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Great recommended reading suggestions from our star reviewer, Julia Kuttner. Just click on the title to go to the library catalogue if you want to place a request on a book or check to see if it is in the library NOW.

 Julia's Page has now been converted to a blog - Great Reads for Great Readers.  The simple way to access Julia's fabulous reviews is now through the library web page.  Just click on the link to Julias Page under the Library Notes heading to continue enjoying her reviews.  Watch out for other guest reviewers who will also be included.  

GREAT READS FOR JANUARY 2012

Faithful Place, by Tana French

Undercover Detective Frank Mackey works for the Dublin Police;  he’s very good at his job – and an absolute disaster at personal relationships:  so far, so predictable for readers of suspense novels, but Tana French invests Frank with so much more than the usual Brilliant but Burnt-Out persona -   all too readily adopted by other writers -  that he is like a chilling but welcome blast of fresh and frosty air, holding the reader in his ruthless grip from the start of his story to the finish.

His life so far has had some huge disappointments:  his first love Rosie stood him up without any warning on the night they were planning to run away from their gothically awful families to start a new life in England together, and was never seen again;  his marriage has ended in divorce and the associated recriminations; and apart from his job, his life doesn’t have much focus – except for the precious gift of his daughter, 9 year old Holly .  Frank’s love for her is profound and complete and he constantly blesses the fact that she will never know the horrors of living with an alcoholic Da who terrorized not just Ma, but all five children of that blighted union, and that she has never met his terrible relatives – and nor will she – he thinks.  He hasn’t seen any of his family except his sister Jackie for 22 years,  until a derelict house undergoing demolition in Faithful Place, their street, reveals some secrets that require his professional attention, and to his horror, he finds that Rosie didn’t stand him up after all:  she was murdered.

This book is more than just a who-done-it;  it’s more than the usual tragic family saga of violence and dashed hopes:  it has more layers than an onion, and as each layer is peeled away more insights are given into each character and the terrible reasons for their behavior towards each other.  And before the reader decides that they wouldn’t touch all this tragedy with a barge pole, I’d like to lure them back in with the solemn (!) promise of a laugh on every page:  the uniquely Irish humour which has helped the entire race survive war through the centuries, famine and The Troubles  is here in abundance:  who else but an Irish author could write such great drama, and leaven it with such comedy.  This is a wonderful story:  don’t miss it.

 

Rangatira, by Paula Morris

Paratene te Manu was a great warrior, specially trained in the arts of war from childhood.  He fought alongside the ferocious and brilliant Hongi Hika, Nga Puhi Ariki , as one of his Ngati Wai allies and was himself a rangatira of great mana – and he is Paula Morris’s ancestor.  Who better to write an account of the ground-breaking trip he and a group of other rangatira made to England in 1863, but a loving and eloquent descendant  - and she has paid fitting and respectful homage to her forebear in this lovely book.  Paratene’s story is told in a series of flashbacks and reminiscences whilst he sits for his portrait by Gottfried Lindauer, the Bohemian artist who made paintings of many of the rangatira and kuia of that time, and despite Paratene’s offense that their moko was not always correctly depicted – how else were maori to recognize ancestry and region amongst the tribes if not for their moko – he recognizes within the painter a similarity to himself when he went to England:  they are strangers in a strange land.

Fourteen men and women set out on their big adventure in February 1863, under the leadership of Messrs. Jenkins, Lightband and Lloyd, all of Nelson;  the rangatira had signed ‘a piece of paper’ guaranteeing them a sum of money each week, and the opportunity to see the big cities of England and learn about British culture.  After an uncomfortable voyage in steerage on the ‘Ida Zeigler’ – with the attendant weevily food – the party arrived in London, at first to great acclaim.  They were feted by London society and met the Prince and Princess of Wales and Queen Victoria herself, but gradually realized that Messrs. Jenkins et al were collecting a lot of money from people who came to gawk at them;  they were instructed to wear their cloaks all the time whatever the weather and were required to sing waiata and prance about doing the haka at every ‘meeting’.  To add insult to injury, photos of them were sold as postcards, the proceeds being pocketed by Mr. Jenkins:  this was not what they signed the piece of paper for!  Their gradual disillusionment and distrust of their pakeha ‘managers’, combined with the approach of a cruel English winter is beautifully described in Paratene’s voice by Ms Morris:  he is at pains in his narrative to be fair-minded and objective and recounts events to the best of his recollection, but he has to concede  eventually  that the whole exercise has been one of exploitation, principally by Jenkins, hoping to make money from the goggle-eyed voyeurism of the London public and the patronizing charity of liberal do-gooders.  He sums up their situation succinctly:  ‘Jenkin’s mana depended on his association with us, but ours did not depend on him.’ How true.  And how profoundly moving is this true story of people who influenced and shaped the thoughts, minds and directions of our young nation 150 years ago.  Ms. Morris has done her ancestor proud.  Highly recommended. 

GREAT READS FOR DECEMBER

The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley

The Siege of Leningrad has earned its place in 20^th century history as one of the most horrifying events of the Second World War.  Much has been written to record a great city’s descent into starvation, death, and the barbarism that desperate citizens visited upon each other in their efforts to stay alive.  Leningrad, the City of Ghosts:  bombed and strafed night and day by the Luftwaffe and hammered mercilessly by the German troops on its borders, it is a miracle that there were still people alive and sane at the end of the siege, more than 800 days after it began.

Sarah Quigley ‘s novelized account of the Siege, and the reaction to it by the city’s cultural elite stands alone;  it’s more than just a story of the composition of a Symphony by Dimitri Shostakovich, his 7^th, called the Leningrad Symphony, his evocation of the horrors of war and his attempts to make sense and beauty of an ugly world;  it’s also a powerful and compelling tribute to the courage, tenacity and willpower of a group of starving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, led with iron resolve by the Conductor Karl Eliasberg.  A fellow student of the Conservatoire with Shostakovich, he could never hope to aspire to similar greatness, instead having to employ his more workmanlike talents to lead  the second-string orchestra of Leningrad,  perpetually battling his contradictory  feelings of envy for always being on the periphery of the elite social circle surrounding Shostakovich, and his true admiration for his genius.

It took this reader at least a quarter of the novel to engage with Ms. Quigley’s characters;  initially I felt that they were two-dimensional and forced, but as the story progresses and she finds her wonderful rhythm the events are revealed with a stark beauty and terrible clarity that nails the reader to the page;  there’s no escape from the horror and  tragedy besetting the Conductor (when the country’s leaders order Eliasberg and his orchestra to perform Shostakovich’s newly completed 7^th Symphony to boost the morale of the people, there are only 14 of his original musicians left alive – the rest have starved to death), he must find anyone who has the breath to blow a horn, and a huge reserve of determination within himself to complete the task – and survive. 

When Ms Quigley writes of music, the SOUND of it, she makes beautiful music herself;  In my reading experience there has been only one other writer who could do the same, and that was Anne Patchett in ‘Bel Canto’. What a singular gift this  is, and how fortunate we are to enjoy it.  As an added bonus, this book comes with an audio CD of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony – what a delight to listen to the music whilst reading the book.

 

11.22.63, by Stephen King

 

Stephen King has produced an astonishing body of work during the course of his career – 52 novels at last count – and all involved to a greater or lesser degree with fantasy, the supernatural and outright horror:  this time he decides to explore time travel, and the consequences of going back to alter cataclysmic events in world history.  What would happen, say, if someone was able to return to 1963 – and prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald?

Maine English teacher Jake Epping is provided with the opportunity to do just that in 2011, through the existence of a time portal in an old diner soon to be removed to make way for a national chain store.  He is introduced to this phenomenon by the terminally ill manager of the diner and begins his mission very reluctantly, first trying out a ‘dummy run’ of going back to 1958 to alter the fate of a person very dear to him, the janitor at the school in which he teaches.  To anyone who grew up in the 50’s, Mr. King’s version of those years is solid and sound;  his ear for idiom and his eye for detail is as sharp and funny as always and, as always, he can build suspense and dread within the fluttering heart of any reader with effortless ease.

This book covers a lot of emotional and historical ground;  it’s a whopper in size, feeling and scope, and it poses some fascinating questions, including what state the world would be in if Kennedy HAD survived his assassination – would the Vietnam war have really been avoided, and hundreds of thousands of lives saved – or would something even worse have happened, because as Jake finds out more than once, history is obdurate:  it doesn’t like to be tampered with, and will throw up many obstacles in the path of anyone who will try to do just that.  This is an exceptional story from a very fine storyteller.  Highly recommended.   

 

 

Wouldn’t it be presumptuous – but fun! -  to have a Horowhenua Library Best Reads of 2011?  After all, it’s that time of year when all the august publications –  TheNew York Times, Time magazine (and don’t forget The Listener!) et al present their lists of the crème de la crème of contemporary writing.  Well, a cat may look at a king, so I shall take it upon myself to compile my very own highly subjective list of the best of  the titles  I reviewed for the Library for 2011.

 

1.       Agaat, by Marlene Van Niekerk

2.       The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht

3.       The Passage, by Justin Cronin

4.       The Wake of Forgiveness, by Bruce Machart

5.       Swamplandia, by Karen Russell

6 & 7 Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

8.       Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall

9.       La Rochelle’s Road, by Tanya Moir

10.    The Larnachs, by Owen Marshall

11.    A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

12.    The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan 

13.    The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley

14.    11.22.63, by Stephen King

        

I f anyone requires more detail (and my usual verbosity) about any of the above titles, just scroll down;  they are all below in  various monthly sections.  And I’d like to say this:  isn’t it great that we have a library that punches waaay above its weight, providing us with such excellent reading choices.  Levin is fortunate indeed.  Happy New Year to all. 

GREAT READS FOR NOVEMBER

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan

‘It’s official,’ Harley said.  ‘They killed the Berliner two nights ago.  You’re the last.’  Then after a pause:  ‘I’m sorry.’

And that’s how Jake Marlowe discovers that he is indeed the world’s very last werewolf .  Not that he wants to be a 9 foot killing machine every full moon, but two hundred years ago he was inadverdently ‘turned’ and has since satisfied The Hunger every month.  He greets the news  that he is next on the list with relief:  he is tired of his immortality, of his victims’ souls clamouring inside him, and the very solitariness of his long existence .  He will welcome his death at the hands of the son of one of his victims, now a high-ranking officer in WOCOP, an acronym for World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena – a modern version of the eighteenth century secret society The Servants of Light :  yep, brave men have been fighting monsters for centuries, but Jake is tired of running and hiding;  he will welcome his death at the next full moon.  Or so he thinks, until his unerring olfactory senses pick up the irresistible perfume of another were – and a young female, to boot!

And what happens next is the plot of Glen Duncan’s wonderful novel.  I have never read anything quite like this: rhapsodic, scholarly, subversive and screamingly funny, his prose veers from lyrical heights to obscene depths, all in the space of a paragraph.  There are enough f’s and c’s to sear the eyeballs of a bishop, but the language whether high or low is all relevant to events  that Mr. Duncan controls with superb precision and a brilliant knack for exposing society’s hypocrisies.  By the end of the novel the reader is hoping that Jake and his lover survive – he’s unique, even if he does tear a hapless human limb from limb once a month – but all is not revealed until the very last page, and even then many questions remain unanswered but are ‘for another story’.  I certainly hope so:  Mr. Duncan (who looks pretty wolfish himself in the jacket photo) owes it to the reader to finish the tale, and even if he takes several books to do it, that will be fine by me.  Highly recommended.

 

River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

This is the second book of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy.  At the end of  ‘Sea of Poppies’( Book one)  the Ibis, a converted slave ship carrying indentured Indian labourers to Mauritius, is caught in a huge storm.  Two condemned prisoners and three Lascars murder an officer, escape the ship and are thought drowned :   the ship’s first mate is held responsible, not for the loss of life of those worthless monkeys, but for the danger that was caused to the main shipment, a huge cargo of opium on its way to the Chinese port of Canton. 

It was cruel of Mr. Ghosh to leave the reader in such suspense, but ‘River of Smoke’ answers all the questions raised in the first novel, and presents us with a host of fascinating new characters to enjoy.  There is a welcome reintroduction to some of the main protagonists of Book One, but some take a back seat as the action shifts from Calcutta to Canton.  Mr. Ghosh writes of his characters with gusto and verve and it is nothing less than a delight to follow their adventures, framed against the background of Britain’s iniquitous embrace of the Opium Trade, all in the name of ‘free’ enterprise.  Exhaustive research has been undertaken to present an authentic account of the everyday life and business in ‘Fanqui-town’ enclave of the  fabulously rich British Traders:  not permitted to reside in Canton itself, they nevertheless carve for themselves fiefdoms that ignore Chinese laws completely, believing themselves in their monumental arrogance to be above and beyond the control of the heathen devils.   Chinese objections to the enslavement of their population to the poppy go unheeded until a powerful new High Commissioner is appointed by the Emperor – a scholar, an intellectual, a poet -  and worst of all incorruptible,  he  takes up the cudgels on behalf of his people and engages the traders in the first battle of what is to become known as the British Opium Wars. 

Mr. Ghosh’s meticulous attention to fact and his great gifts for imagery and characterization make this story a winner;  my opinion after reading ‘Sea of Poppies’ was that he is a worthy successor to the great 19^th century adventure novelists, and this still holds true with ‘River of Smoke’:  when Book Three is read, I know that I will regret this great trilogy coming to an end.  Highly recommended.

Hell to Heaven, and Heaven to Wudang, by Kylie Chan

For those among us who love the utter escapism of Fantasy novels, Australian writer Kylie Chan ticks all the boxes;  she has combined Kung-fu action with Chinese mythology so successfully that there is a waiting list for each of her books – we just can’t get enough of Emma Donahoe, originally hired to be a nanny to the daughter of enormously rich (and handsome, naturally) Chinese ‘businessman’ John Chen – who turns out to be Xuan Wu, the Dark Lord, God of war and martial Arts, and through her love for him, Emma metamorphoses into the Dark Lady, champion of Good, and battler extraordinaire against demons and baddies of every stripe.  Oh, it’s great stuff:  the various deities she befriends or has contact with are a very motley and amusing lot with particular powers of their own, and they’re not above using their gifts for their own selfish ends; deals are constantly being made,then broken, but when the going gets tough, they are still loyal enough to rescue Emma from all sorts of ghastly situations – and there are many:  she has variously  been turned into a snake, infected with demon essence, burned to a crisp in an effort to get rid of it, and don’t forget an inadverdent dose of HIV – for heaven’s sake:  this is more than Australian girls usually have to contend with on their OE !  It would be an impossibility to summarise her latest adventures, and anyone who would like to embark on these action-packed, mile-a-minute tales should start at the very beginning with the first book, ‘White Tiger’  (If you start in the middle you won’t know whether you’re Arthur or Martha or Wun Bung Lung),  you won’t be sorry:  Ms Chan will never win any great literary prizes -  in fact at times her writing is shamefully clunky, but she can tell a bewdy-rippah story with the best of them.  These books are the perfect airport or beach read:  these books are FUN.    

Great Reads for October

The Larnachs by Owen Marshall

Owen Marshall is one of New Zealand’s foremost writers, and demonstrates his unique literary voice once again as he chronicles in his latest novel the successes and tragedies of the Larnach family of Dunedin.  He is careful to stress in a foreword that his book is a fictional account of events that happened to real people, but such is his skill in drawing convincing portraits of his characters  that the reader has no choice but to believe every word he writes.

The story is narrated in alternating chapters by Constance de Bathe Brandon,  and  Duggie, favourite son of Constance’s husband William Larnach, politician and enormously wealthy property speculator.   Constance is in her mid-thirties when she meets and in 1891 marries William, twice- widowed and at 57, still full of vitality, joie de vivre and the strutting self-confidence that comes from humble beginnings and hard-won success.  His ostentatious social position is epitomised by the construction of Larnach ‘Castle’, symbol of his power and standing.

Constance is also very sure of her place in society.  Raised and very well- educated by her father, one of the country’s early MPs, to consider herself equal in all things,  she decries womens’ inability to vote and agitates whenever she can to bring about change – but only within her own social sphere;  while she feels an intermittent sympathy for ‘the lower orders’, it does not prevent her from ruling her staff with an iron hand, and she is glad to have a married woman’s influence among her contemporaries, previously  denied to  her as a spinster.

William’s adult children from his first marriage detest Conny;  she is an interloper and thinks far too much of herself;   only Duggie treats her as a friend – a friendship that eventually turns to love and a full-blown affair destined to create a scandal of catastrophic proportions and ongoing tragedy for all involved.

The literary device of having each lover narrate a chapter is clever:  Mr. Marshall’s characterizations have such veracity that it is a pleasure to follow Conny and Duggie through the highs and lows of their great love;  one eager to tell the world of his delight in finding his life’s partner, and the other thrilled to experience the physical and emotional love she thought would ever be denied, but fatally unwilling to give up her social status.  Mr. Marshall has recreated the morals, life and times of a fledgling NZ society with consummate skill and great empathy.  Highly recommended.

