BOOK REVIEW: All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve, fiction, Abacus, paperback, 2003, 322 pages.
Knowing very little about Anita Shreve’s work, I picked up All He Ever Wanted after reading somewhere online that it references Virginia Woolf’s notion from A Room of One’s Own that ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. More broadly, this is often taken as a claim for women’s independence. All He Ever Wanted tips its hat to this idea but it’s not its central force.
BOOK REVIEW: The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton, fiction, Pan Macmillan Australia, large-format paperback, 2001, 434 pages.
The first night I began to read The Ill-Made Mute, I put my lack of interest down to being tired. But as my reading progressed over subsequent days, my interest continued to flat-line. At the 200 pages mark, I called it quits. Read the rest of this entry
BOOK REVIEW: Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, fiction, Fourth Estate – Harper Collins, large format paperback, 2004, 307 pages.
se-duc-tive –adjective
tending to seduce; enticing; beguiling; captivating: a seductive smile.
Purple Hibiscus is a seductive book.
Set in Nigeria during a military coup, it charts the development of Kambili, the 15 year old protagonist, from petrified, silent schoolgirl, terrorised by her zealously religious father, to awakening young adult, learning to stand up for herself.
The catalyst for this change is her Aunty Ifeoma, and the joyful approach she and her three children have towards life. Kambili and her elder brother, Jaja, holiday with their aunt and, during this time, filigrees of change are wrought.
You’re starting to undress already, aren’t you? Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Let me explain what I mean when I say Purple Hibiscus is seductive.
When I think about this book, there are a number of elements to it that are identifiably cliched. For instance, there’s the young girl who awakens to an awareness of her self and others; there’s the poor but joyful relation who remains buoyant and optimistic in the face of poverty and political uncertainty; and there’s the oppressive father who terrorises his children but is outwardly perceived as a pillar of the community.
Now, cliches are generally thought to be the last bastion of the unimaginative. And they’re often uninteresting because we’ve seen them so often before. But cliches are double-edged creatures. The reason why they’re cliches and why we’ve seen them so often before is because, quite simply, they work.
What Adichie has done is take a few cliches and make them work for her. They provide structure and plot, and she infuses them with a sometimes joyous, sometimes horrifying, reality. But she also slightly subverts them, which not only showcases the less-than-perfect world we live in but also creates a book strong on complexity, intelligence and real world colour.
For example, if we take a look at the storyline of the young girl awakening to adulthood, Kambili awakens to a reality that’s far from pleasant, involving as it does tragic parental behaviour and, to a lesser extent, the state of Nigeria. It’s not the fairytale arrival which often accompanies coming-of-age stories.
Similarly, in relation to the cliche of the oppressive father, Adichie uses the friction inherently generated by such a character to sustain the writing over many pages. But she chooses to cloud our condemnation of him by ensuring that we see that Kambili loves him even though she also fears him. Kambili’s love shows us that he is a father and has a relationship with his daughter even though it’s an undesirable one. It creates a complex reality that isn’t easily reconciled.
In case I’m making this book sound somewhat bleak and possibly, difficult, I want to point out, it’s not. Not completely, anyway. As the title suggests, ‘purple hibiscus’ is the metaphor that grounds the book. At the very beginning of the novel Kambili says:
Aunty Ifeoma’s little garden next to the verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.
So purple hibiscus represent freedom and though rare, remain something to seek, something to try and attain. Similarly, Kambili’s attempts at freedom — to be who she wants to be — while rare, remain something to hope for, something to try and attain. Hope is at the core of this novel and it’s hope that we’re left with at its end.
Part of the charm of Purple Hibiscus – an additional reason why you might want to take your clothes off again, metaphorically speaking, of course – is its characters. I’ve already mentioned the honest portrayal of emotions from Kambili towards her father — well, there are additional relationships in this novel which are as complicated.
In fact, one of the things this novel does well is display the relationships that exist or develop between characters, particularly those involving Kambili. There is a sense of real depth in her relationships with her brother, mother, aunt, cousin and then a young, good looking priest whom she meets while staying with her aunt. How is that last relationship resolved? I can only say, read the book.
Opulent characterisation and defiant twisting of cliche, hovering over twin heartbeats of freedom and hope — can you see why I think Purple Hibiscus is seductive?
