BOOKRBLOG

Neverwhere

2007-10-14T09:21:00.004+10:00

While this fantasy/horror by Neil Gaiman is set in an alternate London underground, it’s somehow so similar to Stardust that it’s practically the same book. There’s the goblin market, the quest, the dangers, the unusual girl who turns out to be more special than the girl at home, the references to myths and fairy-tales, and the clumsy boy who becomes a hero. I really don’t like in most fantasy novels, and didn’t like here, the horror elements – how writers can spend so much time on such disgusting things I have no idea – but I liked the idea of the Underground reflecting historical and imaginative aspects of the real world. The language was reminiscent of Terry Pratchett but with a slightly more American flavour. Clever, interesting – but like the previous book, not particularly deep or moving, and so I doubt I’ll be seeking out other books by this author.

Stardust

2007-10-14T09:21:00.003+10:00

This fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman is something like The Princess Bride without the mocking flavour of that particular book (although like TPB, the film of Stardust is more tightly structured and therefore slightly better). Tristan Thorne is asked by a girl he’s keen on to go catch a falling star – and so he crosses the Wall into fairy-land and discovers that over there, stars are girls and magic is real. It’s a fun, clever, and well-written fairy tale, albeit with a rather modern American tone to it all. There’s the usual twists on the usual fairy stories, and some of the darkness of modern fantasy novels – an altogether good, if not deep or moving, read.

Where the Road Leads

2007-10-14T09:21:00.001+10:00

From the ridiculous to the sublime – this is the story of Jean Calder, an Australian physical education teacher specialising in children with disabilities, who has worked with the Palestinian people in Lebanon, Egypt and Palestine, and will probably die there – she’s in her seventies. She adopted three children with disabilities, and has supported the care of thousands of others. At the same time, she’s promoted understanding of disability through inclusive education, training of workers, and training of parents. The story covers her life, as well as what has happened in Palestine, especially in the last few years – it finishes in 2006. It’s a straightforward read, and a fascinating one, about someone living in extraordinary circumstances and simply focusing on the plight of others, rather than worrying about herself – there’s little mention of any personal discomfort in the face of the everyday inconveniences of living in developing countries – no, it’s all about the children. An amazing story, and definitely highlighting some of the more ridiculous non-fiction I’ve read below.

Absolutely Faking It

2007-10-14T09:20:00.003+10:00

This travel story by Tiana Templeman was one of the fluffiest things I’ve read – the story of how she won a trip round the world’s top hotels, but didn’t have the cash to live the lifestyle, so had to essentially backpack from one posh resort to the next. And that’s it. There’s no twist, no other story. She describes the hotels and the countries she visits, but as she spends about three days in each, it’s not even as deep as a lonely planet guide. The difficulties she finds are summed up in what she learned: “I can cope with any struggle now, such as smuggling a pizza into the Ritz hotel”. I suppose it’s interesting as a portrait of the average world knowledge of a regular backpacker – but it’s not much as a piece of literature.

What I Was

2007-10-14T09:20:00.001+10:00

This was another disappointment by Meg Rosoff; I don’t know why I’m always so hopeful that the next book will be any better than the previous. This is a coming-of-age YA novel (with the word “bugger/buggery” in every second page, to try to keep it either hip or British) about a boy in a boarding school in the sixties who runs off and meets a boy called Finn who lives on a riverbank by himself. He’s increasingly attracted to Finn and his lifestyle and goes to live there during the holidays. Disaster strikes and (with no great surprise to the discerning reader) Finn turns out to be a girl, and some other boy drowns. I can see the vision Rosoff had, but it really isn’t realised in this book; neither the school, nor the characters, nor the landscape comes across in any genuine way, and at the end of the day it’s because she really isn’t a very good writer.

Those Faraday Girls

2007-10-14T09:19:00.003+10:00

I’ve always enjoyed Monica McInerney’s books, and this one is no exception. It’s the story of five motherless girls who get a shock when the youngest falls pregnant at 16. They raise the child together, but separate when one of the sisters, Sadie, has a breakdown and leaves – taking the child away. While Maggie is soon returned, Sadie disappears, and never comes back, though the other sisters meet regularly. Years later, when Maggie grows up, she begins to discover all the lies that her life has been based upon, and she ends up finding Sadie too.

This is a plot-driven novel, plainly written – it’s not literature – but it’s a good, thought-provoking read about families. It doesn’t revel in pain, but it doesn’t give out bland happy endings, either. Some people are just horrible, and don’t turn out nice – that’s reality, even if they’re members of your family. I raced through this book as I race through all of McInerney’s books, because the characters are enticing and the story is well-told and it does what it sets out to do – entertain.

A Watery Grave

2007-10-14T09:19:00.001+10:00

This was a fairly dull read by Joan Druett, although that’s probably just because I don’t find all things nautical particularly interesting, especially when the entire book from beginning to end lacks a single female character (except the dead woman from the first page). The hero, a half-Maori half-American sailor during the nineteenth century stumbles on the mystery and while he’s sailing south with the navy endeavours to solve it. He does, because there really isn’t very much mystery to it at all. While the tidbits of information about being a pacific islander in an increasingly white world during the nineteenth century are interesting, they were too infrequent to hold my attention in this particularly pedestrian novel.

Shantaram

2007-10-01T10:04:00.003+10:00

This book by Gregory David Roberts is like a wild dream, where things just get crazier and more unbelievable – and it’s also one of the best books I’ve read all year. In fact, after finishing part one, I was tempted to agree with the front cover and call it a masterpiece, but unfortunately the rest of it wasn’t as brilliant – it was still good though.

The story is based on the author’s life, although the narrative has obviously been tweaked (he calls it a novel). Roberts was an armed robber who escaped from prison and fled to Bombay. He met up with a variety of interesting characters, including the woman, Karla, who shapes much of the story. He ends up living in the slums and starting a clinic there, but after a tragedy, leaves and joins the Bombay mafia, and his hero-father figure, “Kaderbhai”. After getting involved in Bollywood, spending months in an Indian prison, and travelling all around the world smuggling, he follows Kaderbhai to Afghanistan, where he discovers to his horror that both his life, Karla’s life, and the lives of thousands of others, have been manipulated by Kaderbhai to support the war in Afghanistan. He returns alive – although Kaderbhai doesn’t – and sees the downfall of the mafia group. When the story ends, he’s planning to go join the war in Sri Lanka.

It’s not just the crazy action, the philosophy, and the lyrical language (sometimes a little too purple) that makes this story – there’s people returning from the dead, twins attacking the hero in a Queen’s darkened tower-room, incredible riches and incredible poverty – but the characters, fascinating, unique, real, and human. The women – including Karla – are neither ciphers nor princesses, the men aren’t angels either, and best of all the hero isn’t heroic. He runs away from the fire in the slum, from the pain of the people, from the worst of everything – it is the Indians who cope and survive and make plans and explain to him how to live. It’s a reverse City of God. He learns, because he’s humble, and that’s why it’s real, because anyone who has travelled knows that’s the real truth of travelling. It’s shocking, disturbing (there’s violence, sex, drug use, death), and tragic, but it’s uplifting because it’s about real people living a real life. Comparing this book to the stories below of sedate wealthy lives enlivened by canteen duty is almost impossible. This is an amazing book because the writer lived an amazing life.

Dreaming Water

2007-10-01T10:03:00.003+10:00

This is a typical American novel, but it’s not too bad - Gail Tsukiyama being an adequate writer. I say typical because it has that forced simplicity, that focus on some issue or other (this time it’s both Werner syndrome and the Japanese interned during WW2), and the exploration of relationships. It’s a snapshot, in that the action takes place over two days, although the narrators (another sign of the typical American novel - using several narrators to carry the story) dip into the past, reminiscing. Basically Cate, in her sixties, is caring for her thirty-something daughter Hana who, having Werner syndrome, is like she’s in her eighties. She hasn’t long to live. A close friend, Laura, from the past comes to visit, with her daughters, showing that the end of one life can still make a difference – the mother has time to ponder her growing attraction to the family doctor, and Laura’s teenage daughter sees that difference can mean uniqueness and something beautiful. It’s a quiet read, a thoughtful read, but nothing particularly new or original.

Something Rich and Strange

2007-10-01T10:03:00.001+10:00

This is a small sea-story by Patricia A McKillip, who writes fantasy. Megan and Jonah live near the beach somewhere in modern-day USA, running a shop full of sea-treasures like drawings (done by Megan) and fossils (found by Jonah). One day a stranger appears, offering them jewellery to sell in the store; luring them into the sea, so that Jonah is seduced by a siren and disappears, and Megan’s drawings begin to contain worlds she never knew existed. That part is good, but when they get down into the sea, it turns into an environmental message (pollution of the ocean/they’re sent back to bear witness) which really feels at odds with the rest of the book, and brings it down to a children’s morality tale. However, the writing is very beautiful, and the first part so mesmerising that you feel desperate to drop everything and go directly to the beach.

The Towers of Trebizond

2007-10-01T10:02:00.003+10:00

The title of this book by Rose Macaulay is incredibly familiar to me as one of those classics that everyone should read; and yet it turned out to be nothing like I expected, and the sort of book that I can’t see lasting into the future. It’s ostensibly a comedy about a woman who accompanies her elderly aunt Dot into Turkey, is separated when Dot goes to visit (communist) Russia, and returns to England with Dot’s camel and her own ape to await her return. What it’s actually about is religion; the narrator, like the author, is in a long-standing affair and cannot see a way out of it, is an agnostic and can’t see a way into the Anglicanism of her ancestors, and struggles with both things constantly. The end is both tragic and unexpected, and in a way unresolved. It’s a very interesting – and well written, in a very Cold Comfort Farm voice – story, especially for lovers of Turkey, comedy, and travel stories in general, but it’s a story of its time, and I can’t see it lasting as a classic into this century.