 

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Since its publication last year this novel has generated extraordinary praise, not least being included in Time magazine’s top 10 books for 2010 and this year winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Even Oprah endorsed it.  (Is that good or bad?) I approached it with trepidation:  was it too great for mere mortals to read?   ( I have been caught before).  Oh me of little faith:  All the reviews are true.  This story fully deserves every accolade lavished by the literary pundits – and anyone else  who wants to have a wild ride through time with Ms Egan as she explores through her characters the different selves we all become at different times of our lives.  Through a dizzying series of flashbacks and leaps forward, the reader follows Bennie Salazar, failed music producer and his personal assistant Sasha, ‘capable in every way but for her kleptomania’ as they are moulded and buffeted by the forces of time, and the influence and effect they have on their world through the connections they make, both intimate and tenuous, with the people they meet.  There is a host of different characters here, and sometimes it takes the reader a little while to connect the dots, but when that happens, a wonderful pointillist portrait  emerges of our flawed and ailing contemporary society – (there’s even a powerpoint presentation!), and an irrevocable truth that time rules us all:  the onrush of it;  its implacability;  and how peoples’ lives are helpless before it and the inexorable changes it makes.  In Ms. Egan’s novel time is a Goon, and no-one escapes a visit from the Goon Squad, but Bennie, after a lifetime’s vicissitudes is no fool:  he knows the score – ‘ Time’s a goon – are you going to let time push you around?’  No, sir!  This is a great book.

 

Cold Vengeance, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

 And now for something completely different:

Guess who’s back!  Messrs. Lincoln and Child have been working their little tails off to provide fans with the next instalment of the intrepid adventures of FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, that peerless paragon of perfection in all things, arbiter of funereal fashion excellence – he always wears black designer suits, giving him ‘the look of a wealthy undertaker’ -  and lethal weapon in the perpetual battle against the forces of evil.  As always, the reader is transported to places near and far, starting in the Scottish Highlands where Pendergast has been shot and left for dead in a swamp by his wicked brother-in-law.  He cannot possibly survive shooting and drowning – or can he?  Mere mortals would long be contributing to the swamp gases, but not our Aloysius :  he manages to haul himself out of the muck and crawl 12 miles (truly!) to shelter and the devoted nursing of a reclusive auld biddie who lives on the wild moors (this is Scotland, remember), gradually returning  to good health, thanks to his cast-iron constitution, burning desire for revenge, and the new-found knowledge that his beloved wife Helen, killed twelve years before by a lion (!) is actually still alive.  And as the ultimate plot device, Lincoln and Child have brought in the Neo-Nazis in the shape of a diabolical organization called The Covenant.  What CAN one say?  Except that you’ll just have to keep on reading all this glorious silliness to find out WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.  These books are seriously good fun and I can’t wait for the next one:  will Aloysius be reunited with his wife, captured by said evil Neo- Nazis?  Will Aloysius be able to sustain yet another gunshot wound? (He is now more ventilated than a Swiss Cheese.) Will his ward Constance Green reveal where she has hidden her baby, the son of his mad brother Diogenes?  Oh, the questions are endless and had better be answered soon, otherwise the enormous cult following of Agent Pendergast - he has his own webpage – will suffer terminal withdrawal symptoms.  Funeral garb never has never been more cool, and the FBI”s reputation has been burnished quite undeservedly. Trashy escapism of the very highest quality, and entertainment par excellence.

 

Near Misses:

 

The Burning Soul, by John Connolly

 

The tenth novel of the adventures of Charlie Parker, haunted – literally – private detective,  starts as always by instilling within the reader a lowering sense of dread:  a young girl has disappeared in a remote coastal town in Maine, and people are frightened:  this is not the first time it has happened.   No-one can set a scene like Mr. Connolly;  he creates atmosphere and mood perfectly;    he writes wonderful dialogue and all his characters, particularly those who have appeared in previous books are a pleasure to meet again – but this time something has gone wrong with his usual sure-fire recipe:  the plot becomes so labyrinthine and unwieldy that its impetus is lost and when all is FINALLY revealed, the reader is glad to have waded through to the finish.  Not one of Mr. Connolly’s bone-rattling successes, but it won’t stop me from looking forward to his next opus – with the hope that it will be back to his old high standard.

 

 

The Quiet Twin, by Dan Vyleta      

Dan Vyleta’s first book ‘Pavel and I’ was a wonderful debut novel, set in Berlin at the end of the Second World War with marvelous characters and a great plot - how I wish I could similarly endorse his  second effort but this time he has missed the mark, and that is a great shame as Mr. Vyleta is a talented writer;  consequently it is a disappointment not to enjoy this book. 

Set in Vienna at the beginning of the Second World War,  the plot concerns the inhabitants of an apartment building, all examples of Hitler’s Inferior Races policy:  there is a hunchbacked child, a homosexual, a gypsy, a severely catatonic woman, and a hypochondriac, not to mention various minor characters, all most unpleasant.  The reader could handle all the intentional squalor if there appeared to be a point to all the dirt and depravity  -  starting with the early introduction of four unsolved murders and the deliberate butchering of an elderly dog -  but Mr. Vyleta’s plot goes nowhere, instead becoming weighed down by Freudian slips, slaps and slops.  At the novel’s end, nothing is resolved, the murders aren’t solved, and the reader is left with the uneasy thought that some of these awful characters may appear in a sequel:  I hope not.  A second-class novel from a first-class writer.

 

Great Reads for September

Dreams of Joy, by Lisa See

 

It has been a great pleasure to read the long-awaited sequel to ‘Shanghai Girls’, Lisa See’s epic novel of 1930’s China, detailing the appalling betrayal of Pearl and May Chin’s father as he sells them into marriage to two brothers, peasants who live in ‘The Gold Mountain’, America, so that he can pay his gambling debts.  The sisters’ escape from Shanghai and the attacking Japanese Army produces lasting scars and horrific memories  - and a baby girl to May, the result of a passionate affair with an artist both women love:  there is much sorrow to overcome before the girls can reconstruct their lives in in Los Angeles with their new husbands;  they are the keepers of many secrets which they expect to stay hidden -  until 1955, when terrible and tragic events expose everything to Joy, the child born of war and privation, irretrievably  fracturing the relationship the sisters have as aunt and mother to her, their beloved.

In vengeful retaliation and bravado, Joy steals her college fund and flies to China to search for her biological father, only to eventually discover that the Chinese Peoples’ Republic is a vastly different beast from that depicted by her ardent socialist-leaning fellow  college students.  Finding her father proves to be relatively easy ;  he has become an artist famous for his portraits of Mao Tse Tung and posters of the Chinese people celebrating their glorious revolution, but she is mystified that he has been ordered to spend six months in a remote country collective,  giving art lessons to the villagers – what kind of work is this for a man of his repute?  It takes a long time and many adverse experiences for Joy to lose her naivete, and when Mao starts his mighty agricultural experiment, his ‘Great Leap Forward’, which results in the eventual starvation and death of millions, her disillusionment is complete.  Lisa See has carefully and exhaustively researched this terrible time;  her characters endure tragedy and horrors barely imaginable, based on authentic accounts by people who were real-life sufferers of Mao’s terrible failure;  who managed to survive to tell their dreadful stories and it is a tribute to her literary skill that the reader hangs on to every word until the story ends.  One also hopes that Ms See doesn’t abandon her singular characters:  The novel’s conclusion is still in the 50’s, which means that there are oodles of time yet left for a third book, still time for more life experiences for the brave, tenacious Chin women and their loved ones.  Fingers crossed!

 

THE PARIS WIFE, by Paula McLain

 20^th century literary lion Ernest Hemingway had four wives.  This is a story of his first, ‘the Paris wife’, Hadley Richardson, eight years his senior, introverted and shy when they first met in Chicago, and perfectly ready to be swept off her feet by Hemingway’s handsome looks, fierce intelligence, and his utter conviction that he would make a great career as a writer.   Ms McLain paints a compelling portrait of their life and times, well-researched and empathetic to Hadley’s unenviable role as The Wife, caregiver, helpmeet, organizer and factotum to her man’s Great and God-Given Talent, and humble admirer of her husband’s many friends , of solid literary repute themselves:  Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (and her own wife and helpmeet, Alice B. Toklas), Ezra Pound and his ménage a trois, Ford Madox Ford, Archibald MacLeish and their respective wives and mistresses – all portrayed against a background of Paris in the ‘20’s;  damaged and frenetic after the war but still a city of endlessly exciting literary and artistic possibilities. 

Narrated in the first-person by Hadley in beautifully lucid sentences, she recounts with a singular lack of self-pity all the dramas of her 6-year marriage to Ernest:   the birth of a beloved son;  the great highs and terrible lows of life with a man who was everyone’s friend, loyal, true, generous and staunch – until he wasn’t;  the agonizing inadequacy and sorrow she was forced to endure as far more attractive women than she doggedly pursued her husband, who stayed faithful – until he didn’t.  Hemingway’s shameful treatment of his friends (portraying them cruelly as thinly-veiled characters in his books was the least of his sins) is well documented;  his adultery with Hadley’s good friend Pauline Pfeifer, who was to become his second wife, was at first suggested by him to Hadley as perhaps a situation that could be workable – his very own ménage-a-trois?  After all, so many of their friends had similar arrangements which seemed to be successful;  couldn’t they give it a try?  Such is the ability of Ms. McLain to recreate the desperation and agony in Hadley’s own voice that the reader is not disappointed in her for attempting to live in a situation that was utterly repugnant to her, but to give her top marks for trying, and to applaud her for finding the courage to abandon Ernest, selfish bastard extraordinaire, and the woman determined to become his muse.

Hadley must also have the last word, a classic summation of their lives in the Twenties :  ‘We called Paris the great good place then, and it was.  We invented it after all.  We made it with our longing and cigarettes and Rhum St. James;  we made it with smoke, and smart and savage conversation and we dared anyone to say it wasn’t ours.  Together we made everything and then we busted it apart again’. A  Five star story.

 

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

When I first read the publisher’s blurb for this book I felt that I was about to begin a highly improbable ‘Perils of Pauline’-type novel;  in fact, trying to summarise Ms. Patchett’s story WITHOUT straining the reader’s credulity is a major task, but such is Ann Patchett’s literary skill that she can present  fantastic and impossible situations with utter conviction.  It’s fair to say that any dedicated reader will be hooked from the first page.

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist for a big Minnesota drug conglomerate is sent to the Amazon by her CEO (also her lover) when her colleague and friend, Anders Eckman -  dispatched first to check on company financed ground-breaking medical research by formidable and reclusive scientist Annick Swenson, dies suddenly of a fever:  his wife wants his body (to prove that he is really dead – she can’t believe it) and the company wants proof that their investment is proceeding according to plan.  Marina’s trip to Brazil and the jungle is predictably hellish, and she has an added burden:  the formidable Dr. Swenson was her professor and mentor when she was a student majoring in obstetrics 12 years before, until a terrible mistake and its subsequent repercussions drove her into the safety of chemical research.   Marina is naturally reluctant to meet Dr. Swenson again, to be reminded of the past and its terrible sorrow;  she can hardly wait to complete the tasks assigned, collect Anders’ ‘few effects’ (according to Dr. Swenson’s terse announcement of his death), and bring them home to his widow.  Needless to say, nothing turns out to be as it seems;  complications arise at every turn and a lot of water flows down the Amazon before Marina can  return to Minnesota, irrevocably changed thanks to, or in spite of her experiences.

 This is not the first time Ms. Patchett has written of South America and its fatal beauty;  the lyrical  ‘Bel Canto’ (2001) was first, and once again she has created memorable characters that  react plausibly and naturally to unnatural circumstances.  Dr. Swenson commands the reader’s attention from the first time she appears ;  ruthless, terrible, relentlessly honest, and utterly selfless in her devotion to science – and humanity.  Ann Patchett has done it again;  she has pulled another rabbit out of her literary hat, enthralling us with big ideas, big adventure and big characters.  Which makes this book a BIG success.

 

Started Early, took my Dog, by Kate Atkinson

 Jackson Brodie is a solitary man;  an ex-policeman, an ex-paratrooper -  and  he doesn’t have a very good record at personal relationships either, being the ex-husband and ex-boyfriend to several women, one of whom fleeced him for every penny.  At the start of this novel, Kate Atkinson’s 4^th featuring his misadventures, he’s half inclined to get ‘I don’t understand’ tattooed on his forehead:  how could his life be so mismanaged – by himself – without him even trying?  He is now reduced to tooling round the English Midlands, playing at being a private detective,  half-heartedly pursuing an adopted New Zealand woman’s request to ‘find out where she came from’, a task that leads him into predictably dangerous and murky waters, and the unveiling of a tragic murder and police cover-up lasting 35 years .  Sounds like the usual familiar stuff, doesn’t it – except that Ms Atkinson is not just a crime novelist per se; she is superb at constructing plots that are straight out of left-field:  the reader doesn’t know what hits them until it arrives with a swipe across the head.  Her characters are always beautifully observed and true, and her dialogue and description is a delight:  in spite of the disturbing elements of the story, there is a much-needed element of wry humour – just what the reader needs to combat the murder, mayhem and squalor of society’s sub-strata.  It’s a rough old world out there, especially for the children – and the dog(!) - in this story, but fortunately for them, Jackson Brodie, their unlikely rescuer, turns up once again to solve the case and save the day with the help of some great supporting players.  A library member who read this before me wrote on the comments sheet:  ‘riveting’.  That sums it up beautifully.           

GREAT READS FOR AUGUST

Finding Jack, by Gareth Crocker

In the course of my reading addiction I have come across several stories now about A Man and His Dog;  nothing beats ‘Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein, but ‘Finding Jack’ is a worthy example of the genre, touching, funny, almost unbearably suspenseful and a six-hanky read:  animal stories tug at the heartstrings whether one wants them to or not, and the protagonists of this novel have much tragedy to overcome before their lives take a turn for the better.  In a prologue as notable for its prose of deepest purple (where was the editor?!) as for setting the scene, Fletcher Carson reveals to his good friend that after the deaths of his wife and daughter in a plane crash, he has joined the army to fight in Vietnam:  it is January, 1972;  his life is meaningless without them and he is hoping to die soon fighting for the defeat of Communism in South East Asia.

Six months later, he is still alive and fully involved in the hell that the rest of his platoon has to endure;  throughout their daily ordeal they look after each other, creating strong bonds that can only be forged in war, and Fletcher comes to realize that even though he still doesn’t care about living, he cares about his fellow soldiers, and in particular about a wounded military dog who appears to have strayed from its unit:  the labrador Jack can sniff out bombs and snipers when his wounds heal and saves the Platoon on numerous occasions  - only to be abandoned as ‘surplus to requirements’ at war’s end when the American forces leave Vietnam.  Here begins the main thrust of the novel – the lengths to which Fletcher will go to save his beloved friend, the only precious thing left in his life.  You better have those hankies ready!  I couldn’t put the book down until the end, and despite all the privations that Fletcher and Jack suffered, almost wept again with relief to know that they survived – and isn’t that an example of what a master storyteller Gareth Crocker is, to engender such emotion in the reader, and to paint a picture so convincingly of the hell on earth endured by good young Americans sent by their politicians to a war they couldn’t win.  And it is a sorry footnote that of the several thousand life-saving dogs in the canine units sent to Vietnam, less than 400 were permitted to come home.  We are fortunate that Man’s Best Friend hasn’t elected to transfer his affections somewhere else.  Highly recommended.

 

A Man You Can Bank On, by Derek Hansen

To the dedicated reader, Derek Hansen should need no introduction;  his first novel, ‘Lunch with the Generals’ generated a solid fan base (and I’m right there in the van!) who knows that subsequent novels will always be great reads, entertaining page-turners that are satisfying and well-plotted.  ‘A Man You Can Bank on’ is no exception, and though the story takes on a Keystone Cops air and an element of farce, especially towards the end , Mr. Hansen controls the action and his characters admirably without once inducing the reader to mutter cynically ‘Yeah, right’.  And that’s no mean feat, considering the plot:

The NSW outback town of Munni-Munni, hardly a dot on the map, is dying:  mortgages are being foreclosed,  Bank Manager Lambert Hampton has been forced into early retirement and his daughter Sophie, the town’s only schoolteacher, has been informed by the authorities that the school may have to  close.  Lambert’s beloved wife has recently died of a brain tumour and life appears to be utterly hopeless – until three desperate crims decide to bury their three million dollar haul from a bookie robbery and are observed doing so just outside the town:  what a stroke of luck!  Lambert uses the money to revive Munni-Munni and its inhabitants:  they have robbed the crooks!  With the huge cash injection new and successful small businesses are started;  everyone drives a Toyota Camry;  (Lambert got a good deal from Toyota);  mortgages are paid off and there is a thriving business in Jack Russells;  everyone has one and the litters fetch big money interstate.  Fate has finally smiled on Munni-Munni – until the crims get out of jail 10 years later and return to disinter their loot, only to find it gone.  Predictably, that’s when the brown stuff hits the fan:  Mr. Hansen has created a fine cast of villains ranging from the ‘duh’ variety to the Boss Big Kev, all single-mindedly determined to get what’s ‘rightfully’ theirs after spending 10 years in jail dreaming about spending it, and a wonderful array of town and bush eccentrics  equally determined to protect their investments, their town and their lives.  This is indeed a great read, a you-beaut romp through the outback with more humour than you can shake a stick at, and a convincing story of a man’s devotion to his family, friends and sense of place.  Great entertainment.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

This novel is the first book of a trilogy, and an exhaustive account of Britain’s infamous Opium trade, poppies grown and manufactured into the drug  in India and sold to China in a bid to unman and enslave both populations – until the Chinese Mandarins decide to block further imports of the poppy to their country, thus starting the Opium Wars in the late 1830s, a conflict championed by all ‘right-thinking’ British importers and supporters of Free Trade everywhere – or more correctly, a fight by them to retain the huge profits and enormous riches gained in living off the misery of others.  This story is an ambitious undertaking;  a great sprawling mess of a tale centred around the 1838 voyage of the Ibis, a two-masted schooner fitted out originally as a slaver, then altered minimally after the abolition of slavery to transport indentured Indian labourers to the Mauritius Islands.  The Ibis’s next port of call is  Canton, there to deliver its supplementary cargo of Opium, but such is the detail, the scene-setting, the sheer sweep of the story that at the end of Book One the Ibis is nowhere near Mauritius, but instead fighting a mighty storm, with an officer murdered and several escapees deciding to take their chances in a stolen longboat – Mein Gott!  What an ending:  I am nearly as much up in the air as the crashing waves and screeching winds so thrillingly described by Mr. Ghosh, and am still marveling at the ease with which he has brought an initially bewildering and polyglot array of characters (almost a cast of thousands, and every one has a backstory) into being, then pared them down convincingly until the remainder through many a different circumstance end up as voyagers on the Ibis.  This novel is also notable for the almost unintelligible mixture of Hindusthani, Urdu, Lascar and old British slang used as dialogue, and I had great fun reading the origins of many of our English words still in use today. Mr. Ghosh has crafted an adventure story in the fine tradition of the great 19^th century classics;  he’s a worthy successor to Conrad, Defoe and Melville and I am looking forward with great anticipation to Volume 2, ‘River of Smoke’.  A treat is surely in store, and I hope Mr. Ghosh is hard at work on volume 3.  Highly recommended.  

