Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey (The Expanse #2); obituary for Katherine Jane Kaszas

Please note this is actually an obituary for my recently late mother-in-law, so if you’re here for an in-depth exploration of the enjoyable, pacy and very-well-structured Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey, you’re in the wrong place as barely 2% of this blog post is about it. (This is a “literary lifestyle blog”, not a serious book reviewing website so please read on or navigate away, depending on what you’re here for.)

One Sunday afternoon in early June, my partner, my toddler and I attended a housewarming in Leyton, the part of London where everyone I know approximately my age with a slightly higher housing budget than me seems to be gravitating towards.

On the way home, my wife received a strange, somewhat cryptic text from one of her sisters asking her to call as soon as possible. We de-trained (love that word) at Canada Water (or “Water”, as my Canadian wife would call it) and my wife called her sister. The call connected as I bounced our hungry, over-warm, Summery toddler on the platform, and then a few moments later my wife began to hyperventilate and cry.

Because, unexpectedly, and with no warning, her mother had died.

My wife booked herself on the first flight she could to Canada, leaving our flat at about 3am the following morning after having not slept at all.

I had a busy few days of work ahead of me and scrambled to make sure I could sort evening childcare on the days it was needed (my sister came down straight after work on the Friday evening so I could work a wedding on the Saturday and I appreciate that so very much), and in the moments when I wasn’t working or trying to entertain a toddler who kept asking to FaceTime a woman no longer alive, I picked up the biggest, easiest-looking sequel I had lying around. This was Book 2 of The Expanse: Caliban’s War.

I’ve seen the TV show adapted from it, so I knew the story beats. I’ve read the previous book from the series, so I knew the tone and characterisation and vibe. And I knew that something like this – pacy, explorative and with a real wallop of heart in its protagonists – was probably about all I’d be able to manage at this moment. I slowly read my way through it during that week at home with a toddler and a dog, and then more so once I travelled over to join my partner and her family in the home they’d once all shared. It was a book that was able to hold its own in brief bursts in these spaces. But it isn’t what I’ve been thinking about much since.

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My mother-in-law, Katherine Jane Kaszas, was a very successful theatre director who worked with some of the most important people in her field for several decades (some of whom would later go on to global superstardom, though as the speakers at her funeral eschewed name-dropping, I’ll eschew it, too), running performance festivals of national and international renown.

Later in life, she founded the Performing Arts department at a college and went on to run its musical theatre programme, and she would talk about past student performances and cast and crew with the same tone and respect she would use when talking about her work at some of the most prestigious theatres in the country earlier in her career.

Sometimes, actually, she’d talk about the students with more respect, because something that – it seemed to me, at least – really mattered to her was the idea that theatre (and in particular Canadian theatre) wasn’t something that should ever be treated as a mere stepping stone (or line on the CV) prior to a hoped-for career in film and television below the Southern border.

In Southern Ontario, you’re very often within sight of the United States (often the other side of bodies of water of varying depths and widths), so one often encounters people who are very keen to look in that direction.

Katherine was not one of those people, and although for the decade or so that I knew her (and I presume for many years before) she had started her day with a (very large) Starbucks coffee, in response to Trump’s sovereignty-threatening comments at the start of his second presidency, like many Canadians she joined a cultural boycott of very American brands and abandoned her long-form habitual coffee order, a position she maintained until the end of her life (or at least made the effort of actively appearing to do so, which amounts to the same thing imo). (She didn’t give up coffee, just Starbucks.¹)

She visited us a few times in London after my child was born, and in early moments her presence was invaluable. She’d drink lots of coffee when she stayed with us, too, almost always aiming to get to the kitchen first in the morning so she could fill the cafetiere with so much ground coffee that the plunger could barely go half way down.

She also paid attention to things that people were interested in.

Since Christmas of 2023, I’ve been collecting tapes, music cassettes, and though this is something I’ve made no secret of, my mother-in-law was the only other person who ever gave me any.

She bought books and clothes for my child regularly, too, and she spoke to him, online, all the time (as schedules and time zones allowed). The first week where he and I were solo in London, he’d point at devices and ask to call her, often multiple times a day. When we were staying, then, in her home, without her in it, he’d do the same thing, too; as by that time he’d realised she wasn’t around.

“Nana gone”, he said. Succinct and direct. Nana gone.

My mother-in-law was probably the most supportive person in the world beyond my own life partner re: my strange and late-mid-30s adoption of a performance practice. Sometimes we spoke about her maybe coaching me into a midlife application for drama school, if I ever managed to get ahead enough of responsibilities to do that sensibly, or if I ever had enough of a midlife crisis to do it recklessly. I think it’s unlikely that will ever happen, for either reason, but I’m fairly certain that were it to have happened, she absolutely would have let me practice monologues at her via videochat over and over and over and over and over and over again.

She was generous with her time and with her knowledge and with her experience, and this definitively I know to have been how she approached teaching, too, as one of her former colleagues sent through a collection of reflective notes, comments and short essays written by former students of hers and it is powerful and meaningful reading. It’s easy to not know the wider-world impact made by a person you know domestically, but floods of correspondence have come to my wife, her siblings and her father making it impossible for them to be in any denial about how liked Katherine was.

