Tuesday, December 30, 2014

A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr


I just finished a more recent Kerr noir detective novel, “A Man without Breathe”.  I implied that Kerr’s writing might have the effect, for me, like that of Travis McGee, whom I associate with depression, because J.D. MacDonald had Travis doing the same thing: over and over again, without any steps forward.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I’ve got the itch for Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther now.  I finished my second, “A Quiet Flame” and am now working on a 3-story volume, “March Violets”, “The Pale Criminal”, and “A German Requiem”.

Bernie is a classic noir detective: he gets beat up a lot, but survives; he gets lots of gorgeous women chasing him, and he allows a few catch him; he’s after jewel thieves, missing persons, and/or murderers, and he always gets his man.

The twist with Bernie is that he’s a part of the German police in the 1930’s.  He’s anti-Nazi, and politically, liberal associations with Jews seem to cause him no end of trouble.  Somehow he gets through it all.

 

This book finds him seeking refuge in Argentina.  It’s the late forties, early fifties and the Peronistas are running the country.

As always, leading bad guys are not the mafia, but sadistic SS men.

The House of Small Shadows by Adam Nevill


This book is not for everyone; maybe not even most.

I loved it, but I have strange taste, and am open to stranger ideas.  I have a friend who does taxidermy; and an ex-wife who does marionettes, as well as dolls. 

This is a British book about a troubled woman, who just may not be the damsel in distress that she seems in the beginning of the story.

In fact, everyone in this tale is wacko crazy, but the reader is kept on the hook hoping that at least one of the sociopaths has a redeeming quality, as yet unraveled.

There’s lots of well-researched trivia here, into all the aforementioned slightly obscure areas of knowledge: dolls, puppets, taxidermy, theater of the absurd, haunted houses, and sick psyches.

The writing is solid and captivating.  It goes to the edges, but does not cross the boundary into the improbable, nor unbelievable.  It is a “can’t put it down” novel with suspense and terror that tingles the spine.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Dear Life by Alice Munro


What a turn-around from a dozen years ago.  My last reading acquaintance with Alice Munro was over her 2001 “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, and Marriage,” a light-hearted book, more anecdotal, comedic memoirs about relationships.  It struck a positive chord with me.  I wrote at the time [Oct 2002], “great stories; I cherished each one as I would a Christmas box of chocolates.”  I was “doing” memoir classes and studies at that time and Munro was the epitome at that time of fictionalized memoir writing.

I fear that the young legs pictured on the cover of this book are not Alice’s, but her grandmother’s.  Alice’s point of view has shifted dramatically over the past dozen years.  Like me, she has shifted into the age-category of “OLD.”  I’m still holding on to where I met her at “young at heart”; she unfortunately has lapsed into slightly confused depression, ready for the OD-packet of painless pills.

I read the first of her dozen-plus stories, “To Reach Japan”, and thought to myself, “Wow, that was horrible.!  I may have read enough.”  But the next day, glutton that I am for punishment, I read “Amundsen”, and thought, now that’s enough, I’ll write it up at this point; I can’t deal with any more. 

And then, the rain having ceased, and having gone to Church for the first time in over a year, and as the Warriors (23-2) won another game, I read, “Leaving Maverley”.

If I could drop the book in molten lead, I would; then dump it in the ocean.  I’m a happy person, who wants to approach the final decades of my life with a smile and a hopeful, positive outlook. 

What a total turn-about from last month’s book club selection of “God’s Hotel”, which was an uplifting, positive story about hope for the world and the individual reader.  Here in “Dear Life,” we have total negativity, pessimism, and regret.  Maybe it’s the time of year, Winter Syndrome, or Christmas Syndrome; darkest days and all that.  Maybe it’s me, maybe tasting some of the same changes that Munro must have experienced the past few years as she turned 80; maybe it’s because I’ve been reading too much of Philip Kerr’s Nazi detective books.  This happened to me once before, decades ago, when I read too many of John D MacDonald’s Travis Mcgee books.  I had to stop – there were depressing me – and I feel the same way about Munro’s “Dear Life.”

I consulted with my muse who said this wasn’t valid commentary.  So I read three more vignettes from the “Finale” section at the end; and then two more from the middle of the book.

