Reading Matters

'Mateship with Birds' by Carrie Tiffany

Fiction - hardcover; Picador; 224 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Carrie Tiffany's second novel, Mateship with Birds, has been nominated for numerous prizes, including the Stella Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. I chose to read it on the strength of her debut novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, which was published in 2005.

Rural Australia

Mateship with Birds is set in rural Australia in the 1950s. It's a character-driven novel about two lonely people — Harry, a dairy farmer whose wife ran off with another man, and Betty, a single mother raising two children, Michael and Little Hazel — who live next door to each other. The over-riding question is this: when will the two of them get their acts together and transform their friendship into something rather more, well — how shall we say this — sexual?

This rather thin plot line is interspersed with Harry's observations of a raucous family of kookaburras, which live on his farm. In these iconic birds, he sees the kind of love and interaction he, too, would like to experience — and it is this theme which forms the hub of the novel: what is it that makes a family?

But the novel also centres on sex — to an almost obsessive degree. Mues, a local farmer, exposes himself to Little Hazel; Betty masturbates after work; a patient in the local nursing home (where Betty is employed as an aged-care nurse) plays with his "limp cock" — and this is all by page 45 of my edition. To take it up a level, Harry decides to teach young Michael the finer points of sex education, some of which he writes in letter form to save the embarrassment of conversation. These outpourings are very frank and occasionally very funny.

Vividly descriptive

One of the things I most liked about the book is the delicious descriptions of people, places, nature and birdlife. And having grown up in dairy farming country — albeit much further south than the area of Australia depicted here — I especially loved the way Tiffany conveyed what it is like to live and work on a diary farm. This is not a bucolic view, but completely authentic and real, right down to every last unpleasant detail.

Dairy pastures are difficult to establish in gullies where there is seepage and drainage. They drift like continents; their hides are maps of uncharted countries. Keep the herd on dry ground through the winter. Sunlight shines ginger through their ears. Plant shelterbelts to reduce wind speed. Elastic ropes of snot hang from their nostrils; their hocks are stuck with shit.

The characters are also wonderfully drawn: Betty is desperately lonely and sad, watching herself and her body slide into perceived decay; Harry is an old romantic and rather kind and tender; Mues is appropriately creepy; and the children are inquisitive and naive in the way that only children of that era (before TV, the internet and mobile phones) could be.

Tiffany's prose style is always interesting. She writes in a minimalist easy-to-understand way (the product of being a rural reporter, no doubt), but finds creative ways to play with the language — for example, "his tongue tasted curdled in his mouth"; a white dress has a "thick, expensive lustre, like icing on a fancy cake"; and two huntsman spiders "prowl Harry's bedroom ceiling" in "opposing corners like boxers waiting on the bell".

Harry's bird watching notes written in an old milk ledger also read like poetry and are typeset in stanzas to convey that impression even more so.

Too much sex

But while there is much to admire about Mateship with Birds, I found that the constant sexual references, allusions and metaphors got in the way of the story. They clogged up the narrative like tipper trucks on suburban streets — a hulking presence that simply could not be avoided. And once you noticed them, they were everywhere.

If I was to sum up the novel in one word, it would be this: quirky.

To see what others think of this book, do check out Naomi's review on The Writes of Woman, Tony's on Tony's Reading List and Lisa's on ANZ LitLovers.

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I read this book as part of Australian Literature Month, which runs throughout April 2013. The idea is to simply celebrate and help promote literature from my homeland and to encourage others to do the same. Anyone can take part. All you need to do is read an Australian book or two, post about Australian literature on your own blog or simply engage in the conversation on this blog and on Twitter using the hashtag #OzLitMonth. If you don't have a blog, don't worry — you just need to be willing to read something by an Australian writer and maybe comment on other people's posts. You can find out more here.

'Ru' by Kim Thúy

Fiction - Kindle edition; Clerkenwell Press; 160 pages; 2012. Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman.

When Kim Thúy's Ru was published in its original French language it won the Governor General's Award for French language fiction at the 2010 Governor General's Awards. Now the English edition, translated by the Canadian translator Sheila Fischman, has been shortlisted for the 2012 Giller Prize.