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Katherine is the first person I’ve known to have died suddenly.

And though I think it is this that is making the grief, the bereavement, so difficult for my partner and the other people who were closest to her, in contrast to the drawn out declines I’ve seen with my own elder relatives, it does seem that there are arguments for and against both ways to go. Because go we must, some way, some time. And though she wasn’t deep into her 70s and always gave the impression she had another decade, two, three, even, left in her, she didn’t have to suffer through a lessening of self, which I don’t think would have been easy for this powerful, articulate, caring and deeply expressive person, or for the people who loved who she was.

She lost the very last game of Scrabble she played, I’ve been told, though that was probably the only loss of the final ten.

She died peacefully and quickly after a pleasant evening with people she loved and who loved her, and though it is sad that my child will not get to hold onto that love and that person deeper into his life, and any future other grandchildren of his grandmother will never have gotten to meet her, it does matter that she was a person who was loved and respected and cared for, and did all of those things back in return. And she loved my child and my child loved her and she knew that. And that matters. And she loved my wife so much and my wife loved her so much and they both knew that to be the case and it is because it was good that what happens next will be harder. Loss hurts more the more that is lost. And my wife’s family, a family I am part of, lost a lot.

It was a privilege and a pleasure to be part of Katherine Kaszas’s family and though, yes, absolutely, my beautiful, competent, creative and professionally successful partner would probably not think that a person as strange and (sometimes) off-kilter as me would be a suitable partner had she not been raised in such a theatrical household, that isn’t the real and meaningful benefit of having known Katherine Jane Kaszas. She was a person who noticed the people around her and went out of her way to make simple gestures to make them feel seen and known and as if other people. 

The four or five $1 or $2 tapes bought from flea markets and thrift stores over the course of a few years isn’t a big gesture, or something that really should feel as weighty as it does, but it did feel impactful, so impactful, when I looked at my stack of tapes while my wife was the other side of the ocean mourning with her siblings; I knew for a fact that Katherine had, on multiple occasions, thought about me, fondly, when I was thousands of miles away. And that is a knowledge and a feeling that matters.

–///–

I loved seeing the way Katherine had maintained friendships into later life, too; one of the most moving speeches at her funeral was from her oldest, best friend, someone she met at university in the 1970s.

I loved seeing her and her husband together and I honestly think it was one of the first adult relationships I ever encountered where the people involved still seemed genuinely interested in each other after decades of a shared life. That was inspirational. (But also puts a lot of pressure on – I’m in a relationship with someone with high expectations of a shared, collaborative, life!)

I enjoyed the relationship she had with her siblings (they often called her KJ), and – recently, just in April, I saw this – I saw her and her brother hanging out and ribbing and riding each other in a way that evidenced years of affection and care and genuine pleasure in each other’s company. That, too, was inspirational.

I hope, if I get there, in my 70s there is still play and interest and fun between me and my friends and family.

Katherine Kaszas was a warm and memorable person. And inspirational in ways that truly matter; she cared about her own life, she cared about the lives of the people around her.

I’m very sad that she is gone, and though I could try to undercut this or talk about the ways in which my own anxieties around perceptions of hierarchies of grief have meant that I haven’t really sat with my own sadness about this as much as might be helpful to me (my wife is devastated, floored, by it); but this, I suppose, this collation of thoughts is how I deal with things.

If it’s important, I write about it on my blog.

–///–

So with all this going on, I read Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey. It was fun and distracting and exciting and good. It’s good enough, for sure. 

It’s a pleasureable and imaginative and very solid read. It’s long and full of characters and pacy action and it’s enveloping and easy to drop in and out of over the course of a very emotionally-draining couple of weeks.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

–///–

There was a slideshow running on screens during the funeral and wake, and my wife sat at a desk scanning old photos for several days beforehand getting ready for it. 

At one point I wandered over and watched her scan a few pictures. A few down the pile, there was a photo of her mother with an instantly recognisable and very successful actor, screenwriter, comedian and and film and TV producer (a Grammy winner, an Emmy winner, a Tony nominee), whose play Katherine had staged in the 1990s. 

“Are you going to put that one in the slideshow?” I asked my wife.

“No,” she replied, tossing it into the short stack of non-scanned photos, “My mum thought he was a dick.”

And that was who she was; not wowed or awed by fame or glamour, but a person who was interested and excited and engaged with the people she met, unless they were dicks. And she certainly wasn’t a dick. She was great.

–///–

If interested in knowing more, a more formal (and official?) obituary is available here: https://www.arbormemorial.ca/en/janisse/obituaries/katherine-jane-kaszas/162422.html

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1. There was going to be a joke here about the quality of Tim Horton’s coffee, but I decided to delete it as I don’t want to do anything to lose my ongoing legal right to live and work in Canada. I buy and drink Tim Horton’s coffee all the time. Do I like it? I repeat, I buy and drink Tim Horton’s coffee all the time. ↩︎