Purple Hibiscus is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest release is a book of short stories entitled The Thing Around Your Neck.
I haven’t got anything much else to add except to say, I really liked this book so I reckon you should go out and read it, nude or otherwise.
BOOK REVIEW: Something Might Happen by Julie Myerson, fiction, Vintage, paperback, 2004, 328 pages.
After being recently bowled over by Julie Myerson’s wonderful book, Home, I eagerly sought out some of her fiction — in this case, Something Might Happen. Unfortunately, there’s no way of getting around this, I’m disappointed.
Something Might Happen is the story of a murder and the emotional ramifications for the victim’s family members and close friends, including children. It’s told from the first person perspective of Tess, who was the best friend of the victim, Lennie (a woman).
Tess doesn’t so much observe as tell, and she tells us how everyone reacts to Lennie’s death. She also immerses us in her own response, including a will-I-won’t-I dilemma she faces about having an affair with Ted Lacey, a victim support officer, even though Tess is married.
The main problem I had with the book was that I just didn’t buy what was happening. So much left me cold. And I think it’s because of the over-involved first person narration. It reads like a diary, lacking quotes for direct speech, which was sometimes confusing.
Suddenly he’s behind me.
They’re not really going in are they?
Oh, I say, blushing furiously.
Sorry, he says, I could see you were in a dream.
Well, I say. Hi.
It’s freezing, he says. Do they really swim in this?
I shrug.
It’s warm enough, once you get in.
Lacey shivers.
I was looking for you, he says as Fletcher wags and wiggles.
Without quotation marks to act as signposts, I found myself having to evaluate what I’d just read to work out if it was speech or description. It becomes tiresome after a while. It also has the effect of making it seem as though everyone is communicating telepathically; it seems to disembody the characters and render them disconnected from the world.
This ‘diarising’ also creates a lack of perspective. We are so much in Tess’s head, we’re not really sure what’s going on. And we’re distanced from other characters because we don’t get to know them or see things from their points of view, thereby limiting the empathy or sympathy we might feel for them.
At about three quarters of the way through the book, there is a further tragedy which I felt was actually the core of the novel because it touches Tess far more directly. It rips her heart out, and her behaviour starts to feeling somewhat more authentic as a consequence. But there isn’t any real exploration of the effects of this event because there isn’t time — the book is neatly wrapped up in a where-are-they-now summation of the main characters.
On the positive side, Myerson has a knack for creating realistic family interactions. I found myself thinking about the accuracy with which she captures our behaviour, particularly between adults and children. But it’s not enough to hold the book together.
I really wanted to like Myerson’s book because I adored Home but Something Might Happen is not my cup of tea.
BOOK REVIEW: At Risk by Stella Rimington, fiction, Arrow books – Random House, paperback, 2005, 454 pages.
At Risk is a contemporary espionage novel written by the former head of Britain’s MI5, Stella Rimington. It’s the first in a (so far) series of five which has at its centre, the determined Liz Carlyle, an MI5 operative working in London.
Liz works in the counter terrorism section and at the Monday morning meeting of the Joint Counter-Terrorist group, there are alarming reports that an Islamic Terror Syndicate is about to deploy an invisible — a terrorist who, because they are an ethnic native of a country, can cross that country’s borders unnoticed and infiltrate its institutions with ease.
In other words, a native Briton with terrorist inclinations is about to enter Britain to do something dastardly.
Couple this news with a report from one of Liz’s old agents that there is some kind of ‘drop off’ coming from Germany and you have the beginnings of a tense and intricate plot that gradually unfolds itself like a piece of origami — logical, precise and economical.
The action takes place in Norfolk. Liz works with MI6, Special Branch and the armed forces, desperately trying to work out the specific time and location of the threat to English security. It’s naturally a race against time and Rimington keeps you on the edge of your seat wondering if Liz will win the day and who will be a casualty of that win.
There were many things that I liked about this book — a zippy plot, a breathtaking finish, and a thorough laying of groundwork in terms of who Liz is and where she’s come from.
