The Axeman’s Carnival, by Catherine Chidgey.

 

            ‘The Axeman’s Carnival’ tells a story which may be all too familiar to some:  marital violence perpetrated for distressingly common reasons:  a livelihood going down the tubes;  jealousy;  loss of control (‘I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  It’ll never happen again!’) when the guilty one has had ‘a skinful’, and a gradual build-up of resentment and rage so that each destructive episode repeats itself sooner or later in varying degrees of cruelty.

            Catherine Chidgey doesn’t spare the reader as she describes the lives of Rob and Marnie who farm sheep on a high country station in Otago.  Rob’s family have owned the farm for generations, but it is losing money steadily, regardless of Rob’s 24/7 efforts to keep it afloat – no wonder he loses control and hits the missus sometimes when he’s had a few;  she has no idea the pressure he’s under!  Women are pretty clueless all round, really, and look what she’s done – brought home a bloody magpie that’s fallen out of its nest:  it’s just a hatchling, it’ll never survive (it certainly won’t if Rob’s got anything to do with it!) and she should be out working instead of teaching it words.  Bloody women!  Just because she lost a baby last year she’s gone all clucky.  It wasn’t really a baby anyway, and Rob couldn’t help punching her – not his fault she had a miscarriage!

            Poor, anxious Marnie manages to stand firm, however, in her determination to keep her little Magpie whom she baptises Tama, short for Tamagotchi, but also Maori for boy or son, and Tama, who narrates this beautiful, terrible story is well aware of the poisonous atmosphere in that creaky, rotting old farmhouse, of the nine golden axes hanging above the marital bed, and Rob’s overwhelming desire to win a tenth at the next Axeman’s Carnival, sealing his reputation as the best Axeman ever.

            Ironically, Tama’s facility for language – he can imitate perfectly every human word with ease – earns him a huge following on Twitter, thanks to Marnie thinking he would look cute in a selfie or two;  in fact he becomes, thanks to his internet following and eventual clever marketing, the saviour of the family finances.  Rob will have to eat his words and curb his impulses.  But can he, especially with his jealousy running rampant and a skinful consumed at the Axeman’s Carnival?

            Ms Chidgey has excelled herself:  in beautiful, lyrical language she tells a savage story of Man the Wrecker against the Environment, elemental and capricious, always battling each other.  Who will win, and at what cost?  And what happens to Rob, Marnie and the unbelievably intelligent and hilarious Tama?  There’s only one way to find out – be the happy captive of this mighty story.  SIX STARS.

What's Tops for 2022?

 

WHAT’S TOPS FOR 2022! 

(Even though we have started 2023).  Late again, BUT!  Better late than never, so there.  I have read some wonderful stories this year, and here are the really super-stand-out titles (in no particular order) that thrilled me to the marrow in 2022 – and we’ll all have to admit that there wasn’t much else about the year just gone that was uplifting, heartwarming and optimistic, except the marvelous escapism of great fiction.  Let’s get started:
 

The Hungry and the Fat, byTimur Vermes

 

Never, by Ken Follett

 

Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen

 

We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

 

Greta and Valdin, by Rebecca K. Riley (NZ fiction)

 

City of Ice, by Brian Klingborg

 

The Fish, by Lloyd Jones (NZ fiction)

 

Harbouring, by Jenny Pattrick (NZ fiction)

 

Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn  (Young Adults)

 

Again, Rachel by Marian Keyes

 

Vine Street, by Dominic Nolan

 

Managing Expectations, by Minnie Driver  (Non-fiction)

 

City on Fire, by Don Winslow

 

These Days, by Lucy Caldwell

 Have a safe and healthy 2023, everyone, and happy, happy reading!  

 

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver.

 

            Demon Copperhead is the nickname of narrator Damon Fields, child of a young man who died before Damon’s’ birth, and a girl who was too young for motherhood and entirely without family of any kind to support her.  Alcohol became her crutch.  He also has the misfortune to be born in Appalachia, ‘hill-billy’ country, one of the poorest, most exploited parts of the States bordering the Mason-Dixon Line, where Mining is the only work on offer and those offering it have complete power – over everyone.  In short, the Great American Dream is a nightmare for the ordinary folk Damon grows up with.

            But!  He is best friends with Maggot, his name for Matthew Peggot, who lives next door, and Maggot’s family has taken him to their hearts, which is just as well for, though she loves him, Damon’s mum cannot be relied on, especially when she goes on a bender;  then the boot is usually on the other foot:  Damon becomes, of necessity, a care-giver from a very early age.  Which is not to say that he’s any more deprived than any other of his schoolmates;  everyone puddles along, various parents in rehab of some kind, depending on their addictions – until twin tragedies occur:  opioids in the shape of oxycodone and fentanyl make their first appearances, and Damon’s mum meets her fate in the shape of Stoner, a fast guy with a motorcycle, a steady, well-paying job – and a loathing for Damon. 