Great Reads for July

The Night Season, by Chelsea Cain

This is Ms Cain’s fourth novel in her Beauty Killer series.  It follows Evil at Heart, Sweetheart, and Heartsick, (see earlier review below)  and one of her reviewers extols her as the new queen of serial-killer fiction.  That’s a fair comment.  In her first three novels she had all the necessary prerequisites of the genre:  blood and gore for Africa;  a crazed (but beautiful – gee, that’s a surprise!) FEMALE serial killer;  the brilliant but burnt-out detective who eventually captures her – but only after she has carved a heart on his chest and removed his spleen – (truly!),  and a plucky girl reporter with enough irritating habits to drive even the reader mad.  What more could one ask for in a thriller?  ‘The Night Season’ follows in the same vein, with the same characters , but evil Gretchen Lowell, the Beauty Killer of the other books plays a lesser role this time;  she was incarcerated for the second time at the end of book three and now sits in gaol refusing to talk, but the citizens of Portland, Oregon, must now contend with a new madman, as well as a huge, impending flood of the Willamette river caused by heavy rain and snowmelt that threatens to inundate huge areas of the city.  Oh, it’s all happening, especially as the new crazed killer poisons his victims in the most preposterously clever way, then disguises them as drowning victims.  It’s up to Archie the carved-up, burnt-out – but brilliant – sleuth and fearless girl reporter Susan Ward to track him down and reel him in.  (Sorry about that, but there is a lot of water in this novel!)  And they do, but not without a lot of heart-stopping suspense in between:  Ms Cain sets her scenes superbly;  she creates effortlessly the lowering atmosphere of a flooding city and the creeping dread of yet another killing just round the corner:  the reader cannot put the book down until the end, and there can be no more satisfying experience than to have to keep reading to see What Happens Next.  All the elements of good thriller writing have been satisfied in this series :  horror, black humour and psychological tension.  As one reviewer said:  ‘This time she adds another arrow to her narrative quiver:  the interplay between landscape and mood …. Terrifying. ‘  Wish I’d thought of that, but he’s absolutely spot on!

Oldies but Goodies

Sweetheart, Heartsick, Evil at Heart, by Chelsea Cain

These books are Potboilers par excellence – gruesome, gory, hair-raising -  all the basic requirements of the classic thriller personified in the continuing duel between Good Archie Sheridan, burnt-out superdetective, and Evil serial-killer Gretchen Lowell, twisted, psychotic and gorgeous – and endlessly fascinating, naturally.  Gretchen takes torture to new and unheard-of levels;  Archie falls victim to her scalpel but manages to survive at the cost of his marriage and mental health, not to mention his spleen.   Oh, that Gretchen – she’s so nasty she makes Lucretia Borgia seem like a favourite Sunday School teacher, but as Archie and every reader knows, she’s also irresistible and unforgettable.  The next episode can’t come soon enough.  (See Above!)

La Rochelle’s Road, by Tanya Moir

The advent of Ms Moir’s first novel assures this reader yet again of the exceptional quality and health of contemporary New Zealand writing:  she takes an old and well-tried theme and creates an entirely new perspective upon it, not only because of her beautiful prose and command of atmosphere and time, but also the authenticity and strength of her characterizations.

The Peterson family leave England at the end of 1866 to begin a brave new life in New Zealand;  Daniel the father has bought acreage sight unseen on the Banks Peninsula;  he is a clerk but means to become a gentleman farmer, producing grass-seed;  his wife Letitia is adoring, soft, gentle and genteel, the mother of Hester, aged 18, and Robbie, 15, and frighteningly ignorant of the realities and harsh trials of their new existence:  their land, for which they paid an exorbitant price is unproductive and must be cleared by them all of scrub and rubbish before they can even begin to think of a crop;  Daniel finds that, when his money runs out his services are not required by the contemptuous new settlers, hard men all, when he attempts to find supplementary work as a clerk or a teacher, and his humiliation is complete when he has to offer himself as a labourer – for less money than the others! – in order to put food on the table. 

The family’s plight is recorded firstly in optimistic letters Home by Hester to her friend Lucy, then by more realistic entries in her Journal.  She also finds the Journal of the house’s previous occupant, Etienne de la Rochelle, gentleman, artist and would-be explorer, the original owner of the land;  his story offers a fascinating subplot as he relates his adventures in an attempt to find a way across the Alps from West to East – and his guilty love for a Maori woman, the concubine of his guide, Teone.  Ms Moir chronicles this love story with great skill, using the language of the time with absolute assurance.  Her account of farmer- turned -labourer Daniel’s descent into bitterness, disillusionment and despair is masterly:  Daniel does not eventually conquer his land:  it conquers him, and he is forced by tragic circumstance into the realization that the contempt shown to him for his British airs and graces is perhaps justified -  there is no room here yet in this young, harsh, unrelenting land for those with pretensions towards education and airy-fairy ideas on politics and philosophy:  the class system has been turned on its head, and he with it.

This book is completely absorbing from start to finish;  Ms Moir’s prose is lyrical , brilliantly evoking people,  times and places long gone, and her chief narrators, Hester and La Rochelle, carry the story onward with strength, optimism and purity of heart.  Highly recommended.

The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht

 This book will not be everbody’s cup of tea:  it deals with primitive superstition, family legends and folklore, and the average reader looking for light entertainment will not find it on these pages.  That said, I can also state that this story still has me thinking of its electrifying characters;  the savagery of fate towards its unsuspecting pawns and the horror of the Balkan War, that terrible ethnic conflict that fractured Tito’s Yugoslavia permanently into all the separate little States that are trying to function independently today.  Ms. Obreht has made an astonishing debut into the world of American Letters with this book:  she was born in Belgrade in 1985 and came to America when she was twelve, but her family ties are still strong and she writes with the assurance of one whose homeland will always be with her, regardless of where she travels.

Ms. Obreht’s novel is constructed on two levels;  the modern-day first-person narrative of Natalia, granddaughter of an eminent physician : she’s impatient, rebellious, practical and brilliant, and she has no time for for old and entrenched family customs;  she has graduated as a doctor, too, and she wants to cure people, not pander to their superstitions!  Until the news comes that her Grandfather has died miles from anywhere in a remote Muslim seaside village over the border in unfriendly territory:  peoples’ memories of atrocity are fresh and vivid:  Natalia is told not to advertise her surname as she searches for answers as to why he went there – and why he chose to die there.

As Natalia delves further into her Grandfather’s past life the story’s second level surfaces:  it covers  her Grandfather’s childhood in Galina, a tiny village not even on the map, and the reason for his fascination with tigers, something that was always a mystery to her and the source of many childhood visits to the local zoo.  The village inhabitants are forces of nature;  their every day controlled by superstitions big and small and anyone displaying an iota of difference from what they know and accept is not going to have a long and happy life in Galina. A great tragedy inevitably occurs and the child grows into the man that becomes Natalia’s grandfather, forged by adversity into a formidable and unforgettable character – and so he will remain in my mind:  I am still marveling at Ms. Obreht’s brilliance;  that she can create such a book at the age of 26, and write with such maturity and lyricism of her country’s terrible history.  What a privilege it has been to travel with Natalia, back to a primitive past that still has a strong grasp on the present.  Ms. Obreht has taken me on a Magical Mystery Tour de Force,  and she has my most humble thanks

 

Dog Tags, by David Rosenfelt

.And now for something completely different!  Something for the readers who just want to be entertained, to NOT have to contemplate the huge questions of life, the universe and everything:  this is YOUR book, and what an unmitigated pleasure it is; a really good legal thriller combined with enough humour to carry us on to the next Rosenfelt opus (for this is a series) and to hope that Mr. Rosenfelt keeps the jokes – and the suspense coming.  True to form, I have come in on the fifth or sixth title in the adventures of Andy Carpenter, defence lawyer extraordinaire.  It irritates me immeasurably to realize this after I have started a book;  I like to start things FROM THE BEGINNING!  Well, never mi nd:  I have started to trawl back through the series to the start, and one thing that Andy can be counted on is to be perpetually smart-mouthed in a really death-defying way, to solve the current mystery, and to get rid of all the bad guys – oh, and he’s an unashamed dog-lover:  what’s not to admire?  And Mr. Rosenfelt’s dialogue had me breathless with admiration:  one of Andy’s friends knows absolutely everyone:  ‘You wanna meet the Dalai Lama?  Well, I don’t know him but I know his sister, Shirley Lama.  I could arrange a meeting.’  I  wish I’d thought of that, and I’m still trying to figure out how to introduce it as all mine in future conversations.  Hasn’t happened yet!           

 

GREAT READS FOR JUNE

Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett

I waited seven months to read Ken Follett’s latest Best Seller, such is his popularity with library members, and I’m happy to say that it was well worth the wait.  He may never scale lofty literary heights but  what a good storyteller he is, and how credible are his characters.  He has produced (yet again) the consummate read – a rattling pace, Love (True and not so!), the horrors of war and revolution, and a meticulously researched account of the seeds that were sown to germinate  the War to End All Wars, World War 1.

The story starts in 1911 and ends in 1924.  This is the first novel of a trilogy and deals with five families:  The Williams family, Welsh miners and unionists;  The Fitzherberts, English Aristrocrats absolutely certain of their ancient, inalienable rights as the ruling class;  two impoverished Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, eager to escape the crushing burden of serfdom under the hated Czar;  the von Ulrichs, German Junkers and diplomats – Otto the father, implacable in his dream of the domination of Europe for his Kaiser, and Walter the son, doing his utmost to avoid war at all costs;  and American Presidential Aide Gus Dewar, for a large part of the war a worried spectator of events until early 1918 when the United States finally entered the conflict.

Mr. Follett is a master at keeping the reader turning the pages at a furious rate as he moves effortlessly from continent to continent, marshalling his characters with the precision of a chess player.  He sets the scene beautifully for future events:  Ethel Williams, young housekeeper to Earl Fitzherbert takes fatal steps above her station;  her young brother Billy, ‘down t’ pit’ at thirteen and in the army to become cannon fodder at 16,  becomes implacably hardened in his support of socialism after surviving the Somme under the inept leadership of aristocratic superiors;    brothers Gregori and Lev choose very different ways to escape starvation and the Czar’s corrupt police -  Lev, irresponsible and charming, skips Russia to end up eventually in Buffalo, New York, whilst Grigori is conscripted into the Army to fight the Germans;  and Walter von Ulrich enters into a secret marriage just before war is declared that will have consequences for all.

‘Fall of Giants’ could essentially be seen as a family saga and a love story but all is framed by the huge and momentous events of the early twentieth century:  no-one emerges unscathed from the cataclysm of war and revolution and there is a sad inevitability that the second book in the trilogy will pose yet more trials for characters who have become unforgettable.   Regardless, Mr. Follett’s storytelling expertise is such that, potential tragedies notwithstanding, the reader will again be swept up in the lives of these five families – and soon, one hopes.  I trust Mr. Follett is pounding away at # 2 on his keyboard as I write!

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, refers to a little rhyme that Southern children learn to enable them to spell ‘Mississippi’ and   with a name like that, any assistance would be helpful.  The people of this story are much the same, tricky to read ,  complicated and full of twists and turns in this beautifully written novel from Tom Franklin – his marvelous imagery encompasses the land as well as his characters, and the reader is blessed to read such fine prose.  He chronicles the lives of the inhabitants of the tiny, dying hamlet of Chabot, Southern Mississippi:  naturally, everyone knows everything about everyone, including the fact that Larry Ott, the town outcast and mechanic whom no-one ever takes their cars to, probably – well, FOR SURE – killed a girl 25 years ago, but was so fiendishly clever at hiding the deed and the corpse that the law was never able to arrest him.  Now another young girl has gone missing, and who else but Larry Ott could be the prime suspect, bearing the brunt of the finger-pointing, the name-calling and various acts of vandalism to his property:  he done it FOR SURE!

And who else but Larry Ott could bear such vitriol with stoic resignation and Christian meekness – that’s how he was raised after all, the only child of a Good Christian Woman and a Good Ole Boy who views Larry with contempt for his allergies, asthma and pudgy frame – and even worse, his obsessive reading habits.  ‘Git yore nose outta that Goddamn book and mow the lawns – git some fresh air for a change!’  Larry has been behind the eight ball for a long time, a good, lonely boy grown into a decent, lonely man – until his mother’s daily prayer for him to ‘find a friend’ – which he did when he was 14, and once more at the age of 41 – produces horrific consequences:  Larry is fate’s plaything, and fate is in a foul mood.  Mr. Franklin captures time, place and idiom with ease.  He has created a most satisfying mystery, a page-turner of the first order and a fine exposition on the Southern way of life -  functional and otherwise.  And let us not ignore the sly vein of humour throughout the book:  ‘Miss Voncille, did yall ever date Crazy Larry?’  ‘Yes, only the once, and ah was nevah seen agin’.  This is a dang fine story!    

Instruments of Darkness, by Imogen Robertson

Imogen Robertson won the Telegraph’s first thousand words Competition in 2007 by submitting the start of this book, her first novel.  It is a murder mystery, set in 1780, and the prose is as elegant and  genteel as the characters and time of which she writes.  She has researched thoroughly the political and social mores of country and city life and writes convincingly of the huge gaps between rich and poor, noble and base, and the glaring unfairness of gender inequality:  her heroine, Mrs. Harriet Westerman, runs a prosperous estate in Sussex while her husband, a Naval Commodore, is at sea – she is forthright, independent and used to making independent decisions, but is constrained by society’s expectations of how a ‘Lady’ should comport herself.  It is not socially acceptable for a woman to take on a murder investigation, even if the corpse was found on her land;  consequently she has to enlist the aid of Gabriel Crowther, recently-arrived ‘natural scientist’, an anatomist whose reputation is illustrious and far-reaching, but a recluse who has secrets of his own.  There is also a dissolute Nobleman (the main suspect), his dastardly steward and a cast of minor villains hell-bent on murder, and as the story progresses the corpses pile up in a most satisfactory way – one even gets his throat ripped out by a leopard!  Oh, it’s all good Georgian fun, and the denouement when it arrives has a twist that surprises, as it should.

Ms Robertson is a fine writer, tapping  a new vein in the crime genre by giving her work its 18^th century setting;  her characters, too, could never be confined to a single story and are thoroughly deserving of a sequel, ‘Anatomy of a Murder’.   I look forward to reacquainting myself with these reluctant pillars of respectability as they triumph with respectable  but determined resolve over evildoers once again.   

Great Reads for May

Swamplandia! By Karen Russell

Swamplandia! Is the name of a run-down nature park owned and operated by the Bigtree family on an island in the Everglades in Florida.  They Swim with the Alligators!  Wrestle them into Submission!  Take the tourists on Island Wildlife walks and Tours of the Bigtree Historic Family Museum !  And sell their captive visitors toxic refreshments and souvenirs from the only café, reluctantly staffed by the three Bigtree children who are home-schooled  by their  mother, Hilola, Alligator wrestler and swimmer extraordinaire, star of the show and of their hearts.  Dad is Samuel ‘Chief’ Bigtree;  he is the compere, works the lights, does all the repairs, and looks after his aged father, Grandpa Sawtooth, who started up the business – which is running on the smell of an oily rag and mortgaged to the hilt.  There is not a drop of Native American blood in any of them, but it’s good for business and the tourists to think so, and as a business and a family the Bigtrees putter along until Hilola dies of ovarian cancer at the age of 36.

Ms. Russell writes with stark and painful clarity of the confusion and disintegration of the family:  the Chief leaves the children in charge of the animals – the tourists have stopped coming since the star attraction died – and goes to the mainland, ostensibly to find ‘investors’, taking Grandpa with him;  the old man has lapsed into senility and has bitten a  tourist;  he is now a reluctant resident of the ‘Out-to-Sea’ retirement facility.  Kiwi, the oldest at 17 (named for the fruit;  there’s no mention of Our Bird) is furious with his father for deserting the ship – then does precisely the same, getting himself a job on the mainland at the opposition, The World of Darkness, a huge and tawdry new funpark, where all the visitors are not called tourists, but Lost Souls.  His aim is to earn enough money to get the family out of debt and his attempts to do so are achingly funny.  Then there’s Osceola, 16 years old and convinced that she’s visited by spirits, so much so that she elopes with one, to the enormous distress of her younger sister Ava, 13 years old and an aspiring apprentice ‘gator wrestler. Ava embarks on a wild journey through the swamp on a recovery mission of her  sister with The Bird Man, a professional bird removalist as guide and everything turns predictably, horribly pear-shaped:  it is a tribute to Ms. Russell’s dazzling literary skill that she can draw the reader in to the great predatory and natural world of the Everglades to such a degree that everything is chillingly real, everything is believable -  but most of all, her evocation of family bonds, hugely strained but not broken by great tragedy, lies at the heart of this wonderful story.  This was a pleasure to read.  *****

Their Faces Were Shining, by Tim Wilson.

