GREAT READS FOR JUNE 2012

The Golden Mean, by Annabel Lyon                                                          It is the year 343BC and Aristotle, revered student of Plato’s academy, superb logician, philosopher and teacher, has arrived in Pella, capital of the northern Greek city state of Macedon to greet and pass on messages to his old childhood friend and liege lord Phillip, king of Macedon.  Aristotle has recently married and is anxious to bring his new (and very young) wife Pythia to Athens, the cultural centre of the universe;  he frets that she will tire of him before their marriage has properly begun – he feels he must beguile and bribe her with new experiences and fine things in order to keep her with him.  Unfortunately for Aristotle, Phillip ‘requires’ him to stay on to be tutor to his 13 year-old son Alexander, and ‘no’ is not an acceptable answer.  On one hand, Aristotle hopes and prays that Pythia will not get restive and disgruntled after the exciting life he has painted for her does not immediately materialise, and on the other he is fascinated by his new student, a brilliant, relentlessly curious young boy who wants to be EVERYTHING:  an intellectual, a warrior, an athlete, an explorer of unknown lands – and the greatest conqueror of the known world.

Thus begins a relationship that lasts for years, Aristotle always attempting to instil within his headstrong charge the virtue of moderation over extremism in all things, the perfect balance between the two – the Golden Mean – with only partial effect.  Aristotle’s teachings are undermined on several levels by court intrigue from other, lesser tutors, and Alexander’s mother Olympias ‘s sick dependence on her beautiful son, not to mention the prince’s own dreams of glory.   He is gradually forced to relinquish all influence on Alexander and eventually is compelled to watch in horror as King Phillip is assassinated.  Though the prince is never blamed for his father’s murder, many fingers are pointed at Olympias as the culprit, but Alexander does not care:  he is now king and can embark on his life’s course.

Canadian writer Annabel Lyon writes beautifully of these great figures of history.  In spare, elegant,

sometimes bawdy prose she constructs the life and times of a militant people with great care and skill, and with almost ridiculous ease breathes thrilling life into ancient heroes of culture and war who have remained a huge influence on the world for more than 2000 years.  Highly recommended.

The Chemistry of Tears, by Peter Carey

Peter Carey is one of Australia’s most famous and prolific novelists;  he has won numerous literary awards, including the Man Booker Prize (twice!), and each new work is greeted with delight by his legions of admirers – including me:  after reading his marvellous comic novel ‘Parrot and Olivier in America’, (scroll down all the way to China to read that review!) I am a committed fan, and while there is much of a mechanical bent that went right over my head in this latest book, there is also much to savour and admire;  his wonderful facility for dialogue;  his great flare for mood and nuance, and the complete credibility of his characters.

Catherine Gehrig is a Conservator and Horologist for one of London’s many museums, the fictional Swinburne.  She restores and repairs all manner of clocks and antique mechanisms, and has had an all-consuming love affair for the last 13 years with a curator of Metals at the same institution, Matthew Tindall, a married man with two grown sons. Weekends and holidays with her lover, and her profession are all she needs to feel whole and a perfectly functioning, happy woman – until Matthew dies suddenly of a massive heart attack.  Catherine is reeling, unmanned, shocked to the core – and she can’t turn to anyone for sympathy, for her great love affair has been kept secret from her work colleagues, and she has no family she can turn to.  She is completely, frighteningly alone – she cannot even attend his funeral, for the official, despised ‘wife’ will be centre stage as chief mourner.

Catherine hits the booze for the next few days;  she can’t concentrate at all on her work, that of restoring a beautiful French clock, and vodka is the only thing that can get her through the nights - until her Head of Department, Eric Croft, presents her with a challenge that will eventually rouse her from her terrible grief sufficiently enough to start functioning again:  the restoration of an automaton, constructed in the 19^th century for a rich English manufacturer, Henry Brandling.  His young son Percy was ailing and tubercular;  after embarking on many different and desperate cures, Brandling decided that an automaton, a mechanical duck, would be the last, greatest entertainment for his precious little boy.  Brandling’s journals are included with the huge jumble of parts, and the account of his trip to Germany in 1854 to find the very best Black Forest clockmaker to construct his dream enthrals Catherine:  Henry and Catherine narrate alternate chapters and the reader is enthralled too by Henry’s account of the man who eventually constructs for Henry not a duck, but something much more:  is he a liar, a conman, a visionary, a genius – or all of those things?

Peter Carey writes movingly about the grief suffered by both his protagonists:  the reader has great sympathy for them even though they are not always likeable, but the last third of the book is most memorable for the thrill that starts to build as the automaton, splendid and awe-inspiring, nears completion, and the gradual taking of centre-stage by Catherine’s gorgeous young Sloane Ranger assistant, who has started to manifest some worrying problems of her own.  There is also a last, final mystery for the reader to chew on, and this reader certainly didn’t solve it – engines big or small have always stayed under the bonnet for me, but the historical enigma intrigued me greatly, and probably will for a long time.  Highly recommended.

