North and South

This was a really interesting book. I wonder why she isn’t better-known in Australia? The only other book I’ve come across by her is Mary Barton, which was lent to me by a Britisher. I think my reaction was worthy but boring, though it may have just been not what I wanted to read at the time.

This particular story is worthy and not boring at all. It was originally to be called Margaret Hale, because it’s basically her story – she’s born in the South, loves her country hamlet, though spends her youth in London. Her parson father has a crisis of conscience, leaves his parish and becomes a tutor in the big bad North, a town called Milton (actually Manchester, apparently). Margaret and her parents must get used to the dirt and the poverty and the manners and the way of speech, and most of all the strange people there. It’s a bad time for poor Margaret – by the end of it, she loses both parents and a friend. On the other hand, she makes friends with both rich and poor, and meets Mr Thornton, a mill-owner who learns Plato from Margaret’s father. It’s a rather passionate affair, actually, with Mr Thornton keen on Margaret the whole way through while she hates him for exploiting the workers. In the end it turns out she doesn’t really hate him and he’s not such a bad employer. It’s a sort of Pride and Prejudice, but set among real issues of the war between workers and masters. Lots of dialogues and, best of all, in the end while both Margaret and Mr Thornton learn a lot and finally get together, nothing in the big wide world is really resolved.

There’s humour in it, though you have to dig for it, and there are many interesting studies of human beings, the poor and the rich, the northerners and the southerners, both men and women. Definitely a classic.

How I Live Now

This young adult novel by Meg Rosoff is set in the war which is about to happen, which is an interesting idea - ie, bombs falling on London and from there a war starting up without any identification of who the baddies are. It's a war which is similar to the way people imagine war in Iraq, Afghanistan etc - confused, chaotic, ever-changing, and the idea is, I suppose, to set it in a place where you can't quite imagine it happening (England). The young protagonist is a cynical teen from New York shoved into a lovely farmhouse in country England, and she falls in love with it all, esp her first cousin, Edmund. The aunt leaves early on, and after that the war comes along, and it would be all very exciting, except that everything happens off-camera - the love (and sex, thank goodness it's off camera I suppose), the war, all of it. We're told about it, we hear it, but we don't see much in this story - I felt like I was groping blindly around. It's full of original ideas and it's clever, but I think it's hard to have a first-person story without the right details, and perhaps Meg Rosoff can't quite imagine the right details - she's got the little kid Ding down pat, but war and agony? I don't think so. It's an interesting book, and it will make you think, but it misses out on being great, like say Z for Zechariah is.

How I am living now has changed remarkably from my last review - I've moved twice since then - and I'm no longer housesitting but living in a small granny flat at the back of someone's house - a colleague of my father's. The horror of trying to find adequate accommodation in Sydney needs a whole novel to itself, with Real Estate agents as the enemies (refusing to return calls or help you at all), and the setting the filthy rooms offered to people who aren't earning so much, with boarded up windows and holes in the walls. No one deserves to be offered that as housing.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

It's being labelled as a book for children, but it isn't, of course - it's marketed directly to adults, and while teenagers might read it, I can't see any adult giving it to a child. It's about the Holocaust, and it's fairly obvious - in fact, as soon as I read the title and the blurb "we can't give anything away about this book" I knew what it would be about.

I suppose the "book for children" thing might explain why as a reader you grow very impatient with the story (not the characters, particularly) and want it to hurry up. One mention of "Out-With" is enough, surely, for people to "get it" - does he need a whole page of repetition? This characterises the entire book; simplistic and obvious, and the question is - do we need a "dumbed-down" version of the Holocaust? It makes me very uncomfortable; it makes me feel that the author is missing something. It also makes me feel that the author doesn't read much children's literature.

It has been touted as "the first book about the holocaust for kids", but it isn't, of course - two Australian writers have done it before and done it better. Julie Vivas' "Let the Celebration Begin" and the more recent "Once" by Maurice Gleitzman do it far more effectively and far more movingly.

Dogsbody and The Ogre Downstairs

I grew a little panicked the other day that Diana Wynne Jones' great books might go out of print and disappear from libraries - so I had to buy up the ones I didn't have. I purchased Eight Days of Luke (which I had already read), Dogsbody, and The Ogre Downstairs. They're written for the eight to twelve age-group, I suppose, and they're the sort of books you'd like if you're a Margaret Mahy fan (speaking of a writer whose books are now difficult to find).

Dogsbody is about Sirius, the dog star, and his fall to earth. It has an unexpected twist, but some beautiful aspects, even apart from DWJ's usual humour and originality, which make for great reading.

