MORE GREAT READS FOR MAY, 2014
Night Film, by Marisha Pessl
The remarks sheet on this
library book had only one comment from a previous reader: ‘weird’.
And it is, in that the
plot generates terrific momentum for a good two thirds of the story, then winds
down to a conclusion that is hardly satisfying – at least for me. The author’s intentions are clear (maybe!): she has created her story as metaphor for the
works of her shadowy and reclusive protagonist Stanislas Cordova, world famous
film director, auteur and recluse, unseen since a 1977 Rolling Stone
interview. He specialises in the
suspense and horror genre, maintaining that everyone should ‘travel to the edge
of the end, for mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us
what we are. Will you step back and
cover your eyes? Or will you have the
strength to walk to the precipice and look out?’
Needless to say, Mr
Cordova has a cult following, strengthened by his secrecy and the fact that all
his films are made on a huge Gothic estate he owns in upstate New York – he is
the perfect subject for famed investigative reporter Scott McGrath to delve
into after McGrath receives a mysterious phone call telling him that ‘Cordova
does bad things to children’. Unfortunately, his curiosity earns him a
career-destroying lawsuit, the breakup of his marriage and a wish never to hear
the director’s name again – until he reads of the death of Ashley Cordova, the
director’s 24 year old daughter, a possible suicide.
Call him fatally curious
after all the wrath Cordova has already visited upon him, but Ashley’s death
excites Scott’s interest again in a way that nothing has since his
disgrace: he HAS to establish to his own
satisfaction that her fall down a lift shaft in an abandoned building was an
accident, suicide – or murder.
As his investigation
progresses (aided by her ex boyfriend and a hat-check girl, one of the last
people to see her alive) dark magic starts to surface: it appears that Ashley has been marked by the
devil and her death was owed to the Evil One for services rendered to her
father. Ms Pessl by this time has the
reader by the throat – she can generate suspense and a lowering dread with the
best of them, and as an added fillip the reproduction of notes and photographs
from Scott’s comprehensive files bring the reader deep into the story. As a literary device this is quite a novelty.
I have never been more intrigued by a
plot after seeing various photos of Ashley and reading newspaper reports
(mock-ups of the New York Times and TIME Magazine, no less!) of her prodigious
musical gifts and the Police Report on her death: it gives a great verisimilitude to the plot –
until Scott’s investigations lead him into a maze of false starts, dead ends and
trails that bring him inexorably back to the beginning. He is a hamster on a wheel.
And so is the reader,
snagged in an insoluble mystery of the fictional film director’s own
making. Each discovered revelation
obscures something else, right up to the final page – where all should be
explained, but isn’t.
We are forced to draw our
own conclusions, as in a classic Cordova film.
The previous reader thought that Ms Pessl’s book was ‘weird’, and I can
understand why: I’ve never read anything
like this before either, but I salute the writer’s many attempts to flummox and
trick us, at the same time wondering if
it was really necessary – her overuse of italics, too, nearly drove me mad!
Neverthless, her powerful
imagery and her creation of a protagonist in Stanislas Cordova who dominates in
spite of his absence, every page of this book, must be commended. But how many readers will last the distance? I am sure Ms Pessl enjoyed writing this
book. I wish I could say I enjoyed
reading it.
Heartland,
by Jenny Pattrick
Donny Mac is on his way
home to Manawa, a tiny village at the foot of Mt. Ruapehu on the central
plateau of the North Island of New Zealand.
He has just served a six-month sentence for grievous bodily harm,
charges brought by the overprotective mother of an old ‘schoolmate’, someone
who has taunted and bullied him since he was a child – but Donny Mac doesn’t
care now: he has completed an anger
management course; still has his job as
a shelf-packer at Manawa’s New World supermarket; a little home his late grandfather left him
and a place in the local rugby team, possible future winners of the regional
championship. His life is on an even
keel again and he is happy – childishly so, for Donny Mac is regarded as slow; ‘ a few sandwiches short of a picnic’ and ‘not
the sharpest knife in the drawer’, but he dearly loves Manawa and everyone in
it - except for all the townies, who
turn up during the ski season on Ruapehu, having bought up all the old mill
houses for use as their holiday accommodation.
No local likes the townies who disrupt their quiet way of life with
speeding SUV’s and raucous parties, but they accept them as a necessary evil,
for Manawa is dying. The timber mills
are closed, there are no jobs and all the young folk have left to look for work
in the big cities, as has happened in countless other once-thriving
communities. At least the townies spend
money when they come to ski on Ruapehu, enabling the village to stutter along
for another year.
Yes, Donny Mac can’t wait
to get home – until he finds that his house has been appropriated in his
absence by Nightshade, the local slut, drunk most of the time, and hugely
pregnant – ‘ and the baby’s yours, you ##@$!!’
Which in all fairness, is drawing a very long bow: given her non-existent reputation, the
hapless baby could belong to any one of the local youths, but after being
rejected by them all, she has settled on poor slow Donny Mac as a last
desperate resort. She has been abandoned
by everyone. He is her only chance of support.
And support her he does,
much against the wishes and counselling of his true friends, people who love
him and worry about him and wish that his life could be better, and that is the
crux of this charming story: the fellowship
of a tight-knit community; their heartfelt
affection for each other regardless of blood-ties, and their wildly desperate
solutions to frightening problems.
Jenny Pattrick is a firm
favourite with New Zealand readers. Her
‘Denniston Rose’ trilogy is fast becoming a classic of popular fiction,
similarly the beautiful ‘Landings’ and while there are a couple of her titles
that I thought weren’t up to her very high standard she has hit her mark once
again with ‘Heartland’. It is a
heartwarmer of a tale in the very best sense of the word, and the only
complaint I can make is that I finished it too quickly – I didn’t want to leave
Donny Mac, Vera, Bull and the Misses Macaneny, finely drawn characters that
will stay with the reader long after the story is finished. Highly recommended.
