BR: Peace like a River (Leif Enger)

Amazon Link: Peace like a River

The back cover reads:

Leif Enger's best-selling debut is at once a heroic quest, a tragedy, and a love story, in which "what could be unbelievable becomes extraordinary" (Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald). Enger brings us eleven year old Reuban Land, an asthmatic boy in the Midwest who has reason to believe in miracles. Along with his sister and father, Reuben finds himself on a cross-country search for his outlaw older brother who has been controversially charged with murder. Their journey unfolds like a revelation, and its conclusion shows how family, love and faith can stand up to the most terrifying of enemies, the most tragic of fates.

I'm not particularly religious, I don't believe in 'God', at least not in the 'go to church on Sunday's and say your prayers at night' type of belief. This book is riddled with miracles, real Jesus-as-our-saviour type miracles. It has a character who walks on air, a whole car and caravan being made invisible so as to evade police observation, a gas tank that never runs dry, a boy surviving a gunshot wound after he has been declared dead... and, you know what, I loved (and believed) every bit of it.

I didn't read this book from beginning to end in one sitting, in fact it took me quite some time because it's a slow book and not much happens in any great hurry, but each time I came back I settled right in and felt at home. Reuben is an adorable character. He's gutsy and young and vulnerable and real. His younger sister, Swede, is a novelist and poet, gifted with incredible insight and a vocabulary that puts mine to shame, and she's only nine years old.

Davey is the quintessential older brother: sixteen years old, fiercely protective of his family and those he loves. His honour lands him in deep trouble when he kills two intruders in the family home. His lawyer claims self defence, but there's history between Davey and the two young men, a history that unravels to reveal murderous intent.

With Davey in prison and their father out of work, things are looking pretty bleak for the Lands family. Until Davey busts out of prison and disappears. The FBI send a man out to interrogate the family, but he finds out very little because they don't know where Davey has gone. The situation enters a stalemate with the FBI man unwilling to let them out of his sight, and the Lands having nowhere to go and no way to get there. To quell her anxiety, Swede composes maudlin poetry while Reuban concentrates on breathing.

Miraculously, a local man bequeathes a car and caravan to the family, and a tank of gas that never runs out. Off they head into the barren winter wilderness in search of their lost brother and wayward son, managing to evade the FBI agent and local police as they pass through small towns.

When winter storms move in and the highway is closed, they are forced to spend a night off the highway with a widower, Roxanna. She's a friendly, ferocious woman who takes them in as her own. What was going to be one night, becomes two, three, more. They settle in, making a family for themselves but never far from their minds is Davey.

One night Reuban sees Davey on a horse at the boundary of the property. He braves the winter cold with his gummy lungs and meets with his brother. Here starts a series of clandestine meetings whereby he learns that Davey is holed up with a derelict outlaw, Waltzer, and his child bride, a brutal man with a sordid past.

Reuben is torn, bound to secrecy by his brother but fearful of the man who holds so much sway over Davey's safety. When the FBI agent, who by this stage has tracked them down, goes missing, Reuban believes Waltzer has murdered him and he's afraid for Davey's life. He tells his father who in turns tells the FBI agent and a posse is put together to hunt the men down. Reuban is dragged along and his guilt at betraying his brother is palpable.

The story takes a dramatic turn at this point and I won't give it away, but the ending is satisfying and rewarding, if not... miraculous. As Reuban says, 'Make of it what you will'.

Rating: **** out of five

BR: The Dogs of Babel (Carolyn Parkhurst)

Amazon Link: The Dogs of Babel


The back cover reads:

This exuberantly praised bestseller - one of the year's most admired and enjoyed fiction debuts - tells the story of a man's quest to solve the mystery of his wife's death with the help of the only witness: their dog, Lorelei. Written with a quiet elegance and a profound knowledge of love's hidden places, The Dogs of Babel is a work of astonishing and lasting power - a story of marraige, survival and devotion that lies too deep for words.

This novel is one that I bought in the US last year. In fact, the last four books that I read, excluding the most recent, were books purchased last year in the US. Evidently I'm subconsciously clearing the shelves for the new books I will buy during my visit early next year.

This is a charming story, dark in places, beautiful in others, odd and disturbing when Paul's obsession with teaching his dog to talk leads him to a small group of people who believe that surgically altering the profiles of dog's jaws will give them the ability to speak.

Paul is a grieving husband, obsessed with finding out the truth of his wife's death. She fell from a tree in their backyard and the dog was the only witness. What was she doing up there? Why did she fall? Why did she cook the dog a steak before climbing the tree, and why did she rearrange their entire collection of books before she died?

Lexy left her husband a myriad of clues and he unravels them as he recalls his marraige, the highs and lows, the special things they did together and Lexy's sometimes unusual behaviour that didn't make him love her even less, but served as clues to her eventual demise.

I understand why this book made the best-seller's list, why it's a book-club book, and why it has such high praise and quality reviews. It is a quality novel that crosses genres. It has mystery and romance, it's not too long and it's not too challenging. It deals with complex issues in a manner that is accessible and not overly maudlin. It gives the reader an experience of mental illness from the outside, and it gives the reader a fluffy, light ending which readers can feel good about.

It's no wonder this is a book-club favourite and a best-seller, it packages up the nasty stuff and makes it palatable for the masses. Unfortunately I'm not one of the masses.

Paul's obsession to teach Lorelei to talk was endearing if not a little disturbing, and his embroilment with the crazy dog mutilators gave the story an aspect of danger and served to illustrate to the protagonist the error of his own ways. These are nice techniques, but they felt orchestrated rather than organic. I'd have preferred to see Paul work out for himself that the dog talking thing was flawed, which would have been much harder to pull off for the writer but inherently more rewarding for the reader.

Lexy's creativity worked well with the story and her painting of masks, especially the death masks, fed toward the eventual reveal, but the choice of making her a gifted artist is subtexturally stereotypical.

From the beginning this book didn't quite gel. The structure is mature and the pacing, though a little slow, kept me interested but the sadness is perfunctory and the writing lacked honesty. As for the whole handling of mental illness and suicide... this book sends completely the wrong message.

Readers of romance novels will enjoy this, but anyone who is seeking to understand the human condition won't get much out of it at all.

Rating: ** out of five.

BR: Always running (Luis J. Rodriguez)

The back cover reads:

By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings,
and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as drugs, murder, suicide and
senseless acts of street crime claimed friends and family members.

This book was written in 1993, and revised with an updated introduction in 2005. Luis wrote the book, in a large part to appeal to his son in an attempt to deflect the young man from the same path he took. The introduction of this version informs the reader that his son is serving a 28 year prison sentence for three counts of attempted murder. It's a sobering start to a serious piece of work, written as a novel but with the truth of autobiography, it reads with the punch of a newspaper editorial and the poetry of lyrical prose – readable, accessible and haunting. It has lessons applicable to us all.

Luis is the son of Mexican immigrants. His parents were forced to move to the US after Luis' father, a former school principal, fell out of favour with the local chieftains – powerful men with political connections – his transgressions so dire that he was imprisoned on trumped up charges, fed food scraps from a can, treated with contempt. The family finally escaped to America and sought to build a life in the face of poverty, homelessness and social rejection.

Our first exposure in America stays with me like a foul odor. It seemed a strange world, most of it spiteful to us, spitting and stepping on us, coughing us up, us immigrants, as if we were phlegm stuck in the collective throat of this country.

Luis is one of several children but his closest and harshest sibling relationship is with Rano, his older brother.

In fact, I remember my brother as the most dangerous person alive. He seemed to
be wracked with a scream which never let out. His face was dark with
meanness, what my mother called maldad. He also took delight in seeing me
writhe in pain, cry or cower, vulnerable to his own inflated sense of power.

Displaced at home, misunderstood at school, surrounded by violence and gangs, social exclusion and minimal prospects, Luis and several other boys with similar backgrounds form a gang. They are kids, barely teenagers yet they begin their evolution into a life where alcohol and drugs numb pain, violent crime signifies strength and all that matters is blind, unerring loyalty to
their homies, regardless of personal or moral cost.

