Reading Matters

'Fifth Business' by Robertson Davies

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 272 pages; 2005.

First published in 1970, Robertson Davies' Fifth Business is the first volume of the Deptford Trilogy, but can be read as a standalone novel. The title refers to the idea of a person being neither hero or heroine, confidante nor villain, but still being a vital part of a plot — without them the denouement or resolution would not happen. And that is the perfect description of the role with which our narrator, Dunstan "Dunny" Ramsay, fulfills — he is the "fifth business".

A seminal moment

The novel opens by recounting a rather compelling and ultimately seminal moment in Dunny's life:  It is "5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908" and he is "ten years and seven months old". He is returning from a sledding adventure with his friend (and occasional enemy) Percy Boyd Staunton and snowballs are being thrown. Hidden in one of the snowballs is a stone.

Percy throws this dangerous snowball at Dunny, who ducks to avoid it, and it hits a woman, walking nearby, on the back of the head. She cries out and then collapses to the ground. Her name is Mrs Mary Dempster and she is out taking a stroll with her husband, the local Baptist minister. They do not see who threw the snowball — no accusations or confessions are made — but Dunny is plagued by guilt because of two shocking outcomes: Mrs Dempster is pregnant and the fall results in her baby being born prematurely; she also spends the rest of her life as a "simpleton".

From this one incident, Dunny finds himself forever tied to three people: Percy, who threw the stone; Mrs Dempster, who he helped carry home on his sled; and Paul, the premature baby, who grows up to become one of the world's leading illusionists.

The bigger picture

From this exciting start, the book suddenly expands into a wider view as we learn that Dunny is now in his early 70s and has recently retired as a teacher. In fact, what we are reading is a report to a headmaster in response to an "idiotic piece that appeared in the College Chronicle in the issue of midsummer 1969". It seems Dunny did not appreciate the portrait of himself and wishes to correct the impression that he is "a typical old schoolmaster doddering into retirement with tears in his eyes and a drop hanging from his nose".

But what most galls me is the patronizing, dismissive tone of the piece, as if I had never had a life outside the classroom, had never risen to the full stature of a man, had never rejoiced or sorrowed or known love or hate...

The rest of the novel fills in the gaps by telling the story of Dunny's life. And he is right — if you can forgive the slight snobbery in his voice and his often hard-hearted tone (he feels no emotion on the death of his parents, for instance) — Dunny has done much more and experienced much more than the drab biography of him in the newspaper might suggest. Not only has he devoted 45 years of his life to teaching boys in a private school in Toronto and become a decorated war hero (the latter a point of embarrassment rather than pride), he has developed an interesting sideline as a hagiologist (a specialist in saints) and sold 10 books on the subject, some of them to extraordinary best-selling success.

He has travelled the world, not only as a soldier in the Great War — in which he was "frightened for three years", mistakenly thought dead on the battlefield and awarded the VC "posthumously" — but in pursuit of knowledge about the saints he finds so fascinating.

Along the way he has fallen in love with various women — his affairs are recounted in the narrative — but has never been able to commit to any one in particular, except perhaps Mrs Dempster, who he comes to believe is a religious saint after he sees her face on a Madonna in a church he seeks refuge in during the height of the war.

And he has kept in contact with Percy, almost his polar opposite, who becomes a very rich man focused on material gain, and constantly runs into Paul, who reinvents himself under another name to become a magician renowned around the world.

Problematic novel

I have to be honest and say I thought The Fifth Business a rather hit-and-miss affair, which may partly explain why it has taken me so long to pen this review (I finished the book in late January). I think there are two factors at play here.

First, because the narrative is essentially composed of a series of set pieces and "chapters" in Dunny's life, the interest level (or entertainment value, for want of a better description) was not consistent throughout.  I enjoyed the early parts of Dunny's life and I loved his experiences during the Great War and in the immediate aftermath, but for me other parts waned and when I put the book down I struggled to pick it back up again.

And second, I found the way in which all the women were depicted as problematic — and chauvinistic. I realise that is probably a reflection of the time in which the book was set (and written), but Dunny's treatment of all the women who come into his life is so reprehensible (or alien) that I did not find him particularly empathetic. He cannot understand his mother (and feels nothing upon her death), he puts Mrs Dempster on a pedestal, and he treats the nurse who falls in love with him during the war very badly indeed. The girl waiting for him at home is portrayed as empty-headed and husband-hungry, and another woman he meets in later life comes across as a vicious manipulator. They are all desperate and needy.