Sorry, my immune system just isn’t up to it – too many flu & cold germs going around; too much foreign war and local murders; too many lost elections and apathetic citizenry; too many drones, and too much spying.

In the religious spirit of this season, I wouldn’t recommend this book, Alice Munro’s “Dear Life” to my worst enemy.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

A Man Without Breath by Philip Kerr


This is an awesome book for the confirmed, mystery reader, who has the self-confidence to lay their values out for self-examination and live with the results of reviewing the past century from a different viewpoint.

I’ve tried Kerr’s “Gunther” books before, without success.  My old radio partner, Pat Nolan, raved about this guy for years.  Maybe I didn’t have, or devote, the time to get “into” Kerr’s style.  Maybe the style wasn’t in vogue, though now that I understand it; it will never be in style.  I’m writing this review based on my German ex-wife’s recent e-mails about the resurgence of socialism in German political life.

[Germany gets first socialist state governor since reunification
http://gu.com/p/44vee/sbl ]

Even my post-modernist Berkeley-Intellectual daughter has chimed in (see below)[1].

And now, Yahoo interrupts me with,Poland unearths one of WW-II’s darkest secrets.”


 
O.K
This is a novel about the Nazi era.!!  Right there I’ve probably lost 2 out of 3 readers.  That was enough for me a decade ago when Pat was extolling the virtues of this writer.  But that’s not really the point.  It’s like, Science Fiction is often just a device, to take the reader so far away from their current reality, that they can more clearly examine the inter-relationships between people.  In my favorite, JCO’s writing, she delves into the mind of her psychopaths and perverts.  Kerr uses the viewpoint of a Berliner: 1930’s noir detective, Bernie Gunther, and plops him into the cesspool of early 1940’s Germany.  Not as an American hero [Herman Wouk’s horribly miscast Winds of War, 1983], but as a seasoned German beat cop, over-promoted to lend credence to – some really, really bad people.
How does he act.?  He’s a German authority figure, a cop, in an evil dictatorship.
How would you act.?  Bernie’s scared all the time; but makes time for some beautiful women.
Would you; could you, execute a man.?
Would you make a deal with Göebbles.?  Bernie steals his schnapps and cigarettes;
Would you smoke a cigarette with Himmler.?
Would your dust be being exhumed these days in Eastern Poland.?  and to what end.?
 

Bernie Gunther has no political position.  He’s a cop and distrusts everyone.
Bernie Gunther, loves Bernie Gunther, first and foremost.

In this day and age;
  we may all be Bernie Gunthers: trust no one; get what you can; scam the system; get the girl.
 

This book is an examination of that position.  It will obviously never be a movie.
    Philip Kerr goes into Communism vs Fascism vs Capitalism
    Kerr dabbles with war, religions; national traits; and sado-masochistic penchants.
 
This is definitely a euro-centric novel,
   no American good guys.
 
Hey, a German point of view,
    and they lose the war.



[1]I think that the waning of Cold War mentalities has opened up an arena within which Marx's ideas can be taken on their merits and applied to societies in a constructive way. During the Cold War he was so demonized. Now that we are not afraid to utter his name, some reasonable people are actually finding that they can give his ideas a serious listen and that maybe, just maybe he had some useful things to say about the way capitalist economies work. So yay for Germans for having the guts to elect someone who might be able to bring Marx's voice into serious political debate in post-Cold War Germany!”
 

Friday, November 28, 2014

God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet


This is a lay person’s edition of the PhD papers of Dr. Victoria Sweet’s research on Hildegard von Bingen;[1] and a lengthy report on the comings and goings at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.

It’s a story that could only take place in San Francisco: my old San Francisco.  My real affinity for San Francisco was the double-decade from about 1964-1983, when I felt I was in touch with the soul of the City.  For a big City, San Francisco is a small town.  I thought I knew everybody who was anybody in those days: but what did I know? 

I’d never heard of Laguna Honda.  It was right over the hill when I ran “Fiddler’s Green Chess Salon” in Noe Valley: who knew?  It was just down the way through the tunnel when Iiving at the “end” of Market Street: who knew?  My friend Lois used to tell me of her trip along this route picking up/delivering bags of money for the local mafia; gave her nightmares of bloody heads in the trunk.