Along the spine of the night, through the shrubbery, on the coarse roads, past
the peeling shacks, past the walls filed with the stylized writing that
proclaimed our existence, past La India's shed where boys discovered the secret
of thighs, in the din of whispers, past Berta's garden of herbs and midnight
incantations, past the Japo's liquor store, past the empty lots scattered around
the barrio we called "the fields" overlooking Nina's house, pretty Nina, who
lavished our dreams, there you'd find the newest and strongest clique. There
you'd find the Animal Tribe.

Before long, the Animal Tribe is forced to disband, their members split up and absorbed by larger gangs of older boys, young men with bloodied pasts, murder and revenge in their veins. The initiations into these gangs are brutal, but Luis has grown up with pain and takes the beatings just as he takes everything else that happens to him – with numb acceptance.

Everything lost its value for me: Love, Life and Women. Death seemed the only door worth opening, the only road toward a future. We tried to enter death and emerge from it. We sought it in heroin, which bears the peace of death in life. We craved it in our pursuit of Sangra and in battles with the police. We yelled: You can't touch this!, but Come kill me! was the inner cry. In death we sought what we were groping for, without knowing it until it caressed our cheeks. It was like an extra finger in the back of our heads, pressing, gnawing, scraping. This fever overtook us, weakening and
enslaving us. Death in a bottle. In spray. In the fire eyes of a woman, stripped of soul and squeezed into the shreds of her humanity.

As a young adult, Luis begins what will be a long journey toward turning his life around. He was born with a gift of writing, and he started this book when he was 15 years old though no-one believed that a low achieving Mexican boy could (or would want to) write a novel. As he matured, he developed a healthy distaste for the daily horror, the deaths and violent reprisals, the fear of someone he loved being taken out by a warring gang. Through school, he learned that there were options and alternatives, he gained a voice, organized activities, appealed to his homies to stop the madness though very few would listen.

I arrived at a point which alarmed even me, where I had no desire for the
internal night, the buoyancy of letting go, the bliss of the void. I require
more, a discipline as a bulwark within which to hold all I valued, a shield
against the onslaught.

On a broader scale, some people listened and are still listening, others don't and never will. While he has a voice, Luis will spread his message and though he failed to save his son from prison and accepts responsibility for at least some of Ramiro's despair, the lessons he has learned and the hope he shares will save many others. That is without a doubt.

Rating: ***** out of five

BR: Close Quarters (Larry Heinemann)

The back cover reads:

Like many other recent high-school graduates in the 1960’s, Philip Dosier found that if he didn’t have plans for himself, his country certainly did. Shipped off to Vietnam to fight in a war he knew next to nothing about, he found himself in a world of violence, fear, heat and squalor unlike anything he ever thought
could exist.

Told in the unflinchingly accurate language of the field soldier – fast, rough slang that becomes a kind of surreal poetry – Close Quarters is the story of Dosier’s year in Vietnam.

A classic of war fiction, it is the harrowing account of a decent young man who becomes an embittered combat veteran and how he makes his way back to the world he left behind.

The reader meets Philip on his arrival in Vietnam, his introduction to what will be his life for the next twelve months. He’s naïve, scared and out of place. Everything he sees and experiences is new and disorienting. The men who are already in active duty are dirty and dead eyed, rough and brutal, nothing like the guys he knows back home. All the preparation, training, instruction haven’t prepared him for the reality of what he faces, but he man’s up because he has no other option.

I stood stiffly with my feet well apart, parade-rest fashion, at the break in the barbed-wire fence between the officers’ country tents and the battalion motor pool. My feet and legs itched with sweat. My shirt clung to my back. My shaving cuts burned. I watched, astonished, as the battalion Reconaissance Platoon, thirty-some men and ten boxy squat-looking armored personnel carriers – tracks, we called them – cranked in from two months in the field, trailing a rank stink and stirring a cloud of dust that left a tingle in the air. One man slowly dismounted from each track and led it up the sloped path from the perimeter road, ground-guiding it, walking with a stumbling hangdog gait. Each man wore a sleeveless flak jacket hung with grenades, and baggy jungle trousers, the ones with large thigh pockets and drawstrings at the cuffs. The tracks followed behind like stupid, obedient draft horses, creaking and clacking along, and scraping over rocks hidden in the dust. There were sharp squeaks and irritating scratching noises, slow slack grindings, and the throttled rap of straight-pipe mufflers, all at once. And the talk, what there was, came shouted and snappy – easy obscenities and shit laughs. It was an ugly deadly music, the jerky bitter echoes of machines out of sync. A shudder went through me, as if
someone were scratching his nails on a blackboard.

The men walking and the men mounted passed not fifteen feet in front of me. A moult, a smudge of dirt, and a sweat and grit and grease stink covered everything and everyone – the smell of a junkyard in a driving rainstorm. Each man looked over, looked down at me with the blankest, blankest sort of glance – almost painful to watch – neither welcome nor distance. This one or that one did signify with a slow nod of the head or an arch of the brows or a close-mouthed sight, and I nodded or
smiled back, but most glanced over dreamily and blinked a puff-eyed blink and
glanced forward again.

Over the course of the novel, Philip becomes one of these dead eyed men. It’s a slow progression, an unnatural one, the destruction of a soul. As the back cover reads, Philip starts out as a decent guy, an average everyday Joe with a girl back home and a life ahead of him. After one year in the jungles of Vietnam, he is nothing of who he once was and bearing witness to his slow disintegration is difficult.

And I glanced up and down the two rumpled rows of cots, the two lumpy rows of sleepers. What in the world am I doing here? My parents raised me on “Thous-shalt-nots” and willow switches and John Wayne (even before he became a verb), the Iwo Jima bronze and First and Second Samuel, and always, always the word was “You do what I tell you do to.” The concept around our house was everybody takes his own lickings. But what in the name of God had I done to get this one?

Philip starts out doing ambushes: laying in wait all night in the pitch black of the jungle for the enemy to come past and hoping, and praying that he doesn’t fall asleep, doesn’t move, doesn’t screw up or he and his platoon will be dead. It doesn’t sound so bad, doesn’t sound so hard… well that’s what Philip thought too, until he started doing it.

It’s the oldest skill. You think about everything: God and the devil and pussy and what the fuck am I doing here. You sing a song to yourself or crack a joke. You squirm because you’ve got to take a leak, but you hold it until your stomach aches, and wait for morning. And sometimes if you’re a FNG, a fucken new guy, you nod out, thinking the same things you where thinking before – God and the devil and pussy, damn I wish I had some pussy. Then something starts you awake. There is a flash of light, like somebody has cracked you across the face with the narrow side of a two-by-four. You startle. And there it is just the way you left it. The woodline and the bushes and the kanai grass. You sit there red in the face, not because
you’ve nodded off, but because you have jerked awake and made the mistake of
being heard. But it is a trick of the mind. It is only your eyes that have moved. You sit there dumb, like stones and logs, as still as lake water in the moonlight. The movement is underneath – the cool water rising, the warm slowly sinking. All you heard was your heart beating, slamming against your chest, screaming again and again.

Philip’s first kill is long, drawn out; bloody hand to hand combat that culminates in Philip gaining the upper hand and choking the life from an enemy soldier, a kid younger than he. I won’t type out the scene because it is chilling and awful and there is no way that a man can come back from something like that. Worse, he is forced to stay in that cramped, pained position for hours until dawn breaks, with the body of the dead enemy soldier in his hands, his fingers locked around the other man’s neck, the dead stiff eyes staring back at him. When help finally comes and he is free to move, I sense that Philip is not the man who started out that night, he is irrevocably changed and I grieve for him – I grieve for all the young men like him.

Over the course of the year, Philip lives the life of a field soldier and the book holds nothing back, bringing into existence for the reader the reality, brutality, comradeship and compassion that exists in a war such as this. It’s a confronting and challenging read, an insight into experiences that many men would never speak openly about, but that needs to be known.