Wulf, by Hamish Clayton

Hamish Clayton was recently announced as the winner of the prize for the NZ Society of Authors Best First Book, and deservedly so:  he has written an extraordinary, mesmerising account of early 19^th century New Zealand traders and their dealings with the brilliant and ruthless Te Rauparaha, using that feared Rangatira’s exploits as a modern retelling of the 10^th century poem ‘Wulf’, a verse that has resisted clear translation by scholars ever since it was written – and shall probably continue to do so, because of the myriad shades of meaning in so many of the Old English words.

Here we have Mr. Clayton’s interpretation of the poem underlying factual events in 1830 when the merchant brig ‘Elizabeth’ sailed to New Zealand from Sydney to trade with Te Rauparaha.  At that time, Te Rauparaha was so powerful that he held sway over the lower North Island, and had ambitions to conquer Ngai Tahu who had a stronghold on Banks Peninsula.  Te Rauparaha himself had captured Kapiti Island and turned it into a fortress, unassailable to war parties of any number due to the brilliance of his military tactics.  He was justly feared and had fully earned his title ‘The Napoleon of the Pacific’.   His mana was held in awe by ‘the white goblins’ as well as all Maori, for this chief also held the monopoly over a huge region in the trade of flax and whale oil, for which he received tools, blankets – and muskets.

The ‘Elizabeth’s voyage is narrated by a nameless crewmember, a man aghast at the strangeness and beauty of this new and savage land, it’s cruel weather in winter turning into searing heat in summer, trees which in winter were black and green and gloomy, bursting in the new warmth into bloody riots of red:  everything seems to become its opposite.  The crew is entertained and enthralled during their trip down the coast to Kapiti by Cowell, the ship’s trading master, a young man fluent in Maori who has already met Te Rauparaha and is happy to relate stories of the great man’s exploits – and his utter ruthlessness when dealing with his enemies.  Cowell baptises him ‘The Wolf’, and the name takes hold.

Cowell is indeed a bard, a great spinner of tales to entertain and inform – but he is not able to counsel his captain and first mate against entering into a deal to receive enormous amounts of flax if they would consent to take Te Rauparaha and 120 of his warriors south to Banks Peninsula, hidden on the ‘Elizabeth’ there to capture by trickery  the Ngai Tahu chief Tamaiharanui and his family.  The predicted bloodbath ensues, and everyone is dishonoured by the outcome, including the captain of the ‘Elizabeth’:  as a last act of treachery, Te Rauparaha reneges on the fifty tons of flax he promised and the brig is forced eventually to return to Sydney and ignominy – and criminal charges against captain and crew for being accessories to the murder of ‘native New Zealanders’.

Mr. Clayton has told this story so convincingly that the reader journeys willingly with his beautifully realised characters every step of the way:  his juxtaposition of the old ‘Wulf’ with the new is clever and intriguing and it is satisfying to know that New Zealand literature has a superlative new voice to tell our stories.

The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye

The city of New York in August, 1845:  it is high summer and all, especially the poor, are suffering from the dreadful heat and the illnesses that flourish in the noisome, rancid downtown tenements.  Despised Irish emigrants, arriving in their thousands from a home country that can no longer feed them – the Potato Famine has started – are clustered in rat-infested ghettos, wondering if they have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire:  their children are starving and the only work they can find is that which no ‘native’ will do.  Fires start easily in such conditions and a huge one, destroying several blocks, razes the accommodation, job and hopes of Timothy Wilde, barkeep, aged 27.  He has saved his wages for years so that he can eventually feel prosperous enough to offer marriage to charity worker Mercy Underhill, virtuous daughter of a protestant minister renowned for his tireless efforts on behalf of the poor – as long as they are not Irish catholics.  There is constant friction between Mercy and her father;  he lost his beloved wife to the cholera she contracted nursing those Irish savages and he can’t bear to think that his cherished girl would meet the same fate.  Mercy defies him at every turn, and Tim’s adoration of her knows no bounds.

  Sadly, he feels no such admiration for his elder brother Valentine who has looked after him (minimally, he feels) since the death of their parents in a farm fire when Tim was 10.  Valentine indulges all his animal appetites, is totally unscrupulous – and has just been made a captain in the newly created Police force, a fledgling organisation founded by Justice George Washington Matsell in a desperate attempt to instil some kind of lawful order to a city that wallows in chaos and anarchy.  Valentine ropes Tim in as a Roundsman for the 6^th Ward, giving him a Copper Star to wear to signify he is on the side of right:  Tim hates his big, bluff brother even more but is forced to comply – he has lost everything in the fire and unless he wants to starve he must adapt to his new circumstances.  And what circumstances they are!

On his way home to his new lodgings he is nearly knocked over by a terrified little girl clad only in a pretty nightgown – it is soaked in blood not her own and there begins a mystery as fascinating and sordid as the great city itself, particularly when Tim establishes that the child is an escapee from a brothel, where there are other child prostitutes, all of whom are coerced into selling themselves because  ‘the madam provides fresh food’.

His police work uncovers the graves of twenty children, all with their rib cages opened like the sign of the cross:  it appears that a serial killer is abroad, intent on stoaking religious and racial hatred for whatever ends he desires, and the sacrifice of little children means nothing if they are all Irish.