That said, I loved the eyewitness view of history presented here and being able to follow the way in which people's lives play out — Percy's rise to riches and Dunny's complicated friendship with him is one of the novel's highlights. Similarly, Davies' portrayal of small town Canadian life, where alliances are forged depending on which church you attend, and how communities can band together (or pull apart) at times of need, is deftly portrayed. And its exploration of moral responsibility, the ties that bind us to people and places, and our diametrically opposed hunger for new experiences and the comforts of home, makes it a high-quality read.

But I think it is fair to say I didn't love Fifth Business enough to want to explore the two follow-up novels, The Manticore and World of Wonders. Others may feel differently.

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I read this book as part of my year-long Project 1001. Thanks to KevinfromCanada for the additional inspiration — he read it as part of his 2013 project to reread 12 Canadian authors who have influenced him, and I thought I'd join in the fun. You can see Kevin's review here.

'The Old Romantic' by Louise Dean

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 292 pages; 2011.

Louise Dean's The Old Romantic couldn't be more different — in tone, subject and style — than the last novel of hers that I read, the brilliant but oh-so bleak This Human Season (2006), which was set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of The Troubles and explored the political divide.

The Old Romantic is right at the other end of the spectrum: it's a warm-hearted comedy set in on the south-east coast of England and is one of those lovely novels that you eat up in a day or two and feel all the better for having done so.

Grumpy old man

The story is essentially about the ups and downs, trials and tribulations of one family headed by the cantankerous Ken Goodyew — the "old romantic" of the title — who has become slightly obsessed by his own death. Ken is retired and lives in Hastings, a rundown coastal town in East Sussex, with his second wife, June.

When the book opens he has just been reunited with his eldest son, Nick, a solicitor, for the first time in 15 years at a hastily convened lunch with the extended family. You know things are not going to bode well for the newly established relationship when Ken announces that he has decided to leave all his worldly goods to his younger son, Dave — and that he wants Nick to draw up the will.

His marriage to June also looks to be on the rocks when he announces — just a few minutes later — that he also wants Nick to sort out a divorce. "I don't want her lot, June's family, to get their hands on a penny of it, see?" he says, while June sits there and does her best to ignore him.

Working class hero

From this fateful lunch, Dean spins a simple tale about Ken and the ways in which his actions, both past and present, impinge on his two wives and his two children. He is wilfully ignorant, marvellously grumpy and blatantly proud of his working class roots. I loved that all his dialogue is written phonetically, so he sounds like a London cab driver, and that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is appallingly rude or appallingly funny.

But even though Ken is the central character around which everything else tends to revolve, the book devotes equal attention to Nick and the ways in which he has spent his entire life trying to escape his humble beginnings — and his father's overbearing shadow. That he changed his name from Gary, that he decided to study law, that he goes on holiday to exotic locations abroad, all speak of his desire to reinvent himself as a middle-class "somebody".

His relationship with younger brother Dave — his polar opposite — is beautifully fleshed out, too, and you get a real sense of their sibling rivalries, tensions, contradictions — and love.

Other standout characters include Astrid, Nick's beauty-parlour girlfriend obsessed with her looks and staying young, and Audrey, the business-like 40-something undertaker, whom Ken falls in love with — until she shows him the delicate and specialised art of embalming.

Comedy of manners

The Old Romantic is a wonderfully witty read that showcases Dean's ability to write funny set pieces. But she's also very good at developing drama, constructing believable dialogue and fleshing out back stories without losing that all-important narrative tension that keeps the reader turning the pages. The plot might be lean, but it's the characters and the exploration of life, death and family which makes it rather special.

I loved this book and laughed out loud quite a lot, although I must admit that part of the enjoyment came from knowing that much of it was set in areas with which I am familiar. Indeed, I read this while on holiday in East Sussex, just a stone's throw from Rye where much of the action takes place.

But even if you don't know these places, there is much to enjoy in this rather fine comedy of manners.

'The Cold Eye of Heaven' by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Fiction - Kindle edition; Atlantic Books; 368 pages; 2011.

Last month I stated that I was going to read all the books shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Christine Dwyer Hickey's The Cold Eye of Heaven, published last year, is one of the shortlisted titles.

A life told backwards

The book opens on 15 January 2010. Farley, an elderly gent who lives alone, has collapsed on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, "one side of his face shoved into the linoleum, right shoulder pressed into the radiator". As he lays there, trying to figure out how he got there and how he might be rescued, his mind starts wandering back to earlier times.

We are then transported back to the previous day in which Farley traverses Dublin on various errands — taking his suit to the drycleaners, getting one of his shoes resoled, trying to find a priest to sign a mass card — all in preparation for the funeral of an old colleague, Slowey, with whom he had become estranged.

