After my productivity in January, I’m upset to discover I didn’t blog at all in February! Too busy with gardening (new fence), coffee catch-ups, films and family. It’s been go, go, go…. I’m happy to say that my reading this year has been much better than at the end of last year. Here are my thoughts on the books I’ve read so far.
The Bee Sting, Paul Murray
I am resolved not to buy any new books this year, but to read those I have, or which I gather from my neighbour’s community library – which is where I found this. A friend told me last year that it was the best book he’d read over that year and it was indeed very good. Short-listed for the 2023 Booker Prize, it’s the story of a family. All told from the points of view of each family member – daughter Cass; Imelda the mother (in a chapter entitled The Widow Bride); Dickie the father and son PJ. Each of these people become fully alive as separate individuals – in all their complexity. There’s no binary good versus bad here. The author gets the psychology and language just right for of all of them. The yearning to be included by the late teen Cass, the scars left behind by early poverty in the Molly-like (from Ulysses) stream of consciousness from Imelda, the loneliness of young PJ and his susceptibility to an online relationship. You want to shout at all of them: Tell someone – anyone – what you’re feeling, being asked to do, contemplating doing! Be more observant so you can see what’s going on in the lives of those dearest to you! Nothing is quite as it seems as we hear about the same people and the same incidents from different angles. It’s like the layers of an onion being peeled back. Even the book’s title is not what it seems. Dickie’s story reveals how family myths build until false memories become passed down from generation to generation as real. This is a novel about miscommunication, thoughts and true feelings hidden away from each other. All of these misconceptions building a fragile edifice that looks set to destroy this family in a devastating final chapter. I stayed up late unable to put the book down until I found out what happened – a long time since I’ve done that. And even then one isn’t quite sure. Terrific writing, delivering a completely authentic picture of these lives in all their complexity. I found it a totally immersive reading experience. Quite wonderful and strongly recommended.
Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens, Shankari Chandran
This is a book I’ve had on my shelf for a year at least – my NY resolution is working! I really enjoyed all of this as I was reading it, only later did some doubts creep in about the characterisation of the person, part of the circle of friends the focus of the story, responsible for the final denouement. Sri Lankan refugees have made al life in Sydney, running a retirement home for their compatriots. Descriptions of the home and the residents are really well done. These are interspersed with the back stories of their lives as Tamils in Sri Lanka. Vivid descriptions of Tamil life and beliefs provide insights into something one has heard about but knows little about. The oppression of the Tamil population and imposition of what is described as a revisionist history of Sri Lankan in which Tamil contributions have been suppressed is interesting. Grim scenes of life during the conflict, including torture, are vivid but not overdone. While it’s a novel you do feel you’ve learned a lot about Sri Lanka – both history and culture – by the time you finish the book. The bits about the Australian characters are not so compelling – but I only really thought that later. A good read, recommended.
The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng
This book, with its beautiful cover, has been on my iPad kindle for ages. It was on the Booker Prize Longlist in 2023. I enjoyed it a lot. A quote from Somerset Maugham’s memoir Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that … I can hardly distinguish one from the other at the start tells us what to expect. There is much mingling of fact and fiction here. I’ve not read much by Maugham, only A Painted Veil, which I enjoyed (as I did the film). But I’ve read quite a bit about him in biographies and memoirs of, and by, other people. He’s a pretty awful person. He was very unhappily married, had male lovers, travelled extensively in South East Asia and China. This novel builds on a real visit Maugham – known by all and sundry as Willie – made to Penang in 1921. He was there with his longterm male lover after travelling through China about which he had written the book On A Chinese Screen. There are lots of references to his writing throughout the story. He stays at with an old friend from his wartime experience. Chapters in the first part of this novel alternate between Willie and Lesley, the wife of his army mate. The bits about him are basically true. Her back story is entwined with another true story – the visit to Penang of Sun Yat Sen in 1910. Part Two goes back to that visit and tells us about Lesley’s involvement with Penangs Chinese community and the organisation actively supporting Sun Yat Sen’s ambition to take over China. There’s another real life incident woven into the story – the Ethel Proudlock case, involving a murder in the expatriate community, it’s all in Wikipedia. I really enjoyed everything about this. The writing is beautiful and the interlocking stories work well. It’s all very evocative of time and place. The characters really well drawn and it keeps you guessing. Did Lesley have an affair with Sun Yat Sen or did she not? Recommended.