A refugee's tale

Ru is an elegantly written tale about a woman who emigrates to Canada from Vietnam as a boat person. The narrator, Nguyên An Tinh, was born during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, "when the long chain of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns".

The book reads very much like a fictionalised memoir (Thúy was also born in 1968 and came to Canada with her family as a refugee), but it doesn't follow the normal conventions,  particularly in terms of structure and narrative. In some ways it feels like a long poem, broken into extended stanzas (short chapters), in which the narrator recalls certain incidences from her life, and the lives of her parents, cousins and other relations, in non-chronological order. This means her narrative continually switches from the present — where she is a mother of an autistic son — to the past — the privileged life she led in Vietnam, the stint in a Malaysian Red Cross camp, a treacherous journey across the ocean —  then back again.

But by recording her personal history and her journey, both physical and metaphorical, in this way, we are able to see the shape of her life and how 30 years ago it was dramatically changed by circumstances beyond her control. At times it is distressing, as this passage about the narrator's journey across the Gulf of Siam on a tiny refugee boat reveals:

The small bulb hanging from a wire attached to a rusty nail spread a feeble, unchanging light. Deep inside the boat there was no distinction between day and night. The constant illumination protected us from the vastness of the sea and the sky all around us. The people sitting on deck told us there was no boundary between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. No one knew if we were heading for the heavens or plunging into the water's depths. Heaven and hell embraced in the belly of our boat. Heaven promised a turning point in our lives, a new future, a new history. Hell, though, displayed our fears: fears of pirates, fear of starvation, fear of poisoning by biscuits soaked in motor oil, fear of running out of water, fear of being unable to stand up, fear of having to urinate in the red pot that was passed from hand to hand, fear that the scabies on the baby's head was contagious, fear of never again setting foot on solid ground, fear of never again seeing the faces of our parents, who were sitting in the darkness surrounded by two hundred people.

At other times, it is almost joyous —  for instance, there's a palpable sense of relief when the family arrives in Canada, where people are kind and helpful, and where their sponsors, a family of volunteers, help them to furnish their home in Quebec — even if, with hindsight, our narrator realises that they were buying inferior goods and that their father was given a red cowl-necked sweater that he wore proudly every day not knowing it was a "woman's sweater, nipped in at the waist".

Lacks emotional connection

Much of the story revolves around the theme of "the other", of trying to fit in to a new life and a new country. It doesn't help that our narrator is painfully shy — on several occasions she describes herself as "deaf and mute" or as a "shadow" — and that she struggles at school, "where there was a glaring gap between my grades and the results of my IQ tests, which bordered on deficient".

But it is also about keeping history alive, the kind of history "that will never be taught in any school" — this is not so much about the Vietnam War but about its disturbing and heartbreaking effects on the civilians who had to flee for their lives and start all over again (if they were lucky) on foreign soil.

That said, there's something about Thúy's overly descriptive prose style that makes it hard to make an emotional connection with the narrator. I finished this book feeling strangely unmoved by it and yet I'd just read about the worst kind of pain and grief that a fellow human being could experience. (I felt exactly the same way when I read Madeleine Thien's Dogs at the Perimeter, another Canadian novel, this time about a Cambodian refugee, earlier this year.) 

Yet that is not to dismiss Ru — it's already a massive bestseller across the globe and was the BBC's Book at Bedtime in June — so there's undoubtedly a vast audience to whom it greatly appeals. Sadly, I guess I wasn't one of them...

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I read this book as part of the Shadow Giller Prize 2012. For another take on this novel, please read KevinfromCanada's review.

Note that this is one of the few books on the list that has been published in the UK, where it has been reviewed favourably in The Independent and The Guardian.

'Dogs at the Perimeter' by Madeleine Thien

Fiction - hardcover; Granta Books; 272 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Last year I read Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, a very moving novel about the Cambodian genocide in which more than a million people were systematically killed as part of Pol Pot's regime. Her fellow Canadian author Madeleine Thien treads similar territory with her novel Dogs at the Perimeter, which opens as follows:

On November 29, 2005, my friend Dr. Hiroji Matsui walked out of Montreal's Brain Research Centre at 7:29 in the evening. On the security video, his expression gives nothing away. For a brief moment, the camera captures him in passing: greying hair, neatly combed. [...] He exits through a side door, down a flight of metal steps. And then Hiroji walked into the city and disappeared into air.