The Rapture, coming soon to a place near you!  And this is what happens when it does.  Tim Wilson has quite an important day job, that of U.S.  Correspondent for TVNZ, but I’m happy to say that the ‘There’s a Great Novel Bursting to be Born from every Journalist’ cliché is very true in this case:  Mr. Wilson has made a most successful first foray into the world of the Good Book – in subject and construction.

Hope Patterson and her husband Wade have lost a son to drowning at the age of three;  they have another daughter, Rachel, but Hope turns to religion in an attempt to assuage her terrible grief.  Wade does not.  He loses his job and tries to start a new business with a spectacular lack of success.  Meantime, Hope tries all religious variations on for size – Holy Rollers, Happy Clappies et al – before deciding that the Presbyterians are her flavor of choice;  thereafter she immerses herself completely in her new identity as a worthy subject of the Lord, so Good and Without Sin that she will forget the u

nforgettable:  the outrage of her son’s death:   in fact, all that piety must ensure that she will surely get to Heaven eventually to be with her darling boy again -  not that she would consciously admit it.  Her Holier-than-Thouness creates a schism in her family:  Us against Her, much to her sorrow and confusion.  She cannot understand why her husband and daughter don’t want or need the comfort of God’s Grace and more baffling still is the sneaking thought that God has left the building whenever she asks for assistance with the Patterson family’s myriad problems.  And supreme insult is added to agonizing injury:  The Rapture, long prophesied and written of in the Holy Book, actually occurs:  the Righteous are taken up Unto Heaven, accompanied by all children under the age of 17 (even Hope’s son is taken up from his grave) – and Hope, that paragon of virtue, that shining example of The Good Woman, is left behind .  Those others of her acquaintance left to wallow in the Sinful World cannot believe it and neither can Hope:  she is forced to stay behind to confront some very big questions:  where do her loyalties lie – with God or her family?  Do you love God utterly, or is God truly Love?   Tim Wilson chronicles Hope’s rocky road to realization with real skill and, despite the serious themes, great humour.  This is a smart, funny exploration of love in its many guises but posits most persuasively  that familial love is the most unrewarded, unselfish, painful,  noble love of all.  Well done, Tim Wilson – you can leave your Day Job anytime!  ****

Ape House, by Sara Groen

Sara Groen has already been justly acclaimed for her novel ‘Water for Elephants’, a wonderful story of an American circus during the time of the 30’s Depression, recently made into a very successful movie.  Now she tries something completely different: a story of  scientific experimentation – good and bad -  with primates, in this case six Bonobos, (cousins of the chimpanzee) held at a laboratory and taught by sign language to communicate with scientists.  Reporter John Thigpen is assigned to do a story on the apes and their ‘trainer’ Isabel Duncan, a scientist who regards them as family rather than mere animals – certainly they are more her family than anyone else -  and she has made great strides in educating them and increasing her own knowledge of how the apes and their hierarchy function.  Thigpen wishes to write a serious article lauding her singular achievements and does so – until he is usurped and his story stolen by an unscrupulous colleague.  The apes’ laboratory is bombed, ostensibly by animal activists;  Isabel is seriously injured and the apes are sold on to a Porn king who wants to make a reality TV show called, of all things, Ape House!  Yep, a lot happens in a very short time and I have to say that there are more characters in this book than you can shake a stick at, some of them wildly funny and others who are superfluous to the plot;  regardless, Ms Groen manages to keep all her literary balls up in the air and we reach the happy ending (and I’m so glad it was!) with every loose thread neatly tucked away.  Ms Groen has done some very solid research into apes and their ability to communicate by picture and sign, and the story she has produced is both a damning condemnation of animal cruelty and abuse and  a loving tribute to a species’ dignity, intelligence and innate integrity.  This was a pleasure to read.  ****

Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall

The year is 1865;  the great Gold Rush is well under way and Hokitika is booming;  there are 100 pubs throughout the town to slake the miners’ thirst – and relieve them of their hard-won gold, and everyone is trying to get rich quick by fair means or foul before the gold runs out and all the diggers move on to the next Big Strike.  Into this hotch-potch of goodies and baddies comes  Halfie – Half-pint, Harvey, Bedwetter, Monkey:  these are only some of the names he answers to, this little maori boy who has run away from his tribe after the death of his beloved tuakana Moana.  Being a resourceful and intelligent little boy he has decided to be a ‘coin boy’, and where better a place to earn coin than Hokitika town – he is sure that he will eventually accumulate enough coin to earn a place to sleep by the stove of the reclusive miner and drunk, Ludovic, with the hope that Ludovic will teach him English.  He knows that ‘That Inglish is a langwich what don’t behave’ and he would appreciate some tuition so that he can get fair treatment from Whitey.  Besides, he’s sick of sleeping up a ponga tree – that’s tolerable in the summer, but Hokitika gets a lot of rain and it’s coming onto winter, so he has to plan ahead.

Thereafter follows a rollicking account of Halfie’s adventures as a coin boy,  in his own fractured and inimitable style:  comedy and tragedy vie equally  for places in this wonderful story of great riches and hard times portrayed by a writer of superlative skill.  Halfie is ebullient, shrewd, hilarious, and quite simply unforgettable as he  bravely attempts in his little boy’s way to deal with problems that most adults would  flee rather than solve:  sometimes ‘his heart sag like a old bed’ when his mind turns back to ‘rememorying’, but he has a lion’s heart,  a fox’s cunning and a nobility of spirit that many adults would never achieve in a lifetime.  His friends – and enemies – are wonderfully drawn, too;  an astonishing cavalcade of the Good, the Bad, and the downright Ugly, and all utterly convincing.  Ms. Randall has brought our Goldrush era to thrilling life:  as Halfie would say:  KA PAI!  And I would say A-MA-ZING.  *****      

Great Reads for April

Blackout, by Connie Willis

The year is 2060.  Time travel has been  perfected and it is now possible for scientists and historians to travel back through time to ‘observe’ and experience defining times in world history.  Oxford University is home to a thriving laboratory of highly skilled technicians who can send scholars anywhere to a century and an event that they wish to study and experience, complete with authentic clothes provided by wardrobe, and mannerisms, accents and information implanted for the period of time they will be away.  Nothing can go wrong;  all contingencies have been covered – except for a slight problem of ‘slippage’, the hours or even days that the arrival and departure times might be erroneous.  Nevertheless, it’s considered a minor inconvenience and three historians travel back to 1940, to London and the Blitz, experiencing at terrifying first-hand the sleeplessness and fear, the grief of losing friends and loved ones, and the indomitable courage and collective good cheer of a people under terrible siege.  Ms Willis describes the bombing raids to such good effect that the reader feels right in the thick of action that she really would never want to experience; there are many well-drawn and engaging characters, in particular two cockney child evacuees, dreadful but wonderfully engaging and Ms Willis, in spite of her American origins, gets all the accents and idioms right for the most part -  any errors left can be attributed to careless editing .  This is a rattling good read and we are inexorably drawn on to the sequel ‘All Clear’ for at the conclusion of ‘Blackout’, the worst has happened:  the three historians’ access to their own time has been blocked; ‘The Drop’ is no longer working.  They are trapped.

Sadly, Ms. Willis runs out of steam in ‘All Clear’, which appears to be a direct continuation of the story - that would be fair enough, were her plot not to become bogged down in a lot of extraneous detail, soul-searching and rhetorical questions which this reader found tiresome in the extreme.  This is disappointing, for the first book is fast-paced and has genuine passages of quality writing:  her description of the evacuation of Dunkirk is gripping and meticulously researched, her characters believable and brave in their ordinariness.  A reader commented on the remarks sheet of ‘All Clear’ after reading it: ‘ One book too many’.  Fair comment.

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

Ten years ago Jonathan Franzen wowed the literary cognoscenti with his superb novel ‘The Corrections’, and that world has been waiting with breathless anticipation ever since for the next opus.  Jonathan Franzen writes about families:  in ‘The Corrections’ he explored the lives of  two protagonists in a very long marriage, and the relationship between them and their children to hilarious and stunning effect;  the American nuclear family at the turn of the century was laid mercilessly bare by his astute and incisive observations, but all was softened by his wonderfully Dickensian humour.

Now we have the long-awaited second novel, once again about  families, flawed and almost titanic in their awfulness, and again Mr. Franzen softens his ruthless dissection of contemporary American society with delicious and much-needed wit:  sadly for this reader, the recipe doesn’t seem so wildly successful the second time around.  I realize  that I am a lone swimmer against the tide of literary adulation and sparkling reviews from those eminently qualified to know, but I still feel that Mr. Franzen has not done justice to his characters – his exploration of what defines freedom for each of them gets bogged down in nit-picking and navel-gazing, WHICH SHOULD NOT HAPPEN!  For Walter and Patty Englund deserve better treatment from their creator.  They meet in college;  Walter is a shy, decent, hard-working intellectual, a passionate advocate for the environment  studying for a law degree - and always attracted to the unattainable, in this case Patty Emerson, a talented basketball player and very damaged member of a high-achieving family.  Naturally, Patty is barely aware of his existence, being much more attracted to Walter’s disreputable room-mate and friend Richard Katz, leader of a punk band of no repute.  ‘Richard is an itch she must scratch’!  Sadly this doesn’t occur until after Patty and Walter have been married for some years, Patty having been worn down by Walter’s goodness and deciding that to be an awesome wife and mother to his children is her destiny.   What Happens Next, the awful consequences of a steamy tryst to scratch the itch, loses impact with long-winded digressions into the family origins of Walter and Patty, an equally verbose section devoted to their utterly self-centred (thanks to Patty) and odious son Joey and his long-running affair with next-door neighbor Connie, and Walter’s liaison with an impossibly glamorous Indian P.A. named Lalitha.  I have to say that my eyes were rolling like marbles and the ‘Yeah, right!’s were coming thick and fast:  Mr. Franzen’s characters  weren’t just unlikeable, but scarcely credible,which is a great shame.  A writer of his talents and undeniable artistry should have romped away with his story and the reader;  instead he compels us all to amble slowly through a maze of time-wasting side-streets before reaching Home, and an impossibly pat and happy ending – not that I’m against happy endings per se, but why didn’t he end with ‘And They All Lived Happily Ever After’ and be done with it!    

Great Reads for March 2011

The Passage, by Justin Cronin

Now:  Your first requisite for reading this book is strong wrists – it’s a doorstopper.  Your second is a complete suspension of ‘yeah, right!’ comments as I recount my heavily-abridged version of the plot, for this is a novel on the grand scale as well as huge physical size;  it’s a tale of a scientific experiment gone dreadfully, fatally wrong, conducted by the U.S. Army in a remote location in the mountains of Colorado, the scientific objective being to create a race of ‘Super Soldiers’, impervious to heat, cold, disease and virtually indestructible, thereby conquering America’s terrorist enemies in Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent.  There would be no more wounded and dying to be returned home  ‘eating up the defense budget in the veterans’ hospitals’;  in short, it would be the answer to the Pentagon’s prayers – all that had to be done was to inject a new-found virus into chosen candidates, and after a short period of illness, a new, invincible warrior would be born. 

But here’s the rub:  the men initially chosen as guinea-pigs for the experiment were all convicts on Death Row, criminals of the worst kind.  When injected with the serum they were turned into killing machines, entirely devoid  of morals, compassion and conscience – and highly infectious.  The major part of the plot deals with their escape, the destruction they wreak on the world, and What Happens Next, for naturally there are some doughty survivors left to battle these thousands of dreadful beings.  Mr. Cronin is a superb story-teller;  his masterly plotting and wonderful imagery create suspense of the most heart-stopping kind;   at no time does the story sag or lose impetus -  no mean feat when you consider the size of this book (760 pages).  I read that ‘The Passage’ is the first book of a trilogy:  well, my heart and my wrists quail at the thought of the sheer physical weight of words in the next two volumes, but I can honestly say that I can’t wait to continue this epic adventure,  at the very least  to find out WHAT HAPPENS, but also to know how Mr. Cronin’s characters eventually vanquish the mutants – or will they?  There’s only one way to find out:  keep reading.   Book #2 is called ‘The Twelve’.  *****

A tiny bit Marvellous, by Dawn French

There is no end to Ms. French’s myriad talents – quite apart from her superb comic skills as an actress she has now proven that she is also a writer of insight and wit, capturing effortlessly in her amber the 21^st century family:  Mum Maureen Battle (Mo), capable and efficient, on-to-it child psychologist – except when it comes to her own children, about whom she clearly hasn’t a clue:  Dad or ‘Husband’ as Mo invariably refers to him, hovering lovingly in the background, keeping the wheels turning in ever so subtle ways in his efforts to provide a loving and stable environment for his family.  He has a job, ‘doing something with computers’, but everyone seems to be vague as to its specifics:   Dora, about to turn 18 and full of teenage angst and self-loathing, is fretting about the humiliation of being dumped by her small but perfectly-formed boyfriend, being a virgin, being less than interested in a future career, and being FAT!  Last but not least, Peter:  call him Oscar please, as he is such a disciple of Mr. Wilde that he is sure he is his reincarnation.  Peter is also tall, cherubic, flamboyant, academically brilliant  and gay as a hat – and proud of it  - no gender angst for Mr. Peter;  in fact the only thing he agonises over is having to live in Pangbourne, the most deeply unfashionable place on earth.

  The novel is written in diary form, with each member of the family contributing their own thoughts and opinions (and some of them are hair-raising) about each other, and while some of the humour is laugh-out-loud funny (as we would expect from Ms. French) there is also very shrewd and poignant observation of this flawed, Ipod, Iphone, Ipad, I want family – the problems they face are all too familiar to anyone who reads this charming, wise little story;  the dangers parents  wish to protect  their children from are still the same, but stranger-danger has become Internet- danger in the 21^st century,  and not always preventable.  Fortunately,  Dad/Husband/Den – that loving, unsung problem- solver extraordinaire – well, he only gets one chapter to narrate, but he saves the day, his family and his marriage:    what a Star!  Oh, and I nearly forgot (for shame!) to mention Nanna Pam, Mo’s loving mum, dispenser of sound common sense and wise council, and baker of everyone’s favourite cakes – and the yummy recipes are all at the back of the book.  Magic. ****

The Wake of Forgiveness, by Bruce Machart

 This novel is not for the faint-hearted.  It’s themes are as unforgiving and brutal as the Texas landscape in which the story is set – but WHAT a story:  starting in 1895 with the death in childbirth of the beloved wife of Vaclav Sala, a Czech immigrant cotton farmer.  The baby, the fourth son for the couple, survives but Vaclav is completely unmanned and embittered by his loss.  His heart turns to stone and he regards his sons, particularly the youngest as intolerable reminders of what he once had.  He becomes famous in the district for treating his horses better than his sons – in fact, he races his horses and makes his sons pull the plough in front of him, no better than human livestock, with all four reaching adulthood with permanently deformed necks.  His  sons hate Vaclav (not that he cares) but they are staunch in their love and support of each other – until their father accepts a wager from a very rich Spaniard newly arrived in the district:  a horse race between Vaclav’s best mount, ridden by 15 year-old Karel, the youngest, despised cause of his wife’s death, and the Spaniard’s beautiful thoroughbred, ridden by his spirited youngest daughter.  The prize if Karel wins:  600 acres of land.   If he loses, the three eldest brothers must wed the Spaniard’s daughters.  The brothers are ecstatic!  It’s a win-win situation for them – escape from their tyrannical father, and legal union to three comely girls:   what could be better – provided Karel will only lose.   And Karel finds that he doesn’t want to, indeed can’t, because Vaclav threatens him with a terrible punishment if  he dares to throw the race;  he is  caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and Mr. Machart doesn’t spare us as he draws us inexorably onwards to the terrible conclusion of the wager and the end of the brothers’ loving alliance against their terrible parent.

