Reading Matters

'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes

 

Fiction - paperback; Gollancz; 224 pages; 2000.

Daniel Key's Flowers for Algernon is a very special science fiction novel that reveals much about the human condition and the ways in which we relate to others. It touches on many issues including the way we treat the mentally handicapped, the ethics of scientific experimentation on animals (and humans), our desire to be "normal", the differences between IQ and EQ, and the ways in which our childhood experiences impact on our adult lives.

It was initially published as a novella in 1959 for which it won the best short fiction prize at the 1960 Hugo Awards. Keyes then expanded it into a full-length novel but it was rejected by five publishers. When it was finally printed by Harcourt in 1966 it won the Nebula Award for Best Fiction that same year.

I read the short story version of Flowers for Algernon when I was at secondary school, but this was the first time I'd read the fully fledged novel. It tells the story of Charlie Gordon who has an IQ of just 68. He is 32 years old, no longer has any contact with his family and supports himself by working in a bakery, where he sweeps the floors and runs errands.

Researchers at the local university select him to take part in a scientific experiment designed to boost his intelligence which has already proved successful on a mouse called Algernon. The story is told in diary form, or "progress reports", from Charlie's perspective. Initially his writing abilities are rather dubious, with grammatical errors and phonetic spellings throughout, but as his intelligence increases so does his ability to express himself.

Within quite a short period of time, Charlie becomes much cleverer than his colleagues at the bakery, who begin to shun him because they don't understand his sudden transformation from simpleton to genius. But his emotional development is still stunted, which causes problems with how he relates to others, especially women.

Things begin to unravel when he attends the scientific conference, where the success of the experiment is to be announced to the public for the first time.

We were the main attraction of the evening, and when we were settled, the chairman began his introduction. I half expected him to boom out: Laideezzz and gentulmennnnnn. Step right this way and see the side show! An act never before seen in the scientific world! A mouse and a moron turned into geniuses before your very eyes!

From then on, Charlie goes on an amazing psychological adventure as he comes to terms with his past (including the mother who dumped him in a home when he was a young boy because he wasn't "normal") and develops feelings for the teacher who once took pity on him. It's an amazing journey, full of ups and downs. It's also hugely emotional, because as Charlie's self-awareness and moral conscience grows, so does his frustration and his pain. Was the experiment really worth it? Was he really better off being exceptionally intelligent? Or was he happier being a simpleton who at least knew his role in the world?

I won't spoil the ending, but it's a thought-provoking one. I'm so glad I read this truly wonderful book, because it's a story that will stay with me for a long time. Despite its age it seems remarkably contemporary. If you've never read any science fiction before, this may well be the place to start.

----

This book was chosen by Jackie as part of our Riverside Readers book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members:

• Simon's review

• Novel Insights' review

'All Names Have Been Changed' by Claire Kilroy

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Claire Kilroy is a young Irish writer whose debut novel, All Summer, published in 2003, garnered much critical acclaim and earned her the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. It was also shortlisted for the 2004 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Her second novel Tenderwire (2006), a literary thriller set in New York, was shortlisted for the 2007 Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year but lost out to Patrick McCabe's Winterwood.  I read it last August and thought it was such an intelligent page-turner I was eager to read more of her work. So when I found out there was a new one on the way I asked Faber and Faber if they'd be kind enough to send me a proof copy, and they obliged.

Sadly, I found it very difficult to "get into" All Names Have Been Changed and I put it aside, hoping I might find it more rewarding if I picked it up at another time. And so it lay abandoned on my bedside table for almost two months, until I picked it up last night to give it another try. This time the book seemed more readable and I eagerly made my way through the remaining 100 or so pages, but ultimately I found it disappointing in comparison to Tenderwire.

The book is set in 1980s Dublin and is about a group of creative writing students at Trinity College who become dangerously obsessed with their tutor, the world-famous PJ Glynn. It is narrated by Declan, the only male student in the class of five, but not much seems to happen and before long, as harsh as this will sound, the reader begins to wonder whether there is any point in ploughing on.

Because this is a book about group dynamics and personalities, it seems odd that none of the characters, bar Glynn, a stereotypical drunk Irishman, and Declan, the impoverished student, are particularly memorable. Perhaps it was just me, but the others -- Antonia, Aisling, Faye and Guinevere -- seemed indistinguishable from each other, so I could never quite remember which one was the mature student, which one was the Goth and which one was rumoured to be abused by her husband. This seems a fundamental flaw given this is essentially a story about writing.

But, in a way, it is this examination of what it is to be a writer that makes All Names Have Been Changed such an interesting read. If you have ever participated in a writing class or idolised a particular author, then much of the content will resonate.

There's a lot of literary in-jokes here, too, and probably far too many of them went over my head, but it becomes apparent as the story moves on that the participants in the group find themselves acting out roles in a novel. Indeed, at one point, Declan realises that he is no longer aping Glynn but the characters in Glynn's books.