I highly recommend this novel, but appreciate that it won't appeal to all readers. There are things in this book that would be better left unknown.

Rating: ***** out of five.

BR: Cold Skin (Albert Sanchez Pinol)

Amazon Link: Cold Skin

The back cover reads:

We are never truly far from those we hate. For this very reason, we shall never be truly close to those we love. An appalling fact, I knew it well enough when I embarked. But some truths deserve our attention; others are best left alone.

On a desolate island at the end of the earth a young man discovers there are things more frightening than solitude.

This book was a quick read, enthralling from start to finish, disturbing and haunting. The writing is solid, eloquent and beautiful and I do it little justice by reviewing the book close on two months after having completed it.

The protagonist is a young man who takes on a role as a weather official on an uninhabited Antarctic island far away from any shipping routes or rescue should events turn sour. He is set down by a sea captain who is also there to collect his predecessor, Gruner, except the man is a slobbering, jabbering, semi-naked idiot, senseless and hostile. The captain leaves both men on the island; the deranged Gruner in the lighthouse and the (unnamed) protagonist in a timber hut on the other side of the island.

All is well until nightfall when, from the waves comes creatures that are reptilian in appearance and treacherously homicidal. Unaware of the danger and entirely unprepared, the protagonist survives the first attack with a mix of sheer will and dumb luck. He seeks out Gruner's help, knowing that the other man has weapons and protection in the lighthouse, but his attempt to seek sanctuary is violently rebuffed.

Only when Gruner's secret alliance with one of the reptilian females, Aneris, is revealed, does the protagonist bargain his safety by threatening the other man's 'mate'. Earning himself an unsteady alliance, he shelters in the lighthouse and works with Gruner to stave off attacks by the creatures, which they come to know as Situaca's, a sub-human lifeform.

A complex relationship develops between the two men and Aneris and later with the children of the Situaca who come onto the island in between attacks. The protagonist attempts to establish an alliance with the creatures, recognising that they demonstrate human-like traits and the capability for compassion toward each other. Gruner, however, is unable to appreciate them as anything more than vile enemies and sets off a reaction of violence and brutality that goes on and on for nights on end, wearing the men down and decimating the island.

At the end of the book, only the protagonist is left to greet the sea captain upon his return a year later. By this time all sanity has left and, instead of leaving as any sane man would do or at the very least warning the new weather official of the fate that awaits him, the protagonist stays and takes on the dead Gruner's role -- that of a deranged maniac who disallows the new weather official access to the lighthouse, the only structure on the island that affords shelter from the murderous creatures.

This book was enjoyable and well written, if not somewhat differnet from what I usually read.

Rating: **** out of five.

BR: Boy A (Jonathan Trigell)

In 1993 two ten year old boys abducted a two year old boy, took him to an isolated location where they tortured and murdered him. I remember the case well because it shocked and horrified me, but I never could condemn the children who committed this act even if they had known full well what they were doing. Children do what they have learned, and they cope and manifest their emotions in unpredictable ways. Moreover, these two boys were children and there is no way to predict how they will mature. In my experience, children explore their evil sides at a young age and if left untempered, without discipline and guidance, it’s not unimaginable for them to go too far.

I don’t know if the author was inspired by that case, though it seems likely he was, and I commend and thank him for taking something like this and crafting it into a novel that is both moving and disturbing. I also thank Emily for gifting me this book.

In this novel Jack is Boy A, one of two boys who were convicted of murdering a girl their own age. Jack, which is not his real name, and Boy B were pre-pubescent boys when the murder occurred and both claimed their innocence, accusing the other. As an adult, newly released from a life of juvenile detention and prison, Jack is a naïve innocent, unaccustomed to society, its norms, practices, demands. Terry, his advisor, mentor, father figure and legally assigned protector, introduces him to the new world, a boarding house and job. Nothing is too demanding for a socially acclimatized individual, but to Jack the experiences are daunting. I related to this, in a small way, and felt deeply for Jack’s anxieties.

An example is Jack’s first experience of an automatic washing machine. It stalls as he is cooking a meal for himself, so he goes to tend to the machine thinking it will take just a minute, but it all goes awry.

The switch comes away in his hand, leaving a hole. Jack is staring at it when the water starts pouring out on to the floor. He tries to push the switch, which he sees is really a screw-plug, back into its slot. But he fumbles, and it jumps skittishly away, into the water already flowing behind his knees. As he turns to reclaim the plug, Jack sees the flames snaking out of the grill. They lick dark venom on to the clean white of Kelly’s oven. He’s caught for a moment, unsure which disaster to counter first. The fire makes his choice by grasping at the wallpaper. Still holding the plug, Jack leaps to his bare feet, nearly slipping in the water. He turns off the gas and thrusts the burning grill pan into the sink. The fat spits, hissing onto his hand and cheek, but the flames quickly die. Although the water is barely trickling out now, and the floor is already flooded, he screws the plug back in, as tight as it will go.

He slumps down in the pool of water, covering the washing machine’s still-laughing mouth with his back, and holding his burned cheek with his burned hand.

It’s a comedic scene, but so heartbreaking and indicative of how hard he tries and how little he knows.

As he settles in, slowly making friends, learning what he can and can’t do, living with memories of beatings, victimization, suicide ideation and the unabridged hatred of society because he is a convicted kiddie-killer, Jack must call on his tattered inner strength to keep it all together. Most of all, he must keep his past a secret – tell no-one, be careful of everything he does, don’t drink too much alcohol in case his tongue loosens to reveal the truth. Always in the back of his mind is the only option available to him if it all goes wrong: suicide.

After he picks himself up, Jack shaves with his new cut-throat razor. He holds the blade inwards, stroking it with his thumb, feeling the comforting sharpness, so honed it has to be restrained. The razor wants to sever his skin. That’s why it feels so good to shave with. Jack feels alive this close to the choice. He senses intensely the vertigo of possibility – the fear he might go with the urge to slip into jugular. And, having made his decision, not dying makes him feel stronger.

There are too many scenes to quote, too much about this book that can’t be given credit in such a short review. The writing is literary, poetic and melancholy – all the attributes I adore! On every page is an underlying sense of doom, of every high being met by an eventual low, of the promise of an ending that will tear my heart out.

The further I got into this book, the more nervous I became, and the revelation near the end was enough to dislodge me. I must have known it was a possibility but I’d so unerringly longed to believe that it wasn’t, so much so that when it was spelled out, plain and simple, I had to put the book down and process what that meant in the face of all I knew about Jack and how much I had come to love him.

The ending is unclear, Jack’s fate is unclear and it needs to be so. I like to think he finds peace without dying, but I wonder if ever he can. In a world that wishes you dead, how can you ever find peace?

After reading this book I caught up on the fate of the two boys who had murdered the two year old boy, Martin Bolger. This is one of many links about the case and the current status: http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/bulger.asp

I didn’t even have to think very hard to remember the child’s name, which shows how much the case imprinted on my mind. After reading this book, more than ever I hope that those two boys (now men) can find peace in their lives. I doubt very much that either of them will go on to kill again, but will they ever have happy lives, knowing that the world is waiting for them, or someone who knows the truth about them, to slip up. It’s frightening. One of the most frightening things I can imagine.

Rating: *****+ stars out of five. A must read!

BR: Cutting through skin (Michael McCoy)

The back cover reads:

‘Sometimes I would close my eyes with the tip of the scalpel poised and ready and just feel its progress as it cut through the skin. I’d hold the blade in my hand and press, expectantly and sightlessly through the skin. Feeling the release. Feeling the joy’

With his PhD recently finished, Matthew Bass is adrift in his work as a prosector in the Department of Anatomy. He is attracted to the sexually well-practised Zoe, a fellow cutter with bizarre religious beliefs. Almost willingly, Matt lets lip his grip on reality until, with Zoe’s encouragement, he pushes his newly discovered ideas on life and death to their ultimate extreme.