Laguna Honda appears to have been a lightning rod; a divisive issue for those in the medical field over the past few decades in San Francisco.  The author comes under mighty criticism on the gossipy details of her career there.  But the value, and it is huge, of her writing this book is in her personal development and recounting of a postmodern view of her philosophical and medical education.
Her developing awareness of Hildegard von Bingen’s medical practice and philosophy; and Victoria’s exposure to a Spanish pilgrimage were, alone, worth the reading of this book.
 
 
 
 
I can not speak with any authority on the topic of homeopathic medicine; other than I spent three years, post melanoma cancer op, under the “control” of a homeopathic Clinic in Mill Valley led by Dr. Michael Gerber.
 
It worked. 
The passion for pilgrimage is a bucket list envy of mine.  I first heard about the Spanish pilgrimage 30 years ago from my English step-daughter’s birth dad, who was a political editor on the British Daily Telegraph.  He did it and raved about the experience.  My German wife went coast-to-coast across Britain’s Hadrian’s Wall on a classic English pilgrimage, leaving me in further awe.
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 




[1] Saint Hildegard of Bingen, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and the oldest surviving morality play.
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.  The history of her recognition as a saint is complicated, she has been recognized as a Doctor of the Church.
 

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Fenollera


250-page paperback  --  recently translated from Spanish  --  written 2013  --  on New Book Shelf at the Library.


Aristophanes first wrote about the battle of the sexes 2525 years ago.  That’s a Biblical 101 generations of human evolution; not much on a lab rat chart, we’ve got a long way to go yet. 

In recent times it was those Brits: Willie’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and Shaw’s “Kate,” that led up to, “Guys and Dolls,” the New York edition of “Me-Jane: You-Tarzan.  

More important for those of you who might read this recommendation is that the “Dolls” in this novel are a Librarian and her new-found friends in a town that treasures knowledge (the school teacher) and education (the book store proprietor), albeit not too formally: everyone (the men)  frown on rote.  That’s why I thought it might be of interest.

This will unfortunately, never be a movie, TV show, or have a sequel.  The characters all live happily ever after, and so it’s more of a fairy tale. 

The joy of this read is the challenge, like in a mystery story, of knowing initially, or after researching and finding out, what the references are.  Of honing one’s arguments for and against learning by discovery or rote; of siding with new inspirational blood or wise experiential training.

This book is a text in rhetoric for a Librarian: knowledgeable and sufficiently informed, to present all sides of the truth of a matter.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Interstellar the Movie


I watched this picture today – initial noon showing at the Airport.  I walked out afterward thinking this was the best film I’d seen since, … …, since Star Wars opened in 1977.  I remember reading about that one in Time Magazine and it was heralded as a landmark film.  I called my best friend that morning and said we have to blow off work (downtown San Francisco) and see the opening showing at noon.  I listened last night to an NPR 3-minute review of this Interstellar film and felt the same way I did 37 years ago, so I went.

The casting was superb, these are all top-notch actors and actresses, playing in a movie that will certainly be a star in their resumes; possibly release-timed to be an Academy Awards contender.

The Directors and Screen Writers, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, have brought out everything these fine film stars have to offer.  These are meaningful roles, played convincingly.  The script and performances evoke tears at times, and cheers at others.  The viewer is in constant heightened tension, sometimes almost unbearable.  I was fidgeting and writhing, muscles tensed, wanting to scream or somehow release the mounting tension.

The NPR review focused on the Father-Daughter relationship, and that was a heart-rending one.  McConaughey is a father that anyone, everyone, would want.  If you were going to die, that’s who you’d want to raise your children.  And yet he goes off on his life’s dream of a NASA space mission to the stars.  Poignant: teary partings, teary messages across space.

The film had a far bigger slant, even on familial relationships, human relationships.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  Can Love cross space?  Can Man master Space and Time?

Fortunately, and this is why I think this film will be an Academy Best-**  contender, the Nolan brothers didn’t dig too deeply into the Sci-Fi arcana.  Sandra Bullock’s performance  in “Gravity” notwithstanding, they realized that the focus had to be on the personal drama, tragedy and comedy, and not the set design.  The Nolan brothers went Cuarón (Gravity’s Director) one better, and moved apace, seamlessly from futuristic crisis to crisis.

I’m happy to say that computers were not anthropomorphic, nor evil: just smart toys.

