Reading Matters

'Truth or Fiction' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 160 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Jennifer Johnston does a nice line in slightly kooky characters, and her latest novel, to be published on November 16, is no exception. Desmond Fitzmaurice, one of two main characters in Truth or Fiction, is a doddery old writer who's fallen into obscurity. He lives a rather privileged existence in a house on the Dublin waterfront, where he is waited on hand and foot by his second wife, the dour-faced Anna. For all intents and purposes he seems to be a gentle old soul prone to sentimentality and a hankering for times gone by.

But then London-based journalist, Caroline Wallace, enters his rather mundane world and this version of a polite, well-mannered chap nearing the end of his life, gets turned, ever so slowly, on its head. Caroline, who's been dispatched to interview him on the eve of his 90th birthday, isn't entirely sure what to expect. When she arrives the first thing she does is tell Desmond that:

"My editor asked me to come and interview you. She would like to bring you back to life again. She feels your work is too important to be let fade away, as it has. She would like me to reassess your work and also to do a feature on your lifestyle. How you live, how you have lived, the interlocking of your life and work."

Desmond is not entirely enamoured with the intrusion:

"You wish to take the unimportant garbage of my life and stir it in with the important, with my work. You wish to make me intelligible to the masses. I never wrote for the masses to read."

And yet, there's something about this new-found attention that wins Desmond over. Before long he is introducing Caroline to the important people in his life and confessing a succession of sordid events. But how much of what he tells her is truth, and how much of it is fiction? 

The beauty of this novel, Johnston's 16th, is not so much her typical restrained and unpretentious prose style, nor the fast-moving narrative that largely comprises dialogue, but her very human characters with their flaws and foibles. That Caroline arrives in Dublin reeling from a marriage proposal made by her partner of 10 years adds an extra layer to the story, for how much of her anger is affecting her opinion of Desmond? And why is she so angry in the first place?

Once again Johnston has delivered an entertaining and effortless read, one that can quite comfortably be read in an hour or two. It's a welcome return to form after her slightly disappointing Foolish Mortals; I only wish I hadn't raced through it so quickly, because it could be a long wait for her next one.

'The Haunting of Hill House' by Shirley Jackson

Paperback - fiction; Penguin Modern Classics; 246 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Reviewing two Shirley Jackson novels in the space of a week might border on overkill, but having very much enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle I was anxious to try The Haunting of Hill House, which was originally published in 1959.

First and foremost, unlike We Have Always Lived in the Castle, this is a horror story. Of course, the title itself should give you an inkling of the subject matter, which is essentially a rather creepy tale about a haunted house.

Now this is where I put up my hand and declare that I'm not much into the horror genre. I read so many of these types of books (think Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, James Herbert and Anne Rice) in my teens and early 20s that I eventually became bored with their formulaic style. And since then I can count on one hand the number of horror stories I've read (Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Bram Stoker's Dracula).

There's no doubt that The Haunting of Hill House is a creepy, look-under-the-bed-and-check-the-closet type reads. But in Jackson's capable hands it also has a smattering of humour throughout, so it's not overly claustrophobic and is far less spine-chilling than, say Stephen King's The Shining, which this book brought to mind quite a few times. But Jackson ratchets up the suspense by playing with the minds of the characters, so you're never entirely sure whether the terrifying events she depicts happen physically or psychologically.

The book opens with a rather ominous description of the house.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and some of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

Into this secluded mansion come four main characters: Dr John Montague, a doctor of philosophy, who thinks himself something of a "ghost hunter" and has rented the house for three months in order to find scientific evidence of the supernatural; Eleanor Vance, a 32-year-old loner, who has spent the past 12 years looking after her (now dead) invalid mother; Theodora, a Girl Scout type with psychic abilities; and Luke Sanderson, a liar, thief and heir to the house.

The house has two dour-faced caretakers, Mr and Mrs Dudley, who live in the closest town, six miles away.

"I don't stay after I set out dinner," Mrs Dudley went on. "Not after it begins to get dark. I leave before dark comes."
"I know," Eleanor said.
[...]
"So there won't be anyone around if you need help."
"I understand."
"We couldn't even hear you, in the night."
"I don't suppose--"
"No one could. No one lives any nearer than the town. No one else will come any nearer than that."
"I know," Eleanor said tiredly.
"In the night," Mrs Dudley said, and smiled outright. "In the dark," she said, and closed the door behind her.

It doesn't take long before creepy things begin to occur inside Hill House, but I'm not going to divulge them here. You'll just have to read the book yourself. But make sure you do it in daylight. And preferably not while you're alone.

'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 176 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Put the kettle on, grab yourself some snacks and make sure you've got no other plans when you curl up to read this book, because We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of those delicious, atmospheric reads from which you will not want to be disturbed.

I was caught in the sway of this mesmirising novel, Jackson's last (it was first published in 1962 and she died in 1965), from its opening lines:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

How could you not be intrigued by that?

Sadly, it's difficult to properly review this novel without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I'll refrain from telling you too much about the story. (A cursory glance at the blurb on this newly published Penguin Modern Classic edition does reveal one of the "secrets" but it doesn't ruin the suspense.) 

Basically, Mary Katherine, also known as Merricat, lives a secluded life with her sister and their bumbling, eccentric Uncle Julian, in Blackwood House, a Gothic-like mansion surrounded by woods on the outskirts of a village. Every Tuesday and Friday Merricat braves the wrath and scorn of the villagers ("The people of the village have always hated us"), who stare and gossip, to buy food and borrow library books. When she enters the grocery store the owner rushes to serve her before anyone else, while other shoppers stop what they're doing...

holding a can or a half-filled bag of cookies or a head of lettuce, not willing to move until I had gone out the door again...