I chose this book because of the title and the references to the characters being cutters, but they are not the cutters that I am accustomed to so that came as a disappointment.

The novel is written in alternating viewpoints of the four main characters, Matt, Zoe, Frank and Rushworth. Rushworth is Matt’s father and Frank is an academic of similar vintage who is friends with them both, and worried about Matt’s increasingly erratic behaviour. The setting is modern day Melbourne, which was another selling point. It’s refreshing to read novels set in environments I know.

The book opens with Matt walking into a hold-up in progress. The event affects him deeply.

September 22^nd. The day I came to believe was my birthday. My real birthday.

I stopped to get petrol. Pulled up, filled the tank and walked across the concrete from the pump towards the sliding glass doors, petrol fumes rising thickly from my hands in the fat afternoon air. A dog lay asleep just outside the door, her fur twitching easily in her dreams and shining back at me like eddies in a black mirror, before giving way to a row of dry, weathered nipples on her belly. And in her face you could read a perfect, mindless contentment. She was the kind of dog you’d like to whistle into the back of your car and take home with you. To share in some of that mindless contentment.

Maybe five steps from the door I felt a hand on my shoulder, firm and with a purpose to the pressure it exerted, rather than just a blundering push to get me out of the way. Then an instant later there was the gun.

I read this much in the bookstore and decided to buy the book. I don’t regret my purchase, but the story did not pan out as I had imagined. In several places it was bogged down with repetitive prose; characters who engaged in lengthy monologue in their heads, making the reader proxy to their thoughts. Initially I didn’t mind being along for the ride, impressed by the writing style and distinctive imagery, but it eventually grew old.

Also, I lacked the ability to connect with any of the characters in a way that would allow me to care for them, to fear for them, to stand beside them and cheer them on. Aside from the opening chapter – the petrol station hold-up – the remaining chapters were lengthy and dry, driven only by Matt’s unusual behaviour and Zoe’s belief that she was the religious figure Eve and Matt was Adam.

The story took a disturbing direction when Matt’s father dies and Matt breathes in what he believes is the soul of his dying parent. He takes Rushworth’s last breath, seals their lips and sucks it in. If I had been involved with the characters enough to really care about them, then this event would have bothered me greatly, instead it just freaked me out – I mean, who does that!? It’s unnerving.

If it weren’t for the poetic writing style, though arguably a tad overdone, I’d not have finished the book at all. As an example, Matt meets with Frank at the racecourse after having been out of touch for some weeks. This is in Frank’s POV.

‘Morning; Frank,’ he replied, like a working dog. ‘What are we doing here?’

He was all hunkered down on himself as if his bones were chilled through to the marrow. It wasn’t cold, though. No one else was cold. So he had to be hiding something. It wasn’t thermoregulation that was curling him into a ball, it was emotional regulation, you’d have guessed. Or maybe he had his hands stuffed deep in his trouser pockets in an effort to trap the smell from inside his underwear.

I had to smile.

‘What are we doing here?’ I repeated, still grinning. “I thought we could have a chinwag, Matty, that’s what. Sit and natter while God’s most beautiful parade their wares in front of us.’

I stood there in the lower reaches of the grandstand, my arm sweeping across all before us, as if we were in a gallery full of Rembrandts and Picassos and Van Goghs. He sat down next to me, hands still shoved in his trouser pockets and collar turned u against the wind that didn’t blow. He didn’t even look at what I was showing him. Didn’t even know I was trying to show him anything. Not interested in knowing. He gazed at me as though I’d traded my last drop of nous for a bus ticket to an empty circus ground.

The novel definitely is literary in the common sense of the word, being rambling, introspective and explorative of psychology, philosophy and religion, but it lacks an intangible element that would have made it memorable.

Rating: *** out of five

BR: The Inner Circle (Gary Crew)

This is the story of two teenage boys: Tony who is white, affluent, ignored by his divorced parents and given money instead of love. He moves between his mum and dad’s homes on a roster system, but whether he is present or not seems inconsequential to either of them; and Joe, an aboriginal boy who came to the city for an apprenticeship from a poor but close and loving family, only to lose the opportunity to covert racism and social exclusion. Ashamed of having failed, he holes up in an abandoned pumping station and writes letters of imagined success to his sister so she will be proud of him.

The book is written in alternating points of view; a chapter for Tony and a chapter for Joe. It works well, allowing the reader to get to know each boy and the fears that each keep inside, hidden from the world and from each other.

We meet Tony first:

I heard a story about a little kid who came home from school and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor. A screwdriver was lying next to her and the electric toaster was still on. At least he found her. The day I came home there was only a note from my Dad:

Stan, I’ve had enough. It’s all over. You know where I am. Give me some time then Tony can come. You’ll cope. – Angie.

I was eight. Until then we had lived like any other kid; Mum and Dad, three bedroom weatherboard house with a brick base and tiled roof, an above-ground pool up the backyard. A Holden, Australia’s own car, was in the garage. I was given a BMX bike for my seventh birthday. Dad was a sales rep for a pump company and Mum was always on the phone, making appointments to demonstrate cosmetics. Everything was normal. There was something nice about that; maybe too nice, even claustrophic.

Then Joe:

I was scared as hell when I went out on that catwalk. I’m no hero. At first I thought maybe rats woke me but when I sat up and listened I knew there was someone mucking around in the room next to mine. I’d been half expecting some derelict to wander in sooner or later but sitting there with my scalp creeping I wished it was much later – like never. I waited a minute, hoping whoever it was would shoot through and leave me alone. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a guy having a pee; I guessed whoever it was intended to stay the night. There was no way I could go back to sleep so I slid over to the door.

Tony and Joe’s paths cross. They have nothing in common aside from their age and emotional confusion – Tony who doesn’t know who he is and where he stands; and Joe who knows who he is but finds himself in a society that doesn’t accept him because of the colour of his skin. Both boys have a lot to learn about themselves, about life, about the future they will carve out for themselves, but mostly Tony for he is the most broken of the two boys. Despite his comparative affluence, access to money, food and scholastic opportunity, none of it meant anything because his parents did not see him. When they split up, Tony became an object to trade, a reminder to his father of the woman who had left him, and to his mother, nothing more than a possession to have for part of the week. When Angie left to be with another man she sought love that her husband and son could not give her – that no-one could give her, and by the end of the book she is an embarrassing example of emotional neediness and despair.

Joe weathers several of Tony’s storms, forgiving and accepting him when a lesser person would struggle to do so. At the end of the book, Joe has found a purpose and place, an apprenticeship with an older man who treats him as an equal and appreciates who he is. Tony is less fortunate and the reader must come to their own conclusions about whether he has the resilience to make it on his own.

This novel is young adult, aimed at a teenage audience (particularly boys) and its messages are strong, simple but not presented in a simplistic manner.

Rating: ***1/2 out of five for an enjoyable read.

BR: Surrender (Sonya Hartnett)

Amazon Link: Surrender

One word describes this book: bleak.

There is not one single shred of happiness in the entire story, not even anything that comes remotely close. From the opening lines:

I am dying: it's a beautiful world. Like the long slow sigh of a cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

it goes downhill for Anwell, the protagonist who in the opening chapter is twenty years old and dying. As the story progresses, he imagines events from his past that have led him here, and driven him to what he must do.

This book won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for fiction in 2005. Sonya Hartnett is a gifted writer, her style is enviable and polished, but this book didn't work for me. Don't get me wrong, I adore depressing stories, I hunt those suckers down and consume them like candy, but this goes beyond depressing, it's downright awful -- so awful as to be unbelievable.

It's soon obvious that Anwell (who for part of the book calls himself Gabriel), is mentally ill. Schitzophrenic, I suspect, or something more pathologically unstable than that. The reader relies on him as narrator, but he is patently unreliable and at the end of the book I am uncertain as to what was truth and what was imagined, which I actually do like and one of the reasons why I'm not rating this book lower.