And Kilroy takes it further by giving each chapter a title taken from a real-life Irish book or song -- for example, I don't like Mondays; The Book of Evidence; The pipes, the pipes are calling; and Tarry Glynn -- half the fun of which is identifying their source.

Such a gloomy, sombre novel -- remember, this is set during a time when the length of Dublin's dole queues were notorious and the city was in the grip of a heroin epidemic -- begs for this light relief, but I'm not sure the dark humour truly works.

While Kilroy's prose cannot be faulted (the oft-used phrase "beautifully written" has never been more apt) and the tone is measured and the atmosphere suitably claustrophobic, it feels as if something is missing. I suspect it might be a tighter plot, because even as a character-driven novel I don't think All Names Have Been Changed quite pulls it off. You might beg to differ.

'Time After Time' by Molly Keane

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 247 pages; 1990.

I have Sinead Gleeson and regular commenter Tony S. to thank for my introduction to the late Molly Keane. Both suggested I try the Irish writer when I was casting about for female authors to read early last year. Two of her novels, Time After Time (first published in 1983) and the Booker shortlisted Good Behaviour, were promptly added to my wishlist.

Fast forward 15 months, and I finally got to read my first Keane a couple of weeks ago. And boy, was it worth the wait.

Time After Time is a gorgeously fun novel that seems frothy and lighthearted on the surface, but underneath there's a very dark heart forging its own steady rhythm. It's not immediately obvious but this is a story about cruelty and the nasty things people do to each other.

It's set in a beautiful but crumbling mansion in Southern Ireland where four elderly siblings reside. Each of them is eccentric, fiercely independent and set in their own ways. The only things they have in common is their love of animals -- each fusses over their own cat or dog, treating them like substitute children -- and their treasured memories of their darling Mummie. There's one-eyed Jasper, who rules the kitchen, and his three ridiculously named sisters, April, May and Baby June.

April, the only one to have married, is now widowed but still bangs on about her late husband, Colonel Grange-Gorman, and is somewhat obsessed with preserving her looks and her figure. She's stone deaf so any conversation with her is full of misunderstandings, making her ripe for comedic effect.

May is the one obsessed by handicrafts -- she's been president of the Flower Arrangers' Guild for years and instructs members of the Irish Countrywomen's Association in the art of picture-making from scraps of tweed, wool and sprigs of heather -- despite the fact she was born with only half a finger and a thumb on one hand.

Baby June is the hard grafter, the one who runs the farm with the help of a local Catholic boy, and is an accomplished horsewoman, who achieved much success in point-to-points when she was younger but now considers herself too old to ride. 

(That's all of them pictured above -- I simply love this cover, because it depicts each chacracter perfectly, right down to the types of clothes they are wearing as described by Keane in the text.)

Together the Swift siblings rub each other the wrong way. Meal times are fraught with petty squabbles and half-imagined slights. The sisters belittle each other in order to compensate for their own failings, while Jasper seeks refuge in his closely guarded friendship with a local monk.

Into this mêlée comes cousin Leda, who arrives unannounced for a short stay. Now elderly, fat, blind and widowed, Leda was once a very beautiful young half-Jewish girl with whom the Swifts lost contact during the Second World War. Indeed, the family believed she had most likely died in a concentration camp. Her visit is but the first in a string of surprises that shakes each of the siblings to the core and leaves them all wishing she really had died in the Holocaust... 

I told you there was a dark heart to it.

Time After Time is a black comedy filled with the type of people you'd never want to meet in real life. I loved every minute of it and can only imagine that Good Behaviour will dish out more of the same.

'Real World' by Natsuo Kirino

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 208 pages; 2007. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.

Back in 2005, I read Natsuo Kirino's Out as part of the online reading group I used to host on this blog. (You can read the ensuing discussion here.) It was a dark and disturbing crime thriller told from the murderers' point of view, and while quite gruesome in places, it did mark Kirino out as a brilliant writer and I made a mental note to read more of her work as soon as it was translated into English.

I seemed to have missed Grotesque when the English translation was published in 2007, and jumped ahead to the next one, the recently translated Real World, which was originally published in Japan as Riaru Warudo in 2003.

This slim volume is an unusual read about a young, "stoop-shouldered boy" dubbed "Worm" who murders his mother and then goes on the run. There isn't much of a plot. Instead, the novel is largely a psychological study of the murderer and the four teenage girls who band together to protect him. Each of the five characters take turns in narrating the story so that it reads like a collection of private diaries, lending the story a voyeuristic feel.

