My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Title: My Sister’s Keeper

Author: Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Allen & Unwin (First publisher Atria Books)

Publish date: 2009 (First published 2004)

ISBN: 978 1 74175 805 4

Quite the most compelling book I’ve read in a long time. The narrative is: a couple with two small children have a designer baby when they find out their two year old (Kate) has leukemia. The baby’s umbilical cord blood cells are the original desired product, but things get out of hand. The struggle to balance family life in the constant environment of imminent death and hospitals continues for years. There are plot twists.

The novel’s success is lodged firstly in the strength of Picoult’s clear-shorn writing, adroit at tossing the reader straight into a situation by a look or a four-word phrase. But more than that, and more surprisingly, it is through the energy the characters are imbued with. I read this in paperback so I don’t have a word count, but I’d place bets on the count for permutations of the word ‘death’ (dying, dead, deadly, died) being close to 100. The whole novel is firmly under the constant shadow of When Will Kate Die. Considering this, it is even more extraordinary that the main themes are actually life, and love.  The phrase that kept popping into my mind while reading was Marvel’s ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife/ through the iron gates of life.’ The juxtaposition of how little time there is, with how much one would theoretically want, is the same impetus that drives both pieces on, with the same exuberant mix of wry humour and desperate bravado.

The ‘love’ aspect is a careful mirroring of almost every combination of characters. Kate and her designer sister Anna, Sara the mother and Brian the father, the physical similarity between the mother and the son Jesse, and between the father and Kate (and later the similarity between Anna and Sara), the echo of Kate and her also-terminally-ill boyfriend Taylor, and the romance between Campbell the lawyer and Julia. This last is by far the weakest portrayal, which I think is telling, because the ‘love’ the author is obsessing about is extremely platonic, in its most basic form. The mirror opposite, the other half, the twin, the necessary other to be complete. Talking of which, actually the combo of Julia and her sister Izzy are possibly worse sketches, put there purely, it seems to me, to draw the reader’s attention to this already screaming duality theme. It really could be omitted altogether. The whole Campbell side of things is weak, if amusing at times, and of course necessary for the plot to go forward. Given that the book could probably be 1/3 shorter with absolutely no detriment, it’s astonishing how powerful it is. This review certainly does it no justice. Go forth and read. Four Moose Hoofs up out of five.

Shakespeare's Kings - John Juilus Norwich

I was enjoying this, and taking copious notes, until I stumbled on the bizarre statement in Henry V that Nym had 'been imported from the Merry Wives of Windsor', which displayed such a stunning lack of knowledge about the background of the plays and dates that it quite knocked me sideways. Then noticed another weirdo-potato statement that in Richard II, that Wiltshire 'appears nowhere in Shakespeare's play'... apart from being a character, of course. At this point I stopped reading because I couldn't trust the book any more and didn't want to perpetuate any inaccuracies by taking them as fact. A shame, because it had some humour.

Island Home - Tim Winton

Title: Island Home – a landscape memoir

Author: Tim Winton

Publisher: Penguin         

Publish date: 2015

ISBN: 978-1-926428-74-1

Book Quote:

‘But at the first glimpse of the King Leopold Rages, as gold as roo fat in the afternoon light, he jerks upright and slaps his thigh like a man who’s just won a chook raffle.’

From an unpromising start of swept-together generalizations, this collection – I’m not sure either ‘memoir’ or ‘book’ would be entirely appropriate, despite the title – moves from high-handed assumptions to meditative observations in a curve that suggests not so much a story-plan as an imperative from a publisher. The production of something touching and memorable by sheer force of incorrigibly good writing and a genuine listening mind rather than an initial need to ‘say something’.