This sense of creepiness builds further when she has coffee in the local coffee shop, because

If anyone else came in and sat down at the counter I would leave my coffee without seeming hurried, and leave.

It's almost like whichever way Merricat turns, there's an insidious, nasty reminder that she, and her family, are not wanted. But what did they do to earn this hate? The answer to this is the nub of the novel, so I'm not going to tell you here.

But essentially, the secretive, hermit-like existence that the Blackwood's lead is disrupted when Charles, a long-lost cousin, makes an unexpected visit and settles in for the duration. Merricat, a wayward, naive and some might say decidedly kooky teenager, feels so threatened by his presence that she goes out of her way to make him feel particularly unwelcome -- with intriguing consequences.

As much as I enjoyed this book and the oppressive, Gothic atmosphere it creates -- think The Village of the Damned meets The Wicker Man -- I did guess the main revelation before the half-way point. But even so, this is a thrilling read, and I can easily see why Shirley Jackson has never been out of print in her native America.

It's not a horror story per se, because it won't have you checking underneath the bed for monsters, but it's a kind of twisted fairytale with a dash of black comedy and a pinch of mystery. Or, as Joyce Carol Oates claims in the Afterword, "We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a 'happy ending' is both ironic and literal, the consequences of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice -- of others".

'The Gates' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction – paperback; Headline Review; 167 pages; 1998.

First published in 1973, The Gates is Jennifer Johnston's second novel, although at just 167 pages in length it feels more like a novella and can be easily consumed in one sitting.

It has a very simple linear narrative in which Minnie McMahon, aged 16, returns home to Ireland, where she is in the care of her elderly uncle, "The Major", and his forthright housekeeper, Ivy. Having completed her "expensive education" in England it is now time to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life. 

Here, free from the domineering clutches of her English aunt who keeps thinking that "if she tidies me up a bit, and shoves me into the London social whirl, some ghastly chinless wonder will lose his head and marry me," she unwittingly falls for Kevin, the local lad from a poor family who works for The Major. When Ivy points out that she's wasting her time and would be better to return to England and a secretarial college, Minnie insists that she is merely following in the footsteps of her late father, a socialist journalist, who married "beneath him" and was ostracized from the family because of it.

When she hatches a plan to help Kevin steal the extravagant gates that belong to the English Italianate-style mansion house in which she grew up you know there's a disaster in the offing...

In fact the gates are rather symbolic of her family's slide from Protestant Ascendancy, 150 years earlier, to the current situation in which The Major struggles to pay for the whiskey that keeps him functioning while the estate falls into a state of "peaceful decay":

Ornate, flamboyant, garlanded with carved flowers, they hung eight feet high between two stone pillars, topped by smiling lions. [...] Nowadays the gates hung open, pale with weather and age. The avenue that curved for half a mile under the tunnel of elms, was rutted and overgrown. The tiny pillared gate lodge had not been lived in since 1922, when it had been the scene of one of the Civil War's minor incidences. Nettles grew up now through the empty windows and in the height of summer foxgloves peered over the walls. No one any longer bobbed and smiled, or passed the time of day as the Major drove  in and out.

This is a book about youthful naivety and misunderstandings between people. But it also explores the uncertain role of the Anglo-Irish in the new independent Ireland and how they grappled with changing attitudes to religion, wealth and class.

It is far from being Johnston's most accomplished work, but it gives glimpses of her future talent and there are some passages in which Minnie talks to the ghosts of the house (a kind of metaphor for her troubled conscience) that are reminiscent of the magic realism in 1998's Two Moons.

Please note, other Jennifer Johnston books reviewed on this site include: Foolish Mortals, The Christmas Tree, The Invisible Worm, The Old Jest and The Gingerbread Woman.

'Foolish Mortals' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 312 pages; 2007.

If I had my wits about me I'd be reading Jennifer Johnston's back catalog in the order in which the books were written, so that I could appreciate her development as a writer. However, I'm not that well organised, and when I saw this book in Waterstone's the other day, while I was doing some last-minute Christmas gift buying, I snapped this one up for myself.

This morning, curled up in bed, I read it cover to cover and, not for the first time, wished my rating system featured half-stars. If it did, I'd probably award Foolish Mortals -- Johnston's most recent novel -- three-and-a-half stars: it's not one of Johnston's best, although it is by far her most accessible novel. The literary flourishes that characterise most of her books (or the ones that I've read so far) are not here, save for one character -- Henry -- telling his side of the story in the first person, while the rest of the story is narrated in the third person.

The book opens with Henry lying in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. We later learn that he's been involved in a serious car accident in which his wife, Charlotte -- the driver -- was killed. Save for a lot of broken bones, he's quite okay but his memory has been shot and it takes time for him to piece the past together.

So here I sit in this hospital room broken in pieces and little by little the past is revealing itself to me. Things I want to know and things that might be better left unremembered. How great it would be if you could only remember the good bits, the noble thoughts, the generosity, all the bits we hope for ourselves. Dreams, prayers, discard the blackness, let all the muck slide away.

Henry's amnesia is a great device for Johnston to throw in the "reveals" that normally irritate the hell out of me -- see my review of Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage for my thoughts on that particular literary device -- but in this context they're appropriate and don't seem as if the author is using them to show off.

Unfortunately, because the narrative relies on the unveiling of so many "secrets" to work it means I can't say much more about the storyline without ruining the plot for everyone else. But without giving anything away, Foolish Mortals is about the coming together of a dysfunctional family -- Henry's Canada-based brother, his first wife Stephanie, his almost-grown children and his 80-something mother, the rather gloriously eccentric Tash -- with the car accident as a catalyst and everything climaxing with a wonderful Christmas dinner.