            It is patently clear that this is not a marriage made in heaven.  In short order Damon is made an orphan and  abandoned to the inept local welfare system where he is subjected to the whims and vagaries of people who have applied to foster him, but only want the monthly allowance the State pays them to ‘look after’ him.  At the age of ten, he has become just a number, living in squalor and worked into the ground at one place, and barely fed in another.  This part of Damon’s narrative is purposely reminiscent of Dickens’s David Copperfield, for Ms Kingsolver wants it known that not a lot has changed between modern-day Appalachia and British Victorian times, just the anaesthesia that people use (including, eventually, Damon) to block out heart-ache, sadness and hunger for increasingly shorter periods.

            Ms Kingsolver was born, raised and lives in Appalachia, and there is no writer more uniquely and superbly qualified to write Damon’s powerful story, which is both a tribute to the country’s beauty and an elegy to its cruel mismanagement.  In God We Trust means nothing where Money is the only God.  Having said that, let us thank whatever deity gave us the pleasure of Ms Kingsolver’s singular literary voice:  how lucky we are to hear it.  SIX STARS.       

           

 

 

All the Broken Places, by John Boyne.

 

            This superb sequel to ‘The Boy in Striped Pyjamas’ examines the nature and essence of guilt:  how much one can feel, and how much one can block out and hide away so that one can carry on living in this sorry world.  Widowed Gretel Fernsby has become an expert over her long life at doing just that;  now in her 90s, she is highly proficient at guarding her terrible secrets, among the worst being that she was the 12 year old daughter of the notorious Kommandant of a concentration camp:  he was hanged for his heinous crimes after the Second World War, but Gretel and her mother escaped to France, there to hide until their disguises and false papers were exposed by furious and vengeful neighbours, with predictable results.

            Gretel’s life journey has veered down several blind alleys and wrong paths during her youth but, thanks to the love, kindness and stability of her marriage to Historian Edgar Fernsby, her awful secrets have slept like the dead for many years;  she is financially secure and lives in an apartment block in London’s Mayfair where property values rise daily;  she is within walking distance of theatres, Fortnum’s and Harrods, and her only son whom she loves but considers to be a bit of a no-hoper in his personal life (he has been married three times, gearing up for a fourth!) visits her regularly – to ask for money.

Life could be worse and has been, but all is serene at the moment, even regarding her younger friend and upstairs neighbour, who is succumbing to early onset dementia – until the downstairs flat is sold to a powerful film producer, his beautiful actress wife and their 9 year old son.  The age of Gretel’s brother when he died:  the brother whose name she cannot say:  the brother whose fate was her fault. HER fault.

            Well, she’ll have to make the best of things and have as little to do with them as possible – which is easier said than done, especially when it becomes painfully clear that the little boy and his mother are being bullied and beaten by their husband and father, bringing back searing childhood memories for Gretel and a crisis of concience:  should she ignore what is plainly happening in the flat below, or report his cruelty thus ruining his reputation - and stirring up a rats’ nest which could lead all the way to her door and the terrible secrets behind it.

            Mr Boyne has created a marvellous protagonist in Gretel;  as broken as the places in which she once sought refuge, she still ennobles herself by a final selfless act which permits her, at last, to say her brother’s name.  SIX STARS.     

 

The Tilt, by Chris Hammer.

         

  

          Master exponent of Aussie Noir Chris Hammer has forsaken his usual protagonist Martin Scarsden, burnt-out Sydney journalist, for a couple of Scarsden’s police acquaintances who have been sent to a small town on the border of New South Wales and Victoria to investigate a cold case, the discovery of skeletal remains at the bottom of a dam recently blown up by activists unknown.  The police are involved because the skeleton’s skull has a bullet hole in it, clearly not an accident, and Detective Constable Nell Buchanan, originally a local girl whose adoptive family has lived in the area for four generations, is raring to solve the mystery, if only to prove to her parents, strongly disapproving of her career choice, that she has the skills to bring criminals to justice.

            The great Murray river courses through the Millewa/Barmah forest where the crime scene is;  it is a breathtaking natural wonder, home to flora and fauna found nowhere else in the country – and home too, to drop-outs, conspiracy theorists and small-time racketeers:  the wildlife involves more than the four-legged kind, once one knows where to look, and Nell and her boss Ivan Lucic are astonished at the variety of busy criminal activity in the area – and shocked again at the discovery of a second body as the dam, called The Regulator, gives up its secrets. 

            And what secrets they are!  Especially as Nell eventually discovers that the second body is her natural grandfather, coldly murdered because he was a reporter and was investigating lucrative rackets controlled by a man who was supposed to be everyone’s friend.  But the worst discovery for her is the fact that her own family – her mother and father, uncles, even her grandparents! – were all involved to a lesser or greater degree in the criminal ‘family  business’ (obviously why they disapproved of her choice of job!) but, most shocking of all in Nell’s eyes is that they kept up the veneer of respectability to such a degree that her retired dentist dad, her agoraphobic mother (hasn’t left the house in years!), and her newspaper editor uncle could have taken their secrets to the grave if those two bodies hadn’t been found. 