It’s unfortunate that the most bombastic bits are huddled towards the start. It’s irritating to read statements like the light (in ‘Australia’, mind – the whole of it) being ‘like no other’ and being ‘big’, comparing it to Northern European light. Well duh, latitude and climate. For some reason Winton singles out Europe as the one and only possible counterfoil to Australia – and mainly Northern Europe at that. Possibly consciously or unconsciously, because that’s where settlers mainly came from initially. If consciously, it’s disingenuous. If unconscious, it’s sloppy. Having lumped all of Australia as a comparable, he goes on to negate an earlier comment about even the natural mountain ranges in Europe to present a finite barrier as opposed to the open sea and desert near Perth, in detailing residence in another area of Australia where mountains loom just as oppressively. It’s not the European mountains or the Australian desert that are oppressive, it’s the writer’s perception, and no checks and balances seem to have been made in the headlong dash to write something. The destruction of the bushland to build Perth is decried, but the text is joyous about going out into the bush to fish turtles or crayfish. He deplores urban sprawl but the first chapters show him buying a sprawling house, complete with turtles, which (to add to the irony) he makes sure are ‘gone’ before he moves in. It’s all very irritating. In this mash, occasionally a vivid and Wintonesque simile is thrown in to keep the punters going.

Then the pace slows down from the Publisher-Hop to some more considered reminiscences on boyhood experiences. There is increased illumination from the trademark similes and expressiveness here. Nonetheless, the ego-centric nature of autobiography is off-putting. Who cares what this particular person did in their youth, and why would they make the assumption that I’m interested? For me it raises hackles and hostility. Were the same material presented in the form of fiction, it would be another matter. I find ‘a child did this, saw this’ is much more acceptable than ‘I did this, saw this’. I’m more open to suggestion and persuasion through fiction. Interestingly, I rather wonder if Winton was having this debate internally while writing. There’s a curious passage describing the specific quality of the joy of surfing:

‘… but the beauty of these things lay in how they worked, how they caused stuff to happen elsewhere. The way a storm in the Antarctic produced an echo that became a completely distinct event in my own world. From some unspeakable terror across the horizon came a day of pleasure for me. Surf was old energy transformed.’ 

It’s a perfect description of the creation of fiction. All fiction is memoir. It must needs be, as however acrobatic our rearrangements are, we are but creating from materials we have to hand. It seems that at this point in the writing process the author realized this, and the rhythm changes again.

From here we are given what are more a series of persuasive texts: political and ecological pieces, which break with increasing frequency into meditations on the minute details of the natural landscape. This portion is much more measured, with a reserved, humbler approach that’s infinitely easier to accept. As the pace decreases, the accuracy of the descriptions increases exponentially, bringing the reader painfully close to the dust and spinifex, the very air of the land the writer is so passionate about. In an episode about tracking black-flanked wallabies, great care is given to precise naming of all the flora and fauna. ‘Stygofauna’, ‘black-faced cockatoo-shrike’, ‘zebra finches’, ‘white-bellied sea-eagles’, ‘euro’, ‘spinifex’ and ‘spinifex-pigeon’. The respect accorded to flora, fauna and geological and meteorological formations directly mirror the care with which Winton uses adjectives and similes: precise to a pinpoint. At the climax of the wallaby scene, the cave he finds the wallabies in is ‘the size of a child’s bedroom’. The comparison masterfully brings the alien scene into acute intimacy, bypassing all between. 

It is interesting also, that although throughout the volume (and in line with the title) Australia is obdurately referred to as an ‘island’, presumably to emphasize its isolation and uniqueness. Towards the end it suddenly becomes a ‘continent’. A step made together with the acceptance of its great variety and abundance, and a much increased hopeful outlook towards to future, barely stated but definite. 

In all, 3.5 out of 5 Moose-Hoofs up. The annoyances are such that I can’t give it more. However, despite all, it was worth the read, and provides some potent food for thought.

To The Islands - Randolph Stow

Title: To The Islands       

Author: Randolph Stow

Publisher: Text Classics 

Publish date: 1958 (Original), Revised edition Angus and Robertson Sydney 1981, Text Classics 2015

ISBN: 9781925240290

'He fed her until she was satisfied, and then she reached out and touched his shoulder with her hand, and leaned over and rested her forehead there. In that way they sat for what seemed like a long time in that timeless place, naked brown woman by naked white man, and he stroked the loose skin on her back with tenderness, wanting to laugh, wanting to weep.'

