It's a house of tricks

I am in D.C. with strange_selkie and darthrami and three cats and a Jack Russell terrier. One of the cats is investigating my luggage, the other one is sandpapering my hands as I type. Until six o'clock this morning, I was not sure I was going to make the trip because I spent much of last night coming down with a cement-mixer cold, but I hauled myself out of bed and onto a train, which thanks to six years of Amtrak Guest Rewards I did not have to pay for; there's some free publicity for them. No free publicity for the woman who sat behind me in the quiet car and listened to music on headphones so loud I could make out the lyrics to the songs, so that I could not sleep on the train; I read Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day (2008) and a quarter of the new biography of Isaac Rosenberg and bashed my head against a poem. Selkie met me at the station. She brought mango chocolate. We met Rami at the apartment of two friends whose fifteen-month-old she was sitting; I did not get a chance to see the child in question, but said hello to the parents (who are probably on Livejournal, if someone points me in their direction) before coming home to be bounced on by the terrier before he started dashing in circles and rolling over. Apparently I can look at him so that he recognizes me as pack leader. I am sure this skill will be useful in various arenas of my life. (One of the cats, meanwhile, is contemplating drinking out of my water glass. Observe how deferential she feels toward me.) I have been awake for over twenty hours now, with three hours of sleep before that. I have remarked before that this state is what my brain recognizes as familiar, therefore normal: I really need to find a way of getting around it.

I feel ambivalently about Dreamers of the Day. It reads like two or possibly three novels spliced into one, but I think I would have preferred to read them separately. One is a novel whose protagonist is T.E. Lawrence, crossing paths with Winston Churchill and others at the Cairo Conference of 1921, poised between the shadows of what he has accomplished and what he will fail to achieve; the other is the reminiscence of a never-married teacher and librarian, Agnes Shanklin, whose seven weeks in Cairo were a love affair, an Oriental romance and a harsh jolt of self-awareness, and an encounter with the shape of the Middle East to come, even though she does not realize it until after her death; the possibly third being the fact that Agnes narrates all of this from the vantage point of an afterlife much like a slow bend of the Nile, where she has fetched up with other spirits, among them Napoleon and Saint Francis, who in life "drank from the Nile" and seem as a result bound somehow to its flow, anchored perhaps by the remembrance of the living, without even a Book of the Dead to guide them on. This fact is dropped casually into the last chapter, along with a rather didactic infodump summarizing her life and global politics up to the present day; I cannot be alone in thinking it's a terrific conceit, and not only because it enables such commentary on the current war as:

General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. "Non, non, non!" he'll cry. "Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn't anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?"

"This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia," George [McClellan] predicted.

You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.

The problem is that once she leaves her native Ohio, where the first third of the novel brings her from birth to middle age and her mother's death, what Agnes primarily does is provide a limited third-person view onto the Cairo Conference and the famous personalities that attended it; I am genuinely not sure what her interaction with them adds, except layers of historical irony. Winston Churchill does not come off particularly well. Lawrence does, but with fewer complications than my admittedly limited knowledge of his life—yes, I know Peter O'Toole is not the historical record—led me to expect. I cannot tell whether Agnes is meant to be a reliable narrator or one whose own biases must be winnowed from the text like the prevailing geopolitical assumptions of 1921, which in hindsight of 2008 are a desk to the head. She claims the dead are clear-sighted. I have my doubts, but I worry that I am not supposed to. So I do not recommend against the book, but I'm curious for other opinions: am I missing the point? Has someone already written a novel about T.E. Lawrence? And why does Churchill's painting get such a bad rap?

My brain still thinks it should be awake. A cat is sprawled across both my wrists, kneading my lap and generally doing her best to distract me from the keyboard. I'm going to shower.