Faust

2007-10-01T10:02:00.001+10:00

I was attracted to this novella by Turgenev because I love the Faust story, and indeed this is a sort of variation on the myth. A young man meets a girl who has been brought up in isolation, never having read anything fictional, never hearing any stories. He’s attracted to her, but her strong mother suggests that they’re not a good match; humbled, he agrees. Years later, when the girl is married, they meet again; this time her mother is dead. He introduces her to Goethe’s Faust, and she’s altered irrevocably.

It’s a great idea, but while Turgenev is supposed to be one of the great Russian writers, I wasn’t touched by it – it lacked that spark that the other authors have, that real passion – it felt more like a writing exercise than anything that the author really felt, even though apparently he was a great fan of Goethe. Great writing of course, but it didn’t grab me.

The Secret of Lost Things

2007-10-01T10:01:00.001+10:00

This novel by Sheridan Hayes is not very good. It’s a coming-of-age story about a Tasmanian girl who goes to work in a bookstore in New York. It’s set in the eighties, though it took me three-quarters of the book to work that out, because it doesn’t sound like the eighties at all, and the girl is not anything at all like a modern teenager; I’d guessed it was the twenties. The characters don’t sound American (e.g. asking for black coffee!) and are caricatures (someone likes Dickens, evidently). None of the lost things are eventually found – the secret is obviously that lost things are lost – and while the girl somehow gains some kind of understanding, it was lost on me. Derivative, and not very interesting – it really didn’t feel as though the author put too much of herself into this one.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

2007-09-12T08:16:00.001+10:00

More like books than book, this collection by Italo Calvino parodies books, readers, publishing, ideas and his own works, all at the same time. The Reader picks up his book – discovers in a printing error he’s reading a different book – goes to correct the error at the bookshop, university, publishing house, more and more places, each time being given a completely different book, and each time wanting to read it but being thwarted. He meets a fellow Reader – the Other Reader, Ludmilla – and a cast of other odd characters including writers and ghost-writers and professors and critics – and in the end the Reader, you, finally end the book, even if it’s not the one you started with – although of course it is, because it’s his book.

The Last Days

2007-09-12T08:15:00.002+10:00

This is a YA novel by Scott Westerfield, and it’s a sequel to Peeps which I reviewed earlier. Set nowish in NY, more people have caught the vampire virus, and there are more signs of the underground worms who are going to eat everyone. A couple of young people put a band together, and get signed up to play at a massive concert. Their unique sound not only draws a crowd, but calls up the worms, too. They end up going round the world calling worms out of the ground so everyone can kill them. Obviously, it’s an end of the world novel, but it focuses on a small bunch of people and while it’s simple, it’s not simplistic. It’s slightly depressing, although the obvious fantasy element does engender enough disbelief to stop the reader wallowing in it. The author introduces some basic ideas about viruses and civilisation, in a less complex way than in his previous book, which is food for thought, even if he doesn’t elaborate on it.

Talyn

2007-09-12T08:15:00.001+10:00

This tale by Holly Lisle is one of those thick fantasy books, with the usual fantasy-lands, violent action, great heroes doing deeds that at first everyone reviles them for but in the end rewards and cheers them on, magic and magicians, and very nice horses. Talyn is a magical soldier in a permanent war; when the ceasefire is declared, she’s suspicious. She gets involved with one of the Peacekeeper race, finds out they’re bent on mind control and destroying everyone, and joins up with a former enemy to take them down. It reminded me a lot of Farscape, and also of a sort of justification for xenophobia and the US imperialist policy. Better the war you know than the peace you don’t, is the theme; but there’s also the idea that while you’re fighting the familiar enemy, several more unfamiliar ones are lining up unexpectedly at your border. It was fairly well-written and made me want to read to the end, but without that real depth that would lead me to seek out more by the same author.

The Last Summer (of you and me)

2007-09-12T08:14:00.000+10:00

Ann Brashares really does have her finger on character, which is why I like this YA book. It’s unusual, in that she’s taken a real place, and a real place she really loves (an island called Fire Island off NY where rich people spend summers) and weaves a story about it which isn’t entirely happy. Alice and Riley are sisters, and have spent every summer on Fire Island; now they’re in the early twenties and embarking on life. Paul’s the guy next door who has spent every summer with them. This is the last summer of the three of them because Paul and Alice fall in love, and because Riley gets sick (and eventually dies).

The first half of the novel was great, and I really enjoyed it, but I wasn’t so sure about the second half. The idea of the young person not entirely engaged in life dying – and she brings it on herself, like a Peter Pan refusing to age – doesn’t sit too well with me as something real – it’s more like a cop-out, a way for it to be not so bad. The first half was slowed down, really analysing character; the second half sped up and went many places. It was still enjoyable, but if the novel had just been the first half, it would’ve been just as good. Brashares reminds me of Melina Marchetta, with a real feel for that coming of age period. It’s a very good book, perhaps even better than her Sisterhood series.

Terrier

2007-09-12T08:13:00.000+10:00

I’m never sure with Tamora Pierce, because some of her books are dull; but this, like her Trickster series, was great. Beka is a “puppy”, which is a trainee police officer in this alternate world; she’s got to survive the streets of the Low City, which is ruled by slavers, thieves and child-killers. She also has to deal with the way her family sees the low status of her job, the new relationships she’s forming, and the ghosts that she hears in dust-devils and pigeons.

Pierce has got a good feel for the messiness of life. The job isn’t perfect, the relationships are untidy, and the way things pan out isn’t going to suit everyone. Yes, Beka’s a hero, but she does make mistakes. The “dogs” take bribes, and the man she likes is a Rogue, which is something like a thieves’ guild (I think – it wasn’t so clear to me). The writing was fast-paced and full of fun Aiken-like language, and the world was believable. This is one of her best, and I’m hoping there’ll be a sequel.

The Careful Use of Compliments

2007-08-21T08:05:00.006+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:05:00.005+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:05:00.003+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:05:00.001+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:04:00.001+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:03:00.000+10:00

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

2007-08-21T08:02:00.000+10:00

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

2007-08-10T18:17:00.002+10:00

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

2007-08-10T18:17:00.001+10:00

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

2007-08-10T18:16:00.000+10:00

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

2007-08-10T18:15:00.000+10:00

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

2007-08-03T10:08:00.000+10:00

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

2007-08-03T10:07:00.000+10:00

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.

The Namesake

2007-07-29T18:08:00.001+10:00

This is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel, and it’s not bad. It’s the story of Gogol who was named after the Russian writer whose writings, his father believes, saved his life. Gogol is a second-generation Bengali immigrant to the US, and this story is as much about the different aspects of American culture as it is about Indian (Hindu) Bengali culture. Gogol hates his name, and gets it legally changed, and it takes half his life to accept both his name and his heritage.

This story is mostly narrative, with few chunks of dialogue, which gives it a very calm but also a cautious feel – there’s no strong emotions. It’s well-written, and entertaining, even though only a few of the characters – Gogol and his parents – are really fleshed out. His wife, Moushoumi, remained a bit of a mystery to me, partly because their break-up is revealed second-hand. The other women in his life also fade away without fanfare, although they’re described well, and their differing lifestyles are really interesting. All in all, it’s a good read, especially for a first novel.

Maisie Dobbs/Messenger of Truth

2007-07-29T18:07:00.000+10:00

These old-fashioned mystery novels by Jacqueline Winspear are in the style of Sayers and Allingham, even though they're modern. It's set in the 20's, but reverts occasionally back to the Great War, with the theme that what happened then had consequences which went on and on. Maisie Dobbs is the female investigator who solves mysteries using her psychological training and a bit of ESP; she's more interested in the human element than the solving of the puzzle.

It’s rather commonplace – the cockney servant, the emancipated woman and the convoluted mystery which is resolved easily in the last chapter. The writing is pedestrian, and she has a habit of telling us twice, rather than showing us once, what is going on. While it’s reminiscent of the early mystery classics, it lacks the depth of thought and the eye to detail, too – for example, historical characters think and speak in ways which would have been quite foreign to them. It has interesting moments, but it’s definitely not my kind of book.

Dido and Pa

2007-07-29T18:06:00.000+10:00

Joan Aiken is definitely the best writer for children, ever. This is another story in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, and it’s a good one. Dido has returned to England after her travels and meets up with Simon, who is now Duke of Battersea. Unfortunately she also meets up with her Pa, who lures her away and forces her to work for the enemy, training an impostor to speak like the new Scottish King. But with the help of a number of curious characters the King, Simon, his sister and even the impostor is saved, as well as a poor slattern called Is.

You can’t help but love a book that ends with a young lady sewing a penguin, with a girl crooning, “I love little Kitty, her coat is so warm/And if I’m not kind she will chew off my arm”, where the enemies are stoned to death by children and it’s all done with seriousness and good fun (unlike many modern books which seem to laugh at, not with, their child readers). The utter richness of the language is something unique and lovely, again reflecting the respect the writer has for her readers. And the story always comes together in a satisfactory way, with Dido not marrying the Duke, and feeling rather sad about her Pa getting eaten by wolves.

Somewhere More Simple

2007-07-29T18:05:00.002+10:00

I’m often whinging about books being given too good a rap by publishers and critics, but this is the opposite case; Marion Molteno is an exceptionally good writer, and yet most of her books are out of print, and this, her latest, was stuck up on a back shelf and not even put with “new arrivals” in the store. She reminds me of Melina Marchetta, because her books are all about character, and there’s something so intimate about the writing – you feel as though it’s been written by someone you know.

Cari decides to take a maternity leave locum on a small island off Cornwall – an island where she spent an idyllic summer as a child. Her boring husband agrees, and they settle there, meeting the locals including Anna, a bereft mother, and Hugh, a local farmer whose wife has left with their son. Cari and Hugh fall in love, and she has to choose between him and her husband; Anna has to get over blaming others for her grief; and Hugh has to deal with his own control issues. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s filled with a kind of beauty which really is simple, and really is human. I have to say I didn’t truly buy the Hugh-Cari relationship, because it seemed more a vehicle for them both to deal with their issues rather than an issue itself, but apart from that I loved it, I really did.

