by Julia Kuttner
Fall of Giants, by Ken Follett
I waited seven months to read Ken Follett’s latest Best Seller, such is his popularity with library members, and I’m happy to say that it was well worth the wait. He may never scale lofty literary heights but what a good storyteller he is, and how credible are his characters. He has produced (yet again) the consummate read – a rattling pace, Love (True and not so!), the horrors of war and revolution, and a meticulously researched account of the seeds that were sown to germinate the War to End All Wars, World War 1.
The story starts in 1911 and ends in 1924. This is the first novel of a trilogy and deals with five families: The Williams family, Welsh miners and unionists; The Fitzherberts, English Aristrocrats absolutely certain of their ancient, inalienable rights as the ruling class; two impoverished Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, eager to escape the crushing burden of serfdom under the hated Czar; the von Ulrichs, German Junkers and diplomats – Otto the father, implacable in his dream of the domination of Europe for his Kaiser, and Walter the son, doing his utmost to avoid war at all costs; and American Presidential Aide Gus Dewar, for a large part of the war a worried spectator of events until early 1918 when the United States finally entered the conflict.
Mr. Follett is a master at keeping the reader turning the pages at a furious rate as he moves effortlessly from continent to continent, marshalling his characters with the precision of a chess player. He sets the scene beautifully for future events: Ethel Williams, young housekeeper to Earl Fitzherbert takes fatal steps above her station; her young brother Billy, ‘down t’ pit’ at thirteen and in the army to become cannon fodder at 16, becomes implacably hardened in his support of socialism after surviving the Somme under the inept leadership of aristocratic superiors; brothers Gregori and Lev choose very different ways to escape starvation and the Czar’s corrupt police - Lev, irresponsible and charming, skips Russia to end up eventually in Buffalo, New York, whilst Grigori is conscripted into the Army to fight the Germans; and Walter von Ulrich enters into a secret marriage just before war is declared that will have consequences for all.
‘Fall of Giants’ could essentially be seen as a family saga and a love story but all is framed by the huge and momentous events of the early twentieth century: no-one emerges unscathed from the cataclysm of war and revolution and there is a sad inevitability that the second book in the trilogy will pose yet more trials for characters who have become unforgettable. Regardless, Mr. Follett’s storytelling expertise is such that, potential tragedies notwithstanding, the reader will again be swept up in the lives of these five families – and soon, one hopes. I trust Mr. Follett is pounding away at # 2 on his keyboard as I write!
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, refers to a little rhyme that Southern children learn to enable them to spell ‘Mississippi’ and with a name like that, any assistance would be helpful. The people of this story are much the same, tricky to read , complicated and full of twists and turns in this beautifully written novel from Tom Franklin – his marvelous imagery encompasses the land as well as his characters, and the reader is blessed to read such fine prose. He chronicles the lives of the inhabitants of the tiny, dying hamlet of Chabot, Southern Mississippi: naturally, everyone knows everything about everyone, including the fact that Larry Ott, the town outcast and mechanic whom no-one ever takes their cars to, probably – well, FOR SURE – killed a girl 25 years ago, but was so fiendishly clever at hiding the deed and the corpse that the law was never able to arrest him. Now another young girl has gone missing, and who else but Larry Ott could be the prime suspect, bearing the brunt of the finger-pointing, the name-calling and various acts of vandalism to his property: he done it FOR SURE!
And who else but Larry Ott could bear such vitriol with stoic resignation and Christian meekness – that’s how he was raised after all, the only child of a Good Christian Woman and a Good Ole Boy who views Larry with contempt for his allergies, asthma and pudgy frame – and even worse, his obsessive reading habits. ‘Git yore nose outta that Goddamn book and mow the lawns – git some fresh air for a change!’ Larry has been behind the eight ball for a long time, a good, lonely boy grown into a decent, lonely man – until his mother’s daily prayer for him to ‘find a friend’ – which he did when he was 14, and once more at the age of 41 – produces horrific consequences: Larry is fate’s plaything, and fate is in a foul mood. Mr. Franklin captures time, place and idiom with ease. He has created a most satisfying mystery, a page-turner of the first order and a fine exposition on the Southern way of life - functional and otherwise. And let us not ignore the sly vein of humour throughout the book: ‘Miss Voncille, did yall ever date Crazy Larry?’ ‘Yes, only the once, and ah was nevah seen agin’. This is a dang fine story!