Mr. Machart is a superlative writer;  his characters and plotting are Shakespearian in breadth and he conveys effortlessly beautiful and haunting imagery of landscape and the primeval ties to it.  He shows us with infinite grace that the ancient bonds of fraternal loyalty, shattered by hatred and betrayal, are still capable of being reforged by passing time and the healing balm of forgiveness.   This is a very fine debut novel.  *****

Great reads for February 2011

American Subversive, by David Goodwillie

What a great pleasure it was to read this debut novel, judged to be one of the New York Times’ 10 best books of 2010, for Mr. Goodwillie has produced that rare thing;  a superior literary thriller which combines great suspense with searching  moral and ethical questions:  which person or event provides the fire to the touchpaper of radicalism from within?  What ‘last straw’ finally breaks the back of tolerance in an age of disillusionment and impotence?  For Paige Roderick it is the death by friendly fire of her brother in the Iraq war – for Aidan Cole, jaded and going-nowhere-fast failed journalism student turned blogger, (phew, glad I wasn’t holding my breath when I wrote that) it is merely the fact that he wishes to rescue Paige (she’s a serious hotty, quite apart from her lofty ideals!) and keep her safe from the radicals she hitherto supported, after it becomes clear that they no longer want to blow up buildings:  they want to kill people too.  This novel is beautifully constructed, a split memoir with each chapter narrated by Aidan or Paige;  Aidan has a very nice line in black humour, describing his New York lifestyle with ruthless honesty.  Paige is also honest, remaining true at great cost to her integrity and ideals:  she had firmly believed ‘that America had passed an invisible tipping point, strayed too far from the noble tenets of its founding;  taking it back would require drastic measures.’  Now her radical friends have reached a tipping point of their own – radicalism has turned into terrorism and she knows too much for them to allow her to live.  Mr. Goodwillie has written the thinking man’s thriller, fast-paced, highly suspenseful – and unafraid to ask the uncomfortable questions of a complacent, apathetic society.  *****

 The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

 This is the story of a newspaper, a newspaper founded in the 50’s in Rome by an industrial tycoon  who had enough money to indulge himself in a flight of fancy, that of providing a superior international news organ for English speakers in Europe.  It didn’t matter that it didn’t make money;  what mattered most was that it be a benchmark always for the highest journalistic standards – and a means of being close to his one true love, the woman he installs as joint editor – with her husband.  So begins Tom Rachman’s charming novel of the experience of living and working in Rome, producing a newspaper for English readers.  He knows the business intimately, having worked as a correspondent and editor for Associated Press in New York and Rome, and for the Herald Tribune in Paris;  in fact his characters have such a ring of truth about them I have to wonder how thinly veiled they are:  how many of his former work colleagues recognize themselves in this book?  There is the Editor-in-Chief, hugely intelligent, driven, and driving everyone else before her in a breathless attempt to produce a daily newspaper that people will read despite competition from the relentlessly encroaching electronic media;  sadly, she also drives away the men in her life with her harsh judgements and scathing opinions of their worth.  Her second in command Craig Menzies is a workaholic, living with a much younger woman whom he adores.  He can’t believe that she wants to stay with him permanently – how could someone like him ever be THAT lucky?  Through a tragic miscalculation of his own, he is eventually proven correct.  Arthur Gopal, son of one of India’s greatest writers is in charge of ‘Puzzle Wuzzle’ and Obituaries;  he knows he has more to offer the paper than the tasks to which he is set, and through a series of carefully calculated underhand moves manages to get the promotion he always dreamed of:  culture editor, over and above the former holder of that title, Clint Oakley, a loudmouthed braggart and racist who is demoted in turn, to his fury and dismay, to Puzzle Wuzzle and Obits!  Mr. Rachman’s debut novel is a delight, witty, convincingly written and peopled with great characters who are all linked by the work they do for the paper – which cannot last;  the bosses in Atlanta are ready to pull the plug, with tragic consequences for one of their own.  This is a very funny book, but the reader still gets sucker-punched along the way.  I’m still thinking about some of the shocks I never saw coming, and this is how fine writing can be and should be. *****

 

Gunshot Road, by Adrian Hyland

Here’s something different in the Whodunnit category, and what a welcome – and different – breath of fresh air it is:  Emily Tempest, the novel’s protagonist, is a half-aboriginal woman whose stamping ground is the Northern Territory.  Her white father has worked in the mining industry all his life and never remarried after the death of his aboriginal wife 20 years earlier.  Emily has received a unique upbringing in that her father has encouraged her  to embrace both cultures ;  consequently she is responsible, educated ( well, nearly:  she went to Uni to study Earth Science, not with the intention of getting a degree but to understand better the ancient land that has its roots in her heart.  When she felt she had learned all she wanted to know she left.  Without the degree.), and fearless to a fault:  her aggression and disrespect for authority is legendary, especially if she sees injustice – ‘that bint has got nice tits and a mouth like a blowtorch!’ – is a common opinion held by Emily’s suffering work colleagues, the local constabulary.  For Emily is the district’s Aboriginal Community Police officer – a ‘Clayton’s Cop’, she calls herself, but conscientious in her representation of her people, those sad, aggressive, drunks and no-hopers who subsist in the humpies on the edge of town.  Mr. Hyland doesn’t give us the hearts and flowers version of the uneasy alliance between the People of the Dreaming and the white usurpers;  imbedded racism bubbles away under the surface and spills over it too;  ‘those bloody abos’ contribute diligently to their own degradation, but the story is infused with great insight (Mr. Hyland worked for 10 years with aboriginal communities in Central Australia) and hope;  with Emily as their champion ‘those bloody abos’ have more rights than they were aware of, and a reason to return and protect the great red land of their ancestors from something evil that is poisoning it and everything it sustains.  An old miner is murdered before he can reveal what that poison is, and Emily relies on her prescience and instincts as much as her intelligence to solve the crime – along with a cast of Outback characters that put ‘Dad and Dave’ to shame.  This is the third Emily Tempest novel;  I hope the library will give us the treat of the other two:  ‘Moonlight Downs’ and ‘Diamond Dove’:  the action is hectic;  the corpses pile up everywhere;  the ducks are all lined up in a row at the conclusion, and the Ocker humour is unbeatable.  One of the characters stops to think and  ‘He gave a fair imitation of a budgie trying to pass an emu’s egg’.  Can you top that?  I don’t think so. ****

 

Gread reads for January 2011

Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King

Stephen King needs no introduction.  Some of his more fulsome admirers have likened him to a modern-day Dickens, which is certainly true regarding his output;  fans can expect a new novel every year, faithfully arriving regardless of adverse personal circumstance (he had a near-fatal accident one year) and world calamity.  It would no longer be politic to say that he is reliable as the weather, given the current apocalyptic floods occurring world-wide, but you can certainly set your clock by his ability to churn out yet another best-seller.  Having said that, Mr. King’s novels, while not all of a high standard, are ALWAYS wonderfully readable, having just that right blend of the ordinary and macabre which never fails to make the hair rise on the back of the neck most pleasurably.  He says that he has always been interested in exploring the reaction of ordinary people to extraordinary events, and this is never more ably demonstrated than in his latest collection of four novellas, all dealing with themes of retribution:  the first is called  ‘1922’,  the year that a husband hates his wife so much that he plans what he hopes is her perfect murder, only to snare his son into being his accomplice with tragic results;  ‘Big Driver’ is  a cautionary tale of what happens to a lady novelist who accepts an offer of help to change her flat tire on a road to nowhere;  ‘Fair Extension’ recounts the bargain a desperate and dying man makes with a stranger when he reveals to himself as well as the stranger that he hates and despises his so-called best friend;  and ‘Good Marriage’, demonstrates that the true love between two decent people changes irrevocably when large sums of money are involved – and decency flies out the window, too.  Yes, Mr. King has done it again, producing the cleverly plotted page-turner that I always expect of him:  entertaining, readable, reliable:  yep, that’s him!

 Agaat, by Marlene Van Niekerk

 Here is a story of South Africa, that wild, cruel, beautiful land, written by an Afrikaner woman about Afrikaners in the 50’s and 60’s and beyond.  It is the story of a childless white woman, Milla De Wet, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with her husband Jak, righteous upholder of Boer ideals and utterly convinced of white supremacy over his brown farm labourers:  ‘Give a Hotnot your thumb and he’ll take your arm!’  Milla is lonely, unfulfilled and severely disillusioned with her young handsome husband;  he’s not happy with her either, or his life on her inherited family farm.  He beats and belittles her constantly.  She sees as her salvation the adoption of a little coloured girl from her mother’s farm;  Agaat has been ill-treated and abused nearly to death:  Milla sees her rescue of the child as an excellent act of charity, a way of proving (especially to her forbidding old Boer mother and Jak) that she can be the perfect Christian, dispensing love and kindness to the needy and less fortunate, and a wonderful surrogate mother to the child who is not hers – and the wrong colour.  The inevitable happens.  Loving bonds are formed, then broken – her husband is jealous of the new-found affection Milla has for her little charge and decrees that Agaat must be trained and treated as a servant - then a miracle occurs:  after many years Milla is finally pregnant, but after the birth of the longed-for son, Agaat is jettisoned, exiled to an outside room ;  her favoured status is over.

Ms. Van Niekerk has created a master work;  her characters are unforgettable:  Milla, finding out that the Road to Hell is truly Paved with her Good Intentions;  Jak, weak, willful, cruel and frightened;  Agaat, relentlessly intelligent, bitter, and most efficiently vengeful;  and Jakkie, the beloved son whom all three desperately adore,  the New Afrikaner outraged by the injustices perpetrated by a Dutch God and his Dutch Disciples against the People of the Land.  This is such a powerful work that it deserves to be seen as one of the classics of early 21^st century literature – Ms Van Niekerk makes her prose sing, evoking images painful, cruel, stark and despairing, then bathing the reader in balm and beauty:  I salute her.  FIVE STARS.

 My Architect, a film by Nathaniel Kahn   DVD

 Louis Kahn, internationally renowned American Architect, died of a heart attack in Penn Station, New York in 1976, aged 74.  He had just returned from India, and because he had insufficient identification on him his body was unclaimed for three days.  He had also been declared bankrupt, owing half a million dollars at the time of his death and he had two mistresses, each with a child to him – and a wife of many years at home.

This academy award nominated documentary was made by his son Nathaniel, only eleven years old at the time of Kahn’s death, and convinced at that time that his father would eventually come to live with he and his mother:  indeed, it was a conviction that his mother never lost and twenty-six years later she still states her unshakeable belief in the happily-ever-after to her skeptical son.  Regardless, Nathaniel has made an absorbing film in his attempts to unravel the mystery that was his father.  He interviews Lou’s great contemporaries , I. M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson et al, all of whom had the greatest respect for his work and we are taken on a world tour of stunning monuments to Kahn’s genius, but most of all, this beautiful little film is a loving and respectful tribute to his ‘once-a-week’ Dad, and an honest attempt to understand and appreciate the enigma that was his father.  Highly recommended.

 My Life as a Dog, a film by Lasse Hallström    DVD

 This classic little Swedish movie was made in the 80’s but it has lost none of its impact;  nothing is dated – the world according to adolescents is still unexplored, wondrous – and frightening.  12 year-old  Ingmar and his older brother can no longer live with their beloved mother;  she is very ill.  Older brother goes to their Granny and Ingmar is sent to his uncle in a little town a long train ride away.  He is forced to leave his beloved little dog behind but  is assured it will be taken care of:  that is the first betrayal.  Despite missing his pet terribly, Ingmar makes friends easily, and looks forward to going back to live with his mum and ‘making her laugh again’ when she is better.  The trouble is – well, Mum doesn’t get better and Ingmar and his brother are forced to learn some of life’s very hard lessons whether they want to or not.  Lasse Hallström directs and guides his actors effortlessly through low comedy and high drama and all his actors respond accordingly, especially Ingmar – he is a delight:  I can’t believe that this wonderful child will now be getting on to forty;  he will always be twelve to me, mischievous, poignant and funny.  Be warned (those who don’t like them!) there are subtitles, but they will be secondary after the very first scene.  What a beaut little movie!        

Christmas treats

Room, by Emma Donoghue

Jack lives in room with Ma.  He sleeps in Wardrobe, plays with Paper Snake and eats food off Table.  He has to be very quiet at night when the beeps sound at Door;  it means that Old Nick will come to Ma.  Jack is supposed to be asleep and not meant to listen to any conversation between Old Nick and Ma but he knows that this man is someone to be afraid of, and that he once hurt Ma’s wrist so badly that it doesn’t work properly anymore.  But!  It is Jack’s 5^th birthday today, and Ma has made him a cake, his very first one, just like ‘in the TV’;  yesterday he was only four, but today he is five, and anything can happen.  And does.  So begins Emma Donoghue’s gripping story of a young student kidnapped and held hostage for seven years, the birth of a son to her captor, and their eventual escape from him, all told in Jack’s words.  What a singular feat of great writing, to describe the thoughts of a young child whose only reality is a 12x12ft room;  who has never experienced rain, or hot sun;  who has never heard the sound of a car engine, except ‘in the TV’, who has never spoken to anyone else but his beloved Ma, let alone played with another child.  Ms Donoghue’s portrayal of Jack’s isolation is profound and very moving – and brilliant, especially as he struggles to understand and make sense of his new-found freedom – as does Ma:  her attempts to reintegrate herself into society and family bring catastrophic results.  This story will stay with me for a long time.  I found (as the blurb on the cover suggested) that I HAD to read it until it was finished, and anything else I read hereafter has a lot of measuring up to do!  This novel has just been selected as one of  the New York Times’  10 best books of the year, and shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize:  rightly so.  ‘The Finkler Question’ was the eventual Booker winner;  I look forward to reading it, but ‘Room’ will be a very hard act to follow.  FIVE STARS.

Traitor, by Stephen Daisley

This is a novel about friendship, sure and true and everlasting, born in the carnage of battle and strengthened by terrible subsequent adversity.  There are no happy endings in ‘Traitor’ for its theme is an exploration of what is traitorous:  the betrayal of friendship or of one’s country?  David Monroe is a New Zealand soldier at Gallipoli;  he has already been mentioned in dispatches for his bravery at Chunuk Bair, but his life is changed forever by his meeting in the heat of bombardment with a Turkish Officer, a Doctor who is frantically trying to save the life of an Australian Digger – his enemy.  They are all victims of the next explosion;  the Australian dies and David, badly wounded by shrapnel, ends up being guard to the Turk Mahmoud, who has lost his foot and most of the fingers of one hand.  They bond with each other to the extent that David tries to help Mahmoud to escape, with disastrous results, especially for himself:  he is now regarded as a deserter and a traitor and undergoes terrible punishment, especially from men he formerly regarded as friends – they have no time for ‘conchies’.  He demonstrates his courage again and again as a stretcher bearer on the battlefields of France and Belgium, where he has been sent after his prison sentence, but he is never forgiven, then or after the war;  people don’t care to associate with him for consorting with the enemy, a murderer of ‘our boys at the front’. 

This is Mr. Daisley’s debut novel and it is a searing, powerful evocation of a time when ‘King and Country’ meant everything to those at home and to those young men who went to fight – until they encountered the dreadful theatre of war, experiencing first-hand the great divide between patriotism and the bloody reality of destruction.  It is a story of love in many forms, parental love – in David’s case, the lack of it – the love of mateship, romantic love and the love of the land.  Mr. Daisley has crafted a superb and poignant story with unforgettable characters, and a wonderfully accurate portrayal of a life and times now barely remembered in this new century.   His prose is beautiful and elegiac – and utterly compelling.  Highly recommended.

Wait for me!, by Deborah Devonshire

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, was the last child and youngest daughter of David Mitford, second Baron Redesdale and his wife Sydney.  Born in 1920, she was part of a family famous for its eccentricity – Sydney, known as Muv to her offspring, didn’t believe in sending girls off to school and educated them herself until they reached the age of eight;  then they were entrusted to a succession of governesses, some of whom were less than leading lights educationally speaking.  Lord Redesdale, called Farv, was unlucky in his financial investments (there were a succession of moves to smaller houses as the family fortunes waned) and delighted in being entirely unpredictable in his behavior, especially when his daughters brought friends home.  He was heard often to say  that he had only read one book, Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, and it was so excellent that it quite spoiled him for anything else, and he hadn’t read another  since!  This handsome pair produced a son and six daughters, all famed for their beauty, charm and intelligence:  Nancy achieved international prominence with her comic novels ( many of the characters based transparently on her family) and historical biographies, and Jessica’s essays, reviews and best-selling exposé of the funeral industry ‘The American Way of Death established her reputation as a writer of excellent satire, but it was the sisters’ politics which fascinated and enraged 30’s and 40’s society.  Diana, the most beautiful of the girls, married at the age of 18 the heir to the Guinness fortune, produced two sons then left him  after four years of marriage to become the mistress of Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Fascists and great  admirer of Hitler;  she embraced her new lover’s politics as ardently as she loved him and when Mosely’s wife died, Diana and he were married in Berlin, in Hitler’s Drawing Room.  The fifth Mitford daughter, Unity, had already  spent a considerable time in Germany, a complete convert to the Nazi ideal,with the hope of eventually meeting Herr Hitler whom she patently adored:  miraculously for her, the meeting took place and a very close and worshipful friendship was formed with the Fuehrer.  Jessica, in the meantime, had embraced Communism with typical Mitford fervor and harshly decried her sisters’ extreme politics, though her own were just as radical for the times – in short, these were all singular women whose restless energy, joie de vivre and a self-confidence born of being high- aristocracy enabled them to make their mark indelibly on 20^th. Century manners and mores.

In this charming memoir, Deborah (Debo) follows in her family’s wake, crying ‘Wait for me!’  As the youngest some of the cataclysmic events occurring to her sisters flew over her head, but as time went on, she understood more and became closer to her sisters as they proceeded through their lives and loves at a breakneck pace;  in fact, Debo (if one reads  between the lines) had some amorous adventures herself:  dropped names glitter like sequins on every page, not least a friendship with President Kennedy.  As we now know, he was friends with a lot of women, and while Debo may not have been a ‘friend’ in the biblical sense (one hopes!) it is telling that Jackie Kennedy gets nary a mention:  ‘Jack’ occupies a lot of pages! 

In spite of  the sisters’ disparate political views – Debo has always been staunchly and loudly conservative – what impressed me most about this lovely, witty backward look into a family history is the great love that they all had for each other;  personal and political differences notwithstanding :  could one possibly ask for more?  Highly recommended.         

