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.

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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

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 352 pages; 2004.

How do you review a book that is a true 20th Century classic like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four without simply regurgitating all that has been said before? Is there really anything more I can add to the mix? Probably not, but that won't stop me telling you just a little about this brilliant dystopian novel, first publishing in 1949, and why I love it so much.

For those of you who have never read Orwell's masterpiece (a term I don't use lightly), it's set in London in 1984. The city, which belongs to one of the world's three superstates, is under Totalitarian rule and at perpetual war. Everyone lives under the watchful eye of Big Brother, children are encouraged to spy against their parents, and to even think "bad" thoughts is considered a crime.

Winston Smith, the narrator, works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting Times articles so that the ruling Party's version of history, which changes on a daily basis, is always correct. But Winston is not like everyone else and considers that the continual surveillance and collective world view is oppressive and stifles individuality. He's also alarmed by the number of people who are "disappeared" and re-written out of history because they haven't toed the Party line.

When he meets the intriguing Julia and begins an illicit romance with her, he discovers that he is not the only secret "rebel". But this liaison does not escape the Thought Police and Winston is thrown into prison, where the "secrets" of the Party are finally revealed to him.

I first read this book circa 1994 when I was studying journalism and I remember, quite clearly, the oppression resonating off the page. It was a dark, incredibly thought-provoking story, and with every turn of the page I could feel my whole world view being challenged on very many different levels: was history a true record of the past? was the news media so corrupt? were wars just a means to stimulate the economy and keep people in jobs? were the enemies of the West just a conspiracy invented to keep us living in fear?

Fast forward 15 years and I re-read the book as part of my book group last month. This time 'round, my brain, having already grappled with these new and alarming concepts, now concentrated on whether Orwell's "predictions" had come true. And because I was less caught up in the overwhelming brilliance of the book's scope and vision, I enjoyed the narrative, which is quite fast-paced, and the eloquence of the prose, which is sparse without ever becoming boring.

The thing that struck me most, however, was how much of this futuristic novel was deeply rooted in the time in which Orwell wrote it. There are echoes of war-torn London throughout this book, not the least in the following passage:

He remembered better the rackety, uneasy circumstances of the time: the periodical panics about air-raids and the sheltering in Tube stations, the piles of rubble everywhere, the unintelligible proclamations posted at street corners, the gangs of youths in shirts all the same colour, the enormous queues outside the bakeries, the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance -- above all, the fact that there was never enough to eat.

Obviously there's a lot of stuff that feels incredibly prescient today: the so-called War on Terror and its resultant erosion of civil liberties; the increasing reliance on media spin, particularly by government agencies; and the ever-present CCTV surveillance, especially here in the UK (in 2006, there was one CCTV camera for every 14 people).

By contrast, Orwell's prediction that the future would be sexless didn't quite come off, and even the notion that you only had to alter The Times newspaper to rewrite history seems laughable given today's preponderance of media outlets and formats, including the internet and mobile phone technology.

But, on the whole, this is a remarkable book, a kind of warning shot from the past, that still resonates and which will continue to resonate long into the future. If you've never read this book, I urge you to do so, and even if you have, it's worth revisiting just to re-experience Orwell's amazing vision.

For a rather wonderful breakdown of the novel, including explanations of the terminology, visit the wikipedia entry.

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This book was chosen by Gemma as part of our London-based face-to-face book group. Here's some other posts written about the book by fellow members:

• Claire's review

• Simon's review

'A Far Cry From Kensington' by Muriel Spark

Fiction - hardcover; Virago Modern Classics; 208 pages; 2008.

The late Muriel Spark is one of those writers whose back catalogue is so long and eclectic it's almost impossible to know where to start. I read Aiding and Abetting last year, because I was intrigued by the real life disappearance of Lord Lucan upon which the novel is based. Having seen KevinfromCanada's glowing review of A Far Cry From Kensington last month I decided this novel, first published in 1988, was the next to try.

I treated myself to a lovely Virago Modern Classics edition, featuring an introduction by Ali Smith, and found myself reading the entire book in just two longish sittings. To say I was utterly charmed by it would probably be an understatement. This is a deliciously enjoyable story that is so perfectly constructed it's almost impossible to find fault with it -- on any level. The prose is simple, the characters believable and the plot expertly drawn, so that you're never quite sure where it's going to take you and then feel overwhelmingly satisfied when you arrive at its destination.