Anwell's upbringing was one of neglect and abuse. His older brother, a boy with serious mental retardation, is left in Anwell's care when their mother retreats to her room and their father escapes the house. Anwell is seven years old. The outcome is tragic and Anwell's future is cursed from that point on (though, arguably, he was cursed from the moment he was born).

As a young teen, he is hounded in school, hated by the townsfolk, misunderstood and belittled by his parents, physically punished for even the mildest of indiscretions. He has no friends, no hope, nothing but misery and anguish... until Finnigan comes along.

Finnigan is a wild boy, dark eyed, dark haired, full of mischief and evil intent. He plays the role of the dark avenger, seeking retribution for anyone who errs against Anwell (who refers to himself as Gabriel, an angel). When the small town is plagued by a series of arson attacks, Anwell knows that Finnigan is responsible and it both thrills and scares him. Over the following years, Finnigan comes and goes, living in the dark forest nearby, a force unto himself and beyond Anwell's influence.

Surrender is Gabriel's dog, but later he becomes Finnigan's. You'll have to read the book to see how and why that happens, and similarly, I won't say anything more about the plot because to do so will give it away.

Unfortunately, I can't say I will recommend this book. It is well written, though I felt that the poeticism of Sonya's writing was heavy handed, and the bleakness over done. Every chance she had to draw the mood into darkness, she took it. I became numb to it, desensitized, like relying on a tool that has lost its shine and sharp edge through overuse.

In reading about the novel, I learn that comparisons are made to 'I am the Cheese', by Robert Cormier. I have read that book and I enjoyed it, and yes, in reflection there are similarities, however Cormier's book worked for me, this one didn't.

I didn't find the story depressing, unsetting or objectionable, just... consistently bleak. There were no high points, and no low points because the book started out pretty much as low as one can go. It doesn't get much worse than a character who is paper thin and coughing up blood. In reading this book, I have learned that I need for there to be hope in a story, even if it's misguided (as in 'I am the Cheese') and eventually thwarted, it doesn't matter, I need there to be a reason for me to be drawn through the book. Surrender lacked that, and for all the beautiful writing (because, yes, Sonya really is gifted), without hope there is no point.

As an aside, Spider worked well for me as a film-based example of this type of story -- an unreliable narrator on a platform of crippling mental illness. That film was intricate, sombre, moody and dark, and unashamedly bleak... but it had hope, even if that was all dashed at the end, while it lasted, it kept me connected.

Rating: ***1/2 out of five.

BR: Triage (Scott Anderson)

Amazon Link: Triage

Mark Walsh wakes on a hilltop in Kurdistan, injured, disoriented, the victim of an artillery attack. As a war photographer, he is no stranger to violent atrocities, death and near misses, but this event disintegrates his mind, leaving him in a stuporous half-state that sees him through his initial physical recovery in a remote, clandestine guerrilla hospital, then his return to Brooklyn where his wife, Elena, struggles to make sense of his symptoms.

As Mark’s physical state worsens and he denies her the full story of how he was injured, Elena pushes him to seek medical help, but Mark refuses, trapped in a body that is betraying him and with emotions that alternately numb and overwhelm him. Meanwhile, Diane, heavily pregnant and the wife of Mark’s best friend and photographic buddy, Colin, fears for her missing husband. Mark and Colin set out to Kurdistan together, but split up before Mark’s accident. Despite Elena and Diane’s fears for Colin’s welfare, Mark assures them that Colin is simply delayed and will return home soon.

Complicating Elena’s progress with Mark is her grandfather, Joaquin, a man who raised her after her own father died in a car accident but whom she disowned after learning of his involvement with war criminals after the 1930’s Spanish war. Joaquin, a self-proclaimed psychologist, established an asylum for officers and soldiers who had committed heinous acts of inhumanity and brutality during the years of fighting. These men, unable to return to their families and too dangerous to be allowed to return to society without psychological intervention, were passed to Joaquin to ‘cure’. And, so he did, according to the history books. Elena is unable to forgive Joaquin for housing and healing men who, she believed, were beyond forgiveness.

After Mark collapses and is hospitalised, his symptoms determined to be psychosomatic, Elena’s mother calls in Joaquin, believing him to be the only person who can heal Mark’s trauma ravaged mind. Joaquin journeys from Spain to Brooklyn, ignores Elena’s attempts to keep him from Mark, and commences his own form of therapy. The journey taken by all three is dark – of solitude and grief, of guilt and laying blame, of denial and ultimate responsibility.

Scott Anderson makes no attempt to gloss over the horror of war, neither does he revert to bloody gore. Instead, he exhibits rare restraint and by doing so he crafts a story that drills to the very core of the reader, leaving much to the imagination, painting scenes and images that are horrific in their ghastly serenity. Mark recalls experiences that are unequivocally stomach churning – no person could witness those events and walk away unscarred, yet Mark tried to… tried and failed.

Scott is a former foreign correspondence, he writes from experience, from the heart, from the soul. It shows in his writing. No-one but a man who has experienced these horrors first hand could write such a jagged, emotionally crippling books such as this.

Few books bring me to tears, this one did. Few books stay with me, a part of me as though they have carved their will into my soul; this one did. I can’t recommend it highly enough, but it’s not a pretty read, not a happy story, though the ending does bring hopeful closure for the three main characters. It is the journey that will linger long after these characters have moved on.

As an aside, while reading this book I had a chance encounter with a stranger on a train who noticed me reading and admitted that he is a photo journalist and had read the book. I was only halfway through and asked him what he thought. He chose his words carefully, spoke in a sparse, measured way (almost pained), and admitted that it was ‘difficult’. I now have a greater appreciation of what he means.

Rating: *****+ (out of five)

BR: The Shiralee (D'Arcy Niland)

Amazon Link: The Shiralee

A shiralee is a swag, a burden, and Macauley's is Buster, his four year old daughter. Macauley took the child after returning home to find his wife in bed with another man. He took the child to spite his wife, expecting her to come after him, begging for the return of their daughter, but that did not happen. Months passed and still there was no word and as Macauley moved from place to place, living a drifter's life, roughing it with his child in tow, he became accustomed to the company – though he would never admit that to himself, or to Buster.

The book starts off several months after he has left Sydney, after abducting the child and beating his wife's lover half to death. The reader finds father and child on the road, the little girl dressed in shapeless rags, a sunhat on her head, her form near indisguishable as to gender. Macauley is about as rough as they come, and he does very little to accommodate his daughter, towing her along as a stray dog, or an inanimate rucksack. Despite his harshness (that borders on cruelty), I immediately liked this rough, confused, very masculine loner who trusts no-one, spends little time reflecting on his behaviour and sometimes, in brief moments of insight, recognises that he's an A-grade asshole, but does nothing to change it.

The opening paragraphs read:

There was a man who had a cross and his name was Macauley. He put Australia at his feet, he said, in the only way he knew how. His boots spun the dust from its roads and his body waded its streams. The black lines on the map, and the red, he knew them well. He built his fires in a thousand places and slept on the banks of rivers. The grass grew over his tracks, but he knew where they were when he came again.

He had two swags, one of them with legs and a cabbage-tree hat, and that one was the main difference between him and others who take to the road, following the sun for their bread and butter. Some have dogs. Some have horses. Some have women. And they all have mates and companions, or for this reason and that, all of some use. But with Macauley it was this way: he had a child and the only reason he had it was because he was stuck with it.

As he moves from town to town, searching for work, hospitality and money to tide him over, Macauley finds trouble, reignites old friendships and incurs the wrath of strangers. Bubbling below the surface of his man is a brutal violent streak, a rage that Macauley keeps barely tempered. Several men find out the hard way that this is a man not to be crossed, and despite the near lethal beatings he doles out (his daughter witness to some of them) in my mind he remains a good man, fair, honest, with solid instincts. Only once did my judgment waver, when Buster is deathly ill and Macauley chooses pride over an offer of assistance that could save her life. I believe he did the wrong thing by flouting the offered hospitality, but as a vehicle to demonstrate his character arc, it's beautifully executed and a testament to the writer.Pure luck and questionable bush medicine sees Buster through her grave illness, and the reader gains valuable insight into Macauley's state of mind. In contrast, when faced with a similar situation later in the book we are shown he has matured emotionally and learned from the mistakes of others.

