Month: November 2021

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles – Book

From a Google Image Search – CBS News

In Amor Towles book, The Lincoln Highway, Billy Watson, young brother of main character Emmett, has been staying with a neighbor, Sally. His brother was serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm, his father recently died, and Billy is living out of his backpack which he keeps very close. In the backpack, along with his collection of silver dollars, is his treasured edition of Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and other Intrepid Travelers. These heroes whether mythical or real are beginning a new journey to complete a task or find something that is lost or to take care of a responsibility that has been entrusted to them. In other words, they are on a quest.

As the brothers are going through their father’s things they discover postcards from their mother, who left them on a memorable Fourth of July. The postcards, addressed to the boys show the stops their mom made on her trip west and the postcards stop at San Francisco, suggesting that that is where she may have settled to begin her new life. The thing they know for sure about her is that she loved fireworks and never missed an Independence Day display. Billy also knew from his mom’s postcard that there was such a spectacle every Fourth in San Francisco. Emmett loves his brother and he wants to please him but he wants to go to Texas. He was an apprentice to a local builder and now he wants to buy and restore houses, but he needs a city that is growing. After some research in the library (it’s the fifties, no internet, no cell phones) he discovers that San Francisco is growing even faster than Texas. The brothers agree to go to San Francisco on the Lincoln Highway, a real American highway that runs from coast to coast. 

Every good quest meets with obstacles and this quest is no exception. Two of Emmett’s incarcerated friends show up at the repossessed farm as the brothers prepare to leave. They have not been legally released from their sentences. Duchess and Woolly are two very different individuals. Woolly may have a slight mental disability, but he was born into a wealthy family. His father died and he is set to inherit a fairly large sum of money. Duchess is an opportunist. He never had a stable place to rest his head; his father was an itinerant actor who was often drunk. Duchess has a certain charisma though, and he has a ton of nerve. He doesn’t want to go to San Francisco. He wants to go to New York City to collect Woolly’s fortune. So he and a reluctant Woolly steal the car that Emmett paid for with his own apprentice pay and he leaves Emmett and Billy to find their own way to San Francisco. If a quest must have obstacles this twist is the first in a long line of them. It forces Emmett and Billy to follow Duchess and Woolly to New York City, not only to recover the car but to retrieve the envelop containing the $3,000 their father left for them in the well with the spare tire. 

Take the Lincoln Highway on this wild quest and you will meet more heroes and villains than you have in many a day. And you will discover that ordinary people often contain the stuff of heroes, and villains. Amor Towles writes about the quirks of human nature in ways that allow us to focus on what is best about us and what is worst about us. It’s a long journey but it goes quickly and yet the heroes pace is slowed by many astonishing events.

Silverview by John Le Carré  – Book

From a Google Image Search – Time Magazine

In an ‘afterword’ to the book Silverview, Le Carré’s youngest son, Nick Cornwell, tells us that the manuscript for this book was one his father worked on and set aside. He never seemed completely satisfied with it, but it was essentially finished. This was not one of those posthumous agreements allowing a new person to complete an unfinished manuscript. A bit of simple editing was all that was required. Silverview by John Le Carré offers fans a temporary reprieve from the finality of a beloved author’s passing. 

Julian Lawndsley has grown a conscience and left his successful career in the stock market to move to a small town by the sea. He opens a bookstore. He is not a reader and knows next to nothing about books, but he has a bank roll, and he has style. Julian is just considering leaving his new life behind to go back to what he knows because business is slow and boring. Then Edward Avon wanders in. Here is a man who is alive and exciting, even if slightly dodgy, and he knows books. He is also a mystery, quite inscrutable. Little does Julian know that he is being used by a spy gone rogue, a man married to a spy who is dying.

This is new territory for Le Carré, with new characters and new locations – no George Smiley, no Russia. Edward had been active in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia where ethnic cleansing can sicken even the most intrepid spirit. Edward cannot stay objective, and he questions whether an agency that requires its employees to stay objective should even exist. We view events through Julian’s eyes, the view of a mystified bookseller who is currently, in his new life, a fish out of water. The point of view allows Le Carré to fill the reader in little by little, creating that fog of intelligence work so familiar throughout his oeuvre. 

Silverview is the house of spies where Edward’s wife lives while she is dying. The fog of secrecy emanates from Silverview. The fog is part of the appeal. It confuses our reader’s view of Edward’s secret lapse from the rules of intelligence. However, his misadventures are not as secret from his handlers as he thinks. Edward and his wife Debbie have a daughter. Lily, who has a two-year-old son, Sam, and no husband. Julian may end up losing his partnership with Edward, but he may have found a new reason to stay in this village by the sea. Edward is up to something but my lips are sealed.