Reading Matters

'The Silent Twins' by Marjorie Wallace

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 304 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I first remember reading about identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons when I was a teenager. They were featured in an article in Reader's Digest magazine (my parents were subscribers), which explained that the girls did not communicate with the outside world because they had developed their own private language.

A complicated history

The Silent Twins, first published in 1986, updated in 1998 and reissued in 2008, explores June and Jennifer's complicated history. It is written by an investigative journalist, Marjorie Wallace, who founded the mental health charity SANE on the back of her experiences writing articles on schizophrenia for The Times.

In fact, after years of incarceration — the sisters were sentenced to Broadmoor after going on a five-week crime spree when they were teenagers — both June and Jennifer were diagnosed as schizophrenic. Wallace, who befriended the girls as part of her research for this book, argues otherwise.

The label seems to fit awkwardly the profound and complex problems of their twinship. [...] I have met many people with schizophrenia and have read many of their letters and writings. In the million or more words written by the twins I read in preparing this book, I have not yet found any sign of the fragmentation of thought so typical of this illness. Nor do the twins appear to suffer the more florid symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hearing voices. In any of my conversations with them I did not feel the fundamental disintegration of personality; or those moments of vacancy which can make communication so difficult. The twins are certainly not normal. They do suffer from feelings of paranoia — the people are watching them or reading their minds, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. But how much was that paranoia an extension of their own experience of reading each other's mind and their jealous vigilance over each other?

Alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you a bit about the twins when they were youngsters and what made them so unusual.

Identical twin girls

They were born in 1963 to a West Indian couple, where they were brought up on an RAF base in Wales (their father was a technician in the RAF). But from the age of three the girls rejected communication with everyone around them — they would only talk to each other, and even then it was in a soft but high-pitched voice in a private language no one else could understand.

Because of this, they lacked social skills and failed at school (they weren't sent to a special school until they were 14, by which time it was too late). The older they got, the more private — and reclusive — they became. By the time they were 16, they'd dropped out of school, were living on benefits and rarely left the bedroom they shared with a younger sister. Most of their time was spent writing purple-prosed novels, which they would send off to be published by a vanity press.

But when editorial success eluded them they decided to seek their fame and fortune in other less legal ways: they went on a five-week crime spree involving petty thieving, breaking-and-entering, and arson. They were caught and sentenced for an unlimited period to Broadmoor, the only facility prepared to accept them.

Wallace charts the girls' lives from birth until their release from Broadmoor in 1993.

Diaries reveal their secret lives

Throughout their teenage years and beyond, the girls kept incredibly detailed diaries to which Wallace had access. These show that they were intelligent and that they cared deeply for their parents and siblings, even though they were unable to show emotion and unwilling to communicate with them.

And it reveals how they made a childhood pact to only communicate with one another, often through the subtle use of body language or eye contact. The pact became so all-consuming they were never able to break out of it.

What emerges is a powerful study of two siblings caught in a peculiar bond in which they loved and hated each other in equal measure — when they were separated, which the psychiatrists would do as part of their "treatment", they pined for each other to the point of illness, but thrust back together they would fight violently, tear their hair and scratch each other's faces.

Truth is stranger than fiction

The book is written in an easy-to-read narrative style and there were times when I had to remind myself it was not fiction. Truth can, at times, be stranger than fiction, and no more so than the case of The Silent Twins. It's a compelling and tragic tale.

You can find out more about June and Jennifer Gibbons via this Wikipedia entry — but be warned, it does contain plot spoilers.

'On Canaan's Side' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 272 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Back in the summer I heard Sebastian Barry give a reading of his latest novel On Canaan's Side at the Gallery space in Foyles. I'd heard Barry do a reading at DublinSwell and had been so astonished, amazed and awed by his performance, that I just knew this would be something as equally as special. I was right.

Barry isn't like most authors, who will merely read an extract in a well-spoken voice — he inhibits the mindset of his characters, gives them accents, waves his arms about a lot and just generally brings his written words to life in a dramatic, almost over-the-top way. He is mesmerising to listen to, but he is also mesmerising to watch.

When I attended the event I hadn't yet read the book. But when I did get around to cracking open the spine a day or two later, I couldn't help but hear his voice in my head, with its gentle intonations and occasional outbursts of loud excitement. It made reading On Canaan's Side a kind of aural-visual sensory experience and probably coloured my opinion of it a great deal.

A deeply intimate confessional

The story is a deeply intimate one. Essentially it is a confessional written by the elderly Lilly Bere, who is newly bereaved: her beloved grandson, a soldier returned from the "desert war", has killed himself.

What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?

His death sparks off a stream of memories, not only of the times in which she raised him, but of her earlier life in Dublin and her subsequent immigration to America in the 1920s, a death warrant on her own head because of her engagement to a Black and Tan and her father's role as chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police — both enemies of the "new Ireland".

Over the course of 17 days (each day is a separate chapter), Lilly recalls all the joys and tragedies of her own life during the past seven decades. It is heart-rending in places, hilarious in others. It is a life marked by a fiery determination to survive — against the odds — and to forge her own way without a support network.

A long bit of string and six chastened-looking pearls. Maybe my life is a bit like that.

And that's what makes Lilly's life so extraordinary — she has been cut off from her family back in Ireland and never sees them again. In this new land and new culture, she must survive alone. Initially, she has her fiancé for support, but that ends badly (it would be a plot spoiler to reveal how), and yet she somehow keeps her head above water and experiences some good fortune along the way.

A gift for storytelling

Plot-wise it would be easy to suggest that Barry has shoehorned in a few unlikely coincidences and scenarios — Lilly, for instance, gets to meet Martin Luther King — but that would be to take away from his exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.

I spent much of the book totally caught up in Lilly's adventures, from her time on the streets of Cleveland — "I was a young down and out, right enough. I did not even have the inspiration to beg [...]. I might have been murdered then, and no one would notice" — to her joy at having her eight-year-old grandson sing a song for Signor Devito, a famous teacher from the Metropolitan Opera.

So Bill began to sing 'Roses of Picardy', that he had got Mr Nolan to teach him, after I told him it was one of his great-uncle Willie's favourite songs. As I say, he was only eight, and his youthful voice, singing a soldier's song, made me cry, secretly, where I sat. Indeed I wished Willie could have been there to hear it; perhaps he was, his shade creeping near, from Flanders to Bridgehampton. To cock an ear to such sweet singing, with all his own suffering and the suffering of his companions contained in the song. As if, a ghost for some seventy years, he was hearing his own young self, magically renewed by the mercies of history.

As the above quote attests, there's a real sense of family connection here, and of history occasionally repeating itself — Lilly's brother, Willie Dunne, from Barry's Booker shortlisted A Long Long Way, goes to war and two generations later her grandson does the same.

A life lived in fear

And it is this that puzzles Lilly so greatly. Having lived her life in fear, she cannot fathom why her grandson, living in "free" America, would chose to sign up when he "had a chance to enjoy some sort of victory over fear".

There's so much more about On Canaan's Side that I could talk about — probably one reason why it's taken my almost six months to put my thoughts in writing — but I won't. I'll just say this: if you are looking for a fascinating portrait of a life well lived, with gorgeous writing and startling insight into a woman's view of a complicated, often harsh, world, then this extraordinary novel won't disappoint.

Finally, you may also be intrigued to know that Lilly's sister, Annie, is the subject of another book, Annie Dunne, which I read earlier in the year and adored. The Dunne family novels, which can be read in any order, are based on Barry's own relatives. At the reading I attended, he said it was his way of reclaiming their untold histories.

Top 10s: My favourite novels of 2011

It's that time of year again, when I assess what I've read and decide my best reads of the past 12 months.

At the time of writing I am on target to read just under 100 books, which comprised a mix of narrative non-fiction, translated fiction, crime fiction, latest literary releases and older books pulled off the TBR pile. The ratio of men to women writers was roughly 6:4. And, for the first time ever, I did not read one American novel.

For the purposes of this list, I've only included novels (and one novella), although I would highly recommend 'Antarctica' by Claire Keegan for those who enjoy short story collections and 'Joe Cinque's Consolation' by Helen Garner for those who like narrative non-fiction.