A novel about disappearances

Hiroji's disappearance is the first among many in this novel, which is essentially about the ways in which the people of Cambodia disappeared, many of them overnight and without warning, during 1975-79.

His friend and colleague, Janie, who narrates most of this story, lost her entire family in the Cambodian genocide. But that was 30 years ago. Now she lives in Canada, is married, has a son and a successful career as a electrophysiologist studying neuron activity. What we don't understand when we first begin reading the book is why Janie no longer lives in the marital home and why she only sees her son at the school gate in the mornings.

So this is a book about secrets, too.

And in the disjointed narrative that swings between first person and third person those secrets, both recent and long since buried, come to the surface in tune with Janie's fragmented recollections.

Past and present collide

When Janie heads to Cambodia to look for Hiroji — because that is where she believes he has gone to look for a long-lost brother who was a Red Cross doctor — her past and present collide.

For the first time in her life, she is able to confront what happened to her as an 11-year-old girl when she and her family were turfed out of their home in Phnom Penh by the brutal Khmer Rouge regime and transported to the countryside. She recalls the fear, the starvation — and the smell of death. And she remembers what it was like to escape by boat and to arrive in Canada as a young, traumatised refugee.

Dogs at the Perimeter is far from a cheery read, but there's something about Thien's detached prose style that left me feeling strangely unmoved by the story. It's almost as if you are watching events unfold from behind a window; you can witness the pain and the grief and the horror, but you can never feel truly part of it because you are shielded by a thick pane of glass.

Deftly controlled narrative

Thien's narrative is deftly controlled. It's up to the reader to figure out what is going on, and in many ways it mirrors Janie's descent into pyschological breakdown, offering important scraps of information in random order, so that nothing is truly straightforward.

In fact, there were times I found the storyline a little bewildering, because I wasn't sure what was real and what was not, nor whether Janie was talking about something in the here and now, or something that had happened in her past. But this is not a complaint. The novel invites slow, careful reading — and sometimes that is more rewarding than turning the pages at a furious pace.

As a book that explores memory, loss and madness — both political and personal — Dogs at the Perimeter is extraordinarily good, incredibly haunting and compassionate.

'Truth' by Peter Temple

Fiction - paperback; Quercus Publishing; 400 pages; 2010.

When I reviewed Peter Temple's The Broken Shore in 2007 I described it as a "refreshing take on crime fiction, both in setting and style". So when his follow up to that novel, Truth, won the Miles Franklin Award in 2009 I wasn't too caught up in the hype about it being the first crime novel to win such a prestigious literary prize. I suspected that it probably had strong literary leanings. I was right.

Two killings — are they linked?

Truth is set in Melbourne, Victoria, and focuses on two separate killings — the murder of a young woman in a luxury apartment block and the discovery of three mutilated drug dealers in a warehouse on the other side of the city — which may, or may not, be linked.

But this is not so much a crime novel but an exposé on corruption — of cops, of businessmen, of politicians.

And while it certainly shares characteristics with the detective genre, the book's central focus is less on the gruesome killings that Inspector Stephen Villani, the head of homicide investigates, but more on the ways in which Villani copes with events happening in his personal and professional life.

Temple's prose style is also hard to characterise. There are some chapters which move ahead chiefly through dialogue, and these are blunt and snappy, with everyone talking in a staccato rythym. But elsewhere, when he describes the city or the bushfires raging in the state's north-west, he's rather lyrical and poetic.

A hot north-west wind on their faces, another blocking system was idling out in the southern ocean. Two long valleys ran from the north-west towards Selbourne, the main road down one of them. The fire would come as it came to Marysville and Kinglake on that February hell day, come with the terrible thunder of a million hooves, come rolling, flowing, as high as a twenty-storey building, throwing red-hot spears and fireballs hundreds of metres ahead, sucking air from trees, houses, people, animals, sucking air out of everything in the landscape, creating its own howling wind, getting hotter and hotter, a huge blacksmith's reducing fire that melted humans and animals, detonated buildings, turned soft metals to flowing silver liquids and buckled steel.