This story is so fast-plotted and such a page-turner that I had to keep reading until the very end;  then I was sorry there wasn’t more.  (And it will take some time to guess whodunit:  this tale has more twists and turns than the reader can keep track of.)  Ms. Faye is a storyteller extraordinaire, evoking an excellent sense of time and place and characters that are utterly credible.  An added bonus for me was the ‘flash talk’, the thieves’ argot that has existed since the 17^th century, evolving here into an 1840’s version and the forerunner to so many of our colloquial expressions – yep, a bloke was still a bloke in those days;  he hadn’t evolved into ‘dude’!  Highly recommended.      

           

               

GREAT READS FOR MAY, 2012

Cinder, by Marissa Meyer (Young adult reading)

Children’s librarian Wendy Fraser recommended this book to me, and as she’s seldom wrong in her reading choices (we have to agree to disagree about Nalini Singh) I’m happy to give this the ravingest (ravingest??) endorsement possible:  WHAT A STORY! 

The tale of Cinderella – yep, Cinderella, her nasty stepmum and the two stepsisters – is transferred hundreds of years into the future.  Cinderella is now Cinder, living in New Beijing with a family who are, to say the least, most reluctant guardians.  She is a mechanic (truly!) and a Cyborg, to her shame, having been fitted out with a steel hand, leg and inbuilt computer screen after a terrible childhood accident.  Cyborgs are the future’s Untouchables, considered fit only to perform the most menial and degrading of tasks, but Cinder is such a good mechanic that a Royal prince visits her to have his tutor android repaired, and after that visit she and the reader are lost:  she to alien romantic impulses (she is not programmed for this!)and a reluctant involvement in a life and death experiment -  and the reader to being nailed to one spot until they have reached the last page.

To add insult to injury, the hapless reader finds that after a thrilling journey at a breakneck pace through more clever plot twists than a pretzel, there are three more books to come – and they haven’t been written yet!  To say I feel cheated is an understatement and the withdrawal symptoms are dire, but I also say with complete confidence that ‘Cinder’ will be the next big Blockbuster book/movie series:  you read it here first.

Waiting for Sunrise, by William Boyd.

    

I have been a devoted fan of William Boyd’s since I read ‘Any Human Heart’.  He is a writer of elegance and style, and also has the exceptional gift of effortlessly generating suspense and mystery in his plots without belonging to the thriller genre.  One reviewer called him an expert writer of ‘the literary thriller’ and that is certainly true of ‘Waiting for Sunrise’.

It is 1913, the setting is Vienna, and Lysander Rief, a young British stage actor of middling success has decided to visit the Austrian capital because it is currently the centre of the daring new medical science of psychoanalysis:  he has a worrying sexual problem that he hopes will be resolved so that he doesn’t disappoint his new fiancé when they eventually consummate their union.  Sadly, Lysander disgraces himself utterly by a series of ill-considered decisions, and eventually breaking his engagement turns out to be the least of his worries.  He must call on the help of an attaché at the British embassy to help him flee the country, and is aghast to find upon his return to Britain that his saviours expect financial repayment for their assistance – but all will be forgotten if he will carry out a small intelligence mission for them.  He is asked in such a way that refusal is not an option;  his descent into espionage and life-threatening danger reveals a cunning and ingenuity he wasn’t aware he had, and a distressing, conscious lack of honour and conscience when ‘up against it’ which can be rationalised away  - except when he dreams. 

Mr. Boyd has created with great assurance the lowering atmosphere of Europe on the brink of the Great War, and the disintegration of one man’s shaky hold on principle and decency in his efforts to survive – he does, but at enormous personal cost.  Highly recommended.

Wild Thing, by Josh Bazell.

Peter Brown, former Mob hitman turned State’s evidence is on the run again.  Those Mafia heavies will NOT leave him alone to lead a respectable life undercover as a doctor in the witness protection programme and his mentors have had to remove him from danger yet again, (read Beat the Reaper review below) this time jacking him up a job as a physician on a cruise ship.  And THAT’S not all it’s cracked up to be – far from lolling around in a deck chair working on his tan, Peter finds that it’s 24/7 drudgery;  he and the rest of the crew have no say at all in their working conditions or lack of them, let alone a union to represent them – in short, the job stinks.  To add insult to injury he has been given a new name that sounds like a nasty medicine.  He is not happy!  But (in the best tradition of wildly-plotted novels of this type) salvation is at hand:  his mentor requires him on another more important job, this time to join an expedition financed by a reclusive billionaire (hereafter called Rec Bill) to explore the veracity of a claim that a creature similar to the Loch Ness Monster is terrorising people in a remote lake in Northern Minnesota.  Peter is recruited as part of the team so that he can test the truth of the claim, and to provide security and protection of a sort to the Palaeontologist sent by Rec Bill to verify whether the ‘Monster’ is real or a hoax.

Violet Hurst is not your usual idea of a Palaeontologist:  she is loud-mouthed, foul-mouthed and she bad-mouths;  she is half-drunk most of the time because she can’t bear to face our polluted and overpopulated world sober;  she is a doomsayer and a naysayer and her lack of belief in everything ordinary people (what are they?) hold dear gets her into some unenviable situations, but she is a very good scientist, can scale cliffs like a mountaineer and shows a resourcefulness under pressure that Peter can only describe as admirable: together they could conquer the world!  Or at least, find a prehistoric monster if it exists.

