sashagoblin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sashagoblin) wrote2010-05-24 05:57 pm
sashagoblin) wrote2010-05-24 05:57 pm
Entry tags:
reviews - for the edificarion of my grandma, among others
Ellen Horan – 31 Bond Street
There’s a certain kind of novel that always feels like a guilty pleasure to me. The kind one reads in the bath: absorbing, dramatic, clever enough to hold one’s interest and suspend disbelief without presenting too much of a challenge to the work-weary, libraried-out brain. Genre fiction tends to be particularly good for this, but only if it’s well done; I’ve read far too much bad pseudo-literary fiction to believe quality lies in categorisation rather than intelligence, skill and characterisation. And happily, 31 Bond Street wins on all three counts. Based on the true story of the murder of New York dentist Dr Harvey Burdell in the mid-1800s, it tells the story of defence attourney Henry Clinton as he goes out on a limb to prove the innocence of the prime suspect, Burdell’s live-in mistress Emma Cunningham. The more he investigates, the more suspect Burdell’s dealings become, and the more danger Emma and her more vulnerable associates find themselves in. Horan’s characters and plotting are pleasingly well-rounded, their relationships refreshingly unpredictable: in a shock move, Clinton and Cunningham do not fall in love, for the former has a bright, challenging, loving wife and the latter far too many skeletons in her rather overburdened closet. The interweaving strata of New York society are exposed in all their hypocritical, grasping glory, and the plot trots along at a spanking pace as secret after secret comes flying out of the woodwork. Horan has clearly done her research, too, for the intricacies of nineteenth century legal practice and land law are explained alongside the social niceties of courtship ritual and the painful social realities of widowhood and bondage. It may be more of a ripping yarn than a life-changer, this one, but still, its combination of human interest, historical detail, and well-structured mystery makes it damn good fun to read.Evie Wyld – After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
Evie Wyld’s first novel is the kind of book that blindsides you unexpectedly with its harshness and its grace. Set in Eastern Australia, it recounts the lives of two men from different generations: Leon, baker-turned-Vietnam conscript, and Frank, fleeing the complications of city life and a relationship destroyed by his own abuse to live and work on the land left him by his family. Both are in unimaginable pain, scarred by their experiences, and the land where they seek succour is as hard and merciless as the traumas they seek to escape. As the communities they join come under threat, from war and from the mysterious disappearances of young girls, the two men are forced to confront their demons in a place where there’s nowhere to hide.
Certainly, After the Fire…, is incredibly atmospheric. Sharp-edged sunlight on dry earth, the relentless heat, the isolation, the harsh salt of the sea, all are displayed with sensual vividness, and the effect of such bleakness on a struggling population equally so. There’s little space here for thought, or empathy, or pity: women respond to punches by ‘hit[ting] him right back’, and comfort children with ‘Not to worry, chickadee, he hasn’t done me in yet.’ Trust, where it exists, is inexplicable and easily shattered. Sex is for the most part nasty, brutish and short, even loving relationships challenged and eventually undermined by the strain of living life in such stark, pure colours. The connections that we see growing between Leon and his playmate Amy, and Frank and neighbouring 7-year-old Sal, are notable for their acceptance of unpredictability, absence, and loss.