The story is narrated by Mrs Hawkins, a war widow, looking back on her life in London some 30 years earlier when, in 1954, she lived in a South Kensington rooming house and worked in publishing. She was only 28 at the time but had a matronly air about her.

There was something about me, Mrs Hawkins, that invited confidences. I was abundantly aware of it, and indeed abundance was the impression I gave. I was massive in size, strong-muscled, huge-bosomed, with wide hips, hefty long legs, a bulging belly and fat backside; I carried an ample weight with my five-foot-six of height, and was healthy with it. It was, of course, partly this physical factor that disposed people to confide in me. I looked comfortable.

Even her boss, Martin York, of the struggling publishing firm Ullswater Press, confides in her, inviting her to his office for a minute ("A minute meant an hour, sometimes more"), where he would stand at his window, or sit in his leather armchair, and regale her with his thoughts. (Despite his confiding tone, he never reveals that he's carrying out fraudulent activities for which he's later arrested and imprisoned for seven years.)

But her forthright manner and her maxim that "no life can be carried on satisfactorily unless people are honest" lands her in hot water. When a purple-prosed would-be writer, Hector Bartlett, starts stalking her in order to get his work published by Ullswater Press, she tells him in no uncertain terms that he is a pisseur de copie, a French phrase for a hack writer who urinates copy. Unfortunately, for Mrs Hawkins, Mr Bartlett is having an affair with a well regarded author, Emma Loy, who has a lot of powerful sway in the book industry. You can guess what happens. Mrs Hawkins not only loses her job, her candid admission (and Mr Bartlett) follows her wherever she goes, and comes back to haunt her in more ways than one...

Meanwhile, back at the rooming house, one of the tenants, Wanda, an immigrant Polish dressmaker, receives a poison pen letter accusing her of "not declaring your income to the Authorities". Wanda almost has a nervous breakdown over this, because she's petrified of being deported back to her homeland. This is where the ever-dependable Mrs Hawkins steps in to do a bit of detective sleuthing to see who might write such a nasty letter. Her efforts come to nothing. It's only when the letter writer phones Wanda to warn her off, that things take a sinister turn for the worse and Mrs Hawkins finds herself being accused of the very crime she's trying to investigate.

So what A Far Cry From Kensington delivers is a two-pronged narrative, one that focuses on the book publishing industry in 1954 and Mrs Hawkins' career as an editor (this makes fascinating reading in itself), and another that focuses on a sinister campaign to frighten a lodger out of her wits, but to what end?

What makes this novel work so wonderfully is, of course, the detail that brings the book trade and post-war London to life. But it's also the sparkling wit (I laughed out loud several times), the delicious characters (Hector Bartlett, for instance, seems as frightful as his prose) and the seamless weaving of two different narratives that are expertly drawn together right at the very end to deliver a really satisfying conclusion.

'Pretty Monsters' by Kelly Link

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 400 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

That I would give this book a five-star review comes as quite a surprise to me, because this is not the type of book to which I would normally be drawn. First, it's a collection of short stories and novellas, and I generally have a preference for full-blown novels. Second, its target market is young adults/teenagers. Third, it's about monsters and ghosts and magic and all kinds of fairytale, fantasy and horror-type subjects. Fourth. Well, need I go on? 

This is, quite frankly, not my usual cup-of-tea. And yet when Pretty Monsters arrived unsolicited from Canongate I couldn't help but be drawn to it. It's an absolutely gorgeous-looking hardcover that has a real Gothic feel, owing to each page being edged in black. It features striking art-work by Australian-based illustrator Shaun Tan throughout (including the cover) and the weight of the book is perfect to hold in the hand, not too heavy and cumbersome as some hardcovers are wont to be.

But what about the content?

There are nine stories here, some of which have been published elsewhere in the past, and each one presents an intoxicating, hugely original world. "These stories will come alive, put on suits and wrestle you to the ground," says Alice Sebold on the back cover blurb. "They want you and you will be theirs." She's completely right. I've never read such a wacky collection of stories that gripped me, held me in their sway and slightly altered my perception of the universe when I came to each stunning conclusion. Where has Kelly Link been hiding all my life? She's bloody brilliant.

She's been described as "an alchemical mixture of Borges, Raymond Chandler and Buffy the Vampire Slayer". But I wouldn't be surprised to discover that she was the lovechild of Stephen King and JK Rowling. To give you an idea of the breadth of her style and imagination, here's a brief rundown of each of the stories in this collection.