Robins at the Abbey/Stowaways at the Abbey

2007-07-29T18:05:00.001+10:00

I’ve got a few of these books by Elsie J Oxenham, collecting them randomly in the same way as I collect other British Girls’ Stories of the 1920-1950 period. They’re a little slice of history, where the pinnacle of life is to marry and have sets of twins (in Robins, one poor damsel has two sets in one year!) and where there’s an impassable gap between the working and the landed classes. These stories are set near an old Abbey, where discoveries are made such as buried bells, loot from highwaymen, collapsed tunnels and the like. The girls all attend an English Dancing club and have very mild adventures. These two volumes – where one female Robin meets a male Robin and fall in love, or where a boot-boy is a stowaway in the Abbey and is reconciled to his master by one of the girls – are fairly tame, especially as most of the action is “off-camera” and is just retold by one girl to another, interspersed with announcements of more twins. They are nothing to the Chalet School, where the girls have a constant brush with death every other chapter, but as a piece of history they’re fairly interesting.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

2007-07-29T18:04:00.000+10:00

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine, had a stroke which left him completely paralysed apart from one eye. By blinking while the listener recited the alphabet, he was able to communicate and write this short memoir. He was a father of two young children, and he lived only a few days after the publication of this book. It’s full of longing, full of hope, both angry and humorous, and extremely human.

He writes about one perfect day he shared with his children; writes about the day that his stroke occurred; writes about the history of the hospital, about how he feels about his carers, about the things he imagines as well as the things he experiences. He was only forty-three, and he lived less than a year after his stroke, but this book isn’t a book of grief but a book of life.

Invisible Cities

2007-07-29T18:02:00.000+10:00

The idea of this book by Italo Calvino is that Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan (and actually they were contemporaries during the 1200s) and describes to him the cities he has visited; cities where the people worship the buckets and pulleys of a well, where everything is underground or high in the air, cities which contain the faces of the dead, or where everything is reflected and so the reflection is more important than the reality. Which is the meaning of these sketches, that the cities are invisible because they’re actually Venice, or not-Venice, or not-the city of the reader.

Definitely reminiscent of Borges, definitely both eerie and beautiful, and the sort of book where occasionally there’ll be an “ah-ha” moment; like the city where the unborn have their memorials and their worshippers like the graveyards of the dead, like the city of signs where only the sign is visible and perhaps there’s nothing there at all.

The Good German

2007-07-09T12:47:00.001+10:00

It’s evident that Joseph Kanon is a big The Third Man fan; this book is like an extended version of the film. It’s set in the same time, just after the war, but in Berlin. There’s the innocent newsman just wanting to find out the truth, and the ugliness of what is really going on in the world - the black market, the Russians, the Nazis bobbing up once again. It’s a thriller rather than literary fiction, with car chases and gun fights and desperate escapes. At the same time, he’s asking questions about who turns out to be the good guy and who is the bad, in a time and a place like this?

It’s pretty well written, and flows well, without too much confusion or scene chopping. The women aren’t too stereotypical – Lena, Jake’s lover, is fairly annoying rather than the perfect woman, and Jake himself is not without blemish either. There’s no one in the story who is innocent apart from the children, and that’s the point of it all, that the dark’s so deep no one wants to see anyone implicated, because they too must therefore be guilty. No one dares throw the first stone; leaving the old Nazis free to declare themselves just under orders.

The conclusion isn’t easy, although he does try to make the last few paragraphs count – fails, but tries – and you’re left with the mess and a bunch of strangers flying away from it, which is something different at least. It’s a good novel, although the underlying idea of war excusing death, not crime, isn’t one I can swallow easily.

The Mathematics of Love

2007-07-09T12:46:00.003+10:00

This is Emma Darwin’s first book, and it’s a good read – I couldn’t put it down. On the other hand, once you analyse it, it really doesn’t work. The ending’s disappointing, and the supernatural element doesn’t quite fit; you’re not sure what all the different pieces – why 1970’s, why 1819? – are supposed to mean. But the characters are interesting and sympathetic, and the story moves on at a good pace. It works emotionally, even though intellectually it doesn’t quite make sense.

Stephen Fairhurst is recovering after the horrors of Waterloo, and trying to deal with the past, including his great love and a child. He meets a family and becomes close friends with one of the women, an artist. She helps his recover his child and some meaning in his life. This story is interspersed with that of Anna in 1976 who is sent to her uncle’s place – the Fairhurst house – and discovers love and photography and a sense of history. The link between the two is letters, but also a mysterious little boy who is part of both worlds.

It’s well-written and flows nicely. I do feel suspicious about these 1819 women who are so liberated in their opinions, and the men too, actually, about war and women’s freedom and sexuality. Anna’s shock at 1970’s morality seems far more realistic. So it doesn’t quite work, but it’s still a great read, anyway.

Prisoner of Tehran

2007-07-09T12:46:00.001+10:00

This non-fiction by Marina Nemat falls into the category of books you should read but can hardly bear to; they’re filled with true agony. This is about her life, when at 16 she was thrown into a political prison for instigating a strike at her high school. She is marked for execution, but is remanded to life in prison at the last minute, at the intervention of her torturer who has fallen in love with her. This torturer ends up forcing her to marry him, and she ends up becoming pregnant to him; but he is assassinated by fellow torturers who despise him. She is eventually freed and goes on to marry the man she loved before prison, but is unable to tell him all that happened to her. Years later, after emigrating to Canada, the memories flood back and she writes this manuscript, showing her husband, who is devastated by it.

It’s an unbearable story that is sadly quite easy to believe – there are too many stories that are similar about girls being beaten, raped, imprisoned, tortured for wanting something different to what is presented to them. The most frightening part is the utter reasonableness of her torturer husband, who was actually imprisoned and tortured under the previous regime himself, but cannot see that what he is doing is intrinsically wrong, that he has become evil.

It was written partly because of the Canadian woman who was arrested and tortured to death after photographing the very gaol that Marina was imprisoned within. The horror of her death shocked the world, but as the author says, it was many women and it still continues.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

2007-07-09T12:44:00.000+10:00

The best you can say about this book by Paul Torday is that it’s entertaining; the worst is that it’s silly, or if you chose to be harsh, nonsensical. It’s about a British professor who is pushed into investigating the possibility of putting salmon into the wadis in the Yemen. He gets interested in the idea which results in him falling for a young woman who is also involved, realising his marriage and his work are farcical and that maybe there’s more to life than what he has. It’s all written in email or letter form, which is fairly irritating – it’s a style rarely done well – and while it’s supposed to be satirical, it comes across as simply silly. Most annoying of all is that the author, while he’d protest it’s just supposed to be entertainment, has tried to put across some deep ideas in the most shallow way possible – ironic, because the deep ideas are about how shallow politicians are. They may be, but it’s pretty obvious a lot of novelists are no better.

The History of Love

2007-07-09T12:43:00.000+10:00

This novel by Nicole Krauss is in some ways a typical Jewish-American novel, but has a few original elements which has led it to being lauded as a masterpiece; that’s overstating it, but it’s got a couple of interesting twists which keep you reading. It follows two characters; Leo Gursky, a holocaust survivor who lost his love and his son to chance, really, and who is trying to find some kind of meaning in each day, and Alma Singer, who is trying to do the same through a book of her mother’s, “the history of love”. And of course through various twists and turns the two characters’ journeys end up intersecting and becoming one and the same thing.

There’s the usual little quirks in the characters, some fairly clever language, some poetic and myth-like qualities to the story. It didn’t really draw me in, however, partly because the quirkiness leads to a lack of intimacy with the characters, a kind of coldness. It’s well written, but it’s not my kind of book.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

2007-07-09T12:37:00.002+10:00

Alas, I need to stop reading reviews; there were so many positive ones about this novel by Michael Chabon, and yet it’s terrible, terrible. It’s a black comedy which is partly a homage to the Raymond Chandler era, partly to the whole Jewish comedy genre (I can hear The Princess Bride’s voice loud and clear) and is mostly incomprehensible – as exhausting as reading Jabberwocky, for every phrase contains at least fifty percent Yiddish. I’m sure if you were familiar with Yiddish, the language and culture, this book would be hilarious, but otherwise it’s just not readable.

Landsman is a worn-out cop who is investigating a murder, and neither he (nor the readers) can really work out why, seeing the entire country – of Alaska, which has been the Jewish homeland since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war didn’t turn out so well – is probably going to fall, and all their cases are going to be filed away anyhow. His superior turns out to be his ex-wife, and yes, they get back together sort-of, and the murdered bloke turns out to have all sorts of twists and turns, and in the end, I did not care, and I hoped the entire alternate world turned out to be some bizarre Sliders bubble, and mercifully popped.

Julie of the Wolves

2007-06-20T08:01:00.002+10:00

This children’s book by Jean Craighead George won some awards and is recommended for ten year olds; and includes an attempted rape, a child marriage, and one of the darkest conclusions I’ve ever encountered. They were brave judges! I can imagine this being banned in libraries across America. It’s about an Eskimo girl who escapes her child marriage/rape and goes to live with the wolves. She discovers her father is still alive, but when she finally meets him, he’s not the man she thought he’d be – the great hero. So she walks back out into the snow.

If you were a great animal lover as the author is, you’d get more out of this book – I preferred the scenes with humans in it. She’s a good writer, and the details are both exact and interesting (she was a lifelong environmental scientist who knew her stuff). But for ten year olds? I don’t know.

Passarola Rising

2007-06-20T08:01:00.001+10:00

This is the first novel by Australian Azhar Abidi and it’s extremely accomplished. It’s set in the age of Reason, the mid eighteenth century, and stars two brothers who build an airship and start exploring the world. Voltaire makes an appearance amongst a cast of famous names. The descriptions are beautiful and story moves along quickly; and it’s very believable, too. Apparently the two brothers really did design an airship, although they didn’t actually build it and try to fly around the world. But if they had, you can imagine they’d have come up against all the things detailed here – the inquisition calling them sorcerers, the government using them for their own meaningless military objectives, and the philosophers of the day denying the wonders they see on the basis of cold reason.