The book’s characterisation is remarkable, all the more so for a first-time novelist. Neither Frank nor Leon are particularly likeable, but such considerations pale into insignificance against the sheer human trauma we watch them undergo. Wyld writes like a punch in the face, a simple simile carrying the traumatic weight of an entire relationship or encapsulating an emotional collapse, her imagery lingering disturbingly in the reader’s mind. As Leon’s father is broken by the war, his mother’s spatula ‘dangles like a broken arm’; the floating bodies remaining after some atrocity are ‘soft like rotten potatoes,’ their faces ‘dark holes pushed in soft fruit.’ The novel’s very brutality is compelling, but that’s not the only thing that lends the narrative its power. Flashes of insight and beauty penetrate even the most shocking scenes, moments of compassion or closeness granted added poignancy by their juxtaposition with cruelty and horror. Whilst its metaphors may on occasion be obvious (‘he’s eating his baby self..’ whispers Leon’s mother, in a flashback between scenes of his wartime activities) but they’re never laboured. Ultimately, in its stark complexity, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is a novel fraught with silence; it explores the delineation of space and identity, and the power of the human spirit. David Nicholls – One Day
Reading One Day, it’s easy to see David Nicholls’ screenwriter past lurking in the background. This is by no means a bad thing – the man knows how to structure a scene, write dialogue, and sum up a character in a snappy sentence – but it does mean that what would otherwise be a very funny and gently thought-provoking comedy occasionally devolves into representative caricature as opposed to character. This aside, One Day is by and large great fun. The story of Emma and Dexter, who meet in 1988 on the night of their graduation, spend the night (and day) together, and proceed to spend the succeeding two decades of friendship feuding and flirting, it’s both a rather self-consciously heart-warming love story and a richly comic account of nineties’ and noughties’ popular culture. Whilst Dexter takes advantage of his privileged background to travel and falls almost accidentally into a job as a kids’ TV presenter, Emma’s principles lead her from a succession of minimum-wage McJobs into teaching and then writing, just as Dexter’s alcoholism and immaturity bring his nascent TV career crashing down around his ears. It’s very well-observed: the scenes of Dexter’s fall are mind-bendingly awful, and although Emma can be somewhat less three-dimensional, interactions between the two are frequently pitch-perfect. Her exasperated understanding renders her the more sympathetic, and when Dexter finally develops a modicum of awareness and the pair eventually unite, it’s hard not to cheer. For all its occasional oversimplification, this is a wry and moving take on love in an increasingly complicated climate.
Rachel Trezise – Sixteen Shades of Crazy
There are echoes of Jez Butterworth’s notorious Jerusalem, with its intimate dissection of the pastoral myth of rural harmony, in Rachel Trezise’s second novel, Sixteen Shades of Crazy. Set in Aberlaw, ‘a tiny South Wales valley village where nobody ever arrives and nobody ever leaves’, it tells the story of failing local punk band The Boobs and their reckless, hapless womenfolk, chronicling the effects of glamorous English stranger Johnny’s precipitate arrival in their midst. All three – Ellie, rebellious university-educated factory worker burning to escape; Sian, accidentally stunning mother-of-three; and the ubertough hairdresser Rhiannon – fall for Johnny’s dubious and chemically-enhanced charms, with predictably destructive results.
Sixteen Shades… manages the clever trick of being utterly bleak and blackly amusing at the same time, the overwhelming stupor and misery of the women’s lives nevertheless affording wry chuckles at the unpleasant familiarity of the situations in which they find themselves. Trezise has a sharply perceptive eye for relationship dynamics and a wince-inducing ability to convey believable dysfunctionality, be it realistic infidelity, old socks or sheer frustration. Still, there are aspects that flirt with the boundaries of cliché – Ellie as a struggling writer, or Sian as Wales’ tragic answer to Sylvia Plath, could both perhaps have been better thought out. However, both characters and setting come through very clearly as dreary isolation both cultural and geographical is pounded home. A life lived endlessly shutting around the same streets, pubs, and bedrooms, it appears, is less than no life at all. It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The ending is surprisingly optimistic for at least some characters, and whilst Sixteen Shades… undoubtedly offers a much more downbeat vision of life in Great Britain’s rural idylls than a lot of mainstream fiction, it also provides a thoughtful analysis of the whys, wherefores and ways out. Warren Fitzgerald – The Go-Away Bird.
