The Bookseller of Kabul

This is a set of stories by Asne Seierstad, a journalist who was in Afghanistan in 2002. She lived with a middle-class family for four months, and recorded their stories. It's a slim volume, and it moves from character to character, but it's very interesting. For me, it's a mix of Iraqi and Bangladeshi cultures, with an added strictness.

The disadvantage of stories like this, focusing on how hard other people's lives are, how depressing it is for women and for others who aren't in power, is that it makes you justify any intervention to change it. I wonder whether if someone tracked a western family for four months they'd also want to bomb it into the ground as a rigid and meaningless way of life. There is no sense of joy about the lives in this story, which is perhaps because four months is a short period of time, perhaps because the Scandinavian and Afghani lifestyles are so foreign that the writer can't appreciate what the Afghans do enjoy.

There's some great moments, though, including some women's poetry about forbidden love, the tenacity of the bookseller who lives across half a dozen different regimes, descriptions of a day at the hammam. It's very readable, and really interesting, even if it's also really depressing at the same time.

My Sister's Keeper

This novel by Jodie Picoult is an interesting addition to the field of sibling literature out there, both intentionally and non-intentionally. Anna was conceived in order to medically aid her older sister who had leukaemia. At thirteen, she decides enough is enough and gets a lawyer so she doesn't have to continue donating bits and pieces of her body to her sister against her will.

There's some very interesting issues within this story - the idea of the sister as patient and donor not having the same rights legally, not being thought of as having any rights legally - which are good to raise. There's some stereotypical stuff like the older brother acting out to get attention. There's a ridiculous twist at the end which was obviously shoved in just as a twist, which the editor should have put a big red pencil through. But there's another twist which actually is far more interesting. It turns out that the legal case was instigated not by Anna but by Anna's sister Kate, who couldn't stand going through it all, and wanted to die. This is quite interesting on a literary level - the main person the case involves isn't in the story so much but actually turns out to be the instigator of the story - but I can see siblings all over the world banging their heads against the wall. The writer has ensured that Anna is not selfish, that Anna is good. The case is never tried on its real merits - the right of one person to exist over the rights of another person to lead a normal life. It isn't a fair twist, and I wonder whether the author understands that at all.

The writing is the usual bland transparent American writing where you're told exactly where the important moments are going to be by using short sentences and pausing before the main thrust of a comment. ("Because," Anna says, "the butler did it!") The thirteen year old voice does not sound the least bit like a thirteen year old. There's so much of a similarity between voices, actually, that you're often not sure who is talking and you have to turn back to make sure. But it's clear and it's pacy and it gets the job done.

I suppose it's always the usual regret - if some of these interesting topics had been tackled by better writers, how good it would have been! But there's too much to say out there and not enough good writers to say it. This is pretty good, and that'll do.

The Secret of Platform Thirteen

This little book by Eva Ibbotson is either an accidental or deliberate Harry Potter rip-off. There's another world filled with magic; there's a boy living with an unsympathetic family who doesn't actually belong there; there's a rescue mission involving an giant; they have to go to King's Cross station and . . . you get the picture. There's no school, though, and it's not so well written, and there's a lot of time spent on really unpleasant and boring characters. But it's still unsettlingly similar. It's also a waste of time.

Elsewhere

Alas, another book full of potential which is sadly crap because of the way it is written.In this YA novel by Gabrielle Zevin a girl dies and goes to the afterlife, where she has to learn her life lessons - backwards. Because in the afterlife, you age backwards until you turn into a baby and get reincarnated.

Why oh why do people think starting a story with a chapter narrated by a dog is a good idea? The author is a dog person - there's a huge number of dogs in this story - but that is really no excuse. It just makes the whole thing ridiculous, like a picture book of bears dressed in human clothes. Nice for two-year-olds, irritating for the rest of us.

Anyway, the bland life lessons are generally about falling in love and about working hard and and and - yes, it's the great American/Hollywood dream. I can't see why anyone needs to learn such lessons when they're so freely available on television. And then they're written in such a dull, unbelievable way, that it'd be more fun inbibing them from a soapie anyway. This is, in short, a book to miss.

Shatterglass

I love Tamora Pierce's Trickster stories, but I haven't been so keen on her other stuff. It's YA fantasy, which I generally like, with gutsy girls and very well described settings - this one is so Xena-like, it's got to be faux Ancient Greece. A young mage bumps into a glassworker who has been struck by lightening and has got magic unawares. At the same time a murderer is going around killing women in the entertainment industry. So the mage and the glassworker team up to solve the mystery.