And from here, things start getting silly, not to say absurd;  the plot thickens to the extent that even Sarah Palin makes an unlikely appearance -  it’s obvious that Josh Bazell doesn’t like her or the Republican Party – but the plot could well have done without her inclusion.  There is the usual plethora of footnotes (some of them VERY funny) to clarify science for the reading masses, and Mr.Bazell has even included an appendix to prove all the assertions and theories Peter and Violet espouse in the book.  I found some of this so bewildering my brain was in danger of exploding, but having said that (now that I have come up for air!) ‘Wild Thing’ whilst indeed a wild read, was also a FUN read, with the right amount of suspense at the right time, and characters that remain so likeable and engaging that we look forward to meeting them again.  And Messrs. Lincoln and Child, those former masters of the absurdist crime genre, must be looking very sour at the advent of Josh Bazell, New Kid on the Block.

Beat the Reaper, by Josh Bazell.

Peter Brown is a first-year hospital doctor in Manhattan.  He is chronically tired, an arch-cynic, prone to taking all sorts of dubious meds to keep himself awake and firing, but he loves medicine and respects his Hippocratic oath.  He is a good and dedicated Medical practitioner.  And in a former life he was a ruthless hitman for the Mafia.  This is the first paradox in Mr. Bazell’s hugely entertaining novel:  the trained killer is now saving lives.  However, Peter’s former occupation is, naturally, a big and constant worry, especially as he fell foul of his Mob bosses and testified against them, gaining himself a much-needed place in the Witness Protection program.

Unfortunately, Peter is not the sort who fades into the background;  he’s enormous, a cross between Godzilla and Attila the Hun, but after six years of medical school and nary a sighting of his former employers, he is confident enough in his new identity to lead what passes for a normal life, as an overworked and underpaid member of the medical staff at Manhattan Catholic Hospital – until one of the ‘made men’ turns up for cancer surgery in Peter’s ward.  In a horrifyingly short time, Peter is on the run, and only his previous expertise at killing people can save him – oh, the corpses stack up at an alarming rate, and there are so many novel ways for the baddies to die:  did you know that the tibia in one’s leg can be removed (provided it’s done competently, without damaging the knee and ankle);  it’s not weight-bearing, and appears to be of no earthly use at all until Peter removes his own tibia, entirely without anaesthetic (naturally!) - to stab the arch Mafia villain in the heart.  What a warrior!  And Lincoln and Child, creators of Aloysius Pendergast, that peerless paragon of Right over Might, must be writhing with envy that they didn’t come up with anything half as outlandish.  Yep, the reader’s credulity is stretched to the utmost, but there is also much to admire in this story;  there are fascinating medical and historical footnotes, a huge and ironic twist in the tale towards its conclusion, and more humour than a body has a right to expect. 

On the library’s remark sheet at the front of the book, one person has written ‘Stupid’.  Fair enough, but another has written ‘awesome read, and that’s the one I’M going with

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn West.

This story is narrated by Esch Batiste, aged 15 and the second youngest child of a black scrap-dealer in a small Louisiana town near the Mississippi River delta.  She has two older brothers, Randall aged 17, and Skeetah, aged 15.  Junior, the youngest at 8, survived childbirth, but their mother didn’t, and the family has not managed well without her:  each carry their own memories of her loving ways and try to exist on them like a precious food that will soon run out, and they each have their defences against the harshness of their existence, Randall in his athleticism and the hope that he will eventually be eligible for a free school basketball training camp which could lead to a college scholarship, and Skeetah to make money for the family by breeding pups from his beloved pitbull, China.  Esch loves to learn and reads prodigiously, particularly the Myths of Greece, and one story, that of Jason and Medea, strikes her as having a similar parallel to her own hopeless yearnings for Randall’s best friend Manny.  The person most adrift is their Daddy, unmanned and helpless without his life’s partner.  He turns inward and away from his children, giving the new baby entirely into their inexperienced care;  for the next eight years he puts food on the table but very little else.  His heart has turned to stone.

Despite their poverty, the Batiste children still have their goals and aspirations - until  terrible unplanned events wreck their hopes:  they are floored by fate’s cruelty and don’t believe that things could get any worse – until they do, with their father bedridden by an awful, fluky accident, and Hurricane Katrina about to hit the Louisiana coast.

Ms. West’s account of the Hurricane alone is stark and terrible:  we are there trying to shield ourselves in our pathetic little shelter from the howling, roaring wind and waterfalls of rain;  we are completely given over to our gutclenching fear in the face of such a huge, elemental power, and watch in terrified disbelief as the water floods our mean little dwelling and threatens to drown us all.

I cannot remember when I last read such splendid prose.  Ms. West is a true wordsmith;  she paints compelling, unforgettable pictures with her beautiful language and her characters are so strong and true that I didn’t want her lovely book to end, for despite the parallels to Greek tragedy, the story ends on a triumphantly hopeful note:  the Batistes and their friends survive, and they survive because they love each other enough to make all the right sacrifices.  They now have even less than before, but what they have gained is immeasurable.  FIVE STARS!!!!!