But the thing I liked most was the particularly strong characterisation of Liz. Rimington has said that Liz is partly autobiographical and partly based on women she has met during her career. As a consequence, Liz is a cracker — strong, intelligent, unprepared to brook any resistance, occasionally funny, often humourless but steadfastly committed to her job (to wit, the clinical decision she makes to dump her boyfriend because he threatens her independence and potentially her career). She also has to contend with being a woman in a predominantly male world and I enjoyed her prickliness and strident attempts to maintain her equal status.
Having now read two Stella Rimington/Liz Carlyle books, At Risk feels to be a stronger novel than Illegal Action, which I’ve reviewed previously. It feels as though a great deal of planning has gone into At Risk and Rimington has ensured she has dotted all her ‘i’s and crossed all her ‘t’s — plotwise and characterwise, that is. It’s a very thorough piece of work.
I ripped through this book in a couple of days and recommend it for its strong female protagonist and its smart, intelligent and pulse-racing take on latter day espionage.
BOOK REVIEW: Grace and Truth by Jennifer Johnston, fiction, REVIEW, paperback, 2005, 250 pages.
Jennifer Johnston is an Irish author that I’d heard of only recently thanks to various posts over at Reading Matters. She seemed like the kind of author that I’d like to read, sounding strong on characterisation and exploring what makes human beings tick. So I snaffled a copy of Grace and Truth at a cheap bookshop near my local supermarket.
And I read it.
And now I don’t really now what to make of it. Despite its 250 page length, I’m not 100 per cent sure what it was about and I suspect I could write a PhD trying to figure it out.
On the surface, the story is about Sally, an actress returning home to Ireland after playing the role of Pegeen Mike in John Synge’s, The Playboy of the Western World for a number of months. She is weary, needs a rest and is looking forward to seeing her husband, Charlie. But once home, Charlie leaves her and there is a war on the TV.
In the shock and grief that envelop her after Charlie’s departure, she decides to make contact with her only living relative, her grandfather, a bishop of the Church of Ireland. He is initially reluctant to have anything to do with her but eventually begins to want to see her, asking Sally to take him on drives around the countryside.
This makes the book sound more straightforward than it actually is. Sally is the narrator and I found her quite slippery – hard to get hold of. You’d think that after breaking up with your husband, you’d be somewhat distraught. But Sally is a strange one and there’s a large disjunction between the crisis she’s undergoing and the language she uses to express herself. Her interior monologue is almost like a sequence of musings characterised by a distance and lack of involvement. For instance, when contemplating contacting her grandfather, Sally thinks:
What do bishops do on Saturday?
I shall go and find out.
Interrupt his prayers perhaps?
I think not.
He’s never seemed the praying sort to me.
Maybe he spends Saturday in bed.
Anyway I bet I’ll surprise him.
The only sign of Sally’s grief is the morbid interest she takes in the war that is being broadcast on tv. It’s almost as though she’s subsumed the pain in her own life to experience it vicariously on tv.
As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that Sally’s grief is not new. She has carried a grief for most of her life and the cause is not knowing the identity of her father. It’s eroded her own sense of identity and caused her to distance herself from her life — a kind of sleepwalking of which, she admits, acting is also a form.
I just act.
The very act of acting being a form of sleep.
The book, then, seems to explore the need for identity and, by extension, truth. It plays out the consequences of Sally’s search for truth when Sally eventually discovers her parentage and it blows her life wide open. In this case, the truth hurts.
What Johnston seems to propose is the idea that truth about identity does not have any existential value. In other words, you can know the facts about someone – or your self – but it doesn’t satisfy a deeper need or a deeper yearning for some kind of truth about who we are as individuals and human beings.
Sally awareness of truth’s lack grows as she ponders lines from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot:
Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?
That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night,
I waited for Godot?
That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us?
Probably.
But in all that what truth will there be?
Like the character in Beckett’s play, Sally has learned facts but wherein lies the truth? Facts dressing up as truth neither help her to feel better about herself nor shift the existential weight she carries. Importantly, though, it’s not something that Sally resolves nor seems overly concerned to resolve, because she discovers that love is more important than truth. Love is the answer, and her final actions are acts of grace — they provide a moving conclusion to the book.
I am ambivalent about this book. There are aspects that are very good: the writing is tight – not a word wasted; the first person narration provides access to a complex and complicated character; and the naturalness of the characters’ speech and behaviour is both cinematic in its brevity and musical in its rhythm.