It's not bad. The writing's good enough, and the setting's interesting, and the characters are well-realised. It's slightly slow, as more and more people get murdered, and when the culprit is found, it's some complete stranger so it's not particularly exciting. There is a big change in the glassworker, but not a great alteration is anyone else, so mostly by the end of the story you don't feel you've travelled very far. It's a good, but not a great book. I'm just hanging out for the last one in the Trickster series.

Brief Candle

This YA novel by Kate Pennington is a re-imagining of part of Emily Bronte's life. She comes across a wild boy, Heslington, and quickly gets tangled up in his troubles. At the same time, his freedom and his need for freedom is reflected in Emily's life, as she begins to realise what is in store for her as an adult; servitude and duty.

There's no information given about the author; there's no real sense of the narrator in this story, which makes it even more mysterious, which adds to its dark mood. The atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors and the teenaged girl running wild there is developed perfectly. All the Brontes, from sweet Anne to crazy Branwell (and why he, the loser of the family, survived so long when the other girls died off is a sad mystery) are brilliantly and accurately portrayed. The language is deliberately archaic without being stilted, and at the same time she's done what the Brontes should have done, which is to avoid all "Yorkshire-isms" which are not only incomprehensible but patronising.

This is actually a clever "coming-of-age" novel, clever because most of those kinds of books are so obvious. This is subtler; she's not discovering her sexuality or her femininity or whatever, she's discovering what being an adult is really all about - deceit, bearing burdens unwillingly, choosing what is thought right over what is right. Emily stays true to herself even when it seems ridiculous - even to the reader - and whether she is right or wrong, she's admirable in being true to what she believes. She comes across as the best person in the story because of this, which is good because she's the hero of it.

This is a great book for fans of Wuthering Heights, but even for people like me who can't bear Heathcliff or Catherine, it's great, because it's about the passion of the person who wrote that book,and about how some people just don't fit into this world.

Stowaway to Mars

This is early, early John Wyndham - he wrote this under another name, early on, in order to make some money. It's not brilliant as a piece of writing, but it's pretty amazing when you think it was written in 1935. It's about a guy who builds a rocket and goes to Mars and then after that things don't exactly go to plan.

This book works far better than the previous one I reviewed. He got a lot more right, maybe that's why - it's the 1980's and the cold war is still on (yep); people have landed on the moon already (yep); and people are now heading towards Mars (ok, not quite, but anyway). The media is a pain, and there are big fat famous entrepeneuers doing crazy stunts and inventing amazing things. Oh - and the Martians actually have developed Artificial Intelligence, with machines that think and reproduce. It's pretty clever stuff when you think that this was all before WW2.

Again, the main thing he gets wrong is the social stuff, especially the women stuff. He is such a misogynist - and yet on wikipedia someone has said he's pro-feminist, which is just mind-boggling. He has a massive rant in this book about how women won't tackle machines, how they're jealous of them because of their creative mothering instincts or something. AND when the stowaway to Mars turns out to be a woman, she endures several rape attempts quite calmly, with everyone accepting that as she's the only woman on board it's to be expected. I really wonder whether men were such horrors eighty years ago? The worst of it is when she falls in love with a Martian (not the machine one, a native) - takes her two minutes, she sleeps with him, falls in love, has flowery language, it's all revolting and all a deus ex machina so she can go back to earth and have a half-martian baby. John Wyndham did get married later in life and did write tougher women later in life, too, so maybe he learnt something like C.S. Lewis did after he got married. I really wish sometimes I could go back in time and tell men like that how things turned out for women. It really makes me realise how lucky we are.

This was written for pure entertainment, and he put a bit more work into his later stuff, so it's not great, but you can see the seeds of his other books (esp Triffids) in this one. It's interesting as a historical document, definitely, but not as a literary one - and that's ok.

Murder in the Dark

I actually read one of the Phryne Fisher mysteries by Kerry Greenwood years and years ago, maybe as a student, and I remember being terribly shocked. They're set in the roaring twenties in Australia, and feature a very liberated heroine who sleeps with a different man each book, and has references to all sorts of salacious things. Now, how sad is this, it seems rather tame. This is the result of the hundreds of books I've read since then!

Greenwood obviously does a lot of research for her books, and they're very interesting on that side. Basically Phryne is invited to an end of year bash, knowing that there's a murderer there. She has to catch the murderer and rescue a couple of kidnapped children and seduce a government agent while enjoying herself at the wild party which features Japanese cuisine, medieval dance (very interesting for me, even a crumhorn was mentioned, although negatively) and some very odd Turkish sex practices which, the notes tell us, were fashionable at the time. She doesn't dwell on details, so it's not explicit or anything, and in fact it's rather distanced so that you do feel that Phryne is slightly bored by it - after all, this is number fifteen in the series?

