Hillerman/Hobsbawm/TopoftheLake

Today I read the next section of Tony Hillerman’s 2006 novel The Shape Shifter. In this section of the novel, Leaphorn meets with Jason Delos, the current owner of the Navajo rug at the center of the book, and his assistant Tommy Vang, but is still no close to figuring out what happened to his friend who died, or even whether the rug in Delos’ house is genuine or a copy. Whatever the answer, it seems to revolve around not only the rug but also Ray Shewnack, the man who died in the fire that was supposed to have destroyed the rug, a man on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. It’s not only Leaphorn’s investigation that’s mired in uncertainty; Hillerman has Leaphorn himself riddled with self-doubt and a feeling of being lost throughout the book. An investigation that was presumably meant to give the retired Leaphorn a sense of purpose and direction is doing anything but at the moment.

I also read the next fifty pages of Eric Hobsbawm’s Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20^th Century. Hobsbawm covers a lot of ground in this section of the book, with essays on culture and gender in European bourgeois society 1870-1914, art nouveau, the future of the concept of heritage, and the last days of mankind. Although the last of those chapters sounds like the most capacious, it’s actually the most focused, as it concentrates on the life and work of Karl Kraus and his play entitled “The Last Days…” In the other chapters, Hobsbawm’s focus is usually so broad that he can produce interesting generalizations but little else; his essay on Kraus, however, thanks to its more limited ambit, is a valuable examination of what Kraus’s work reveals about the fate of European culture in the 40 years between 1890 and 1930. To put it another way, it’s when Hobsbawm moves from the particular to the general that he’s at his most enlightening.

I also watched the first two episodes of Jane Campion’s 2013 tv miniseries Top of the Lake. Set in a small town in New Zealand, the series focus on Tui Mitcham, a 12-year-old girl who is five months pregnant and who disappears after what appears to be a suicide attempt reveals the fact of her pregnancy. The other main character is Robin Griffin, the detective who is trying to find Tui and determine who raped her. Her investigative efforts are already starting to stir up this small town that is clearly filled with dark secrets. Another significant part of the plot involves GJ, the enigmatic leader of a women’s commune that provides a shelter for women who have suffered in various ways from the violence of a patriarchal and misogynist society. It’s that violence that is the most striking fact about Top of the Lake for me—up to this point, very little violence has been seen and yet the show is defined by its looming presence in the lives of so many of the women and girls in the show—not only in the form of Tui’s rape, but also Robin’s rape when she was younger, the domestic violence suffered by Robin’s mother, and by the women who have gathered for some kind of healing from GJ in the aptly/ironically named space of ‘Paradise.’ All of the male characters, with the possible exception of Johnno, seem complicit in or at best indifferent to this culture of violence. The only thing I’d fault the show for at the moment is perhaps trying to do too much too quickly. Top of the Lake is held together in many ways by the figure of Tui (in a remarkable performance by Jacqueline Joe) and while this character’s disappearance may be structurally necessary in terms of plot development, it also threatens to take some of the energy out of the drama.