Unrelentingly grim

But it has to be said that the story is unrelentingly grim. Villani's world view is bleak — he's estranged from his wife but still living in the same house, he is having an affair with a political television journalist, his younger drug-addicted daughter is out on the streets, one of his brothers is about to be struck off as a doctor...

Then there's the complicated relationship he has with his bullish father, a man who is now refusing to leave his property despite the imminent threat of bushfire.

The state of Villani's personal life is only matched by his working life, which is also strained to breaking point. He doesn't feel he's earned the right to be head of homicide — and there are plenty of others in the force who feel the same way — so he's constantly on guard, doing things under the radar or taking risks to get results.

Feels claustrophobic

All this means that the book feels claustrophobic — and depressing. I felt heavy-hearted whenever I picked it up and I was anxious to be rid of it.

Here's but one example of the ugliness that permeates the narrative — this is a description of Melbourne:

Villani remembered when the CBD was still safe enough to walk across on a Friday night. But once the chemicals took over, spread into the suburbs, cops regularly began to see things once rare — teenagers bashing old people, women and children beaten, the punching and kicking and stabbing of neighbours, friends, cab drivers, people on trains, trams, buses, strangers at parties, in pubs and nightclubs, the hacking at people with swords, road-rage attacks, bricks hurled at trams, train drivers.

And 40 pages further, here's what it's like to be a police officer in that city:

In uniform, a full understanding of the job slowly dawned. A life spent dealing with the dishonest, the negligent, the deviant, the devious, the desperate, the cruel, the callous, the vicious, the drunk, the drugged, the temporarily deranged and permanently insane, the sick and sad, the sadists, sex maniacs, child molesters, flashers, exhibitionists, women-beaters, wife-beaters, child-beaters, self-mutilators, the homicidal, matricidal, patricidal, fratricidal, suicidal.

I think it's fair to say that I appreciated Truth — particularly the banter between the cops and the examination of their human failings — but I didn't like it. The novel was too dark, too edgy, too noirish for me. I found the crime investigation difficult to follow and the subsequent resolution slightly far-fetched. But I wouldn't mind seeing the film when it finally gets released.

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I read this book as part of Australian Literature Month, which runs throughout January 2012. The idea is to simply read as many novels as I can by writers from my homeland and to encourage others to do the same. Anyone can take part. All you need to do is read an Australian book or two, post about Australian literature on your own blog or simply engage in the conversation on this blog. If you don't have a blog, don't worry — you just need to be willing to read something by an Australian writer and maybe comment on other people's posts. You can find out more here.

'Loaded' by Christos Tsiolkas

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 151 pages; 1995.

Loaded is the first novel by Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas, he of The Slap fame. To say the book is loud, brash and in-your-face would be an understatement. It brims with raw energy, power and verve. It's audacious — and confronting.

It's also pornographic and those who don't really want to know the detail of casual, often anonymous, gay sex should probably stay clear. But the sex is central to the novel's focus, for Ari, the narrator, is 19, unemployed and trying to find his way in the world. He is bored — and self-destructive. He's looking for any kind of experience to lift him out of his ordinary, dull, suburban existence. And if that means getting it off with strangers in nightclubs and public toilets, then so be it.

Ari is also a drug user — and occasional pusher.

Stark subject matter

Yet despite the stark subject matter and the clear-eyed prose, there's something sad and tender about this story.

Spanning just 24 hours, we get a glimpse of Ari's frustrating home life — his father, a Greek immigrant, calls him an "animal" and is prone to angry outbursts; his mother, an Australian, shouts and nags — and see how he prowls the city — its streets, its suburbs, its nightclubs  — because he needs "something else going on".

What's clear from the outset is that Ari, aimless, directionless and confused by his sexuality, has a bleak world view shaped by the things he sees around him — his parent's unhappiness ("I love my parents but I don't think they have much guts. Always complaining about how hard life is and not having much money. And they do shit to change any of it"), the casual racism among his peers and the ways in which the immigrant community is just as obsessed by money and class as the "skips" (white Australians).

