Reading Matters

'The Visitor' by Maeve Brennan

Fiction - paperback; Atlantic Books; 86 pages; 2000.

Maeve Brennan's The Visitor is one of those exquisite novellas that encapsulates everything that is good about literature in one tiny, fierce package.

It was first published in 2000, seven years after the author's death, and its discovery was something of an accident. According to the "Editor's Note" in this edition, the typescript was acquired by the library of Notre Dame University, when it purchased a job lot of business files from the Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward in 1982. No one seems to know exactly how the novella came to be in Sheed & Ward's possession, but it's believed that it was probably written by Brennan in the mid-1940s.

By all accounts Brennan was an interesting character. Her Wikipedia entry states that she was born in Dublin in 1917 but moved to the USA in 1934 when her father became the first Irish ambassador to the country. She later lived in Manhattan, where she famously worked on The New Yorker magazine as a columnist and short-story writer. Her talent and beauty marked her as one to watch, but she had little eccentricities which later grew into mental illness. By the 1970s she was an alcoholic and homeless. She died in 1993 after years of hospitalisation.

The Visitor, easily devoured in one sitting, is a bittersweet homecoming story in which 22-year-old Anastasia returns to Dublin after living in Paris for six years with her mother. Her mother died a month ago, so Anastasia is at a bit of a loose end. Her best option is to go back to the house in which she was raised to live with her paternal grandmother, Mrs King, who is still grieving over the death of her son -- Anastasia's father.

But this is where things go a little awry, because Mrs King is a hard woman with nary a charitable bone in her body. She does not want Anastasia to live with her. She is distant and cold, her voice "cool and unemphatic", and she "smiles with anger".

In a narrative that swings between the past and the present, we learn that Mrs King never liked her daughter-in-law, who was much younger than her son and prone to emotional outbursts at the breakfast table. She believes that "she disgraced us all, running off the way she did, like some kind of madwoman".

Similarly, she fails to understand Anastasia's situation at the time:

Mrs King said in her gentle voice, "You know, Anastasia, you made a serious choice when you decided to stay with your mother in Paris. You were sixteen then, not a child. You knew what she had done. You were aware of the effect it was having on your father."

She turned the spectacles thoughtfully in her hands.

"Didn't you know what state he was in, when he left you in Paris, after trying to get you to come back here, and had to come alone?"

"Oh, Grandmother," cried Anastasia, "how could I leave her?"

The tension between these two women of different generations -- the younger who brims with emotion and the older who keeps emotion at bay -- is what makes this novella such a riveting read. And because both of them have different loyalties --  a daughter trying to do the best thing by her mother, and a mother wanting the best for her son -- means they will never see eye to eye. The crucial point is that Anastasia is willing to move on emotionally, to let bygones be bygones, but her grandmother is not.

While Mrs King comes off as a monstrous creation, her cool, calm manner makes her totally believable. She never becomes a caricature. But she only truly works in stark contrast to Anastasia, who is a young woman full of love for those around her, including Mrs King's housemaid, Katherine, whom she lavishes with Christmas presents, and Mrs King's elderly friend, Miss Kilbride, whom she visits regularly for tea and cake. In fact, Anastasia is so desperate to be loved in return she cannot comprehend her grandmother's inability to make her feel at home in her home.

This is a story about love and loss, about grief and death, about relationships between children and their parents, and how our loyalties can be skewed by all kinds of things, including jealousy, prejudice and age. It's also a story that focuses on nostalgia, atonement and our inability to correct past wrongs. But ultimately, The Visitor focuses on the notion of home: what it is, where it can be found and how it affects you when it changes in your absence.

Although I had heard about this novella in the vaguest of terms over the years, I must thank Claire from Paperback Reader for reminding me that it was a book I had to read.

How to colour-co-ordinate your book shelves

What a terrific little animation, via @FaberBooks

Of pin-stripe suits and psychopaths: an evening with Jon Ronson

"Jon Ronson just looked at me and pointed his book in my direction."