Great reads for December

Ghost light, by Joseph O’Connor

When I began this book, I didn’t think I’d be able to continue with it;  I wasn’t in the mood for the unbearable poignancy of the first couple of chapters which set the scene for what happens to Molly Allgood, a once-famous actress using the stage name of Maire O’Neill.  How fortunate I am that I chided myself for my faint-heartedness and pressed on beyond the squalor and misery of Molly’s old age, to be utterly beguiled by her memories of her youth and beauty, and her once-in-a-lifetime love for John Millington Synge, the famous and controversial Irish playwright.  Synge was a co-founder with William Butler Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and produced his works there until his premature death at the age of 37;  Molly and her older sister Sarah received their dramatic training there and both went on to fame and fortune in the early part of the twentieth century, Sarah making a name for herself in Hollywood and Molly becoming a notable stage actress.  Tragically, Molly cannot forget her reclusive and brilliant lover, and as her life enters its decline she sees him everywhere – in the mirror, on the street – and was that his voice just whispering behind her?  Mr. O’Connor recreates these real-life characters with superlative skill;  he is careful to stress that he has written a work of fiction, and profusely apologises to Synge scholars for the many errors and licence he has taken with dates and facts - all in the name of a good story -  but there is no denying the life and the breath he has given his protagonists.  In true Irish fashion, he can be the Master of Melancholy in one chapter, then in the next  he ambushes  the reader with a seduction scene that is side-splittingly funny.  Mr. O’Connor can wear the masks of Tragedy and Comedy with equal ease, and the elegance and musicality of his prose is a delight.  He ‘can make a glass eye cry’, or let the reader be ‘as happy as a threaded needle’.  What more could we ask?   FIVE STARS

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Costa Zannis is a Senior Police Officer in Salonika, Greece, in 1940.  World War 2 is underway and Hitler is massing his forces in the Balkans, ready to push south.  Costa is very good at his job;  he is a decent man, blessed with an empathy and  excellent judgement of his fellow citizens and their failings - but  Costa’s world has become a very dangerous place, and feels even more so when he is approached by a very rich lady, a German Jew, who wishes his assistance in smuggling Jews out of Berlin, where she lives with her husband, a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer.  So far, she is untouchable by the Gestapo – her husband is powerful  - but her friends are not;  she has the money to finance their flight, but not the contacts, until she hears of Costa and his very special network of friends and colleagues.  Thus begins Costa’s reluctant expansion of his talents;  from canny policeman to clandestine operative, for he cannot refuse her request for his help – no decent man could.  Mr. Furst takes the reader on a fascinating, suspenseful journey through the Balkan countries as the first Jews make their tentative way to Greece and safety;  he has a particular talent for establishing atmosphere and mood, essential elements in a spy story – BUT! – (and it’s a very big one) – in the latter half of the story Costa’s talents become known to others who require him to further the war effort  in a different, risky,  even more life-threatening way and though the novel’s tension should heighten at this point to an unbearable level the story suffers and the suspense starts to sag with the introduction of glamorous, beautiful Demetria , wife of a cruel shipping magnate.  It is love at first sight for hitherto down-to-earth and sensible Costa;  he falls for her like a blind roofer (which brings me to wonder cynically why no-one ever seems to fall in love at first  sight with a woman who has, say, a wall eye or is slightly mustachioed.  Demetria is also blonde and has a big bottom, but this is 1940:  big bottoms are IN).  The plot’s impetus suffers accordingly.  Having said that, ‘Spies of the Balkans’ is still an enormously entertaining read;  Mr. Furst is too clever a writer to produce a flop – it’s just not quite as good as his previous novels, in particular ‘The Spies of Warsaw’.  Read that one as well!

 

The Crime of Huey Dunstan, by James McNeish

 Huey Dunstan has murdered a man in a violent and frenzied attack;  his case is regarded as open-and-shut and despite a spirited defense from his counsel, he is sentenced to life imprisonment.  Dunstan is 23 years old, reserved, even withdrawn,  but regarded as a good man, respectful to authority and his elders and the last person to be considered capable of such a crime.  His counsel feels that there is more to the case than meets the eye and enlists the assistance of an old friend of his, Psychologist Charlie Chesney, to interview Huey, and see if he can prise his secrets from him, thus leading to an appeal and a retrial where the charge of murder could be reduced to manslaughter, with a defence of provocation.  Mr. McNeish is a most competent writer and presents his characters well, particularly ‘Ches’, who narrates the story -  and happens to be blind.  I have to confess that I found Ches’s daily struggles and compromises with his disability to be more fascinating than the crime itself, important though it is in light of current events:  thanks to the infamous Clayton Weatherston trial, where he would admit only to manslaughter not murder because he was ‘provoked’ into stabbing his girlfriend 216 times, the law of provocation as defence has now been abolished in NZ.  This law still applies in Mr. McNeish’s story, however, and he produces a satisfying courtroom drama with all the twists and turns that we would expect in such a case.  Because Ches is 82 when he begins the story I can’t expect him to be resurrected in a second book -  he is reminiscing, really, about a particularly intriguing case in the body of his life’s work – but that’s a shame:  the reader is the poorer for not reconnecting with Charlie Chesney, in his official capacity or otherwise, in the future.

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré

Dima is a Russian gangster, and proud of it.  He is also an expert money-launderer for the Russian Mafia and has amassed huge wealth for them, and for himself – but a new young ‘Prince’ is coming to the fore in the Mafia Hierachy, and the Prince doesn’t like Dima;  Dima is too ‘Old-School’, he dwells too much on the old Vor code of Honour amongst thieves (and murderers) and after one last, biggest laundering operation – the opening of a new ‘respectable’ bank in the City of London – Dima and his family will be eliminated, as were several of his dear friends and colleagues already:  it’s time, thinks Dima,  to defect with all his secrets and sell them to his preferred country of asylum, Great Britain.  Yet again John Le Carré has crafted an impeccable story of secret service diplomacy, political corruption and life-and-death back-room dealings;  his characters are superb,  almost Dickensian in range and description and utterly, utterly believable.  Mr. Le Carré has the best eye and ear for accents and body language in the business, and his wit, interspersed even at times of great suspense in this beautifully plotted story, is delicious.  This is the master at his best:  FIVE STARS.

 Every Last One, by Anna Quindlen

The Lathams are your typical upper middle-class suburban American family:  father Glen is a respected Ophthalmologist;  Mary-Beth his wife is content if not wildly happy with her comfortable role as his consort and mother to their three bright children, beautiful Ruby and twins Alex and Max;  she has her own little side business designing gardens for her neighbours – everything in the Latham family garden should be rosy, but it isn’t.  There are secrets in this family;  damaging secrets:  14 year old Max suffers from anxiety and depression and Ruby is a recovering anorexic.  There are some who would regard these illnesses as typical 21^st century diseases;  that may be so, but family suffering is not lessened because many children are now bound by such commonality:  the Lathams try to respond  to and overcome their problems with as much love and good common-sense as they can muster – until a tragedy, more unbelievable  and horrifying than they can ever imagine overtakes them all.  Ms Quindlen, in her spare, lucid prose guides us through the unspeakable events that change the Lathams’ lives forever.  She tackles the core subject, grief, with great delicacy and skill;  in fact she writes so intimately of her characters that I wondered if she had suffered a similar tragedy and used this story as a catharsis:  regardless, she has produced a novel of great insight, empathy and intelligence.  This is a harrowing read, but it’s also a story of courage, familial love and most importantly, hope.  Highly recommended.

 

DVD’s       DVD’S       DVD’S       DVD’S       DVD’S       DVD’S

Check out the many wonderful new titles in your library, donated by The Friends of Horowhenua Libraries, resourceful and tireless fundraisers Supreme:  thanks to their latest efforts all library users can enjoy a huge range of movies, from Documentaries to mini-series, Art house films to mainstream Blockbusters,  all for a very reasonable rental (Video-Ezy, eat your hearts out!)  Below is a selection of movies I have watched and loved over the past few weeks – and for those of you who don’t like subtitles:  live dangerously!  Don’t miss out on some great movies because you don’t like to read words at the bottom of the screen – you read them in books WITHOUT the pictures, don’t you?  Same difference, as far as I’m concerned.  Happy viewing.

 

 

Great reads for November 2010

ONE GOOD DOG, by Susan Wilson

I have been reading a lot of very mediocre stuff lately;  consequently it was a pleasure, a DELIGHT, to come across this lovely story by Susan Wilson.  This is her sixth novel and the first I have read – it’s strongly reminiscent of Garth Stein’s wonderful ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ in that part of the story is narrated by the Good Dog of the title, but there the similarity ends, for Chance is very different to Stein’s Enzo;  in fact he fancies himself as a bit of a dude, an ex-fighting dog and a mighty street warrior with pit-bull ancestry  – until he ends up in the pound on Death Row.  He is rescued, albeit reluctantly, by Adam March, who because of a careless promise he made, needs to find a dog as a substitute pet for a homeless man he doles out lunch to everyday  at a shelter for indigents.  Adam, by his own standards has hit the bottom of the barrel, too:  he is a former top executive of a huge corporation who loses everything –carefully sculpted wife, spoilt daughter, several homes, the bulk of his money and social status – when he strikes his P.A in a fit of uncontrollable rage. He is sentenced by a spectacularly unsympathetic judge to a year’s community service at the shelter.  ‘You’re an arrogant bastard who needs to learn some humility’, says the judge, and this is what this book is about:  learning to be humble, learning to redeem oneself, learning to make real friends, and learning to love again.  It’s definitely a feel-good novel and in the hands of a lesser author these themes would seem chintzy and old-hat, but Ms Wilson’s considerable writing talents chronicle Chance and Adam’s experiences together in entirely credible fashion.  FIVE STARS.

 

THE EYE OF THE RED TSAR, by Sam Eastland

Meet Finnish-born Inspector Pekkala,  the latest hero  in a long line of thrillers about  flawed but brilliant detectives – but here’s the difference:  Pekkala was formerly Tsar Nicholas the second’s most singular and trusted detective, dubbed ‘The Emerald Eye’ and given carte blanche in his investigations – until the revolution and fall of the Romanovs.  Pekkala’s fall from favour is equally steep;  he makes an unfortunate impression on Comrade Joseph Stalin and ends up barely surviving for the next decade in the gulags of Siberia  - until Stalin requires his unique talents for investigation.  He promises Pekkala his freedom if he will track down and deliver the murdered Tsar’s fabled gold reserves – for the Glory of the Revolution and the good of the Great People of the Soviet Union, naturally!  A number of books have already chronicled the Romanovs’ last months before they were shot to death at the Ipatiev house in Ekaterinburg in 1918, most notably ‘The House of Special Purpose’ by John Boyne, and ‘The Kitchen Boy’ by  Robert Alexander;  both books show better craftsmanship, but what Sam Eastland lacks in technique he makes up for with sound facts and solid research, fast-paced action, plenty of suspense and believable characterization – the basic requirements for all successful thrillers.  This is his debut novel:  I look forward to # 2.

 

WENCH, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Despite its Bodice-Ripper title, Ms Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel is anything but – rather, it is the second damning account of slavery that I have read this year; more subtle, perhaps, than Andrea Levy’s ‘The Long Song’ (recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) but having the same horrific impact:  how can people who purport to be civilized visit so much inhumanity on their fellow men?

‘Wench’ is first set in 1852 at Tawawa House, a fashionable resort in Ohio, popular with Southern gentlemen who take the waters every year, go hunting and fishing – but leave their wives behind, bringing instead female slaves who service their every need.  Four of these women become friends and look forward to the annual renewal of contact;  their individual histories  graphically demonstrate blatant cruelty or the same evil disguised as kind and loving treatment:  Lizzie’s master professes to love her;  she is his ‘true wife’ and has given him two children of whom he is particularly proud, especially as his white wife is barren, but he refuses her only wish that he give the children their freedom:  they are his lawful property, and as such he is entitled to sell them if he wishes.  Mawu belongs to Mr. Tip, whom she hates and bravely stands up to at every opportunity – she even makes an escape attempt, only to be brought back by the slavecatchers, stripped naked and whipped by Mr. Tip while the other slaves are forced to watch ‘as a warning’.  He then sodomises her and her humiliation is complete.  Reenie is owned by ‘Sir’, her late father - and Master’s son:  he uses her whenever he pleases, then ‘loans’ her to the resort manager.  Each woman must deal with her own tragedies as best they can;  sometimes they make the right choices but for all but one of these good women, slavery is the only option:  they dare not leave their children.  Their only hope that life may some day be different is that the first rumours of Abolition have started to surface;  indeed, Ohio, where they ‘vacation’ every year with their masters is a Free State – could this mean that more and more people are willing to protest against the appalling outrage of slavery?  Emancipation does not come until the South has fought a bloody and unsuccessful Civil War in defense of its slave-based economy;  meantime, the ‘wenches’ must remain strong in the face of their thralldom, and resolute in the hope that the next generation will know a better life.  Ms. Perkins-Valdez has produced a superb story, moving and beautifully written.  FIVE STARS                                                                                           

FEVER DREAM, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

I hardly dare introduce yet another Brilliant but Flawed super-detective to readers, but Aloysius X. L. Pendergast is such a singular invention of the above authors that, after reading the latest in a long line of Pendergast adventures, I feel I must give this SuperHero some publicity.  Pendergast is an FBI Special Agent, but that is the least of his talents:  he has two PHD’s (only two? you say); he’s a master psychologist and manipulator of the human psyche;   he has an exhaustive knowledge and appreciation of the arts and literature;  he is an accomplished forensic scientist;  he is immensely wealthy, the last survivor of  a Brilliant but Flawed family of old New Orleans aristocracy ;  he is a driver with Formula One capabilities;  he is a martial arts expert;   he has ‘preternaturally fast’ (a favourite Preston/Child adjective) reflexes, and he is a crack shot – naturally. In fact, what Pendergast doesn’t know about weaponry – about ANYTHING – isn’t worth knowing!  Lastly, he is tall and thin, pale as death (he always dresses in immaculate black suits which give him the appearance of a wealthy undertaker) and he has a disconcerting, silvery stare.  Bet you haven’t met anyone like that in the Supermarket lately.  Oh, I nearly forgot to mention (and how could I have forgotten such a villain!) Diogenes Pendergast, Aloysius’s equally Brilliant but Well and Truly Flawed criminally insane brother:  he has chosen the paths of evil, due to a terrible childhood incident which drove him to madness.

 ‘Fever Dream’ is the ninth Pendergast novel, and, incredible as all his adventures may be, Pendergast and his associates ruthlessly command the cowering reader’s attention from beginning to end:  there’s enough blood and gore to float a boat;  corpses litter the series’ pages like old bones;  Pendergast’s powers of deduction are repeatedly flaunted and effortlessly honed á la Holmes and Watson by using his dimmer associates as sounding-boards;  in fact, it all sounds like utter silliness -  BUT…..  Messrs.Preston and Child’s scholarship and research are irrefutable (they are themselves Academics) , Pendergast is made human by exhibiting some very irritating  failings, and the various supporting characters are well-drawn and credible.  Well, SOMEONE has to be, don’t they?  In the forthcoming book # 10, we are told, our hero journeys to a shooting lodge in Scotland, intent on some R & R with a dear friend who turns out to be exactly the opposite – will he prevail?  Will he survive?  Well, what do YOU think?   In short (which I haven’t been),  the action’s torrid, the prose is florid, but all these books are serious fun -  trash of the very highest quality.         

Great reads for October 2010

The long song, by Andrea Levy

Everyone has read of the evils of slavery in America and the war that was fought between the States to emancipate its victims, but less has been written about the equal injustice perpetrated by the British Empire, who transported slaves from Africa to harvest the huge sugar plantations they established in the Caribbean.  Andrea Levy in her third novel, takes us back to the times of her forebears in early 19^th century Jamaica, a time of complete dominance by the white planters, a time of regarding their slaves as livestock, to be traded, sold or disposed of any way they saw fit – until that same ‘livestock’ rose up in bloody revolt, leading eventually to King William 1V declaring an end to the British Slave Trade.  This is Ms Levy’s first excursion into history;  previously she has written tellingly and well of contemporary race relations in Britain;  now she explores the rich and violent path of her ancestors in Jamaica, treating us to a life as seen through the eyes of Miss July, a house slave in the Big House of the Amity Plantation.  At the end of her life, Miss July is writing her memoir at the behest of her son, and what a story it is, full of humour, cruelty, deprivation and great sorrow, for Miss July has been used badly – and has badly used people in return.  Regardless, she is sly (she tells lies!), funny and utterly irrepressible;  she is an unforgettable singer of ‘The Long Song’, as she calls her memoir:  long may her music sound.

 

The lion and Wildfire, by Nelson de Mille

 It’s always a pleasure to recommend a book by Nelson de Mille - he is a consummate master of the perfect airport and beach read;   his books are page-turners par excellence.  He can get a little long-winded sometimes, but he’s ALLOWED.  He produces so much high quality suspense in his writing that he can be forgiven for occasionally flagging in pace or getting bogged down with more detail than his readers  think they  need.  In his latest book ‘The Lion’, sequel to ‘The Lion’s Game’ and the previous ‘Wild Fire’, Mr. de Mille has no problems at all with the tempo as he  again treats us to his danger-prone and irreverent protagonist John Corey, Special Contract Agent (after various misadventures with the NYPD) for the FBI.  John’s a bit of a maverick;  bad guys seem to walk into his innocent fists often;  he has been known to say ‘Who, me?’ when various villains fall unconscious (or even dead) at his feet:  in short he treads a very fine line between permissible force and police brutality – not to mention insubordination - but he’s just the man to have onside against the most feared Islamic terrorist of them all, The Lion, back again to wreak death and destruction on long- suffering post 9/11 New York.  Mr. de Mille is known for his impeccable and thorough research – at no time do we feel that we must suspend belief in the plot and its fascinating characters  – until Mr. Corey ‘inadverdently’ causes another villain to bite the dust.  And our Hero proves that he is indeed a well-rounded personality,  for his daily existence has elements of the mundane from time to time.  Normal life intervenes when his wife suggests that they go wine-tasting at the weekend:  in his mind he replies ‘Wine tasting?  WINE TASTING? What kind of crap idea is that?!’  In reality he says’ Darling, what a great idea, let’s do it.’  Proof, if we ever needed it, that Mr. de Mille is intimately familiar with real life situations as well as death-defying suspense.  What a good writer he is, and how well he deserves his huge readership.