He thinks he looks like John Cusack

He is intelligent, good-looking ("I saw John Cusack interviewed on late-night television and he looked like me") and obsessed by movies and music. In fact, he spends most of the novel mooching around listening to mix tapes on his Walkman (the music references are particularly good if you are of a certain, a-hem, vintage).

But what resonates most is Ari's sense of alienation — from his parents (in particular, his father's Greek background), his older brother (who is studying at university and is not afraid to stand up against his domineering parents), his friends (who have gainful employment) and himself (never quite sure if he is gay or straight).

This alienation is reflected in the city he sees around him — the narrative is very much tied to Melbourne's suburban enclaves and is split into four parts named East, West, South and North — which he loves and loathes in equal measure. I particularly enjoyed his references to suburbs and places I know from my time living in Melbourne (which is about the same time that events in the book take place) and thought his descriptions of the Eastern suburbs (which are more affluent than the West) — with their "continuous loop of brick-veneer houses forming a visual mantra" — pretty much spot-on.

In the East, in the new world of suburbia there is no dialogue, no conversation, no places to go out: for there is no need, there is television.

An angry young man

The strength of the novel lies in Ari's voice, which is angry, full of self-loathing and deeply cynical. He's not necessarily a likable character, but he is empathetically drawn.

Loaded isn't the type of novel you read for "pleasure", but it's worth reading because it offers an eye-opening peek inside a rarely seen world. It's like getting on a rollercoaster for the first time: it's deeply frightening but once the ride ends you're glad you found the courage to experience it.

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I read this book as part of Australian Literature Month, which runs throughout January 2012. The idea is to simply read as many novels as I can by writers from my homeland and to encourage others to do the same. Anyone can take part. All you need to do is read an Australian book or two, post about Australian literature on your own blog or simply engage in the conversation on this blog. If you don't have a blog, don't worry — you just need to be willing to read something by an Australian writer and maybe comment on other people's posts. You can find out more here.

 

'Death in Summer' by William Trevor

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 220 pages; 1999.

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

Mournful beginning

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

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

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

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

They are wrong.

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

Portrait of a stalker

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

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

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

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

'The Darkest Room' by Johan Theorin

Fiction - paperback; Black Swan; 475 pages; 2009. Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

Earlier this year I read Johan Theorin's debut novel Echoes from the Dead and was immensely impressed with it. I was therefore keen to read the follow-up, The Darkest Room, which is the second book in Theorin's planned quartet set on the Swedish island of Öland.

The novel is not so much about a crime, but what it is like to live in a haunted house where mysterious things happen for which there is no logical explanation. Or at least, that's how the book feels when you begin reading it.

This is largely because the story revolves around a young family -- Joakim, his wife Katrine and their two small children, Livia and Gabriel -- who move from the Stockholm suburbs to renovate an old dilapidated manor house on the coast of Öland. The house, which was designed for the family that looks after twin lighthouses on little islands out at sea, was originally built from timber salvaged from a German vessel that was shipwrecked in 1846. According to Swedish folklore, it is bad luck to build a house from the spoils of a shipwreck, and there are plenty of local ghost stories attached to the house. But is it really haunted?

He [Joakim] stopped in the grass by the shore and took a long look at the buildings behind them. Isolated and private location, as it had said in the ad. Joakim still found it difficult to get used to the size of the main house; with its white gables and red wooden walls, it rose up at the top of the sloping grassy plain. Two beautiful chimneys sat on top of the tiled roof like towers, black as soot. A warm yellow light glowed in the kitchen window and on the veranda; the rest of the house was pitch black.

Odd little things do start to occur, which makes Joakim think twice. But when one member of his family dies suddenly, and in mysterious circumstances, it's easy to see how a sensible adult might begin to believe that there are supernatural forces at work.

But to dismiss The Darkest Room as a horror story is to miss the point. There's a lot more going on here, helped by multiple story lines in which each character has a dark secret to keep.

The first involves Henrik Jansson, a local tradesman, who goes into partnership with two small-time criminals, Tommy and Freddy Serelius. Together the three of them embark on a series of burglaries in which they steal valuables from holiday homes along the coast.