This is my Other Half, also known as Mr Reading Matters and occasionally referred to as T.

We are at the swanky offices of Pan Macmillan, just down the road from King's Cross Station, and we're here to find out all about two upcoming non-fiction releases by Picador: Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test and Gavin Knight's Hood Rat. Jon has recently walked into the room, but he's stuck by the door talking to a small circle of "publisher types".

The rest of the room is heaving with bright, young things, all dressed in chic casual attire, but Mr Reading Matters has come straight from an afternoon of meetings and is looking all debonair in his pin-striped suit.

"It's probably the suit you're wearing," I say. "He might think you're the CEO of the company or something."

Later on, when Jon Ronson takes the microphone and begins regaling us with excerpts from his book, interspersed with funny comments (and a carefully-worded put-down to the woman in the front row whose mobile phone rang at the most inappropriate moment), I realise why he might have spied Mr Reading Matters across a crowded room.

"Wearing a pin-stripe suit is a classic sign of a psychopath," he tells us all.

Cue nervous laughter. From me. And Mr Reading Matters.

What makes a good novella?

A good novella should be as compact and elegant as a perfect cocktail and pack just such a punch. Novellas such as Nabokov's 'Transparent Things', Turgenev's 'A Russian Beauty' and Chekhov's 'Lady with Lapdog' are slender telescopes on large and luminous worlds. Their success depends on perfect focus, physical and emotional. In the right hands they are infinitely superior to the vast numbers of pretentious and overweight novels being written today.

-- Clare Boylan, as quoted in the Foreword to Maeve Brennan's The Visitor

Do you agree?

5 books about London pubs

When it comes to non-fiction books, I have a little side interest in books about London pubs.

Of course anyone who knows me personally, knows that I enjoy the odd pint (preferably of Guinness, occasionally real ale, more occasionally lager and when it's stinking hot a refreshing Aspall's cider does the trick), so books about drinking establishments might not come as too much of a surprise.

But these books really have nothing to do with beer. They're essentially history books about the haunts of famous -- and infamous -- people who didn't mind the odd tipple. We're talking a lot of literary connections here. People like Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens. Or more modern writers like Graeme Green and Ernest Hemingway (who were both frequent visitors to one of my locals).

I've got four quite handy little books about pubs:

• Ted Bruning's Historic Pubs of London
• David and Rosemary Hall's Pub Walks in Middlesex & West London
• Geoff Brandwood and Jane Jephcote's London Heritage Pubs
• Bob Steel's (autographed) CAMRA's London Pub Walks

Yesterday I bought another to add to the collection: Tim Hampson's London's Riverside Pubs, which has just been published by New Holland Publishers. Funnily enough, this new book features 100 waterside pubs -- and I'm familiar with around 90 per cent of them!

What I love most about these books, aside from giving me ideas about new places to visit, is their wealth of information on architectural history and the interior design of public houses. The photographs are always a real treat.

Does anyone else collect books about pubs? Or books about particular interests of comparable kookiness?

'The Fall of Light' by Niall Williams

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 382 pages; 2001.

The Fall of Light is Niall Williams' third novel -- he has seven to his name and I've read three of them (two of which are reviewed on this blog). I've come to appreciate his elegiac prose style and much enjoy his themes of love and loss, all set in Ireland.

I had high expectations for this novel, which was published following a wave of critical acclaim and commercial success for Willams' two previous efforts. But I finished it feeling nothing but relief. Indeed, I was surprisingly unmoved by its contents. (One critic, from the international Catholic newspaper The Tablet, was perhaps more circumspect than me, writing "Williams is not interested in character-driven plot. His people are driven by something else entirely, a sort of cosmic passion, a oneness with the universe, the meaning of which they find in the stars...")