In the end, the two brothers part company. The narrator chooses an ordinary life, marrying, becoming a businessman and a father. The older brother continues to fly and eventually dies with a vision of a great bird-griffin – the passarola – clearer than anything else in his life. A short life but a good one, the younger brother thinks wistfully – but only occasionally.

It’s a good book for a first writer, and it has all sorts of famous people singing his praises on the front cover. All sorts of famous men, I should clarify; because there are really no women in the book at all. There’s the early temptress and a later wife, both faint ciphers. The real world, says the author, is peopled by men; there aren’t even any women in the background. That’s why it’s a good book, but not a great one – in fact, I find it quite terrifying.

The Secret River

2007-06-20T08:00:00.000+10:00

This is a rather depressing novel by Kate Grenville, about the early days of white settlement in Australia. You can tell what’s going to happen from the first line, and the inevitability of it all adds to the gloom.

William Thornhill is born in poverty in London, works hard but still has to steal to stay alive. He’s caught and sent with his family to Sydney. There, he rises in the world through a mix of hard work and theft, and one day gets a glimpse of a beautiful point of land on the Hawkesbury river. He covets it and eventually camps there with his family. Of course, it’s already occupied by the local Aborigines. The same land, the same resources, and therefore only one choice – leave the place or get rid of the locals. Both sides have the opportunity to make the choice, both sides expecting the other to take the hint and leave. Small conflicts turn into larger ones until there is a massacre. The Thornhill family become wealthy and respected, with their lovely house on the point.

It’s a fast-paced story, which keeps you reading even though you know it’s going to end horribly. Grenville’s style isn’t anything unique – typical actually of an Australian writer, reminiscent of Malouf and Keneally and the rest – especially the characterisation and the dialogue. For some reason the way Australian writers put such awkward speech in their characters’ mouths really annoys me, like having to read the Yorkshire in Wuthering Heights. But apart from that, it’s a well-told novel with a calm and reasonable narrator putting down such terrible unknowable things.

My Side of the Mountain

2007-06-01T10:12:00.003+10:00

I’ve been wanting to read this children’s book by Jean Craighead George for years and years. It’s a classic American novel about a boy who runs away from home and goes to live in the woods – in a tree, to be exact. He learns how to live off the land, tames a falcon and makes friends with other creatures. It’s very detailed in what he eats and how he takes care of himself.

It was written forty years ago, and you can tell – no child nowadays would be let alone the way this boy is. He gets help from the local librarian and other wanderers, who accept his life choices and agree that his lifestyle beats theirs. He’s considered capable and to have the ability, and the right, to make decisions for himself. It’s definitely a fantasy novel, but it’s a good one. I’d love an Australian version of this with bush tucker and kangaroos, though.

Divisidaro

2007-06-01T10:12:00.001+10:00

This is the long-awaited new novel by Michael Ondaatje. Like his earlier books, it uses lyrical language with embedded quotes and dialogue, occasional authorial comment, and fragmented chronology. It does lack the emotional power, the anger which sparked his previous works; it’s a calmer, even a more distant work. But that’s part of it, because “divisidaro” doesn’t just mean “divisions” (one of the more obvious themes) but also “seeing from a distance”.

All the characters are observed in many different ways, first person, third, the main actor, the one on the sidelines. Unlike his earlier novels, which had scattered characters who come together for a time, this is more about the separation. Lovers are divided, parents from children (most of the characters are orphans), siblings, friends. Their time together is often brief and sometimes imaginary. And yet, despite the ever-present divisions, it’s actually the connections which are stronger. They might not be together, but they feature in one another’s life, colour one another’s lives.

I enjoyed this – it’s a book to read slowly, revelling in the language. I didn’t love it as I did his previous works, but then it took a few reads before I embraced them anyway. Perhaps after a couple more rereads I’ll be waxing more lyrical – but at the moment, it’s true to say I liked it.

St Jude's

2007-06-01T10:11:00.001+10:00

I grew increasingly uneasy as I read this story by Gemma Sisia. She’s a good Catholic girl from country NSW who saw pictures of the starving Africans and made it her mission to go and save them. She went there, fell in love with an African man and married him (although her family was against her marrying a black man) and was given land by his family to build a school. Through Rotary, she’s raised thousands of dollars to set up this school for poor but intellectually gifted students in the area, and now hundreds of students have been, and continue to be educated.

Good for her, of course, and it’s great that hundreds of kiddies are now educated. That’s not all you learn, though; it’s all because of St Jude and his magical prayer that you pray nine times. Not the African people who provided the land, the idea and the labour for the school – no, apparently they’ve got no sense of honesty (there are several “amusing” stories about their lack of understanding about lying, money, possessions etc), have to be led by Westerners (every time Gemma leaves Australia, she returns to utter chaos), and are unable to care for their children (she tells us that a lot of poverty is because some people just don’t care for their children or possessions). When she starts to feel concerned that perhaps her efforts aren’t exactly saving Tanzania, someone tells her the fable of the starfish (you know, how the boy chucks a few starfish back in the ocean saying “it matters to that one” even though the others are dying).

Of course it matters to the individual – but it also matters to the individual who stays choking on the beach because your good intentions don’t include them. In this case, children who aren’t bright enough (there are entry exams), who don’t work hard enough (there’s a “probationary period” for the students – if they’re not smart enough, they get kicked out), whose parents aren’t good enough (they get inspected too), don’t deserve an education. She says she can’t help everyone – but what is she saying to the other hundreds of kids who don’t make it into her school? One thing alone I’ve learned from working overseas, and that’s that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Gemma is full of good intentions, but it would help if she had some insight, as well. This book is another in the long line of books about poor countries which are saved by a Wonderful Westerner, because, apparently, the hopeless locals just can’t do it themselves.

The Driftway

2007-06-01T10:10:00.000+10:00

I’ve had Penelope Lively books on my shelf ever since childhood, and now I understand why I never read them. This is a boring book, and the kind of book which annoys me now and would have infuriated me as a child. Paul hasn’t accepted his stepmother into the family – in fact he’s been a brat about it all. After travelling along the Driftway and listening to the stories of people from the past, he realises he’s not the only fish in the pond, and decides to be nicer to his stepmother.

Preaching “be nice” to teenagers through stories like this really irritates me. A novel should be a novel, not a social story. And the individual tales of the people of the past, including soldiers, highwaymen, poachers etc should have been exciting, but were also extremely boring. I read one book of hers that she wrote for adults and really loathed it; this one I didn’t hate, but I’m glad it’s unlikely to be reprinted for a new generation.

The Map of Love

2007-05-12T10:39:00.001+10:00

This book by Ahdaf Soueif was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999. It’s many things – political, historical, romantic, adventurous, and filled with very good writing. It’s a few years before 2000; an American woman, in love with an Egyptian guy, decides to go to Egypt to see what that ancient land thinks of a new millennium. She brings with her a trunk of old letters from the turn of the century, and so we follow the story of Lady Anna, an Englishwoman in Egypt who also falls in love with an Egyptian guy. The unique part of this book is not only is it written by an Egyptian woman, but the main narrator is also an Egyptian woman; the westerners are imagined through their eyes.

The first part races along with an almost clichéd love story (imperious sheik falls for headstrong foreigner) but gets bogged down in the last section as the politics (modern and ancient) is heavily pushed. The rise of Israel from an Egyptian point of view, the fundamentalists, the push for modernisation and the modern and ancient forms of imperialism are all issues that are tackled. Nothing is easy (well, except for Anna settling into an Egyptian “hareem” without any difficulty or discomfort whatsoever) and nothing turns out particularly well. It’s the birth of a child, rather than the approaching millennium, which brings hope (and I remember the near-euphoric feeling in Australia at that time, quite different).

What’s interesting is that the women in the story are all still on the sidelines. They’re the narrators, they carry the story through the generations, and yet they are utterly powerless. Anna’s husband makes the difference in the old Egypt, Amal’s brother in the new. She can’t even approach the government, has to get an old lover to intercede. None of them are able to live life in public or in freedom; they’re trapped by love and by custom and by a sense of their own limitations. I do wonder if the writer realised this, or whether she just decided to reflect the reality of women – women in Egypt or women worldwide? – as she saw it. In any case, it’s not a particularly uplifting read, but it is fascinating.

The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Protest

2007-05-12T10:38:00.000+10:00

This is a collection of essays, speeches, letters and other documents of protest edited by Brian MacArthur. It’s full of famous people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Sylvia Pankhurst and Marie Stopes, as well as lesser-known writers; it’s a very thick book. And it’s a good record of what people were protesting about; war, women’s rights, imperialism, social justice for the poor, civil rights for black Americans, rights for gay people, the destruction of the environment. Two interesting things; there’s not a single entry protesting about the treatment of people with a disability, or disability rights; and one of Marie Stopes’ main reasons for pushing birth control is eugenics, so that the weaker and less deserving are never born. Now that’s something I bet they don’t talk about in their international society nowadays. Then again, maybe they do.

The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith

2007-05-12T10:37:00.001+10:00

I avoided this novel by Thomas Keneally because I thought it would be worthy-but-boring. It’s not; it’s worthy, not boring, but chilling, like an Australian In Cold Blood. This Aboriginal guy gets hassled at every turn, snaps, and axes a bunch of women. He escapes through the bush with relatives, runs around Australia, meets some interesting people, dies in the end. It was written around 1971, it’s set in 1900 where the big news is Federation and the Boer War, and what is Australia, and who are Australians, and it would’ve been an explosive book back in 1971 when Aboriginal people couldn’t even vote, I don’t think.