It's delightfully kooky in places, although it never strays into outlandishness. The rambling family nature of the story does bring other authors to mind -- Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve and, dare I say it, Maeve Binchy -- but it still retains that distinctly Jennifer Jonhston feel with its economical use of language, its strong female characterisation and its deft analysis of ordinary human life. It was also refreshing to read a book by this writer set in New Ireland (as one of the characters dubs it) instead of some undefined period in history. I enjoyed it as a piece of literary "fluff" but if you're looking for a serious introduction to Johnston's work, this is probably not the place to start.

'Life in Seven Mistakes' by Susan Johnson

Fiction - paperback; William Heinemann Australia; 346 pages; 2008. Review copy courtesy of the author.

It seems somehow appropriate to review Susan Johnson's new novel, Life in Seven Mistakes, on Christmas Eve given that the book is set at Christmas -- although this is not how I planned it. I read this book in October and kept meaning to post my thoughts about it. As ever, life got in the way, and it's only now, with the fairy lights twinkling in my living room and my traditional chocolate festive cake baking in the oven that I feel inclined to put my thoughts down on paper.

The book opens on "a blistering December afternoon" on Australia's Gold Coast. The Barton family, which is spread across the continent, gathers at the parental home -- a penthouse in Surfers Paradise -- for the Christmas holidays. But this is no carefree, happy family get-together. There are underlying tensions and complicated family relationships with which to contend. It takes the reader a little time to come to terms with the wide cast of characters, but it is forty-something Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Bob and Nancy Barton, whose eyes we largely experience the "celebrations" through.

Married three times, and with three children from three different fathers, Elizabeth has not lead a conventional life. She's a ceramicist on the brink of international success -- she has a show in New York coming up and one at the Australian Embassy in Washington -- and yet her parents don't take her career seriously, particularly her 70-something father who equates success with being rich.

'You know what depresses me most?' Elizabeth says. 'How infantilised I become around them. Out there in the world I am an adult, with a career and a husband and a house. People buy my work and articles are written about it in art magazines. I'm about to have my first show at the best ceramics gallery in the world. I am a mother myself, for God's sake, with three children who depend on me. Yet Dad only has to start bagging artists and I'm like a kid trying to get his approval by showing him my best finger painting. Or Mum says something in a certain tone of voice and I turn into a ten year old.'

If that's not enough Elizabeth has to contend with a younger brother, Robbo, who is "loud and uncomplicated" and the apple of her mother's eye.

He was Nancy's joy, a boy who made her laugh and for years and years Elizabeth was jealous of him.

And then there's the never-mentioned youngest sibling Nick, a long-term drug user -- "the ghoul at the table, who always rises, covered in ash" -- who is in a low-security "correctional centre".

Throw in difficult spouses and an assortment of children, and it's no wonder Elizabeth finds the strain of Christmas almost too much to bear. Heightening this tension is Bob and Nancy's impending golden wedding anniversary, just four days after Christmas, upon which no one can agree how to celebrate appropriately.

Intertwined with this rather complicated, and at times funny, family drama is a second narrative that explores Bob and Nancy's life together, from lovestruck teenagers in the 1950s to hard-bitten parents trying to maintain control over three teenage children. It is this beautifully written element of the story that makes Bob and Nancy come alive in the eyes of the reader. You learn the source of Nancy's current primness, her forthright opinions on rearing children and her staunch support for Bob in the face of what others view as his ongoing rudeness, and you gain an admiration for Bob -- patronising, loud and overbearing as a retiree -- who worked his way up the career ladder from labourer to managing director of a major company through sheer bloody hard work, all the while supporting his family.

Life in Seven Mistakes has been described as a black comedy, but I'm not sure that's an apt description. While there are funny moments throughout the book, for the most part this is a richly layered family drama imbued with emotion. There's plenty of thought-provoking material here to mull over too: How do you ever reconcile your childhood with your adult life? How do parents cope with children who don't live up to expectation? At what point do you learn to accept responsibility for your own life and your own mistakes?

My only quibble with the book -- and it's a minor one -- is Johnson's tendency in places to be a little long-winded with the narrative and to over-explain things, but for the most part the prose style is effortless and authentically Australian. (Maybe it's me, but whenever Bob spoke I heard his voice in a distinctly occa accent, aka Australian acting legend Bill Hunter.)

But it's the somewhat unexpected ending, which ties everything together nicely, that rounds out this lovely tragic-comedy of a novel and makes it one of my favourites for the year.

'The Christmas Tree' by Jennifer Johnston

  Fiction - paperback; Fontana; 168 pages; 1982.

As I work my way slowly but surely through Jennifer Johnston's rather extensive back catalogue -- 15 novels at last count -- I'm constantly surprised and delighted by the quality and consistency of her writing. This one, first published in 1981, only serves to confirm my high opinion of her under-appreciated talents. In fact, no sooner had I finished this than I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it all over again because I so thoroughly enjoyed it.

Judging by the title alone The Christmas Tree sounds like it could be sentimental claptrap -- and the somewhat dated illustration on my cover doesn't do much to dispel that assumption. But this is truly a case of never judge a book by its cover, because what lies within is an exquisitely written tale about an Irish woman who returns home to die, and not once does Johnston resort to mawkishness or saccharine touches to achieve a deeply affecting story.

As ever, Johnston treats her readers with intelligence and lets them fill in a lot of the gaps. She's not one to spell things out -- she does a lot of show and not much tell -- and I like that kind of approach, although, admittedly, it may not be for everyone.