Then there's the story of Tilda Davidsson, a new police officer, who is conducting a sordid affair with a former colleague. Tilda is also embarking on a personal research project, in which she "interviews" her great uncle in order to find out about her late grandfather.

This is the glue that melds all the story lines together, because her great uncle is Gerloff, the retired sea captain now living in a residential home for the elderly, who made his first appearance in Theorin's earlier novel Echoes from the Dead. Gerloff is essentially an amateur sleuth, and it is his wisdom and pet theories that drives the narrative forward and helps Tilda in her official investigations. But he has a secret to keep, too, as does Joakim, who's drug-addicted sister still haunts his conscience.

Theorin interleaves a fourth and final thread throughout these other character-driven threads, and this is about the history of the manor house. The history comes in the form of book extracts written by Mirja Rambe, Katrine's mother, covering the period 1846 to 1962. (The Darkest Room is set somewhere in the mid 1990s, going by the age of Gerloff and the lack of mobile phone technology.) These extracts help to shape the idea that the house is haunted, because it reveals a rather sordid succession of troubles and deaths associated with those that have previously lived in it.

And there's constant reference to Öland's infamous blizzards, which roll in almost unannounced and claim lives. (Interestingly, the original Swedish title of the book was Nattfåk [Night Blizzard] and Theorin includes a short essay he wrote about the blizzard at the rear of the book.)

Told over the space of three months (the book is divided into sections labelled "October", "November" and "December"), it is filled with secrets, ghost stories and Swedish folklore. The darkest room of the title turns out to be a secret room in the barn attached to the manor house, but it could also be seen as a metaphor for the secrets we all hold dear to us.

While I preferred Theorin's debut to this one, The Darkest Room is an effortless read with plenty of momentum, and the resolution is a believable -- and surprising -- one.

The Darkest Room was named the Best Swedish Crime Novel in 2008 and won the CWA International Dagger in 2010.

'Do No Harm' by Carol Topolski

   Fiction - paperback; Fig Tree; 336 pages; 2011. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

A couple of years ago I read Carol Topolski's Monster Love and found it one of the most disturbing novels I'd ever come across. When I discovered that Topolski had a new novel out, I was anxious to see whether she would up the ante. I think it's safe to say she has.

Do No Harm is billed as a psychological thriller, but it's not your typical page-turner. For a start it's structured in an odd way, interleaving several different story strands, told occasionally in the first person and at other times in the third person. The tenses are sometimes present and sometimes past. And yet, despite what could be described as a piecemeal, bitty approach, there's a narrative tension that builds and builds as you get closer to the climax. I read it with a sense of mounting horror, but the denouement, when it comes, is brilliant.

The story builds on our worst fears: that doctors, with whom we trust our lives, are capable of doing unimaginable things to their patients.

Dr Virginia Denham is a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology working in one of London's top hospitals. She's held in high regard by her patients (for her genuinely caring manner) and her colleagues (for her brilliant mind, surgical prowess and management skills). But Virginia is a bit of an odd ball. While her staff are used to her somewhat unkempt, mannish appearance, no one knows the secret life Virginia leads when she leaves the hospital and goes home to her empty house at night.

In this secret life, Virginia has an odd system of eating in which she stuffs herself silly for three days in a row (which she calls "trips"), then starves herself for the following four (which she calls "quads").

Choosing to eat like this put me in absolute control and I never had to depend on Mother for food. I never went hungry for attention or felt full of her bile. On trip days I stuff myself with the most desirable foods I can imagine -- way, way beyond my appetite's outer reaches. Quad days starve me into submission. During the three days of the trips, I can believe myself the most loved woman on earth. The austerity of the following four stops me wanting more.

Virginia also gets her thrills by self-harming while wearing lots of rubber. Her imaginary friend Ruby is often close by, encouraging her to do bad things.

The story is told in chunks and moves backwards and forwards in time, from 1974-79, in which we follow Virginia's adult life, and 1938-1945, when we hear of Virginia's childhood and her mother's extra-marital affair.

Interleaved into this narrative are two other stories: that of Dr Faisal Usman, one of Virginia's colleagues, who was sent to England, from Pakistan, to be educated as a child, but has never been brave enough to return to his homeland; and that of Gilda, one of Virginia's patients, who has escaped the clutches of a cult and given birth to a son she doesn't want.