The Wrong Grave
A black comedy about a teenage boy whose girlfriend dies and is buried with his collection of self-penned poetry. When he suddenly wants his poetry back he accidentally digs up the wrong grave.

The Wizards of Perfil
A magical story about children who are sold to wizards, whom live in very tall towers and are never seen.

Magic for Beginners
A thrilling tale about a cult-TV show called The Library which a group of teenage school friends become slightly obsessed by. This particular story, probably my favourite in the whole collection, received the Nebula, Locus, and British Science Fiction Association Awards and was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, Hugo, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Award.

The Faery Handbag
An odd fantasy about an eccentric grandmother who owns a magical handbag that hides a village full of fairies. This story won the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the 2005 Locus Award.

The Specialist's Hat
This is a classic ghost story set in a grand house with eight chimneys. Two ten-year-old twins, Claire and Samantha, are introduced to a magic hat by their babysitter. This one won the 1999 World Fantasy Award. You can read the whole story on Kelly Link's official website.

Monster
A creepy story about a school camping trip that attracts an unexpected campfire guest -- a foul-smelling monster.

The Surfer
A science-fiction story about a father and son travelling to Costa Rica to see a surfer who claims to have made contact with aliens. But their trip is waylaid when a flu pandemic hits and they are quarantined in an aircraft hangar.

The Constable of Abal
An almost old-fashioned fairytale about a mother and daughter, who turn out to be transsexual goddesses.

Pretty Monsters
This one involves schoolgirls, werewolves and romance.

These stories are unsettling, dark, disturbing, surreal, wacky, occasionally confusing, often laugh-out-loud funny, but always rewarding, enjoyable and fun. More please.

'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street' by Hilary Mantel

Fiction - paperback; Harper Perennial; 298 pages; 2004.

Take a look at Hilary Mantel's back catalogue and I defy you to name another living British author with such a diverse range of subjects and genres under his or her belt. I've only read two of Mantel's books -- the delicious black comedy Beyond Black and her critically acclaimed memoir Giving up the Ghost -- but have been keen to explore more of her work.

Eight Months in Ghazzah Street, originally published in 1988, came much recommended by visitors to this blog. It turned out to be a superb, insidiously creepy read, the kind of story that gets under the skin and has you throwing glances over your shoulder to make sure no one's watching you.

It's set in Saudi Arabia, a highly secretive and repressive society, where the religious police keep a close watch on everything, there are strict laws about what you can wear in public and women are not allowed to drive. Into this restrictive and claustrophobic world come British expats Frances and Andrew Shore. Andrew, an engineer, has a job working for a private construction company in Jeddah. Frances, a cartographer, is forbidden from working, because of her gender, so she must spend her days "keeping house".

Despite the fact that both are used to strange cultures -- they lived in Zambia, where poverty, violence and corruption went hand in hand, for many years -- Frances is immediately uncomfortable in her new surroundings. Instead of living in an expat compound, they've chosen to live among the natives, in an apartment block in a quiet neighbourhood. But everything is walled in and even one of the doorways has been bricked up, creating a cavern-like abode rarely penetrated by daylight.

Not long into their stay Andrew tells her about a psychiatrist's study into the stress on immigrant workers, and you know his words are going to be prophetic:

'When you get here and everything's so strange, you feel isolated and got at - that's Phase One. But then you learn how to manage daily life, and for a while the place begins to seem normal, and you'll even defend the way things are done here, you'll start explaining to newcomers that it's all right really - that's Phase Two. You coast along, and then comes Phase Three, the second wave of paranoia. And this time around it never goes.'

Leaving the house becomes almost impossible. Even a stroll down the street, wearing her "baggiest smock and sandals', is beset with unwanted attention from leering men:

A man in a Mercedes truck slowed to a crawl beside her. 'I give you a lift, madam?' She ignored him. Quickened her step. 'Tell me where you want to go, madam. Just jump right in.' He leaned across, as if to open the near door. Frances turned and stared into his face; her own face bony, white, suffused with a narrow European rage. The man laughed. He waved a hand, dismissively, as if he were knocking off a fly, and drove away.

With not much else to do, Frances befriends the Muslim women living in the building and finds herself unable to come to terms with the religious and cultural differences between them. She finds a similar discord with the expatriate community in which she is expected to socialise.