Instruments of Darkness, by Imogen Robertson
Imogen Robertson won the Telegraph’s first thousand words Competition in 2007 by submitting the start of this book, her first novel. It is a murder mystery, set in 1780, and the prose is as elegant and genteel as the characters and time of which she writes. She has researched thoroughly the political and social mores of country and city life and writes convincingly of the huge gaps between rich and poor, noble and base, and the glaring unfairness of gender inequality: her heroine, Mrs. Harriet Westerman, runs a prosperous estate in Sussex while her husband, a Naval Commodore, is at sea – she is forthright, independent and used to making independent decisions, but is constrained by society’s expectations of how a ‘Lady’ should comport herself. It is not socially acceptable for a woman to take on a murder investigation, even if the corpse was found on her land; consequently she has to enlist the aid of Gabriel Crowther, recently-arrived ‘natural scientist’, an anatomist whose reputation is illustrious and far-reaching, but a recluse who has secrets of his own. There is also a dissolute Nobleman (the main suspect), his dastardly steward and a cast of minor villains hell-bent on murder, and as the story progresses the corpses pile up in a most satisfactory way – one even gets his throat ripped out by a leopard! Oh, it’s all good Georgian fun, and the denouement when it arrives has a twist that surprises, as it should.
Ms Robertson is a fine writer, tapping a new vein in the crime genre by giving her work its 18th century setting; her characters, too, could never be confined to a single story and are thoroughly deserving of a sequel, ‘Anatomy of a Murder’. I look forward to reacquainting myself with these reluctant pillars of respectability as they triumph with respectable but determined resolve over evildoers once again.
Swamplandia! Is the name of a run-down nature park owned and operated by the Bigtree family on an island in the Everglades in Florida. They Swim with the Alligators! Wrestle them into Submission! Take the tourists on Island Wildlife walks and Tours of the Bigtree Historic Family Museum ! And sell their captive visitors toxic refreshments and souvenirs from the only café, reluctantly staffed by the three Bigtree children who are home-schooled by their mother, Hilola, Alligator wrestler and swimmer extraordinaire, star of the show and of their hearts. Dad is Samuel ‘Chief’ Bigtree; he is the compere, works the lights, does all the repairs, and looks after his aged father, Grandpa Sawtooth, who started up the business – which is running on the smell of an oily rag and mortgaged to the hilt. There is not a drop of Native American blood in any of them, but it’s good for business and the tourists to think so, and as a business and a family the Bigtrees putter along until Hilola dies of ovarian cancer at the age of 36.
The Rapture, coming soon to a place near you! And this is what happens when it does. Tim Wilson has quite an important day job, that of U.S. Correspondent for TVNZ, but I’m happy to say that the ‘There’s a Great Novel Bursting to be Born from every Journalist’ cliché is very true in this case: Mr. Wilson has made a most successful first foray into the world of the Good Book – in subject and construction.