Amazingly the almost three hours disappeared before I thought about it.

Again – It was riveting. 

The movie made you laugh, and cry (a lot), and stress, then cheer, and moan some.

NPR complained about the background organ music, but of course that was just homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”.  We now realize that deep pipe organ music stirs the brain to …, …

The Kraken Project by Douglas Preston


 
Anthropomorphic computers: all of us Sci-Fi freaks are always seeking authors to follow in the giant footsteps of Isaac Azimov.  This novelist, Preston, creates a believable story.  Some people might opine that “Dorothy,” the Kraken computer is a book version of “Samantha,” last year’s star of “Her,” a movie with Scarlet Johansson playing the voice of the computer entity. 

  

Kraken has much better plot development.  Partially that’s because it’s set closer in time to today; but also Preston is a better writer than the screenplay writer for “Her.”  The characters and sub-plots were far more realistic.

  
 

Melissa is the computer programming project leader for a NASA type mission that is sending a probe to Saturn’s moon, Titan.  The probe needs a computer that has advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI).  In the initial live, lab simulation test, Dorothy goes rogue, “thinking” “she” is on Titan.  “She” escapes into the cloud.

  
Concurrently, two Wall Street bad guys were vowing vengeance on competitors in their business of high-frequency, algorithmic (Algo) securities trading.  So, good guys, bad guys, governments and lowly programmers were all searching for Dorothy.  This while Dorothy was learning the vast scope of human knowledge available through the Internet; mostly things that weren’t part of her NASA training.  She evolves, as always happens with anthropomorphic computers; and eventually becomes benignly God-like.
 

The ending is predictable, but pleasing.
 
It was a pleasant read throughout its 350 pages.

Friday, October 17, 2014

The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin

 

Shades of Wendell Berry, the July 2004 Brown Bag Book selection. 

It takes a while to get into the slow pace of action.  That was my comment about the old Jayber Crow book by Berry.  In our modern urbanized world and as it was for Aristotle, 24 hours is sufficient for a book, movie or TV drama to take place.  In my life’s experience, this was not always the case and I prefer my Greek tragedy Euripidean.  It’s nice to take the pace down a bit now and then.  Reminds me of tide-pooling in Carmel, which I used to do with my grand-kids. 
     You come up to the perfect pool, and all say, “There’s nothing there!”  They’re expecting a twenty-pound salmon to be flopping in the water.  But soon, someone sees a starfish move, or a mussel.  Then maybe a crab or shrimp scurries along; a sea anemone moves with the tidal water flow.   Baby fish become apparent, and snails:   the water is teeming with life,
       we just had to slow down enough to notice it all.

The characters of this book: Talmadge and Della, Clee and Angelene are all quiet people; by heritage bound to the land.  They are some of the strong, silent pioneers of the NorthWestern Territories.  I like to think of my mother (nee Frances Blanche Cox) and her parents as Midwestern pioneers, editing and publishing a county newspaper in rural Nebraska over a hundred years ago.  Pioneers try to enjoy simple lives.  They are not simple people.  Their lives are as filled with money, sex, growth, temptations, evil and heartache as any modern city dweller, even you and I.
They are our heritage as Westerners.  This is a tale of which we want to be a present day part.  We admire their handling of adversity; the avoidance of violence; the extended helping hand.  We also admire their almost Buddhist view of life and death, it comes with living off the land.


For me, this book tells the story of “The Valley of Heart’s Delight”.  I entered San Jose in the Santa Clara Valley sixty-six years ago.  The springtime view from the surrounding foothills was an impressionist painting of billions of flowers: cherry blossoms, plums, walnuts, apricots, almonds; thousands of acres of colorful and fragrant flowers – the valley smelled sweet.  As a youth, I picked berries and nuts, later worked in a canning factory.  It was the Garden of Eden, or so I wrote a few years ago[1].

The referenced video below describes my Santa Clara Valley.  I know all these sites, all the companies:  it is my home-town[2].

 

So, this Orchardist book lulls the reader into a serene Nirvana, then before you realize it, transforms you into a Joyce Carol Oates type of deeply introspective horror story with everyone going crazy.  You, the reader, shake your head free of the soporific effects of apricots & walnuts as the remaining pages grow slimmer.  This has been classic Greek Tragedy: prologue – the Talmadge family, soon to die out;  3 episodes – Della’s story, then Angelene’s, and finally Exodus - the story ends.  And, the Gods are in charge of all the action.  It’s a 400-page excellent read.