For most of The Christmas Tree I was trying to figure out the year in which the story was set. Beyond the odd clue here and there -- a pair of old fur-lined boots in the cloakroom "that my mother must have bought some stage during the war, when to keep warm was more important than to look elegant" and a Polish Jew whose deformed fingers were broken by soldiers who "should have really killed me too" --  I could only assume it was not long after the Second World War.

What we do know is that the London-based lead character, Constance, 45, is a failed writer and suffering from leukemia diagnosed shortly after the birth of her first child. She's returned to her childhood home in Dublin -- now lying empty after the death of both parents -- to die on her own terms. Her infant daughter is in the care of an older sister, Bibi, who is bossy, prone to fussing and can't understand her refusal to go to hospital.

Here, with a whiskey bottle for company, Constance writes to her child's father -- Jacob Weinberg, a Polish Jew she met on a sojourn to Italy -- to tell him that he now has a daughter. While she waits for his response, she arranges for a live-in carer, 18-year-old Bridie, to take charge of the house and to help her work on her final book, which she wants to be published posthumously. Meanwhile all medical care is delivered by Bill, a former boyfriend, now family doctor.

This may seem like a rather dull premise for a book, but Johnston makes it sing by employing three interwoven narrative threads that reveal little nuggets of information that make you want to read on and on. The first narrative -- told in first person from Constance's point of view -- is about her impending death as Christmas slides ever closer; the second is about her rather spontaneous romance with Jacob Weinberg in Italy; and the third is a kind of look-back on Constance's familial relationships with a kind but distant father, a cold somewhat uncaring mother, and an overbearing, but more popular, sister.

There are several themes running throughout The Christmas Tree, not the least of which is death: how we deal with losing loved ones and how we deal with our own impending expiration date.

You get the sense that Constance, a headstrong, stubborn and independent woman, is not prone to regrets, but as she reflects on her life she does wonder whether she has made the right decision to lead the rather solitary life that she has lead.

Suppose I had married Bill and we had gone to Connemara and had six children, would we have been better people? Happier? Would I have comprehended more in that isolation than I succeeded in doing in the isolation I created for myself? Would I have been able to write, in those circumstances, the books that I wanted so much to write?

A large part of Constance's history is that she does not really know or understand her coolly indifferent parents, and she tries to reconcile this as she recalls specific incidents from her troubled past.

I had always felt that after my mother's death I would find some kind of release, the awareness for the first time of an identity. It wasn't that we hadn't been great friends or even communicated with each other in any important way. On the contrary I had always seemed to be a source of great irritation to her, a curious disappointment. The fact that I had been born the wrong sex had been the first major setback, from which our relationship never really recovered.

Her father, a successful lawyer, was happy to support her move to London, but he remains largely unfathomable and she never feels that he truly loves her. Long after she's abandoned the writing career for a dead end job in an advertising agency, her father comes visiting and takes her out for a meal. He then makes an astonishing admission: he once had dreams of being a writer and had enjoyed a modicum of success writing short stories and plays when he was a student at Cambridge. He gave it all up because he "lacked commitment".

'You look at your children as they grow, mature a bit, and will, yes, will, that somehow they will succeed in having some of the attributes that you yourself regret having lacked. At least...' he flushed away the painful taste of the smoked salmon with some sherry '...some development of the qualities that you find admirable in yourself. Is it a failure of some sort if you only see your own weakness in your children? I wonder'

She felt the question was rhetorical and didn't say a word.

Can you imagine the pain of hearing that from your father? No wonder then that Constance has developed a rather spiky character -- indeed, Jacob calls her a hedgehog: "The first signs of trabble [trouble] and you roll up into a ball and put your prickles out." He also berates her for deflecting everything with humour. "Foolishness. Joking. Flippant joking. You are always joking, Constance," he tells her. "I would like to see you cry."

This is a short, all-too brief novel but all the major issues we have to confront during our lifetimes -- from choosing a career to having children, from never being able to escape the past to not ever truly knowing the people we should be closest to -- is encompassed within its 168 pages. There's no doubt that The Christmas Tree is a totally absorbing tale, but it's also one of the best I have ever read about the human condition. This is the kind of literature that makes you goggle-eyed with the sheer beauty of it. It's not exactly a festive read, but it is a memorable one.

'The Invisible Worm' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 181 pages; 1991.

Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston has, in recent times, become one of my favourite writers. This book, her ninth, was first published in 1991. The cover* of my Penguin edition (which I acquired at no cost from BookMooch) is deceptive, because this is not the historical novel I came to expect but a very modern one about the long-lasting impact of child abuse on one woman's life.

Despite the somewhat horrific subject matter, Johnston has created a delicately realised and completely unsentimental tale. In any other author's hands I'm afraid this story about a family's secret past would be elevated to melodrama, with everything spelt out in minute detail. But Johnston's strength is her ability to weave a complicated narrative using an economical palette of words. As ever, it's the things she does not say that make The Invisible Worm such an interesting, compelling read.

Set in an unspecified era -- is it before the Second World War, immediately afterwards or in the 1980s, I could not tell -- Laura Quinlan's quiet existence is shattered by the presence of Dominic O'Hara, a former priest turned school teacher, who keeps her company whenever Maurice, her busy, but rather doting husband, is away on business. It is clear from the outset that her platonic relationship with Dominic has an undercurrent of sexual tension, but she seems happy to leave it unfulfilled.

Laura is 37 and childless, though not for want of trying.

I did try to have a daughter.
I believe in continuity, the handing down of secrets; I want someone else to hear the whispers, the breaths from the past, as I have always done; someone else to be stirred by the tremors of memory.
Some of the tremors of memory.
I did try. All those seeds were rejected.