This is a rough, simple story, beautifully written, rich with old Australia -- the raw, dusty, unkempt drifter's life that so few of us now could even imagine. The print edition I have is prefaced by an introduction by Les Murray who explains that the author employed some poetic licence in having Macauley solely reliance on walking as a means to get around. In the 50's, when this book was written, Les considers that would have been an unlikely scenario. The factual imperfection does not draw from the richness of the story.

I do believe Macauley is the roughest, hardest, least lovable protagonist I have yet met -- yet I enjoyed every moment I spent with him. It was also delightful to read the dialogue, conversations loaded with Australian slang, so heavy at times that even I, a country girl, had to take a moment in order to understand what was being said.

The characterisations are particularly well crafted, with attention to each and every person with whom Macauley interacts, so much so that they are distinct, imaginable people. This is a skill of which I am most envious.

The door opened and the doorway was plugged with a gargantuan female. This was the woman Sweeney called the Cow. She had a casky bosom, as if stuffed, an uddery bulge against the garish print dress covered with yellow and vermilion flowers. An amber scarf was tied around her head and tucked in, giving her a poly look. Her face was a massive blob of radiant flesh, with the features a long way in from the perimeter as though they had been superimposed, forming a face within a face. There was a vague, elusive doll-like prettiness about it.

Now, imagine if he had just said she was fat! The paragraph that follows offers more evidence of the vastness of this woman, but not limited to physical form. D'Arcy goes to great lengths to bring her alive as a loving, boisterous, incredible woman with a huge heart. I fell in love with her. I wish she were my aunt.

The writing is brilliant: restrained, crisp, accurate and at times heartlessly brutal, in keeping with Macauley's character. This book reminded me of my grandfather on my father's side... though, maybe the character Beauty may have been a closer match.

Rating ***** out of five. (this book should be on school reading lists, bloody violence and all).

BR: Maestro (Peter Goldsworthy)

Link: Maestro

This book is a Bildungsroman (a 'novel of self-cultivation') that illustrates the growth of a protagonist, usually from childhood to maturity. The protagonist in this book is Paul Crabbe, a self-confident teenager who possesses a rare musical talent that is fostered and encouraged by his musically inclined parents. They send him to a piano teacher, Eduard Keller, an old Viennese man who Paul immediately dislikes and shows little respect. Though self-assured, to the point of arrogance, Paul continues the lessons as his parents wish, and he does what he is told even though he suspects Keller is a Nazi -- a matter of little consequence in modern day Darwin, but of great interest to Paul.

Keller demands that Paul return to the basics, practising notes, playing childish songs. Frustrated and belligerent, Paul reluctantly does as he is told, more for his parents sake than any belief in Keller's talents as a music teacher.

His snooping and library research uncovers a link between Keller and a great composer and pianist, information that Paul shares with his parents who express shock, then jubilation, at having someone so esteemed in their midst -- even better, someone who is now teaching their son. It takes a long while before Paul is able to share their admiration for Keller -- in fact, it is only as an adult, many years later, is Paul able to reflect on all the lessons Keller taught him, about music, about the fine difference between being good and being great. Paul will never be great, as Keller points out early on. He lacks that extra something that no amount of practice and repetition will bring out of him. It's a hard lesson for anyone to learn. Paul imagines he will be a concert pianist, that he will travel the world, playing music that will change people's lives. It is not to be so, and it's a bitter pill to swallow.

Eduard's past is a mystery that Paul spends a lot of energy on uncovering, especially the fate of his wife and child. Immature inquisitiveness propels him to uncover a mystery that he initially hopes will defame his mentor, but as he matures he learns that sordid history is ugly and painful.

Paul learns more about life, love, choices and passion from Eduard, more than playing ivory keys on a piano, and longing for a life of fame and adulation. He grows up, gets married, has children, but never will he forget his Viennese piano teacher.

This book is on the reading lists for high school students, and many hundreds of teenagers have written book reviews and essays about it. It's a good choice for the classroom because it has a subtle message, deeper meaning and layers that can be teased out through discussion. It's the type of book I'd have enjoyed studying at that age, and I wonder why it wasn't on my school curriculum.

I've given it only three and a half stars because it's a safe story, readily digested and lacking the sharp edges that would earn it a higher rating from me. I prefer my characters to be more tortured, more questionning, to live less ideal lives than Paul does, but that's just me.

Rating ***1/2 out of five.

BR: Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen)

Amazon Link: Water for Elephants

I longed to read this book for almost a year, leaving it on my wish list in the hope that I could pick up a cheap second-hand copy somewhere. But that was not to be so. I finally took the plunge and paid full price when the book came up on a book club reading list, a book club I was thinking of joining. I read the book, enjoyed it, but didn’t go along to the club meeting. I’m an introvert, what can I say!?

I wish I could say I adored this book, that it was worth the months of waiting, of longing for it, of dreaming of reading it, but it wasn’t and that’s not the book's fault, nor the writer, but rather the reality that something sought for so long, once achieved will rarely meet its imagined ideal. Having said that though, the book is enjoyable, well researched, disturbing in places (animal abuse) and has a happy ending for the main characters, not so much for some of the smaller players (no pun intended).

The story starts in a nursing home where Jacob Jankowski is being treated as an old man – which he is. He’s ninety, or ninety three, he can’t remember. The mushy tasteless food that he and the other ‘inmates’ are fed, irks him, as does the requirement to be pushed around in a wheelchair, forced to co-exist with drooling, staring ‘vegetables’ and treated as though he is a mindless child. To say he is recalcitrant is an understatement. If he were more able bodied, he’d be dangerous.

The story is told in flashbacks, memories Jacob has in between experiences in the nursing home. As a young man, Jacob joined the circus, an accidental encounter that nearly saw him thrown from the train he had jumped upon. When asked by the circus hands what he was running from, he says little, but he isn’t running from anything, all he had and hoped for was lost when his parents died in a car accident. His father, a kindly small town veterinarian, more or less gave away all that his family owned through caring for sick animals and accepting no payment in return. Until the death of his parents, Jacob was at Cornwell University studying to be a vet. He intended to work with his father, but that is not to be so. With no money, and in the midst of the American depression, Jacob’s options are gravely limited.

Aboard the circus train, he finds himself among a band of misfits who have segregated themselves into hierarchical bands, a dysfunctional class system where belonging to one subset demands certain behaviour and ignorance of all the other subsets. Jacob is a kindly soul and this does not sit well with him, especially when the lower classes of people are treated with contempt by those who are considered above them.

However, his veterinary training affords him some freedom and respect, though it isn’t enough to save him from painful run-ins with August, a certified paranoid schizophrenic whose wife, Marlena, Jacob (unfortunately) falls in love with.

The story is rich with circus life, the squalid, brutal, unseen side that is painstakingly kept from public view. By far the most disturbing practice is that of ‘red-lighting’. That is the term used when people are thrown from the train as it nears a railroad siding (a red light), thus giving them the opportunity to scramble away and potentially avoid serious injury or death. When times become exceptionally hard, and Jacob’s interest in Marlena is suspected, he is targeted for red-lighting. He is spared by being elsewhere, but two of his friends, a pair of vulnerable individuals who Jacob had been protecting, are not so lucky. Their fate is chilling, as is the treatment of the animals, in particular an elephant named Rosie which Jacob does his best to protect, but does not always succeed in doing so.

Though the book has a happy ending (a little too 'happy', if you ask me, but that's a minor complaint), there are parts that made me angry and sad, and it taught me much about circus life for a less than stellar outfit. This book really did earn the notoriety it gained, and my inability to give it a higher rating is due to my having known too much about it before I started reading. That’s not the book’s fault.

