This book is about bullying. Coming from the gut.My niece goes on about her mother who is always interpreting herself as Maltese, though her father wasn’t even born there and she has spent all of several days on the island. I totally agree with you, Martha. And yet despite that I’m perfectly capable of doing just the same. This book is about Calabria. I was raised in the dark shadow of the brutal nature of existence there. This even though my father was born here and I have most certainly not put one foot onto the soil of my ancestors. This even though my father disowned his family when I was about six years old, so except for tiny memories, I only know the fear of the fear, not the fear itself.I think that is why of all the things in the world one might get upset about, bullying distresses me in the extreme. Bullying, manipulation, threats, rule by fear so that you don’t even have to wave this stick often, it is there anyway. Those around you will be grateful and think you are being nice whenever you aren’t exercising these things. They are willing to pretend that the niceness has no connection to the rest. You get your way. The people around you pretend that this was their choice and that they hadn’t been abused into giving you what you want.When I was little I didn’t fight bullying, to my shame. At home I’d gather the little ones up and put them in a place I hoped was safe, but when it came right down to it, I didn’t fight. I guess little children don’t. They watch their father or mother yelling and screaming and doing something awful to their sibling and they do nothing.I’m supposed to excuse that, I guess. It’s all right, you were just a child, you did your best. But I didn’t. I behaved like a coward when there were times as a child and then a teenager I should have stood up to the outrageous bullying I watched, glad it wasn’t me.You become an adult. What then?I’m particularly upset about this right now, this moment, because last night I received a message from somebody who said he was really looking forward to talking to me today, but in fact what happened between that message and this morning was something that so distressed him that he can’t talk. I can only guess at what happened last night, but I’ve now observed enough from a distance to see the entirely predictable pattern. He gets yelled and screamed at. It deeply distresses him. After he’s been yelled and screamed at enough – and please note ‘yelled and screamed’ does not necessarily mean literally, it often doesn’t have to be, it is a figure of speech for what happens – he gives in to whatever is being demanded of him. Often this is after his wife turns nice for a moment, in guilt and relief he gives in and then thinks he is in control and that it was his choice and that his wife is fine, it isn’t her fault she is like that, if he does the right thing she won’t be. Ie it is HIS fault. Now, this is a bright guy. If he were on goodreads he’d be writing about domestic violence in some sympathetic way where he thinks it is terrible what happens to girls. You’d all be voting for him. But he is a male. What is happening to him isn’t even physically violent, after all. Whatever she does in the way of threats and manipulation he says it isn’t her fault, she doesn’t mean it, she is fine as long as he does what she wants. Now, I don’t actually think he believes this stuff, but he is terrified of actually doing anything about it, so he plays the game. He isn’t terrified for his life, like a girl with a psychotic partner might be. He is terrified of all the threats she has ready to put into place. Divorce, financial deprivation, never seeing his kids, poisoning his friends. You can be as logical as you like about it. Point out that his son is grown up and won’t do what his wife says, point out that if his friends are really his friends they won’t be turned against him…it doesn’t matter. He isn’t having it. He has been so cowed by what is happening to him that he is no longer able to do anything other than believe what he wife feeds him.Written later….We hope that this sort of bullying in our society is rare. But there are cultures in which it is entrenched, in which bullying is made into love so that at a personal level relationships depend upon there being a bullyer and a bullyee. Calabria is one of them. There are cultures in which social bullying of a more public kind is also entrenched. The consequences of this in 1930s Germany still haunt us. Calabria is a law unto itself, even now, and society is built upon the edifice of bullying.Thinking about this, about the fact that at some point Calabrians let this happen, I ask:Would you have kicked Jews to death in Nazi Germany? Most people very complacently say yes, they would have, they wouldn’t have been brave enough not to. Their comfortable logic is that what would have happened to them if they didn’t was so bad, that this forgives the nature of their crime.You watch somebody being yelled at in a most abusive way at a knitting group by the leader of the group. The leader is being an unreasonable bully. Do you stick up for this visitor, say that the visitor has a point, she is actually right…and that even if she wasn’t, perhaps yelling abusively at her isn’t the right approach. Do you do this? Or do you knit furiously away, eyes down, pretending you aren’t there?Because, this is the point. Most people are pathetic cowards in the face of bullying. If you say to the knitting nutter ‘hey, stop that’; you aren’t actually really being brave, are you? The fucking Gestapo isn’t going to arrive and take you away and torture you to death. That is the point, isn’t it? The people who cheerfully admit they would have kicked Jews to death shouldn’t actually think they have the right to justify it by saying that you know…they just wouldn’t have been able to accept those particular consequences.It is shameful that people aren’t willing to stand up to bullies. I don’t know if I will be brave when it is really hard, but in my own life I do fight bullies be they not of the spine-chillingly terrifying ones of Nazi Germany, and I can see this actually counts for something because most people don’t. Just don’t. Full stop. I can see from time to time that it costs me too. So be it.This is how it goes. To begin with you don’t do anything about Jews being kicked because, hey, they aren’t actually being killed, just getting a bit of a beating, they’ll recover and as things progress you start to justify your behaviour by saying it is too dangerous to intervene. You were never going to do the right thing. You just pretend to yourself that you had adequate reason for being a good person who did nothing.And yes indeedy, dear readers. I got kicked out of a knitting group a few weeks ago in just these circumstances. And as I left I was disgusted more by the people who knitted on, eyes down, glad it wasn’t them it was happening to, than I was by Madam Defarge, (as I discovered is her name adopted by the more disrespectful Manchester knitters). It is because people like them won’t stand up to the woman who runs their knitting group that you end up with Nazis. So, I’m not prepared to excuse the German population as if something special was happening. At some point it was just a crazy person running a knitting group and they were too fucking pathetic to do anything about it.
