The Foreshadowing

This book by Marcus Sedgwick was another disappointment. I feel like I haven’t read a good book in ages. Anyway, I’ve ordered a few from Amazon.com so hopefully they’ll come soon enough. (Admittedly, I’ve been rereading some goodies, including Marion Molteno’s brilliant book, If you can walk, you can dance, but my aim on this site is to only review books new to me.)

It’s World War One, which is why I bought the book, because like probably a lot of people, WW1 is this horror that I can’t let go of, like a place rather than a time. Sasha finds herself starting to see the future, and funnily enough, it being a war, she sees people dying. See, the writer could have used this kind of ironically, but he doesn’t; it is what it is. Her older brother dies, a few people in the hospital die, and she realises the shell-shocked soldiers her dad are working with are probably getting tortured by him (and this isn’t really followed up, Marcus just wants to tell us about it), and then she sees her other brother going to die, so she ducks out to France and saves him.

I know what this reminds me of. When my sister was trying to study history for her HSC, I tried to write a story for her which included all the salient points she needed to know so it’d be easier for her to remember. Well, she failed; and so did I, such a story is impossible. Sedgwick is trying to do the same thing, make a story up from the bits of WW1 that he finds interesting. It doesn’t ring true. The writing is bland, the action is predictable and not very believable. And there’s just so many words which say nothing, chapters with nothing but I thought I thought I thought all the way through it.

This is the kind of empty children’s book that people think of when you say you love children’s literature and they can’t understand why. They don’t think of Joan Aiken who sketched out the utter horror of Vietnam in her story The Shadow Guests without mentioning that war at all.

Daniel Isn't Talking

This is a novel by Marti Leimbach, but it’s based loosely on her own experiences, in that her child has an autism spectrum disorder. It doesn’t say that anywhere on the cover though, which is a pity, because you can forgive bias in personal experience, and this is a biased story. It’s told in the first person – from the mother’s perspective – and it covers her marriage break-up, her work with her son over about a year, and her new relationship with the ABA therapist. She’s an American in the UK (which is a good metaphor for being thrust into a new world where you feel uncertain, just like becoming a mother of a child with a disability), and her husband when he leaves her keeps her in such poverty that she has to sell the furniture to pay for the ABA therapy. Her psychologist thinks she has personal issues, and no one will tell her what’s wrong with her son or what to do with it.

I can see that this book would provoke very strong emotions. For example, the mother secretly thinks it’s the MMR needle that caused the autism, which is valid because it’s still actually a fairly widespread belief among families. The choice of an ABA-style approach would annoy both pro and anti ABA people; because ABA people always think that their approach is the “one true thing”, which annoys the anti-ABA people, while the pro-ABA people would be annoyed because the therapist’s approach in the book isn’t pure Lovaas. Even the concept that having a child with autism will alienate your partner and destroy your marriage would annoy families and probably a lot of fathers as well. But I suppose provoking strong emotions is a good thing to do if you want people to read your book.

Again – you can tell it’s American from the first sentence. Those short clear journalistic sentences, that particular timing where there’s a summary sentence left at the end of a paragraph like a jolt. Easy read. Honestly, someone, surely, must have done some research into this era of writing. I was reading (and won’t review because I won’t finish it because it sucked) a British book which was so obviously British from the first breath but also used the short, clear sentence thing. It’s a late 20th/ early 21st century marker. I can’t wait till writers move past it to something more lyrical.

This is a good novel in that it’s an overview of the feelings that parents must face when they get a diagnosis of autism. (I do have to wonder if Early Intervention services in the UK are that bad – maybe they are, though. You’d think they’d have some sort of Autism Association which would guide families through some of the maze at least.) It’s good for people who don’t know anything about autism, because it’s fairly accurate on what the difficulties are for the children. For families who do have a child with autism, it’s likely to be a love or hate book. It’s not particularly positive. There’s very little out there that shows the uniqueness of a person with autism – apart from stuff they’ve written themselves. Because, of course, they don’t see themselves as broken or alien.