    

Great Reads for April

GREAT READS FOR APRIL

The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst

Alan Hollinghurst deservedly won the Man Booker Prize in 2004 for his superb novel of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 80’s;  a relentless account of high hopes and low types;  a booming economy – until the ’87 crash – and the radically changing social scene where any behaviour becomes acceptable – until the AIDS epidemic takes hold.

Mr. Hollinghurst’s many admirers have waited seven years for his next  book, and while his writing is still as elegant and incisive as before, the story was a disappointment to this reader for its lack of impetus, and a kind of languor that slows the plot further.  The author relies much on conversation, trivial and otherwise, to push his story along, and as artful and witty as some of the characters are, none of them are sufficiently strong or memorable to be up to the task.

The story begins shortly before the First World War.  The Sawles, a middle-class family are expecting a weekend visit from son George, a student at Cambridge and his new friend Cecil Valance, a fellow student and published poet already being hailed as a new literary lion.  George’s 16 year-old sister Daphne is particularly dazzled by the handsome and aristocratic Cecil, ignorant as is the rest of the family that George and Cecil are lovers.  The account of this weekend is perhaps the strongest part of the book, full of potentially satisfying plot developments and strong characterisations – then we are moved along to 1926, on the eve of the General Strike, and we find that Daphne is now married to Cecil’s younger brother Sir Dudley;  she is the mother of two children, and the mistress of the Valance family home, the great house of Corley Court.  Cecil was killed in the war by a sniper’s bullet, and thanks largely to his mother (whom both boys unkindly referred to as ‘the General’)he has been lionised, anthologised , deified, and finally entombed under a marble effigy in the family chapel.  Dudley also went to France to fight ‘but did not have a good war’ and the marriage is foundering.  There is much swilling of alcohol in an attempt to drown unhappy memories, and as 1926 is the age of the Bright Young Things there are lots of wild parties, and Gay young Blades are more openly accepted than a decade before – in fact, Daphne runs away with one!  Ah, how she has changed from the impressionable, sheltered young teenager of 1913,

Cut to 1967:  Daphne is celebrating her 70^th birthday.  There are more children, supposedly fathered by the Gay Blade, but only Daphne is privy to the truth, and even the reader at the end of the book is unsure – as one could also be uncertain as to whether ‘The Stranger’s Child’ is ultimately the story of the unhappy union of the Sawles and Valance families , or a 100-year history of homosexuality in Britain, evolving from The Love That Dare not Speak its Name to the civil marriages of the early 21^st century.  The best thing I can say about Mr. Hollinghurst’s latest is that it is like the curate’s egg:  good in parts

Death on Demand, by Paul Harris

A prominent businesswoman is killed in a hit and run accident in posh St. Heliers;  a wealthy old Remuera matron dies in a mysterious fall at her home;  a partner in a publishing firm about to be sold is clubbed to death in Ponsonby, and a police informer is found dead at his  villa – also in Ponsonby.  Oh, the corpses are turning up in every Auckland suburb in Paul Thomas’s latest book, the first of his crime novels to feature detective Tito Ihaka in a starring role, and a lot of readers would say ‘and about time, too!’ 

Detective Ihaka is not known for toeing the line and keeping a low profile – well, he couldn’t because of hi s enormous  size -  but he managed to rub so many people the wrong way at Auckland Central, particularly because of his conviction that the St. Heliers hit-and-run investigation should be classed as murder, that he was exiled to the Wairarapa for five years.  Now, at the request of the dying widower of the late businesswoman, he has been brought back to hear What Really Happened.  The widower wants to confess.  It is as Ihaka always suspected:  Hubby hired a hitman, identity unknown, who carried out his orders most efficiently.  Oh, Ihaka could wallow  like a hippo in all the ‘I told you so’s’ but is content to let his superiors at Central try to clean the egg off their faces :  he wants to track down the hitman before any more contracts are undertaken, particularly as he has a nasty suspicion that he might be the next victim.

Paul Harris has constructed a very  competent and well plotted story;  all the loose ends are satisfactorily tidied away by the end of the novel, but the big attraction here is Mr. Ihaka, a singular character in his own right. The snappy, riotously funny dialogue is always a delight, and the sprawling, messy city of Auckland is portrayed so well that it made this reader (an old ex-Jafa) quite nostalgic.  This is the ideal airport or beach read;  I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying it.

Empire Day, by Diane Armstrong. 

Sydney, 1948:  the occupants of Wattle Street in Bondi Junction are celebrating Empire Day as always, with fireworks and a bonfire.  Their actions are viewed with confusion and in some cases fear by new residents of the street, postwar displaced persons, refugees from the carnage in Europe, all struggling to start life again after the unspeakable horrors they suffered in the Camps;   all trying to erase terrible memories and cope with the loss of entire families  - and learn an incomprehensible new language on top of everything else.  Fireworks and bonfires are completely outside their experience. 