The world, or at least that narrow section of cultural space bounded by Amazon’s stocklist, is full of that strange phenomenon, Offbeat Love Stories. There’s almost a formula: oddball x meets vulnerable y, is touched, opens self to humanity they’ve been rejecting for years, surmount obstacles, hearts are warmed. Tragic ending an optional extra. There’re even subgenres: romance, sibling (usually same-sex), and the particular flavour Warren Fitzgerald’s The Go-Away Bird is riffing off, which is The Parental Dream. The Go-Away Bird is a bit like Leon, only with a failed singing teacher/smalltime drug dealer instead of an assassin, fewer guns and a Rwandan refugee girl with less of a Lolita schtick than the young Natalie Portman.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Fitzgerald sets his novel in 1994, at the height of the Rwandan crisis, and the narrative is divided between Ashley’s isolated, antisocial existence in London and Clementine’s increasingly fraught struggles to survive in conflict-torn Rwanda. Whilst playing contrasting unhappinesses off against one another is hardly original, here the dysfunctionality of Ashley’s self-destructive life and family background provides a poignant contrast to Clementine’s parents’ happy marriage, threatened by their Hutu/Tutsi racial divide. Fitzgerald doesn’t stint the gloom, in either case. The highlights of Ashley’s daily life are the illusory moments of peace and calm facilitated by self-harm, the legacy of an abusive childhood, and his social interactions focus rather on the impossibility of communication or feelings of inadequacy than any genuine connection. Meanwhile, the gradual disintegration of Clementine’s stable community under the pressures of historical atrocity and mutual mistrust is painfully realistic as it gathers pace. Her attempts to insulate herself from the traumatic events of her family’s destruction through the imposition of high fantasy simply serves to emphasise the horrors involved. Ironically, it is perhaps in these sections that the novel is at its best, for when the characters coincide after Clementine’s escape to England, the plot does become a little Richard Curtis. An initial encounter on the stairs turns, perhaps implausibly unproblematically, into a quasi-adoption of uncertain duration, as the pair provide not only each other but their immediate community with emotional succour. They go to church, football matches, shopping, watch cartoons, all the bonding activities of late twentieth-century Western culture, and lift spirits wherever they go. Ashley teaches Clementine to sing; Clementine gives the local hard nut confidence in his supposedly effeminate falsetto voice, Ashley’s drag queen pupil Lola (yes, really - I shuddered too) confidence in her femininity, Ashley confidence in himself. Then her evil uncle tries to take her back to Rwanda to redeem his personal honour, and the troop of misfits whose hearts have been warmed by her sudden presence unite to save her before it’s too late.
For all my flippancy, it’s a good book. Ashley and Clementine are well-realised and mostly three-dimensional, and there’s a lot of social comedy amongst the angst. Whilst some aspects could perhaps have been better handled (random inclusion of chunks of newspaper reportage, whilst probably necessary, is clumsy at best), the book’s human interaction and family dynamics are skilfully and powerfully plausible, and its political undertones timely indeed.Isabel Allende – Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende’s latest complex and involving saga of human passions and cruelties takes place in the Caribbean towards the end of the eighteenth century, as slavery is beginning to batter itself to a bloody and brutalising end. On the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Zarite (known as Tete) is snatched from the hands of an enslaved mother attempting infanticide, and the violence of her entry into the world sets the tone for what follows. Acquired at the age of nine by the famous cocotte Violette de Bosier to serve her lover, plantation owner Valmorain, Tete becomes both his wife’s maid and his unwilling concubine. When the island’s field slaves finally rebel, Tete’s devotion to Valmorain’s children – both her own daughter Rosette, and his legitimate son Maurice – leads her to ensure their rescue as well as her own. She spends the succeeding years struggling for independence, subject first to the formal bondage she refused to abandon and then to the tensions of a divided and stratified society.
The task of narration is shared between Tete and an omniscient narrator. Yet Tete never quite springs to life, and the plot as a whole suffers from this surprising lack of interiority. Ultimately, the peripheral characters are perhaps more appealing: the indomitable Violette and her minder Loula, Valmorain’s Mrs Rochester-esque wife Eugenia and the idealistic Maurice, unconventional priest Père Antoine. The boundaries of Allende’s reality also leave something to be desired. Less openly ‘magical realist’ than some of her other work, touches of the supernatural or overly coincidental vary between the effective and the slightly jarring. Sustained and coherent fantastical passages are sometimes but not always explained away, which undermines the reader’s sense of narrative stability as well as the powerful realism of those passages about the experience of slavery.
One of the novel’s major strengths is the effectiveness with which Allende conveys the human cost of the frantic struggle to impose hierarchy. In a world that orders itself via the arbitrary (we are told early on that ‘there were more than sixty classifications set by percentage of white blood’), the explosive violence required to maintain such distinctions renders their futility obvious. Moreover, the tendency of individuals to form relationships across these divisions emphasises the centrality of common humanity without labouring the point. Allende’s message, it seems, is that ideas and ideals – freedom, dignity, compassion – are as fundamental to survival under intolerable pressure as the sheer animal will to live.
