Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt
read by Jeff Woodman
written 1994, read 1996
I remember really enjoying this book back when I read it when it was first published but since I recently listed to Brendt’s next book City of Falling Angels, I realized that I couldn’t actually remember any of the actual details about this book, so I should listen to it next. This is his more famous/successful book that got turned into a movie released in 1997, which I also watched for the first time this week.
This book is set in Savannah, Georgia in the 1980s, and it’s very much a story of a time and a place as much as a story of the characters. It’s more or less nonfiction, ie, the people are real and the events are real, but Berendt in his narration plays fast and loose with his own position in the story and exactly what order the events happened in. There’s an extremely idiosyncratic cast of characters and a city that’s caught up in it’s own long history as an old Southern city with an ingrained concept of proper ettiquette, a strict racial divide and only the beginnings of gay pride.
The book is an introduction to a little-known city filled with peculiar but fascinating characters and a culture that’s developed from being caught up in it’s own history, filled with fancy manners, warm welcomes, ingrained exclusions, endemic violence, and ruthless social standards. Some of the main characters include: Joe Odom is an extremely charismatic southern gentleman who is a hub of society despite being a perennial conartist. The Lady Chablis is an extremely beautiful and outgoing black trans showgirl / dragqueen who loves making an impression and leaving chaos in her wake. Jim Williams is a rags-to-riches antique dealer who believes in psychic powers, puts on the most elaborte Christmas parties in the city, and is surprised to be charged with murder when he shoots and kills his much younger, male hustler lover.
To the extent that there’s a plot, the book covers the four trials for murder of Jim Williams, as he’s repeatedly found guilty and appeals. What the truth is, is very much in doubt. What the book tells are the many stories that are recounted, and the many characters who may or may not (and many are not at all) impacted by those cases.
It’s a fascinating and fun book, and I do recommend it, but I also think City of Falling Angels was better.
The movie, on the other hand, was rough: the scriptwriter took a meandering set of character studies and nearly a decade of events and tried to shoe-horn them all into a standard Hollywood plot template complete with romantic secondary plot. While it was full of cameos from the real people playing themselves, it was the professional actors who gave the most wooden performances. It was kind of shockingly bad. It did make me think that the time might be ripe for a remake as a mini-series.
The novella The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo features a Malaysian woman trying to make a living as a journalist in Victorian-era England. It is short and funny and touching, all told through her journal entries. It just felt very much like a story by a woman for other women.* The male characters, both good and bad, are only given context in relation to Jade, and the story focuses primarily on her growth as a young adult trying to establish her sense of self. So, this was extremely comforting in these worrisome times.
Sorcerer to the Crown, the full-length novel, starts slowly and in very high-fantasy fashion, set in a magical version of Regency-era England. It reminded me almost immediately of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but luckily it picks up the pace much more quickly. Zacharias Wythe, as a very young boy, proves his extraordinary magical ability in front of a large panel of sorcerers, who promptly all lose their shit. This is not because Zacharias shows such promise so early, but rather because he is a freed African slave. The lead sorcerer adopts him and trains him to be his successor as Sorcerer Royal, the position he holds at the time the book.
*If I can be excused a diversion for an additional recommendation – a few months ago I saw “The Dressmaker,” and I absolutely loved it! It is an Australian film that didn’t get a lot of showings, even though it stars Kate Winslet and Liam Hemsworth. The 
All three of us blog writers went to go see the third Captain America movie together, and I have thoughts. Actually, I had thoughts (concerns) before we even went. I didn’t follow the Civil War event in the comic books, but I knew the basic gist is that there is a growing political movement for putting superheroes under some kind of government control, and the Avengers become split between Iron Man supporting that movement, and Captain America against it.