The quartet of girls are all friends from school, and each has different reasons and motivations for helping Worm. Similarly, they also have secret identities they are hiding from each other: Toshi calls herself Ninna to protect herself from the marketers and scammers; Terauchi pretends to be simple when she's actually an abstract, intellectual, thinker; Yuzan is a lesbian; and Kirarin, the "cute, cheerful, a well brought-up, proper young girl", is sexually experienced and has other friends outside of the four.

What emerges is a dark study of teenage alienation in modern day Japan. In fact, Toshi claims that "the sense of danger we all feel is something my mother can't comprehend". She elaborates further:

Walk around Tokyo and all you see are people tryng to sell you something. Tell them okay and before you know it you've bought something. Make the mistake of telling them your name and address and now you're on a mailing list. Some old guy pats you on the shoulder and before you know what hits you you're in a hotel room. Stalkers' victims, the ones they kill, are always women. When the media was going nuts over schoolgirls getting old guys to be their sugar daddies for sex, that was the time when high school girls like us had the highest price as commodities.

There's something deeply unsettling about the unfamiliar, somewhat seedy, world presented here, one that makes you shudder with the horror of it. But despite this there's something clinical about the writing style that didn't quite gel with me. I found the girls' voices wearing and slightly false, and because I didn't much like any of them as people I soon grew bored of the storyline. It doesn't help that the translation appears to have been done with an American audience in mind, because the girls use lots of American slang, such as "dude", which only makes the book seem more alien and unrealistic.

And while the book may not exactly work as a crime thriller, it does raise some interesting points about what it is like to be young in a society that treats you as a commodity. It also provides some troubling insights into the corrupting influence of peer pressure and the dark ties of friendship.

'A Separate Peace' by John Knowles

Fiction - paperback; Bantam USA; 208 pages; 1975.

John Knowles' A Separate Peace is well known as a set text in the USA, but I first heard of it only a matter of weeks ago when I read an intriguing review by Trevor Barrett on The Mookse and the Gripes blog. I immediately scoured the internet for a cheap copy and managed to find one listed on BookMooch, which was soon whizzing its way across the Atlantic.

The novel (first published in 1959) is set in a boarding school called Devon, which is "sometimes considered the most beautiful school in New England". The story is told through the eyes of Gene Forrester, a past student, who returns 15 years after graduation and stands among the pleasant surrounds -- all "varnish and wax" -- and recalls one particular year during World War II which shaped the rest of his life.

Here, in the summer of 1942, Gene was a quiet bookish boy and his best friend and room-mate Phineas (sometimes dubbed Finny) was an extroverted, athletic type who charmed students and adults alike. We learn pretty much from the start that Finny is a bit of a daredevil but that he gets away with it.

The Devon faculty had never before experienced a student who combined calm ignorance of the rules with a winning urge to be good, who seemed to love the school truly and deeply, and never more than when he was breaking the regulations, a model boy who was most comfortable in the truant's corner. The faculty threw up its hands over Phineas, and so loosened its grip on all of us.

Meanwhile Gene, desperate not to lose face with his friend, succumbs to peer pressure and cuts class, misses meals and skips chapel -- often against his better judgment. And it is this crucial inability to say "no" that lands Gene in trouble. To say more would reveal crucial plot spoilers, which makes it almost impossible to review this book properly, but if you think of William Golding's Lord of the Flies you'll come to understand the dark heart that beats very strongly at the centre of this novel.

Of course there's an exterior darkness looming over the story too in the form of the war, although it all seems rather remote to Gene, Finny and their fellow 16-year-old students, just a year away from the draft:

We saw nothing real of it; all our impressions of the war were in the false medium of two dimensions -- photographs in the papers and magazines, newsreels, posters -- or artificially conveyed to us by a voice on the radio, or headlines across the top of a newspaper.

Indeed, Finny is so cut off from the horrors of the war he doesn't believe it it is true. At one point he suggests it is nothing more that a conspiracy created by a "bunch of calculating fat old men who don't want us crowding them out of their jobs". But to Gene, the clever intellectual one, it is more real; in fact he describes it at his defining moment and 15 years on claims he still "instinctively lives and thinks in its atmosphere".

A Separate Peace is a beautifully wise and knowing book. There's no driving narrative to force you to keep reading save for a desire to learn what becomes of this fraught friendship between two completely different teenage boys, and yet I couldn't put it down. It encapsulates everything that is wonderful and good in 20th century literature, coupled with an intelligence that belies its simple premise.

Truman Capote, one of my favourite writers, described it as "a quietly vital and cleanly written novel that moves, page by page, toward a most interesting target" -- and he is completely right. This is a lovely gem of a novel and I'm so glad to have discovered it via Trevor's blog.

'The Bird Room' by Chris Killen

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 208 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Sometimes you finish reading a book and you're not quite sure what you think of it. You're not even sure if you liked it. If you flex your brain matter a bit more you might even come to the conclusion that you hated it -- but you couldn't be sure.