 

The invisible bridge, by Julie Orringer   

This is a wonderful story.  It has been a rare privilege to read such rich and beautiful prose, to be swept up and carried along by the relentless tide of history -  even though we know the terrible outcome, for Ms. Orringer has written a novel of the Holocaust.  This is a risky subject on which to write as everyone knows  of the heinous crimes of the second world war, the extermination of millions of Jews, and the sheer tragedy visited upon families and generations yet to come, but the author succeeds admirably because of the strength and believability of her characters.  The novel starts in 1937, when Hungarian student Andras Levi wins a scholarship to attend the Ecole Speciale, a venerable school of Architecture in Paris.  His life and that of his brothers Tibor and Matyas are chronicled;  their hopes, dreams and ambitions;  their love affairs and eventual marriages;  then the agonizing privations they suffer as part of Hungary’s Jewish ‘Labour Force’, cannon fodder as the expendable front line of Hungary’s Army fighting for Germany against the Allies.  The war years are predictably horrendous, not only for the unimaginable loss of beloved family, but the destruction of entire cities and lifestyles, bombed out of existence.  How could anything ever be resurrected from such annihilation?   Despite the seriousness of the subject, Ms. Orringer has not written a tragedy;  rather it is a compelling story of Life in all its guises; heart-wrenching, comic, dramatic, powerful, triumphant and moving – which is what life can be for all of us .  FIVE STARS.

 

The adamantine palace and King of the crags, by Stephen Deas   

Here be dragons – lots of them!  For lovers of fantasy fiction, Stephen Deas is the new Flavour of the Month, and for those of us who previously decried such nonsense (like myself) – well, we’ll all have to eat our words, for Mr. Deas has effortlessly captured our attention, hearts and minds with the sheer brio and excitement of his story-telling, and he won’t release us until he finishes the series – however long that may be.  Not that I mind, for he can tell A Story-and-a-Half:  The Realms are a loose federation of Kingdoms who depend on their dragons for their power;  bred, guarded and nurtured by their keepers, they are ridden by the aristocracy, used for hunting and warfare and kept docile by the Alchemists with a mysterious potion added to their food;  without it they would return to their natural state, uncontrollable and terrifying, able to destroy armies and turn cities to ash – and one of them has escaped.  The leadership of the Realms is also ready for change:  enter Prince Jehal, power-hungry and unscrupulous, ready to murder if he has to – and he does, reaping unexpected and unwanted consequences.  In fact the Prince, nasty as he is, gains the reader’s sneaky sympathy by the end of the second book of the series – what WAS he thinking?  Couldn’t he see the danger coming?  The fool better smarten up his act in Book 3!  And so on.  In other words, a complete entertainment, totally addictive with great characters – and those dragons.  Oh, those dragons:  I’d love one for a pet, if I had a place big enough to keep it (and several dairy herds to feed it).  Perhaps I could do a deal to rent the Waitomo caves?

Great reads for July 2010

Stone’s Fall, by Iain Pears

John Stone, an immensely wealthy and powerful Industrialist has fallen to his death from the second- floor window of his home – everyone believes it to be an accident except his wife, who knows of his aversion to heights and his care never to be near an upper-floor window: she is convinced he was murdered and turns to a young journalist for help in her quest for answers. Thus begins one of the most intriguing mysteries I have read in years, told in a series of flash-backs which cover several fascinating periods of 19th century history. No-one is what they seem, particularly Stone’s lovely wife Elizabeth, an elegant, titled and fiercely intelligent woman who bewitches effortlessly every man she meets, including the hapless journalist. Her origins are cloaked in mystery; is she truly Hungarian Nobility – or could she be a clever guttersnipe, whoring her way to a position of great power? Iain Pears draws us inexorably into the convoluted pathways of his plot; he is a master of lucidity, and offers a fascinating study into the nature of finance and the great global power of money as a backdrop to the machinations of his unforgettable characters, both real and fictional, for the consequences of Stone’s fall could also lead to the fall of the European banking systems – and Governments. FIVE STARS

 

Noah’s Compass, by Anne Tyler

Liam Pennywell is 61 years old and has just been ‘downsized’ from his job teaching a Grade five boys’ class at a second rate Baltimore Private School; he’s a widower from his first marriage, divorced from his second wife, and regarded with tolerant exasperation by her and their three daughters. He’s not exactly a loser, but loserdom is closing in fast, especially when he downsizes himself into a cheaper apartment in a poorer area, then is attacked and concussed by a burglar. (He forgot to lock his door.) The memory-loss of the event distresses him more than his family thinks it should; why does he try so obsessively to recall a traumatic experience that any rational person would strive to forget? Pulitzer Prize-winning Author Tyler explores Liam’s search for his memory and himself, the young philosophy student so full of hope and promise, with great subtlety and wit, peopling this gentle, funny novel with characters and situations that we can all readily recognize, and the realization that no-one can remain a spectator to the drama of their own lives; one has to become involved eventually, whether they like it or not! This was a great pleasure to read, as are all of Ms. Tyler’s novels.

 

GREAT READS FOR MARCH 2010

by Julia Kuttner

Pavel and I, by Dan Vyleta

Berlin, Christmas 1946:  the once-proud capital of Hitler’s Reich is vanquished, bombed to smithereens , its inhabitants barely surviving in one of the coldest winters on record, and reduced to dog-eat-dog methods of survival.  The narrator of this story recounts how Pavel Richter, supposedly a decommissioned GI and language expert who decided to stay on in the ruined city, becomes unwittingly involved by his best friend in the murder of a mobster who has a secret, information that the British and Russians desperately want.  An almost farcical element is introduced by the fact that the mobster is a dwarf;  there is a nod to Dickens with the introduction of a cast of street waifs ruled by an Artful Dodger-like character;  the arch-villain is florid, torrid, hugely corpulent and most satisfyingly brilliant at crossing his I’s and dotting his T’s, and lastly, Pavel’s eventual love-interest is Sonia, The Whore with the Heart of Gold, terribly used and humiliated by the war, and willing to do anything to survive, like war victims everywhere.  Sonia is drawn to Pavel’s old-fashioned aristocratic air, his courtliness and intellectual gifts – he could never kill anyone except as a combat soldier, for any reason at all, least of all in cold blood – or could he?  As Vyleta’s wonderful debut novel draws to a close, we realize that Pavel is much more than the sum of his parts, and very different from surface impressions:  whose side is he on?  Who is giving him orders?  The reader, like the characters, is inexorably drawn into the enigma that is Pavel, and what a satisfying, beautifully written mystery it is.  Highly recommended.

Half-Broke Horses, by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls, long-time journalist and already well-known for her celebrated memoir ‘The Glass Castle’, wanted to write a memoir of her maternal Grandmother, Lily Casey Smith , but Lily turned out to be such a larger-than-life character, so singular and indomitable that writing of her in the third person fell flat on the page;  turning her story, all true, into a first-person narrative and therefore a novel, was the only way that Lily could leap satisfyingly off the print and into the reader’s mind and heart.  The prose is matter-of-fact, without frills, chronicling Lily’s life from the age of six in the early 1900’s when she helped her father break horses;  how her younger brother Buster got the only long-term formal education ‘because he was a boy and he would inherit the ranch’, whilst she and her sister were educated by Dad, who was well-read but had his own radical ideas about politics, government and civilization in general.  When she was thirteen she was allowed to board at a mission school for six months, but was sent home because Dad had spent her tuition money on eight Great Danes, from whom he was going to make a killing when he bred them;  sadly, his next-door neighbor shot them as soon as they ventured onto his land, thinking they would kill his stock.  Lily, naturally, was bitter that her tuition money disappeared so quickly, but was eventually dispatched at the age of fifteen to a tiny settlement in Northern Arizona as its teacher.  The First World War had started;  able-bodied men were enlisting;  women were moving into the factories, so she was offered a job as a relief schoolteacher at Red Lake, five hundred miles from her home, a journey she undertook on horseback without a backward glance.  It took her a month, and this reader is still in awe of her accomplishment, written about not as a huge, brave undertaking, but just as a statement of fact:  this was how it was ‘back in the day’.  In the course of Lily’s life she learned to drive a car, fly a plane, manage a huge ranch in Arizona with her second husband (the first was a bigamous, low-down  no-gooder), and led the kind of life that makes us city-slickers quake at the mere thought of the hard work, hardship and privation.  She was a woman of huge heart, unshakeable conviction, great humour and rigid opinions, particularly about her daughter’s choice of a husband:  ‘You need a steady man.  He ain’t steady.  What are you going to do for a honeymoon?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – we’ll go where the road takes us.’
  ‘Well honey, you’re in for a ride.’  And eventually had to wave them off as ‘they took off off up the street, heading out into open country like a couple of half-broke horses.’
Magic.

REMARKABLE CREATURES, by Tracy Chevalier

This is a novel, based on factual events and singular women, who dared at the beginning of the 19th century to challenge male domination of science and paleontology, not because they wanted to change the accepted order of things, but because their lives as spinsters made them courageous and different, emboldened by their shared curiosity and awe at the wondrous fossils they uncovered on England’s Southwest coast at Lyme Regis.  This is a story of a unique and precious friendship, that of a crossing of class barriers;  Elizabeth Philpot, upper class, genteel but comparatively poor – until she meets Mary Anning, ‘a working girl’, doomed to subsist at the bottom of the heap, until her remarkable gift of hunting fossils or ‘curies’ as they were named, brings her success and fame of a kind, but not the happiness she desires.  Tracy Chevalier blesses us yet again with another beautifully crafted story in the spirit of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, the prose lucid, clear as a bell, and just as magical.  As always, she brings to life with great verve the times and the historical figures of which she writes , and as always, we are reluctant to reach the end of the tale.  A beautiful story, superbly written.

As the Earth turns Silver, by Alison Wong

Ms. Wong’s debut novel is a story of morals and prejudice at the start of the 20th century in  Wellington, New Zealand;  prejudice against ‘the yellow peril’, Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the country to work – but not to bring their families, unless they could pay £100.0.0. poll tax, an enormous sum and virtually impossible to accomplish within any acceptable length of time.  It is a story of inflexible moral standards, particularly towards women and what was regarded at that time as ‘respectable’;  the fact that one’s husband beat a woman black and blue was to be expected and silently endured.  If the husband drank away all the family’s money that was also no cause for complaint:  the man was ruler in his own home;  the king of his castle.  Double standards were the norm.  This story exposes the hypocrisy of the times, and recounts with great lyricism and subtlety a forbidden love which must end in tragedy.  The author has researched widely and well to recount some of the signal events of the times;  events which, jaded even as we are, still have the power to shock us with their savagery.  Ms. Wong is a poet and her mastery of the language and the beauty of her prose are to be savoured and enjoyed.  A very fine first novel.  I look forward to the next.

OLDIES BUT GOODIES.

White Tiger, Red Phoenix, Blue Dragon, Earth to Hell, by Kylie Chan.

These four novels based on Chinese classical mythology will never win any prestigious literary prizes:  they are brash, predictably plotted and blood flows in torrents – BUT! (as we know, there’s always a but) - Australian Kylie Chan has hit upon a winning formula, skillfully combining modern kung-fu action with  themes of warfare of the most savage kind amongst the ancient Chinese Gods, all recounted by a very exceptional (well, of course!) Australian girl who happens accidentally upon all the Heaven and Hell conflict by applying for a Nanny’s position in a very rich Hong Kong Chinese household.  Over the course of the novels, Emma Donohoe becomes imbued with semi-magic powers herself and battles the forces of evil with a fine supporting cast of Gods, demi-Gods, dragons and demons (and I’m here to tell you that the Demon King is pretty hot stuff!) - but even the ‘good’ Gods are quarrelsome, promiscuous and can’t be trusted an inch. There is a fine vein of irreverent, outrageous ocker humour permeating the series, and while we know that the old Kylie is about as serious as Pauline Hanson’s last attempts to change the face of Australian politics, it must be cheerfully admitted that each book is a breathless page-turner.  Ms Chan’s novels are FUN.

Anything by John Connolly!!

Much to my irritation (because I don’t like reading things out of sequence) I realized after reading ‘The Lovers’, my introduction to the novels of John Connolly, that this book was the latest in a series, the main protagonist of whom is Private Detective Charlie Parker, a man of dark secrets and huge sorrows;  completely fearless, which is just as well as he is a magnet for every kind of evil imaginable.   That he manages to vanquish all his enemies (with the aid of some unique supporting characters) is recounted by Connolly in entirely credible fashion:  each novel has exactly the right amount of suspense, menace, fear and violence to keep the pages turning at a furious rate.  Best of all, Mr. Connolly is a superbly elegant writer, scaring us silly in one chapter, then making us chortle in the next.  His one-liners should be memorized and repeated as often as possible.  He is a master of the thriller genre;  long may he continue to thrill!

 

GREAT READS FOR JANUARY 2010

By Julia Kuttner

Black water rising, by Attica Locke

Attica Locke’s Debut novel introduces a bold and talented addition to the ranks of black American writers.  A former screenwriter, Ms Locke weaves into her story racial paranoia in the Texas of the 80’s, black activism and a murder mystery in which her main protagonist Jay, a struggling young black lawyer about to become a father for the first time, becomes a reluctant witness.  There are several backstories,  most notably a port oilworkers’ strike and machinations by evil Oil Barons, but  Ms Locke is adept at keeping her many characters in line. Some of them are very good, particularly Jay’s white ex-girlfriend from their college protest days, now the newly-elected Mayor of Houston and a wearer of power-suits and coiffed blonde hair as stiff as a warrior’s helmet, a far cry from the days of bare feet and beads.  Corruption and activism, murder and betrayal – these are not new themes in contemporary fiction, but Attica Locke (named by her parents for the 1971 uprising in Attica NY State prison) brings a freshness and a brave new voice to former times.

The brightest star in the sky, by Marilyn Keyes

Once again Marilyn Keyes produces a charming, hilarious page-turner, delighting the reader with her wonderful Irish wit, but as always there are very serious themes hubble-bubbling away in the background.  Ms Keyes’ characters in her previous books are flawed individuals, buffeted by life, and the same applies here;  we get to know the occupants of a block of flats in Dublin – none of whom have socialized with each other, until crises occur.  They are all linked together and considered as candidates for parenthood by a wee soul itself, waiting to take up residence in the most deserving future mum;  there’s a count-down and much suspense until (predictably) the most unpredictable parents are chosen.  As a literary device I found this most endearing, and salute Ms Keyes for providing us all yet again with so much entertainment when she struggles mightily herself with life in the real world. ‘Tis’s a broth of a book, so it is!

 

 

Parrot and Olivier in America, by Peter Carey

Rich, Dickensian and picaresque, Peter Carey’s latest novel is a delight, a masterly tale of an unlikely relationship between Olivier de Garmont, the scion of a noble French family, and the older, lowly son of an English printer, John Larrit, called Parrot because he is able to mimic perfectly the accent and language of anyone he hears.  Olivier is in mortal danger for fomenting dissent and sedition in post-revolutionary Paris, and it is decided by his family to send him to America, out of harm’s way with Parrot as his secret protector, coerced and bribed into being his reluctant general factotum, but also instructed to spy on Olivier by his mother.  De Garmont’s character is loosely based on Alexis de Toqueville, the French Aristrocrat who journeyed throughout America and produced an account of the mores and customs of the New Order in the New World.  The cachet of de Garmont’s noble birth allows him automatic entrée to the budding salons of the new society, but it is not known if de Toqueville had a manservant similar to Parrot, who abhors Olivier’s utter lack of practicality and wishes constantly that he were elsewhere – regardless, after many shared experiences and misadventures they develop for each other a mutual respect and dependence:  Olivier’s mother, the Comtesse need worry no more about her sickly, woolgathering son:  Parrot, that conniving, opportunistic adventurer, is also steadfast and true;  he will always be there (reluctantly!) for his aristocratic friend.  A Great Read, indeed.

Family album, by Penelope Lively

Seldom has the disintegration of a family been so lyrically but mercilessly portrayed than in Penelope Lively’s latest novel:  the wonderful façade of familial love and unity, six jolly and talented children lovingly nurtured and adored by Alison, the great Earth Mother, Charles, the erudite and charming father, and Ingrid, au pair extraordinaire, is contained within Allersmead, a charming, ramshackle but commodious Edwardian home in a good suburb - ‘room for everyone, even a dear old dog!’ cries Alison, all the while wondering why, when the children have grown up, they rarely come to visit.  Needless to say, there is a secret in this house:  everyone knows about it but the siblings don’t discuss it unless they have to, and certainly never with their parents.  Ms Lively has created  a little masterpiece of what lies unsaid in many family dramas;  male aloofness, feminine desperation and blighted expectations:  family dynamics have never been portrayed more superbly, or with such tenderness.  Highly recommended.