The House of Styx, Michael Meehan
Another book that I’ve had for a long time – a couple of years I think. I really loved The Salt of Broken Tears by this author, who I’m told was taught in primary school by my much loved Aunty Stasia – in Speed in the mallee. That was his first book (1999). It’s set during a drought in the mallee. I loved it. And I really enjoyed his second, Stormy Weather (2000), also set in the mallee but this time during a flood. In both books, much like the more recent ones by Jane Harper (see below), the landscape is a real character. Looking him up now I see he has written five novels, the most recent being An Ungrateful Instrument in 2023 which I’m going to get hold of when I get back to buying books. I haven’t kept up with his output. This one was published in 2010. It’s focussed on the life and times of Marcus Clark . About whom I knew nothing. I haven’t read his famous novel For The Term of His Natural Life which also takes centre stage here. It’s a single person narrative – a format that I’m not keen on, but here it works. Martin Frobisher is in prison awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. He’s hired a research assistant to dig into the life of Clark and so we get extracts, purportedly accurately represented (there’s an index at the back) of contemporaneous articles written by, and about, Marcus Clarke. Along the way our narrator muses on life’s big questions: Why are we here? What is a life well lived? What is guilt – with or without mens rea? I enjoyed everything about it. The sentences might be long but it’s very good writing. I don’t think I’m minded to read The Term of his Natural Life after reading this, but I’d read a biography of its author perhaps. He sounds a fascinating figure.
The Engagement, Chloe Hooper
This is another from across the road in the community library. I think Chloe is a great writer and I’ve read all of her other books. This is her third, written in 2012. I really like her writing but I didn’t like the story much. Another single person narrative – not my thing really, but well done. She is a young woman at a loose end, over from England, working in her Uncle’s real estate business here in Melbourne. She’s trying to earn enough money to go home to England and to settle down to real life. Out of the blue she has sex with a fellow to whom she’s been showing a house. He assumes she’s a prostitute and hands over a wad of money – so she declines to disabuse him of the notion. Bit murky but all told in a way that makes it believable (almost). While she’s very short of money he has lots. Assignations follow – all in houses open for inspection. These are described in some detail that’s a bit lurid for me. There are descriptions of the different sorts of houses you find in different Melbourne suburbs. Finally he invites her for a weekend away – at his property in middle Victoria somewhere. She takes it to be another assignation but it turns out he’s become smitten with her and wants to redeem her from her unsavoury life – which she has embellished over the course of their meetings. No he insists he wants to marry her – or does he? Has he as she starts to think, imprisoned her in this gothic pile in the country? Or worse is he going to do her harm? It’s all quite claustrophobic at the end. She is a great writer! I contemplated not finishing it but I was keen to see what happened. Which is surprising. So this is a half recommendation!
The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie
I’ve been plunging into Agatha Christie since seeing a documentary about her on the ABC which was terrific. She really was pretty amazing. We’ve been watching episodes from the BBC’s 1970s Miss Marple series with Joan Hickson and the later Poirot ones with David Suchet. They both hold up well – the plots are so clever – and I love the clothes! I got this from over the road ages ago. It’s the first of her series of Tommy and Tuppence mysteries. She wrote five of these and this is the first which introduces the two characters. I’d heard of them but never read one. This was fun. And very clever. It’s clear early on that the bad guy is one of two characters but she keeps you guessing right until the end which one it is. Clever. Written in 1922 it’s very conservative – there are evil Russian agents intent on fermenting a revolution in England, using dimwits in the Labour Party and unions to wreak havoc upon the land! But as was promoted in the documentary Agatha is quite insightful about the mythic British character and makes fun of it. She uses the trope of stereotypical characteristics afforded to men and women – not sure whether to make fun of or for real. Tuppence is instinctive and impulsive and whilst plucky is liable to rush in and get things wrong. Tommy is slow and lugubrious but by careful analytical thinking gets things right in the end. And of course is very brave! I enjoyed an afternoon’s quick read.
The Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood
This is another book that is really well written. It was a gift at Christmas. I liked her novel The Weekend which I’ve written about (scroll down) here. But I was unconvinced about the setting for this one. It’s a sort of convent retreat – variously described but finally called an Abbey – situated on the Monaro plain in New South Wales or is it the ACT? I’m not sure. Maybe I let my knowledge of nuns, and the Catholic Church for that matter affect me but the details about the place seemed wrong. It’s a community of women – no priest to be seen, no mention of an hierarchy to which they were beholden – very unlike any sort of convent I’d say. Maybe they’re not Catholic – it’s all a bit unclear. I also felt you don’t know enough about the narrator to care very much. At least I didn’t. It’s another single person narration. We start with her driving to the place (it’s too unimposing to be called an Abbey in my book. She’s going to be there for a week. We aren’t told why in any sort of detail. She seems worn out with her life. Later she comes back seemingly forever, having left husband and job working in environmental advocacy somehow or other. She joins in the daily rituals of the nuns, back and forth to the rudimentary chapel and daily chores – mostly cleaning, gardening and preparing meals. It’s nice writing. She describes a mouse plague – having lived through one, the vivid descriptions were accurate! A visiting nun – and environmental activist- turns up who just happens to be the person our narrator knows from primary school where she was bullied by the other students. But all in all not enough story for me.
Force of Nature, Jane Harper
I’ve read this ages ago; I suspect in 2018 I think but I couldn’t find any reference in a blog. Surprising. I re-read it after seeing the film – and being disappointed. I wanted to clarify where the film differed – which was, as I thought, quite extensive. They give our good detective Aaron Falk a different back story – as a child with his father and mother trekking in the high country. As well as being unfaithful to the book it distracts from the actual story – of women on whom disaster falls while on a trek during a corporate team building exercise. It’s as if the film makers didn’t think the relationships between the women were enough to drive the plot. Which as set out in the novel they certainly are, but maybe it was all too complicated. I enjoyed the book the first time around and am surprised to find I didn’t blog about it. The story builds on the first in the series, The Dry (which I’ve written about here). We’re back with the same detective Falk who since the finale from that first outing when he was badly burnt, has been, in his personal life, in a state of hiatus. This time the mystery he’s involved in solving occurs while he is doing his day job – investigating financial malfeasance. The question is, whether that investigation has lead to Falk’s informant coming to harm. He has a female off-sider with whom he develops a relationship which is not reflected in the film but which is nuanced and sweet in the book. And the relationships between the women are interesting and form the core of the story. Girlhood experiences impact on the lives of adults. The lengths to which mothers will go to protect their children also plays a role in the events that unfold. The film was disappointing with Eric Bana as Falk looking gorgeous but spending much of his time just looking sorrowfully out at the majestic landscape. And there was not enough detail to make sense of the plot – no back stories of the mothers and not enough about the daughters. Fantastic scenery, all filmed in Victoria – the Dandenongs, Yarra Ranges and Otways. Jane Harper has made the landscape in which her stories are set a character in all of her books. And so it is in this one – both the book and the film. Dense forest, slippery paths, twists and turns up and down hill. All quite beautiful. But the plot is too opaque in the film and the film loses completely the positive ending that closes the novel. Which sees Falk returning to a life properly lived, and some accountability for bad behaviour – on the part of both the corporation Falk has been investigating and the young people whose drama has impacted on the mothers – achieved. The book is good, the film not so much.
Salonika Burning, Gail Jones
I’ve enjoyed Gail Jones writing before and I enjoyed it again in this book. It’s a gentle portrait of four people working in a field hospital in Macedonia at the Eastern Front in the First World War. They are stationed outside the city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) when it was almost razed by a great fire. I didn’t realise it when reading – although it is described in end notes at the back of the book -that the four characters are all based on real people. Stella who is an assistant cook despite volunteering as an orderly is in fact Miles Franklin. Stanley who looks after the donkeys that convey injured soldiers to the hospital is the famous British painter Stanley Spencer (who I’d not heard of). Olive, the ambulance driver, was the daughter of a Sydney banker and Grace was a British surgeon who became a Freudian psychoanalyst and surrealist painter. Very beautiful writing takes you into the lives, including back stories of these four. It all feels very authentic although the author points out it is a work of fiction not history – there’s no record of these four ever meeting, as they do in the story. It’s all very impressionistic but poetically described – the daily routines, the hierarchies, the impact of the war on personal lives, the smells, the landscape. Images of the burned city are vivid and realistic. The imagined thoughts and feelings of the characters and their relationships between each other feel authentic. It’s not overdone. A minor occurrence late in the novel provides a shock. It feels an accurate description of life in wartime – long periods when nothing occurs and then instances where moral decisions are required. It took me to Wikipedia to check out the historical record, including to some of Stanley’s pictures that he did after the war depicting some of the things that are described in the book. Beautiful writing. Recommended.
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