The Bird Room by debut novelist Chris Killen is one of those books. I read it in just two sittings, but even before I'd come to the last page I was trying to figure out my feelings about it. By the time I came to the rather abrupt ending I was scratching my head, unable to figure out if the young Manchester-based author is a genius or a chancer.

And so, instead of damning the book with a one-star review or praising it with a five-review, I've settled on a rather middle-of-the-road three-star review -- just to be on the safe side.

The book is set somewhere in northern England. It's about Will, an insecure 20-something who ditches his job because he's bored, but then never bothers to look for other work. When he meets Alice, a cool, sexy girl on the rebound from a failed relationship, he can't quite believe his luck. She promptly moves in with him, and, not wanting to shatter the illusion that he's a good catch, Will fails to tell her that he's unemployed. He makes up some story about how he works from home instead -- and she shows so little real interest in him, beyond the sex, that she never bothers to question such a blatantly obvious lie.

But then Alice meets another guy called Will, a charming artist who's witty and intelligent, and it looks like it doesn't really matter whether Will, the unemployed one, has a job or not. Unfortunately he is so weak-willed and wimpish he doesn't bother standing up for himself. Or at least that's the assumption you're expected to make, because Will is not all that he appears to be. He might have a tortured love life, but beneath it all beats a very dark heart...

The Bird Room is riddled with wicked one-liners. The prose style is short and snappy. Killen rations out words like they're rare and precious stones he's reluctant to give away.

The characterisation is wonderful -- indeed it's one of the book's strengths. It's peppered with no-hopers, of young adults that haven't quite figured out their place in the world, and so, despite their obviously twisted outlooks, you can't help but feel sorry for them. The book treads a nice line between black comedy and pathos. There's plenty of sex and melancholia in the mix too, just to make it all that more interesting.

M.J. Hyland has described it as "an astonishingly good first novel" while Steven Hall says it's "either disturbingly brilliant or brilliant disturbing". I think it's slightly weird and a little bit clever, but I still can't figure out if I loved it or loathed it.The Bird Room is published in paperback by Canongate next month.

'The Sirens of Baghdad' by Yasmina Khadra

  Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 307 pages; 2008. Translated from the French by John Cullen.

This novel, first published in 2005 under the title Les Sirenes de Baghdad in France, is yet another earnest and thought-provoking story by Yasmina Khadra, the non deplume of the Algerian Army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul. While The Attack was set in war-torn Israel and examined what it is that drives people to become suicide bombers, The Sirens of Baghdad is set in war-torn Iraq and looks at what spurs young men into becoming insurgents.

The story is told through the eyes of an anonymous young man, a Bedouin, who lives in Kafr Karam, a village in the Iraqi desert, a "place so discreet that it often dissolves in mirages, only to emerge at sunset". 

Determined to become more educated than his illiterate well-digger of a father, he attends the university in Baghdad a few months before the American invasion. But when the war begins, the university is vandalised and closed down, and he returns to Kafr Karam, "wild-eyed and distraught".

Back in his parent's house, living on the roof in a remodelled laundry, he settles back into village life, feeling far removed from the troubles in the capital. But the war is soon brought home to him in a series of violent incidences involving American soldiers. These despicable acts -- an interrogation and shooting at a US army checkpoint, the bombing of a wedding reception and a raid on the family home -- turn the young man from a rather shy, sensitive creature into an angry youth desperate for retribution.

Consumed by a desire for revenge, he makes his way on foot to Baghdad, where he falls in with a radical group planning a major terrorist operation to be carried out in London. Groomed as the key terrorist in the mission, he is told that his sacrifice will represent "the end of imperial hegemony, the turning wheel of fortune, the redemption of the just". He is fully confident and prepared to go "all the way, without flinching" ...

Obviously, this is a very contemporary novel, and it felt slightly odd to be reading about real events that most of us are familiar with via television news footage. Here's a good example:

And I happened to arrive in Baghdad the day a false alert caused an enormous crush on a bridge -- you remember -- and a thousand demonstrators got killed. When I saw that, cousin, while I saw all those bodies on the ground, when I saw those mountains of shoes at the site where the panic took place, those kids with blue faces and their eyes half closed -- when I saw that whole mess, caused to Iraqis by Iraqis, I said to myself, right away, This is not my war.

But what struck me most about this book -- which is slightly laboured and over-worked in places, as if Khadra wanted to make sure we really understood certain points -- is this: under a series of strict unwritten codes, revenge is vital to the Bedouins and insults can only ever be washed away in blood. I immediately thought of the protests over the Danish cartoons controversy and how violent it all became -- and suddenly something "clicked" as if I'd been given a fleeting glimpse of a mindset I'd never quite understood before.