Despite some minor disappointment, it was worth the wait and the read. It is nicely paced, well written, superbly researched and all the characters come to life. Jacob is likeable, consistently portrayed and a character that it's hard not to care for. I'd have preferred the story to have been told in present time, being Jacob's experiences in the circus during the depression. I felt that having him in the nursing home, telling his story in flash-backs, took away some of the tension that might otherwise have been there during the times he was in peril. Afterall, it's dificult to be afraid for someone when you know they live to be 90 (or 93).

Still, it's a good read and I'll readily recommend it to others.

Rating **** out of five.

BR: Autumn (Noel Beddoe)

Any book that opens with:

‘You fell in love with your balls,’ she said. ‘You fell in love! With your
balls! When you were ten years old!’

is guaranteed to grab my attention. The recipient of this vitriolic rant is Charlie McFarlane, a man on the brink of divorce, helpless to prevent it and weary of trying to hold the relationship together. When his wife leaves him, taking his daughter with him, Charlie offers no resistance, no emotion beyond the tremors in his hands and uncertainty in his gut. Emotionally, he is unresistant, detached, unable to reach into himself to interrogate the physiological response to his wife's departure.

He goes to work, steps through the motions, observes his colleagues and the empty career paths they are on and realises he has to get away. He quits his job, gives a large proportion of his resignation pay to his wife and daughter then heads back to the town he grew up in. What he’s looking for is unclear, and what he hopes to find even less certain, but he ends up staying with an aunt and uncle who force him to take a vacant position at a local school.

In getting to know the children, their parents, the school headmistress and her husband, Charlie thaws. A relationship blooms with the mother of one of his pupils, and soon they are more than friends. As he spends time with this woman and her child, he learns how to connect with a woman, how to care for another and he thinks about his own child and the time he should be spending with her, the gifts he should be buying her, the responsibilities he has as a father to the child he sired.

When the end of his contract as fill-in school teacher comes, Charlie has no reason to stay on and the relationship with the woman ends when she decides to return to her husband, the girl’s father. Charlie goes back to the city, to his wife and daughter, and the book ends with him making a tentative step to woo her, just as he did with the woman in his home town. In being away, Charlie has grown up.

I found it difficult to link the experiences he has (duck hunting, fishing, accompanying a suicidal elderly man to a remote hilltop then watching him die of heart failure) with his emotional growth. Charlie introspects very little, and by the end of the book I felt I didn’t know him any better than I did at the start. Though I prefer books that don’t spell it all out, this one lacked that special something that would connect me to the protagonist. I felt as though I were a detached witness rather than experiencing and living the story with the characters.

In summary, this book was readable, entertaining and had potential, but far less than I had hoped it would be given the recommendation by Tim Winton on the front cover.

This review by Warrick Wynne eloquently illustrates some of the strengths and failings of the novel. The points he makes are useful for any first time novelist to take on board, myself included.

Rating: ** out of five

BR: The Alchemy of Desire (Tarun Tejpal)

Amazon Link: The Alchemy of Desire

I found this book at a second hand book fair and chose it because of its Indian author. I am eager to broaden my literary catalogue with authors from beyond western shores.

The front cover states that the book was a finalist for a literature prize while the back is filled with praise for what promised to be a luxuriously long novel, tepid with sensuality and rich with intricacies of modern India. Without hesitation, I forked out $7. Despite this book being nothing like what I would ordinarily read, I consider the money and my time (which was considerable) well spent.

The back jacket reads:

"A young couple from a small town in India, penniless but gloriously in love, move to the big city, where the man works feverously on a novel, stopping only to feed his ceaseless desire for his beautiful wife. In time the lovers abandon the city for an old house in the mist-shrouded Himalayas. While renovating their ramshackle new home, the young man unearths a chest full of diaries written by the previous owner. Thrust into another world and time, he slowly uncovers the dark secrets at the heart of her story."

The narrator is nameless, not even referred to in dialogue by another character, yet despite this oddity I had no trouble identifying him. For the first half of the book (or thereabouts), the narrator is obsessed with his wife, Fizz, deliriously so. They make love in every possible manner and, as the narrator convinced me, each time they physically connect the experience is more passionate and erotic than all those that preceded it. Though this is not a pornographic novel and the love scenes are crafted with attention to metaphor and simile, the explicit nature could be off-putting to some readers, and repetitive to others. Admittedly, the copy I purchased has an image of a bee pollinating a flower with a road leading into the distance, but had the cover been that which is shown on Amazon, with the figure of a woman, I would never have bought it – although that cover is definitely more representative of the book's content.

Beyond the love making (and yes, let's be honest, there is a lot of it), the narrator strives to write a sweeping, epic Indian novel while he and his wife are renovating a small cottage in the mountains. As the renovations go on, the narrator and his wife drift apart. Over time it becomes obvious to them both that their love is fed only by lust, if they're not having sex then there is very little between them. The separation is complete when he finds a box of old journals written by the previous owner of the home – an American woman who came to India as the wife of a gay prince. It's not too hard to guess that the woman was more of a sex deviant than the narrator, and soon he is fully immersed in reading of her experiences, so much so that he loses touch with reality.

The second half of the book fills in the woman's life, through the narrator who dreams of her, his dreams being so vivid and intense that he wakes in terror, convinced she has sexually violated him in his sleep. Representative of his carnal desires and increasing dysfunction, he longs for more contact with her, believing that he is experiencing the dead woman's ghost. When, finally, he reads the last journal and the fantasy dies, he comes to the awareness that he is alone, destitute, without his wife, friends, family – so completely has he shut them all out. The final pages have him searching for Fizz, hoping to reconnect, but she is gone and her friends (who used to be his) send him away.

The book opened with 'Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.' It ends in reverse, with the narrator having learned the greatest lesson of all.

This is a long book with a simple premise: one man's extraordinarily sensual journey to learn the truth about love. If it weren't for the polished writing style, I never could have withstood 518 pages of description, introspection and sex.

The narrator ponders on what is involved in writing a novelAbout writing a novel:

I had once read in school that poets let their poems mature in their head for a long time. Contrary to popular belief, poetry is not an instant inspirational process. Good poets, once lightning has struck, hunker down to wait. They allow all the ingredients to season and simmer to just the right taste and texture before taking them off the hotplate of their imagination and serving them up on paper.

Even after it is off the fire, the dish needs attention. Careful garnishing, decoration, tweaking. When you eat at a master's table, when you read a master's text, you do not partake of something sudden and speedy. Long hours and subtle spices – a lifetime of nuancing – lie behind it. There is no such thing as an instant masterpiece.

And sex:

I took the hard little ball of her ankle in my mouth and sucked it so fully that it acquired a deeply erotic dimension. I then journeyed to the promise of her fleshy calves and sucked them so fully that they became sexual organs. And then I slowly curved around the shin and ascended the dome of her knees, resting at the peak, mouth open and lips moving. Descending on the other side I banked to the back and drove my tongue flatly down the smooth highway of her inner thighs, eyes set firmly on the dark line of the final ranges. And so I journeyed slowly, seeking the source of the musk; and as I closer and closer and the flesh grew and grew and the musk grew and grew, my control began to waver. From my mouth I became my nose. From handing out pleasure I began to hunger for it. Window by window, my thinking mind shut down. Reason, intellect, analysis, perception, speech – everything went, one by one.

I was now an ancient beast, on all fours, prowling in pursuit of a spoor and a secret place.

Outside the pale of civilization.

An animal no longer to be denied.

And when I had drunk on the source, deep and long, I was nothing but a tumescence. I rose behind her and seeking traction held her at the waist, and as she looked down the rolling green slopes all the way to the sweltering north Indian plains, I began to move in the oldest dance of all.

The wind carried her moans to all corners of the subcontinent.

Rating: ***1/2 out of five.

BR: The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene)

Amazon Link: The Heart of the Matter

Lietenant Scobie is a weary man, second in charge to the Commissioner of a small British colony in Africa during the second world war, he yearns for peace, for an emptiness of being… for death. His wife, Louise, is a sad, needy woman who in her own way yearns for peace and who draws heavily on Scobie’s spirit and energy. She seeks from him the love and support he is incapable of giving – arguably, that anyone is capable of giving, yet in a symbiotically dysfunctional manner her desperation gives Scobie the purpose to keep on living.