The story is set in 19th century Ireland. The blurb on my edition is misleading, because it claims the story begins during the famine. It doesn't. The famine occurs a good way into the story and even then you'd be hard pressed to say this is a book about the Irish famine. The horror of it is there, but only in the background, and even though several characters sail to America on what must have been "famine ships", it is not starvation that drives them to leave their homeland. It is love. Or a sense of adventure. Or as a way of escaping heartache.

There's a lot of that in this novel -- love, adventure and heartache -- and if I was to come up with a one-line description I'd say it's a kind of road story about a family, scattered across the world, which struggles to be reunited once again. All kinds of disasters and tragedies befall the Foleys -- Francis and his wife Emer, and their four sons, Tomas, Finbar, Finan and Tiege -- which makes this struggle all the more difficult. But there are also moments of unimagined good luck, quiet successes and amazing co-incidences, which injects the story with a sense of optimism.

When The Fall of Light opens Emer has fled the family home after a row with Francis. Francis responds impulsively by setting out to find the rugged West coast, his four children in tow. He burns the house down before leaving. But then tragedy strikes when one of the party is swept downstream while crossing a swollen river.

This sets the pattern for the remaining 300 or so pages, because an awful lot of things -- good and bad -- happen to these characters, and you're never sure what's going to befall them next. But strangely the story lacks tension and momentum, perhaps because it is told from too many divergent points of view and reads as a series of anecdotes rather than one streamlined narrative. Even when there are hints of drama -- such as Tiege stealing into the room of his upper-class beloved to watch her sleeping without her knowing -- it fizzles out almost as soon as it begins.

Perhaps Williams is trying to convey too much here. The story is, essentially, a family history, told by an omnipresent narrator -- a descendant of the Foleys -- who occasionally buts in, reminding you that the story is a distant one, not an immediate one:

The story leaves him and returns to the island. Always the story returns there. The teller changes the lens and the green slope of the island appears in focus. And it is as if the teller understands that the island is an image for all Foleys thereafter, after there was something passionate and impetuous in the character of the family that made each of its men islands in turn, and that this was a trait deeply fated and irreversible.

That said, The Fall of Light is filled with gorgeous language and lovely turns of phrase, the type of writing that is best appreciated slowly. But the lack of narrative drive makes the story gentle and meandering, which is wonderful if you like that sort of thing, and tedious if you don't.

Top Australian novelists contribute to The Monthly's summer reading special

It's no secret that I have a life-long love of magazines. But like most people, my monthly spend on them has much diminished, and I tend to only buy them when I've got a journey to take, such as a train ride or a plane trip.

On my recent long haul flight from Melbourne to London (via Dubai) I took plenty of books with me, including a substantial number on my Kindle, but when it came to the crunch I didn't much feel like reading them. Thankfully, I had a copy of The Monthly with me, which was actually a spur-of-the-moment purchase at the airport, more to use up my spare Australian dollars than anything else.

I've never read The Monthly before. Apparently it's only been around since 2005, and is produced by the same company that publish those excellent Best Australian Essays and Best Australian Stories every year.

It's a national magazine about politics, society and the arts, and is crammed with excellent reading. This edition turned out to be a particular treat for a fiction fiend because it was a double issue (December-January) featuring a fiction special with no less than four top Australian novelists: MJ Hyland, Christos Tsiolkas, Murray Bail and David Malouf.

Hyland's offering is actually a sample from her next yet-to-be-published novel, Tsiolkas' is a piece about a fictional band called The Gaza Strips, Bail writes about a sea voyage and Malouf's contribution is a short poem.

There's also a lovely selection of diary entries from Helen Garner, that makes me wish I could write about such mundane things as beautifully as her!

You can buy back issues of The Monthly from the official website shop. But note that at the time of writing, the Summer Reading Special issue hasn't yet been made available to purchase online. I assume that may change in a month or so. In the meantime, I'm contemplating taking out an annual subscription...

'The Mayor of Casterbridge' by Thomas Hardy

Fiction - Kindle edition; Public Domain Books; 400 pages; 1994.