Before long paranoia takes ahold. Knowing that the apartment above her is empty, Frances begins to hear unexplained noises -- a woman sobbing, footsteps and furniture moving around. When she sees a strange presence in the apartment block's stairwell, she's convinced that something illegal is going on, but no one, including her husband, believes her when she voices her concerns. Perhaps she's going stir crazy after all?

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is a psychological thriller of the finest order. It reads like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but because Frances is an intelligent worldy-wise woman, you know that her fears aren't fickle. Mantel builds up the tension slowly but surely, revealing Frances' increasing sense of foreboding through diary entries that are interspersed throughout the third-person narrative. It's a highly effective device.

Interestingly, the story does not paint a very flattering portrait of Saudi Arabia, but Mantel, who lived in Jeddah with her husband, a geologist, for four years in the 1980s, makes no bones about this. In the reader's guide that comes with this edition, she writes: "When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must someties pay it the compliment of hating it."

You can read the first chapter of the book here [although you need to be registered with the New York Times website to do so]. But be warned, once you start you'll want to read the whole thing.

'A Drinking Life' by Pete Hamill

Non-fiction - paperback; 1st Back Bay Ed; 280 pages; 1995.

I am a sucker for memoirs, especially if they're written by "proper writers", whether authors or journalists. It's not so much that these particular people lead more interesting lives than others, but they can write about them so much better than anyone else. Essentially, they use the skills of novelists and reporters to turn their life stories into highly readable and entertaining narratives.

I was particularly keen to read journalist and novelist Pete Hamill's memoir A Drinking Life because I knew so little about the man. I suspect Americans have a better handle on him given he's been the editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, but I only discovered him when I read his 2002 novel Forever last year. I thought that book was excellent and on an excursion to New York last November I went on a mission to track down his memoir, expecting that I'd probably have to order it online at some point. But, alas, the first store I went into -- Barnes & Noble in the Time Warner Centre -- had it in stock. I felt like I'd found gold at the end of the rainbow!

Needless to say, it took me almost a year to dig it out of the ever-growing To Be Read pile, but the wait was worth it.

Given the title I had expected A Drinking Life to be a story about Hamill's battle with booze, but that's not really what this memoir is about. While he discusses his relationship with alcohol very frankly throughout the book, from his first taste of beer as a child to his teenage discovery that drink could let him "get rid of something", this is not solely an alcoholic's confessional. It's actually a memoir of a lifetime New Yorker, and, more crucially, reveals how a poor working-class kid from Brooklyn managed to carve out a successful writing career despite several setbacks, poor decisions and a fondness for women and drink.

At times it reminded me very much of Betty Smith's much-loved American classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly Hamill's account of growing up in Brooklyn the oldest of seven children (his parents were Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland), but it's also a firsthand account of what it was like to experience everything from the Great Depression (Hamill was born in 1935) to the Korean War, McCarthyism to the assassination of President Kennedy.

What makes this particular memoir so vivid and interesting to read, however, is Hamill's brutal frankness and the candid nature of his writing. He never shies away from being totally honest, even if it portrays him in a bad light. His relationship with his father is often painful to read, because he makes it clear that he loved his father, a one-legged drunk, but did not feel that his father loved him in return -- he was constantly seeking approval that never came. It was only when he left school at 16, moved out of the family home and took a job as sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that he gained some measure of paternal respect. This was helped, in part, by working alongside men that knew his father and who told him tales about Billy Hamill's strength, determination and brains.

Pity allowed me to see him as man, instead of a father who could not play the role that my childish imagination and need had assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands from his own father. [...] In a new way Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination, and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all his black silences.

But despite Hamill's vow that "I didn't want to be like my father. I didn't want to be a drunk", he discovers that drinking gives him "strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true". It is the drink that sustains him through a myriad number of changes in life direction: he studies art, has an affair with a much older nude model while dating a "nice girl" his own age, flees to Mexico City with a male friend to study painting and writing, and later returns to New York, as a fugitive, to work as a graphic designer. In 1960 he makes the dramatic switch from pictures to words, and becomes a reporter for the New York Post.

He later marries, has two children, and travels the world in pursuit of stories and good times. When his marriage breaks down, mainly because of his drinking, he decides to quit the bottle for good. It was a move that produced another dramatic turn in his life, because he met and later moved in with actress Shirley MacLaine, and developed a career writing fiction, including novels and TV scripts.