            The Regulator isn’t the only yielder of secrets:  the forest with all its secret waterways has much to hide as well, and Chris Hammer doesn’t let the mystery or the suspense flag for a minute.  His characters are all true-blue, Dinky-Dye Aussies without being caricatures and his colourful prose effortlessly evokes a provincial Australia that is changing all the time, as he proves in his World War Two flashbacks.  Aussie noir at its best.  FIVE STARS            

 

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King.

 

 

           Master of the macabre Stephen King‘s ‘Fairy Tale’ is yet another fitting tribute to his seemingly bottomless well of imagination, in which he weaves the fear and vulnerability of today’s world with the awful desperation and magic of another:  ‘Fairy Tale’ is an amalgam of everything that went bump in the night and scared us silly when we were little – leavened with rewards:  the promise of huge pots of goblin gold, and the hand in marriage of a fair princess – but only if we could complete certain tasks, usually involving giants and witches.

            It goes without saying that Mr King has stamped his own royal seal on this story, classic in its way:  his hero is Charlie Reade, 17 years old and an athletic, strapping (6ft 4”) high school student.  Charlie has had a rough few years – his mother died in a tragic accident when he was a child, and his much-loved father spent some years cosying up to the bottle.  Life was bleak until quite by accident (really?) Charlie one day hears a dog’s frantic howling coming from the Psycho House – so called because it looked exactly like Norman Bates’s creepy home in the movie – and when he investigated, found the reclusive owner, Mr Bowditch, lying on the back porch with a badly broken leg.  He’d been trying to climb a ladder and had fallen.  Charlie’s efforts to get him to hospital and later kindnesses (fixing his fence, looking after his old dog Radar while he was hospitalised, and running various errands – including biking to a nearby town to sell 4lbs of gold pellets (whaaaat!!) – to a shady jeweller) become the foundation of an unusual but firm friendship, finally culminating in a bizarre message from Mr Bowditch as he succumbs to a heart attack:  the locked wooden shed at the back of the property contains a staircase to a well.  It is the portal to another world, and if he decides to journey there, he may not return, because it contains unspeakable horrors  - and riches beyond imagining.  Risk and Reward.

            What to do?  Well.  Easy- Peasy!  Except that gold doesn’t hold the usual attraction for Charlie – he has fallen for Radar, Best Dog in the World, and there may be a way to make her young again:  if that’s a possibility, then tarry not!  And they don’t, entering a world controlled by magic, but still peopled by those whose lust for power is very similar to Charlie’s own messed-up modern existence.

            There are juicily documented monsters galore, and enough pace, tension and excitement after the ambling scene-setting to make anyone burn the midnight oil.  Stephen King is STILL the king!  SIX STARS.       

 

The Bullet that Missed, by Richard Osman.

           

Game-show host Richard Osman has, with his third novel about a gang of retirement-village sleuths, cemented his reputation as the new master of the comic Crime novel:  his Thursday Murder Club series is rightly lauded as perfect entertainment, while glossing over none of the sadness and isolation that affect so many of the elderly – and the vulnerability, physical and emotional, that they are forced to deal with in their everyday lives, as shown so powerfully in Book Two, ‘The Man Who Died Twice’.

In Book Three, the gang is still meeting every Thursday, and have decided that their latest cold case investigation should centre upon the murder ten years before of Bethany Waites, an ambitious and talented young TV journalist whose car was found at the bottom of a Dover cliff.  Her blood and clothes were found in the car, but her body has never been found.  There was no doubt of her murder, as she was investigating a huge VAT fraud at the time, but the police investigation revealed practically nothing – just the sort of mystery that former spy Elizabeth, retired nurse Joyce (whose new rescue dog Alan loves them ALL with tongue-licking abandon), retired psychiatrist Ibrahim, and former firebrand unionist Ron delight in sinking their teeth into.

There’s just a tiny complication, though:  Elizabeth has just received a text from an unknown number instructing her to kill Viktor, an old friend from her spying days, a retired (naturally!) KGB officer, who now lives in great style and wealth in London as a money-launderer:  if Viktor is not disposed of in two weeks, Joyce will die.

Naturally, Joyce is blissfully unaware that she may have only a fortnight to live, and when she and Elizabeth take the train to the Big Smoke, she is enjoying herself tremendously – until she meets Viktor in his palatial Penthouse and Elizabeth suddenly points a big gun at him:  even her threat never to speak to her best friend EVER again does not persuade Elizabeth to lower her weapon.  What had been a lovely day out (it wasn’t even raining!) has turned into the worst time of Joyce’s life.

Once again, we are all willingly sitting in the palm of Mr Osman’s hand:  his plotting is water-tight and his supporting characters are, as always, people like thee and me, and wholly delightful (as thee and me are)!  And because life isn’t always a laugh a minute – even though it should be – we must make the journey with Elizabeth as she witnesses her beloved husband’s inexorable decline into dementia.  With this great series, Mr Osman has shown that he is a true voice of Those of a Certain Age – the Elderly.  And he does it with great style and wit.  Well done!  FIVE STARS.