The Careful Use of Compliments

Not Alexander McCall Smith’s best title - it’s a bit too cutesy – but I picked it up because it’s the next in the Isabel Dalhousie series, which I love. Interestingly enough the bit he gets right this time is the mystery, which is well put together and well resolved. The character bit, which is usually so enticing, was a bit uneven this time. Isabel has had her baby and is still with Jamie although she won’t marry him yet; Cat, her niece, won’t speak to her or acknowledge the child; and she has been fired – properly – from her editorship. It’s full of the little ponderings which make Isabel so fascinating a character, but the bit that falls flat is the child, who is a cardboard baby and just sleeps and eats – little crying, no dirty nappies, no sleepless nights etc. The odd relationship between Jamie and Isabel continues being odd, which I suppose is all right, but slightly frustrating. However it is all tied up very nicely at the end, even if Isabel does make a decision worthy of an entire article in her own journal of ethics.

First Among Sequels

I picked up Jasper Fforde’s latest with fear and trepidation, because his Nursery Crime books have been so terrible – but I needn’t have feared, this was very good. It’s sixteen years on and Thursday is still dabbling with both in SpecOps and BookWorld duties, while trying to be a good wife and mother at the same time. There’s all the fun of weird time, Spike and his demons, bookjumping and carpet laying, with lots of not-so-subtle asides about the reality tv era and corporate madness. Best of all he’s shoved in some cool twists that I really didn’t see coming. While this isn’t on par with the first two of the series, which are, I think, the best, it’s still very good, thought-provoking and – finally – a good comedy.

Salvation Creek

This rambling biography by Susan Duncan is a kind of sea-change book. She suffers the death of her brother and husband in the same week, soldiers on, breaks down, moves house, loses her cat and her dog, has a devastating affair with a married man, gets cancer – and then finds a house in Pittwater, or, more accurately, a community of people there. She makes friends, learns to live in the moment, and eventually falls in love and gets married. It’s well told, although it could be more cohesive, and her habit of giving away what’s going to happen in two years’ time, then not referring to it for chapters, is a bit irritating. Again, it’s about wealthy people and their lives – I suppose wealthy people are the ones who are free to make the changes and write the books. And there’s an enormous amount of alcohol – I never realised how much people drank. Too much about dogs, too. But very readable, even though it makes you realise that there must be a lot of people who wait too long to realise life is short, if there are so many books like this being published.

Under the Wolf, Under the Dog

This is a quite interesting YA book by Adam Rapp, who is also a playwright and movie director. Steve Nugent is in an institution for teens who have mental health problems – either addicts or attempted suicides. He’s writing a journal as part of his healing process, covering where he started – in a school for the gifted – to where he ends up, in the institution. While it’s not really new stuff, there’s something about the writing that really draws you in; probably the casual nature of it. He loses his mum to cancer, his brother to suicide, takes some drugs (and you almost feel as stoned as he is during those parts) and ends up walking the streets and then poking his own eye out. While this seems sad material – and there’s no resolution to it all, except he falls in love with another girl in the centre – it is more thought-provoking than really depressing. It’s a portrait rather than a journey (although perhaps it’s supposed to be a journey – I’m not sure) and it’s a good one.

Romanitas

The concept of this book by Sophia MacDougall is interesting; the Roman empire never fell and still rules to this day. It’s just that the execution isn’t particularly well thought through. It’s the Roman empire just with technology. And the story – the heir is in danger of getting killed cause he wants to end slavery, so he runs away – doesn’t really hinge on it being now rather than two thousand years ago, so, seeing that the planes and cars and so forth only appear sporadically, you don’t usually remember it is supposed to be now. Which is a waste, and as you read you can’t help but nitpick – that Latin would have remained the same over two thousand years, and all the customs, and the clothing etc – the only change is that there’s electricity. The idea of then but now has been done before and done better, so it’s a real pity the author didn’t revel in the challenge. Anyway, the characters are well-drawn and interesting, the story races along and is written fairly well (except for the chopping and changing from place to person and back again) and it’s resolved at the end despite being a trilogy. A good concept, but a wasted one.

The Ballad of Les Darcy

Peter Fitzsimmons was fortunate enough to have this book commissioned by the Books Alive people, to be given out free, which is how I got it. It’s the story of a boxing legend during WW1 who refused to join up and was vilified for it. He became champion in Australia at only twenty, and died at 21 of an infection brought on from a boxing injury. While the historical aspect was interesting, in the large segment of society that was not so keen on joining up and becoming bullet fodder, the idea that Darcy was an utter hero and legend just because he was a boxer doesn’t really cut it with me. The author, clearly aware of his audience, uses an overly-conversational style, including phrases like “see,” to start every other paragraph, almost as though he’s aware we’re not really going to get why Darcy was so great. I wouldn’t have read this if it hadn’t been a free book, but as a snapshot of Australian history, it was quite interesting.