On the whole, though, The Sirens of Baghdad is a tough read, because it's so damn depressing. The narrator doesn't help things much because he's effectively carrying the weight of the Islamic world on his shoulders and he is completely and utterly miserable for the entire story. Coupled with a cold, detached prose style, it doesn't make for a cheery novel. But it's a worthy, edifying read that leaves one deeply unsettled.

'Tenderwire' by Claire Kilroy

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2007.

Back in January a reader of this blog emailed me to recommend Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire. "I have recommended this book to so many different types of people, young and old, male and female, and I haven't heard one negative review of it," she wrote. "In fact, friends of friends of friends and distant relatives of friends have gone out of their way to tell me how much they liked it."

I'm always partial to a good recommendation, so I looked this one up on Amazon: it ticked several boxes for me, including great reviews and a mention on the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award long list. The fact that it was written by an Irish author and set in New York sealed the deal: I "mooched" a copy from BookMooch as soon as I could hunt one out.

Last week, looking for something that would entertain me during my lunch hour, I extracted the book from my reading queue and took it to work with me. I rarely take full lunch hours these days, often scoffing a sandwich at my desk, but last Wednesday the sun was shining and so I sat outside and cracked open this book. Hooked from the start, the hour whizzed by and for the rest of the day I couldn't wait to get back to the story of Eva Tyne, an Irish violinist living and working in New York, who goes on a rather dangerous mission to buy a rare violin of dubious provenance.

Admittedly, this might not sound like a gripping story, but the first-person narrative, written in a kind of cruel, edgy and unstable voice, is the type that gets in your head and throws your world a little off kilter. You want to keep turning the pages if only to shake-off that quietly menacing monologue that so disturbs you.

Part thriller, part psychological drama, Tenderwire is set in a rather unfamiliar place in which the criminal underworld collides with the refined world of classical music. And Eva, our narrator, gets caught up in it, naively expecting that if she buys a valuable violin -- the Magdalena Stradivarius, dating from the 17th Century -- from a dodgy Russian she met in a bar there will be no repercussions and no payback.

If I bought the violin, would somebody come knocking on my door, claiming rightful ownership? Not if it had been stolen from somebody who'd stolen it themselves. And not if it had been lost; not if it had been seized from the Russian aristocracy a century ago and found its way into the hands of someone who didn't fully grasp what it was. Just another fiddle in a country full of fiddles. it was feasible Highly unlikely, but feasible.

There'd been any number of wars during the violin's lifetime, huge savage wars spilling right across Europe, in which everything had been uprooted and lost. Napoleonic wars, world wars, cold wars, a plethora of revolutions. Things had come loose from their moorings; paintings, jewels, even people. And the difference with paintings, jewels and people was that they were identifiable by sight. A violin wasn't. Not unless it had distinctive ornamentation. Magdalena had no distinctive ornamentation. At least, not that I could recall. I racked my brains, but remembered no markings at all. Only dirt, grime, the formidably all ruing patina of neglect. It was just possible that I might get away with this.

Obviously, the whole point of reading this book is to find out whether Eva does, indeed, get away with it. It's an alluring premise, because it's hard to believe that someone so fragile and mentally unstable as Eva would have the audacity to stump up $650,000 in cash to buy it. Even more intriguing when you know that it does not come with any papers and therefore cannot be authenticated. Is she merely being duped into buying a fake and staking her whole career on a possible copy?

This is a rollicking good read, with plenty of red herrings, including love affairs and concert performances, to keep you on tenterhooks throughout. There's a great cast of characters in supporting roles to give the story real depth, and the prose style, clipped and restrained, is imbued with enough paranoia to make the reader look over their own shoulders once or twice.

And for those who doubt they know enough about violins to warrant reading the book, there's plenty of background information on the rich history of violin-making to give you an understanding and appreciation of the very object that Eva becomes so passionate and obsessive about. It's an intriguing insight into a world I knew very little about.

I can see why Tenderwire is one of those books you end up recommending to others -- it's an intelligent page-turner, highly engaging and with a terrific, satisfying, ending to boot. I very much enjoyed it.

'The Attack' by Yasmina Khadra

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 257 pages; 2007. Translated from the French by John Cullen.

It's not very often that I get about 10 pages into a novel and decide I absolutely must buy everything else written by this same author. But that is what happened when I started reading Yasmina Khadra's The Attack. I was so stunned and impressed by the novel's opening I just knew that I had to explore her back catalogue as quickly as possible.

But Yasmina Khadra is not really a female author. She is, in fact, a man and former officer in the Algerian Army who used a pen name to avoid military censorship -- or that's the explanation given on the "about the author" page in this book. (You can find out more on the Wikipedia entry and on the author's official [French language] website.)