Otherland

I bought this book by Tad Williams because I read a short story by him once and I liked it. I don’t usually read thick fantasy novels, and this is a thick fantasy novel, and I think I’ve discovered why I don’t enjoy them. It’s well written, original, with good characterisation, but I hate the structure. You know the type; about six different plotlines which don’t interact at all, short chunks of information, no real build-up or let-down when something occurs, and you’re swung from one point of view to another without any bridge. I can’t invest in the characters or the storyline when it’s like this, and so, although this was fairly good, I won’t be buying the next in the series (they’re always, always, series).

Basically, it’s set in the not-too-distant future, where the internet is accessed not by text but by VR. It’s super-duper and cool, except a whole lot of children are falling into comas or getting sick, and so Renie, whose brother is affected, sets out to discover why. Not that we do really discover why; I suppose in book number four or whatever it may be explained. It’s pretty clever considering it was written in the early nineties before everyone got into the internet, and I like the fact that it’s set in Africa (mostly). The thing that made me buy it was the opening paragraph, which was about a soldier in the Somme – mixing that with sci-fi really got me interested. But again, that isn’t completely explained by the end.

Interesting characters, interesting ideas, interesting set-up; but I wish these fantasy writers would stick to a more traditional structure, because I can’t get into it at all.

Jakob the Liar

This is a fable, a small story within a big story, a story about some people in a ghetto during the holocaust. It’s by Jurek Becker, and I’m reading it in translation, because it was written in Germany in the sixties, and it’s only been available in English since the nineties. Becker was a holocaust survivor and the little details of life in the ghetto, like the rations and the newspaper and the way work was done all reflect his experience.

It’s written in a very straightforward manner, with a style that seems to be peculiarly American, which either means that’s the way it’s been translated, or that the American style has come from there, maybe. I’m sure someone knows this better than I, but perhaps it’s to do with the way people talk, and maybe the Jewish subculture in America has something to do with it; I don’t know. There’s certain structures – like beginning a sentence with “so”, using the narrator’s voice to ask questions and give answers, using short sentences and then long sentences with phrases, separated with commas, which don’t have verbs in them – that seem to reflect speech, which seem to reflect a certain writing style which seems American to me. And actually, I’ll be honest, it reminds me of the way a lot of fanfic is written. Which isn’t an insult – I mean good fanfic – but maybe it’s got to do with the American style and way good fanfic writers mimic speech. There has to be someone who knows the answer to all of this, or who can at least say it’s all rubbish, because I don’t know, but that’s what I feel.

In this story Jakob finds himself in a bizarre situation which the back of the book says is Kafkaesque but it isn’t really, because unlike a Kafka story you know why these bizarre situations are going on – he’s in a ghetto surrounded by the Nazis who want to kill them all. He says one lie and it snowballs into something enormous. That’s why it’s like a fable, like a children’s story. The difference is that you aren’t sure – the narrator isn’t sure – whether these outcomes are good or bad or whether the good outcomes outweigh the bad or whether the bad ones would have happened anyway. When his friend finds out the truth, he kills himself; and the most powerful part in the story is when the narrator says to Jakob, ‘ “The point is not that you’re to blame for Kowalski’s death, but that he has to thank you for having stayed alive up to that day.” “Yes I know,” was Jakob’s response, “but none of that helps.”’ And none of it does help, in the end; because after his friend’s death, he keeps the lie going, as long as he can; but they’re all deported to the camps anyway. So does it make a difference, that he kept hope going that long?

Apart from Jakob there are a number of characters – Lina, the little girl, Mischa, a young man, Rosa, his lover – and they’re all drawn beautifully. Everything can be seen clearly, every chair in every room, and all presented without sentiment. It is a small story within a big one, and that’s ambitious, because it quite powerfully presents the small ordinary lives that went on during that horrific time.

The Constant Gardener

This is the only book I’ve read by John le Carré; I borrowed it from a friend because I liked the film. It’s a funny mix of good craftsmanship and poor writing. The dialogue doesn’t ring true, the language isn’t beautiful, but it races along, it’s clear, and it’s well-structured. It’s basically about a woman who is murdered after uncovering a pharmaceutical scam in Africa, and about her husband trying to find out what happened, and learning more about his wife. The writer is very shocked by it all, so that the good people are too good and the bad people very bad (I won’t say too bad; they probably are exactly like that). It doesn’t exactly reflect the reality of NGOs and the people who work in them, but it’s not about that really, and in any case how would he know?