It’s a brave book because it includes chants of the tribe that Jimmy comes from, includes lots of ideas about Aboriginal people, it’s mostly told from their perspective. It races along and thank goodness doesn’t turn the conversations into unreadable dialects of “Australianisms” – except for when Jimmy is replying to a white man, underlining the whole idea of having to put on a form of inferior language and thought just to get by in the white world. I wonder what the feminists thought of it though, because there’s a lot of the underlying bitterness towards women – the free man getting shackled by their desperate need for order and propriety, mostly – that a lot of novelists of that time put in. It’s a book with masses of food for thought, but I don’t know if I could read it again, because even thinking about that axing makes me feel sick.

Blindness

2007-05-12T10:36:00.001+10:00

Apparently José Saramago, the author of this novel, won the Nobel prize in 1998. He’s Portuguese; I’d never heard of him. This was a good book, though. It’s like an allegory, a story where none of the characters have names. It’s very reminiscent of Kant (in fact there’s a line which is a direct reference, I’m sure, to The Trial) and it reminds me of other German writers, especially the style – no paragraphs, lots of commas, and embedded speech. It’s conversational, like you’re being told the story, but you never even notice the narrator. It draws you in, it’s intimate, without being entirely real.

A man goes blind one day. Then his doctor, his wife, a man who stole from him; it’s an epidemic. Those who are blind are herded into a disused mental hospital and if they try to leave, they’re shot. The packed mental hospital descends into chaos; a bunch of men take control of the food and force the rest to give them their possessions and then rape the women. But one woman can see. She kills one of the blind men, sets fire to the hospital, and then escapes with her husband and some others – because by then the whole country is blind, those guarding the hospital too. They forage their way through the city, which has also descended into chaos. Everything is just filthy, anything edible is food. There is no organisation any longer, there’s just nonsense.

Lots of big ideas here – how quickly society and civilisation break down, that blindness is simply not seeing, that books unread are invisible, that people may as well be nameless – no great speeches, just some good lines and the overall impression of chaotic filth. It’s a pretty amazing read altogether, leaving a strong impression behind.

Orpheus Lost

2007-05-12T10:35:00.001+10:00

This novel by Janette Turner Hospital follows the lives of three different people; Leela, an American mathematician, Cobb, her childhood friend who is a mercenary, and Mishka, her Australian lover. It’s set now, or a bit in the future, in America. More bombings are happening. Leela’s brought in for questioning, and it turns out that Mishka actually knows the guy who blew himself up the previous day. And the guy questioning her is Cobb.

This story races along, with plenty of action interspersed with childhood flashbacks and description. All the fundamentals (such as mathematics) turn out to be false, nothing is quite what it seems. It’s about as subtle as a sledge-hammer, although there’s some disturbing undercurrents which are never resolved – like Leela being punished for her sexuality (cast out by her family, interrogated by a jealous Cobb, harassed by her professor, hassled by her secretive boyfriend). In the end the dark side redeems itself, while the real evil remains murky and unnamed, or is simply “America” or “the current political regime”.

Apparently some of this novel was published earlier as short pieces, which explains why it feels a bit piecemeal. There is something too ordinary about this novel to be powerful, too obvious, “torture is bad, terrorism is bad, people must stand up for what they believe in”. It’s powerful because it’s immediate, it’s taking the situation as is and just taking it to a new level, but without the complexity which most thinking people know are inherent. I liked this, but the way Leela was written disturbs me more than the violence, and I don’t know whether that was in any way intentional, or whether it’s actually the whole point.

Five Red Herrings

2007-05-12T10:32:00.000+10:00

This isn’t the greatest book that Dorothy L Sayers wrote. It’s more like a mathematics exercise actually (the kind where you’re given sixty eggs, twenty boys and $1.25 a kilo and it’s all supposed to mean something). There’s one passage which is good, where she delves into some human psychology quite successfully, but the rest is not much fun to read, which is a pity, because she’s capable of profound thought.

An artist in an artist’s colony is found dead, with a picture next to him, still wet. So an artist is the murderer. We follow where each of the artists went on the fateful morning. Lord Peter Wimsy tells us in the end who did it. He also tells us that it’s not really murder because the dead bloke wasn’t very nice. Sayers doesn’t really sidetrack, just gives us an immense amount of boring data to work the sum out with, most of it (of course) consisting of red herrings. The most annoying part is that it’s set in Scotland so she has half the characters speaking broad Scots which is both patronising and incomprehensible. None of the women come across particularly well either. The problem with Sayers is that she was a snob; her worst books reveal it, her best transcend it. This isn’t one of her best.

The Top Ten (writers pick their favourite books)

2007-04-30T07:39:00.003+10:00

This is a book of lists, edited by J. Peder Zane – a book review editor for a newspaper. He evidently wrote to a lot of writers and asked them for their top ten books. He then wrote a one-paragraph review of every book listed. There’s also some longer reviews by a few of the writers, and two longer essays about books and reading.

The purpose of this book and the reason I bought it is one and the same; to isolate, from the mass of books out there, a few that you simply shouldn’t miss. There’s definitely a couple which hopefully will appear on this blog in the near future. The shortcomings of the book, however, is that he didn’t ask any children’s literature authors, with the result that only maybe five of the three hundred and sixty five books listed are children’s lit. And he missed on the probably unique points of view he would have gained by included the greats such as Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowry and Madeleine L’Engle (most of his authors are American – most, I hadn’t heard of, although there’s Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey, and a fair few Brits as well). The other shortcoming is that most of my top ten aren’t listed at all, which means the kinds of books I like are probably not the kinds of books these authors are keen on. But out of the several hundred there’ll be a few I’ll be very glad to discover, I’m sure.

Letter from New York

2007-04-30T07:39:00.001+10:00

This is a series of five-minute “talks” that Helene Hanff gave on BBC radio between ’78 and ’84 about everyday life in New York, where she lived. They’re witty, exuberant and inoffensive, and filled with all sorts of interesting details about how Thanksgiving was celebrated, what happens at Easter and on St Patrick’s Day, and how Autumn is the unofficial new start to the year. She meant all this to be how it’s different from living in London (or even any other city in the world or in the US), but now of course it’s about how it was a different time, as well as place. 1984 doesn’t feel like so long ago, but it is, I guess.

She details the lives of her friends (and their dogs; far, far too much time is taken up detailing the lives of dogs!) as well as her own; she talks about the history of particular incidents, and she describes special places such as Central Park. It certainly does make you want to go visit there. I picked up the book because of her name, of course – 84 Charing Cross Road is a really original classic – and it’s her personality, rough and generous, that makes this little book of letters stand out as well. It’s a tame read, but a good one, about a time that I suppose has disappeared, even if the place has remained.

The Discovery of Slowness

2007-04-30T07:38:00.001+10:00

I can’t get over how good this book by Sten Nadolny is. When you think how lauded all sorts of crap is, and then you come across this lying on the shelf, it’s astonishing. I had no idea. You really think this would be especially talked about in Australia, set as a text etc, but no. They go with rubbish like Life of Pi.

This simply and clearly written story follows the life of John Franklin. He experiences life more slowly than other people. He can’t catch a ball, he can’t catch a bully. It takes him longer to perceive things and therefore he has to soak himself in the details and really know something before moving on. At first he sees this as something to overcome; it comes to him later that it is a gift of sorts, or at least a personality type. Later he decides that it needs a slow person and a fast person together to make good decisions.

He joins the navy and experiences a battle, and therefore a life-long distaste for war and violence. He joins Matthew Flinders on his trip to Australia. He travels to the Arctic to seek the North-West passage. It was only at this point that it clicked that this wasn’t just a novel. He wrote a book about it and became famous and then became governor of Tasmania and did some great reforms. Then he went to the Arctic again and died. This had actually been the only thing I had known about John Franklin; his ship getting stuck in the Arctic and everyone dying. How incredible, when he did all these other things!

What an amazing life, and what an amazingly well written book. It’s written by a German, I can just imagine the purplish horror this would have been if an American had written it. It’s so understated, perfectly so, the sentences so quiet, every word placed together carefully and neatly. He has turned a diamond of a life and shown it from a completely unique angle, so that it is something never seen before, something beautiful. I need to seek out other books by this brilliant writer.

The Road

2007-04-15T10:42:00.003+10:00

I heard about this new book by Cormac McCarthy on the ABC. I quite like end of the world novels, so I thought I’d give it a go. It’s certainly very readable; I got through it in just a few hours. I’m not quite sure what it’s trying to say, however.

A man and his son are trudging along the roads through a burned USA, trying to get south to where they hope other people and a better life might lie. It’s really just a hopeful destination as they’ve got nowhere else to go. Most people are dead, and they scavenge food and shelter as best they can, protecting themselves from the bad people who are likely to eat them. In the end, the man dies, and the boy – who seems about four or so – latches onto another family group.

There’s no explanation of what has caused the end of the world scenario, although it’s inferred that it’s worldwide and there are barely any people or animals left. It’s funny reading about burned forests as a symbol of hopelessness, because as an Australian a burned forest is about renewal; it’s the only way, actually, that certain native plants can be propagated at all. That’s certainly not what’s meant here.

This book is a snapshot rather than a narrative. McCarthy has decided to throw out both commas and apostrophes in negative contractions (e.g. won’t, shouldn’t) – and if there’s some deep dark reason for that, it eludes me. There’s a lot of long plain sentences, and the style does feel slightly derivative. A great book should have a voice of its own; this doesn’t, but it’s still a pretty good read.

The Three Incestuous Sisters

2007-04-15T10:42:00.001+10:00

I don’t really like the title of this visual novel by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s not the kind of thing you want sitting on your shelf, when the actual book itself is something I feel proud to own – proud, because it was selling for sixty bucks and I got it for a fraction of the price. It’s a beautiful concrete piece of artistry, something real and solid in a way that an ordinary book isn’t. It’s filled with amazing artwork (it took her 14 years to create) and a very simple storyline. It’s a fairytale, albeit a dark and twisted one, and so there does have to be three sisters in it. They’re not incestuous however, and you feel she chose the title for its sensational nature.