Sara Groen has already been justly acclaimed for her novel ‘Water for Elephants’, a wonderful story of an American circus during the time of the 30’s Depression, recently made into a very successful movie. Now she tries something completely different: a story of scientific experimentation – good and bad - with primates, in this case six Bonobos, (cousins of the chimpanzee) held at a laboratory and taught by sign language to communicate with scientists. Reporter John Thigpen is assigned to do a story on the apes and their ‘trainer’ Isabel Duncan, a scientist who regards them as family rather than mere animals – certainly they are more her family than anyone else - and she has made great strides in educating them and increasing her own knowledge of how the apes and their hierarchy function. Thigpen wishes to write a serious article lauding her singular achievements and does so – until he is usurped and his story stolen by an unscrupulous colleague. The apes’ laboratory is bombed, ostensibly by animal activists; Isabel is seriously injured and the apes are sold on to a Porn king who wants to make a reality TV show called, of all things, Ape House! Yep, a lot happens in a very short time and I have to say that there are more characters in this book than you can shake a stick at, some of them wildly funny and others who are superfluous to the plot; regardless, Ms Groen manages to keep all her literary balls up in the air and we reach the happy ending (and I’m so glad it was!) with every loose thread neatly tucked away. Ms Groen has done some very solid research into apes and their ability to communicate by picture and sign, and the story she has produced is both a damning condemnation of animal cruelty and abuse and a loving tribute to a species’ dignity, intelligence and innate integrity. This was a pleasure to read. ****
The year is 1865; the great Gold Rush is well under way and Hokitika is booming; there are 100 pubs throughout the town to slake the miners’ thirst – and relieve them of their hard-won gold, and everyone is trying to get rich quick by fair means or foul before the gold runs out and all the diggers move on to the next Big Strike. Into this hotch-potch of goodies and baddies comes Halfie – Half-pint, Harvey, Bedwetter, Monkey: these are only some of the names he answers to, this little maori boy who has run away from his tribe after the death of his beloved tuakana Moana. Being a resourceful and intelligent little boy he has decided to be a ‘coin boy’, and where better a place to earn coin than Hokitika town – he is sure that he will eventually accumulate enough coin to earn a place to sleep by the stove of the reclusive miner and drunk, Ludovic, with the hope that Ludovic will teach him English. He knows that ‘That Inglish is a langwich what don’t behave’ and he would appreciate some tuition so that he can get fair treatment from Whitey. Besides, he’s sick of sleeping up a ponga tree – that’s tolerable in the summer, but Hokitika gets a lot of rain and it’s coming onto winter, so he has to plan ahead.
The year is 2060. Time travel has been perfected and it is now possible for scientists and historians to travel back through time to ‘observe’ and experience defining times in world history. Oxford University is home to a thriving laboratory of highly skilled technicians who can send scholars anywhere to a century and an event that they wish to study and experience, complete with authentic clothes provided by wardrobe, and mannerisms, accents and information implanted for the period of time they will be away. Nothing can go wrong; all contingencies have been covered – except for a slight problem of ‘slippage’, the hours or even days that the arrival and departure times might be erroneous. Nevertheless, it’s considered a minor inconvenience and three historians travel back to 1940, to London and the Blitz, experiencing at terrifying first-hand the sleeplessness and fear, the grief of losing friends and loved ones, and the indomitable courage and collective good cheer of a people under terrible siege. Ms Willis describes the bombing raids to such good effect that the reader feels right in the thick of action that she really would never want to experience; there are many well-drawn and engaging characters, in particular two cockney child evacuees, dreadful but wonderfully engaging and Ms Willis, in spite of her American origins, gets all the accents and idioms right for the most part - any errors left can be attributed to careless editing . This is a rattling good read and we are inexorably drawn on to the sequel ‘All Clear’ for at the conclusion of ‘Blackout’, the worst has happened: the three historians’ access to their own time has been blocked; ‘The Drop’ is no longer working. They are trapped.
Ten years ago Jonathan Franzen wowed the literary cognoscenti with his superb novel ‘The Corrections’, and that world has been waiting with breathless anticipation ever since for the next opus. Jonathan Franzen writes about families: in ‘The Corrections’ he explored the lives of two protagonists in a very long marriage, and the relationship between them and their children to hilarious and stunning effect; the American nuclear family at the turn of the century was laid mercilessly bare by his astute and incisive observations, but all was softened by his wonderfully Dickensian humour.
Now: Your first requisite for reading this book is strong wrists – it’s a doorstopper. Your second is a complete suspension of ‘yeah, right!’ comments as I recount my heavily-abridged version of the plot, for this is a novel on the grand scale as well as huge physical size; it’s a tale of a scientific experiment gone dreadfully, fatally wrong, conducted by the U.S. Army in a remote location in the mountains of Colorado, the scientific objective being to create a race of ‘Super Soldiers’, impervious to heat, cold, disease and virtually indestructible, thereby conquering America’s terrorist enemies in Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent. There would be no more wounded and dying to be returned home ‘eating up the defense budget in the veterans’ hospitals’; in short, it would be the answer to the Pentagon’s prayers – all that had to be done was to inject a new-found virus into chosen candidates, and after a short period of illness, a new, invincible warrior would be born. 