___________________________________________

This novel won the Miles Franklin Literary Award when it was first published in 1958. It was written after Stow worked for a few months as a ration storeman at the Anglican-run Forrest River Mission in far north Western Australia, and draws heavily on the experience. This edition was re-edited by Stow in 1981, with some portions of the original deleted (according to his own introduction to this edition). I have to say, it doesn’t strike one as a novel written by a 22-year-old. Not this life-time round, for sure.

The story revolves around an Anglican minister reconciling his oncoming death with his faith, his self-doubts, and his environment. The Australian Outback provides a Shakespearean exile-setting of liminal harshness, peopled by the half-familiar, half-inscrutable Aboriginals.

The novel is extraordinary. One level of intrigue is that it tells of a case of extreme indigestion of The Wasteland, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Medieval Mystery plays, Shakespeare (Lear in particular, self-confessedly), Baudelaire, Cervantes, Walt Whitman, the Bible, and Aboriginal Dreamtime narratives among others. Gobbets and echoes from Western literature drop into the dust of the Outback, as incongruous and fascinating as the main character that stumbles through the narrative.

Another level is the sentence structure, and the narrative structure that inversely echoes it. On the sentence level, the initial third or so of the book is overtly fluid in construct, with multiple and inverted clauses, subjects far from their objects, and pronouns frequently ambiguously placed. There is little demarcation between scenes. Time is not linear, nor is much attempt made to clarify where or how the characters are moving or what they are doing. So we’ll suddenly hear of a protagonist stop leaning against a tree, when last time we 'saw' then there were inside a building. Even the names seem to be deliberately confusing, with most of the characters being variously referred to either by their first names, surnames, or their personal pronoun being misplaced altogether so that numerous re-reads are needed to guess who is doing what. The effect is a gauzy haze of impressionist prose with pinpoint ‘plums’ of clarity. As the novel progresses this pattern morphs, via poetic jumps and rhythm, into a much more consistently direct diction. It abandons the passive voice and looking-glass grammar. Utterly perversely, the more the diction straightens up, the more the narrative disintegrates into stanzas of what might be termed associative meditation. Clarity is insanity, and confusion is the real world.

A third level of uniqueness is the yearning portrayal of the many dissonances between the white settlers and native Australians. The gulf between them is tectonic, pushing up strange behaviours where they are least expected. It isolates not only each individual character with a cocoon of silence, but the reader as well, bouncing one about in a muffled cotton-ball through a suspicious and hostile dreamscape. But within the haze of the novel’s Gethsemane-like wanderings, the communication gap is sometimes a vast canyon, and then suddenly barely a trickle of water on a flat plane. Both the unbridgeable weight of  silence and the fervent desire for it to be gone are, I think, uniquely Australian, and something echoed repeatedly in the country’s literature, but rarely so accurately given emotional coordinates.

In short, the novel is indeed more than deserving of the accolades it has won and its status as a classic piece. Don’t pick it up if you want an easy read. It is difficult, and I haven’t even started to scratch the surface. Five moose-hoofs up out of five, with both ears up as well for emphasis.

Twice - Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Title: twice

Author: Lisa Unger (Lisa Miscione)

Publisher: Broadway

Publish date: 2004

ISBN: 978-0-307-95317-9

To describe a novel jam-packed with brutal death, revenge, maniacs, monsters and more as ‘delightful’ may seems wrong, but really that’s what it is. A fantastic, fresh, young zest for life bounces innocently through the pages describing (with considerable skill) horror after horror – and it’s a great combo.