The three sisters are divided by a man, one who loves, one who is rejected, one who is tormented by possibility. There’s strange magic at work and there’s ordinary love and extraordinary bitterness. The end reminds me of a Margaret Mahy story about a trapeze artist and a forest or the Jostein Gaarder story about the lost little girl who is found. It’s messy and very, very weird, but it’s really beautiful and different, which is why I like it.

Pictures of the Night

2007-04-15T10:41:00.001+10:00

This final book in the Egerton House series by Adele Geras uses the Snow White fairytale as its basis. Bella’s stepmother has hated her all her life, and now Bella is wondering whether she’s even trying to kill her . . . three odd attempts on her life, not easily explained, end with Bella taking her life in her own hands and choosing exactly what that life is going to be.

The details of being in Paris in the sixties are fascinating, as are the different characters she meets. This tale leans a little more towards the supernatural than the other two, but Geras sensibly leaves it unexplained. As in the previous books, it’s told in a mixture of letter and diary entries, and the story fairly races along. The only problem with these books is that they’re too short! This was a great end to a great trilogy.

Postcards from No Man's Land

2007-04-15T10:40:00.002+10:00

This is a coming-of-age YA novel by Aidan Chambers. It’s about a teenage boy who goes to Amsterdam to attend a ceremony in honour of the English soldiers – including his grandfather – who died in WW2 in Holland. It’s also the story of the teenage girl who met and loved his grandfather during the war.

For some reason, I really disliked Chambers’ style. It’s a fascinating story about a particular incident during the war, but I didn’t feel that it was well-told; in fact, his style seemed to hinder understanding of what actually went on. There’s Jacob (the boy’s) story of discovering his sexuality etc in Amsterdam; there’s Geetrui (the girl’s) story of discovering love etc in wartime; and then there’s bits and pieces shoved in from other people, soldiers and women who were there, about one of the battles. There’s no clear overview of what actually did happen; Chambers instead focuses on the fact that Geetrui had the grandfather’s baby, which you could see coming a mile off. The language which Chambers deliberately tries to keep modern has sadly already dated, only a few years after its publication, and the things that the writer seems to find so shocking just aren’t to a modern reader. It won all sorts of awards, and I can see it being set as a high school text (especially the passages where Chambers amuses himself with various big words – there’s a term for that, but I won’t write it -) but it doesn’t work as a story, which is a pity, because it’s a particular time in history that I’d like to know more about.

The Sea

2007-04-15T10:40:00.001+10:00

John Banville’s novel won the Man Booker prize last year, and after reading it I understand why that decision was so controversial. It’s not a bad book – it’s very readable, with interesting language and a good flowing storyline – but it’s fairly pedestrian, especially compared to the competition – Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Apparently in his acceptance speech he said something about being grateful to the judges for rewarding a ‘real novel’; by which I suppose he meant a ‘real old-fashioned honest to goodness novel novel’. Old-fashioned can mean classic or it can mean dated, though, and I feel that in the 21st century, his book is dated.

Basically – Max has lost his wife. He goes to live in a boarding house where he once holidayed as a child, and where he had all his ‘coming-of-age’ moments; first kiss, finding out about adult secrets, witnessing death. He’s losing it to alcohol and to the past, and in the end his adult daughter comes to take him away. A simple enough story, and it’s fairly well told, but the language is pretentious (although near the end I did wonder if it was deliberately so, because it’s written in the first person about an unpleasant art critic, who would of course speak and write pretentiously – for example, he never uses contractions, even in direct speech, and that’s just crazy). The twist at the end is rather silly (landlady turns out to be Rose, the girl in the background got old, and she’s a lesbian, though he doesn’t state it so blandly). It’s one of those books which focus on the ugly and unpleasant – deliberately, I’d say, he’s depressed and so forth – but in spite of that it’s not too difficult to read. Of course, Ishiguro has already won a Booker prize, so fair enough giving it to Banville, but if you’re going to award prizes on that basis, you may as well hand it over to Martin Amis and be done with it. It’s an all right book, but it’s not one to jump up and down about.

Watching the Roses

2007-04-15T10:39:00.002+10:00

This time, Adele Geras tackles the Sleeping Beauty fairy-tale, and manages to inject an enormous sense of impending doom as she does so. Alice has had her 18th birthday – something terrible happened there. She lies in her room seemingly in a coma while the lives of those around her stop in sorrow and grief. The roses which her father lovingly cultivate rot and grow wild around their home.

The interesting choice Geras has made here is the kiss which begins the horror and the kiss which ends it. There’s the difference between a chosen embrace and a forced one; the difference between two men, or boys, fighting to get what they want or fighting for the right to it. As in her previous book, Geras decides to return the choice to the woman in the story which again makes it a far more interesting version of the fairytale.

Ballerina

2007-04-15T10:39:00.001+10:00

This novel by Vicki Baum reminds me of a lot of other 1950’s vintage ballet stories – the old ballerina reliving her life and wondering if it was all worth it, etc. This one is quite well written and interesting, but at the same time pretty depressing, in the same way most of them are, because for someone who is not a ballerina it simply doesn’t ever seem worth it. The actual dancing part is difficult, maybe impossible, to express in words, which leaves the performance and the hard work and the insecurity of it all – in other words, the negative side.

Like most novelists, Baum focuses on the relationships – one with an arrogant ballet dancer, with an arrogant Spanish bull fighter, with a not so arrogant American doctor. They’re all slightly stereotypical, but interesting enough. The language is the same – typical 1950’s attempt to be realistic and hard-bitten (though for some reason whenever I see Lesbian with a capital in the middle of a sentence it always makes me laugh). In the end the ballerina decides that actually it wasn’t all worth it, gives it up and goes back to her husband. You do feel that it probably wasn’t the best move on either part, but you also don’t feel that any of them deserve any great happiness, either.

The Tower Room

2007-04-15T10:38:00.001+10:00

This is a clever take on the Rapunzel fairy-story by Adele Geras. It’s set in an English boarding school in the 1950s, where three girls are champing at the bit to be released into the real world. Megan’s an ordinary sensible girl, and doesn’t expect all that much – certainly not to fall madly in love with the young lab assistant who insists on climbing up the scaffolding outside her window and introducing her to some new experiences.

While it’s a fairly simple tale, it’s intensely readable and has a few clever twists – for example, in this version, her hair is not cut off by the witch in order to foil the prince, but by Megan herself, with the realisation that it’s her hair, her life, her decision. Love isn’t eternal, the witch isn’t all-powerful, and the coming-of-age isn’t neat or complete, either. A pretty unusual and well-thought out YA novel.

My Country, Right or Left

2007-04-15T10:36:00.000+10:00

This is a collection of George Orwell’s essays and other writings, from when he was a journalist during WW2. I never realised before what a young man he was – he died at 42 after years of TB. His books have a solid kind of wisdom about them which made me assume he was an older man. His essays, however, betray that like everyone else, he was a man of his time, with only the amount of knowledge and understanding that his age and experience could give him.

There’s quite a few interesting tidbits here – a review of Mein Kampf, a discussion of the Indian freedom issues (with a fair few mentions of Ghandi), some descriptions of being an air raid warden in London. There’s some early discussion about American Imperialism and the growing anti-American feeling in Britain, which is interesting, as well as some views on the impossibility of using peaceful solutions in a violent world (pre-Martin Luther and the exit of the Brits from India, of course!) There’s diary excerpts and letters as well, plus a short autobiography. It’s only one of four books of essays (I picked it out of a box of second hand books) but it’s an interesting one, from a man who did a lot in his short life.

Is & Cold Shoulder Road

2007-03-11T17:32:00.001+11:00

Joan Aiken was one of the most gifted and original children’s authors ever. These two novels are part of her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, which is a very long fantasy/historical series set in an alternate Jacobean era. I have a vague feeling I’d either read or skimmed the first one, but the second was completely new to me. They were both excellent, however. The storytelling, characterisation and language is impeccable. I loved them.

Is Dwite lives with her sister Penny in the forest of Willoughby Chase. A man is chased by wolves through the forest and they rescue him. He dies, but as he does so they discover he’s their uncle, searching for his missing son. Is promises to find him. She searches through London and then up North, where Northumberland has been declared a separate kingdom. It’s actually a town where children work in the mines and die like flies. Is finds her cousin and frees the children.

In the second book, she returns south with her cousin to find the rest of his family. They’re part of an odd group called the Silent Sect – they never speak and use signs rarely. The children sneak out and rebel by playing word-games. The south is under siege by a mafia smuggling group. Is manages to reunite her cousin with his mother and free the south from the smugglers.

It’s the brilliant details in the books which make it so original. Spiders the size of dogs who are lulled by pipe-music; people living in boats trapped in trees after a storm; the Channel Tunnel through which wolves travel to warmer climes; secret messages written on pancakes with sugar. The characters have their own language, a mix of English dialect and rhyming slang, and people really do die and really do suffer, without sentimentality. It’s almost a better Dickens, and it certainly never, ever underestimates children’s abilities to enjoy real, well-written literature. You don’t get depth and richness like this anymore, and you never got it in Australian lit. It’s British and it’s gold-quality and it’s Aiken’s own, from the first word to the last.

Out of the Dust

2007-03-11T17:31:00.001+11:00

This is a novel in verse for young adults by Karen Hesse. It’s only the second novel in verse for YA that I’ve come across, and interestingly enough this is also historical fiction. It’s set during the thirties when half of America turned to dust and blew away, and it’s written in free verse, through the eyes of a young girl who endures some pretty horrific stuff. Considering the media, it’s an easily followed story-line, well-told.

An aspiring pianist, the young girl loses her mother and unborn brother when there’s an accident involving kerosene. She also damages her hands. At the same time poverty is overtaking their rural community because of the world-wide depression and the long-term degradation of the land. It’s a simply structured story – hopefulness followed by hopelessness followed by new hope once again. The resolution is not too easy and yet it does provide closure to a fairly horrific story.