From then on, the book tells Farley's life story in reverse chronological order — in 10-year increments — right back to his early childhood in 1940. Along the way we find out about his relationship with Slowey — the pair were in business together as law clerks, but they were also related by marriage  — and discover how things fell apart between them.

We learn about his marriage to Martina, a raven-haired beauty, who died from cancer very young, and how he never quite recovered from her death. And we learn of an adulterous relationship he began some time afterwards that created terrible repercussions from which he could never quite escape. There is also a heartbreaking chapter in which he must look after his senile mother, who often mistakes him for her lover.

An extraordinary portrait of an ordinary man

What emerges is a very human portrait of a complex individual leading an ordinary life, often in extraordinary times. As well as being a lovely, poignant and often humorous tale of one man's life, it is also a brilliant portrait of Dublin through the ages — before and after the Celtic Tiger. The second chapter is especially evocative of the streets and pubs and churches, and in Farley's attempt to attend a funeral, there's a very strong nod to James Joyce's Ulysses.

Indeed, this particularly chapter — by far the strongest in the entire novel — is laugh-out loud funny in places, as we get glimpses of Farley's inner-most feelings, often about ageing, that are deliciously wicked and acerbic. (For example, he would "prefer to eat his own vomit" than get meals on wheels; he wonders if it is worth going up to the alter during Slowey's funeral because "it's not as if he's believed in that fucking eejit for more than forty years".)

Dwyer Hickey is particularly good at detail — an elderly Farley making his way gingerly across a snowy garden path is like "a half-pissed tightrope walker", a neighbour has a "face bulged from the cold and there's a jellied, goitred look about her eyes", a stationary bus is "farting out a long bloom of fumes" — and she deftly balances a full gamut of emotions — sadness, grief, disappointment, joy and happiness — so that nothing feels cloying or tacked on.

My only quibble is that the younger Farley is far less interesting (and wicked) than the older version, so as the book gets closer to the end (and Farley's beginning) the narrative runs a little out of steam.

But in exploring the full arc of one man's life from grave to cradle, Dwyer Hickey is able to explore many themes, in particular what it is to get old, but also how love, betrayal and heartbreak can shape one's outlook. Her acute insights into the inner-most workings of the human heart, mind and soul make The Cold Eye of Heaven a rich, warm and humane novel.

'Our Daily Bread' by Lauren B. Davis

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial Canada; 312 pages; 2012.

Lauren B. Davis is a Canadian writer who lives in the United States. Our Daily Bread, her fifth title, was inspired by events surrounding the Goler Clan in Novia Scotia, some of whom were convicted for sexual abuse and incest in the 1980s.

A fictional god-fearing town

The story is set in the fictional bible-thumping town of Gideon, which is dominated by god-fearing folk who attend the Church of Christ Returning. 

Here, Dorothy Carlisle, a widow who runs an antique store, shuns efforts by well-meaning, if slightly righteous, neighbours to attend the church. And Tom Evans, a working-class man, keeps his head down, fearful that the locals will discover he is not married to Patty, the much younger woman he lives with, and their two children — Bobby, 15, and Ivy, 10.

Meanwhile, on the nearby mountain, the poverty-stricken Erskine clan eke out an existence by growing cash crops of marijuana and burgling homes and shops in the town. Recently they have turned to "cooking" crystal meth (methamphetamine) in a caravan.

An unlikely friendship

But Albert, 22, the oldest of the huge tribe of children that make up the clan, wants nothing to do with his elders — or "The Others" as they are known — because of the way in which he and his younger siblings are treated. (There are hints of incest, but the author refrains from going into detail.) He has built his own "one-door, two-window cabin" in the woods to escape their prying eyes and spends a lot of time reading novels or cruising around Gideon in his truck.

It is during one of Albert's drives around town that he meets Tom's son, Bobby. The pair develop a close if somewhat unlikely friendship, which is kept secret from both of their families. And it is this friendship which sets in motion a chain of events that culminates in an explosive finale.

An effortless, absorbing read

From the first page of Our Daily Bread I knew I was going to love this book. The clean rhythmic prose made it an effortless read, but it was the fully realised characters, the careful plotting and the slow-building tension that made it an absorbing one.

The novel is cleverly constructed: the narrative is told in the third person throughout, but from the perspective of each of the main characters, so that we get a glimpse of their often secretive worlds and the ways in which their dreams and desires do not match reality. Davis expertly intertwines their lives and has them intersect and rub against one another, as one would expect in a small town where everyone's business is common knowledge.