When it comes to pre-20th century classics, Thomas Hardy is my man. Years before I started this blog I read and loved Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. More recently I very much enjoyed A Mere Interlude, published as part of Penguin's Great Loves collection. Now I can safely add The Mayor of Casterbridge to my list of affections.

The novel, first published in 1886, is a sweeping drama about the life and death of a poor hay trusser, Michael Henchard, who rises to become a rich grain merchant and well respected mayor in the fictional town of Casterbridge before falling into poverty once again.

Henchard is a fascinating character, deeply flawed, who looks at the world in a glass-half-full kind of way. He's besieged by petty jealousies and makes terribly rash decisions, which ultimately bring about his downfall. He also has a foul temper that he finds difficult to control.

The book's opening gives us a pretty good picture of what this character is really like. He gets drunk and then sells his wife, Susan, and their young daughter to a passing sailor. Once they are gone and he sobers up, Henchard realises the horrible deed he has done. Full of remorse, he takes himself to the nearest church and makes a personal oath that he will never touch a drop of alcohol for 21 years, which is as many years as he has lived.

The story then jumps ahead by 19 years, and when we meet Henchard again he has reinvented himself as a grain merchant with a strong work ethic and financial acumen. Indeed, he's rolling in money and is so busy that he hires a manager, a young Scotsman called Donald Farfrae, to help strengthen and build up his empire.

Henchard is also mayor of the town, and while he's generally not well liked, the locals do respect him for the hard work he does on their behalf. What they don't realise is his secret history, and they simply assume he is a widower. Henchard never clarifies the situation -- and why should he? Life is going swimmingly and he's learnt from his mistake -- or has he?

When his wife and grown daughter reappear on the scene you know there is trouble up ahead. And when Henchard's vow of sobriety comes to an end, you also know that his reacquaintence with alcohol is not going to go down well.

I'm not going to say anything else about the plot, except it's a jolly good one, full of ups and downs and family feuds, business rivalries and romantic heartache. The characterisation is, as usual, superb, and despite Henchard's incredible selfishness and mean-spirited nature, you can't help but feel for him. Much of the time I wanted to reach into the pages of this book, grab him by the scruff of the neck and tell him to stop being so bloody stupid and impulsive!

At 400 pages, this is not a short book. But its epic scope and its fast-paced narrative makes it a real page turner. And it has certainly confirmed Thomas Hardy as my favourite 19th Century writer.

Novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton gains blue plaque honour

I'm a sucker for English Heritage's blue plaque scheme, which commemorates "the link between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked" in London. I love stumbling upon the plaques, particularly if they're commemorating a writer or someone with writerly connections.

The latest writer to be "awarded" a blue plaque is the novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962), who, by all accounts, had a love-hate relationship with London. (In the unfinished novel The Happy Hunting Ground he wrote that "London’s a place where you’re forever hunting for happiness – and even if you find it it’s soon taken away from you".)

The plaque was installed at 2 Burlington Gardens, Chiswick, W4 on Saturday.

According to the press release issued by English Heritage, Hamilton resided in the "large Victorian corner-house" on an intermittent basis. "But his connection with the place lasted sixteen years and it was at this address that he laid the foundations of his career."

It adds: "In 1926–28, his most important spell at the house, he completed the first draft of Craven House, conceived the concept for the play Rope and met the prostitute Lily Connolly on a night out in the West End, the model for Jenny Maple in The Midnight Bell."

Although much of Hamilton's work has been neglected in the past, in recent years his work, in particular his novels -- including Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), Hangover Square (1941) and The Slaves of Solitude (1947) -- have been re-discovered.

You can find out more about Patrick Hamilton via this wikipedia entry.

Have editorial standards slipped too far?

For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical or geographical facts. The time and effort afforded to books, it is suggested, has been squeezed by budgetary and staffing constraints, by the shift in contemporary publishing towards the large conglomerates, and by a greater emphasis on sales and marketing campaigns and on the efficient supply of products to a retail environment geared towards selling fewer books in larger quantities. In more broad-brush terms, the question is whether the image of the word-obsessed editor poring over a manuscript, red pen in hand, has given way to that of the whizz-bang entrepreneur attuned to the market's latest caprice, more at home with a tweet than a metaphor.