It’s an early Lisa Unger book, and she’s still writing under her maiden name. Having read some of the later ones I was surprised initially at some of the tell-tale flourishes and pet-projects of a writer slightly less in control than they might be. The earlier chapters are peppered with description of what designer brand of jeans the main characters are wearing, what type of plush covering they have on their cushions, what upmarket ingredients they have in their salad, what their ‘taut’ bodies are like. The language oozes the writer’s own appreciation for these things, and it’s a funny little paradox that while the main character couple move in together they’ve ‘got rid of most of their own furniture and belongings’ because ‘new beginnings demand new objects’, one of them ‘never developed attachments to things anyway.’ A very New-York sort of Designer-Zen where you change your yoga-mat for the latest model every six months and have state-of-the-art surround sound system playing you waterfalls and birdsong in a very expensive, sterile apartment. (My description, not hers.) One laughs a little at this, but the fact is Unger is a very sensual writer, and everything is described in heightened ‘appreciation’: the stench of the subterranean network under New York, the way a policeman’s face is ‘dirty and round as a potato’, a slashed vinyl cover to a discarded table ‘gaping like a mouth’. They don’t stop coming, and it makes for an engaging read. There is, it’s true, quite a bit of doubling up, and the whole book feels as if it’s been written at breakneck speed, never looking back, as if the monsters in the book are running after the author. ‘Grey’ must be used at least 50 times throughout the novel (I’m reading on paperback, can’t do a word count). A lot of things are ‘musty’ and smell of ‘damp earth’. There’s a wonderful description of a librarian who’s ‘as dusty as an old unabridged dictionary’, but then half a page later the same librarian is interviewed and she’s neat and bright as a new penny. A certain house has an ‘evil smell’ – again a combination of ‘musty’ and ‘earth’ but no mention of the pipe that the owner subsequently lights up. A few homophone word-errors thrown in here and there simply season the ‘this is bursting out of my skull’ impression.

Plot? It’s the third in a series of four books featuring Lydia Strong, a crime novelist (ahem) who turns private investigator. Yeah, I know. But it’s charming.  The serial killer who murdered her mother 16 years back has escaped from a mental asylum, and is on the loose with Lydia in his sights. Meanwhile she and her partner in life and in the private investigation firm, Jeffrey, have been hired to look into the brutal murder of a famous artist’s husband. Lots of layers of history, family feuds, layers of New York, criss-crossing of both narratives, rich succulent sensory details throughout. The plot’s fairly intricate and though the story may be written fast it’s certainly not been pantsed. (I can relate to that a lot.) I was surprised, after the other books Unger books I’d read, that the tenor seemed so different, but then the twins flit across the screen and suddenly the language sharpens, just for a moment, and you know at once they’re at the heart of the matter. Lost children. Over and over again. It doesn’t get old, mind, they’re all different. Unger’s foreshadowing in this novel is a bit heavy-handed, and the main jist of the interwoven ‘twists’ are apparent in the early chapters but it’s all good, you can just see the general direction and there are endless details and mini-stories to keep you going. Page-turner? Definitely.

I was particularly grateful on a personal level to have had the opportunity to read this. Stymied myself in a Slough of Despond, not writing anything for months for no good reason, this bouncy narrative might be just the inspiration to get things going. Thank you Lisa Unger! Four happy moose-hoofs up… the one only taken off for the little errors and gleeful carelessness. Because one has to if one’s marking, but wouldn’t really otherwise.

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell Publishing (Random House)

Publish date: 1969

ISBN: 3 2300 01771154 6

Book quote:

 ‘Another time Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, “I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”’

So, you know how everyone has a long list of ‘classics’ they think they ought to read at some point? If this book is on your list of to-reads, get the hell down to the local library and get yourself a copy because it’s freakin’ amazing. The Mysteries of Udolpho: disappointment. This one: not.

I don’t want to write a 5,000 word review on this that would barely scratch the surface anyway. In short…

Summary: The main character is Billy Pilgrim, a gawky, ridiculous private American soldier in WWII, who gets taken prisoner of war and happens to survive the firebombing of Dresden because he ended up in a subterranean meat locker. He returns to the States, marries a rich girl and becomes an optometrist, then after a bump on the head caused by a plane crash, starts insisting he was taken captive by aliens years ago, and has been time-travelling randomly for years before that. The story is sandwiched by a couple of slices of narration from the author, who also makes a small cameo appearance being incontinent in a POW camp.