The characterisation is particularly superb — Erskine skilfully gets inside the heads of everyone from a young girl to an elderly widow, from a teenage boy to a working-class man, and makes them all feel flesh-and-blood real, with flaws and emotions and personal troubles. Each person is an "outsider" — Ivy is being bullied at school, Bobby is uncommunicative and realises his parent's marriage is in trouble, Patty does not love Tom and is having an affair, Tom is desperately in love with Patty but knows that whatever he does for her is never enough, Dorothy hates the town gossips and rejects their so-called Christian values, and Albert wants to escape the clan but knows they will kill him if he dares leave.

Complex psychological tale

This combination of characters provides a complex psychological narrative. Coupled with the real sense of place that resonates off the page — of both the mountain and the town — Our Daily Bread is one of those stories that completely draws you in to another world.

It's dark, without being claustrophobic, and redemptive without being cloying. Davis writes about disturbing subjects in a sensitive manner; there's nothing sordid or sensational here and in many ways the novel's great power comes from the things she doesn't say rather than the things she does.

But while it deals with dark subject matter it is not without lighter moments. I particularly enjoyed Dorothy's wicked sense of humour revealed in her interior monologues in which she pokes fun at the town gossips and their pious ways.

"Hello Mabel." Dorothy did not rise. Oh, Lord, she prayed, please don't start her talking about the church. Dorothy was still not quite over the unsettling image of Mabel McQuaid calling out to the Lord and babbling in a rhythmic jibber-jabber she referred to as speaking-in-tongues. Mabel, in fact, had not been at all pleased yesterday when, after the service, Dorothy asked her why angels didn't just speak in a language one could understand?

Ultimately, Our Daily Bread is a story about the danger of communities collectively burying their heads in the sand, of secrets, of ignorance, of inequality, of prejudice — and of the power of unlikely friendships. 

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Update September 2012: This book has been longlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize, so this review now counts as part of the Shadow Giller Prize 2012. I will include links to reviews by other jury members as and when they are published.

'Dirty Tricks' by Michael Dibdin

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 256 pages; 1999.

I do like a nasty narrator in a novel and the unnamed narrator in Michael Dibden's Dirty Tricks is right up there with the nastiest. He is also one of the most unreliable you will come across in modern fiction.

'Truthful' testimony

When the book opens, the narrator addresses us as if we are in a foreign court about to determine his fate. He tells us that he is going to tell us "the complete and absolute truth". We know that he is living in exile, possibly somewhere in South America, and that the British Government, which describes him as a "sordid sex murderer", has issued an extradition request for him to return to the UK. He admits that his "story is riddled with deceptions, evasions, slanders and falsifications of every kind" but that he is "innocent of the murders" detailed in the request.

But what we don't know is how many people he (allegedly) murdered and in what circumstances. In fact, we know very little about the crimes, other than it all began at a dinner party.

That's where the social action is in my country, among people of my class. Half the English feed fast and early and then go down the pub to drink beer, the other half eat a slow meal late and drink wine, before, during and after. (I am anxious that you should understand the customs and manners of the country where the events in question took place, so different from your own. Otherwise it may be difficult to appreciate how very natural it is that things should have turned out as they did.) When I say dinner parties, I mean drinking parties with a cooked meal thrown in.

You will gather by that quote that our narrator has a sense of humour and he's never more at home than when he is able to poke fun at the English middle-classes to which he so desperately wants to belong. That's because he's not really made much of his life — despite being brought up in the Home Counties by respectable, hard-working parents. He is 40,  still living in shared student accommodation in the "East Oxford slums" and gets about town on a "tenth-hand push-bike". He doesn't have many friends and he certainly doesn't have a regular girlfriend. He gets by teaching English to foreign students at a school run by a man he hates.

Entangled with a middle-class couple

But when he meets the Parsons — Karen, a physical education teacher from Liverpool, and her husband Dennis, a successful accountant cum wine snob — a whole new world opens up to him, one in which people live in large detached houses, drive Volvos and Audis, have successful careers and pensions.

It is at the aforementioned dinner party that his entanglement with the Parsons begins: during the meal he believes Karen is playing footsies with him under the table. This leads to all kinds of shenanigans — and he begins a rather sordid affair with Karen that is detailed in quite an explicit way (if you don't like dirty sex scenes, this is definitely not the book for you).

Once our narrator has inveigled his way into Karen's life, events get increasingly more outrageous — and hilarious — and if I said any more it would ruin the enjoyment for other readers.