Read the full article about 'the lost art of editing' on the Guardian website.

'Annie Dunne' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 228 pages; 2002.

Annie Dunne is Sebastian Barry's second novel. And what a truly moving, gentle, eloquent read it is.

Having read Barry's two latter novels -- the brilliant A Long Long Way (which, incidentally, features characters introduced in Annie Dunne) and the slightly flawed The Secret Scripture -- I had high expectations for this one. I wasn't disappointed.

The story is pretty much devoid of plot. In fact, not much happens in the book at all. It's essentially the inner monologue of a spinster, the 59-year-old Annie Dunne of the title, who shares a house with her slightly older cousin, Sarah Cullen, and spends one summer looking after her nephew's two young children. The unnamed children, a four-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl, bring a new dimension to Annie's sheltered and relatively lonely life. Essentially, they are a metaphor for new beginnings, but can Annie let go of her troubled past to start afresh with two youngsters in her charge?

This probably sounds like a dull premise for a novel, and to be honest, I did wonder whether the story was going to go anywhere. But Barry has such a way with words -- he's a terrrific prose writer -- that it doesn't really matter. This is the type of writing that you savour. It's completely cliché free and every sentence has a fresh, new wonder to it. It's like looking at the world from a different angle, one you've never thought to consider before. For instance, who would ever think to compare laughter to jam-making?

Sarah laughs. Her laugh is thick and chesty, like blackberries beginning to bubble in the big pot, when we are making preserves in the autumn.

The entire novel is littered with sentences like this, making it a joy to read.

And somehow, because Barry captures the minutiae of daily life so eloquently, the story sings in such a way you want to keep reading.

Of course, I'm exagerrating to say that nothing happens, because of course lots of things happen, but they are small incidents in the scheme of things. It's set in 1959, a period of great change in rural Ireland, as horse and carts became replaced by motor cars, and country lanes were transformed by tarmac, and where the once ruling Anglo-Protestant classes were readjusting to life under Home Rule. But it's Annie's inner turmoil that gives the story the impetus to make the reader keep reading on.

Annie is a product of her time. A woman nearing 60 who has never married, never had children, not because she never wanted to, but because the opportunity never presented itself. There is, however, the little matter of her deformity -- a hunchback caused by polio. It's an affliction that has scarred her psychologically, but it has also tormented her in the sense she has always been an outcast.

Never one to fit in socially, she's developed a rich inner life, and it's her interior monologue, her thoughts, both good and bad, ugly and unflinching, which make up the prose of this book. It's written in the present tense so there's an immediacey to it. Much of what she thinks in the present is shaped by the past, and despite her sometimes cruel thoughts and her quick temper, this is a woman struggling to better herself despite her painful history. What shines through is her fierce intelligence, but also her harsh inner critic, the one that tells her to stop babbling and saying things she shouldn't be saying.

It is Annie's struggle with jealousy and rage that marks her out as peculiarly human. She is constantly misunderstood by those around her. And it is that dichotomy between what Annie feels inside and the way her actions are interpreted by others which provides the tension -- and the heart-breaking emotion -- that makes this novel a truly special one.

Yes, it's occasionally maudlin and melancholy, but Annie Dunne also has quiet moments of joy and happiness. There is beauty in nature here, too, and a love for a simple way of life that no longer exists. I expect this novel, which has now earned Sebastian Barry a place on my list of favourite writers, will stay with me for quite a long time to come.

On World Book Night I'll be handing out free copies of a classic novel

In less than a month the first World Book Night will be celebrated here in the UK. On Saturday March 5 one million books will be given away FREE to members of the public by an army of book lovers.

I'm pleased to say that I am going to be one of those book lovers who will be distributing books on the night. I applied in early January and didn't think much more of it, until I received an email last week informing me that my application to give away 48 copies of this book had been successful! 