There is no end to Ms. French’s myriad talents – quite apart from her superb comic skills as an actress she has now proven that she is also a writer of insight and wit, capturing effortlessly in her amber the 21st century family: Mum Maureen Battle (Mo), capable and efficient, on-to-it child psychologist – except when it comes to her own children, about whom she clearly hasn’t a clue: Dad or ‘Husband’ as Mo invariably refers to him, hovering lovingly in the background, keeping the wheels turning in ever so subtle ways in his efforts to provide a loving and stable environment for his family. He has a job, ‘doing something with computers’, but everyone seems to be vague as to its specifics: Dora, about to turn 18 and full of teenage angst and self-loathing, is fretting about the humiliation of being dumped by her small but perfectly-formed boyfriend, being a virgin, being less than interested in a future career, and being FAT! Last but not least, Peter: call him Oscar please, as he is such a disciple of Mr. Wilde that he is sure he is his reincarnation. Peter is also tall, cherubic, flamboyant, academically brilliant and gay as a hat – and proud of it - no gender angst for Mr. Peter; in fact the only thing he agonises over is having to live in Pangbourne, the most deeply unfashionable place on earth.
This novel is not for the faint-hearted. It’s themes are as unforgiving and brutal as the Texas landscape in which the story is set – but WHAT a story: starting in 1895 with the death in childbirth of the beloved wife of Vaclav Sala, a Czech immigrant cotton farmer. The baby, the fourth son for the couple, survives but Vaclav is completely unmanned and embittered by his loss. His heart turns to stone and he regards his sons, particularly the youngest as intolerable reminders of what he once had. He becomes famous in the district for treating his horses better than his sons – in fact, he races his horses and makes his sons pull the plough in front of him, no better than human livestock, with all four reaching adulthood with permanently deformed necks. His sons hate Vaclav (not that he cares) but they are staunch in their love and support of each other – until their father accepts a wager from a very rich Spaniard newly arrived in the district: a horse race between Vaclav’s best mount, ridden by 15 year-old Karel, the youngest, despised cause of his wife’s death, and the Spaniard’s beautiful thoroughbred, ridden by his spirited youngest daughter. The prize if Karel wins: 600 acres of land. If he loses, the three eldest brothers must wed the Spaniard’s daughters. The brothers are ecstatic! It’s a win-win situation for them – escape from their tyrannical father, and legal union to three comely girls: what could be better – provided Karel will only lose. And Karel finds that he doesn’t want to, indeed can’t, because Vaclav threatens him with a terrible punishment if he dares to throw the race; he is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and Mr. Machart doesn’t spare us as he draws us inexorably onwards to the terrible conclusion of the wager and the end of the brothers’ loving alliance against their terrible parent.
What a great pleasure it was to read this debut novel, judged to be one of the New York Times’ 10 best books of 2010, for Mr. Goodwillie has produced that rare thing; a superior literary thriller which combines great suspense with searching moral and ethical questions: which person or event provides the fire to the touchpaper of radicalism from within? What ‘last straw’ finally breaks the back of tolerance in an age of disillusionment and impotence? For Paige Roderick it is the death by friendly fire of her brother in the Iraq war – for Aidan Cole, jaded and going-nowhere-fast failed journalism student turned blogger, (phew, glad I wasn’t holding my breath when I wrote that) it is merely the fact that he wishes to rescue Paige (she’s a serious hotty, quite apart from her lofty ideals!) and keep her safe from the radicals she hitherto supported, after it becomes clear that they no longer want to blow up buildings: they want to kill people too. This novel is beautifully constructed, a split memoir with each chapter narrated by Aidan or Paige; Aidan has a very nice line in black humour, describing his New York lifestyle with ruthless honesty. Paige is also honest, remaining true at great cost to her integrity and ideals: she had firmly believed ‘that America had passed an invisible tipping point, strayed too far from the noble tenets of its founding; taking it back would require drastic measures.’ Now her radical friends have reached a tipping point of their own – radicalism has turned into terrorism and she knows too much for them to allow her to live. Mr. Goodwillie has written the thinking man’s thriller, fast-paced, highly suspenseful – and unafraid to ask the uncomfortable questions of a complacent, apathetic society. *****