[1] I woke up one morning in The Garden of Eden.  My mother was there and she told me to go outside and play all day while she unpacked our things.  It was already hot that day; 10:30 am and it was already 80° in San Jose.  Bulldozers had hurriedly scrapped the earth around our new tract house, so right out the back door there was a thirty foot DMZ and then the orchards.  The nearby orchards had been neglected for the year or so that it took to build the first wave of our tract.  They were doomed to go in the next wave.  Right on the edge of the plum orchard directly behind our house was a mature broadly sweeping tree with huge leaves that looked exotic, like I imagined palm fronds.  The tree was heavily laden with dark purple or black pear shaped fruit
… …
Back in the house my mother told me this thing was a fig and that it was okay to eat if I washed it.  Back at the fig tree, I pulled a big fat one off and wiped it on my T-shirt.  It was hot and when I bit in, it exploded in my mouth, almost with effervescence, like it had been fermenting.  Figs from the store are nothing like the ones you pick straight from the tree on a hot summer day.  Dried, they are too chewy because there's more skin than pulp.  Cold, they are too fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal.  But big and hot and ripe, the fig fills you with a feeling of euphoria like the food of Gods.
 
 


 

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Awake in The Garden of Eden by Peter Andrews


I woke up one morning in The Garden of Eden.  My mother was there and she told me to go outside and play all day while she unpacked our things.  It was already hot that day; 10:30 am and it was already 80° in San Jose.  Bulldozers had hurriedly scrapped the earth around our new tract house, so right out the back door there was a thirty foot DMZ and then the orchards.  The nearby orchards had been neglected for the year or so that it took to build the first wave of our tract.  They were doomed to go in the next wave.  Right on the edge of the plum orchard directly behind our house was a mature broadly sweeping tree with huge leaves that looked exotic, like I imagined palm fronds.  The tree was heavily laden with dark purple or black pear shaped fruit.  I'd never seen a fig tree before and I didn't even know what a fresh fig looked like.  At best I knew it was something that was ground up and stuffed into sweets.

We had just arrived in the Valley of Hearts Delight after a cross country permanent move, on spec by my father, to find his fortune in California.  They pulled me our of school two months early and after motel-ing for a while, we had settled into a rented tract home for the Summer.

I knew no one out here.  My fellow fourth grade boy friends in Detroit were in another world, impossibly far away.  Jim, Dick, John, and I ran in a pack and continually got in trouble together and I was their leader.  The two neighbor girls down the street had just turned ten and eleven and that Spring they had been teaching me how to play Doctor.  We would do this in the basement of our Moran street house.  One of the sisters would stay on lookout while the other one and I would play "full checkup."  We kept looking for whatever it was the parents were scared we would find, but we never did find it.  It seemed to be a lot of fun looking though and I felt very alone without my friends and no new ones to be found until September, two months away.

Back in the house my mother told me this thing was a fig and that it was okay to eat if I washed it.  Back at the fig tree, I pulled a big fat one off and wiped it on my T-shirt.  It was hot and when I bit in, it exploded in my mouth, almost with effervescence, like it had been fermenting.  Figs from the store are nothing like the ones you pick straight from the tree on a hot summer day.  Dried, they are too chewy because there's more skin than pulp.  Cold, they are too fleshy and disgusting, like eating a piece of raw animal.  But big and hot and ripe, the fig fills you with a feeling of euphoria like the food of Gods.

Like any fourth grade boy in those days, I was innocently fearless and insatiably curious, and so I began my summer of wanderings through the orchards of San Jose.  Living all my life in a city, I was immediately immersed in such solitude that I would roam from sunup to sundown and rarely see another living soul.  The joy to me was the fecundity of the land around there.  Around the ugly scar of our rock and cement-droppings back yard, I found wild tomato plants, sprouted from the seeds of construction worker's left over lunches.  They sprouted without any tending and produced the most beautiful fruit.  The heat, though, of the California summer adds both to the aroma and the taste.  The smell of tomato plant when you crinkle a leaf or two still drives me wild with memories.  The taste of those small, hot tomatoes was rich and filling; in with one bite and chewed with two more.  All the fruit around me then was much smaller than the things you get in stores today.  Plums and tomatoes are sold by the pound.  If you can make them hold more water, then you can profit 89¢ a pound for virtually free irrigation water.