The following list has been arranged in alphabetical order by author's surname.

 

'Mercy' by Jussi Adler-Olsen (2011)

It's no secret that I love a bit of Scandinavian crime and this one, by Jussi Adler-Olsen, is one of the best I've ever read and certainly the best I've read in 2011. I was so enamoured of it that I cleared my whole weekend to eagerly eat it up and even before I'd reached the half-way point I tweeted that it "beats the pants off Steig Larsson". Mercy is the first book in the "Department Q" series (three others have yet to be translated into English), a division within the Danish police force that looks at cases that have run cold and remain unsolved. In this story, homicide detective Carl Mørk investigates the mysterious disappearance of a young and beautiful politician, who vanished while on board a cruise ship five years earlier. Could she still be alive? What Mørk discovers is chilling to the core...

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'Fair Stood the Wind for France' by H. E. Bates (1944)

H.E. Bates' 1944 classic Fair Stood the Wind for France is one of the finest and loveliest books I've ever read. It's definitely my favourite read of the year and is one of those books that I know I will read again at some point, if only to wallow in its beauty once again. It tells the story of a young British pilot whose plane is downed over France and the lengths he and his crew must go to in order to survive. Because it is set against the horrors of war, it takes on a life-affirming force, and Bates' prose is so elegant and pitch-perfect he somehow gets to the heart of human emotions without actually spelling anything out. In fact Bates' writing is so stripped back — not one word is wasted — that it seems a feat of exceptional genius to wring so much emotion, drama and truth out of almost every sentence, every page.

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'The Afterparty' by Leo Benedictus (2011)

The Afterparty arrived unannounced at Chez Reading Matters and I wasn't sure that it would be my cup of tea — or my sort of whisky — going by the cover image alone. I figured I'd try a chapter or two to see if it was my thing, and if it wasn't I'd put the book aside and forget about it. Two hours whizzed by and I was so immersed in the story I just had to keep on reading... In the end I found it to be an inventive, darkly funny, postmodern novel set in a world where British celebrities rule the roost and lowly tabloid journalists will stoop to almost anything in the quest for a big story — and there's not a hacked phone in sight!

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'A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali' by Gil Courtemanche (2009)

I have a penchant for harrowing novels and this one is probably the most harrowing I've ever read. It's set during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which more than 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered. It was an event that I was aware of in only the vaguest terms — probably because, as Courtemanche writes in this novel, "the media don't show dead bodies cut up by men and shredded by vultures and wild dogs". The story is told in the third person, but we see it mainly through the world-weary eyes of Bernard Valcourt, a widower and highly experienced journalist from Canada, who is bored with his job as a Radio-Canada producer and goes to Rwanda to try something new. What he experiences on the ground is so shocking and horrifying I felt dirty reading about it. Definitely not for the faint-hearted, but this is an important book that explores what happens when hate is left to reign unchecked.

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'The Devotion Of Suspect' X by Keigo Higashino (2011)

I love a good crime thriller and this one by Japanese writer Keigo Higashino is as close to perfection as a crime thriller can be. It works because even though you know from the outset who committed the crime — the murder of an abusive husband — you're not quite sure how the body was moved to the position in which it is found by the police the next day, with its face and fingerprints destroyed. In perfectly restrained style, Higashino offers a slow drip feed of information, as clues are revealed by  the police detective investigating the murder, along with two academics, one a physicist and the other a mathematician, who were rivals in a former life. But even when you think you have solved the riddle, Higashino offers a brilliantly unexpected ending that could only be plotted by a genius! No wonder the book has sold more than two million copies in Japan alone.

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'Five Bells' by Gail Jones (2011)

I was convinced this novel by Australian writer Gail Jones was going to make the Booker longlist, if not the shortlist. It's probably the most literary novel I've read in 2011, but it seems to have slipped under the radar. This is a great shame, because the novel — Jones' fifth — deserves a wide audience. It's not a particularly plot-driven story; instead it focuses on four individual characters and reveals their inner lives as they criss-cross Sydney on a fine summer's day. Jones' great achievement is that she gives each character an authentic back story and fleshes it out without being too obvious about it. In doing this she shows how memory works, but she's also able to demonstrate what it is to be human, and how, despite our varied backgrounds and upbringings, we are all much alike beneath the surface.

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'Ulysses' by James Joyce (1922)

Who would have thought the book I was too scared to read would turn out to be such an enjoyable romp, not only through Dublin on one fine June day, but through a wide variety of literary styles and genres. In many ways, when I tackled it, I felt like I'd been in training for it my whole life — that's because the book is essentially a history of English literary styles condensed into one volume. And while there were bits that went totally over my head, I was constantly amazed and surprised by how widely it has influenced so many writers that have followed. I can honestly say that Ulysses changes the way you look at literature after you've read it. I suspect I will read it again at some point, if only to finish those reading notes I started but didn't complete!

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'Leaving Ardglass' by William King (2008)

Sometimes you pick up a book and before you've even finished the first page you immediately know there's something very special about it. That's exactly how I felt when I began reading William King's Leaving Ardglass, a saga that spans 40 years and follows the lives of two Irish brothers — MJ Galvin, a building constructor turned property magnate, and his younger sibling, Tom. Much of the story is set in London during the 1960s, where Tom, who narrates the story, earns his living on building sites and witnesses some horrendous scenes, including the death of a fellow worker. The story is shocking in places and there are endless examples of racism against the Irish. Mostly, there's an all-pervasive sense of wasted lives, that these men will spend their lives "digging and drinking, and finish up at the doss-house". It's an eye-opening book, but beautifully written, with fine plotting and great characterisation.

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'Get Me Out of Here' by Henry Sutton (2010)

I do love a nasty character in a novel and Matt, the narrator of Get Me Out of Here, is the funniest — and sickest — character I've come across in modern fiction for a long time. He is filled with an over-inflated sense of self-importance and thinks the world revolves around him. He is shallow and manipulative. But as you get further and further into the novel, which is set in London circa 2008, you begin to realise that Matt is not all he seems to be. In fact, he may well be a danger to society. I loved this book and laughed out loud a lot. It's enormous fun and yet, outside of Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kingali, it's the most disturbing novel I've read all year.

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'Down the Rabbit Hole' by Juan Pablo Villalobos (2011)

Technically, at just 77 pages in length, this is really a novella, but for the purposes of this list it is one of the most powerful — and enjoyable — reads of the year. The charming seven-year-old narrator, Tochtli, lives in a secure compound with his drug baron father. He is obsessed with guns, violence, death — and acquiring a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia. Most of his narration treads a fine line between comedy and heartbreak. And because he is far too young to comprehend all the illegal activities happening around him, as you read his tale you want to step in to protect him— you understand the danger he is in, even if he doesn't. Down the Rabbit Hole is an ultra-quick read — you can easily consume it in a couple of hours — but its brevity should not be mistaken for shallowness. This is one of the best novellas I've ever read.

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Have you read any from this list? Care to share your own top 10?

'The Devotion of Suspect X' by Keigo Higashino

Fiction - paperback; Little, Brown; 374 pages; 2011. Translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith, with Elye J. Alexander. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

To what lengths would you go to cover up a murder? For maths teacher Ishigami — "Suspect X" of the title — the answer is absolutely everything. This is despite the fact that he is innocent of the crime in question. His motivation is nothing more than love — and an obsession with mathematical puzzles.

Cult sensation

In this extraordinary crime thriller, which has been a major sensation in its native Japan and turned into a cult film, we know from the outset who has committed the crime, how they did it and who has helped cover it up. But what we don't know is the detailed steps Ishigami undertakes to protect the real murderer.

According to Kishitani's report, the body had been left in a sorry state. It had been stripped of clothes, shoes, even socks. The face had been smashed — like a split melon, the young detective had said, which was more than enough to make Kusanagi queasy. The fingers had been burned, too, completely destroying any fingerprints. The corpse was male. Marks around the neck indicated he had been strangled. There were no other wounds apparent on the rest of the body.