This is the story of a newspaper, a newspaper founded in the 50’s in Rome by an industrial tycoon who had enough money to indulge himself in a flight of fancy, that of providing a superior international news organ for English speakers in Europe. It didn’t matter that it didn’t make money; what mattered most was that it be a benchmark always for the highest journalistic standards – and a means of being close to his one true love, the woman he installs as joint editor – with her husband. So begins Tom Rachman’s charming novel of the experience of living and working in Rome, producing a newspaper for English readers. He knows the business intimately, having worked as a correspondent and editor for Associated Press in New York and Rome, and for the Herald Tribune in Paris; in fact his characters have such a ring of truth about them I have to wonder how thinly veiled they are: how many of his former work colleagues recognize themselves in this book? There is the Editor-in-Chief, hugely intelligent, driven, and driving everyone else before her in a breathless attempt to produce a daily newspaper that people will read despite competition from the relentlessly encroaching electronic media; sadly, she also drives away the men in her life with her harsh judgements and scathing opinions of their worth. Her second in command Craig Menzies is a workaholic, living with a much younger woman whom he adores. He can’t believe that she wants to stay with him permanently – how could someone like him ever be THAT lucky? Through a tragic miscalculation of his own, he is eventually proven correct. Arthur Gopal, son of one of India’s greatest writers is in charge of ‘Puzzle Wuzzle’ and Obituaries; he knows he has more to offer the paper than the tasks to which he is set, and through a series of carefully calculated underhand moves manages to get the promotion he always dreamed of: culture editor, over and above the former holder of that title, Clint Oakley, a loudmouthed braggart and racist who is demoted in turn, to his fury and dismay, to Puzzle Wuzzle and Obits! Mr. Rachman’s debut novel is a delight, witty, convincingly written and peopled with great characters who are all linked by the work they do for the paper – which cannot last; the bosses in Atlanta are ready to pull the plug, with tragic consequences for one of their own. This is a very funny book, but the reader still gets sucker-punched along the way. I’m still thinking about some of the shocks I never saw coming, and this is how fine writing can be and should be. *****
Here’s something different in the Whodunnit category, and what a welcome – and different – breath of fresh air it is: Emily Tempest, the novel’s protagonist, is a half-aboriginal woman whose stamping ground is the Northern Territory. Her white father has worked in the mining industry all his life and never remarried after the death of his aboriginal wife 20 years earlier. Emily has received a unique upbringing in that her father has encouraged her to embrace both cultures ; consequently she is responsible, educated ( well, nearly: she went to Uni to study Earth Science, not with the intention of getting a degree but to understand better the ancient land that has its roots in her heart. When she felt she had learned all she wanted to know she left. Without the degree.), and fearless to a fault: her aggression and disrespect for authority is legendary, especially if she sees injustice – ‘that bint has got nice tits and a mouth like a blowtorch!’ – is a common opinion held by Emily’s suffering work colleagues, the local constabulary. For Emily is the district’s Aboriginal Community Police officer – a ‘Clayton’s Cop’, she calls herself, but conscientious in her representation of her people, those sad, aggressive, drunks and no-hopers who subsist in the humpies on the edge of town. Mr. Hyland doesn’t give us the hearts and flowers version of the uneasy alliance between the People of the Dreaming and the white usurpers; imbedded racism bubbles away under the surface and spills over it too; ‘those bloody abos’ contribute diligently to their own degradation, but the story is infused with great insight (Mr. Hyland worked for 10 years with aboriginal communities in Central Australia) and hope; with Emily as their champion ‘those bloody abos’ have more rights than they were aware of, and a reason to return and protect the great red land of their ancestors from something evil that is poisoning it and everything it sustains. An old miner is murdered before he can reveal what that poison is, and Emily relies on her prescience and instincts as much as her intelligence to solve the crime – along with a cast of Outback characters that put ‘Dad and Dave’ to shame. This is the third Emily Tempest novel; I hope the library will give us the treat of the other two: ‘Moonlight Downs’ and ‘Diamond Dove’: the action is hectic; the corpses pile up everywhere; the ducks are all lined up in a row at the conclusion, and the Ocker humour is unbeatable. One of the characters stops to think and ‘He gave a fair imitation of a budgie trying to pass an emu’s egg’. Can you top that? I don’t think so. ****