Diane Armstrong chronicles a year in the life of several of these families, and the effect they have on the true-blue, Dinky Dye Aussies who are their neighbours.  She is well-qualified to do so, arriving in Sydney herself in 1948 with her family from Poland, so writes with utter conviction of the hurdles they faced:  bland food and the inability to buy the food they were accustomed to; a  colloquial, every-day language entirely different from the formal schoolroom English they took such pains to learn on the ship voyage to Australia, and worst of all, suffering discrimination -  being called ‘Bloody Reffos and DPs’  because they dared to speak their own language to each other in public.  Their new life is hard, a leap into the deep end of the unknown – but it is SAFE:  the bloodshed and slaughter are over.  The monsters who haunt their dreams  are far, far away, never to be seen again – until Ted Browning, an idealistic young newspaper reporter starts investigating one of his neighbours, originally from Latvia, the father of the girl he has fallen in love with.  Through his research he is horrified to discover that a number of war criminals have been accepted as refugees with the tacit approval of the government, the proviso being that these former fascists, members of Death Squads, SS et al, spy and report on communist affiliations among the refugees.  The government is more worried about the communist threat than the sheltering of war criminals in its cities.

Sadly for the reader, Ms Armstrong doesn’t develop this theme to a satisfactory conclusion and there are other plot devices which are simplistic in the extreme – however!  She is still a good enough storyteller to absorb us completely, especially in her account of everyday life back in the Forties:  New Zealand and Australia were so similar all those years ago;  the children played the same games, the family life was the same, with mum at home boiling up the copper and bluing the wash on Mondays – and Dad weaving home after being tipped out of the pub at 6PM.  ‘Time, Gentlemen, Please!’  I’m not sure if those were the good old days or not, but Diane Armstrong has captured them expertly.

The Berlin Crossing, by Kevin Brophy

Here’s something different:  Kevin Brophy’s first novel could belong to several genres – a  spy novel;  a mystery;  a love story;  a suspense novel – or a successful combination of all.  In fact it’s impossible to categorise this work;  suffice it to say that it was such a page- turner I couldn’t stop reading until I had finished, and as I have been reading a lot of ho-hum stuff lately, ‘The Berlin Crossing’ was a rare treat.

In the Germany of 1993, the infamous Wall has fallen, and  in the Eastern part of the country, previously the German Democratic Republic ‘liberation’ by the West is in full swing;  there are no longer two Germanys;  instead all those previously enslaved under the Communist yoke are encouraged to embrace the New Order.  Incomprehensibly, there are some who don’t see the ‘Wessies’ as their saviours;  they functioned very well under the old regime and are defiantly proud to say so.  One such loyal party member is Michael Ritter, a young man previously lauded as a respected academic with a PhD in English from Rostock University – until he upsets his new western bosses at the Gymnasium where he has taught for years,  by his outspoken disapproval of the new system.  He is summarily dismissed, but that’s not his only problem:  his wife has thrown him out and he is forced to return to live with his mother in her tiny flat near the railway station in Brandenburg.  His humiliation is complete.

Michael’s mother is dying of cancer.  They have always had a love/hate relationship;  his mother abhors his ardent embrace of the communist system, consciously and carefully doing nothing at all to draw party attention to herself;  she has flown below the communist radar all of their lives together.  Now she has reached the end of her life, and in her last hours begs Michael to visit an old Pastor who knows the secret of Michael’s ancestry;  the identity of his father.  It is her last hope that her son will see the fatal errors in his thinking, see the GDR for the monstrous system that it always was, and gradually come to embrace and learn to live in a fully unified Germany.

Michael’s reluctant journey into his origins is never less than fascinating  and the flashbacks to his parents’ great and fatal love and its consequences  are convincingly written, suspenseful and always absorbing. 

I was impressed with this story.  It places an entirely different slant on the two Germanys of the early 90’s:  the Wessies want to show those gutless East Germans, so lacking in ambition and initiative, how to catch up with them and the rest of the world – and are shocked to the core to find that there are many inhabitants of the former GDR who liked things as they were, thankyou very much, SO JUST LEAVE OUR LIVES ALONE!!  Highly recommended.   

    

         

GREAT READS FOR MARCH

The Free World, by David Bezmozgis

The End of the Wasp Season, by Denise Mina

For lovers of crime/thriller novels, the more of this genre they read the more predictable the plots become:  we end up wearily familiar with the brilliant but burnt-out supersleuth, the star of the show – which makes one wonder why writers feel they cannot stray from this old, tried-and-true formula;  there HAS to be a new variation just to liven things up a bit, and to prevent the reader from solving the murder/mystery in the very first chapter.  Well, I’m happy to report that this paragon has finally arrived, thanks to Denise Mina and her singular heroine, Detective Sergeant Alex Morrell.  Alex is nasty.  She’s spiteful and bad-tempered;  fiercely loyal to police hierarchy;  a product of a slum Glasgow upbringing; a brilliant analyst of human behaviour good and bad, and the enemy of hypocrisy and pretension.  She is also pregnant with twins and loves her husband very much.