Mysteries in general don't do much for me. It's the characterisation and so on that makes it interesting. This is based on an actual place in Victoria and some actual incidents, and so as a piece of Australiana it's original and clever. As a piece of literature, it's mediocre, and the characters are too distant to care about particularly. Greenwood is definitely writing this as a piece of pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, pro-ethnic minority righs, pro-left wing, pro whatever and whatever and whatever; it's kind of like reading a student paper from university. I probably won't bother with any more of hers, especially as they are unlikely to include a repeat of the crumhorn.

The Broken Shore

I was recommended this crime novel by Peter Temple when I was at the bookstore looking for more Raymond Chandler. A clever recommendation, because they’re not immediately similar – this novel is very Australian, very modern, and uses language in quite a different way. But they’ve both got the sense of crime being something drab and ugly, the loneliness of the intelligent hero, and the vivid and exceptional writing.

This story is set in a country town. An old man is murdered. People assume it’s a robbery gone wrong done by some local Aboriginal youths. Turns out that that assumption has been planted, and the Aboriginal youths have been set up to take the fall. Turns out that the murder is part of something far more sinister. I must say the twist at the end is very, very Chandleresque – similar to The Long Goodbye, one of the greatest stories ever written.

Temple manages to put extremely realistic dialogue into the mouths of his characters, in a way that highlights the uniqueness of strine, and which creates a vivid picture of the locals. His major characters are allowed complexity, and he allows himself through his descriptions enough lyricism to build a solid picture. While he is dealing with utter evil, he doesn’t linger on it, but focuses on the people, on their reactions. By ensuring nothing is simple, he creates a solid reality about the places, situations, people.

I’m not certain if I’ll go on to read his other books. I’d quite like to know what happens to this bloke afterwards, but because it’s quite sad, I don’t know if I want to read about all the things preceding. It’s not depressing, and there’s hope at the end both for the character and the town. So perhaps I’ll wait for a sequel – the writing itself will be worth it.

The Outward Urge

I’m a big John Wyndham fan, but there’s a reason this book is the only one that’s no longer in print. It’s difficult for futuristic stories to last when the time has come and gone. 1984 will last, Brave New World might. But this hasn’t, couldn’t, because he focused solely on technology when the big changes have been social.

The way people talk now is entirely different (or perhaps people never spoke the way Wyndham thought, but it’s not noticeable in his older books). He’s got characters using classical metaphors when even the smart people I know would never consider such a thing. The feminist revolution certainly never happened in his world (no surprises there, he was a bit of a misogynist) and neither did the sexual revolution – in his 1994, celibacy means not being married. There’s a reference to a guy with initials GMT meaning “Greenwich Mean Time” and thereby him getting called “ticker” – well, we don’t have watches that tick any longer, and I bet if you did a survey half the population wouldn’t have a clue what GMT stood for.

He has a series of stories going from 1994 to about one hundred years later, following one family. There’s no language change over that period of time, there’s wars but no real sense of racial or social alteration, and considering he wrote in the fifties it’s kind of surprising, when you look at the massive change just in Europe let alone Asia post WW2. They’re adventure stories, not particularly exciting, with a twist that isn’t particularly surprising. So on the literary front it isn’t great stuff, and it’s obvious why, because he is writing about technology and his gift, I think, was always the human factor.

I always wish I could go back in time and talk to writers like this, surprise them with the way the rest of their century turned out; more wars, utter social upheaval, the whole focus on civil and human rights, and the way information slowly became the most important commodity of all. But I don’t know if I’d want someone to appear from fifty years in the future to inform me.

Just In Case

Why, when I didn't really like Meg Rosoff's first book, did I buy another by her? Good marketing, I guess. Anyway, this isn't much good. It's set in the UK and there's nothing British about it (e.g. the kids aren't wearing school uniforms), it's set during late high school with no reference to work - the stress of the final exams, esp in the UK, is overwhelming but there's no reference to them whatsoever - and it's just a bit silly.

David Case freaks out when his little brother nearly has an accident. He realises that death could come at any time, that fate is in control, and tries to hide from it by changing his name to the oh so subtle "Justin Case" and his clothes and image as well. He has an imaginary dog, thinks he can talk to his baby brother, thinks he hears fate. In other words, this isn't a realistic novel. He makes some friends, has sex with a girl, nearly dies a couple of times, and then hears the words of wisdom from his baby brother than just as bad things might happen, so might good. Then he recovers.

Rosoff uses the kind of writing which makes you feel even she doesn't take it particularly seriously - the kind that distances you from the story and from the characters. This is a silly book. There's a lot better stuff to read out there.