I'm planning on handing out most of my 48 allocated copies at my local tube station -- commuters need cheering up at the best of times, and what better way than to hand out a free book?

But I'll be setting aside at least a dozen to give to readers of this blog. I'll let you know how you can participate a little closer to the date...

In the meantime, do mark the event in your diary. There will be 25 different titles up for grabs across the UK on the night. What a great way to spread the bookish love!

UPDATE: Apparently not everyone's happy about the idea of World Book Night. Many independent booksellers and authors have branded the event "misguided and misjudged".

'Hash' by Torgny Lindgren

Fiction - paperback; Overlook Duckworth; 236 pages; 2004. Translated from the Swedish by Tom Geddes.

Hash is one of those kooky, surreal books that plays with your mind. The author, Torgny Lindgren, is a prize-winning author from Sweden who currently sits on the panel which selects the Nobel Prize for Literature. His books -- and there are lots of them -- have been translated into more than 25 languages. Sadly, only a handful seem to be available in English.

Hash, first published in 2004, is a strange odyssey involving a school teacher and a travelling clothes salesman whom together traverse the wilds of northern Sweden on an old motorbike looking for the perfect hash. Initially I assumed the hash was of the cannabis variety, but it is, in fact, a famous Swedish meat dish. Torgny describes it as follows:

Swedish hash, pölsa (dial. pysla or palscha). Dish comprising finely ground meat, usually offal, in its own jelly. Minced meat. Originally bulscha, from the Greek balsamon, deriving from a Semitic word denoting a viscous mixture of resin and fragrant volatile oils (see Balsam spruce), thence balsamic.

The story has an unusual twist, however. Well, a couple of unusual twists, if I am honest.

The first is that the travelling salesman, who calls himself, Robert Mazer, is possibly the fugitive Nazi Martin Boorman. Mazer claims to have no memory, but tells everyone he is a "refugee from war-torn Germany" and that he was raised in the district of Mecklenburg.

The second, bigger, twist is that the story occurred in 1947 and is being told in the present day by a 107-year-old newspaper reporter living in a care home. The reporter, who is nameless, has come out of forced retirement to write the story. He hasn't written anything for 53 years, after the local newspaper editor accused him of fabricating all his reports and banning him from publication. Here is some of what the editor told him in a letter:

"For some time now after tactful inquiries from perplexed and concerned readers, we have carried out careful investigations into the veracity of the reports you have submitted over the course of the years, the all too many years, which we have published conscientiously, honestly and fearlessly.
"Having done so, we have found your reports, not to put too fine a point on it, completely devoid of any basis in fact. The reality which you appear to describe is nothing more than a figment of your imagination. The dramatic week-long struggle to rescue an elk from Hölback marsh never took place. The schoolhouse in Avalberg that burned down three years ago never existed. No unknown celestial body 'with shimmering corona' ever rose above your horizon. [...]
"The individuals whose births, birthdays, marriages and, in some cases even deaths, you have reported, have never lived on this earth. On further reflection, it seems remarkable to me, not to say quite extraordinary, that you yourself actually exist."

This letter is crucial to the rest of the book, because it plants a couple of seeds in your mind that ferment as you read further into the story. One of those seeds is this: is our narrator reliable? Is what he telling us the truth? Or is it all fabrication? Another seed: does this 107-year-old man even exist?

This is what I mean about the book playing with your mind. It's very post-modern in that sense, and it's also highly reminiscent of American writer Paul Auster, not necessarily in prose style, but definitely in structure and subject matter, right down to a character named after the author popping up, albeit very briefly, in the storyline. Torgny's novel, much like anything that Auster writes, is obsessed with the notion of story-telling, memory, truth and reality. How do we know these things happened, and is it actually important? What is memory? Does truth exist?

But Torgny's approach is slightly different: he's not afraid of humour. There are some dark comedic moments scattered throughout this novel and some of his commentary, particularly about old age and council funding, is quite biting.