But it’s not easily understood and it’s not easily pinned down. There are loose ends of meaning I can’t account for – particularly references to the bible with their mention of ‘grace and truth’ – but that problem is probably compounded by my ignorance of such matters and an irrational, yet human, need to have everything neatly wrapped up. But I’m not sure.
I like to think that there is more to be discovered in this book and that re-reads will help unearth its secrets. What is achievable on a first reading, however, is an awareness of a kind of poetic beauty and a shifting yet canny intelligence — a combination which is both intriguing and mystifying.
BOOK REVIEW: Illegal Action by Stella Rimington, fiction, Random House – Arrow books, paperback, 2007, 394 pages.
I’m still shirking my reading of A.S. Byatt’s, The Children’s Book. I know the longer I leave it, the harder it will be to get back to it, but have you noticed that when you’re trying to avoid doing something you don’t really want to do, you become productive in other areas?
Well, I’ve become very productive in reading other novels. Since beginning The Children’s Book, I’ve read four others, including Stella Rimington’s, Illegal Action.
I’ve been aware of Ms Rimington’s writing career for a while but only chased up one of her novels recently after watching the last series of the superb TV drama, Spooks. It seems I can’t get enough of stories about British intelligence services running round London, defusing dramatic situations involving terrorists and spies.
Illegal Action, Stella Rimington’s third novel, is of that ilk. It centres again on Liz Carlyle (the heroine of Rimington’s previous two novels) only this time Liz has been transferred from the Counter-Terrorism Section to the Counter-Espionage Section. It’s viewed as a bit of a backwater because espionage finished with the end of the Cold War. Didn’t it?
As Liz finds out, it didn’t. There are more spies in London than ever before and she is soon working undercover in the Belgravian household of a Russian oligarch, trying to discover who might be trying to kill him.
Rimington worked for MI5 for 28 years and was Director General from 1992 to 1996 before trying her hand at writing. As you’d expect from someone with her background, her knowledge of intelligence procedures and protocols is vast. It permeates her writing and forms part of the strong background fabric of the novel.
Less expected were the subtle psychological insights into character and Rimington’s deft drawing of relationships between individuals and those individuals’ respective agencies, such as MI5, MI6 and the British Foreign Office. There is comprehensive coverage without any of it being unnecessary or boring.
Liz Carlyle, as the main character, is likeable and competent, while secondary characters are neither black or white, but grey, which profoundly humanises them. There is one villain who seems unremittingly evil but perhaps that’s how it is for assassins these days. I wouldn’t know.
The plot is occasionally hard to follow simply because of the many characters involved, but it’s not War and Peace, and once you’ve figured out who’s who, it’s a sustaining read, with a suspenseful climax.
I enjoyed Illegal Action and will read more of the Liz Carlyle novels as they appear (there is a new one due out — a fifth — this year). It’s not Spooks but until that show reappears, I’ll be happy to continue to read Rimington’s series.
BOOK REVIEW: The Best a Man Can Get by John O’Farrell, fiction, Black Swan, paperback, 2000, 301 pages.
I am currently struggling through A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book so when a friend gave me a box of his old books, I thought I’d have a squizz at some of them before I get rid of them on BookMooch. I dived right in and emerged holding up O’Farrell’s, The Best a Man Can Get. It’s a complete contrast to Byatt — funny, entertaining, witty and so, so easy to read.
It’s about Mike Adams, a musician in his early 30s, who writes music for advertisements. He spends most of his time in a flat in south London that he shares with three other rootless young men and he has set his life up to be easy — as the following example demonstrates:
“My bedroom had evolved so that the need to get out of bed was kept to an absolute minimum. Instead of a bedside table there was a fridge, inside which milk, bread and butter were kept. On top of the fridge was a kettle, which fought for space with a tray of mugs, a box of tea bags, a selection of breakfast cereals, a toaster and an overloaded plug adapter.”
I’m not giving anything away when I say that what is soon revealed is that Mike has a family in North London – a family consisting of a wife and two young children, with a third on the way. When he returns home at the end of each week, his wife believes he does so after a long few days staying overnight at work.
His rationale for living this way – even though it means that his wife is carrying the can for raising their kids – is to preserve his marriage.