Fat, Forty and Fired

This is the comedy I sought out, by Nigel Marsh, and although it is funny in parts, it was also very irritating. For one thing, the title is a lie; he wasn’t fired, he was given the choice of a new job or a very generous retrenchment package, so generous he was able to live on it for a year – so long as the nanny and the second car went. Yes, he is and was a very, very wealthy man, and the worst part was that he scarcely seems to realise it. In his year off, he travels through Europe – and not backpacking, let me add – has a few other trips in Australia, and spends every day swimming at the beach, as well as doing the school run. His wife doesn’t work either (they have four children between four and six) and must be very long-suffering, as he admits to being an alcoholic with anger management issues – which return in less than a year, when he accepts another generous job offer and goes back to being a CEO. Yes, there’s definitely some funny segments in this book, and yes, it’s nice that he takes some time off to reconnect with his family. But this rambling memoir can’t be taken seriously, simply because most people would never find themselves in that situation. Fat, forty, and fired, yes; able to take a year off and sustain a family of six in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney based on a retrenchment package, with the knowledge that a job would appear whenever one feels up to it again? Unlikely. This guy hasn’t got a clue, and that’s what I really didn’t find very funny at all.

Resilience

Here’s the last in my depressive reading list; a book about resilience by Anne Deveson, which of course is about bouncing back after adversity, but can’t help really be about adversity, all the different kinds. There’s Rwanda and Ethiopa, the Holocaust, human rights abuses in Turkey and South America, the Stolen Generation, child abuse, homelessness, mental illness, disability . .. and then how people managed to rise above them. Throughout the whole story is another, her own – not only the story of her son with schizophrenia from her earlier book, Tell Me I’m Here (which I must have read fifteen years ago) – but also the story of a man she met through writing this current book, fell in love with, and who died six months later in her presence from cancer. It was inspiring to hear of sixty-somethings falling in love, but weird to have it turned into an example for her book – such intimacy, but I suppose that’s what journalists do. While this was a very interesting book, full of quotes, it did lack depth and it did lack real critical discussion, perhaps because it wasn’t written by a philosopher, just by a journalist who has taken a lot of different examples. It’s about the level of a long article in the Good Weekend, but still a great read, unless you’ve just read the long litany of woes beneath. I really need to find a comedy next.

The Life of Charlotte Bronte

This is an excellent biography by Elizabeth Gaskell, not just because it’s about the most unrelentingly tragic family ever, but because she’s an exceptional writer. There’s long descriptions of Yorkshire – historical and geographical – and interesting details about incidents that inspired various parts of Jane Eyre and Shirley. I never realised, either, what a complete nutcase the Bronte father was, nor what a complete loser Branwell was. And then of course the heaping up of horrors which was Charlotte Bronte’s life – poverty, mental instability (I don’t think any of them were free of it) and death after death. It’s almost an essay arguing against the whole “suffering is good for one’s character” case; Gaskell even mentions how ridiculous the philosophies of Day (who tortured some poor girl in hopes she’d turn out to be a good wife for him) were, in connection with some of Patrick Bronte’s actions. Of course, perhaps we would never have got Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights had their lifestyle been slightly more comfortable; but who knows – perhaps we would have got even better, if they hadn’t all died young and horribly at that. It’s interesting how even back then the Bronte’s story was seen as ridiculously tragic, although it does serve to remind you that only a hundred and fifty years ago, England was as diseased and poverty-stricken as the most underdeveloped country today. Charlotte Bronte does come across as slightly more prim and pious than in her books, but that may be because Gaskell was extremely religious herself. There are inaccuracies – deliberate changes and omissions, for example the Hegel situation – but it’s a brilliant piece of writing, even if terribly tragic to read.

The Poisonwood Bible

This novel by Barbara Kingsolver is quite good and very readable; it’s the story of a missionary family – a couple and four daughters - who end up in the Belgian Congo (later Zaire, later Congo) during the sixties. The father is predictably slightly mad, and goes madder; the girls are equally predictably the ones who get on with things and discover that maybe things aren’t as simple as they’d assumed. In the end each person has a different reaction to what has happened.