No moral compass

The best thing about reading Dirty Tricks is being taken on a ride — in all senses of the word — by a narrator, who not only lacks a moral compass, he doesn't even seem to know which way is up. Initially, it's easy to pity him — a poor man who life and luck has overlooked — but then as the narrative unfurls you begin to get a better sense of his strange, skewed outlook on life. Our narrator not only has an inflated sense of his own importance, he is so lacking in empathy for anyone around him that he can only be described as a psychopath.

But while the underbelly of the book is very dark, it made me laugh out loud more than anything I've read since Jon Canter's A Short Gentleman. The further you get into the book, the more shocking our narrator's behaviour becomes. He manipulates people for his own end, but never seems to see the error of his ways. It is always someone else's fault. The humour mainly works because of the way in which he justifies his actions — and maintains his angelic innocence!

Thanks to se71 for alerting me to Dirty Tricks when I wrote about novels starring amoral protagonists earlier in the year. This delicious and very wicked black comedy — first published in 1991 — was perfectly in tune with my dry sense of humour.

'Rebecca' by Daphne du Maurier

Fiction - paperback; Virago; 448 pages; 2011.

Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca was first published in 1938 — and I may possibly be the last person on Earth to have read it. I decided it was time to find out why so many people — friends and bloggers included — count this novel as one of their all-time favourite reads.

Timeless classic

Rebecca is a timeless story about a young woman caught up in circumstances seemingly beyond her control, and while some have labelled it as either "women's fiction" or "Gothic romance" it doesn't really fit in with either description. Yes, it's about women — or more importantly, the relationship between the sexes. And yes, it's romantic. And yes, there are touches of the Gothic about it in the way the storyline is both scary and suspenseful.

But there are echoes of Jane Eyre, too, and of "country house" novels in which stately homes — and the people who run them — play a central role in the plot.

According to Sally Beauman, who wrote an afterword in the edition I read, du Maurier described the book as "a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower ... Psychological and macabre"  — and that pretty much sums it up perfectly.

The tale of a young woman who marries an older man

The basic story is about a young woman — tellingly she is nameless — who marries a much older man, Max de Winter, who is above her station. She meets him when she is living in Monte Carlo, as a companion to an older and quite trying American woman she does not particularly like.

Max is a handsome, well regarded gentleman with a large manor house called Manderley in England. He is in Monte Carlo trying to come to terms with the death of his wife, Rebecca, who was, by all accounts, a rather beautiful and popular woman prone to throwing lavish dinner parties.

When our narrator marries Max — against the advice of her boss — she must not only contend with a new life as a gentlewoman living in a style to which she is not accustomed, she must also live in the shadow of Rebecca who represents all the things she is not: graceful, educated, confident and loved. And from the very first (famous) line — "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" — we know that events have not played out as Max and his new bride might have wished. We get a further inkling of this when we discover that the stately home is now in ruins and that the story is being told from a "bare little hotel bedroom" in an "alien land".

From the outset du Maurier sets up a suspenseful premise: what events lead to Manderley's ruin and what of the fate of those who lived there?

Flowery language

I admit that when I first began reading Rebecca I was worried by the flowery language and the overly descriptive passages, particularly of Manderley and its beautiful grounds. The word that immediately came to mind was "overwritten". In many respects, the prose felt as if it had been composed by a young writer wanting to impress her reader — and I'm pleased to see that Beauman addresses this in her afterword. She, too, uses the word "overwritten" but she believes it was a deliberate ploy by du Maurier to put the reader in the head of a young, easily impressed and not very well educated narrator, who is amazed at the house when she first sets eyes upon it. I accept that that may well be the case.

Even so, I did find the prose style slightly wearing in its eagerness and enthusiasm. And while I realise that Mrs Danvers, the evil housekeeper, is supposed to be our narrator's nemesis and therefore the character we channel all our hate towards, I found her tiresome and a little too two-dimensional to be taken seriously.

That said, the terrific plot made up for these shortcomings. Du Maurier deftly scatters clues here and there to suggest that the much-loved Rebecca may not be all as she seems, but I seemed to miss most of them until they were pointed out (in a rather annoying way, it has to be said, by the narrator herself). This meant that the little twist in the middle caught me slightly off guard — which is always a good thing when, like me, you worry that you may be turning into a jaded reader.

Such an unexpected plot development turned what had been a fairly entertaining novel about a young woman readjusting her expectations of marriage into a page-turning mystery. I found myself racing to finish the book just to see how events would resolve themselves. The denouement, while slightly rushed and too neatly tied up, was satisfying.

A hugely evocative story

I can appreciate why so many readers clutch Rebecca to their hearts — it's a well crafted, hugely evocative story about married love and a young woman's search for identity and acceptance. Its filled with drama and emotion, and is played out against a grand backdrop of the rugged Cornish coast and a beautiful stately home.