This probably sounds very confusing, and I admit there were times when I wondered where the story was going. But if you hold all the elements in your head, you will be rewarded, because the ending draws all the threads together in one neat, and genuinely surprising, conclusion.

Topolski, who is a practising psychoanalytical psychotherapist, has created an amazingly complex character in Virginia, a woman who is outwardly successful and incredibly intelligent but who is deeply troubled and cruelly flawed. But be warned: female readers, particularly those who are pregnant or having difficulty conceiving, might find Virginia's exploits too traumatic to stomach...

'Born or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making of a Mass Murderer' by Robert Wainwright & Paola Totaro

Non-fiction - paperback; Fairfax Books; 336 pages; 2010.

What makes one person go on a killing spree? Are they genetically pre-conditioned to commit such an atrocious act? Or is it the way they have been brought up? Is it nature -- or nurture?

In Born or Bred?, the story of the world's worst massacre by a lone gunman, the authors tackle these difficult, although somewhat clichéd questions, and try to come up with a theory as to why Martin Bryant carried out the atrocity for which he was responsible: the slaughter of 35 innocent people at the Port Arthur tourist site in Tasmania on April 28, 1996.

Of course no one will ever truly know why 29 year-old Bryant did what he did. I'm sure Bryant, who will spend the rest of his life behind bars, does not have a full explanation for what he did either. But this book, written by two highly experienced journalists, attempts to look behind the crime and to examine Bryant's life in the search for clues. In their introduction they write:

This book is an attempt to delve beyond what we think we know about the crime, to place events in context and to provide an answer not only to why this horror might have unfolded but what possibilities we now have, thanks to neuroscience and greater understanding of the human psyche, that might give us a chance to prevent a recurrence -- or at least lessen the chances of it happening again.

This might sound like a pretty straightforward approach to adopt, but Wainwright and Totaro had an uphill battle to get this book written, not least because the Tasmanian Government has had a "media blackout" in place about the incident. In 2001, it went a step further by placing an exclusive embargo on Bryant, preventing any information about the man being disseminated via the media.

The authors figured they could get around this by writing the book from Bryant's mother's point of view, but she eventually fell out with them, and they had to start from scratch.

There will be many people who will see Born or Bred? as a ruse to make money out of a horrendous crime. But the story is very sensitively handled (remember, it was written more than 10 years after the event), to the point where the actual killings are recounted at the rear of the book in a specially marked off section "to give readers the choice of avoiding graphic violence". (You may recall my post about this, in which I thought it was somewhat odd, but with hindsight I can see that it has been done like this for a reason, even if that reason might have been to convince the publisher that this wasn't a book shamelessly exploiting the crime for the sake of it.)

As a piece of narrative non-fiction, the book is well written, fast-paced and rich in detail. It provides a gripping account of one man's life and unearths the stories of his ancestors to show how his story cannot be taken in isolation. It particularly focuses on Bryant's oddness as a child and the ways in which his parents attempted to address his mental and social problems in different ways -- his mother was remote, his father hands-on. Neither approach seems to have worked.

Interestingly, a prison doctor later diagnosed Bryant with a form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome, but the authors are quick to point out that while it might explain his abnormal behaviour as a child it "does not explain his actions as an adult: people with Asperger's are not potential mass killers". But Professor Paul Mullen, a British-born, Melbourne-based psychiatrist, who assessed Bryant's state of mind to see if he was fit to stand trial, disputes this diagnosis. He claims that Bryant was "profoundly socially disabled" not autistic.

So, if his mental problems alone are not enough to cause him to go on a killing spree, what else contributed to this callous act of violence?

The authors are able to demonstrate how a series of events, in combination with Bryant's mental and social problems, lead to that fateful day. Their case is a convincing one. And while I won't recount it in detail -- you need to read the book if you want to know more -- it's clear that the suicide of Bryant's father and Bryant's access to money played a strong role.