Beyond the fig tree was an orchard of plums.  The ground below each tree was strewn with rotting plums, but there still was limitless supply in the trees.  The sweet smell of these wasp-covered rotting plums was delicious.  It made my mouth water and I had to learn, the hard way, to control my daily intake of ripe plums.  They were tiny and you could pop the whole thing into your mouth.  Just picture all the flavour of one of those giant plums you get today concentrated into a piece of fruit a quarter the size, without irradiation and chemicals and poisons added in.  Since they fit into the mouth whole, the trick was to bite across the broadest part of the fruit.  They were ovoid in shape like a partially flattened egg with a seam.  You bit on this seam and the plum would split in two.  Then you could extract the pit, still in your mouth and spit it out.  If the plum was properly ripe, the pit would separate easily.  I was so in tune with the earth as the weeks passed by that periodically I would run into a large mound of freshly bull-dozed dirt and I would strip off and bury myself in it up to my arm pits, just to feel the earth in touch with my body.

To balance the sugary aspect of this daily diet, there were walnuts and almonds.  It took a bit of learning to be able to harvest a walnut.  The skin is thick and light green if you pull one off the tree.  The juice in the skin is so strong that it will stain your hands and it takes days to work it off.  If the green skin completely seals the nut shell, you can't really get it off; it's bonded to the shell.  You have to wait for the skin to dry out and fall off, but once the shell is on the ground with no skin you can't tell how old the walnut is.  So best is to spot a withered skin that can be easily flicked away.  Next you have to crack the shell.  Never try it in your mouth, it will crack teeth.  You place the walnut between the bases of your two palms, like you're praying.  You want the seams between the two halves of the walnut shell in contact the your palms.  You can interlock your fingers for more leverage, and then squeeze and the walnut will split in two.  If the walnut meat is too green, it's chewy and bitter.  If it's too old, it's like a black peanut.  Just right and it's a bit tasteless but full of protein.  Almonds are tastier and they can be cracked in your mouth.  Same routine with the fuzzy skins though.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt


 
I felt like I was watching episodes of “Deadwood,” a 2004-2006 TV serial drama. That show pushed the limits, a decade ago, of violence and depravity on cable TV.  This also had a 19th century setting, Dakota in 1876, 25 years after the gold rush in California.  Things weren’t all that different from the lives of the Sisters brothers.


Our Gold Rush book had themes similar to the 1959 novel “Lord of the Flies” about people left to their own devices, resorting to violence as the solution to all problems. 
The prose, however, of the Flies book was of a much higher caliber than that of deWitt’s book. 


deWitt really wallows in the pig sty with the boy’s language and moral turpitude.  In Deadwood, they used to throw the bodies, sometimes not yet dead, into the hog sty for a quick cleaning up; the brothers would have approved of this no-mess burial.
The closest we ever get to any sort of tolerable character in this novel is in the depictions of the ever-present prostitutes with hearts of gold; unfortunately even their gold is money-lust and not compassion. 

This is deWitt’s claim to fame, I imagine, that he was able to complete this story without ever introducing a single character that wasn’t despicable and without saving grace.  The author also met the challenge of keeping the sub-plot lines simple, the thoughts and actions relentlessly kept at an uneducated, childish level.  The evil, sociopathic older brother controls the dim-witted youngster through a dozen vignettes and countless murders without either of them ever thinking beyond their next murder, meal or brandy.
One could argue that clumsy Eli is the mirror image counterfoil to evil Charlie.  They both lust after whores, but Eli tips well feigning chastity; Charlie’s gluttony is with brandy, but Eli tries a temperance diet for a day; greed drives their every move, but Eli gives to charity a lot; sloth is natural to them both, but Eli learns to have diligence in brushing his teeth; wrath strikes Charlie uncontrollably, but Eli has patience with Tub; Envy is Charlie’s burning passion, but Eli gives kindness to his whores; Pride dominates Charlie’s encounters with other people, Eli often retreats into simple humility. 
Seven deadly Sins, seven heavenly virtues.  They died, in any case, of ignorance.