Each chapter is narrated by a different female, one of the daughters or the mother, and they have easily distinguishable voices. It flows well, and there’s a good build-up to the climax or the disaster which forms the centre of the novel. On the other hand, a lot of it is commonplace; surely by the 21st century we’ve read enough Heart of Darkness clones, and realise that the westerner entering Africa isn’t going to change it for the better, or even want to. There was definitely still the theme of “missionary evil/aid worker good” (and after Rwanda, you’d assume people would have begun questioning this – and interestingly enough, although the Rwanda horror set off the Zaire coup, there’s no mention of it). The whole “backwards” thing with the child with hemiplegia was grating, and I wonder what people with cerebral palsy would think of the easy cure the writer decides upon! In short, the writer does want you to question, but only so far, and I do wonder how far she has gone herself in thinking outside the boundaries.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

This book by Khalad Hosseini is more a potted history of Afghanistan, than a novel; it’s a member of the “life sucks for women” book club, and the “life sucks for people in non-Western countries” book club, too. Mariam is the unwanted daughter of a rich man and his housekeeper; she’s married off against her will at fifteen to Rasheed, is beaten by him, and miscarries every child. Laila, who has had a liberal upbringing, gets pregnant at fourteen to her childhood love Tariq, who goes to Pakistan just before her parents are blown up by a bomb. So she ends up quickly marrying Rasheed, having her lover’s daughter, and then a son by Rasheed. A close friendship develops between Mariam and Laila, and Mariam ends up giving up her life so Laila can have the freedom she never knew.

It’s a fast-paced novel, without much complexity. The details are interesting to me – many of the Farsi words are so close or the same as the Kurdish ones, and they also have the Titanic craze back in 1999 which swept Bangladesh and India. But in general it’s more a way of covering a lot of history through the lives of some poor suffering women. At least it has a happy ending, although I think the hopefulness of the little family at the end at the future of the new Afghanistan may be slightly misplaced – but then, hope is all they have.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

I felt a sense of unease which grew as I read this seventh book by J K Rowling. It wasn’t the bad writing, as someone suggested – it’s pretty much the same as her previous books, with her derivatory storytelling and her difficulty with cohesion – but something else. The entire series is a coming of age story, but a very different one. The usual COA style is to have the hero discover life, bigger than the world he knew, have a few sexual experiences, and discover something about himself along the way. This is quite the opposite. The writer has made Harry’s journey a slow discovery of death – and that’s why I felt quite uncomfortable, considering it’s a children’s book.

The plot is basic – Harry and his pals have to destroy certain magical objects, defeat the Dark Lord, and win back the Kingdom (yes, it’s straight out of Diana Wynne Jones’Tough Guide to Fantasy-Land). The plot of the series is similar, except in every book, right from the first, Harry’s knowledge of death is deepened. Firstly, he discovers his parents’ deaths and his own near-death; it moves on to several close calls as he faces dangerous situations (and creatures!) and faces the possible deaths of himself and his friends; then the possible becomes actual, with more and more characters dying in each book; and finally this last book, where the grounds of Hogwarts are littered with bodies. However, it’s not just that sort of knowledge Harry discovers. From the first book, where he meets ghosts and sees his dead parents in a mirror, through to seeing dead friends and family conjured up by his wand and then through the shadows, to finally hanging around in the land of the dead – Harry really does get an intimate knowledge of “the deathly hallows”. Even his “sexual” experiences are both tainted with death and sorrow. And then there’s the messianic overtones with the hero having to die, rather than having to live.

I personally felt that the book, and the entire series, was incredibly grim and morbid, in the same way the Phillip Pullman series was, and therefore quite disappointing. The initial three books, while definitely introducing these ideas, didn’t dwell on them to the same extent the last four books did. They had a sense of fun and joy – the Quidditch, the four-poster beds and feasts, the boy finding a home. Any fun or happiness in the last books were all “in spite of” – in spite of looming fear and danger. There’s a definite early 21st century feel, that the world is coming to an end, that the good old days are gone because of terrorism and environmental destruction and so forth. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel comparisons with John Buchan, Kipling and Conrad’s Lord Jim; a sort of Boy’s Own feel, do it – whatever ugly thing must be done – for the country, and all will be well. Unfortunately Kim would not be pleased if he checked in on Afghanistan lately; perhaps that’s why the mild coda certainly didn’t make up for – or even fit well with – the rest of the book or series.

Midwinter Nightingale

This was written towards the close of Joan Aiken’s life, which is perhaps why it’s also preoccupied with aging and death – it fits in with the other Wolves books, but is a bit more gruesome – there’s death after death from people being eaten alive, shot, falling off cliffs, being shut in boxes, and being covered by molten silver. While Dido retains her usual matter-of-fact survival sense, she does end the book by weeping – weeping because Simon is now King of England and it will destroy their relationship. She probably does get over it, knowing her, but I don’t know if we’ve seen her cry before. It is just as clever, with the same play on language and the same interesting characters, but there’s a definite sadness throughout the story which perhaps was the author knowing she was going to have to say goodbye.