MORE GREAT READS FOR
JANUARY, 2015
The Rent Collector, by Camron Wright
In
2009 Camron Wright’s son Trevor filmed a documentary in Cambodia called ‘River
of Victory’, an account of the appalling poverty and daily struggle for
survival of the inhabitants of Pnom Penh’s huge municipal waste dump. These people had come to the city from even
more privation in the country to try to make a living; as peasants most were illiterate, but all had
one thing in common: a huge work ethic
and powerful desire to make a better life for their loved ones.
The struggles of one such family in the film inspired Mr
Wright to turn the family’s travails into an extraordinary, novelised account
of their refusal to yield to the squalor of their everyday existence, and their
ultimate success in making a better life for themselves.
Sang Li, her husband Ki Lim and their baby boy Nisay eke
out a precarious living as trash pickers for recyclables at Stung Meanchey,
‘The River of Victory’ – which is anything but:
acres of noisome garbage tower over everything; when it rains the water collects and
stagnates in filthy channels that everyone tries to avoid at all costs: cuts and scratches suffered while picking
through the rubbish easily become infected, and medical help isn’t cheap.
The lives of everyone at Stung Meanchey are precarious; they are all grindingly poor, but they all
have to a greater or lesser degree that vital emotion to get them through each
day: hope. Hope that the next day will be better, that
the pickings will be larger and get them a bit more money from the buyers who
gather at the end of each shift – and the hope that eventually, they will be
able to move on from Stung Meanchey.
Sang
Li and her husband work as hard as everyone else, but their progress is
hampered by the failing health of their baby Nisay, who is continually beset by
fevers and diarrhoea, and the predations of the gangs of young boys who roam
the dump, looking to rob the vulnerable.
Every time Sang Li saves enough money it is eaten up by the cost of
medications for Nisay whose symptoms reappear as soon as the pills are
finished, and like everyone else, Ki Lim has been attacked and robbed by the
gangs of the little money he earned after twelve hours picking through garbage.
The
family is desperate: they haven’t enough
money to pay the rent on the hovel in which they live, and they know that the
loathed Rent Collector, a spiteful old woman known for her complete lack of
compassion – and her drunkenness – will accept no excuses: she wants her money. NOW!
Until a miracle
occurs: someone has given Sang Li a
picture book they found amid the garbage, thinking it would be good for
Nisay; when the Rent Collector chances upon
the book she is disarmed. Weeping at the
sight of it, she takes the book without mentioning the rent.
Sang
Li is intelligent - she realises that
the Rent Collector can read: can she profit
from this situation? Can she convince
the Rent Collector to teach her to read, for Sang Li knows that literacy is the
doorway to knowledge: knowledge creates
opportunity.
And
literature is at the heart of this remarkable story, for in a former life the
Rent Collector taught literature at a prestigious university. She is an ideal vehicle through which Mr
Wright explores human stories, real and imagined; the Rent Collector delivers a fine education
to Sang Li, her last pupil - and many compelling, brutal and unforgettable life
lessons as well.
Mr
Wright is such a skilful storyteller that it is impossible for the reader to
discern where reality ends and fiction begins:
suffice to say that this reader doesn’t care – the message is loud and
clear: hope is the key. Highly recommended.
The
Bright Side of my Condition, by Charlotte Randall
In the first years of the nineteenth century four
stowaways on a sealing ship are left on an uninhabited island in the Southern
Ocean by the captain, furious that they should try to hide themselves on his
ship; he didn’t have enough to feed his
legitimate crew, let alone four escaped felons from Norfolk Island. Well, they could earn their passage back to
Sydney town by collecting seal pelts; he
would be back in a year to collect them.
Thus does their
privation begin.
New Zealand author Ms
Randall has a very large following here;
this is her seventh novel (see May 2011 review of ‘Hokitika Town below) and
is based on actual events: four stowaway
felons were indeed marooned on one of the Snares Islands and instructed to
collect sealskins to earn their passage home;
unfortunately, the ship’s captain didn’t
return to collect them in a year:
nearly ten years would pass before they saw a sail on the horizon.
The story is narrated by
Bloodsworth, a thief and layabout, transported from England to Norfolk Island
for stealing (amongst other things) a length of lace. His reluctant companions are Slangham, who
murdered his wife; Gargantua, or Fatty
(until privation peeled the weight from his bones), and Toper, a superstitious
and God-fearing Irish Catholic drunk not known for deep thinking. Gargantua is reluctantly acknowledged to be
of an intellectual bent – he can recite huge swathes of poetry, especially that
of Rabelais, his favourite. He is also a
classic stirrer and takes smug satisfaction in setting his fellows against each
other; it gives him some small pleasure
to manipulate those he considers less clever than he.
Slangham is a
workhorse; he drives the others
mercilessly to provide the skins that they hope will eventually earn their
freedom, and he takes no pleasure in life that anyone can see: he is a volcano of hatred and misery: he hates himself and everyone else.
Bloodsworth, initially
aghast and horrified at their plight eventually reconciles himself to their
environment and learns to love the spectacular wilderness and wildlife of the
island. For the first time in his life
he feels truly free.
And therein lies his
downfall: his mind must be sick to
enable him to actually feel so rebellious;
to stop taking orders from Slangham, self-appointed ‘boss’; to please himself what he does each day: no, something is wrong. They cannot have a madman in their
midst. He must be punished.
Ms Randall does not put
a foot wrong in this masterly tale; the
island, paradise or hell according to the weather conditions, is described in
gorgeous imagery and her characters are all too real, especially Bloodsworth
who has a conscience that weighs more than the world – but just in case readers
think this is a tale of unremitting gloom, gems of humour like rays of sunlight
illuminate the story at strategic points, enhancing more – if it were possible
– the reader’s enjoyment. This is a
great story. Highly recommended.
Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall
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.
Thereafter
follows a rollicking account of Halfie’s adventures as a coin boy, in his own fractured and inimitable
style: comedy and tragedy vie
equally for places in this wonderful
story of great riches and hard times portrayed by a writer of superlative skill. Halfie is ebullient, shrewd, hilarious, and
quite simply unforgettable as he bravely
attempts in his little boy’s way to deal with problems that most adults would flee rather than solve: sometimes ‘his heart sag like a old bed’ when
his mind turns back to ‘rememorying’, but he has a lion’s heart, a fox’s cunning and a nobility of spirit that
many adults would never achieve in a lifetime.
His
friends – and enemies – are wonderfully drawn, too; an astonishing cavalcade of the Good, the
Bad, and the downright Ugly, and all utterly convincing. Ms. Randall has brought our Goldrush era to
thrilling life: as Halfie would
say: KA PAI! And I would say A-MA-ZING