There’s a certain kind of novel that always feels like a guilty pleasure to me. The kind one reads in the bath: absorbing, dramatic, clever enough to hold one’s interest and suspend disbelief without presenting too much of a challenge to the work-weary, libraried-out brain. Genre fiction tends to be particularly good for this, but only if it’s well done; I’ve read far too much bad pseudo-literary fiction to believe quality lies in categorisation rather than intelligence, skill and characterisation. And happily, 31 Bond Street wins on all three counts. Based on the true story of the murder of New York dentist Dr Harvey Burdell in the mid-1800s, it tells the story of defence attourney Henry Clinton as he goes out on a limb to prove the innocence of the prime suspect, Burdell’s live-in mistress Emma Cunningham. The more he investigates, the more suspect Burdell’s dealings become, and the more danger Emma and her more vulnerable associates find themselves in. Horan’s characters and plotting are pleasingly well-rounded, their relationships refreshingly unpredictable: in a shock move, Clinton and Cunningham do not fall in love, for the former has a bright, challenging, loving wife and the latter far too many skeletons in her rather overburdened closet. The interweaving strata of New York society are exposed in all their hypocritical, grasping glory, and the plot trots along at a spanking pace as secret after secret comes flying out of the woodwork. Horan has clearly done her research, too, for the intricacies of nineteenth century legal practice and land law are explained alongside the social niceties of courtship ritual and the painful social realities of widowhood and bondage. It may be more of a ripping yarn than a life-changer, this one, but still, its combination of human interest, historical detail, and well-structured mystery makes it damn good fun to read.Evie Wyld – After the Fire, A Still Small Voice
Evie Wyld’s first novel is the kind of book that blindsides you unexpectedly with its harshness and its grace. Set in Eastern Australia, it recounts the lives of two men from different generations: Leon, baker-turned-Vietnam conscript, and Frank, fleeing the complications of city life and a relationship destroyed by his own abuse to live and work on the land left him by his family. Both are in unimaginable pain, scarred by their experiences, and the land where they seek succour is as hard and merciless as the traumas they seek to escape. As the communities they join come under threat, from war and from the mysterious disappearances of young girls, the two men are forced to confront their demons in a place where there’s nowhere to hide.
Certainly, After the Fire…, is incredibly atmospheric. Sharp-edged sunlight on dry earth, the relentless heat, the isolation, the harsh salt of the sea, all are displayed with sensual vividness, and the effect of such bleakness on a struggling population equally so. There’s little space here for thought, or empathy, or pity: women respond to punches by ‘hit[ting] him right back’, and comfort children with ‘Not to worry, chickadee, he hasn’t done me in yet.’ Trust, where it exists, is inexplicable and easily shattered. Sex is for the most part nasty, brutish and short, even loving relationships challenged and eventually undermined by the strain of living life in such stark, pure colours. The connections that we see growing between Leon and his playmate Amy, and Frank and neighbouring 7-year-old Sal, are notable for their acceptance of unpredictability, absence, and loss.