A recluse who lives in a lovely big house by the sea, she spends her days reading and gardening. Occasionally she gives dinner parties for Maurice's colleagues, where she is renowned for her "very good cake". But on the whole she seems a lonely, troubled woman who refuses to engage with other people or other places, content to stay at home and "guard this mad museum, the curator of my ancestor's folly".

When the story opens Laura is getting ready to attend the funeral of her father, a man held in such high regard by others that the Irish president and a "distinguished congregation" attend the service. But Laura's inner thoughts -- "The hole that they dig for you won't be deep enough, dear Father" -- reveal a hatred that seems slightly repellent, if intriguing, to the reader.

It's only later, when she meets Dominic, that she feels compelled to tell him a little of her dark, hidden past, as if she is confessing her sins to the priest he once was. And slowly, while the pair get to work unearthing the much-neglected summerhouse that once belonged to her long-dead mother, layers of the family's history are peeled back to reveal the rotten core. The denouement, when it comes, is heart-thumpingly shocking, matched only by the quiet devastation of the aftermath.

For anyone contemplating reading The Invisible Worm I offer a couple of caveats.

This is a simple story, but it jumps backwards and forwards in time and the lack of detail in the bare-boned prose takes a little getting used to, particularly if you are not familiar with Johnston's style.

There are little literary flourishes to contend with too, such as the constant switching between third person and first person narratives, which can make things confusing, and the sometimes ambiguous conversations between characters, full of interruptions and stilted language, can be difficult to comprehend. The secret, I have found, is to read Johnston's novels -- this one included -- in large chunks, rather than snatches here and there. You need to let the language wash over you so that you can find the rhythm of it. You will then find it difficult to let go.

* The cover shows A Summer Afternoon by Sir William Orpen, an Irish painter who died in 1931.

'Sorry' by Gail Jones

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 218 pages; 2008.

Gail Jones' fourth novel, Sorry, has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize as well as the Miles Franklin Award. Even before it was nominated for these prestigious literary prizes, I was looking forward to reading it. I gave Sixty Lights a glowing five-star review way back in 2006, so I expected high things from Jones' new one and promptly ordered a copy from Amazon as soon as it was available in paperback.

But Sorry was disappointing. I wanted to love it. I wanted to find it so brilliantly readable I would find it impossible to put down. Instead, it was the opposite: I'd put it down and then find it almost impossible to pick up. This bugged me, because I couldn't quite put my finger on the reason for my unwillingness to finish the book. And then it occurred to me: I simply did not like any of the characters, a cast of kooky, unlovable and deeply confused people that, quite frankly, annoyed the hell out of me.

Is this a shallow reason for not liking a book? Probably.

That said, Sorry deals with some big themes, not the least of which is Australia's shameful past treatment of Aboriginals in which children were taken from their families and raised with whites, what we now know as the "stolen generations". Jones' book is, indeed, timely, given that the country's newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, recently apologised for a (now defunct) Government Policy that ruined so many lives and caused so much heartache and pain.

The story, which is set in the remote outback of Western Australia during the Second World War, deals with this issue in a rather oblique way. Indeed, many readers, particularly those who know nothing of this dark history, may not even pick up on it -- although Jones provides a helpful, if slightly cloying, explanation of it in her acknowledgment at the end of the book.

The novel opens with the central character Perdita telling the story of her childhood in the Australian wilderness. Her parents, Nicholas and Stella, are English immigrants. Both are relatively complicated characters with a love of literature -- their shack in the outback is filled to the brim with books, all imported from the Mother country -- but their relationship is a loveless one. Indeed, Nicholas secretly engages in sexual relations with aboriginal women, while his wife slips into a dark depression (she is hospitalised on more than one occasion) and becomes increasingly obsessed by Shakespear's work.

Perdita, often left to her own devices, makes friends with Mary, an aboriginal teenager from an orphanage, who comes to live with them as the "hired help". Their relationship becomes an especially close one, almost as if they are sisters.

It would remain wholly separate, Perdita's time with Mary. There was something implacable, sure, about what they shared. Mary was by turns girlish and adult, but she looked after Perdita, daily attending her, offering companionship, knowledge and caring advice. She taught her poker (how to shuffle, to deal, how finally, to cheat), desert songs (learned from her mother from whom she'd been taken), and the lives of the saints (the strange details of which she had read about in the orphanage).

But this tender relationship -- and one of the strengths of the book, it has to be said -- comes to an abrupt end when Nicholas is brutally murdered one dark night.

It's no plot spoiler to say that Perdita's life is changed from then on, but I felt that the death came too early in the story (less than half-way through), because the book loses momentum after this dramatic event. I struggled to complete it, because although the murderer is not immediately obvious I'd already guessed who it was (the product of reading too many crime thrillers, perhaps?) and so I found the remaining 120-plus pages a bit of a drag -- although the ending is a powerful, heart-wrenching one.

To suggest that Sorry is a little bit of a bore, a little dull, may be harsh, especially given that I simply cannot fault Jones beautiful, poetic prose, her pitch-perfect descriptions of the Australian bush and the sheer isolation of the country, far removed from the horrific events of the war in Europe. But the story lacks a certain something, although I can't quite put my finger on it aside from its decided lack of lovable characters. Perhaps it's narrative drive? Perhaps it's a properly structured story arc?  Whatever the case, my overall opinion is that Sorry is a worthy book but not a brilliant one. Still, what's the bet it will probably win every literary award going!

'The Old Jest' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 158 pages; 1984.

This classic text by Irish writer Jennifer Johnston won the Whitbread Award for the best novel of 1979, the year in which it was first published.

