Amazon Adventure by Willard Price

Title:  Amazon Adventure

Author: Willard Price     

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Publish date: (First) 1951

ISBN: 0 340 16303 8

This is Steve Irwin in text form, for colonialists.

What, more detail?

The hero of the piece (‘Hal Hunt’, would you believe) goes on an animal-collecting expedition to the Amazon with experienced, reliable Dad, and his rapscallion younger brother. Guess who always comes out shiny-conscienced and knowledgeable in the various scrapes they get into? Dad gets called away on an emergency, the two boys carry on the collecting expedition on their own, succeeding exultantly against impossible odds, hostile tribes and even more hostile Gringos. Cue triumphant music as they board the ship home.

It’s easy to look down the snoot at something like this. With its now-distasteful ideas about… so many things, its less-than-literary style, and excessive use of character foils and diversions, Tolstoy it ain’t. But the genuine enthusiasm for the animals described is endearing, and there’s some lively anthropomorphic imagery going on there in the individual scenes. The near-messianic zeal to get its audience on side while they’re still a tender age has to be admirable. Hey, if it gets my son reading (which is seems to be doing), I’ll vote it as a top novel. Mr Price done good.

Three moose hoofs up out of five. Which is not a bad score at all, for a 1950s boys-own adventure.

Against the Tide by Irene Savvides

Title: Against The Tide

Author: Irene Savvides

Publisher: ABC Books

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 9 780733 322907

‘We float on fat expectations

And big helpings of nostalgia

To a land memory has rendered perfect

By absence and a good dose of bitter wine.’

I’m going to get a tad vehement here. This is a bona fide world-class Australian YA offering, and yet wherever you look, it’s out of print. You can scarcely find a review of it, and when you do they focus on appreciating the depiction of the struggles of young people, specifically immigrants.

It’s so much more than that.

Firstly, no-one is mentioning that it’s a blatant (and successful) homage to The Odyssey. From the very first pages, the descriptions of wine and sea, and the direct and insistent reference to the exported Greekness, along with the obvious similarity the verse format, make the allusions inescapable. The longing for home, regardless of where ‘home’ is, is the central theme of the book, not the struggle of young people specifically – even though these are indeed the main protagonists. Travel, distance, memory, and overcoming monsters. These are the themes.

In addition to the usual techniques, the characterization is accomplished partially through the clear differences in verse form for all the man characters. Which reminds me that (in my vehemence) I have gone about this review in an unorthodox fashion.

It’s a verse novel. The main characters are high school students: Katie (an ocean swimmer nut, whose mother has run off with her uncle, and who moves inland from Cronulla with her father as a result); Effie (from the Greek community at Westmead, where Katie moves to); and Christie (likewise a Greek from Westmead who is a rapper who drops out of school to continue the family baking business). In the meantime Katie’s cousin Matt (also an ocean swimmer and the son of her uncle her mother ran off with – they have similar problems, you see) and Effie fall in love with each other. The narrative revolves around the sea, with the two ocean swimmers living and breathing it and Effie not being able to swim because her baby brother drowned in it years ago. Friendships form, help is extended, mistakes are made and rectified.

The 2005 Cronulla Riots are brought in towards the close of the novel. Like with Odysseus’ homecoming, ‘home’ is made strange. The Suitors are the hire-a-mob rioters who have no place in the home and are there merely to ruin it for their own pleasure. Like Odysseus, the protagonists ultimately deal with the issues by moving away again – although, this not being the Bronze Age, there’s no vengeful slaughter in the meantime (shucks).

My own piece is now joining the throngs of lame reviews, because to do the book justice would take detailed analysis and a thorough exposition of all the themes and techniques. Which I’m not about to do. In the meantime I’ll sit back and be grateful that someone still actually takes the trouble to write work like this, even if it’s then handed out to unwilling schoolkids and left to run out of print in a dusty corner. Homer never died, after all.