‘The End of the Wasp Season’ is not the first time Alex has made an appearance, a previous novel being ‘Still Midnight’, but this book is easy to read as a stand-alone story, with enough references to her past to enable the reader to enjoy her current adventure with no distractions – which is vital.  How about this for a plot:  we know almost from the beginning that two privileged teenagers commit a dreadful, mindless murder, but it’s not until the very last page that we find out which one actually did the awful deed.  (And here I say that I was WRONG, I who can usually spot the bad ‘un a mile off).  There are no happy endings in this story;  it’s bleak and unforgiving of its characters’ shortcomings, but Ms Mina has a wonderful knack of getting to the essence of things:  she can deliver in a single sentence what other writers use a page to describe.   She is an exceptional writer and deserves all the superlatives heaped upon her, for Alex Morrell is a babe – foul-mouthed, bad-tempered but honourable and unforgettable.  Can’t wait for the next instalment.

Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan

Three generations of women from the same family congregate at the old family beach house in Maine for the summer month of June – not because they planned to be together, but because circumstance dictates it.  Alice, the matriarch, first came to the property as a newly pregnant married woman nearly sixty years before;  her husband had won beautiful beachfront land on a bet with a friend and since then the family, now spanning four generations, have made annual pilgrimages to this lovely and cherished place.  Alice is in her 80’s, sharp as a tack, a devout Catholic with a tongue like a butcher’s knife – especially on matters of faith – and a defiantly heavy drinker.       

Alice’s granddaughter Maggie has also arrived to stay solo ‘for just a few days’;  the original plan of spending some idyllic time there with handsome but feckless boyfriend Gabe scuttled after a huge fight that has ended their relationship.  The problem now is that Maggie’s plan of confessing to Gabe that she is pregnant – in a setting guaranteed (she hoped) to introduce him gently and romantically to the responsibilities of impending fatherhood – has been thwarted:  she finds that at the age of thirty-two, she will have to soldier on alone.  Gabe informs her by email that he can’t deal with fatherhood ‘at this point in time’, which means it’s time to bite the bullet and inform the rest of the family, specifically her mother, Kathleen.

Kathleen is the oldest of Alice’s children, a former alcoholic and intentional rebel against everything that Alice holds dear:  thanks to several massive family confrontations, one involving the death from cancer of Kathleen’s beloved father Daniel, Alice and Kathleen are bitter foes.  Kathleen has sworn after her father’s death never to return to Maine – until she gets the news of Maggie’s pregnancy;  then she swoops in from California to take charge of her errant daughter and do battle with her detested mother.

And into this mix is added the long-suffering, martyred Ann Marie, Alice’s daughter-in-law, married to son Patrick (‘I am the ONLY one of this family who looks after YOUR mother and what thanks do I get?), who  has reluctantly arrived two weeks earlier than usual to keep an eye on Alice (and her drinking) because she couldn’t persuade Kathleen to come from California to do her family duty – until Kathleen gets the news of Maggie’s dilemma.  Ann Marie is furious.

The stage is set for family fireworks, and Ms Sullivan does not disappoint us:  she writes beautifully of fraught family dynamics, the struggles of successive generations to break iron-bound ties of faith and Irish conservatism, and the attempts by Kathleen and Maggie to be as unlike spiteful Alice as possible, without realising that they are more like her than they can possibly imagine.  No-one to their lasting regret has inherited Daniel’s sanguine and sunny nature, that calming and amiable influence that always steadied the family ship, and as Alice eventually reveals yet another bombshell guaranteed to shock her divided family to the core the reader is treated to the long-secret reasons for all the family slights and resentments.  Each woman has successive chapters to herself, a narrative device that works particularly well here, and by the end of this tender, funny and loving tribute to an American family, the reader feels as familiar with the Kelleher family as their own.  Ms Sullivan portrays beautifully ‘The importance of generations:  one person understanding life through the experiences of all the people who came before’.  Highly recommended.

Pao, by Kerry Young

Yang Pao is 14 when he is brought to Jamaica from China in 1938 with his mother and brother;  their slain father’s best friend Zhang has made a new life for himself there and wants to look after his dead comrade’s family.  Chinese merchants have established themselves in Kingston, and Zhang has gained influence as a formidable ‘fixer’, a provider of protection against various dangers besetting the population of Chinatown (racist attacks being only one) and its denizens, and he is the owner of several gambling and smuggling rackets.  Zhang is a crooked character, but he has a way of inspiring respect without fear, (unless it is absolutely unavoidable!) and a credo drummed daily into Pao that in its own fashion is an honourable way of looking at the world.

As time passes, Pao flourishes in his new environment;  he makes strong, lasting friendships and it is generally understood that he will become heir to all of Zhang’s rackets, big and small;  he is happy with his new life and even more so when he meets the great love of his life, Gloria.  Distressingly, Gloria is a prostitute, an occupation that is not honourable according to Zhang – ‘We did not fight and die in Chinese revolution to put women to work to satisfy base needs of base men’ – and when it is time for Pao to marry, Gloria is not on Zhang’s list:  Pao must marry well, and so he does – he weds Fay, the daughter of a rich Chinese businessman. 