And therein lies the mystery of The Devotion of Suspect X, one of the best plotted crime novels I've ever read. How did Ishigami move the body? What is the bicycle doing near it? And how is it possible for him to always be one step ahead of the police?

The story is effectively one giant riddle, but it's an intelligent riddle. If we understand that to solve a crime you must find the clues and then join them together to create a likely scenario, then it follows that to create the perfect crime you must work backwards and mix real clues in with red herrings so that it cannot be solved.

This is what Ishigami, a mathematician who gave up a promising academic career to teach maths to high school students, does: he treats the crime as a mathematical problem that only a genius could solve. But his one-time rival, the university physicist Yukawa, who unofficially helps Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police with the investigation, may be the only one smart enough to figure it all out.

Intelligent plotting and a fast-paced narrative

What I loved about the story — aside from the wonderful characters, the detached prose style and the evocative Tokyo setting — was the intelligence of the plotting and the way in which the tension increases the further you get into the story. Yasuko, the woman who committed the crime, is told to simply follow Ishigami's instructions. While she does this blindly, her nervousness is palpable throughout and you know that it won't be long before she puts a foot wrong and the police are on to her.

And then there's the competitive element with Yukawa, the only man intelligent enough to figure out what Ishigiami is up to: will he solve the case before the police?

With such a taut narrative it's hard not to keep turning the pages.

But while it might be easy to dismiss The Devotion of Suspect X as nothing more than a clever puzzle to be solved, the author explores the repercussions of the crime on the people most closely involved in it. He makes them flesh-and-blood real, with foibles, flaws and fears — and at times you don't know whether you should feel pity or condemnation for them.

The real success of the novel, however, lies in the impossible-to-guess climax. I found myself completely in awe of the way in which Higashino drew everything together so neatly and still managed to provide an utterly unexpected ending, completely out of left-field.

Is it any wonder more than two million copies of this book have been sold in Japan alone: it is a masterpiece of authorial restraint, concept and plotting. More please.

'Better Living Through Plastic Explosives' by Zsuzsi Gartner

Fiction - hardcover; Hamish Hamilton; 216 pages; 2011.

In September and October I had great pleasure in reading a bounty of Canadian fiction as part of the Shadow Giller Prize. In a rush to select our "winner" I never got around to reviewing Zsuzsi Gartner's oh-so intriguing Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. And so now, two months down the line, I am making up for lost time.

Bold, edgy satire

Unlike my fellow jurors, I very much enjoyed this intriguing collection of short stories. I liked the boldness of Gartner's ideas, the edginess of her subject matter and the satirical voice in which she writes much of her prose.

Each of the 10 charmingly named stories  — Summer of the Flesh Eater; Once, We Were Swedes; Floating Like a Goat; Investment Results May Vary; The Adopted Chinese Daughters’ Rebellion; What Are We Doing Here?; Someone Is Killing the Great Motivational Speakers of Amerika; Mister Kakami; We Come in Peace; and Better Living Through Plastic Explosives — offers a subversive take on modern life in North America.

And while they are firmly rooted in reality — our obsession with material goods and brand name items, our desire to be better (richer?) than our neighbours, our quest to drink more and more coffee from chain stores, our fear of terrorism, our narcissism (shall I go on?) — Gartner isn't afraid to spice things up with a little off-the-wall kookiness thrown in for good measure. For instance, in the penultimate story, We Come in Peace, five aliens inhabit the bodies of an assorted collection of teenagers living in a suburban cul-de-sac in North Vancouver. Their mission? To discover the zenith of each human sense. ("Barman's best guess was four years; Elyson thought a week or so should do it.")

In Once, We Were Swedes, my favourite collection in the book (I've read this particular piece three times now), a high-flying foreign correspondent becomes a tutor teaching "journalism 101" to teenage oiks — and hates it. This is a realistic enough story about the world dumbing down until Gartner adds her signature "twist": the 36-year-old teacher finds herself ageing rapidly (she is diagnosed with early menopause) while her husband not only refuses to grow up, he grows younger.

An unusual prose style

Admittedly, this sort of thing won't appeal to everyone. Nor will Gartner's occasional tendency to write in an overly verbose, convoluted manner. It took me awhile to get into the swing of her style. When I read the first story, Summer of the Flesh Eater — about the unusual lengths some people will go to sort out the neighbours from hell — I was a bit flummoxed. It wasn't the subject matter that threw me, but the way she constructed her sentences. I'm not sure whether I simply got used to her style, because by story two it no longer bothered me, or whether it's just the first story that is written in such an odd way.

But there's a lovely vein of black comedy running throughout. And her social commentary and her satire is right on the money.

For me, the way in which she takes the surreal aspects of real life and heightens them further appeals deeply. She reminds me very much of Chuck Palahniuk, who is one of my favourite authors. If you like his work, it's pretty much assured you'll like Zsuzsi Gartner's, too.

For two more takes on this novel, courtesy of my fellow Shadow Giller jurors, please see KevinfromCanada's review and The Mookse and the Gripes' review.

'In Search of a Distant Voice' by Taichi Yamada

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 183 pages; 2007. Translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.

Four years ago I read Taichi Yamada's Strangers, a truly haunting story that I still, occasionally, think about. So when I saw Yamada's second novel, the intriguingly named In Search of A Distant Voice, in Waterstone's the other day I just had to buy it.

It took 20 years for the book to be translated into English (it was first published in Japan in 1986) and earned high praise from the critics. I found it an enjoyable read, one that created more questions in my mind than it answered. It also left me wondering what it is about Japanese society that has so many of its writers penning books about loneliness, repression and alienation, because it seems as if every Japanese novel that I have read — which, to be fair, isn't very many — shares these common themes.

An immigration officer on the run from his own past

In Search of A Distant Voice tells the story of Kasama Tsuneo, a 29-year-old immigration officer in Tokyo, who has a secret past. He's on the verge of being betrothed to a woman five years his junior as part of an arranged marriage, and the rest of his life — dull but secure — seems mapped out for him.

But then one day, while out on a raid, something extraordinary happens to him.

While chasing a suspected illegal immigrant through a graveyard he is overcome by a wave of sexual desire that brings him to his knees, leaving him unable to continue the chase. He does not know what triggered "the tempest of overpowering sensuousness" but he has never experienced anything like it, not even with a real woman. And he then begins to question his sanity — perhaps he's overworked or is keeping too many things suppressed?

Begins hearing voices

Later, in his apartment in a government dormitory, he hears a woman's voice but he cannot see anyone. Is she the woman who gave him so much pleasure in the graveyard? Or is she a figment of his imagination? Is he going mad?

Troubled by the voice and desperate to bond with his soon-to-be fiancée Yoshie, whom he knows so little about, he makes a confession during dinner one evening:

"Lately—" he began.
"Yes?"
"I've been hearing a voice."
"A voice?"
"It says good evening. There's no one around, but I hear this voice saying good evening to me."
"Where?"
"Here and there. Good evening."
"Are you drunk?"
"Yeah, I get drunk suddenly. Before I know it I can't even walk."
"I was wondering what the hell you were talking about."

Tsuneo laughed and let it drop. She wouldn't believe him even if he really tried to tell her. And it wasn't only Yoshie. No one would believe a story like this. He wanted to tell someone about it, but not many people would really be able to accept it. He wouldn't be able to talk with Yoshie about this, even after they were married. He'd just have to let it sink into oblivion, along with the story of what had happened in Portland.

And therein lies the key to this strange but beguiling story. Tsuneo's tortured past in Portland, Oregon, where he was once an illegal immigrant himself, comes back to haunt him.

Confesses all to the woman he cannot see

In a series of conversations with the "voice", he tells her what happened in the USA eight years earlier, a sort of confession that deepens his guilt rather than absolves it. Ultimately it leaves Tsuneo more troubled than appeased and his life slowly begins to unravel...

In Search of A Distant Voice is part ghost story, part quest and it reads like a thriller. But there's a meditative quality to the writing too, which switches back and forth seamlessly from third person to first person, allowing you an insight into Tsuneo's inner-most thoughts.