Hash also has a touch of Gothic horror about it, because most of the action takes place in an isolated village ravaged by highly infectious turberculosis. Relationships, in whatever shape they might take, can be deadly.

This is the type of novel that will appeal to readers who like postmodern literature, complete with trademark metafiction and unreliable narrators. But do beware that the book is richly littered with descriptions of offal, including its taste and texture. The warning is in the title.

Finally, thanks to Philip Young from Scoop! Journalists in Fiction and Mediations for tipping me off about this one.

This is what happens when you go away for three months. The post piles up!

After 11 weeks away, I'm finally back home in London.

Mr Reading Matters has been faithfully curating my post, sorting it into two big stacks for my arrival.

The first stack was filled with junk mail, bank statements, magazine subscriptions and the like.

The second -- and most important stack -- was comprised of books. It's a fairly mixed collection of titles sent mainly from the very good publicity people at Random House and Harvill Secker.

If you're wondering why some of parcels had already been opened (see the books in the bottom of the pile in the picture), it's because Mr Reading Matters photographed the contents and emailed them to me during my travels just to feed my bookish streak!

Opening the rest of the parcels this morning felt a bit like Christmas.

But, as ever, I really don't know what to read next, I have so many new books vying for my attention, including the dozen or so Australian ones I bought last month and the 20 or so eBooks in my virtual TBR pile on the Kindle! Oh, and there's the 200-plus ones cluttering my bookshelves and piled in stacks in the living room, too... Is it any wonder this place feels a little like a book shop?

'A Promised Land?' by Alan Collins

Fiction - paperback; University of Queensland Press; 418 pages; 2001.

The Jewish immigrant experience has been much explored in British and American fiction. In Australia it's a different story. Despite being a nation of immigrants, this is the first book I've ever read focusing on the Jewish in Australia.

A Promised Land? is actually three novels in one: The Boys from Bondi (first published in 1987), Going home (1993) and Joshua (1995). It is also known as the "Jacob Kaiser trilogy" because it follows the life of Jacob Kaiser, an Australian-born Jew, from his childhood in Sydney during the Great Depression to his early 40s during the Vietnam War era.

It's clearly a semi-autobiographical work, because there are many similarities between Alan Collins' early life and his fictional creation, Jacob Kaiser, as both were born in the 1920s and raised in a children's home for Jews. This lends the story, in particular The Boys from Bondi, a truly authentic feel.

The first two novels, which cover the years 1935 to 1948, concentrate on Jacob's search for identity. The third, set in 1967, addresses similar concerns, but it focuses more on Jacob's son.

Reviewing this collection of novels is difficult without giving away crucial plot spoilers, because ultimately what happens in the first book impacts on everything else that follows. So if the outline feels vague, forgive me.

When we first meet Jacob he is 10 years old. It is 1935. His family, feeling the effects of the Great Depression, have come down in the world, moving from their stately home in Bellevue Hill to a boarding house, known as The Balconies, overlooking Bondi Beach.

When Jacob is 13 and his brother Solly is nine, tragedy strikes. They come home to find their step-mother, Carmel, has done a runner and are then told their father has died -- he has "fallen off a cliff"  while working in a road gang, although we never learn if it is an accident or suicide. Now orphans, Jacob and Solly, are taken in by a Jewish charity, the Abraham Samuelson Memorial Home school.

It is while at the children's home that Jacob gets his first taste of what it is to be Jewish. As a third-generation Australian Jew, he feels more Australian than Jewish because the Kaisers have never been religiously observant. He hasn't even taken his bar mitzvah.

But now, surrounded by European Jews fleeing prosecution in Nazi Germany ("The survivors of destroyed Jewish communities in countries that he knew only as blobs on a map of Europe"), he realises that he has little in common with other Jews. Their language, their rituals, their well-to-do European backgrounds feel foreign to him.