The $64 question in my mind was exactly that: how on earth did Bryant afford the $10,000-plus he spent on guns and ammunition referred to in early chapters of the book? Little did I know he had inherited a fortune (literally) from a kooky heiress he had befriended. Helen Harvey was related to the founder of the Tattersall's lottery in Australia and when she died in a car accident (in which Bryant was also involved) her riches passed to him. Without that money it is impossible to see how Bryant would have amassed such an arsenal -- there were firearms and ammunition hidden in various places throughout his house, including shot-guns, semi-automatic weapons, a telescopic sight, an ammunition belt and dozens of cartridges in boxes and bags.

The prime message from this book is not that Martin Bryant was "evil" and hell bent on killing as many people as he could on one day, it is that it might have been prevented had he received appropriate psychiatric care from a young age. (It might also have been prevented if someone stopped to chat to him enroute to Port Arthur that day: he made three stops at petrol stations, for seemingly pointless reasons, as if he was willing someone to end his journey.) He gave out all the signals that he was abnormal as a child and yet his parents, his educators and his doctors failed to deal with the issue properly, perhaps because information about mental health was lacking or the resources were not there to assist. The issue, of course, is not black and white. His life experiences and current circumstances contributed.

The final word goes to the pyschiatrist who assessed Bryant's state of mind in the aftermath of the killings:

"Once you break it down you begin to see a terrible tragedy. What you get with Bryant is someone who did something evil. But, as a person, I'm afraid he's rather dim, rather silly, rather resentful and feels he was mistreated and despairs on life. You combine that with a fascination for guns and you've got a tragedy. Take the [father's] suicide out, and it wouldn't have happened. Without the money, it wouldn't have happened. Take the guns out, and it wouldn't have happened. Provide a little more effective care, and it probably wouldn't have happened."

'Echoes from the Dead' by Johan Theorin

Fiction - Kindle edition; Transworld Digital; 480 pages; 2009. Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy.

With so many publishers jumping on the Stieg Larsson bandwagon, it's hard to know which Scandinavian crime thrillers are worth reading and which ones are just cashing in on the phenomenon. Despite the promotional sticker on the cover of Johan Theorin's debut novel, Echoes from the Dead, I can attest that this book falls into the former rather than the latter category.

The story is set on the atmospheric Swedish island of Öland during the off-season. All the tourists have gone home and the seaside villages are deserted and empty. The alvar -- "a labyrinth of long stone walls, boulders, bushes and endless grassy plains" -- which covers large parts of Öland, lies still and silent.

The alvar is like a sea. Yes. Anything at all could happen out there, and no one would be any the wiser.

Twenty years earlier a little boy, Jens, disappeared in thick fog on the alvar. His body has never been recovered. His mother, Julia, a nurse on the mainland, has never got over her grief; she's convinced her boy is still alive and is waiting for the phone call that says he's been found.

When her elderly father Gerlof (pronounced Yairloff) receives a child's sandal in the post Julia's belief that Jens is still alive gains further weight. If the shoe is one of Jens, who sent it -- and why?

Together Julia and Gerloff, a retired sea-captain living in sheltered accommodation, embark on their own private investigation as they piece together clues from the past.

Their story is intercut with the story of the main suspect, local bad boy Nils Kant, who was suspected of murdering his younger brother on the island in 1936 and was rumoured to have shot two German soldiers and run off to South America with their "spoils of war" several years later.

What makes Echoes from the Dead such a great read is Theorin's terrific plot, which goes off in unexpected directions without sacrificing plausibility.

The pacing is carefully controlled by the interleaving of two separate narrative threads, so that the significance of certain clues discovered in one storyline help inform the second, and vice-versa. All of this builds into a superb climax, one that ties up loose ends and has you feeling genuinely moved by all that has happened before.

But it's the characterisation that elevates Echoes from the Dead above the average whodunit. Julia is sympathetically drawn: she's a deeply troubled woman, prone to drinking too much and unable to stand up to her bullying older sister, but emerges from this story much stronger despite the grief. And Gerloff is a standout: an intelligent, resourceful and kind man, who never lets age or infirmity put him off his mission to find out what really happened to his beloved grandson all those years ago. And how refreshing it is to have a lead character in a crime novel who isn't a journalist or a policeman!

Echoes from the Dead was voted Best First Mystery Novel by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers in 2007 and won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in 2009.