I don't think it is anywhere near as strong a narrative as Strangers, but it's just as unsettling and deeply eerie. If you feel like a supernatural read rooted in reality do try it.

Merry Christmas to you all — hope it's a peaceful book-filled one!

Image via The Mary Sue and Media Thinker

Thanks to everyone who reads this blog regularly, leaves comments, responds to my tweets on Twitter or "likes" my Facebook posts. It's been quite a cultural year in this neck of the woods and I'm looking forward to cosying up with a few books during the festive break.

Do stay tuned for a frenzy of reviews over the next week — I have a lot of catching up to do before year's end!

Merry Christmas!

'Hamlet' at the Young Vic: a chilling mix of '1984' and 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' starring Michael Sheen

At the risk of turning this blog into one about theatre, can I just say that if you live in London and are looking for something interesting and cultural to do one evening, please consider going along to see Hamlet at the Young Vic, which runs until January 21.

Sadly, tickets are all sold out, but the theatre holds back up to 20 "gallery only" tickets for each performance, which cost just £10 a pop (there's a limit of two per customer). The only catch is that you have to buy the tickets in person on the day you want to attend and you have to be prepared to sit on a stool for three-and-a-half hours. But I can tell you that it's entirely worth it.

I went to see the show on Wednesday evening. This meant queuing up at the Young Vic at 9.30am to purchase my tickets (I cycled 6 miles in the rain to get there, that's what I call dedication) and then returning at 7pm that night to see the performance.

I've not seen Hamlet performed live before, although I have read the play and seen a couple of versions of the film, namely the ones starring Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh. Oh, and I've also been to Helsingor, in Denmark, where the play is set (see photograph of Elsinore Castle, below).

But this was completely different to anything I'd ever expected. For a start, the play is set in a secure psychiatric unit — Hamlet is a young man insane with grief, after all — and when you arrive you are frog-marched through a maze of clinical corridors where inmates scribble notes on clipboards as you file past. You exit via a front desk, which forms the key backdrop of the stage set.

It's very cleverly done and reminded me of a cross between George Orwell's 1984 — it's very clinical and drab and grey — and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The play itself is almost performed in the round — it's quite an intimate experience — and from our cheap seats, oops stools, in the gallery we had the most perfect vantage point to take it all in.

I'm not one for reviewing plays, so I'd like to point you in the direction of this review by John Morrison which sums it up wonderfully. He describes the play as "the most exciting Hamlet production of my life".

I thought it was wonderful. Michael Sheen, who I know better as Tony Blair in The Deal and David Frost in Frost/Nixon, was mesmerising in the title role. But the rest of the cast is excellent, too, and I especially liked that Rosencrantz was played by a woman (with an Irish accent) and that Claudius looked — and sounded — like a psychiatric consultant in his three-piece suit and slicked back hair.

The ending was especially dramatic — I'd forgotten how many people die in this play (and I thought Juno and the Paycock was depressing!) But there's an unexpected visual illusion — I believe Derren Brown was a consultant on the show — that provides just the right level of awe to end the production on a wow-I-didn't-know-that-was-going-to-happen kind of high. Brilliant stuff.

'Asleep' by Banana Yoshimoto

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 177 pages; 2001. Translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.

Following on from Jonathan Coe's House of Sleep, here's another book focused on slumber.

As someone who is rather fond of sleeping — yes, I'd happily laze in bed 24/7 if I could — I was intrigued by this book by Japanese writer Banana Yoshimoto. First published in 1992 as Shirakawa Yofune, it comprises three shorts stories focusing on the common themes of love, loss, loneliness — and sleep.

In the first tale, Night and Night's Travelers, a 22-year-old woman remembers her charismatic older brother, now dead, and the affair he once had with their first cousin, Mari, who is now prone to sleep walking.

In Love Songs, another young woman, once caught up in a love triangle with "a boisterous sort of guy, something of a thug"  and a nasty woman called Haru, starts hearing strange music whenever she is on the brink of falling asleep. When her new boyfriend suggests it is the ghost of the dead trying to communicate with her, she goes on a bizarre quest to find out who it might be.

In Asleep, the final and longest story in the collection, an unemployed woman sleeps her days away as she struggles to come to terms with the death of a close female friend. But she hides this news from her boyfriend, a man whose wife is in a coma, for reasons she can't quite explain.

Languid, dream-like prose

All the stories are told in appropriately languid prose — there's something mysterious and hypnotic about the writing which mirrors the subject matter — and there's a very real sense of atmosphere and fleeting sadness.

There are common themes throughout. All three of the lead characters are young women coming to terms with events that have changed them: one is grieving for her brother, another is grieving for a friend and the third is trying to come to terms with a sordid love affair she wishes she had not conducted. In all cases, the women have lost their innocence and are now stuck in a kind of spiritual stupor — represented by sleep walking, dreaming and sleeping — and are waiting for something to truly wake them up so that they can be born anew.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the stories are set in winter — Yoshimoto writes some truly elegant and beautiful descriptions of the snow — a time when nature slumbers, animals hibernate and death lies in wait.

I loved reading this collection. There's a soothing, yet eerie quality to the writing, and the characters, all wonderfully naive, are gentle, compassionate and emotionally fragile without being weak. Each tale is imbued with nostalgia — for things lost that can no longer be found — and exquisite sadness. And if I was to sum up this slim volume in just a few words I would say this: haunting, elegant and tragic.

'The House of Sleep' by Jonathan Coe

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 341 pages; 1998.

Jonathan Coe is one of those English authors I've been meaning to read for years, so I was delighted when The House of Sleep, his fifth novel — and winner of the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997 — was recently selected for my book group.

The central story is a rather complicated one about a set of friends who meet at university, drift apart and then meet up again, by accident, some dozen years later. By some bizarre coincidence — and there are a lot of them in this novel — all of them are obsessed by sleep, hence the title.

For instance, Sarah is narcoleptic and cannot distinguish reality from her incredibly vivid dreams, which means she is prone to mistaking imagined events for real ones; Terry, a film obsessive, drinks copious amounts of caffeine so he can stay awake to watch more movies, a condition which is mistaken for insomnia; and Dr Gregory Dudden, a sleep specialist, is researching ways to eradicate sleep so that humans no longer need to do it.

Second storyline

There's a second narrative thread in the form of Robert, who falls in love with Sarah when they are students, and the extraordinary lengths he will go to in order to win her affections.

These divergent storylines are brought together by a "huge, grey and imposing" house called Ashdown on the English coast. This is where Sarah, Robert, Terry and Gregory live as students. Fast forward 12 years and it is now a sleep clinic where Sarah and Terry are treated and where Gregory conducts his medical experiments.

The student days and the medical treatment days are told in alternate chapters — the odd-numbered chapters are set in 1983-4, while the even-numbered are set in the last two weeks of June, 1996.

Hilarious and menacing

The House of Sleep is, by turn, darkly comic — in fact, I'd rate this as one of the funniest books I've ever had the pleasure of reading — and strangely sinister. It is part campus novel and part medical novel. In many ways it probably shouldn't work — and, indeed, without all the uncanny coincidences that occur to the characters it probably wouldn't.

But it's so hugely entertaining — laugh out loud funny one minute, quite sad and sobering the next — you can forgive it's ever-so-slight failings.

While there are some set pieces shoehorned in purely for their wit factor — the feature article "ghosted" by Terry that results in 12 libel suits and the closure of the magazine in which it was published is particularly hilarious, but the book would be no less of an achievement without it — I appreciated the way in which they broke up the narrative and provided a bit of light relief.

And there does need to be some relief, because while there are moments which are truly shocking — Gregory's penchant for poking Sarah's eyes out during sex, for instance, and the drastic no-going-back way in which Robert changes himself in order to appeal to Sarah — the reader is left feeling quietly devastated by the time the last page is reached.

The House of Sleep is a very good novel peopled with three-dimensional characters, punchy dialogue and a well crafted plot. It's stylish, funny and edgy, and has made me more determined to read more of Jonathan Coe's work — which is nine novels at last count.

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This book was chosen by Carl for our Riverside Readers book group.

