On the Jellicoe Road

Far out, Melina Marchetta. The only Australian writer I get excited about when I see a new book by her in the shops. The only Australian writer who has actually discovered the 20th century, let alone the 21st. The only Australian writer who peoples her stories with human beings.

This is a goodie. Interestingly enough, like her other two books, I was distinctly underwhelmed when I first started reading it. I think it’s because her stories are so character driven that you get lost when you first plunge into her world. There’s a car accident, there’s a suicide, there’s a this and a that, and it takes about half-way through the book before it’s all clear and you start really caring about these people. This is less funny than Alibrandi and more moving than Francesca, but altogether it’s just as powerful and just as important as those other two books.

What’s it about? A girl in a boarding school who is trying to manage the real things in life – relationships. There’s barely any mention of classes or schoolwork; it’s all about a mock-war with the “Cadets” (private schoolboys) and “Townies” (local school kids), or about Hannah, her mentor who has suddenly disappeared, or her mother, who dumped her a long time ago. It’s a big puzzle which comes together just at the right time. As usual, Marchetta captures the intensity of adolescence perfectly, and one of her themes seems to be that the transient intensity is just as, or perhaps more, important than the adult feelings and realities which follow. She is a lovely writer; she has the appropriate timing with her dialogue, followed by moments of sheer lyricism. I liked this book. I liked it very much.

Labyrinths

This set of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges is simply amazing. Again, one of those writers that you hear lauded wherever you go, but are strangely difficult to find in the bookshop. I had to get this from the internet.

Most stories people write are based on psychology; his, on philosophy. Every story is constructed to examine, illustrate, play with an idea. He takes an idea, follows where it would logically go, and then takes it further, to conclusions that no one else would reach. It's speculative fiction, a kind of absurd which sometimes is near horror, just because it's distant from everyday but somehow close.

He's got an entire world invented by a group of thinkers which somehow becomes realer than our world. He's got a language which lacks nouns, so that "the moon rose over the river" becomes "beyond the upstreaming it mooned". He's got a guy who invents a word for every number (I have so thought of that system before!) He's got such a variety of human beings, Christian, Islamic, Jewish. (Nearly all men, although the minotaur turns out to be a woman). He has a mystery with a twist which makes you gasp at the end.

You can really see that he was influenced by Chesterton, and by a lot of the German writers - his voice reminds me of Hesse - and of course Kafka. But he's so original. The colour of his world is just really different from anyone else's. The language is beautiful, and he has some perfect moments;

"In a riddle where the answer is chess, what's the one word that must not be mentioned?" I thought for a moment and said, "Chess."

I keep thinking about those lines.

The New Life

Ha! Last time I complained to the bookshop that there was nothing by Orhan Pamuk; this time they had a whole shelf!

I think I've said before that I love writers who don't walk you into their stories, but throw you in wholesale. This story is a mystery which plunges you into the source of it - a strange book - from the very first line. The narrator can't stop reading it, can't stop believing that its world must really somehow exist. It leads him to a girl under whose spell he falls, and onto an absurd journey across Turkey on buses. I think anyone who has travelled Turkey must really appreciate all these bus journeys - it's a fantastic portrait of their surreal tedium. Pamuk loves the slightly absurd, alongside the lyrical - he has an exquisite line, "I read a book and found you there". But then considering he was nearly locked up for mentioning the Armenian massacre of a hundred years ago, perhaps what we consider surreal is normal in his Kafkaesque landscape.

This book is definitely very similar to his earlier novel, The Black Book, although that novel focuses on Istanbul. It's got the same search and the same strange family undercurrents, with the importance of the children's magazines, and the woman who is just out of reach. He has such a distinctive voice anyway, but I wonder whether this is a kind of heir to that novel, or even an odd kind of sequel. In any case everything he writes is so powerful, that they change the way you see and think about things. Frightening, but wonderful, too.

The Fourth Bear

I am beginning to doubt Jasper Fforde is actually writing these Nursery Crime books. Perhaps he's paid someone else to do it, because they're so bad. The Eyre Affair series was brilliant - both original and deep. These books have predictable jokes and cardboard characters, and it's like sitting through a really crappy stand-up comedian. Basically, Jack Spratt is a police officer who has to catch the criminals, who are all nursery rhyme characters. That's about it. Oh, he has to resolve a few things with his wife. Um, so what? Who cares? Not I. This writer is capable of so much more! He's got a new book in the Eyre Affair series coming out next year. I hope it's good. I fear it will be bad.