According to Hamill's own website, A Drinking Life was on the New York Times list for 13 weeks when it was published in 1995. I'm not surprised. It's a terrific account of a life well-lived, even if much of that life was marred by drink. You certainly don't need to have read any of his novels to appreciate the wonderful story recounted here, but it will no doubt encourage you to seek out his other work. It's emotional, forthright, funny and informative: what more could you ask for in a memoir?

'The Shiralee' by D'Arcy Niland

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 257 pages; 2009.

D'Arcy Niland was an Australian author who wrote six novels, several short story collections, some poetry, radio and television plays, and an autobiography between 1955 and his untimely death in 1969. He was married to New Zealand writer Ruth Park of The Harp in the South trilogy fame.

He was best known for his first novel, The Shiralee, first published in 1955, which went on to become an international bestseller. It was turned into a film, starring Peter Finch, in 1957. But I largely knew it as a TV mini-series, produced in 1987, starring Bryan Brown. I didn't watch the series, because I remember the promotional adverts made it look like mawkish sentimental claptrap, and sadly that put me off ever wanting to read the book.

Turns out that was my loss, because The Shiralee, recently re-issued as a Penguin Modern Classic, is an absolute gem, one of those delicious reads that transports you to another time and place, and makes you hungry to read more of the same thing.

The story is set during the Great Depression (I think -- it's hard to be 100 per cent sure). Macauley is a swagman, an Australian term for an itinerant labourer who travels between jobs largely on foot, carrying a traditional swag (a bed that you roll up) and a tuckerbag (a bag to store food). He even stores his money in "a travelling branch of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company -- an empty golden syrup tin".

As he crosses the byways and highways of rural NSW, Macauley is accompanied by his four-year-old daughter, Buster, whom he initially regards as his "shiralee", a slang word for burden. Six months earlier he "kidnapped" Buster from her city-based mother, when Macauley discovered his wife in bed with another man. Taking Buster was supposed to be a form of punishment, but it seems to have backfired, and his quiet, frugal lifestyle has now become tempered by a little girl who talks too much and slows him down.

And yet, while it's slowly dawning on him that Buster's mother doesn't want her daughter back, Macauley is getting used to the company -- even if he may not want to admit it.

They had walked for two hours, and Macauley couldn't help but observe, as he had been observing, the growing endurance of the little girl. It dragged from him some slight sense of gratification. He wasn't paying out tribute to the child: he was merely feeling the small but positive diminution of responsibility. But it wouldn't be long now. At the end of the third hour and a steadily maintained pace, Buster's feet were scuffling, and she was whinging to be carried.
'Don't kid me,' Macauley said. 'You can go on a bit yet.'
'I can't. I can't,' the kid whimpered desperately.
'Come on.'
Macauley took her hand, and kept going. He felt the tugging weight. It got heavier and heavier. It was not brutality, but purposeful tactics. He stopped them short of the verge of exhaustion. When the child was swaying, leaning back from the mooring of his hand, the legs wobbling, the voice dreeing mournfully while the tears flowed unattended down the crumpled face -- that was when Macauley picked her up.
She was asleep in five minutes, her head on his shoulder.
Pity crept like a little flame into the smoulder of his resentment, but the resentment was too strong for it and it was smothered. Macauley told himself this could not go on. He was vehement.
Yet when he saw emus he had a wish that she could see them; when he saw the wild pigs had been rooting up ground he had an inclination to point it out; and when he came upon a goanna disgorging at his approach a kitten rabbit he had an instinct to wake her up and show her the sight.

The story covers Macauley's and Buster's adventures on the road. To write much more would spoil the enjoyment for others, but it's safe to say there's a few brawls, a run-in with the police and a lot of miserable weather. In fact, you're never quite sure what's going to happen next, and I was surprised, on more than one occasion, at the turn of events. (Note, there are no chapter breaks, so it's almost impossible to put this book down, because there never seems to be a natural point to stop reading.)

It's interesting to get a glimpse of a bygone way of life, particularly given that allowing a child to live such a rough and ready lifestyle today would be tantamount to child abuse. 

There's a wonderful sense of friendship and camaraderie in this book, too, not only between father and daughter, but between the many old friends Macauley meets along the way, as well as the new people he bumps into who think nothing of sharing their food and their shelter. It's certainly a less suspicious era, where people are trusted at face value, and no one thinks twice about picking up strangers wandering along the roadside.