The book’s characterisation is remarkable, all the more so for a first-time novelist. Neither Frank nor Leon are particularly likeable, but such considerations pale into insignificance against the sheer human trauma we watch them undergo. Wyld writes like a punch in the face, a simple simile carrying the traumatic weight of an entire relationship or encapsulating an emotional collapse, her imagery lingering disturbingly in the reader’s mind. As Leon’s father is broken by the war, his mother’s spatula ‘dangles like a broken arm’; the floating bodies remaining after some atrocity are ‘soft like rotten potatoes,’ their faces ‘dark holes pushed in soft fruit.’ The novel’s very brutality is compelling, but that’s not the only thing that lends the narrative its power. Flashes of insight and beauty penetrate even the most shocking scenes, moments of compassion or closeness granted added poignancy by their juxtaposition with cruelty and horror. Whilst its metaphors may on occasion be obvious (‘he’s eating his baby self..’ whispers Leon’s mother, in a flashback between scenes of his wartime activities) but they’re never laboured. Ultimately, in its stark complexity, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is a novel fraught with silence; it explores the delineation of space and identity, and the power of the human spirit. David Nicholls – One Day
Reading One Day, it’s easy to see David Nicholls’ screenwriter past lurking in the background. This is by no means a bad thing – the man knows how to structure a scene, write dialogue, and sum up a character in a snappy sentence – but it does mean that what would otherwise be a very funny and gently thought-provoking comedy occasionally devolves into representative caricature as opposed to character. This aside, One Day is by and large great fun. The story of Emma and Dexter, who meet in 1988 on the night of their graduation, spend the night (and day) together, and proceed to spend the succeeding two decades of friendship feuding and flirting, it’s both a rather self-consciously heart-warming love story and a richly comic account of nineties’ and noughties’ popular culture. Whilst Dexter takes advantage of his privileged background to travel and falls almost accidentally into a job as a kids’ TV presenter, Emma’s principles lead her from a succession of minimum-wage McJobs into teaching and then writing, just as Dexter’s alcoholism and immaturity bring his nascent TV career crashing down around his ears. It’s very well-observed: the scenes of Dexter’s fall are mind-bendingly awful, and although Emma can be somewhat less three-dimensional, interactions between the two are frequently pitch-perfect. Her exasperated understanding renders her the more sympathetic, and when Dexter finally develops a modicum of awareness and the pair eventually unite, it’s hard not to cheer. For all its occasional oversimplification, this is a wry and moving take on love in an increasingly complicated climate.
Rachel Trezise – Sixteen Shades of Crazy
There are echoes of Jez Butterworth’s notorious Jerusalem, with its intimate dissection of the pastoral myth of rural harmony, in Rachel Trezise’s second novel, Sixteen Shades of Crazy. Set in Aberlaw, ‘a tiny South Wales valley village where nobody ever arrives and nobody ever leaves’, it tells the story of failing local punk band The Boobs and their reckless, hapless womenfolk, chronicling the effects of glamorous English stranger Johnny’s precipitate arrival in their midst. All three – Ellie, rebellious university-educated factory worker burning to escape; Sian, accidentally stunning mother-of-three; and the ubertough hairdresser Rhiannon – fall for Johnny’s dubious and chemically-enhanced charms, with predictably destructive results.
Sixteen Shades… manages the clever trick of being utterly bleak and blackly amusing at the same time, the overwhelming stupor and misery of the women’s lives nevertheless affording wry chuckles at the unpleasant familiarity of the situations in which they find themselves. Trezise has a sharply perceptive eye for relationship dynamics and a wince-inducing ability to convey believable dysfunctionality, be it realistic infidelity, old socks or sheer frustration. Still, there are aspects that flirt with the boundaries of cliché – Ellie as a struggling writer, or Sian as Wales’ tragic answer to Sylvia Plath, could both perhaps have been better thought out. However, both characters and setting come through very clearly as dreary isolation both cultural and geographical is pounded home. A life lived endlessly shutting around the same streets, pubs, and bedrooms, it appears, is less than no life at all. It’s not all doom and gloom, however. The ending is surprisingly optimistic for at least some characters, and whilst Sixteen Shades… undoubtedly offers a much more downbeat vision of life in Great Britain’s rural idylls than a lot of mainstream fiction, it also provides a thoughtful analysis of the whys, wherefores and ways out. Warren Fitzgerald – The Go-Away Bird.
The world, or at least that narrow section of cultural space bounded by Amazon’s stocklist, is full of that strange phenomenon, Offbeat Love Stories. There’s almost a formula: oddball x meets vulnerable y, is touched, opens self to humanity they’ve been rejecting for years, surmount obstacles, hearts are warmed. Tragic ending an optional extra. There’re even subgenres: romance, sibling (usually same-sex), and the particular flavour Warren Fitzgerald’s The Go-Away Bird is riffing off, which is The Parental Dream. The Go-Away Bird is a bit like Leon, only with a failed singing teacher/smalltime drug dealer instead of an assassin, fewer guns and a Rwandan refugee girl with less of a Lolita schtick than the young Natalie Portman.