The Ogre Downstairs is similar to Wilkins' Tooth and so on - about siblings having to work together when magic intrudes into an ordinary world. I love how DWJ makes the kids accept magic without too much bother - she obviously remembers that kids actually do believe in magic and engage in it, to a certain extent (do you remember doing rituals and muttering incantations to get things to go your way?). I also like how the adults, especially the parents, in her books aren't uniformly good or wise or kind. Reading her biography I can understand why, but it certainly resonates, I'm sure, for a lot of readers out there. After all, even if one's parents are doing it for your own good, it doesn't take away the feeling of indignation that kids feel about their own powerlessness.

DWJ frequently includes Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, as well as British - a mix of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, I suppose - and I wonder how many of her references little children understand. Do they go back later and does it all click? I love it, anyway.

No Man's Land

Good old Graham Greene. Don't you love how he just thrusts you into a scene and expects you to get on board immediately? He certainly doesn't, as some authors do, apologise for making you listen to or read the story. He simply assumes you'll want to hear it as much as he wants to tell it.

I first read some of GG at 19 and hated it; now I like his works very much. So far I like "The End of the Affair" the best, closely followed by "The Quiet American". This particular story - which has been just published by Hespereus Press, and is considered a "lost" story of his - is also very good. It contains the mystical Catholic elements of "TEoTA" and some of the intrigues of "TQA". It's all about trust - does the narrator trust Brown, the quiet man who is in an unusual place just after WW2? Does Brown trust Clara, the woman he fell in love with on sight? And what about Starhov, Clara's lover, as well as being a Turgenev lover (and really a character straight out of Turgenev)?

This story was actually written as a film treatment although it never became a film; which is why, I suppose, it was lost for so long. It reads the same as any of his other short stories however. You are put firmly into a certain time and place - the descriptions are meticulous. There's always an air of something about to happen, and something always does happen, and you are never sure if anything positive is going to come out of it all. I think the romance is the weakest point in the story, and I assume that if hadn't been for a film he may have written it differently.

In the same edition there's a piece of writing with a funny story behind it. Apparently Graham Greene went in a competition which was for a piece of writing which best parodied Graham Greene! He went in it anonymously and he didn't win. However he eventually used the piece of writing for another film treatment, which did go on to become a film, and that piece of writing is included here.

No Man's Land isn't the best thing by GG ever, but it's pretty good; with excellent writing and thought-provoking ideas, what more could you ask for?

East

Edith Pattou's latest children's novel is a retelling of the Scandinavian fairy tale, East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Which is really a mix of Beauty and the Beast, Snow White and Rose Red, and the Cupid/Psyche myth. There's a big bear taking off with the youngest daughter, she can't see his face or he won't be turned back into the prince, etc etc.

The best way to enjoy the fairytale is to read it (there's plenty of versions online) and skip this story. I say this because the beauty of a fairy-story is in its language, its rhythmic poetical phrases and imagery. The beauty of a retelling of a fairytale is in its depth, both of ideas and language, and those things are missing in this version. Edith Pattou isn't a bad writer, but she lacks that spark of quality. Most irritating about this version is that each chapter is by a different character, and is about a page and a half long. You simply can't get involved in a story that way.

If you want to read a good version of Beauty and the Beast, read Robin McKinley's Beauty; if you want to read a good version of Snow White and Rose Red, try to get hold of Hesba Brinsmead's Bianca and Roja; if you want a wonderful version of the Cupid/Psyche myth, grab C. S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. Don't bother with this book.

My Favourite Novels

I suppose the first day of the year is a good day for recording my favourite novels. I have set for myself some strict rules; only one book per author, and they must be novels only. They aren't particularly in order of preference, although the top ten really are my top ten.

1. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
3. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
4. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
5. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
6. The Moon Shone Down by John Steinbeck
7. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
11. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
12. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
13. The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
14. Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn
15. Schinder's List by Thomas Keneally
16. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Checalier
17. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
18. War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
19. Crime and Punishment by Doestoevesky
20. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
21. The Time-Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
22. Possession by A. S. Byatt
23. Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers
24. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
25. Pale Fire by Nabokov
26. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
27. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowls
28. My Brother Michael by Mary Steward
29. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
30. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M.Coetzee
31. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
32. If you can walk, you can dance, by Monica Molteno
33. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
34. The Handmaiden's Tale by Margaret Atwood
35. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
36. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
37. The Harp in the South by Ruth Park
38. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
39. A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata
40. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery
41. Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
42. The Hobbit by Tolkein
43. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
44. The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy
45. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
46. The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
47. The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston
48. Little Women by Lousia May Alcott
49. The Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy
50. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

Best find this year would have been Orhan Pamuk, who I found while I was in Turkey. I also discovered Dorothy L Sayers this year. Actually ten of the top 50 were new to me this year. Let's hope that I find ten new such wonderful novels in the year to come.