And du Maurier is an expert at putting us inside the head of someone who is floundering and deeply uneasy about her place in the world, so that we want to cheer her on and tell her that she's better than she thinks she is!

While the story is memorable and will stay with me for a long time, on the whole Rebecca won't make it onto my list of all-time favourite reads. And I know I'm going to be slated for this, but it's at least 150 pages too long! That said, I am keen to explore more of du Maurier's vast canon of fiction, if only to see whether Rebecca is typical of her style.

'The Devil's Garden' by Edward Docx

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 323 pages; 2012.

Edward Docx's The Devil's Garden is a dark and disturbing story set in the jungle of South America. It's billed as a literary thriller, a kind of modern day Heart of Darkness, but it's quite a slow burner and it's not until page 218 — two-thirds of the way in — that the action really takes off.

A scientist obsessed by ants

Dr Forle is an entomologist studying the complex social hierarchy of ants. He is based at The Station, a remote scientific outpost in the jungle of an unspecified South American country, with his assistants, Lothar and Kim, four locals and a visiting missionary. Here he is midway through writing a book "that combines the best of my articles for the science journals with my research and findings".

He has a hidden past, which we never really come to find out about, only that his long-term partner has died and he has come to the jungle to "get away from myself. The man I was before — I didn't like him". He is a quiet, reserved man, self-contained and deeply committed to his work. (I hesitate to say the word boring, but it does spring to mind — although Dr Forle isn't adverse to sleeping with one of his crew and he does dabble with a bit of cocaine usage.)

But the equilibrium of his new life is soon disturbed when two visitors arrive unannounced — a Colonel and a Judge, closely followed by a boatload of soldiers. The guests are supposedly registering local people to vote, but their presence soon ushers in an unwelcome air of surveillance, corruption — and violence.

A sense of menace and unease

The book isn't a classic page turner in the sense one would expect, but there's enough menace and unease in the storyline to make it a compelling read. That Dr Forle continues to pretend that everything is all right, that his work must come first, was enough to make me realise that something very bad was probably going to happen at some point... But it does take an awful lot of ground work by Docx to get to the stage where the scales are lifted from our narrator's eyes — and then all hell breaks loose.

This fear is only heightened by the knowledge that The Station is so deep within the rainforest that "there is only one way in and there is only one way out: the river".

And the rainforest, which is dark and mysterious, filled with dangerous creatures and beautiful birdsong, heaving with humidity and crawling with insects, is a character all of its own — brooding, temperamental and frightening.

Lothar's light swept the black. Fronds and leaves and twine lit up, white as fish bones in the  darkness all around. Sometimes there was space, a deeper blackness; other times the forest closed in and we stood a moment — isolated, hemmed, claustrophobic. When we stopped to breathe, a dozen creatures gorged on our blood.

This deeply claustrophobic world, where no-one is to be trusted and where even the jungle is an enemy, is only mirrored by Dr Forle's study of the ants, which effectively become a metaphor for the human race. To hammer home this point, extracts from the book that Dr Forle is writing are scattered throughout the narrative, and in the following example, it's difficult to tell if he is writing about humans or ants:

On the one hand, we have the selfish-gene merchants, who claim that traits can evolve only for the good of the individual and not for the good of the group. This has many implications for biology, but also for our society: most of all, it turns the individual into the king of the biological hierarchy. Most of science covertly or explicitly subscribes to this view.

The insect theme is strongly maintained throughout the novel, where the river is described as being "as black as a scarab's thorax" and where "the insect trill was like some great tinnitus".

Dark, brooding, pessimistic

And while the prose cannot be faulted, there's something almost too dark, too brooding and too pessimistic about The Devil's Garden to make it an enjoyable read. (Peter Temple's Truth comes to mind.)

Its central redeeming feature, however, has to be its punchy, adrenalin-fuelled final pages (one particular scene left me reeling; it made me want to gag) and the delicious last sentence which suggests that some good may yet come out of such a poisoned Eden...

'The Sisters Brothers' by Patrick deWitt

Fiction - Kindle edition; Granta Books; 272 pages; 2011.

Canadian author Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers has been shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize and longlisted for this year's Giller Prize.

It is the kind of book that could best be described as an enjoyable romp. It's billed as a Western, but I saw it more as a road story — with guns and horses.