There’s more to it than that, of course. Fitzgerald sets his novel in 1994, at the height of the Rwandan crisis, and the narrative is divided between Ashley’s isolated, antisocial existence in London and Clementine’s increasingly fraught struggles to survive in conflict-torn Rwanda. Whilst playing contrasting unhappinesses off against one another is hardly original, here the dysfunctionality of Ashley’s self-destructive life and family background provides a poignant contrast to Clementine’s parents’ happy marriage, threatened by their Hutu/Tutsi racial divide. Fitzgerald doesn’t stint the gloom, in either case. The highlights of Ashley’s daily life are the illusory moments of peace and calm facilitated by self-harm, the legacy of an abusive childhood, and his social interactions focus rather on the impossibility of communication or feelings of inadequacy than any genuine connection. Meanwhile, the gradual disintegration of Clementine’s stable community under the pressures of historical atrocity and mutual mistrust is painfully realistic as it gathers pace. Her attempts to insulate herself from the traumatic events of her family’s destruction through the imposition of high fantasy simply serves to emphasise the horrors involved. Ironically, it is perhaps in these sections that the novel is at its best, for when the characters coincide after Clementine’s escape to England, the plot does become a little Richard Curtis. An initial encounter on the stairs turns, perhaps implausibly unproblematically, into a quasi-adoption of uncertain duration, as the pair provide not only each other but their immediate community with emotional succour. They go to church, football matches, shopping, watch cartoons, all the bonding activities of late twentieth-century Western culture, and lift spirits wherever they go. Ashley teaches Clementine to sing; Clementine gives the local hard nut confidence in his supposedly effeminate falsetto voice, Ashley’s drag queen pupil Lola (yes, really - I shuddered too) confidence in her femininity, Ashley confidence in himself. Then her evil uncle tries to take her back to Rwanda to redeem his personal honour, and the troop of misfits whose hearts have been warmed by her sudden presence unite to save her before it’s too late.
For all my flippancy, it’s a good book. Ashley and Clementine are well-realised and mostly three-dimensional, and there’s a lot of social comedy amongst the angst. Whilst some aspects could perhaps have been better handled (random inclusion of chunks of newspaper reportage, whilst probably necessary, is clumsy at best), the book’s human interaction and family dynamics are skilfully and powerfully plausible, and its political undertones timely indeed.Isabel Allende – Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende’s latest complex and involving saga of human passions and cruelties takes place in the Caribbean towards the end of the eighteenth century, as slavery is beginning to batter itself to a bloody and brutalising end. On the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Zarite (known as Tete) is snatched from the hands of an enslaved mother attempting infanticide, and the violence of her entry into the world sets the tone for what follows. Acquired at the age of nine by the famous cocotte Violette de Bosier to serve her lover, plantation owner Valmorain, Tete becomes both his wife’s maid and his unwilling concubine. When the island’s field slaves finally rebel, Tete’s devotion to Valmorain’s children – both her own daughter Rosette, and his legitimate son Maurice – leads her to ensure their rescue as well as her own. She spends the succeeding years struggling for independence, subject first to the formal bondage she refused to abandon and then to the tensions of a divided and stratified society.
The task of narration is shared between Tete and an omniscient narrator. Yet Tete never quite springs to life, and the plot as a whole suffers from this surprising lack of interiority. Ultimately, the peripheral characters are perhaps more appealing: the indomitable Violette and her minder Loula, Valmorain’s Mrs Rochester-esque wife Eugenia and the idealistic Maurice, unconventional priest Père Antoine. The boundaries of Allende’s reality also leave something to be desired. Less openly ‘magical realist’ than some of her other work, touches of the supernatural or overly coincidental vary between the effective and the slightly jarring. Sustained and coherent fantastical passages are sometimes but not always explained away, which undermines the reader’s sense of narrative stability as well as the powerful realism of those passages about the experience of slavery.
One of the novel’s major strengths is the effectiveness with which Allende conveys the human cost of the frantic struggle to impose hierarchy. In a world that orders itself via the arbitrary (we are told early on that ‘there were more than sixty classifications set by percentage of white blood’), the explosive violence required to maintain such distinctions renders their futility obvious. Moreover, the tendency of individuals to form relationships across these divisions emphasises the centrality of common humanity without labouring the point. Allende’s message, it seems, is that ideas and ideals – freedom, dignity, compassion – are as fundamental to survival under intolerable pressure as the sheer animal will to live.