It's set immediately after the Great War in an unspecified village by the sea, a short train journey from Dublin. Here 18-year-old Nancy, an orphan, lives with her Aunt Mary and her invalid grandfather, a veteran of the Boer War. It's summer and Nancy is on the brink of adulthood, excited about starting her new life, but reluctant to bade goodbye to childhood.

Secretly in love with her neighbour, Harry, a city worker who treats her like a younger sister, she knows deep down inside that he will never reciprocate her feelings: he's too busy wooing another villager, the haughty Maeve Casey.

Nancy, naive but headstrong, spends much of her time alone at the beach, where she discovers a secluded hut -- "built by some railway workers many years before, cleverly hidden in among the granite blocks, which protected it from the sea wind" -- that she makes her own.

During one visit she discovers, much to her annoyance, that someone else has been using the hut, and before long she meets the intruder, an older man, in hiding, whom she befriends. And then, one day, he shows her his gun...

This is a typical Jennifer Johnston book, told in sparse but highly evocative prose. Her protagonist Nancy is acutely believable -- although she appears strangely unworldly compared to today's teenagers, a product, perhaps, of the time in which the book is set.

What I liked most was the author's reluctance to spell everything out, forcing the reader to join the dots and interpret all the very many things left unsaid or unexplained. But that is very much a Johnston trademark and one that works to particular advantage here, least of all because the story has a very dark heart -- should you fight for your family or your country? -- that would lose its impact should it be spelt out in black and white. In fact, it's the shades of grey that Johnston specialises in that makes many of her books, not just The Old Jest, so beautiful and perfectly self-contained.

And the ending -- a powerful wallop that ties everything up in a neat package -- makes it all the more satisfying to read.

'Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry' by B. S. Johnson

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 187 pages; 2001.

What goes around, comes around. This is the premise behind this short, quirky and experimental novel, by the late B.S. Johnson, which was first published in 1973. Sadly, the author killed himself not long after publication.

Christie Malry, a simple man from a humble background, decides that if he can't have money he will work close to it. He therefore takes a lowly job at a bank where he learns the principles of double-entry book-keeping. It is only when he moves to a new position as an invoice clerk in a sweet factory that he decides to apply the system of credit and debit to his own life. This system allows him to "even up" all the hard (and not so hard) knocks that society throws at him, so that if he feels aggrieved by something -- for instance, his boss yelling at him -- he must balance the books by doing something to accrue credit -- for instance, playing a prank on his colleagues.

As the novel progresses Christie's credits become more and more outlandish -- and criminal. Bomb hoaxes, death threats and then poisoning of the water supply become the order of the day. Eventually, Christie's account is settled in full in a very karma-like if tragic way.

Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, which is set in post-war Britain (Hammersmith, west London, my local neighbourhood, to be precise), is best described as a black comedy strangely reminscent of the early work of Iain Banks. It's very dark and very funny. But it's also very experimental, with the author's voice constantly intruding, so that the reader is able to see how the novel has been constructed. This is a good example:

An attempt should be made to characterise Christie's appearance. I do so with diffidence, in the knowledge that such physical descriptions are rarely of value in a novel. It is one of the limitations; and there are so many others [...] I have often read and heard said many readers apparently prefer to imagine the characters for themselves. This is what draws them to the novel, that it stimulates their imagination. Imagining my characters, indeed! Investing them with characteristics quite unknown to me, or even at variance with such descriptions as I have given! Making Christie fair when I might have made him dark, for an instance, a girl when I have shown he is a man? What writer can compete with the reader's imagination! Christie is therefore an average shape, height, weight, build, and colour. Make him what you will: probably in he image of yourself. You are allowed complete freedom in the matter of warts and moles, particularly; as long as he has at least one of either.

Ultimately, this book is a fast and funny read backed up by an alarming plot brimming with anger, but some readers may find it too "gimmicky" or experimental. I very much enjoyed it and read it in one sitting.

'Two Moons' by Jennifer Johnston

 

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 232 pages; 1999.

Two Moons is another startling novel by Jennifer Johnston, who  writes in a crisp, clear style reminiscent of so many of her Irish counterparts.

A kind of cross between Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and Salley Vickers' Instances of the Number 3, this book is part comedy and part family drama, but has an element of spiritual "fantasy" that gives it an unusual twist -- although some readers may find it too "inventive" for their liking.

Essentially it is a story about three generations of women, two of whom live together -- Mimi, the elderly grandmother, and her daughter, the stage actress Grace -- in a house overlooking Dublin Bay.

As Grace readies herself for an upcoming role in Hamlet, the family equilibrium is thrown off-kilter by two major events: the appearance of an angel, who can only be viewed by Mimi, and a surprise weekend visit by Polly, Grace's London-based daughter, whose new boyfriend leaves a lasting impression that lingers long after he leaves.

To say any more would spoil the plot of the book. But it has a raw emotional urgency coupled with a few  unexpected "kinks" in the storyline that kept me turning the pages. The characters -- especially Mimi -- are very well drawn, and Johnston's writing is taut but sophisticated: she knows how to move a scene along using crisp dialogue, few details and little else.

My only quibble is the overuse of the moon motif -- the Two Moons title comes from the reflection of the moon in the ocean -- and the fact that pretty much every scene depicted involves wine -- whether pouring, drinking or spilling it -- which began to wear very thin very quickly.

On the whole, Two Moons is a bittersweet story about love, betrayal and growing old while trying to come to terms with disappointments of the past. It's a quick read with a kind of fairy-tale twist -- wonderful, if you like that sort of thing.

'The Gingerbread Woman' by Jennifer Johnston

 

Fiction - paperback; Review; 213 pages; 2000.