This is a common thread that runs throughout Collins' triptych: where does an Australian-born Jew fit into the grand scheme of things? And what does it mean to be Jewish in a secular, supposedly egalitarian society?

Later, when Jacob leaves the children's home, this search for meaning continues. He gains work in a printery as an apprentice, where he confronts anti-semitism from his boss, who calls him an "Ikey" and a "Yid", and blames him for the fighting in Palestine over the formation of a Jewish state. But this casual bigotry is everywhere. Even his Gentile girlfriend, Peg, a student nurse from Bathurst, wonders why he hasn't got a big nose?

"How many Jews do you know, Peg?"
"Well, there's, um, Doctor whatsisname in Casualty. A really nice bloke. He gave me some pills for my hayfever. And then there's--"
"Okay, that makes two -- one has and one hasn't. So you're only half-right, aren't you?"

It is at about this time, living in a house with his Jewish landlady Mrs Rothfield, that Jacob becomes politicised. Desperately lonely, with no immediate family of his own, he discovers the local library, works his way through countless classics and then stumbles upon Robert Tressall's book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. His eyes are opened by the concepts of worker's rights and of Socialism. Later, Peg, introduces him to Communism via the Eureka Youth League, and another female friend, the beguiling Ruti whom he went to school with, invites him to join the Zionist group to which she belongs.

Of course, a book about Jewish identity could not fail to mention Palestine, and it is here that Jacob eventually goes to explore his Jewish roots. There's a particularly telling scene in the second novel in which he looks out the window of the kibbutz and sees "forlorn clusters of refugees" standing about waiting for direction.

One looked up and beckoned to him. Jacob was seized with terrible indecision. He did not want to be associated with these remnants; Jews they may be but what else did he have in common with them? In yet another guise it was the same problem that he had confronted so many times. Jews, he knew to his own longstanding confusion, came in so many varied and wildly disparate personae that one had ultimately to realise that Jewishness was their only common factor. And that Jewishness could not be definied merely as religion. The one thing that Jacob had learned was that the rituals of belief were only the externals of Judaism. It was the five thousand years of history that daunted him, which he carried on his back like the old man of the sea, unable to discard it even if he had wanted to.

In Jacob's struggle to reconcile the Jewish and Gentile aspects of his life, we see that where we come from influences who we are and where we are going. In many ways this is a book as much about Australian identity as it is Jewish identity -- and some of it, including the bigotry, prejudice and ignorance, makes for uncomfortable reading.

It's particularly interesting to see the ways in which the attitudes to Jewish refugees (also known in a derogatory manner as "reffos") changed during the 1930s and 1940s.  Initially they were welcomed with open arms but later, when the Anzac's began to return from war, they were scorned for taking jobs that Australians felt that their soldiers deserved. By the same token, the Vienna Wald coffee shop set up by Jewish refugee Mitzi Strauss, once regarded by locals as a place they would not be seen dead in, becomes popular with the coffee-drinking set in the 1960s.

I loved A Promised Land? despite my initial misgivings that the story didn't sound particularly exciting going by the rather wan blurb description. The presentation of the book, with its uninspired cover image and the poor binding quality, also let it down.

But from the very first page, I was swept away by the tale of Jacob's troubled life. Collins has an amazing gift for story-telling. The three novels are filled with drama, intrigue, adventure, grief and joy. There's plenty of warmth, humour and poignancy too.

And his prose has that old-fashioned effortlessness to it, which makes eating up the pages very easy. It's the characters which really make this book, though. I loved them all, especially Jacob's undesirable Uncle Siddy, with his nefarious money-making schemes and eye for the ladies; Peg, the nurse from Bathurst, is a feisty, tell-it-as-it-is sort; and Mrs Rothfield is motherly and kind, even if she does warn Jacob to stay away from the Gentiles!

A Promised Land? is only available in Australia. For details of where you can buy it visit Alan Collins' official website.

Finally, many thanks to Lisa from ANZLitLovers for giving me this book; I would never have read it otherwise. I would urge you to read Lisa's review for another take on it.