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.