It was because I thought our marriage was so important that I kept resting it. The strain that small children brought into our lives suddenly seemed to create such tension and petty hostility between us that I was terrified of the damage becoming irreparable. Admittedly, I had developed a personal solution to a joint problem … [b]ut I didn’t feel I could confess to wanting time away from my children.
I have no problems with confessing that I want time away from my child. I also have no problems confessing to being envious of Mike Adams. As a parent of a one year old, there are days that I long for the freedom I used to have to do whatever I want and whenever I want. And desperation means that a double life looks like a very good idea indeed.
But as the book shows, this duality is unsustainable, and the rest of the book is a riotous, unpredictable unravelling of both of Adams’s lives.
I recommend this book without question to anyone, not just parents. There are some profound observations on the dynamic that occurs between adults once they’ve had children, and the acceptance that Adams finally musters of his life as a family man is a bittersweet acknowledgement of having to grow up even when you don’t want to – something that applies to parents and non-parents alike.
O’Farrell was previously unknown to me but since reading The Best a Man Can Get, I’ve learned that he’s served time writing comedy for a number of British TV institutions such as Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You. He writes a little like Nick Hornby but is perhaps less apologetic about being male than Hornby. He’s also written a number of other books and runs the satirical news website, NewsBiscuit.
I have a copy of his first book, Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter, in the post, on its way to me, at the moment, and I must admit that I’m very much looking forward to it.
Penguin Australia has this week released 50 new titles in its Popular Penguin reprint series.
This is exciting news because it means that a range of classic literature and non-fiction is now available for the easily affordable sum of AU$9.95 each.
It’s the second batch of 50 that Penguin has released in the distinctive orange and white cover design similar to that of 50 years ago.
I have my eye on Robert Graves’s, Goodbye to All That, and Randolph Stow’s, Merry Go Round By the Sea. But as my partner pointed out, we could buy all 50 for less than $500! Well, that made me stop and think. For the completist in me, this has enormous appeal, but when I look at our overloaded bookshelves, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Popular Penguins has its own website which you can check out here.
BOOK REVIEW: The Hollow Lands by Sophie Masson, fiction, Hodder Children’s Book, paperback, 2004, 227 pages.
Sophie Masson’s heritage is Australian and French. She was born in Indonesia but lived with her grandmother in France until she was five. She then grew up primarily in Australia, but continued to visit France, and it’s France that exerts the major influence on her writing.
The Hollow Lands is set in medieval Brittany and is informed by Breton folklore and Breton history, as well as Arthurian legend. It’s a classic kind of fairytale – beautifully told – about 12 year old twins, Tiphane and Gromer, who have been lured into the realm of the fairies (also known as the Hollow Lands) by the mischievous Archduke Bubo. Bubo claims the boy, Gromer, to live in his kingdom while Queen Rouanez, Bubo’s rival, claims the girl, Tiphaine, to live in hers.
The twins are thus separated and the rest of the book follows Tiphaine’s trials as she lives among the fairies and waits to be reunited with her brother five years hence. During this time, she observes and learns the ways of the fairies in the hope that she may be able to use such knowledge to help her to rescue Gromer and escape. Tiphaine not only has to contend with living with the fairies who are indifferent to her sorrow but before Bubo left for his own kingdom, he transformed her into a harpy – a fantastically ugly creature that is half woman and half bird.
Searching for Tiphaine and Gromer is their nurse, Dame Viviane, a Guardian who can walk between the fairy world and the human world, and Bernard Guesclin, a hedge knight (farmer) who sees a vision of the sorrowful Tiphaine and decides to help her.
There are overtones of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Hollow Lands. Twins are separated, fairies are mischievous, capricious and indifferent to the pain they cause, while humans are generous, kind and big-hearted. Twins are eventually reunited and other characters achieve their hearts’ desires.
But The Hollow Lands is less complicated than Shakespeare’s work. It’s by no means formulaic, with the story retaining a degree of unpredictability right until the end, but it’s honest and straightforward and is sure to engross the 8-13 year old that enjoys escaping to an idyllic world populated by magical creatures and young, brave humans.
Sophie Masson’s home page can be found here.
The Indiscriminate Reader 