Set during the California gold rush of the 1850s, it is narrated by Eli Sister, one half of the Sisters brothers of the title, who makes his living as an assassin. But Eli is not your average killer for hire — he has a sensitive side, troubled by his weight, worried he'll never find a woman to settle down with and constantly dreaming of a different life, perhaps running a trading post "just as long as everything was restful and easy and completely different from my present position in the world".

His elder brother Charlie is more what one would imagine as a typical killer — he is ruthless, is attracted to violence and doesn't suffer fools. But he's also an alcoholic and his love of brandy means he spends a lot of his time on the road nursing horrendous hangovers.

At the beginning of the novel we learn that the pair have been hired by the Commodore — a mysterious man whom we never meet — to kill gold prospector Hermann Kermit Warm (now, that's what I call a great character name!). The brothers are based in Oregon and Warm is supposedly in California, hence their journey on horseback to hunt down their prey. Neither of them know why they have been asked to kill Warm, but this is the least of their concerns: there is tension between them because Charlie has been hired as the "lead" and therefore will get a greater share of the fee. Eli is not pleased.

Part of the reason that the novel is so entertaining is the relationship between the two brothers. The banter and constant, often petty, arguments between them are quite hilarious, especially the way in which they wind each other up and try to push emotional buttons just to get a reaction.

'What’s that? You’re not smiling, are you? We’re in a quarrel and you mustn’t under any circumstances smile.’ I was not smiling, but then began to, slightly. ‘No,’ said Charlie, ‘you mustn’t smile when quarreling. It’s wrong, and I dare say you know it’s wrong. You must stew and hate and revisit all the slights I offered you in childhood.’

While we only ever see things from Eli's perspective, he is a genuinely likable character, with just a few (quite serious) flaws. But what makes him so empathetic is that he recognises these flaws — "When my temper is up everything goes black and narrow for me. [...] I do not regret that the man is dead but wish I had kept better hold of my emotions. The loss of control does not frighten me so much as embarrass me" — and strives always to improve himself.

He loves his brother, but wishes he wasn't so free and easy with the drink — and his gun.

At first, his rather stilted old-fashioned voice takes some getting used to — mainly because it is free from contractions (these only appear in reported speech) — but there's a lovely rhythm to it which makes for a refreshing change.

My problem with the novel lies mainly with the story arc. The first half is essentially a series of set pieces strung together. There's nothing wrong with this per se, because they demonstrate the brothers' less obvious differences and their rivalries. This scene, in which Eli gives a woman he meets a generous tip, perfectly captures the contrast between them, but also the bond that they share:

She dropped the coin into her pocket. Peering down the hall in the direction Charlie had gone she asked, ‘I don’t suppose your brother’ll be leaving me a hundred.’ ‘No, I don’t suppose he will.’ ‘You got all the romantic blood, is that it?’ ‘Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.’

But the second half, in which the brothers find Warm and then set about the task for which they've been hired, falls a bit flat. It doesn't all go according to plan — that would be far too obvious — but it does get a bit melancholic. This isn't helped by Eli doing a little too much soul-searching —  "I thought, Perhaps a man is never meant to be truly happy. Perhaps there is no such a thing in our world, after all" — and later admitting that, "Sometimes I feel a helplessness".

If there is a moral to this story it might be this: that hired killers will get what's coming to them, eventually. 

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.

'The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance' by Edmund De Waal

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage; 368 pages; 2011.

Edmund De Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes won the 2010 Costa Biography Award. And yet this book is not a biography as such. It's a mix of memoir and history, with a little bit of art and some travel thrown in for good measure.

The hare of the title is carved out of ivory and is one of 264 netsuke that Edmund De Waal inherited from his Uncle Iggie. Netsuke are miniature sculptures from Japan, highly collectible and presumably worth a lot of money. De Waal, who is a potter by trade, is obviously enamoured of them and is keen to learn how these intriguing items came to pass. He also wants to know how they entered his family: where did his Uncle Iggie get them from?

While the book appears to centre on this special collection of netsuke — their origin, the ways in which they have been passed through three generations of De Waal's family — their appearance in the text is fleeting. This is more a story about De Waal's complicated, but intriguing, family tree — he is the direct descendant of the Ephrussi family, a Jewish banking and oil dynasty that originated in Odessa, Ukraine, rose to power in Paris and Vienna, but then crumbled when the Nazis seized their assets, including the family's famous bank, during the Second World War.

De Waal chooses to structure his book by starting near the top of his family tree, rather than working backwards as one might expect (or perhaps I've just watched way too many episodes of Who Do You Think You Are?) This is a gamble, because what happens if this person is the most interesting relative of the lot? Everyone else will pale by comparison and the narrative tension will be lost.