A little bit of Beatlemania — and some books you can read to feed the craze

It's a cold rainy Monday night in London. You're given a complimentary ticket to see the Bootleg Beatles, playing within walking distance of your home. You've convinced yourself the entire gig is going to naff, cheesy — or both.

Your mother was a REAL Beatles fan and saw them play at Festival Hall in Melbourne, Australia in 1964 long before you were born. As a teenager, you used to touch the programme she bought — and carefully packed away for safekeeping — with awe, knowing this was a piece of history few people ever got to see or experience.

Would my mother go to see the Bootleg Beatles? Um, yes, I think she would have given her right arm to re-experience a part of her own history even if it wasn't the real deal.

And, so, last night I prepared to go-with-the-flow as it were — and was completely swept away!

The entire show was brilliant. It was like stepping back in time and spending three hours watching the entire Beatles' career being played out before your eyes. And the sound and likeness of the musicians was uncanny.

They even spoke in Liverpudlian accents and joked around in between songs as one would expect had they ever taken a fraction of these songs on the road. (The sad irony is that the Beatles stopped touring in August 1966, so much of what their doppelgangers performed last night would never have been played live in an auditorium like this.) 

I loved that they tried to keep things in context too. At one point, "George Harrison" quipped: "Please feel free to take photographs, even if the security guards might try to stop you, we honestly don't mind. But please don't take them on your digital cameras or mobile phones, because they haven't been invented yet."

Of course, you're probably wondering why I'm banging on about this show when it really doesn't have much to do with books or literature.

But when they performed Paperback Writer last night — the photograph above shows a Penguin cover as the backdrop —I got thinking about my teenage years and the handful of Beatles books I read when I was about 15. (Do teenage girls still go through phases like this, where they discover the music of the Beatles as if they were the first people to do so... or was I odd, or influenced by my mother?)

Way back in 1984 (or possibly 1985), my best friend and I went through a period of Beatlemania, and we eagerly devoured The Love You Make: An Insider's Story of The Beatles by Peter Brown and Steven Haines (which I'm happy to discover has its own wiki page). Funnily enough, I almost had the book confiscated by a teacher, who saw it on my desk, but could only read the spine — which said The Love You Make — and mistakenly thought it was about sex!

The book was a wonderful potted history of the fab four's rise to fame, and I remember being totally besotted by so many (sordid) facts I hadn't realised before — there was a fifth Beatle! they took amphetamines early in their career! Paul got VD in Hamburg! their manager tried to commit suicide! John and Yoko were addicted to heroin!

I guess this kind of insider "gossip" appealed to the teenage side of me, but I suspect the story is pretty accurate given Brown once worked for Brian Epstein, the band's manager.

We then promptly moved on to John Lennon's In His Own Write, which was filled with doodles and nonsensical short stories.

I can't remember much about it, other than I suspect it probably wasn't very politically correct. But for some weird reason we found it appealing — probably because we were 15 and well, everything new and strange is appealing at that age, isn't it?

(I note the book has recently been reissued by Vintage Classic, together with Lennon's second book, A Spaniard in the Works — which I've not read — in one volume.)

From there, we spread our wings and started watching Beatles movies — A Hard Days Night and Help! for instance, on VHS video — and bored all our friends by repeating lines verbatim in terribly inept Liverpudlian accents.

But later, in my late teens and early 20s, I read more stuff, such as Brian Epstein: The Man Who Made the Beatles by Ray Coleman.

I remember this was quite a haunting biography of a man, who had achieved so much success from humble beginnings — and yet it wasn't enough to make him happy. I recall feeling an immense sadness after having read this one. (And I'm still convinced he was in love with John Lennon — although I can't recall if its from this book I got that opinion or from something I'd read elsewhere.)

From there, it was onto Ray Coleman's Lennon: The Definitive Biography, which I still maintain is the best biography I've ever read. Nothing since has come anywhere near eclipsing this one — and I went through an intense period in the early 1990s of reading nothing but biographies (albeit of movie stars and rock musicians, so my opinion should be taken with a large fistful of salt).

In many ways, this book is very much a love-letter to Lennon (the pair were good friends), although Coleman's portrait is a warts and all one. I know it's received criticism for "myth-making" but if you want the seedy version of Lennon's life you can always read Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon (which I haven't read).

So, have you read any books about the Beatles? Can you recommend any particular titles? Do share!

'Down the Rabbit Hole' by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Fiction - paperback; And Other Stories; 74 pages; 2011. Translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Most of us understand the phrase "down the rabbit hole" as a reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. But the only similarity between that novel and this one is the surreal nature of the journey the reader is taken on.

Juan Pablo Villalobos's novella Down the Rabbit Hole was recently shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award — and it's easy to see why. It's a mesmerising and powerful read about one small boy's dream to acquire a pygmy hippopotamus from Liberia.

This might sound outlandish, but seven-year-old motherless Tochtli lives a rather cossetted life in a secure compound — or "palace" as he describes it — where his drug baron father will buy him anything — toys, playthings and even a pet lion — in order to compensate for the guilt of his unusual upbringing.

The story is set in Mexico, with a side trip to Liberia to look for the rather endangered you-know-what, and is told entirely from Tochtli's perspective.

A precocious little boy

Tochtli is an ordinary little boy, albeit with an advanced vocabulary — "Some of the difficult words I know are: sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic and devastating" — who has an over-active imagination and loves wandering around all day in his dressing gown because he thinks it makes him look like a Samurai.

But he's also fascinated by guns, violence and death.

There are actually lots of ways of making corpses, but the most common ones are with orifices. Orifices are holes you make in people so their blood comes out. Bullets from pistols make orifices and knives can make orifices too. If your blood comes out there's a point when your heart or your liver stops working. Or your brain. And you die.

A perfectly pitched voice

His naive voice is beautifully rendered. It's never cloying or "fake" as some child narrators are wont to be and even though he knows a lot of advanced words, he doesn't quite understand the context in which to use them — which makes for some funny moments.

Most of his narration treads a fine line between comedy and heartbreak. It works because you know that the violence Tochtli witnesses on a day-to-day basis, the bad language he hears and the puzzling behaviour of his elders that he experiences, is largely incomprehensible in one so young.

For instance, he is confused by the presence of Quecholli, a woman who visits their palace two or three times a week. He doesn't realise she is a prostitute hired by his father, but he knows there is something not quite right about her.

Everything about Quecholli is a secret. She walks around the palace without looking at anyone, without making a sound, always clinging to Yolcaut. Sometimes they disappear and then reappear, really mysterious. They spend hours like that, the whole day, until Quecholli leaves. Then Miztli brings her back again and it's back to the secrets and disappearing.

A fast but powerful read

Like the very best novels, this one presents an unfamiliar world that feels so real you forget that you are reading a book. And Tochtli is such a brilliant character, someone you want to protect and keep close, that it's hard not to be affected by his situation — you understand the danger he is in, even if he doesn't.

Down the Rabbit Hole is an ultra-quick read — you can easily consume it in a couple of hours — but its brevity should not be mistaken for shallowness. This is one of the best novellas I've ever read.

Finally, just a word about And Other Stories, the publisher of this book. This small independent press has been set up as a not-for-private-profit company and encourages its subscribers to have a say in what gets published next. If Down the Rabbit Hole is any indication of the quality of the rest of its titles then readers are in for a real treat! You can find out more via its official website.

Note that its production values are very high and the books have a similar look and feel to Peirene Press's award-winning designs.

'Swamp: Who Murdered Margaret Clement?' by Richard Shears

Non-fiction - hardcover; New Holland; 191 pages; 2008.

When I was a child growing up in Australia, the "Lady of the Swamp" was part of local folklore. She had mysteriously disappeared in 1954 and was rumoured to haunt the house in which she once resided. The house, known as Tullaree, was an Edwardian "mansion" surrounded by flooded swamp land, about 20km from where my family and I lived.

As a young kid, I knew little of the woman's background, nor the circumstances surrounding her disappearance. And I only vaguely recall the discovery of a skeleton — believed to have been her body but never proved — buried in the dunes behind Venus Bay in the late 1970s.

