"Morpho Eugenia", the first story in A. S. Byatt's Angels and Insects, is a literary mirror maze, starting with the title. Morpho Eugenia is a species of butterfly which is beautiful to behold, but poisonous to eat, and Eugenia Alabaster, the eldest daughter of the Alabaster household, was betrothed once, only to have her fiance die, and is now pursued by a second lover.
So the mirror seems clear enough, until we realize that Eugenia isn't the main character of the story, and in fact disappears from it for most of the second half, as the story focuses on the naturalist William Adamson. His name, I think, also gives us clues to the theme of the story -- Adam, of course, named the animals, as a naturalist does (the references to Linnaeus just cement this theme). But, in another inversion, Adamson spends most of the story pointedly not discovering new species to name, as he so dearly wishes to do, but instead is stuck in England, teaching the Alabaster children about the ants in their own backyard.
This all sets us up for the main mirror in the story, insect and human society. Byatt draws some clear parallels to start with: the males who do nothing except flock around the queen = the young men who do little but drink and hunt; the hive with all the workers = the Alabaster house with its many servants, and so on. But I think she's also playing a bit of game with all this. Throughout the story, many people are mentioned as drawing lessons from the insect world -- insects are cooperative like socialists, or insects care for their young as God cares for us, or insects take slaves like evil humans, and so on. Ultimately, the insects can't be anthropomorphized so easily, as William himself constantly reminds us. They must be studied on their own terms if we want to understand them.
Mattie Crompton reminds us that things aren't always what they seem. The Alabaster house seems like a hive, and sometimes has a hive-mind, but people within it can change roles (as a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, another persistent image). Eugenia herself changes from object of pursuit to object of disgust, and, of course, Mattie herself goes through the biggest changes of all, finding her voice as an author and naturalist.
There's so much going on in this story (I feel I'm just scratching the surface with these musings -- I haven't even touched on the questions of hybrids, Darwinism, the stories-in-stories) that it's almost hard to believe it's just a novella. I've started on the other story in the collection, but so far it seems relatively barren; I hope that will change as I finish it.
On the other side of the literary spectrum, Olen Steinhauer's Confession is a police procedural set in a Soviet state around the time of the Hungarian Uprising. (He doesn't give his state a name, but it's clearly supposed to be near Hungary). The mystery itself is fairly hum-drum -- it's not hard to stay ahead of the detectives in figuring it out -- but Steinhauer is more focused on the tension of living in a totalitarian state, where one can be shipped off to labor camps for any infringement, and sometimes for no infringement at all. Ferenc, the main character, ends up doing vicious and brutal things, just to be able to do something over which he has control, and I think that this same theme is reflected in the characters who return from the work camps driven by revenge.
In the end, I found the book emotionally devastating, in a way that Child 44 (a natural comparison to this book) never was. Child 44 is more focused on the hero's slow discovery that the Soviet state is not just brutal (which he already knew), but brutal toward innocent targets, and not always interested in actual justice. In the end of that novel, he's offered the chance to create a true police force, and there's a sense of closuer. In Confession, there's never a sense that justice is served. It's true that the main antagonist is executed, but for the wrong reasons, and, in the meantime, innocent lives remain ruined. Ferenc discovers that vengeance doesn't set things right, and can make things even worse, but isn't given anything to replace it with. In the end, justice is arbitrarily handed out, and sometimes you're lucky and the right person is punished.
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