The use of verse (while innovative) does tend to distance the reader from the action. Verse novels are a difficult thing because generally what a novel is trying to do is different from a poem. It’s fairly effective, but it’s not a genre that’s going to take off any time soon.

Stephen Fry’s Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music

2007-03-11T17:30:00.000+11:00

This is a bit of a whirlwind tour through western art music from earliest days to basically the end of the twentieth century, written in collaboration between Stephen Fry and Tim Lihoreau. Apparently it was initially a radio show and was put down on paper after that. It’s full of the usual British jokes, sans the kind of filth Stephen Fry prefers (see The Ode Less Travelled) because of radio censorship rules I guess. And it does a pretty good job of covering the major trends of western art music, making you want to go listen to some stuff that you hadn’t heard before – which, I suppose, is the point. Some of the jokes are fairly lame, and you can tell Stephen Fry isn’t as keen on Baroque as, say, I am, but then it’s kind of interesting having the whole thing written from the perspective of a devout Wagnerian. He does put up the argument that modern music – e.g film music – is today’s “classical”, while not really recognising that at the same time Beethoven was composing, all sorts of folk music was going on which I think is a better equivalency to the popular music of our day. This is a small part of the whole, however, and basically it’s a fairly good overview which is good to dip into, a little heavy to swallow in one go.

The River at Green Knowe

2007-02-19T07:52:00.000+11:00

This book by Lucy M Boston is quite different to the other ones. Mostly I think it’s because there’s no Mrs Oldknowe, the grandmother who believes and is connected to the old stories, ghosts and magic. Instead there are two other old ladies, pleasant enough, but who don’t believe. The magic that the three children discover is in the river and islands surrounding Green Knowe – a giant, flying horses, a mouse house – but is not so connected to the place itself, because the children and adults aren’t as connected.

There are two interesting themes; one is of displaced persons, which is what the children are (refugees from Burma and Russia) and the other is the difference between child-like wonder and belief, and the jaded view of adults who can’t allow themselves to believe. The things around the children become what they imagine – wood becomes a giant, a boy pretending to be a mouse becomes a midget – while the real magic in front of the adults’ eyes is invisible to them.

The freedom of spending days and days on the river and in the islands with picnics and wonderful suppers is enticing, and is very English story-tale; but unlike those stories, the heroes aren’t the children, it’s the world they discover, and it’s a limited world because they are still at the end displaced people, and Green Knowe itself is limited to those who believe. In short, another magic realism story which leads rather than pushes you to the wonderful ideas contained inside.

The Pinhoe Egg

2007-02-19T07:51:00.001+11:00

This is Diana Wynne Jones’ latest Chrestomanci book. They’re sort of a series, in that they’re all set in the same set of worlds and feature some of the same characters, although every book is complete in itself. This one has her trademark mix of magic and common sense, and it’s set in her kind of England, one which missed most of the industrial revolution. Magic is getting out of control in the villages surrounding Chrestomanci castle; it’s a mess which only Chrestomanci, the nine-lifed magician, can resolve.

Wynne Jones does a good job of writing children, which is why she’s so successful. They’re not all-knowing and brilliant either; she strongly believes (read her autobiography and you’ll see why) that children should be allowed to be children, irresponsible, and directed by a wise(r) adult. While they might have magic powers, they’re like any other talented kid in our world, and need to be trained up and nurtured by people who care. What she hates most of all is apathy and neglect. The end of her stories – in this series – are often the same; the neglected child is taken off to be trained up at Chrestomanci castle.

She introduces a new magic in this book called “dwimmer”, which is kind of the magic of the land, and she introduces the old English folk-tale creatures related to that, such as unicorns and hobgoblins. At the same time she’s got a kind of technology magic going on, with Roger inventing a flying-machine, and her usual painstaking mathematical kind of magic as well. She’s added a few new characters and a few really surprising situations and twists, and resolved a couple of things from previous books. It’s not sharply new or brilliant, but it’s very readable and solid and interesting, and that’s still pretty rare.

Forever in Blue

2007-02-19T07:51:00.000+11:00

This is the fourth book by Ann Brashares in the “Travelling Pants” series. The four girls have left school and are doing different things. They haven’t spent time together in ages and they’re finding that the travelling pants aren’t connecting them any longer.

Interesting theme, because the different stories also seemed disconnected. Each one of them are doing very different things – Lena’s doing an art course and having sex; Tibby’s doing a scriptwriting course and having sex; Bridget’s on a dig in Turkey and nearly having sex (with a married man); and Carmen’s acting in a play and not having sex. This is really the book where they’re moving out of adolescence into adulthood and Brashere’s attempting to do it in a natural way. It pretty much works. It’s simplistic, but not overly, and the resolutions aren’t too neat – the only real resolution is their decisions to stay friends, rather than allow the pants to do all the work – and while they’re learning lessons, it’s clear that they’ve got about a million more to go.

Brashares writes in a clear prose which won’t date the books overly, and yet still gives it a young, fresh feel; her characters aren’t too articulate to be realistic, and yet don’t rely too much on colloquialisms which will fade within a year or so. The difficulty with following four characters separately is that none of them can be explored with a lot of depth. There are good moments in all of them, but it’s a tying up of the series rather than a serious coming-of-age novel.

The Line Between

2007-02-19T07:49:00.000+11:00

This set of short stories by Peter S Beagle is like all his stuff; of mixed quality. There’s some really good stuff – A Dance for Emilia, for example, which has exactly the right mood for its content, a story about loss. There’s some silly stuff (ala The Last Unicorn) such as his Four Fables. And there’s some clever, interesting stuff (ala Giant Bones) like the story, Quarry. It would be hard to please everyone in a collection with such disparate stories included, but it’s not too bad; you can see the workings of his mind, the workings of a writer, and that’s an interesting thing.

The reviewer compared him to Tolkein (has there ever, ever been a fantasy writer not compared with Tolkein?) but he isn’t at all, of course; he actually reminds me a lot of Ray Bradbury. He has a very American voice, unmistakable, and a kind voice, an earnest voice. He puts a lot into his writing, and he enjoys it; with the result that we enjoy it, too.

Exhumation

2007-02-19T07:48:00.000+11:00

This is a mix of reviews, essays and some short stories by Christopher Isherwood who wrote some novels in the thirties and a few plays, too. I doubt he’s well-known (I mean even in literary circles) today. He isn’t bad, but he’s not great, not one to last the ages. His work is like a mix between Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, without their uniqueness – in which case, you may as well just read Greene or Waugh. It’s serviceable stuff, but not outstanding.

He certainly was a twentieth century man – the usual British upbringing, then Spain and Germany in the thirties, and the US in the sixties where he became a convert to a form of Hinduism – and his work is a good reflection of this. His book reviews are interesting as historical documents; there’s a review of The Grapes of Wrath, just after it was published. And he was, of course – this is how I’d even heard of him – a great friend of Auden, so the things he writes about that poet are both pertinent and very interesting. For example, he says some of his more obscure poems were just a lot of lines from different poems put together in no particular order. Of course, it’d be more pertinent if Auden himself had said it. All in all, good enough, thoughtful enough, but not brilliant.

The House of the Scorpion

2007-01-31T08:02:00.000+11:00

I’ve read one book by Nancy Farmer before – that’s The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm - and I’ve always remembered it, even though I just read it once, because it was so unusual. This is another memorable book, just as good. It’s set in the future, in a land which is a strip between Mexico and the US, and which was created to grow and control the opium trade. It’s run by a dictator, who uses mindless slaves to bolster his power. And he’s all-powerful, because he’s ruthless. And he’s 140 years old, because he clones himself and uses pieces of the clones to fix up his body.

The story is told from the perspective of one of his clones (and it’s quite a companion piece to that other great clone book by Kazuo Ishiguro!) Matt is seen as an animal by most people, apart from the maid who takes care of him, and his bodyguard, Tam Lin, who has come from Scotland, who has seen a different world. He grows up and learns (with some pains, which is good writing) to be different from the man whose genes he shares. He learns to idolise that man, and has to suffer in order to find the truth which is all around him – that he’s living in a very evil place.

This is a really fast-paced read, with fantastic characterisation, very realistic settings and totally believable ideas. Farmer balances quite a few big themes, and manages them pretty well. And it’s got one of the best and most unexpected “I love you” scenes I’ve read. A really good, really well-written story.

An Enemy at Green Knowe

2007-01-31T08:01:00.001+11:00

Someone said to me, when I was complaining about how bad a book was, “But it was a children’s book!” Well, this is also a children’s book, from an entire series of children’s books by Lucy M Boston, and I have no cause for complaint. There are exactly five characters in this book – Mrs Oldknow, Tolly, Ping, evil Melanie and the scholar – and there is one setting, the house, Green Knowe. And the plot is derivative, you might say, because Melanie is a witch who curses the house in one plague after another. None of those things sums up why this book is good and other books are crap. Certainly not either because of, or in spite of, those characteristics. There’s something else special about it, and that’s, I think, the fact that the writer believed in the place, the story, and the people – that they were utterly real, not just their existence but what they meant.

Actually, the house is real, and I’d love one day to visit it – it’s an open house now, somewhere in England, where you can look at the rooms and even some of the objects mentioned in the book. And the writer is sort of Mrs Oldknow, maybe. She told these stories – she said, to entertain herself – about the house and the time she lived (they’re written in the sixties – I think the way it is mentioned that Ping is Chinese alerts you to this) and about an attitude to the past, that the past is part of the present. She writes in a precise and solid and sensible way, and in fact you can imagine her firm storyteller’s voice as you read it.

I’ve always loved this series of books. I especially love it when the ghosts appear. I think it is solid English folklore, the mix of mythological Christianity, with its local saints, and the original Celtic/Briton background. This is the sort of book you could read to a mixed-aged group and everyone would enjoy it, and would probably enjoy the same things.

Tamsin

2007-01-31T08:01:00.000+11:00

Wow, this book by Peter S. Beagle was a find. How odd that his other book, “The Last Unicorn” is so lauded when this is a far better piece of work. The characterisation is just exactly right, the shift in mood works perfectly, and the story races along.