The last book in a wonderful series. Last it would seem because of the author's untimely death, not because of his intention to end the character. In this series we are able to enjoy and participate in the career of the protagonist, as he progresses thru an at times comically haphazard progression of promotions within the Questura. Aureilo Zen is somewhat akin to Harry Flashman, in that he is often an anti-hero, interested in keeping a low profile, enjoying the pleasures of food, wine, locale, and sometimes women. And he is often credited with a level of sophistication of intent and accomplishment that is well beyond what he himself had in mind. With a great deal of irony, in this the last of the series, Aureilio is unhappily immersed in Calabria, where the food is not to his taste, without much contact with his wife, and his first intent to keep a low profile and serve out his tour of duty is thwarted by the arousal of his personal ire at an instance of the perennial Calabrian occupation of kidnapping. As a result Zen uses the very substantial resources of the Questura to completely defeat the primary villans, the sadistic local drug czar and boss who has committed a brutal murder that starts the book, and also the childhood friend of the boss, a totally venal fixer who sets up the kidnapping. Meanwhile, Zen has the cultural sensitivity to solve a fifty year old arson/murder that sets up the later murder that was not the original intention of the kidnapping, eliciting long suppressed information from a wonderfully characterized Materfamillia, while frustrating the intentions of a team of American antiquity looters who completely and very funnily underestimate the cleverness of the Calabrians, the American team led by a fixer who ends up fixed, and an American dotcom billionaire gamer who pays a fortune to sink in the Mediterranean Sea a fake replica of the Temple Menorah acquired by the Romans who destroyed the Temple in the 1st century, thus in an amazingly topical and funny subplot leaving the American billionaire convinced that he has delayed the impending Apocalypse. Finally, after this totally astonishing series of accomplishments, entirely driven by Aureilio Zen's desire for justice for the original kidnapping victim, Zen leaves to return to his original post, in disgrace because the entirely deserving primary villans are killed and not captured. Ironically, Zen has achieved much more than the complacent police chief for whom Zen has been a temporary replacement during the chief's recuperation from a self-inlicted gunshot wound in the foot has or will ever accomplish in the chief's entire career. A fascinating look at Calabria, the culture including the remnants of fuedalism in the 1950s, the psychology of the people, an exciting police procedural, with the mordant wit we have grown to love and will so much miss.
Do You like book End Games (2009)?
I'm sorry to have begun at the end of the Aurelio Zen series, but by the time I finish reading them all in order, I'll be ready to re-read End Games. Some of Dibdin's sentences are so beautiful, I copy them into my commonplace book. (Can't say that about any other mystery writers, and I read most of the headliners.) Zen is Italian, and Venetian, but he's not the same kind of Italian/Venetian as Guido Brunetti, whom I also enjoy--when I feel like being comforted, reassured, entertained. Zen is for when I feel like thinking hard and keeping an eye out. He's always witty, sometimes dark, always clever. Everything does not always work out, messes made are not always cleaned up, Dibdin's stories aren't tidy--especially valuable in this genre. He really IS *more*.
—Rhonda
Very enjoyable book. The descriptions of Calabria made me want to visit, but with bodyguards. Found the reference to ninja looting quite amusing. Jake the leet Microsofty pushing back the day of rapture was a great plot. It was difficult to ascertain just what it was that he wanted until the very end. This time Zen's personal life takes a back seat to the location and the story. I found it very enjoyable and Zen himself a rejuvenated man. The characters were all very interesting and seemed lik
—Leonardo Etcheto
Billed as the final Aurelio Zen in the long-running series, End Games has all the charm and delicious Italian craziness of the others. I'd bought this before the recent PBS airing of the British TV version of three of the early Zens. Compared to most TV detective yarns, they are fine, but it's REALLY hard to adapt a good police procedural. What makes them so addictive, so "page-turning" gets blunted and ginned up at the same time in the movie version. Typically. End Games also returns us to the original Zen trope, e.g., that he's a kind of Palladin of Italian police, which are invariably corrupt and/or incompetent. Zen rides in, overcomes the suspicion engendered by all outsiders, especially a Venetian by way of Rome. Along the way, we readers get insight into the particular flavor of evil and craziness in a given Italian reggione, in this case, Calabria. Very enjoyable. Not deep, but very good.
—Nick