But something about the tales I was told — that she was an eccentric recluse who had probably been murdered — stuck. I've always been intrigued by the possibility of a woman living in an isolated rundown mansion, surrounded by flood waters, going missing. How did she end up living there alone? Who was she? What was her story?

Cue my purchase of Swamp: Who Murdered Margaret Clement? earlier this year when I was visiting my parents in Australia. This large format hardcover, which features beautiful endpapers and sepia photographs, is a revised and enlarged edition of The Lady of the Swamp, first published in 1981. New Holland press have done a fabulous job with the design, because the book is a truly beautiful object. But I can't be the first person to think that it's kind of odd to give a true crime book this sort of treatment...

That said, this is a fascinating account of a real life murder mystery, with the emphasis on mystery.

What happened to the Lady of the Swamp?

No one will ever know what really happened to the "Lady of the Swamp", although journalist Richard Shears hints at the most likely scenario. However, I'm not about to reveal it here, because that would be telling. But even without a "solution" — no one, for instance, has ever been charged with Margaret Clement's murder if, indeed, she was murdered — this is a wonderful tale about one enigmatic woman's life story and her unexplained disappearance.

What I didn't know until I read this book was that Margaret Clement was once a beautiful, rich socialite — "the belle of Melbourne society" is how the author describes her — who was well-educated and well-travelled. Her father, a Scottish immigrant, had built himself up out of nothing to become one of Australia's richest men. Upon his death, Margaret and her siblings inherited a fortune that would supposedly last them a lifetime. It didn't.

Margaret and her elder sister, Jeannie, lived a rather cossetted life. In their 20s they set-up a mansion together — "Tullaree" in Tarwin Lower, about 150km south-east of Melbourne — where they farmed prized cattle with the help of their younger brother and domestic staff. They threw lavish parties for their friends visiting from Melbourne and served them caviar and smoked salmon.

When they weren't socialising they were travelling the world — England, Scotland, Japan and China were just some of the places they visited. They would always bring back exotic furniture and tapestries and other household items for their much-admired home.

From riches to rags

The book traces how the sisters lost their fortune and ended up living as paupers in a crumbling mansion with not a penny to their name. It is unbearably sad in places. Both Margaret and Jeannie were well educated, had good manners and spoke in "cultured voices", but they had no real life skills. They did not know how to run the farm and when their brother returned from the First World War he was too shell-shocked to help them.

Their naivety and their generosity was taken advantage of by a succession of domestic staff, scoundrels, thieves and gangsters. Even the lawyers and bankers got in on the act.

It was not until Margaret was quite elderly, living in squalor with just her cats and dog Dingo for company, that things took a turn for the better. She was a proud woman who had always refused all offers of help and friendship — indeed, she refused to ever leave Tullaree, even when the windows were smashed and the floorboards rotted through. But when new neighbours, Esme and Stan Livingstone, moved in, she let her guard down and became very close to them.

But were the Livingstone's motives genuine? And what of Margaret's nephew, a rogue with an eye on his inheritance — did he have his aunt's best interests at heart?

A tale of greed and deceit

This true life story reads very much like a novel, and if I were to quibble with the author over anything, it would be this: he records some conversations that he could not possibly know happened and has a tendency to embellish scenes with extraneous — and unconfirmed — detail. It's clear he has fictionalised some elements of the story, which is a shame, because it makes it harder to trust the "facts" as he reports them.

But regardless of this, I found Swamp: Who Murdered Margaret Clement? a deeply intriguing read about the exploitation of two well-to-do women, whose privileged and refined upbringing had blinded them to the wickedness of the world.

I came away from this tale of greed and deceit feeling that Margaret's wilfulness, her stubbornness, her pride and her fierce independence, all qualities to be very much admired in a woman of that era, were ultimately her downfall. It is a sad tale and will linger in my memory for a long time to come...

Note that the print edition of this book does not seem to be available outside of Australia, but USA- and UK-based readers can buy a Kindle version from Amazon.

Sean O'Casey's 'Juno & The Paycock' at the National Theatre

I'm not much of a theatre goer, but this year I've seen a couple of Irish productions — The Playboy of the Western World, here in London, and Ross O'Carroll Kelly's Between Foxrock and a Hard Place, at The Gaiety in Dublin — and enjoyed both of them greatly.

And having seen members of Ireland's Abbey Theatre perform, both at DublinSwell2011 and The Music of Ghostlight: An evening with Joseph O'Connor and Friends — at the Abbey Theatre itself — I was really keen to see a fully fledged Abbey Theatre production. So, when I discovered by chance that the Abbey was coming to London to do a joint production of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock (first performed in 1924) with the National Theatre — at the National Theatre — I made plans to go.

I was lucky enough to secure great seats for just £12 as part of the NT's Travelex £12 season and on Tuesday night I braved the wintry cold and went to see the show at the Lyttelton Theatre.

Powerful, is the first word that comes to mind. Depressing, is the second. And, if I'm pushed, I might say funny as the third.

A tragedy in three acts

The tragic-comic storyline, in case you don't know it, goes something like this.

Juno and her retired merchant seaman husband Captain Boyle (also known a "the paycock" of the title) live in a rundown two-roomed Georgian tenement in Dublin during the 1920s. Their son, Johnny, lost his arm during the Easter uprising, and their daughter, Mary, is on strike. When the Captain is informed he is the beneficiary of his cousin's will, he is delighted to be raised out of poverty — they refurnish the tenement and invest in a gramophone using funds borrowed from friends and neighbours with a promise to repay them when the inheritance comes through.

* Beware: spoiler alert *

Of course, the money never arrives and all the goods must be returned. But things take a turn for the worse when Mary becomes pregnant out of wedlock and Johnny is kidnapped and murdered by the IRA.

* End of spoiler *

The play is divided into three parts and is set entirely in the living quarters of the tenement, with its decrepit grey walls, high ceiling and minimal furniture. Time shifts are noted by the sound of rain outside and the amount of pale watery light filtering through the big Georgian windows.

First-class acting

The acting, of course, is first-class and the central characters are terrific. I loved Ciaran Hinds as the Captain, Sinead Cusack is outstanding as Juno and Clare Dunne does a nice, if sometimes overwrought, turn as Mary. But it was the lesser role of Johnny — poor miserable terrified Johnny scared of reprisal — played by Ronan Raftery that made my heart lurch. He spends most of the time on stage in a state of despair — his fear, his pain and his dismay are palpable — but he's always sitting off to the side, or cowering in a corner, and yet it was hard to take your eyes off him.

I hadn't expected the play to be so, well, emotional.

The first two acts, before intermission, were quite hilarious in places — amazing how people pretending they're drunk and philosophising about the world can be so funny — but the third act suddenly became very dark and dramatic. I hesitate to say the word "operatic" because it wasn't, but it could have so easily tipped over into farce if the actors hadn't reigned it back ever so slightly.

I couldn't help but be moved by Sinead Cusack breaking down on stage, sobbing and wringing her hands in a fit of grief, and yet there was part of me thinking, my god, those are real tears. (I think this is always the problem I have with theatre: I never lose myself in the production and am constantly aware that I am watching actors performing roles in front of me.)

When the final curtain came down I was left feeling ever so slightly distraught. It's not exactly an uplifting play, but then it's not supposed to be. This is about the tragedy of war on families and the ways in which women hold the home together. But it might also be seen as an allegory of Ireland's political history — when the family had financial independence they were happy and free but when they lost it they were downtrodden and miserable. On the other hand, with the current economic situation in Ireland, it might be read the other way: living on credit catches up with you in the end.

As Captain Boyle keeps saying throughout the play, "Th' whole worl's in a terrible state o' chassis".

Don't miss out!

If you live in London it's definitely worth seeing if you get the chance. The £12 tickets in the stalls are worth it — although do note the seats don't have armrests, are slightly smaller than usual and if someone tall sits in front of you your view might be obscured — although I don't know whether any are still available. There's plenty of full price tickets though. The show runs until the end of February.

Finally, here's a clip about Juno and the Paycock, the first ever co-production between Ireland and England's national theatres.