In a quick scout along the review circles, there’s a lot of noise about the humour, the oblique portrayal of the supposedly central event of the firebombing of Dresden, and what the ‘message’ is. Strangely, the copy I have has a review-snippet from The Boston Globe on it saying: ‘Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.’ Odd, because it seems that apart from compassion there is no moral statement made at all by the book. No claims, no pretentiousness.

The most extraordinary aspect of the book for me is the structure. The structure is, as far as I can ascertain, entirely unique, and mirrors the content and possibly the ‘message’ (if there is one) of the book. The little aliens that run through the novel have the peculiar quality of being able to see Time as a flat surface – that is, all points at once. So they describe their own novels as ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.’ Which is pretty much what Slaughterhouse Five is. As Billy shoots about the linear timeframe, slipping from 1945 to 1969 is a morphine-induced haze or whatever uncontrolled state he’s in, we see pieces drift into place, slowly coming into focus, fitting in. It’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting: a huge canvass with hundreds of participants, but nothing in central focus apart from a kind of whirling void, where the bombing is. You can look closely at each mini-scene, and there will be humour and pathos and grotesqueness and beauty. What they add up to is entirely open to the viewer, but we’re left damn sure it’s all part of an immensely bigger picture that couldn’t possibly fit into a 2d canvas. It also reminds me of a musical piece. A symphony, where recurrent motifs pop up in the middle of something. Ah, there’s that four falling notes on the oboe again, what’s it doing here? You’re not quite sure, but it’s definitely connecting those images. Orange and black. The POW trains crawling through the countryside, the boat outside the room on Billy’s honeymoon night, the stripes of the marquee at Billy’s daughter’s wedding. A hum, a buzz. Blue and ivory, on the feet and hands of corpses and those who are in some way coming close to death. This novel has abandoned both the linear form and straight descriptions, as there is no way to describe the central event. Instead we focus on the colour of boots, on the smell of ‘mustard gas and roses’.

The author’s words present the alien abductions and details as ‘the truth’, which simultaneously allowing the reader to note that all the extra-terrestrial details Billy experiences, as well as the whole aspect of time-travel and linear discombobulation, come from the writings of single science-fiction writer within the novel. We’re also told that many people found some solace in science fiction, as the normal parameters of morals and straightforward existence did not seem to function or be relevant in the aftermath of something like WWII. An alternate reality that may in some way make the completely irrational, acceptable.

Vonnegut comments about linearity and the nature of writing a retrospective narrative, comparing himself to Lot’s wife:

‘People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. I've finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt.’

I’m stopping there. The book’s an absolute rip-roarer of ingenuity and frankly genius. Five stomping moose-hoofs up. 

Novascapes (Volume 2)

Title: Novascapes Volume 2

Author: Various, compiled Cassandra Page

Publisher: Invisible Elephant Press          

Publish date: 2016

ISBN: 9780992554835

‘Novascapes’ is a showcase of speculative fiction short stories and poetry from the Hunter region in NSW Australia. I’m not sure why the wealth of talent in this corner of the world continues to amaze me. I should be used to it by now. Eighteen stories and poems, all startlingly individual, mostly from almost unknown authors. There is a fair variance in levels of expertise, but the overall standard is high. My favourite by far is ‘The Quiet Realm Of The Dark Queen’ by Jenny Blackford, with its visceral myth-telling, haunting lilt, which overshadows the whole collection for me. ‘Blake’s Angel’ by Janeen Webb touches a yearning and compassion with surreal earthiness that’s powerful and mystical. ‘Murirrugach’ by Megan Buxton has all the solid, creeping thrill of a good horror story, powered by the cold precision of calculated diction.

At this point I’ll ditch the adjectives and leave the rest to the reader. Caveat to this review: as I’m featured in it, I’m not giving it a moose-hoof rating, ‘cause that wouldn’t be fair. (My own story’s OK, but blink and you’ll miss it.) At the moment it’s only available in digital form from Smashwords, but we’re promised a hard copy edition sometime soon. I’m honoured to be part of this exciting team and community.