And does everyone live happily ever after?  Of course not!  Fay loathes Pao – he’s nothing but a small-time racketeer: she has been forced into marriage,  forced into giving him two children, forced into living in squalor with him in Chinatown instead of in her beautiful childhood home on the hill, and forced to tolerate the fact that he visits his whore three times a week – oh, life is not turning out according to Zhang and Pao’s plan at all.  Add to the combustible mix Fay’s obsessive dependence on the new, young and handsome parish priest, and the unpleasant solutions that Pao must employ to solve his many ‘business’ problems;  then the reader can’t help but feel great sympathy for Pao and an urge to give him good advice, for Pao is the ultimate ‘likeable rogue’.  First-time novelist Kerry Young has him narrate this great little story in his own inimitable fractured English, detailing honestly his many faults but revealing, too, his innate love and respect for humanity, family, friendship – and his adopted country Jamaica, for Pao’s story is set against the backdrop of Jamaica’s turbulent and bloody history;  it’s struggle for independence;  and its dogged attempts to meld all the diverse races on that little island into one entity:  a Jamaican.  This was a pleasure to read.        

GREAT READS FOR JANUARY 2012

by Julia Kuttner

Faithful Place, by Tana French

Undercover Detective Frank Mackey works for the Dublin Police;  he’s very good at his job – and an absolute disaster at personal relationships:  so far, so predictable for readers of suspense novels, but Tana French invests Frank with so much more than the usual Brilliant but Burnt-Out persona -   all too readily adopted by other writers -  that he is like a chilling but welcome blast of fresh and frosty air, holding the reader in his ruthless grip from the start of his story to the finish.

His life so far has had some huge disappointments:  his first love Rosie stood him up without any warning on the night they were planning to run away from their gothically awful families to start a new life in England together, and was never seen again;  his marriage has ended in divorce and the associated recriminations; and apart from his job, his life doesn’t have much focus – except for the precious gift of his daughter, 9 year old Holly .  Frank’s love for her is profound and complete and he constantly blesses the fact that she will never know the horrors of living with an alcoholic Da who terrorized not just Ma, but all five children of that blighted union, and that she has never met his terrible relatives – and nor will she – he thinks.  He hasn’t seen any of his family except his sister Jackie for 22 years,  until a derelict house undergoing demolition in Faithful Place, their street, reveals some secrets that require his professional attention, and to his horror, he finds that Rosie didn’t stand him up after all:  she was murdered.

This book is more than just a who-done-it;  it’s more than the usual tragic family saga of violence and dashed hopes:  it has more layers than an onion, and as each layer is peeled away more insights are given into each character and the terrible reasons for their behavior towards each other.  And before the reader decides that they wouldn’t touch all this tragedy with a barge pole, I’d like to lure them back in with the solemn (!) promise of a laugh on every page:  the uniquely Irish humour which has helped the entire race survive war through the centuries, famine and The Troubles  is here in abundance:  who else but an Irish author could write such great drama, and leaven it with such comedy.  This is a wonderful story:  don’t miss it.

Rangatira, by Paula Morris

Paratene te Manu was a great warrior, specially trained in the arts of war from childhood.  He fought alongside the ferocious and brilliant Hongi Hika, Nga Puhi Ariki , as one of his Ngati Wai allies and was himself a rangatira of great mana – and he is Paula Morris’s ancestor.  Who better to write an account of the ground-breaking trip he and a group of other rangatira made to England in 1863, but a loving and eloquent descendant  - and she has paid fitting and respectful homage to her forebear in this lovely book.  Paratene’s story is told in a series of flashbacks and reminiscences whilst he sits for his portrait by Gottfried Lindauer, the Bohemian artist who made paintings of many of the rangatira and kuia of that time, and despite Paratene’s offense that their moko was not always correctly depicted – how else were maori to recognize ancestry and region amongst the tribes if not for their moko – he recognizes within the painter a similarity to himself when he went to England:  they are strangers in a strange land.

Fourteen men and women set out on their big adventure in February 1863, under the leadership of Messrs. Jenkins, Lightband and Lloyd, all of Nelson;  the rangatira had signed ‘a piece of paper’ guaranteeing them a sum of money each week, and the opportunity to see the big cities of England and learn about British culture.  After an uncomfortable voyage in steerage on the ‘Ida Zeigler’ – with the attendant weevily food – the party arrived in London, at first to great acclaim.  They were feted by London society and met the Prince and Princess of Wales and Queen Victoria herself, but gradually realized that Messrs. Jenkins et al were collecting a lot of money from people who came to gawk at them;  they were instructed to wear their cloaks all the time whatever the weather and were required to sing waiata and prance about doing the haka at every ‘meeting’.  To add insult to injury, photos of them were sold as postcards, the proceeds being pocketed by Mr. Jenkins:  this was not what they signed the piece of paper for!  Their gradual disillusionment and distrust of their pakeha ‘managers’, combined with the approach of a cruel English winter is beautifully described in Paratene’s voice by Ms Morris:  he is at pains in his narrative to be fair-minded and objective and recounts events to the best of his recollection, but he has to concede  eventually  that the whole exercise has been one of exploitation, principally by Jenkins, hoping to make money from the goggle-eyed voyeurism of the London public and the patronizing charity of liberal do-gooders.  He sums up their situation succinctly:  ‘Jenkin’s mana depended on his association with us, but ours did not depend on him.’ How true.  And how profoundly moving is this true story of people who influenced and shaped the thoughts, minds and directions of our young nation 150 years ago.  Ms. Morris has done her ancestor proud.  Highly recommended.