Australian literature resources

On Monday I announced that I plan to host an Australian Literature Month in January. I was delighted with the response.

Some of you — and I am looking at Lizzy and Annabel — are even planning a readalong of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (one of my favourite books, by the way), while others are dusting off their TBRs or borrowing books from the library.

And do remember it's not too late to drop a few subtle hints to family and friends if you'd like to find an Australian novel under the Christmas tree in a little over a week's time! Or why not treat yourself?

If you are looking for inspiration on what books to read, here’s a few resources that might come in useful:

• My reviews of novels and non-fiction set in Australia

• My top 10 novels about Australia

• Lisa Hill's ANZLitLovers LitBlog (This list of books you must read is particularly good)

• Perry Middlemiss's Australian Literature website. (His blog Matilda is also worth a look)

• 50 Must Read Australian Novels (excellent list on the Booktopia Blog)

• Past winners of the Miles Franklin Literary Award

• Past winners of the Prime Minister's Literary Awards

• List of popular Australian authors on Good Reads

• An essay about Australian novels on the Australian Government website

• Australian Women Writers website

• Free ebooks on the Project Gutenberg Australiana page

There are bound to be loads more resources online (please do leave links below in the comments if you know of any), but this is a good start.

'Death in Summer' by William Trevor

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 220 pages; 1999.

I don't know where I got the idea that William Trevor wrote lovely heartwarming stories: my two experiences reading him — Felicia's Journey (1994) and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) — have been rather sad and distressing. And Death in Summer is no different.

Mournful beginning

The story, which is set in England, begins with a funeral. (See, it's sad already.)

Leticia, a new mother, has been killed in a tragic accident. Her husband, the much older Thaddeus, is bereft, even though he never truly loved his wife. He does, however, very much love and adore his young baby, Georgina, and it is to her that all his attention now turns.

Although he lives in a rather grand house (inherited from his parents) and has two servants, the impossibly named Zenobia and Maidment, he feels unable to raise Georgina by himself. So, with the help of his kindly well-to-do mother-in-law, Mrs Iveson, he screens four young women as potential nannies.

As it turns out, none are suitable, and one in particular, Pettie, is the wrong type altogether: she wreaks of cigarettes, shows them a badly typed reference, wears a too-short skirt. Fobbing her off with a £10 note (to cover her train fare to attend the interview), Thaddeus and Mrs Iveson think that will be the end of the matter.

They are wrong.

The story pitts these two hapless, loveless characters against one another. Thaddeus, blind to anything other than his natural state of melancholy, is unaware that Pettie has developed a rather unhealthy obsession with him. And Pettie, ignoring the advice of her devoted friend Albert (they grew up together in a childrens' home) that she leave well enough alone, rails against the news that Mrs Iveson has become the child's carer. She will do whatever she can to prove that this is a bad decision and that she should be put in charge instead.

Portrait of a stalker

As a portrait of a disturbed young woman with a penchant for stalking, you will find no better than Death in Summer. While there's a lovely aching quality to the overall storyline, there's also an unspoken tension and unease, a kind of creepiness that pervades Pettie's motivations, which makes the book difficult to put down.

This novel demonstrates what happens when people's emotional wounds are left to fester unabated over a long period of time. And it shows that no matter where you fit in the social spectrum, we can all be haunted by our pasts. What unites Thaddeus and Pettie, even though they might not know it, is their longing to be loved unconditionally.

This is a richly layered novel in which the back stories for all the characters — the servants; Albert; and Thaddeus' former lover, the desperate blackmailing Mrs Ferry — are skillfully fleshed out.

Without ever talking down to his readers, Trevor somehow captures that sense of lives being misspent, of all too real human failings, of life's disappointments and cruelties, of the ways in which people are trapped by circumstance. It is an exceptional achievement.

Triple Choice Tuesday: Alan Glynn

Welcome to Triple Choice Tuesday. This is where I ask some of my favourite bloggers, writers and readers to share the names of three books that mean a lot to them. The idea is that it might raise the profile of certain books and introduce you to new titles, new authors and new bloggers.

Today's guest is Irish writer Alan Glynn.

Alan studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and has worked in magazine publishing in New York and as an EFL teacher in Italy.

His latest novel, Bloodland, was published in September by Faber and has just won Bord Gais Energy's Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. I read it last week (review coming shortly) and thought it was brilliant.

His first novel, The Dark Fields, was published in 2002 and was filmed last year as Limitless, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. His second novel Winterland was published to critical acclaim in 2009 — I read it that same year and loved it.

Alan is married with two children and lives in Dublin. Without further ado, here is his Triple Choice Tuesday selections:

A favourite book: High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

Not exactly a comfort read, but a book I go back to regularly is J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise. It’s one of his most chilling and perfectly formed dispatches from dystopia. As petty disputes erupt and cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on “enemy” floors, the civilized, largely professional inhabitants of a 40-storey London tower block conspire in a gradual descent into madness.

Here, as elsewhere, Ballard sketches a complex human ecosystem that is held together by brittle social codes and the irresistible force of technology. It’s probably silly to call the book prescient, because everything Ballard wrote was a laser-sharp dissection of the world he lived in, but it’s amazing how 35 years on its examination of repression and impulse still feels like a very urgent warning.

A book that changed my world: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

I first read The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien in the mid-1970s. Like any self-respecting work of art from that period (even though it was published ten years earlier and written some 30 years before that again), the book did its solemn duty and blew my mind.

Told in the first person, it is a creepily intimate portrait of a nameless and twisted killer. The reader is taken inside this killer’s head and given access to its darkest, slipperiest corners. As the killer seeks to rationalize a horrific murder, he also succeeds in transmogrifying the external world into an image of his own guilt-soaked, terror-stricken and very definitely crumbling sanity. But what do you know? All of this with jokes. Because The Third Policeman is insanely, hilariously and subversively funny.

I’d never read anything like it and so great was its impact on me at the time that I can safely say I’ve never read anything quite like it since.

A book that deserves a wider audience: A Short History of Decay by E.M. Cioran.

Maybe this book does have a wide audience, I don’t know, but it seems to me that it should have a really wide audience, and that we poor saps in this digitally-fragmented early part of the 21st century — bereft as we are of ideas and understanding, and overloaded with information and images — would be a lot better off for that. It is a book of short essays and aphorisms whose themes are pessimism, misanthropy, despair and the torment of being alive in the modern world.

Okay, so far, so off-putting, but what makes this book work is the beauty and power of Cioran’s mind, and the proliferating paradox that is the book’s magnificent fusing of the blackest subject matter with the most intricate, magical and beguiling of prose styles.

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Thanks, Alan, for taking part in my Triple Choice Tuesday!

What do you think of Alan's choices? Have you read any of these books? I read and reviewed High-Rise in September and found it completely fascinating in a dark rather scary way. The Third Policeman is in my reading queue (I bought a lovely Everyman's Libary edition of O'Brien's collected novels earlier this year), but Alan's description of it makes me want to pull it down off the shelf immediately for a read! Not heard of the Cioran book but it sounds like one I should seek out...

Get your Australian novels ready for 'Australian Literature Month'

As I prepare to survive my first full-length UK winter in two years — I went to Australia for the festive season in 2009 and 2010, so missed out on the two "big freezes" — I'm beginning to think of ways to get myself through the long dark days. Reading books set in sunny climates is a good a tactic as any and then I got to thinking...

How about I host an Australian Literature Month?

The idea is that I will simply read lots of Australian books in January and blog about them here. I've got dozens sitting in my TBR and this is a chance to dust them off before any more get added to the pile.

I'm hoping that some of you may want to join in and share the Australian literature love.

You may already know that Elizabeth Lhuede has set up a rather brilliant Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2012, which also ties in nicely with Australia's National Year of Reading 2012. So, if you've signed up to either of those, this will be an additional way to kill two (or three) birds with one stone.

With that in mind I've created a set of badges (300pix x 300pix) which you are more than welcome to download for use on your own blog whenever you write about Australian books and writers in January next year. See kangaroo above and kookaburra, platypus, koala and wombat below.