The Last Thread by Michael Sala

Title: The Last Thread

Author: Michael Sala

Publisher: Affirm Press 

Publish date: 2012

ISBN: 978 0 9871326 8 0

‘One of Michaelis’s fingers gets wedged between concrete and metal and splits open. He screams. The go-kart stops and he sits there, staring at the wound. (…) A curled leaf of skin hangs from his finger. The tears do not come straight away. The blood holds back. Both come out at once, and then he can’t stop. He is bleeding and wailing like he was made for it. (…)

The tomatoes are swollen and dark and red. Mum runs a knife along each one, before she drops it into boiling water. A thin cut in the flesh, barely visible. The skin of the tomato unfurls when it hits the water, like a flower blooming.’

This is the autobiographical story of a migration and re-migration from the Netherlands to Australia, back again to the Netherlands, and back again to Australia, from the viewpoint of a child of Dutch-Greek heritage, set from the 1970s onward. The first two thirds of the story is told in the third person, and concerns the story of the protagonist as a child. The last third is in the first person and shifts (generally) to events further towards adulthood.

By far the greatest strength of the book is in the spare and evocative language, which is mainly deployed in the third person section. The example above, where disparate scenes or thoughts are linked by visceral images into an impressionist collage of fears and pains, is typical. Most of the initial section is satisfyingly close to poetry. The spaces between the words are given exactly the right amount of room for the reader to create their own experiences, and assimilate the force of often confused emotion behind the language.

This strength ebbs rather dramatically in the latter section. Whether the intention is to impose a more ‘adult’ structure on the thoughts, to seem more detached, more in charge or further along the path of understanding, or some other reason, for me this was a disappointing development. Not only is the language less dense, but the structure is strangely confusing. The narrative about the half-brother Tomos has been shoehorned in awkwardly, with no attempt to fit it into the rest of the story. Possibly this imitates the awkwardness and immobility of the character being described, but for the reader I didn’t find it translated into greater appreciation – it was just like having a filing cabinet out of order. Likewise, the story about the quasi-stepfather Brian is spattered messily across the latter pages, leaving the reader in a sense of confusion about when exactly the events are happening. Again, perhaps this is intentional, as it creates a nightmarish loop of different iterations of the same events taking place over and over again, which is redolent of the character of Brian. But from the consumer’s perspective, it gives but a half-hearted satisfaction.

Overall, the enjoyment of language was notable in parts, and I would be happy to read more from this author. Between three and four moose-hoofs up out of five – would be a clear four, but the subject matter is a little dreary and lacks the zest to pull it into the clear.

Trash by Andy Mulligan

Author: Andy Mulligan

Publisher:  David Fickling Books

Publish date:  1988

ISBN: 978 0385 61902 8

‘I learned perhaps more than any university could ever teach me. I learned that the world revolves around money. There are values and virtues and morals; there are relationships and trust and love – and all of that is important. Money, however, is more important, and it is dripping all the time, like precious water. Some drink deep, others thirst. Without money, you shrivel and die. The absence of money is a drought in which nothing can grow. Nobody knows the value of water until they’ve lived in a dry, dry place – like Behala. So many people, waiting for the rain.’

This is a story about three dumpsite scavenger boys who find a wallet with a clue to a mystery that happens to have massive political implications.

It’s a fantastic, fast read. The story is passed on from one first-person narrator to the other, as they have parts in the action. As the boys are chased by the utterly corrupt authorities. The action is so fast you can’t help but be completely caught up in it. The author’s violent hatred for corruption and unfairness is immense, but even that can’t overshadow the brilliant personalities that populate the novel.  Mulligan has said that ‘children’s fiction needs a bit of toughness’ – and boy does it get it here.

Five moose hoofs up out of five. Strongest points are pace, characterisation, and a prose style effortless as and elf running. Not sure what the weak points are. Go for it.

Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden

Title: Tomorrow When The War Began

Author: John Marsden

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia          

Publish date: 1993

ISBN: 978-1-74351-994-3

‘Then the day came when we stopped playing. We’d gone a couple of months without our usual games, but a few days into the school  holidays I got my dolls out and tried to start up again. And it had all gone. The magic didn’t work any more. I could barely even remember how we’d done it… now it was like reading a meaningless book.’

A group of teenagers go on a camping trip, and on their return, find Australia taken over by a foreign force. Their Rip-Van-Winkle realisation of the situation and awakening to the new reality mirrors the coming of age transitions for most of the characters.

It is not completely without merit. In the latter stages (as long as you get that far) there’s a fair pace of plot – even if that plot is more like a comic action-adventure episodes strung together with no particular direction. Fair enough. I struggle to find further good points, though.

