose names were changed to protect the innocent. I thought the opening picture of North Korea with its’ lights out at night, versus South Korea looking brighter than Las Vegas, was especially attention-grabbing.

However, this reading becomes boring by Chapter 4, and there are 16 more chapters to go. This is like a front cover article in a magazine that grabs your attention enough to get you to turn to page 16 for the first continuation, but when that in turn refers you to page 202, you realize that you’ve already absorbed 90% of what you are going to get from this piece. It’s time to move on.
Maybe it would work better as a textbook for a current events/Korean history class. At least then you could spread the chapters across a full semester, rather than take it all in within two weeks.
This story sets a 10-year low-water mark for depressing books selected for Brown Bag Book reading. Millions are killed through starvation and sheer idiocy; education is taken lower than any marker because it is lies that are taught in schools. By holding back on Western “gadgets,” like computers and cell phones, North Korea is half a century behind the South; and at this point, reunification would create havoc for several generations, if it’s at all possible.
The best outcome might be if China were to trump up a reason to cross the border and take over the North, to provide a two-decade buffer prior to Korean reunification.
Good Luck with that.