Stephen King needs no introduction. Some of his more fulsome admirers have likened him to a modern-day Dickens, which is certainly true regarding his output; fans can expect a new novel every year, faithfully arriving regardless of adverse personal circumstance (he had a near-fatal accident one year) and world calamity. It would no longer be politic to say that he is reliable as the weather, given the current apocalyptic floods occurring world-wide, but you can certainly set your clock by his ability to churn out yet another best-seller. Having said that, Mr. King’s novels, while not all of a high standard, are ALWAYS wonderfully readable, having just that right blend of the ordinary and macabre which never fails to make the hair rise on the back of the neck most pleasurably. He says that he has always been interested in exploring the reaction of ordinary people to extraordinary events, and this is never more ably demonstrated than in his latest collection of four novellas, all dealing with themes of retribution: the first is called ‘1922’, the year that a husband hates his wife so much that he plans what he hopes is her perfect murder, only to snare his son into being his accomplice with tragic results; ‘Big Driver’ is a cautionary tale of what happens to a lady novelist who accepts an offer of help to change her flat tire on a road to nowhere; ‘Fair Extension’ recounts the bargain a desperate and dying man makes with a stranger when he reveals to himself as well as the stranger that he hates and despises his so-called best friend; and ‘Good Marriage’, demonstrates that the true love between two decent people changes irrevocably when large sums of money are involved – and decency flies out the window, too. Yes, Mr. King has done it again, producing the cleverly plotted page-turner that I always expect of him: entertaining, readable, reliable: yep, that’s him!
Here is a story of South Africa, that wild, cruel, beautiful land, written by an Afrikaner woman about Afrikaners in the 50’s and 60’s and beyond. It is the story of a childless white woman, Milla De Wet, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage with her husband Jak, righteous upholder of Boer ideals and utterly convinced of white supremacy over his brown farm labourers: ‘Give a Hotnot your thumb and he’ll take your arm!’ Milla is lonely, unfulfilled and severely disillusioned with her young handsome husband; he’s not happy with her either, or his life on her inherited family farm. He beats and belittles her constantly. She sees as her salvation the adoption of a little coloured girl from her mother’s farm; Agaat has been ill-treated and abused nearly to death: Milla sees her rescue of the child as an excellent act of charity, a way of proving (especially to her forbidding old Boer mother and Jak) that she can be the perfect Christian, dispensing love and kindness to the needy and less fortunate, and a wonderful surrogate mother to the child who is not hers – and the wrong colour. The inevitable happens. Loving bonds are formed, then broken – her husband is jealous of the new-found affection Milla has for her little charge and decrees that Agaat must be trained and treated as a servant - then a miracle occurs: after many years Milla is finally pregnant, but after the birth of the longed-for son, Agaat is jettisoned, exiled to an outside room ; her favoured status is over.
Louis Kahn, internationally renowned American Architect, died of a heart attack in Penn Station, New York in 1976, aged 74. He had just returned from India, and because he had insufficient identification on him his body was unclaimed for three days. He had also been declared bankrupt, owing half a million dollars at the time of his death and he had two mistresses, each with a child to him – and a wife of many years at home.
This classic little Swedish movie was made in the 80’s but it has lost none of its impact; nothing is dated – the world according to adolescents is still unexplored, wondrous – and frightening. 12 year-old Ingmar and his older brother can no longer live with their beloved mother; she is very ill. Older brother goes to their Granny and Ingmar is sent to his uncle in a little town a long train ride away. He is forced to leave his beloved little dog behind but is assured it will be taken care of: that is the first betrayal. Despite missing his pet terribly, Ingmar makes friends easily, and looks forward to going back to live with his mum and ‘making her laugh again’ when she is better. The trouble is – well, Mum doesn’t get better and Ingmar and his brother are forced to learn some of life’s very hard lessons whether they want to or not. Lasse Hallström directs and guides his actors effortlessly through low comedy and high drama and all his actors respond accordingly, especially Ingmar – he is a delight: I can’t believe that this wonderful child will now be getting on to forty; he will always be twelve to me, mischievous, poignant and funny. Be warned (those who don’t like them!) there are subtitles, but they will be secondary after the very first scene. What a beaut little movie! 
ean Gilkyson has been round the block more times than she cares to admit after the accidental death of her 21 year-old husband Griff in a car which she was driving. The child of their union, 9 year-old Griff never knew her father but knows with certainty the relationship her mother is in now will end in violence and tears – if they are lucky.