Obviously, The Shiralee is a product of its time, and there's a very light smattering of racist terminology throughout.

But the book has a big heart. It's funny in places and sad in others. It's occasionally tender, occasionally brutal. It's humble, knowing and wise. Sometimes it makes you feel ashamed to be human, at other times it makes you feel proud. And, above all, it makes you wish every book was written like this: forthright, absorbing and genuinely moving. It is never mawkish, never sentimental.

I wanted the book to go on forever because I so enjoyed being in the company of these wonderfully smart and good-hearted people, but when it didn't, I felt like having a good, long howl: it's got a cracker of an emotional ending.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography says the book is about the "responsibility of fatherhood" but I like this description best, because it sums it up perfectly: "Niland's writing reveals a man who was profoundly aware of the paradoxical burdens and vitality of the shiralees which all human beings must carry."

I can't praise The Shiralee enough and look forward to hunting out Niland's back catalogue, sadly all out of print, in the weeks to come.

'Once & Then' by Morris Gleitzman

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 249 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian-based writer with more than 20 childrens' books to his name. This book, packaged as an "adult edition" brings together his two Holocaust novels -- Once, first published in 2005, and Then, first published in 2008 -- for the first time. Fittingly, it's released today (August 6) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

I'll have to admit that when this one arrived on my doorstep a month or so back I was a little skeptical: surely it was just jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon already set in place by John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (both of which I loved)? What could yet another childrens' novel tell us about the Jewish experience during the Second World War? Hadn't it all been said before? And why wasn't Penguin re-issuing Esther Hautzig's true life story The Endless Steppe instead, a book I adored when I was a pre-teen and still remember with an aching fondness?

Casting my cynicism aside and holed up in my sick bed bed, I decided to give this one a go because it probably wouldn't tax the brain matter too much. I figured I'd probably read the first 50 pages and then make a judgement call. I got so swept up in the story about a 10-year-old Jewish orphan, Felix, and his gutsy little non-Jewish friend, Zelda, that I read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours. And then wished I hadn't ploughed through it so furiously because I wanted to spend more time in the company of these wonderful, inspiring characters.

The beauty of Once & Then is its ability to present the Holocaust in a fresh way -- that is, from the perspective of a young boy who fails to comprehend the violence and brutality around him. Of course Boyne does this in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but Gleitzman tackles it from a slightly different angle: a Jewish boy who doesn't even remotely understand that it is his very religion that puts him in danger. Indeed, when the book opens Felix's naivety is crystal clear: he truly believes he is only residing in a Catholic orphanage, not because his parents are dead, but because they are trying to sort out their problems as Jewish booksellers before coming back to rescue him.

There were two reasons Mum and Dad chose this orphanage, because it was the closest and because of Mother Minka's goodness. When they were bringing me here, they told me how in all the years Mother Minka was a customer of their bookshop, back before things got difficult for Jewish booksellers, she never once criticised a single book.

His innocence is all the more apparent when you realise he's being carrying this false hope with him for three years and eight months, and yet it remains undiminished. His only fear is that when his parents return they won't recognise him because he's changed so much in that time.

But the tables are turned when a group of Nazis arrive one day to burn all the Jewish books in the orphanage's library. Felix suddenly realises that he needs to rescue his parents, not the other way around.

There's a gang of thugs going round the country burning Jewish books. Mum and Dad, wherever in Europe they are, probably don't even know their books are in danger.
I have to try and find Mum and Dad and tell them what's going on.
But first I must get to the shop and hide the books.

This sets Felix off on an amazing voyage of discovery in which he escapes the orphanage and begins a new life on the run. Along the way, he collects a sidekick, a six-year-old girl, whom he rescues from a burning farm. Together Felix and Zelda form a formidable duo, a kind of brother-sister act that endures all kinds of highs and lows as they try to survive everything the Nazi regime has to throw at them.

To supply any more detail would spoil the plot, because the enjoyment of reading Once & Then is letting the adventure unfurl page by page, and experiencing the adrenalin rushes, the shocks and the tears that this brings. There's plenty of laughs in the book, too, a delightfully naive child-like humour that softens the blows of what would otherwise be a terribly dark and depressing story.

But the best part, especially for book lovers, is the infectious enthusiasm for storytelling that exists within Felix and his undying love for British writer Richmal Crompton and her humorous Just William stories.