OLDIES BUT GOODIES

 

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins    Young Adults

This book has just been read by an Old Adult, and I’m so glad I did!  What a no-holds-barred, barreling along at 100mph, heart-in-the-mouth story, a page-turner par excellence, and I am absolutely thrilled to announce that Ms Collins has written a sequel:  I’m hugging myself in anticipation!  It’s not easy to summarise the plot, except to say that in the near future a huge civil war has been fought in North America between the States:  the victor has redrawn all the boundaries into 12 Districts and those conquered areas must pay tribute.  Every year, as an entertainment for the masses (akin to the lions and Christians in the Coliseum) an enormous televised reality contest is organized:  two young representatives from each District are chosen to compete to the death against each other for prizes of unprecedented wealth and lifelong prestige – and permanent food supplies.  Many of the conquered Districts toiling for the victors are held in slavery on subsistence rations, so they are at a disadvantage before they start – those who are better fed are stronger.  The main protagonists, Katniss and Peeta, are from District twelve, the poorest represented area;  what happens to them is brutal, spine-tingling and always suspenseful.  What a treat it is to know that such high quality fiction is being written for this important Young Adult market, and how smug am I for thinking I’m not too old to appreciate it!

Out stealing horses, by Per Petterson

The Times Literary Supplement judged this novel to be one of the best books of the Decade.  Written in prose as stark and beautiful as the Norwegian landscape, Mr. Petterson tells a tale of families, what keeps them together and what drives them apart, as the book’s narrator Trond, an elderly widower, surveys the memories of his boyhood just after the war.  After much reflection and self-examination he solves at last some of the mysteries connected with his final summer holiday at the age of fifteen with his beloved father, a partisan and war-time member of the Norwegian Underground.  Unbeknownst to Trond, his father is about to leave the family for the neighbour’s wife and this betrayal will destroy both families permanently, as does a tragic accident in which a child dies.  These two shattering events are the fulcrum on which the story revolves, and Trond’s elegiac journey back to boyhood is masterfully conveyed.  One reviewer said that Petterson makes each sentence do the work of ten:  there can be no truer or greater praise.  ‘Out Stealing Horses’ thoroughly deserves the Times Literary Supplement’s accolade.

 

GREAT READS FOR NOVEMBER

By Julia Kuttner

The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam

Guantanamo Boy, by Anna Perera – Young Adult fiction

These books are stories of Afghanistan, ‘The Graveyard of Empires’, full of searing truths and crushed hopes, the inevitable perversion of the truth and beauty of a great religion by those fanatics who invoke its name, and the paranoia and terrible revenge wreaked by a powerful nation under attack.

The Wasted Vigil tells the poignant story of a British convert to Islam who has lived in Afghanistan with his muslim wife for decades. Their beloved daughter is forced to flee into hiding after trumped-up charges by the local imam put her life in danger, and thereafter begins the pattern of their lives, times of great beauty, unbearable pain and the savagery and ruthlessness of a war which has no victors. Mr. Aslam’s prose is lyrical and superb; seldom have I read of evil deeds written so beautifully, or delighted in the honeyed imagery of love, atmosphere and landscape that he depicts so well. Horrific and poignant; superlative and full of grace: don’t miss it.

 

 

 

 

Guantanamo Boy, by Anna Perera is an entirely different kettle of fish, but has the same shock value and quickly engenders within the reader the conviction that the West has no place in Afghanistan, Al-Quaeda notwithstanding. Khaled is a 15 year-old British boy of Pakistani extraction; his parents have lived in Britain for more than 20 years and are solid citizens. He is happy at school, has lots of cool friends and life’s good – until his Dad’s sister becomes ill and his father feels that the whole family should go back for a family visit to Pakistan during the Easter break. Khaled’ s disgusted – what a way to spend Easter! Could he stay home with the next-door neighbor? Naturally, his parents say no, and Khaled is off to meet his fate – capture by the CIA as an El-Quaeda suspect, for being photographed in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite the fact that he is obviously British, and obviously 15, and the CIA have obviously erred, he is beaten, tortured, then flown to Guantanamo Bay where he is incarcerated for the next two years – by the Good Guys! This book is written as a novel but is based on true events: it is electrifying, unputdownable and horrifying, all the more so because it’s written in a young person’s mindset and deals with unbearable themes. Anna Perera has grasped the nettle here, bravely exposing the injustices perpetrated in the name of Truth, Justice and The American Way. Everyone should read this book.

 

Lustrum, by Robert Harris

Robert Harris has long had a well-deserved reputation as a writer of superior thrillers, ‘Fatherland’, Enigma’ and ‘Archangel,’ to name a few: now he turns his attention to Ancient Rome and the Republic, its consular leadership soon to be corrupted and vanquished from within by those men for whom matchless wealth and fame no longer hold excitement: ultimate power is the drug.

The greatest orator and wordsmith of the age, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is the central character in ‘Lustrum’, as he was in the first book ‘Imperium’ which charted his rise to power from relatively humble origins; this book covers a Lustrum, a 5 year period which sees Cicero enjoying his greatest fame and popularity –marred only by a younger, implacably ambitious senator, Gaius Julius Caesar, who matches Cicero in intelligence, oratory, deviousness and cunning – and outclasses him entirely in underhandedness and treachery. This book chronicles the rise of Caesar and ends with the apparent fall of Cicero; it’s as fast-paced and exciting as one of Harris’s thrillers and most satisfyingly, we know from the ending that all is not yet lost for Cicero, that beguiling, silver-tongued player of both ends against the middle – there will be a third book. The plot thickens, and I can think of no more able chronicler than Mr Harris to map out the inevitable course that we know history will take; exciting, terrible times are ahead in the next book, and even though the outcome is assured, his talents are such that it will be like reading these well-worn facts for the very first time, and savouring a marvelous adventure with larger-than-life characters – who really did live, in every sense of the word.

Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd

Prize-winning author William Boyd has created for readers yet another unforgettable protagonist, climatologist Adam Kindred , on the run and hiding out after being accused of a grisly murder he did not commit, but equally enthralling is Boyd’s portrait of London, that great, sprawling, dirty magnet of a city and its pulsing artery, the Thames, without whose parallel life, traffic and tidal flows the Metropolis – and Adam – would wither and die.

In his attempts to stay hidden from his accusers, Adam discovers a guile and resourcefulness hitherto unknown; he also realizes how very easy it is to disappear completely, and stay gone with some applied common sense and forethought. Against the odds he establishes a new identity – then the tables are turned: it’s time for the pursued to become the pursuer. Vengeance is in the air.

Mr. Boyd has achieved his usual high standard once again; this is a very classy literary thriller with an excellent cast of characters. Highly recommended.

 

OLDIES BUT GOODIES !

The Night Watch Quartet, by Sergei Lukyanenko

The Night Watch, The Day watch, The Twilight Watch, The Last Watch

Lovers of fantasy (and there are so many of us!) should not go past this series – there’s something in it for everyone; wizards (good and bad), vampires (licenced and otherwise) werewolves, necromancers etc. etc. BUT! It’s set in mainly in Moscow with side trips to Europe and the former satellite states of the old Soviet Union, which increases the novelty factor, and all four books are exceptionally well written, fast-paced, thrilling reads. Absolutely nothing is lost in translation, and though the usual ‘good versus evil’ premise is followed to the letter, Lukyanenko demonstrates that there are still mitigating circumstances and ‘many shades of grey’ to be explored. This is an excellent series and I hope that ‘The Last Watch’ isn’t the last time we shall enjoy the company of these great Russian sorcerers – may they keep on weaving their magic for our enjoyment for years to come.

 

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GREAT READS FOR OCTOBER 2009

by Julia Kuttner

THE 19TH WIFE, by David Ebershoff

Based on historic events, Mr Ebershoff’s novel contains parallel memoirs set 100 years apart, dealing with the Mormon pioneers and their first charismatic leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the disillusionment and fall-out visited by their polygamy on their contemporary descendants.  Ann Eliza Young, Brigham’s ‘19th’ wife, escaped Utah and her husband’s dictatorship in 1873 and thereafter campaigned vigorously through lectures and print to expose the cruel subjugation of ‘plural wifery’.  More than a century later, 

Twenty-year old Jordan Scott, excommunicated and dumped by the side of the road with nothing at the age of  fourteen by his family’s  defiantly polygamous breakaway Mormon sect  returns to Mesadale  in 2006 because his mother – his father’s 19th wife – is in deep trouble:  his father has been shot dead,  his mother has been arrested for the murder and the death penalty still applies in Utah.

Mr. Ebershoff is a very skillful writer;  the action never flags;  his research is painstaking and accurate;  he presents his characters in the fairest light and he has written a fascinating historical page-turner where the murderer is not revealed until the very end.  Which is exactly as it should be! 

Highly recommended.

THE EARTH HUMS IN B FLAT, by Mari Strachan

In the 50’s, everyone in 12-year old Gwenni’s Welsh village has secrets to which she wants answers:  the trick is to be super-watchful, a discreet listener and to have the ability to ask the nonchalant but leading questions -  sometimes people will let their guard down enough to satisfy her curiosity as to (1) why her mother seems perpetually irritated by Gwenni’s very presence; (2) why her mother has an intense dislike for Gwenni’s favourite person, her schoolteacher, who is married to the village wastrel, and (3) why, when the wastrel disappears (and everyone says ‘good job!’) her mother appears devastated by this turn of events.

Mari Strachan’s debut novel is a tender and funny evocation of childhood and village life, where no-one had secrets but thought they did.  As with all immensely satisfying stories there is a twist to the tale at the end, and Gwenni, that singular, kind and determined little girl, will remain with the reader long after the book is finished.

WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel

Thomas Cromwell:   Blacksmith, mercenary, international banker, cloth merchant, lawyer, indispensable assistant to the powerful English clergy – and king’s confidante:  at a court full of the powerful and the power-hungry, this layman of uncertain origins came to wield more influence with Henry VIII than all his royal dukes combined. 

It was Cromwell who was the main architect in drafting the Reformation laws separating the English church from Rome, enabling the king to claim the wealth of the catholic monasteries and religious houses as his own, and finally abolishing the need for the Pope’s permission for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon.  Brilliant, loyal Cromwell engineered for Henry the king’s heart’s desire:  marriage to Anne Boleyn.  

Hilary Mantel recreates admirably  the pomp, intrigue and hypocrisy of the time and the struggles for European dominance by the rulers of France, Spain and England, but most of all she breathes wonderful life into some of the most famous and notorious characters in history:  their stories have been told many times before but seldom so convincingly, or so well.  - And it has just been announced that Ms. Mantel has won the Man Booker Prize for 2009 for Wolf Hall. 

There can be no greater recommendation.

SHANGHAI GIRLS by Lisa See

Shanghai, the Paris of the East, in 1937 glamorous, notorious and home to Pearl and May Chin, cosseted and pampered daughters of the wealthy owner of a chain of rickshaws.  Life is perfect until their father reveals that he has gambled away the family fortune and has sold the girls into arranged marriages to clear his debts.  Then the Japanese bomb Shanghai and the ignominy of their union to two strangers, Chinese American brothers, pales into insignificance as the sisters fight for their very lives in their attempts to leave their beloved city and travel to the Great Unknown, the Gold Mountain:  America.

Lisa See weaves a fascinating tale of families, natal and adopted, and the inflexible obligations expected of them:   love, respect,and  above all unshakable loyalty to each other in the face of racism and discrimination, both overt and hidden.  She evokes unforgettable images of California in the 40’s and 50’s, liberal and cosmopolitan on one hand;  mortally afraid of Communism and the Yellow Peril on the other.
The story ends inconclusively, which surely indicates a sequel:  One hopes Lisa See has already  embarked on Part 2 – the reader musn’t be left in such suspense!

OLDIES BUT GOODIES!

TALES OF THE OTORI  by Lian Hearn

This sweeping fantasy of Medieval Japan covers four books and a prequel, starting with ‘Across the Nightingale Floor’.  15 year old Tomasu is rescued by Shigeru, the charismatic head of the Otori clan after Shigeru’s mortal enemies the Tohan led by Iida Samu raze Thomasu’s village and kill his parents and all the inhabitants because they belong to ‘The Hidden’, a religious sect that preaches love and forgiveness, anathema to the warring Samurai class. 

Shigeru adopts Thomasu as his heir, and sets in motion a chain of events that carry the reader inexorably along until the conclusion of this great saga.  Lian Hearn is a writer of superb talent and imagery and it was very hard to say goodbye to the Otori clan.   Here’s hoping she’s working on her next epic.

THE SOOKIE STACKHOUSE NOVELS  by Charlaine Harris

Sookie Stackhouse works in a bar in Bon Temps, Louisiana.  It’s a redneck little town with a motley population – including shape-shifters, maenads…and vampires, who have now revealed themselves to the human world, thanks to a synthetic blood derivative, TrueBlood, invented by Japanese scientists which saves vampires from having to feed on their traditional human prey.   Sookie is pretty unusual herself:  she is telepathic, making her a very reluctant reader of whatever people are thinking in her presence – she can’t regard this unique power as a gift – it’s a curse! 

She doesn’t WANT to know what secret thoughts lurk behind peoples’ smiles, and for that very reason, she falls for vampire Bill Compton (y’all thought he’d be called Dracula, didn’t you!), not least because his mind is closed to her:  it’s wonderful to meet a true man of mystery at last.

Charlaine Harris has found a winning formula here, starting with the first book ‘Dead Until Dark’, which documents the start of Sookie’s love affair with Bill; introduces Sookie’s handsome but dim brother Jason, who has a distressingly fatal effect on the women in his life (and they are many);  sets the scene for a raft of fascinating characters both dead and alive, and makes sure that we will never regard The Undead in quite the same way again.  Each book (we are now up to # 9) is tightly plotted, slathered with TrueBlood and gore – and very, very funny.  Now a smash hit TV series starring Anna Paquin.

AN UNFINISHED LIFE  by Mark Spragg

Jean Gilkyson has been round the block more times than she cares to admit after the accidental death of her 21 year-old husband Griff in a car which she was driving.  The child of their union, 9 year-old Griff never knew her father but knows with certainty the relationship her mother is in now will end in violence and tears – if they are lucky. 

They flee to a little town in Wyoming, her dead husband’s birthplace;  Jean is desperate enough to throw herself on the mercy of her father-in-law Einar, who blames her utterly for his son’s death.  She can’t break down his hatred for her – but Griff can:  gradually, old and terrible wounds heal, the sun shines again and hope, that most elusive and tremulous emotion in the grief-stricken, lifts its delicate face to bask in its rays.

Mark Spragg writes beautifully of all the trials we must face as family – and all the rewards we can gain, too.  There is a wonderful vein of humour throughout the story, softening the hard truths. 

Highly recommended.

BORN UNDER A MILLION SHADOWS by  Andrea Busfield

Fawad, aged ‘around ten or eleven’ lives with his mother and her sister’s teeming family in Kabul; Fawad’s aunt suffers their presence because Allah decrees that she must be merciful to family members more unfortunate than she – and how true that is: Fawad’s father and brother are dead, fighting the Taliban, and his older sister has been abducted years before and taken who knows where in a midnight raid by the same fanatics. Life is hard, but, he reasons, no harder than for any other Afghan; everyone he knows has suffered similar if not worse hardships, so what’s the point of complaining? Instead, he gets on with his life, begging money from tourists in Chicken Street (Fawad has turned his ability to look pathetic into an art form) so that he and his mother can survive on more than her sister’s reluctant charity, and who knows – if God is good, they may even get enough behind them to find their own place to live; it will be as Allah decides. Journalist Andrea Busfield lived in Afghanistan for many years and in this, her first novel, she pays homage to the country and people she loves, creating unforgettable characters and spinning a magical tale of love and loss, friendship and hope. And Fawad will stay with the reader for a long time – optimistic, devil-may-care in the way of all children, but tough and wise beyond his years: I was sorry when I reached the last page. Please, Ms Busfield, may I have some more?

A  FRACTION OF THE WHOLE by Steve Toltz

It’s impossible to categorise this novel: is it a tragicomedy or a comic tragedy? Either way, the reader is fated to join the wildest ride ever as the Dean family – father Martin, his brother Terry and Martin’s son Jasper – speed inexorably towards Hell in a handbasket. As they hurtle towards the abyss there is a chortle on every page; even the most shocking and heartrending events are disarmed by a delicious wit, and though that hapless family’s misadventures are entirely unbelievable they take on an unexpected credibility in the reader’s mind which makes one say –‘Hey: hang on a minute – this shouldn’t work!’ But it does. Mr. Toltz demonstrates admirably in this, his first novel that despite being the most dysfunctional family in Australia (if not the world), the Deans are ultimately ennobled by their love for each other, even as they indulge themselves in the most extreme forms of familial selfishness and betrayal. This novel is a paradox, a work worthy to be shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize – and also a manic, messy, heartbreaking, chaotic, hilarious tour-de-force that shouldn’t be missed.  May 2010

POOR LITTLE BITCH GIRL by Jackie Collins

Jackie Collins always produces the perfect beach and Airport read; fast-paced, unbelievable and full of the most improbable characters, all of whom we mere mortals will NEVER meet in real life: the babes are hot; the lawyers are cold; the heroes have brooding good looks, heaps of money and rippling abs to match, and the villains are murderous, evil and out to sin as much as they can, (the thugs!) until they are ultimately vanquished by the forces of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. What more could we possibly ask for? It goes without saying that Ms Collins has employed her old, tried and true pulp formula here –(she’s inclined to have her heroines speak ‘crisply’ and her characters to take a long or a short ‘beat’ before replying) - but why shouldn’t she? This formula sells books by the tonne. I’m sure that she would be the first to admit that she doesn’t write Lofty Literature, but this lady knows her subject (Hollywood and its Denizens) intimately; no-one writes more truthfully or shrewdly about LaLaLand than she who has lived there for many years and survived brilliantly to tell its tales. Last but not least, she’s very, VERY funny. May 2010