Arguably, Charles Ephrussi, whom De Waal introduces us to in Part One, is the most interesting relative he has in his tree. Paris-based Charles (1849-1905) is an art historian, critic and collector, who is immersed in the Impressionist era. He buys work from the likes of Manet, Pisarro and Degas and is depicted in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. If that's not enough, he is also the inspiration for Charles Swann in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He even starts his own periodical and becomes editor several years later.

It is Charles who buys the netsuke from Japan at a time when Japanese art was coming into fashion. And it is Charles who passes them onto a Vienna-based cousin, as a wedding present, setting them on a journey that is to stretch for more than 100 years.

I have to admit that there were times when I found this book slightly tedious — and dull. De Waal has a tendency to be self-indulgent, to explore the things that interest him rather than thinking about his reader, but his prose style is elegant and effortless.

Every now and then, however, there are little bursts of excitement — and shock — that lift the text out of the doldrums and give the narrative some extra impetus. I was particularly rivetted by the section in which the Nazis seized the Ephrussi family's palace, depriving them of their property and belongings. For a family so wealthy and privileged it must have seemed an astonishingly rude — and frightening — shock from which they never fully recovered.

But, overall, I had reservations about this book, perhaps because I'm not much of a "thing" person — material objects and accumulation of wealth don't interest me in the slightest. The Hare with the Amber Eyes resonated more with me as a history of anti-semitism in the 20th century rather than a "biography" of netsuke. It's an interesting book, but it's also a strange one, too.

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

'Bullfighting' by Roddy Doyle

Fiction - hard cover; Jonathan Cape; 214 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It's been a long time since I have read anything by Roddy Doyle. I devoured his Barrytown Trilogy in the mid-1990s, absolutely loved his Booker-winning Paddy Clarke, Ha, Ha, Ha and got ready to slash my wrists over The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. But I was less impressed with a Star Called Henry and so I didn't bother reading the two follow-ups in that series.

But when his latest book popped through the letter box unsolicited a month or so ago, I figured I should give the poor man a second chance.

Bullfighting is a volume of short stories that could be best categorised as tales of male middle-age angst. There are 13 stories in this collection, many of which have been published elsewhere, including the New Yorker and The Faber Book of New Irish Short Stories.

The men in this book are passive, weak and out of touch with their emotions. Those that are married seem unable to communicate on any meaningful level with their wives. In The Joke, one man feels as if he's invisible, that he's being taken for granted by his wife, but he cannot articulate the problem -- "Sick of what, but? He wasn't sure. The whole thing. Everything. He was just sick of it" -- so nothing is resolved.

It's even worse for Kevin in the story Ash. His wife tells him she's leaving him, but then she returns for one last romp in bed -- "She rode the arse off me" -- before disappearing again. He doesn't know if his wife is ever coming back. Indeed, he's not even sure if his wife has properly left him, because she's not taken any personal belongings with her. He is stuck at home with the kids, but does nothing -- he doesn't even have the courage to make a phone call -- to clarify the situation, to express his anger, or his dismay. He is kind of pathetic.

The over-riding theme here is men -- "miserable poor shites" as one character describes it -- stuck in ruts, of boredom, of monotony. Hanahoe, in the opening story Recuperation, puts it like this:

It's depressing, a life, laid out like that. Mass, driving the kids to football, or dancing. The pint on Friday. The sex on Sunday. Pay on Thursday. The shop on Saturday. Leave the house at the same time, park in the same spot. The loyalty card. The bags. The routine. One day he knew: he hated it.

But just as I was getting sick of the repetitive themes -- the family men growing old, coming to terms with the kids leaving home, of parents requiring care, of friends and neighbours dying of one disease (usually cancer) or another -- Doyle throws a curve ball in the form of Blood, a startling story about a married man who develops a taste for raw steak and wonders if he might be turning into a vampire.

The stories that follow are slightly more edgy, although they are still peopled by men facing the fact that they have already lived more than half of their lives. The signature story, Bullfighting, hints at men finally opening up and communicating with one another beyond the usual pub-talk of football and politics. It revolves around four childhood friends holidaying in Spain, sleeping by day, partying by night, and even if it is the drunkenness that allows them to talk openly, at least they are admitting their problems and failings.

The collection as a whole is an effortless read, told in warm and witty Roddy Doyle style.  But with so much male repression bound up in one book, most of it completely unresolved, I wondered how much of it is a true reflection of this generation -- okay, my generation -- of men? When Terence, in The Slave, says middle-age is all about "getting older, slower, tired, bored, useless. It's death becoming something real", is that what most men think -- and feel? Answers in the comments box, please!