It’s still harrowing to read. I found myself really reluctant to get into it, afraid of what was going to appear next. I didn’t want to hear any more. So – that’s power, that’s certainly a kind of skill on the writer’s part. So I wonder then why I feel like he’s lumbering into it callously, like he doesn’t quite get it himself? Maybe because when there’s so many horrible things you feel that the writer doesn’t understand that even one thing is terrible, world-alteringly terrible in itself. The rest is unnecessary.

It’s certainly a very interesting, thought-provoking book. The characters aren’t believable, not really, and the language jars fairly frequently. But the topic has been well-researched, and he knows how to present his information in a palatable manner. Not a good book, not a bad book, but a good enough book to read.

The Olive Readers

It’s Christine Aziz’s first novel, and, it turns out, it was written in a short period of time for a reality show. I feel that it could have been a pretty good book had it been stringently edited. Because it’s pretty, pretty like a jigsaw puzzle spilt on the floor. It has all the elements – interesting ideas and quite nicely put together descriptive passages (the dialogue’s not so good) – but the structure and plot development is appalling. Which is a pity.

It’s set in the future, where all the major resources (water, energy etc) are under control of different companies who are at war and keep their citizens tightly leashed. There’s an underground of Readers who have saved books from burning and therefore have the knowledge to undermine the various companies. Jephzat – the story is told from her perspective – learns about these Readers from her lover (who appears briefly, gives her a good time, then dies). She dilly-dallies about joining them, but then it turns out she’s actually the daughter of the hero of the revolution, Castro – oops, I mean Maya – and so she’s in. Then, can you believe, it turns out her sister is the big baddie behind it all, and so she has to get in with her, and save the world (which happens ridiculously quickly) and then deal mercifully with her, before ending up the new hero of the revolution.

See, there’s some not too bad ideas stuck in there with some of the sillier ones, but none of them are dealt with fully. And the writer hasn’t really explored or perhaps even considered the darker side of this particular revolution. Most of all, she hasn’t learned how to build up to a scene, how to present it to the reader, how to use light and shade and timing. Instead she’s just shoved all these things in together. Oh well. When you read a book like this, it just makes you appreciate Dr Zhivago even more.

My Name is Red

This book by Orhan Pamuk is a little different from his others. Oh, it’s still got his inimitable style, the details, the east-west angst, the ironical voice (voices, here, though). But it’s a mystery told in a number of chapters, by a dog, a gold coin, a lot of miniaturists, some women. One of the Sultan’s painters is murdered, and we only find out towards the end who it is. It’s because the Sultan wants a book painted in the style of the Venetian painters, and that’s going to change everything. It’s because of the man’s beautiful daughter who has a distinct voice and a mixed-up existence. It’s because of art and the messiness of life.

Orhan Pamuk used to paint, I don’t know if he still does. He knows a lot about art, and this book is about it, about the art and the artists and the tension between style and individuality. There are a large number of chapters focusing on the way horses are drawn by different people. Of course it’s not just art, it’s people, it’s how people are unique and how life doesn’t work out the way you want it to. Pamuk always puts an incredible amount of detail into every sentence (his writing is like the miniaturist paintings) and it really builds up this textured effect which is perfect for what he’s trying to achieve – a picture of Turkey. He is the best writer of all for westerners to read about Turkey because he knows that it has such a unique set of historical events, mythology, religion, custom, language, peoples, all of which just touch the western world without being part of it. Even though he hasn’t created it, it is something like reading a science-fiction novel about a new world, a new planet, although it wouldn’t be believed because it really is – just like home. Sex is sex, love is love, children are children, employment, food, in-laws, buying, selling, growing, thinking, reading, painting, it is all like it is everywhere else, except it’s Turkish, it’s Eastern, it’s just over there.

Pamuk’s books aren’t easy to read. They’re dense and they’re somehow mysterious. But even so, they give such a perfect impression of what it is to walk through Istanbul today or Constantinople yesterday or Byzantium before that, all those worlds, that they’re utterly unique. That’s why everyone thinks he should’ve got the Nobel prize; well, that, and they hoped it’d save him from the ten-year gaol sentence hanging over his head.