Khadra has some 20 books to "her" name, but only four have been translated into English. The bestselling 2002 novel The Swallows of Kabul, shortlisted for the 2006 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was the first. The Attack, also shortlisted for the 2008 IMPAC Award, was (as far as I can gather) the second. This book was also shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot, and won the Prix de Libraires. So, my initial impression, that The Attack was by an author of some standing was pretty much on the money.

The Attack is set in Israel and -- surprise, surprise -- it's about a suicide bomber. It opens with Dr Amin Jaafie, a surgeon in a Tel Aviv hospital, dealing with the bombed and bloodied victims of a terrorist attack in a downtown pizza restaurant that has killed 19 people. As a naturalised Israeli Arab, Amin has worked hard to be respected, admired and accepted by the Jewish culture in which he could so easily be cast as an outsider. A dedicated, highly professional doctor, married to the woman of his dreams, he socialises in the most fashionable of circles, making him a shining example of integration.

But when police inform him that the suicide bomber is his much-adored wife, Amin's carefully constructed world begins to fall apart. His house is vandalised, he is shunned by his colleagues and suddenly his adopted homeland wants nothing more to do with him regardless of his previous social and professional standing.

And all the while Amin fails to believe that his wife is responsible for so much death and destruction, even when the police provide evidence to the contrary.

For much of the book we follow Amin's search for truth. How can it be that the wife he loved so much had so much hate in her? What caused her to turn away from him and their seemingly perfect life together to carry out such an abominable act? What clues did she give him beforehand that he missed? Could he have stopped her?

During his investigation, helped in part by a female colleague whom he trusts, Amin put his own life in danger. At times the reader wants to reach into the story, grab him by the shoulders and tell him to get over it -- he will never find anything that will make him comprehend the incomprehensible.

This is a searing heart-felt book, at times graphic and shocking, at other times incredibly moving. It is always believable.

My only quibble is that the first person narrative becomes wearing after awhile, but this may simply be a reflection of the rather wearing, or should I say heavy, subject matter.  This is a book that makes for uncomfortable reading, but despite this I found it difficult to put The Attack down. I raced through it in a matter of days and felt completely wrung out by the end of it. 

Khadra definitely knows how to write a thrilling, often thought-provoking, narrative so that it forms one powerhouse of a novel that doesn't shy away from exploring the wider implications of faith and cultural identity. Given the times in which we live, The Attack is an important book and one that will stay with me for a long, long time.

'Tarry Flynn' by Patrick Kavanagh

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 192 pages; 2000.

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) is best known as an Irish poet, but he also dabbled in fiction. Tarry Flynn, first published in 1948, is perhaps his most popular and most famous novel. It is set in rural Ireland in the 1930s and tells the story of a young farmer's day-to-day desires: women, nature and poetry, not necessarily in that order.

On the face of it, this book does not have much of a plot. It's essentially a series of vignettes, held together by the passing seasons, but it is written in such beautiful, evocative prose, it's difficult to find fault with the narrative. There's a quiet, understated grace to every sentence that makes it a powerful and affecting read. I never thought I would say this, but I loved this book so much I'm afraid the late John McGahern, my favourite Irish writer and possibly my favourite writer per se,  has a rival for my affections.

There are lots of similarities in style and content -- I rather suspect that McGahern (1934-2006) drew inspiration from Kavanagh's work -- but it is their shared ability to find beauty in the simplest of things, in the mundane tasks of people's lives, that I love so much.

In Tarry Flynn, the farmer of the title, Kavanagh creates a character that is also able to find beauty in a world that he finds otherwise perplexing.

He stooped down under the belly of the animal to catch the girth strap and as he did he caught a glimpse of the morning sun coming down the valley; it glinted on the swamp and the sedge and flowers caught a meaning for him. That was his meaning. Having found it suddenly, the tying of the girth and the putting of the mare in the cart and every little act became a wonderful miraculous work. It made him very proud too and in some ways impossible. Other important things did not seem important at all.

And:

Walking in the meadow in summer was a great excitement. The simple, fantastic beauty of ordinary things growing -- marsh-marigolds, dandelions, thistles and grass. He did not ask things to have a meaning or to tell a story. To be was the only story.

In fact Tarry is so awe-struck by the fields and flowers and changing seasons that he believes that the "Holy Spirit was in the fields" and that religion is "beauty in Nature". When he shares these views with his overbearing mother, she feels that there is a "kink in him which she never had been able to fathom" and that he spends far too much time with his head in the clouds.

And he was forever reading and dreaming to himself in the fields. It was a risk to let him out alone in a horse and cart. The heart was often out of her mouth that he'd turn the cart upside down in a gripe while he was dreaming or looking at the flowers. And then the shocking things that he sometimes said about religion and the priests. She was very worried about all that. Not that she loved the priests -- like a true mother she'd cut the Pope's throat for the sake of her son -- but she felt the power of the priests and didn't want to have their ill will.