Jenny’s an American. Jenny’s mum marries an Englishman, so they move to an old house in Dorset. An old haunted house; a place which has awoken all the old things, like boggarts, the Wild Hunt, redcaps, Oakmen, all sorts of ancient British folklorish creatures. Most of all a ghost called Tamsin, who is waiting – for what? Well, this is a coming of age story, of course; Jenny has to learn to give things up in order for things to work out. She loves Tamsin – it’s a brilliantly written relationship – but like all ghost stories, it’s about learning to give up the one you love for their own good.

Beagle’s done a great job with a range of characters; the Americans sound American (it’s in first person, Jenny’s voice), the Brits sound British and the old ghosts from long ago sound old-fashioned but comprehensible. He’s a great storyteller; there’s enough detail without being tedious, and there’s a fabulous twist which you feel you should’ve seen coming but you never did. A few red herrings, too.

Parts of it do feel as though he’s devoured Briggs’ “Dictionary of Fairies” and he’s trying to regurgitate it for your benefit; although, oddly enough, his retelling of history – the Monmouth rebellion - doesn’t feel the least bit educational at all. He cleverly mixes modernity with the past without skipping a beat. A great read.

The White Stag

2007-01-31T08:00:00.001+11:00

This little story by Kate Seredy is a children’s version of how Hungary was founded – the myth, the legends, I suppose. I’d never associated “Hun” with “Hungary” at all; now I’ll never forget it, because this story is about Attila the Hun, told from the perspective of him and his people. It’s a fascinating idea, to present a sympathetic Attila to children! To most people he’s scarcely real, he’s like a demon, but in this story the Huns and the Romans and the Visigoths and the rest are all very real peoples, and the leaders, including Attila are altogether human.

It’s not just history; there’s Moonmaidens and a strange god and visions and Biblical language. I don’t know whether I would have enjoyed reading it as a child, but it’s the sort of book that would definitely work being read out loud, with Seredy’s wonderful illustrations – and the need to do some follow-up reading to ascertain how much is legend, how much truth. A very well told story.

Treasure of Green Knowe

2007-01-31T08:00:00.000+11:00

I’ve read these books by Lucy M Boston all out of order, but it doesn’t matter. This is the second one; Tolly returns to Green Knowe, afraid that the magic will have disappeared; it hasn’t, of course. There’s a threat that a picture of his 3 ghost friends might have to be sold, because they’re poor – but Tolly gets to work and finds some alternate treasure, and an alternate ghost, too, while he’s at it. The most exciting part in the book is where Granny’s telling him an ancient story and you realise that he’s in the story, because he stepped into the past just that morning . ..

This would be a fabulous book to read or hear out loud. The atmosphere is everything. Boston is so clever, cleverer than most children’s authors, because she doesn’t try to make her child characters too wise – they remain child-like, innocent and quite ordinary, not strangely gifted or unduly burdened like many child heroes. The magic is not in the children, but in the place itself, simply for being old and hosting the past. No one can help be part of it, through stories, through the objects that have been passed down. This is a true thing; the magic is another way of saying it. A wonderful book.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

2007-01-23T11:08:00.002+11:00

This Scottish classic by Muriel Spark is definitely as good as everyone says. It's funny, sad, clever and very well written. Miss Jean Brodie is a school teacher in the thirties who assures her students that she is in her "prime", and therefore she has to do what she wants. This includes supporting fascism, embarking on affairs, and manipulating the lives of her students in more and more sinister ways.

There's a couple of clever things that Spark does. One is that she doesn't build up her story in an ordinary chronological way, leading to a climax. She lets you know casually who the "betrayer" is, early on in the piece, and how people will end up dying, and that none of it is going to turn out the way anyone thinks or wants. And yet at the same time she's creating a more and more solid picture of the characters, especially the characters who matter. Even though in the beginning you're introduced to the "Brodie girls" at an older age, it's half-way through before you realise you've been reading all about Sandy.

It's very interesting historically, especially as a piece of Edinburgh history, even apart from the psychology of the characters and the quick, clever plot. The only thing that sucked was the introduction. Usually I enjoy these in the Penguin Classics series; this was terrible, and the woman is obviously an idiot.

The Piano Tuner

2007-01-23T11:08:00.001+11:00

This is Daniel Mason's first novel, and it's very good. It's about a fictional incident in the 19th century, where the War Office requests a man called Edgar Drake to travel into the jungles of Burma in order to tune the piano of an important British Officer. A thousand myths have grown up around this officer; Drake, an unassuming man who is happy in his small life, agrees to go.

There's good bits and bad bits. Sometimes he gets a bit overlyrical, where being plain would've done better; sometimes the story slows down. And sometimes you feel as though there's too much 21st century opinion accidently leaking in. Were people really so accepting of difference, a hundred and fifty years ago? I doubt it. However, it's a really well-written story in its subtleties. The important British Officer is nothing like his myths, and even Edgar Drake isn't the man he thought he was. Burma isn't a simple answer.

The writing style is unique, with a mix of embedded and traditional dialogue, and a good balance between description and action. There are enough incidents to show us the change in Edgar, and there's very little explanation of what people must be feeling. I thought the whole "Englishman falls for native woman" thing a really overused and unnecessary device, but at least it was only a small part of the novel. A good work.

Ways of Seeing

2007-01-23T11:08:00.000+11:00

This is a book about art by John Berger. Apparently it's very famous; I just heard about it in a reference in one of Alexander McCall Smith's books. One day I'll write a list of all the books I discovered through other books. Anyway, this is a really interesting set of essays on art. There's essays on oil painting, on women in art, on class and art. It was written in the seventies and you can feel the sort of anger that people felt comfortable with then.

There's also a few visual essays, where there's just the paintings and you're supposed to think about them yourself. One of the interesting things that he says about painting is that it's silent - with everything else you've got that voice reading and analysing in your head, but looking at a painting, it's you and the thing and it's quiet. So he has some silent essays there.

This is the kind of book you dip into, think about, think about over a long time, talk to other people about, think about while you're looking at paintings. It's filled with interesting thoughts. They might not be all true, but they've been thought about, hard, which is more than I've ever done about art anyway.

Songlines

2007-01-23T11:07:00.001+11:00

I've read stuff by Bruce Chatwin before; he's an English writer who travels and researches and puts together books which are thoughtful and interesting. This particular one is about his visit to the Northern Territory, in order to find out about "songlines", or the way that the Aboriginal people of that area saw the land and their totems.

It's good to read a book that doesn't brand Australians as "friendly, casual people" and instead highlights the racism, drunkeness and stupidity which also characterises the average person. It was also good that the Aboriginal people that Chatwin met were also given a balanced overview. The actual information about the songlines was fascinating, and completely new to me - illustrating just how limited my knowledge is, and I'd say, most Australians knowledge is about Aboriginal culture.

It's a good book, although there's a large chunk in the middle where he just quotes random people about Darwinism and war and a whole lot of things which don't relate to anything. Kind of interesting but out of place, and it really ruins the flow of the book. It ends very randomly, too. The first half chugs along well, but the editor should have made him redo the rest of it. An important book to read, but maybe the author was resting on his laurels a bit.

A Circle of Quiet

2007-01-23T11:07:00.000+11:00

Madeleine L'Engle's style is partly refreshingly naive, and partly irritatingly self-consciously naive. She says several times that people have told her she has a habit of saying obvious things in a very serious manner, as though it were new. That is a very true statement. And yet, as she writes for YA, those obvious things probably are new to them. This book, however, is for adults; it's a collection of her thoughts during one summer in the seventies when she was probably in the height of her writing. It's a fantastic insight into a very interesting person, and the limitations of her being an interesting person but not a genius and not perfect. She's persisted, she's done a lot, writing heaps of books as well as raising a family, and doing a good job of that; but in some places I feel like she's put a barrier around the edges of her mind, and that barrier is her Christianity. She butts against it - not doubting the concepts, but trying to reach beyond what she sees as fog to something clearer - but she refuses to actually break down the wall and really seek the truth. Because she likes the sturdiness of the fence, maybe, and all the people standing inside it. Well, there's an extended metaphor which is very L'Engle like, probably says nothing much at all. Good book if you like her works and you'd like an insight into her character; it wouldn't make much sense otherwise.

The Death of Napoleon

2007-01-23T11:06:00.000+11:00

This little novella by Simon Lees won a trillion awards. I don't really see why. It's more like a short story, a long one I guess. Maybe it was such, originally. It's not bad, it's kind of interesting, and it'd be really interesting if you loved Napoleon; it's written fairly well, and it's quite entertaining. But it's not the best thing I've ever read in my life. I wouldn't be pouring awards on it. Basically Napoleon switches places with a loyal Captain, goes back to France, originally wants to get back his empire, but things have changed, he can't do that any more. His only victory is in helping to set up a melon-selling business. And then he dies. There you go! A bit clever and ironic and so forth. But not exactly utter brilliance. Maybe it was a dry year for awards back then.

The Thirteenth Tale

2007-01-23T11:05:00.000+11:00

The fact that this first novel by Diane Setterfield was going to be an utter piece of crap should have been foretold by several things; the fact that it was lauded as being good, and it's a best-seller; the photo of the author in the front cover; the way the bookshops were trying to hock it. It is a bland gothic horror story, which is utterly ridiculous, has no sense of existing in any real world. The characters aren't real - the worst of them is the "writer" who writes such terrible purplish prose it's hysterical - and there's no real sense of place and overall it's just silly nonsense. Why, why, why are such books loved when better versions of them exist? Books like this depress me.

The Bookseller of Kabul

2006-12-30T13:19:00.001+11:00

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

2006-12-30T13:19:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-30T13:18:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-30T13:17:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-30T13:16:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-19T06:55:00.001+11:00

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

2006-12-19T06:55:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-19T06:54:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-11T07:51:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-11T07:50:00.000+11:00

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

2006-12-03T10:47:00.000+11:00

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.