Do leave a comment and let me know if you'd like to take part. Remember it's not a challenge, it's simply an opportunity to read an Australian book or two (or more) and celebrate Australian literature with other people in January. You don't even need a blog to participate — you just need to be willing to read something by an Australian writer and maybe comment on other people's posts. 

I'll compile round-up links and host a few giveaways during the month. I'll also provide some ideas on what books to read and where you can get them before things kick off on January 1.

So, are you up for it? As they say in Australia, it's sure to be bonza!

'Shadowstory' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 240 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

One of several reoccurring themes in Jennifer Johnston's writing is that of the young Irish woman trying to find her place in the world. This kind of coming of age story is the essential focus of Shadowstory, her latest novel, which was published last month.

In this, her 17th novel, Johnston introduces us to Polly, who is a little girl when her father, Greg, is killed in the Second World War. Greg comes from a well-to-do Anglo-Irish family, who live in a big house, complete with an expensive clay tennis court, by the ocean in County Clare.

Polly's mother, Nonie, remarries and has two more children, but Polly feels closer to her Uncle Sam — her late father's youngest brother — who is just five years older than her, than she does her half-siblings. This is an important element of the story, because it is this closeness with Sam and, in turn, her grandparents, that makes Polly forever feel like an outsider within her own family unit. 

Divided loyalties

As she negotiates that tricky twilight period between childhood and adulthood, Polly finds her loyalties divided between her mother, in Dublin, and her father's family, in Clare, with whom she wants to spend more of her time. And when Sam decides to become a Communist and flee to Cuba, her loyalties are divided again: she is made to swear never to tell anyone where he has gone.

While the focus of the novel is largely on Polly — a lovely sweet natured girl who seems too naive to realise that her uncle's affections border on incest — the story also charts the demise of an Anglo-Irish Big House (another recurring theme in Jonhston's work) and the family that resides within it.

I found her depiction of Polly's stubborn grandfather, a veteran of the Somme who walks with a limp and secretly mourns the death of two of his children in the Second World War, particularly moving. His rapid decline into old age, and the way in which this affects Polly, is heart-breaking.

Atmosphere and family tensions

It might not seem much of a plot — indeed, Polly, who narrates the story says as much towards the end — but Johnston's elegant writing and her ability to capture atmosphere in such an acute way makes this one of the finest novels she's written for awhile.

Johnston is also very good at evoking the tensions, domestic and ideological, between family members — without actually describing them. And the Irish political issues of the day — much of the book is set in the 1950s, a time when the Catholic Church was at its zenith — are alluded to without being spelled out.

Overall, Shadowstory is charming without being cloying, and, as ever, it's Johnston's alluring, elliptical prose style and her bittersweet portrait of one girl's transition from childhood to adulthood that makes it a heartfelt, deeply affecting read. There were moments, especially towards the end, where I wanted to grab the nearest box of tissues and have a good old howl!

You can see all my reviews of Jennifer Johnston books on my Jennifer Johnston page.

'Leaving Ardglass' by William King

Fiction - paperback; Lilliput Press; 272 pages; 2008.

Sometimes you pick up a book and before you've even finished the first page you immediately know there's something very special about it. That's exactly how I felt when I began reading William King's Leaving Ardglass, a saga that spans 40 years and follows the lives of two Irish brothers.

What I didn't know when I began reading the book was the way in which the fates of both MJ Galvin, a building constructor turned property magnate, and his younger sibling, Tom, would mirror the fate of Ireland itself.

Consumerism and the Celtic Tiger

Just as Ireland broke free of its Catholic stronghold, adopted consumerism and enjoyed the booming Celtic tiger years before cracks began appearing in the facade, the two Galvin brothers follow a similar trajectory. Although they come from opposite ends of the moral compass, as it were, both become successful in their chosen fields — construction and property development for MJ, the priesthood for Tom — and yet they also succumb to temptations in one form or another, leaving them bitter and downtrodden older men.

The story is narrated by Tom, a parish priest, looking back on his life. Much of the initial focus is on a "summer in London which had changed me". He was one of thousands of Irish who went to "John Bull" (England) in search of a job at a time when there was little work at home. It's 1961 and his older brother MJ is already running a successful construction business in north London, where he employs dozens of down-at-heel Irish workers.

It's a tough, knockabout life. Workers are taken advantage of, subject to brutality, paid a pittance and put in dangerous life-or-death situations. What Tom witnesses that first summer challenges his value system and the ways in which he views his brother. But it also opens his eyes to the ways of the world — the joy of Saturday night dances in the Galtymore, the camaraderie of men in the pub (before the alcohol-fuelled brawls), gambling and women.

But most of all it adds to his sense of dislocation, as his sacristan sums up perfectly 40 years down the line:

'We were neither fish nor flesh. Branded as letting down this ould country by going across to John Bull. Sure we'd have starved to death if we'd stayed.' He flings another log on the pile. 'And not wanted there because we were the drunken Irish.'

It is this dislocation, this feeling of never belonging and of realising that MJ's behaviour, professionally and personally, is morally bankrupt that makes Tom reconsider his future. Instead of joining MJ's firm, where he would effectively become second-in-charge and be set for life, he decides to enter the priesthood.

The Catholic Church

There are religious elements to the book — it may be useful to know that the author himself is a practising priest in Drumcondra, Ireland — but it does not shy away from the issues that have damaged the Church in recent times. Indeed, it raises many talking points — about celibacy, about the ways in which suspected pedophiles within the priesthood should be dealt with and about the role of the Church in the 21st century.

It's also a fascinating account of life lived within the Church, of what one must do — and give up — to become a priest and how, even among those pious men, lives can be scarred by thwarted ambition, political rivalries and bitter in-fighting.

But what I particularly enjoyed was the portrait of north London — Cricklewood, Camden Town, Kilburn, the Holloway Road — during the 1960s that King paints. He has a special talent for bringing the building sites to life, of describing the back-breaking toil thousands of Irish emigrants undertook through necessity, not choice.

And the way in which he writes about the workers, queuing up each morning on Mornington Crescent, waiting to be selected as part of the construction crews to be trucked to individual sites, is especially vivid. You can practically smell the sense of desperation from the labourers and the little Hitler mentality of the bosses.

One or two, wearing creased shirts and loose ties, shout to get into the fucken trucks, that they have to go out to Leighton Buzzard. The men have a ruffled look: dried clay on their turned-down wellingtons or hobnailed boots. A thickset man is walking up and down inspecting a queue of men; he looks mostly at their shoes; every now and then, he lifts his cap and wipes his bald crown with a piece of navy cloth. [...] Down the road, boys are jumping in the air and kicking around a paper football, jostling each other for possession.
'Come on here,' MJ shouts, 'I'll give you plenty to tire you out behind the mixer.'
They desert the ball like schoolboys and climb into one of the trucks. Above the thud of their boots, a big red-faced man with a head of black hair shouts abuse at them. Did they think they had all the fucken day? Such a crowd of lazy fuckers he'd never met in all his life.

And Tom, despite his flaws and his occasional lack of backbone (he never stands up to his elder brother, despite seeing some horrendous things), is hugely likable. I love that he spends his first few days in London trawling the bookshops on Charing Cross Road looking for "books that are banned at home: Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Catcher in the Rye".

Shocking expose of Irish life in London

The story is shocking in places — there's at least one death on a building site that hammers home the point that life was cheap — and there are endless examples of racism against the Irish ("Another Paddy. Filthy lot. I should never 'ave taken them in," Tom overhears a landlady say at one point). Mostly, there's an all-pervasive sense of wasted lives, that these men will spend their lives "digging and drinking, and finish up at the doss-house".

But the book does not make excuses for behaviours or decisions or the moral cowardice that lies at its heart. What it does, through evocative detail, a cleverly paced narrative and a lightness of touch, is showcase the human condition, with all its tensions and foibles and flaws. If anything Leaving Ardglass is about human greed — and how we can all be corrupted by it if we are not careful.

I loved this book so much it's a genuine contender for my number one book of the year. And it's encouraged me to source King's previous novels — The Strangled Impulse (1997) and Swansong (2001) — both of which are out of print. Watch this space.