Wilson, a young officer recently posted to the coast, has his sights set on Louise after they spend an evening together over poetry and wine. Wilson is a sensitive, emotional, literary type who is neither masculine enough nor focused enough to challenge Scobie or to win Louise’s heart. He tries but serves only to embarrass himself and alienate Louise even further. Scobie intervenes, trying to bring the two together because he feels Louise would benefit from Wilson’s company, but even that fails.

When Scobie is passed up for an opportunity for Commissioner, he cares little but Louise cares a lot. She fears that she is not well thought of, that her appearance, her manner, her interest in books and poetry set her apart from the other women in the small colony. She pleads for Scobie to send her away so she may gather her thoughts. A holiday, she argues, would do them both the world of good. Scobie can’t afford to pay for his wife’s passage off the coast, let alone afford to go with her, but he promises he will make it happen. He lies and offers soothing words that calm her, but the reality is that he doesn’t have the money and has no legitimate way of getting it.

He asks for a loan, for an advance on his retirement fund, and is refused because he has drawn on it before when his daughter died and his wife fell ill. Yusef, a fat Arab businessman and renowned swindler, is Scobie’s only option. A transaction is set up, one with no strings attached, but of course there is no such thing in the colonies.

Wilson keeps close tabs on Scobie, which does little more than irritate and bemuse the older man because he has never stood in Wilson’s way, despite knowing his intentions. Scobie is a man who seeks only to see his wife happy, even if that means seeing her with another man – it would relieve him of the burden of responsibility, but Wilson is too inept and Louise too inwardly wounded for the liaison to prosper.

While Louise is away, a ship sinks at sea and a bedraggled, half-dead boat-load of survivors reaches the coast. Among them is a woman, Helen Rout, recently married and just as recently widowed. Scobie spends time at the hospital and an attraction forms between he and the much younger Helen. It burgeons into a brief affair, one which lightens Scobie’s spirit even as the guilt of adultery drags him down. Meanwhile, Scobie's interaction with Yusef is brought to the Commissioner's attention (by Wilson), and questions are raised about potential misconduct.

Louise returns, forcing an early termination of the blossoming love between Scobie and his younger lover. Though cleared of any wrong-doing or improper association with Yusef, and offered the Commissioner’s position, a ranking that carries much prestige and respect, Scobie is overwhelmed by shame at his act of adultery and turns inward. Wilson takes advantage and steps up to reveal his true feelings for Scobie’s wife.

‘That night when I got back,’ he could feel the awful immature flush expanding, ‘I tried to write some verse.’

‘What, you, Wilson?’

He said furiously, ‘Yes, me, Wilson. Why not? And it’s been published.’

‘I wasn’t laughing. I was just surprised. Who published it?’

‘A new paper called The Circle. Of course they don’t pay much.’

‘Can I see it?’

Wilson said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got it here.’ He explained, ‘There was something on the other side I couldn’t stand. It was just too modern for me.’ He watched her with hungry embarrassment.

‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said weakly.

‘You see the initials?’

‘I’ve never had a poem dedicated to me before.’

Wilson felt sick; he wanted to sit down. Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He has read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.

‘Oh, no, Wilson,’ she said, ‘no. You don’t. It’s just the Coast fever.’

He then blurts out that her husband has been unfaithful, but she is unmoved. If she believes it, she gives no sign, but Scobie is already proactively self-destructing, his demise exacerbated by complications with Yusef that lead to the murder of Scobie’s servant, Ali, a young black boy who had been with him for 15 years. Only when viewing the body does Scobie realise he loved the boy and that he is (indirectly, but justly) responsible for the death. Guilt descends like a deathly veil, bringing with it a heavy perception of how God suffers for Scobie’s human failings.

Scobie thought, if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away – like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it. Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You saved me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me and I couldn’t trust you.

‘What is it, sah?’ the corporate whispered, kneeling by the body.

‘I loved him,’ Scobie said.

Though not particularly religious prior to this, he grasps at the opportunity to self-flagellate and condemns himself to death so as to relieve God, and the two women he considers he has mortally wronged, from the burden of his existence.

Before suiciding, he goes one last time to Helen, more for himself than for her, but she is not there.

I must leave some kind of message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of depravation. He looked for paper and couldn’t find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw a writing-case, but it was the stamp-album that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, hhfelt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won’t matter: she had told him that you can’t see where a stamp has been torn out.

There was no scrap of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it: I love you. She can’t take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that’s indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn’t he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill – she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time – an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.

The saddest part about this whole book is that in the end, life goes on without Scobie. It is reprehensible that a life can be so easily lost, that an individual allowed to so deeply care for others yet to show such little compassion for himself.

Only the priest, a man who Scobie confessed to about his sins, offers a shred of understanding and compassion for a man who no-one understood.

'And at the end this--horror. He must have known that he was damning himself.'

'Yes, he knew that alright. He neer had any trust in mercy -- except for other people.'

What is the point Graham Greene was making when he wrote this book? Essays about the author suggest that he suffered from depression, bipolar disorder, lived a roller-coaster of despair that creativity helped (in some respect) to alleviate. I understand that. I think a lot of writers can. But to dismiss this work as the writings of an unhappy mind is to miss the deeper meaning.

Greene was Catholic, apparently fascinated by the interplay between good and evil, and the inner workings of a human soul. I have not been raised in a religious manner and do not understand the intricacies of religious practice, especially not of the Catholic faith with its stern obedience to ritual and God's law, but this book was very much about one man's faith and his despair in the light of what he perceived to be his faithlessness. Scobie considered himself a failure, to those who relied on him, who loved him, and especially to God. No matter what way you look at it, that's a hell of way to suffer, to so deeply believe that one's life is so bereft of worth that death is the only way to cleanse the stain from those you love.

Worse, it was all for nought in the end. Scobie thought he could save his wife from suffering by having her believe his death was accidental, but she was smarter than he gave her credit for.

I wonder whether Greene believed that death was Scobie's only option? Did he consider, when writing this work, of offering Scobie a way out, some kind of salvation? He must have, because Scobie himself considered it, he even longed for it, and he suffered for those thoughts too.

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Whatever Greene's writings and personal feelings toward the story (he hated it and idly suggests that an earlier, failed piece whose place was given to The Heart of the Matter may well have been a better work), the themes of failure are threaded strongly throughout. Each character in the novel, be it Scobie or Wilson, fails in their ultimate goals by the end of the book. Scobie's ultimate sacrifice, suicide, fails to bring the expected happiness he imagines it will to his wife and despite the fact that he tries to conceal the secret of his infidelity with that ultimate sin, the reader discovers that his wife had known all along.

Similarly, Wilson, the man who is pursuing an adulterous affair with Scobie's wife, an affair she refuses to participate in, is foiled at the end of the novel when Scobie's wife refuses to give in to his advances even after Scobie's death. Other instances of failure, both subtler and more obvious, can be seen throughout the work, lending it a muted, dark feeling.

The Heart of the Matter is not just about failure, but about the price we all pay for our individualism and the impossibility of truly understanding another person. Each of the characters in the novel operates at tangental purposes which they often think are clear to others, or think are hidden from others, but are in fact not. This is illustrated wonderfully by Scobie's attempt to hide his affair from his wife, thinking that being a policeman should give him the edge, but whose failure is evident in the following passage;

"'Did you know all the time - about her?' Wilson asked.

'It's why I came home. Mrs. Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he (Scobie) never realized that. He thought he'd been so clever. And he nearly convinced me-that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.'"

(Graham Greene, ed Philip Stratford, "The Heart of the Matter," The Portable Graham Greene. Penguin Publishing, p 301.)

This is the kind of book I'd enjoy working through in a bookclub. Do bookclubs read Graham Greene!?

Rating: ***** out of five, because it made me think.