The priests are, indeed, powerful. The local priest, Father Daly, is so worried that Dargan, the rural area in which the story is set, is "in danger of boiling over in wild orgies of lust" that he organises a special Mission to warn parishioners about the sin of sex outside of marriage.

Tarry, who is fast approaching 30, is one of those bachelors to whom the Mission is aimed. But he has never even kissed a girl, much less gone "all the way" and so the Church's crusade is pretty much a lost cause as far as he is concerned. Indeed, it tends to backfire a little because as he moulds the potatoes one morning "his mind drifted to a new excitement by the thought of all the strange girls that would be coming to the Mission. It often worried him that a lot of other men might be as hypocritical as himself. He, when he analysed himself, knew that he went to religious events of this kind mainly to see the girls".

While the book has dark overtones -- the Mission and the Catholic Church's control of every aspect of village life is pivotal to the story -- it also contains some light-hearted scenes and there's a gentle witticism that pervades much of Tarry's escapades, especially his dispute with a neighbour over the purchase of a field.

All in all, this is a lovely, gentle story about one man's struggle to rise above the burden of family, farm and lust, all set in the idyllic surrounds of 1930s rural Ireland.

'Comfort Woman' by Nora Okja Keller

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240  pages; 1998.

During the Second World War the Japanese military introduced a programme to provide sexual services for its troops. Young, often ethnic, women were kept prisoner in special camps where they were employed as "comfort women", a euphemism for being systematically raped and beaten.

American-Korean writer Nora Okja Keller explores this abhorrent practise in her astonishing debut novel Comfort Woman, which, upon its release in 1997, attracted critical acclaim from far and wide.

Through twin narratives, which jump backward and forward in time, we learn the secrets and private struggles of two women: Akiko, a Korean refugee living in Hawaii, who has the unnerving ability to channel spirits; and Beccah, Akiko's daughter by an American missionary, who loves her mother deeply but is unable to fully accept her cultural and ethnic heritage.

What Beccah does not know is that her mother was once a comfort woman. This deeply hidden secret manifests itself in Akiko's often insane -- and embarrassing -- behaviour that plagues Beccah for much of her childhood. When most teenage girls are having fun, Beccah is haunted by her mother's absurd kowtowing to the spirits of the dead.

It is only when the secret is revealed that Beccah comes to some kind of understanding of her mother's strange ways...

While this is a confidently written and eloquent tale about the horrors of war and its far-reaching impact on its survivors and their children, it's also a testament to the strength of the mother-daughter relationship even when it is dominated by unexplained pain and fear of both the real and imaginary kind.

I very much enjoyed reading this book, although the dual narratives in which Akiko and Beccah take it in turns to tell their story grated slightly and hindered the overall flow of the book.

The emphasis on the spirit world was also slightly overdone, so that it came to suffocate the rest of the story. I wanted to know more about Akiko's traumatic past -- the hub of the novel -- and less about her traumatic present.

Finally, the discovery of Akiko's secret came too close to the end, so that there was very little exploration of how this bombshell impacted on the rest of Beccah's life.

Despite these flaws Comfort Woman is a disturbing yet moving story, and one that resonates long after the book draws to a close.

***

This book was chosen for discussion in Reading Matters Online Book Group (Session 10) in April 2007.

Click here for reading group questions and discussion.

'English Passengers' by Matthew Kneale

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 463 pages; 2000.

This is a brilliant seafaring romp set in the 19th century that is intelligent, witty and thought-provoking.

Told through the eyes of more than 20 diverse characters, it is never dull or confusing. Instead, it plunges the reader into a wonderful boys' own adventure tale turned comical farce in which a Manx smuggling vessel inadvertently flees British Customs by sailing half way around the world to Australia. To make the  journey legitimate the crew, headed by Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley, carry on board a small expedition team, comprising a spiritually crazed reverend, a sinister racial-theorist doctor and a wayward botanist, intent on finding the lost Garden of Eden in Tasmania.

Throw in a lot of historical truths about the settlement of Tasmania and subjugation of its native population coupled with lots of twists in the tale and you're guaranteed a rollicking good read! I loved this book, and I still think it has one of the most satisfying conclusions I've ever read in modern fiction. A clever read for clever readers.

***

This book was chosen for discussion in Reading Matters Online Book Group (Session 3) in December 2005. Click here for reading group questions and discussion.

'The Historian' by Elizabeth Kostova

Fiction - hardcover; Little Brown; 657 pages; 2005.

The Historian is a lush, richly evocative novel that explores the Dracula legend from an historical perspective.

In this gripping tale the narrator, a 16-year-old girl, discovers an intriguing batch of letters in her father's library. Unable to resist reading them she unwittingly opens a dark chapter in her family's past, which takes her on an ominous and dangerous journey, both physically and psychologically, across three decades and several countries. Along the way she learns the truth about her dead mother and how her father's seemingly benign academic research has put them all at risk.