This beautifully succinct novel tells the story of two lonely 30-somethings, both coming to terms with personal tragedies, who forge a tentative -- and rocky -- friendship, almost by accident, on a cliff top overlooking Dublin Bay.

Clara, a freelance writer and lecturer who lives in a house filled with clutter and an overgrown garden, is recovering from major surgery and nursing a broken heart after a failed love affair in New York.

Meanwhile Laurence (Lar), a teacher from Northern Ireland, is mourning the loss of his wife and 10-month old daughter, who were killed two years' earlier.

Both characters have much in common -- they are dealing with loss and grief, and the claustrophobia of familial concern -- but they deal with their problems in vastly different ways. Clara is outspoken, blunt to the point of rudeness and self-deprecating; Lar is filled with hate and quietly stewing in his own anger.

However, as the story gradually enfolds we see that it is Clara who finds it difficult to express herself, other than on the written page, while Lar opens up to strangers, expunging his guilt and pain like verbal diarrhoea.

With no real plot to speak of, the narrative force of this novel revolves around each character's growth and journey to self-realisation. It is not a romance novel -- the friendship between the two is purely platonic -- but it is a novel about the fragility of the human heart.

Johnston, who is an acclaimed writer in her native Ireland, is a master at drip feeding information so that the reader is never quite sure what is driving her characters to say and do certain things. Then a certain fact is revealed that slots neatly into place and everything suddenly makes sense. I am sure I said 'a-ha!!' out loud several times while reading this book as fragmented pieces of information began to join up in my head to form one cohesive -- and intriguing -- whole.

My only quibble is that I found it hard to believe that a single woman would invite a strange man, who is "sick in the head" as she puts it, to come and stay with her for a few days... but then maybe this just demonstrates Clara's naivety and trusting nature, traits which have landed her in trouble in the past.

Ultimately The Gingerbread Woman is a very sad and emotional book, but it is a compelling tale about hope, second chances borne through friendship and human resilence in the face of personal tragedy. I loved this near-perfect book and did not want the story to end and will definitely be reading more by this wonderfully talented writer.

'Out of the Silence' by Wendy James

Fiction - paperback; Random House Australia; 320 pages; 2005. Review copy courtesy of the author.

This delightful book by first time novelist Wendy James is set in Australia at the dawn of the twentieth century.

It revolves around two women from vastly different backgrounds: Maggie Heffernan, a headstrong working-class country girl; and Elizabeth Hamilton, a well educated Scottish immigrant keen to start afresh after the death of the doctor to whom she had been engaged to be married.

Elizabeth's friend Vida Goldstein, an early feminist reformer and the first woman to stand for Parliament in Australia, is also a central pivot to the story, which goes something like this.

Maggie, spirited and inclined to leap before she looks, falls in love with the local town scoundrel and falls pregnant. When he secretly scampers off to Melbourne, Maggie follows but is unable to find him. Refusing to admit that she has been abandoned, she finds a job as a domestic help in a Melbourne hotel, hoping that no-one will notice her expanding girth.

Meanwhile Elizabeth, who narrates her story through a series of diary entries and letters to her American-based journalist brother, lives with her cousins in South Yarra and works as a teacher at the school set up by the Goldstein family. For the most part she is able to keep her head above water, but she is desperately lonely and seeks "a home, hearth, love -- even children. To have a future! To be released from the prison of this solitary existence."

It is only when Maggie is arrested for a terrible crime that the worlds of these two women collide. I don't wish to spoil the story line, because it is this collision -- a completely unexpected turn of events that caught me, as a reader, totally off guard -- that is the high point of this novel. In many ways, it divides the novel in two, because the chapters that follow are like a different book entirely.

Out of the Silence is based on a true story, which gives it extra gravitas. There are newspaper extracts and letters to the editor of The Age to give added weight (I suspect these are real but I cannot be sure).

The prose is confident and the characterisation is strong. But I found some sections tedious and believe it could have benefited from the odd cut or two. While it is supposed to convey the plight of women in the early 1900s and the suffrage movement, some points -- for instance is it better to marry for love or security? -- were laboured a little too strongly.

Plus, and this generally happens to me whenever there is more than one narrator, I found myself enjoying Maggie's entries more than Elizabeth's.

Still, this is a fascinating easily-digestible read that throws up many questions about the role of women, and I suspect those readers interested in the suffrage movement will find much to delight them in Out of the Silence.

Unfortunately, the book is only available in Australia, so if you reside elsewhere try Angus & Robertson's online store or Abebooks.

'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce

Fiction - paperback; Flamingo; 272 pages; 1994.

First published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical first novel that has been much lauded for its inventive use of language and its expose on the claustrophobia of growing up in holy Catholic Ireland.

Stephen Dedalus, the narrator of the novel, tells his story stream-of-consciousness-style from early childhood, where he boards at a strict Jesuit school, to early adulthood, when he has a crisis of faith, abandons his religion and flees his country.

The first part of his novel is enormously entertaining and deeply moving. Joyce captures the voice of the child protagonist so well, you want to wrap the young Stephen Dedalus up in your arms to protect him from the school bullies and the violent priests. When he makes a decision to stand up for himself, albeit under some duress from his school chums, you feel his fear, but then you also share his elation when he confronts that fear and survives.

Unfortunately, for me, the charm and beauty of the book's opening chapters is not sustained. As the story progresses and Stephen grows older, the narrative becomes more complicated, with intricate, sometimes overly wordy passages that are difficult to follow. By the time Stephen is at university, the intellectualising of this thoughts are almost unfathomable! More than once I had to backtrack and re-read entire pages to try to make sense of them.