This text (which for some reason is a set text in high school) is so clunky you want to go in and apply WD40 to all moving parts. Listing all the examples would be tedious, so here are just a few, in no particular order.

WHAT is the point of the character of Chris? I strongly suspect he was brought on a) to fill up the girl-boy numbers and 2) as an example of absentee rich landlords not giving a fudge about anything. The poor critter reminds me of those occasional silent characters in Shakespeare who have been transferred over from the original source but are never given any lines. He is seriously useless in plot terms.

When the kids are arguing about the rights and wrongs of the invasion, Robyn’s supposed understanding of slum dwellers being justified in wanting to ‘take over’ is totally at odds with not one of them having in the least clue what country the invaders could even be from. Clueless teenagers? Fine, believable. Clueless but suddenly full of liberal Christian forgiveness grounded in observation? Not so much. I understand the need to fudge the identity of the potential invader, but the disjunction here leads to a lack of internal credibility and logic.

The character selection is a heavy-handed pick-and mix selection, thumping down the diversity belt. Kevin represents a thuggish right-wing working class, Lee the thoughtful Asian, Robyn the Christian lefties, Ellie the narrator is the agrarian, hardworking backbone of the country, and so on. Rarely have we seen such cut-outs since characters were called names like ‘Vice’, ‘Patience’, or ‘Sloth’.

There are several examples of sloppiness. In an episode in which the supposed narrator is participating, they write ‘No-one mentioned the possibility that they might not get back.’ This is not the gender-neutral ‘they’. It’s simply the writer forgetting who is where. It’s not narrative idiosyncrasy or characterisation, either. No-one would refer to themselves in a group as ‘they’.  These things happen to the best. We all need an editor, and ‘they’ have failed here.

Lol moment. They find ‘Heart of Darkness’ in the Hermit’s hut? Seriously? Why not just read that instead?

The instance of Ellie being ‘in the habit of doing things without looking over my shoulder every sixty seconds to see if an adult was nodding or shaking his head,’ because she gets on with farm work. What kid thinks of themselves like that? Would much better have been a show, not a tell. The novel as a whole struggles with this concept, and the premise that the document is supposed to be a public record of what has happened doesn’t tally with what is on the page. No-one would carefully set down secrets and inner thoughts as part of a collective testament in case they all get blown away. It really isn’t that hard to contrive a different framework. Even if it’s a private diary, for Pete’s sake.

You get the picture. I understand there’s been a film made of this. Oh dear. Not the worst book I’ve read but was not a pleasure. Two moose hoofs up out of five.

Bad Samaritans - Ha Joon Chang

Title: Bad Samaritans

Author: Ha Joon Chang

Publish date: 2008

For a book on economics, this is very easy to read. Heaps of great examples to support the ‘Bad Samaritans’ theory, as well as a convincing amount of detour into why every situation isn’t the same and generalizations are a bad idea. It was a little bit of a duplicate of ’23 things they don’t tell you about Capitalism’ but hey, all in a good cause. Recommended. In the light of what it’s trying to do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t get five moose-hoofs up out of five.

               

Lethal White - Robert Galbraith

Title: Lethal White: Cormoran Strike Book 4

Author: Robert Galbraith

Publisher: Sphere Books

Publish date: 2018

I struggled to get through this book. It’s not without its plus points. Chiefly:

1.       Description is masterly, and sensitive. The language itself is finely honed. Characterisation is clear and full.

2.       The plot is so complex one’s got to take one’s hat off just for the feat of pulling off the job. It’s like some super-real piece of art, or massive mandala made of butter, or sand, or some other improbable material. It’s a big effort to get something like that together.

Unfortunately, not a single one of these perfectly-rendered characters has any likeable aspect whatsoever. One just wants them all to die, and hopefully the cast to be replaced. It’s more a feeling of ‘thank god’ when it all ends than any sensation of satisfaction. Lexical anaesthesia. It’s much more finely crafted than I remember the first Harry Potter book being (that’s as far as I got in the series) but still put-downable. What a shame of such beautiful work.

Three moose hoofs up out of five, simply because of the massive effort and skill, lopsided though it is.