Essentially The Historian is a story about the quest to find the resting place of Vlad the Impaler, the real Dracula whose tyrannical rule in the mid-15th century resulted in thousands of gruesome deaths by impalement in the Romanian countryside.

Part travelogue, part historical drama, part detective story, this gothic novel is immensely readable. Kostova excels at capturing the details and atmosphere of specific places (her descriptions, whether of Oxford, Amsterdam, Venice, Instanbul or Budapest, are pitch perfect) and time periods (1930s Romania, Cold War Europe and Oxford in the 1970s). She is also a master at writing cliffhangers at the end of almost every chapter, which only serves to keep the reader turning the pages (and reading long past this reviewer's bedtime).

The narrative is cleverly constructed, deftly switching points of view and periods in history without ever confusing the reader, while the characters are strong, lively and well-rounded.

I particularly liked that this was not a Dracula book full of blood, coffins, murder and mayhem - instead Kostova presents the lore in an almost intellectual way, using the power of imagined historical documents, folk songs and legends to paint a believable, almost authentic, version of the Dracula myth.

My only quibble is that the story seemed to run out of steam at the end, and the conclusion did not seem particularly satisfying after all the suspense and atmosphere that preceded it.  That said, I thought it was a powerful, well written and entertaining novel that deserves the praise already heaped upon it by other reviewers. If only it would knock those Dan Brown books off the bestseller lists!

'Cover the Butter' by Carrie Kabak

Fiction - hardcover; Dutton Books; 355 pages; 2005. Review copy courtesy of the author.

Cover the Butter is a warm, funny and poignant novel which charts the life of Kate Cadogan, a "lost" housewife trying to make sense of her past and present.

Kate's story spans the 1960s to the 1990s, covering the turmoil, both good and bad, of her transition from inexperienced teenage girl to worldly wise forty-something mother.

Central to the story's emotional impact is the relationship between Kate and her Irish mother, Biddy, whose moods swing in unpredictable and hurtful ways - one minute tender and loving, the next heartbreakingly cruel. Coupled with a weak-willed father, who succumbs to his wife's domineering ways, the Cadogan family is a complex mesh of pain and devotion, humour and heartbreak, unfulfilled expectations and adoration.

It's this very complication that ties Kate in knots: she never seems to be able to break free of her parents restrictive and confidence-sapping chains. And when she marries her self-centred, emotionally distant and just a little bit pompous husband,  Rodney, the escape she once dreamed of is anything but.

Fortunately she has strong friendships, rooted in a shared childhood, and two doting Welsh grandparents to whom she can turn. But even so, there are some secrets that she keeps to herself, the pain of which, to this reader at least, seemed so real I could feel the aching grief resonate off the page.

It is Kabak's ability to capture the entanglement of human relationships in such a very real way that makes Cover the Butter such a powerful read. What I loved so much about this book was the immediacy of the writing, which seems effortless and seamless. The prose is stripped back and unadorned, but this is not to the detriment of atmosphere or emotion. If anything it adds to it. Kabak has such an eye for detail that she can convey the very essence of a scene or an emotion without wasting a word.

In many ways, Cover the Butter reads like the book that Maeve Binchy and Joanne Harris might have collaborated on: friendships, family, romance, food and travel all rolled into one. I loved it, and felt genuinely sad when the story came to an end, I had wanted it to go on forever.

'Australia: A Biography of a Nation' by Phillip Knightley

Non fiction - paperback; Vintage; 384 pages; 2001.

To mark Australia's centenary of federation, Phillip Knightley, himself an expat Australian, set out to write a book about the country of his birth, to explore the idea of what it is to be Australian and to analyse what it is that has made Australia such a successful nation despite the fact it was set up by convicts and their jailers. Why is it that Australia and Australians turned out so differently from America and Americans given that both countries were settled in similar ways?

Knightley's book not only answers these questions (and more), it is a superb exploration and thought-provoking warts-and-all account of Australia's recent history.

As an Australian who has spent the past three-and-a-half years living in London, Knightley's main question has often plagued my thoughts: what is an Australian, and, more recently, why is it that we seem to be taking over the world (Kylie, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Shane Warne, Steve Waugh, Peter Carey, et al)?

Through a clever combination of historical anecdotes and personal memoir, Knightley's "biography of a nation" is a superb, hard-to-put-down story that spans everything you thought you knew about Australia and everything you didn't. If you've never been Down Under or don't know who Gough Whitlam is or have never heard of Mabo, this book will expand your knowledge and have you dying to get on the next plane to Sydney. And if you're Australian you might just find out something you didn't know about your country or had forgotten you knew.

This book is a must read for potential travellers and citizens alike. I couldn't recommend it highly enough.