I suspect this change in narrative style is supposed to mirror the changes in Stephen's maturity. We see him lose his childhood innocence, undergo a sexual awakening (in which he sleeps with a string of prostitutes) and then feel the full weight of Catholic guilt on his shoulders. Later, when he goes to university, we experience his intellectual development and his gradual revolt against his religion, much to the chagrin of his close friends who fail to understand how he can no longer believe in God.

I have to confess that I absolutely loved and adored the first 100 or so pages of this book, which were  mainly narrated in a direct style and provided some of the best descriptions of what it is to be a child that I have ever read. It was when the narrative got more complicated, more experimental, that it failed to hook me as a reader. But on the whole having largely enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I'm pleased to say I have overcome my fear of Joyce... and I now have Dubliners in my sights!

[You can read my initial impressions of this book here and here.]

'Sixty Lights' by Gail Jones

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 224 pages; 2005.

Sixty Lights is a compelling, captivating novel about one young woman's drama-filled life in Victorian times.

Orphaned as a young child, Lucy Strange and her younger brother are brought up by a slightly eccentric uncle. Leaving their native Australia, the family moves to Dickensian London, a city that was "too vast, too chill and altogether too drear". Later, Lucy sets forth for the more exotic India, where she sets up home with her uncle's fey friend in a wealthy European enclave of Bombay.

Throughout the ups and downs of her life (love affairs, depression, oceanic travel) Lucy keeps a diary "bound in purple morocco and tied with a black ribbon" where she "recorded and stored her apprehensions, not of events, but of images". She calls this diary Special Things Seen. Her eye for detail is so keen she becomes a photographer, recording the people, places and objects that so deeply affect her.

Given that Lucy is to meet her death when she is just 22 - this fact is revealed to the reader at the very start of the novel - her eye for beauty, photographic talents and passion for life resonates even more strongly, because you know (that she doesn't know) that she's running out of time to make every moment count.

As a previous post may have indicated, I fell in love with the grace and beauty of Sixty Lights. This is a gorgeous, evocative and handsomely written novel that defies description. It's a book to wrap yourself up in, a book in which you can let the perfect, lyrical prose wash over you. There are sentences in Sixty Lights that make you stop and smile, others that you want to hold close and etch on your mind forever. (One of my favourites, from page 126, is this: "His shape above the desk was a human comma: everything about him paused.")

It is ripe with symbolism and littered with references to photographic processes and techniques (for instance, from page 5,  "the blinding flash of a burnt magnesium ribbon"). There are multiple layers of meaning that aren't fully appreciated on just one reading. I don't re-read books but I feel that with this one, I must. And I know I will enjoy it just as much, if not more, second time around.

'The Earthquake Bird' by Susanna Jones

 

Fiction - paperback; Picador; 272 pages; 2002.

Did she do it, or didn't she? This is the one question that propels the reader to keep turning the pages in this unusual but gripping murder mystery.

I read this book in one sitting - okay, so I was trapped on a long-haul flight from London to Melbourne, but even if I wasn't I'm sure I would have read The Earthquake Bird just as quickly.

Set in Japan, it tells the story of an ex-pat English woman, Lucy Fly, working in Tokyo as a translator. She is arrested by police on suspicion of murdering a fellow English backpacker. What the reader is never quite sure of is this: is Lucy telling the truth? And why did she leave Yorkshire all those years ago? Why is she no longer in touch with her family? What exactly is she hiding?

Susanna Jones has written a sparse but intriguing novel with a menacing undertone throughout. As well as being a gripping, intelligent read, I found the insights into Japanese culture equally interesting. It's also very reminiscent of Losing Gemma by Katy Gardner.

But don't just take my word for it:  this book won the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Best First Crime Novel of 2001.

'Enemy Women' by Paulette Jiles

Fiction - paperback; Fourth Estate; 302 pages; 2003. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Remember the Lassie movies? I remember one particular one — Lassie Come Home I think — in which the collie overcomes great obstacles and distances to return home to her owner. She has had such a difficult journey her little paws drip blood and you don't expect her to survive. It sounds pathetic, but I remember crying my eyes out at the end. It's odd, I know, but I can't help comparing the emotional impact of that old black and white movie with Enemy Women.

Set in America during the Civil War, the heroine, Adair Colley, is imprisoned under (false) accusations of being a Confederate spy. Feisty and determined, the 19 year-old escapes jail and goes on an amazingly tortuous journey to reunite her family torn asunder by the war. During her long walk home we see her being worn down mentally and physically, courting danger at every turn. She has many narrow escapes and before long the reader begins to wonder if she will ever reach her destination at all.

I won't spoil the ending, but let me say it was like watching Lassie Come Home all over again. I'm not ashamed to say I had tears coursing down my cheeks by the time I turned the last page.

This is a brilliant book, extremely evocative of a past era, and while it plays the emotion card it's never cloying or overly sentimental. It will, I'm sure, make a brilliant movie should the screen rights ever be sold. Take your tissues.

'Waiting' by Ha Jin

 

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 309 pages; 2000. Translated from the Chinese.

Set in China during Mao's Cultural Revolution, Waiting is a simple love story on one level and an in-depth exploration of human longing in a deeply restrictive society on the other.

Lin Kong, a city doctor, finds his arranged marriage to a simple but loyal peasant woman a burden, particularly as he is in love with a modern, educated woman, Manna Wu, with whom he works. His relationship with Manna, while unconsummated, is tender and heart warming, but as the years go by — 17 in fact — it becomes more and more strained: will Lin ever divorce his wife and if he does, will the wait be worth it?

This is a lovely fable, beautifully written with poetic descriptions of the Chinese landscape and wildlife. It has a magical, dreamlike quality and is a fascinating insight into an otherwise 'voiceless' society.