I clamber over the beds and squeeze onto the floor and take a book from the shelf. Just William by Richmal Crompton. It's still one of my favourite books in the whole world. As I open it I try not to remember Mum and Dad reading it to me.
Instead, I read a bit to myself. About William's dog. He's called Jumble and he's a mixture of about a hundred different dogs and William loves him even when he pees in William's new boots.
Mum and Dad said I can have a dog like Jumble one day.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about them.
William is training Jumble to be a pirate. That's what I love about William. He always stays hopeful, and no matter how bad things get, no matter how much the world turns upside down, his mum and dad never die.
Not ever.
I know I should be getting back, but I can't get up at the moment. All I can do is stay here on the floor, with Just William and Zelda's carrot, thinking about Mum and Dad and crying.

Once & Then is a powerful story about the strength and resilience of the human spirit. It's about courage and hope, and surviving against the odds. And while it tackles one of the darkest times in 20th century history, Gleitzman does it sensitively without losing any of the important detail. There's plenty of death here, and cruelty, but it's not sensationalist or gratuitous. "This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable," he writes in his afterward. I think he's achieved it.

'The Journalist and the Murderer' by Janet Malcolm

Non-fiction - paperback; Granta Books; 163 pages; 2004.

Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer famously caused an outcry within the media when it was first published as a two-part article in The New Yorker in 1989. Its oft-quoted opening sentence -- "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible" -- seemed to lay down the gauntlet, calling the ethics of journalism into question.

But Malcolm is a journalist herself and so the book must not be condemned on the basis of this first line, nor should it be viewed as summing up the author's views. Indeed, it becomes clear upon reading The Journalist and the Murderer that Malcolm has mixed views about her profession, which I'm sure is true of most journalists today, myself included.

What this book really examines is the relationship between journalists and sources in the context of non-fiction books and the difficulties which face both parties. While the journalist must remain impartial in order to render the truth, he must do whatever he can to convince his subject to be frank and open with him. Meanwhile, the source must come to trust the journalist enough to share his or her most intimate secrets. Such unspoken rules are fraught with difficulty, because what happens if the journalist writes something that upsets the source but which he knows is correct and truthful? Most journalists would say that they are only doing their job - and that's the view I take, too.

But what if the situation was slightly more complicated, and the journalist agreed to write a book about the source and was given unparalleled access to him and his closest family, friends and colleagues? The dynamic might change, a close friendship might result, but surely the journalist still has a job to do and is honour-bound to remain objective and to write events as he sees them? After all he's not in the business of writing flattering, gratifying portraits (unless, of course, that's the "truth"), because he's not a publicist but a journalist.

Tricky, isn't it? And even more so if the source doesn't quite understand the rules of the game and mistakes the journalist's so-called friendship for a genuine intimacy, when it's essentially a means to an end: the journalist has wooed the source in order to extract information. Interestingly, Malcolm calls sources "victims" but she also points out that far too many "victims" are willing ones.

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same negative effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father.

Malcolm really gets to the heart of this very thorny issue by examining the famous lawsuit between a convicted murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, and a journalist, Joe McGinness, who wrote about the crime. 

MacDonald, a United States Army doctor, was accused of murdering his pregnant wife and their two infant daughters in 1970. Before the case had come to trial, McGinness, a hugely successful non-fiction writer, had secured MacDonald's co-operation in turning his story into a book on the condition that he would have complete editorial freedom. He also made arrangements to sit in on the trial, was given full access to McDonald's legal team and even lived with defense counsel and the accused during proceedings.

The book was published under the title Fatal Vision in 1983 (admittedly I read it when I was in my late teens) and turned into a TV mini-series starring Karl Malden in 1984 (I think I probably watched that too, but I couldn't be sure). MacDonald's misguided belief that the book would exonerate him in the eyes of the public did not come to pass. Instead, Fatal Vision states that MacDonald's guilty verdict is the correct outcome, describing him as a "womaniser" and "pathological narcissist". It even goes so far as to purport a motive for the crime: MacDonald killed his family in a fit of psychotic rage caused by amphetamine use.

A writ claiming McGinness had breached his contract was duly served, and it is this case, later settled out of court following a mistrial, which Malcolm dissects using actual court transcripts and her own behind-the-scenes interviews in The Journalist and The Murderer. It is absolutely fascinating reading, if only to see the duplicit lengths that a journalist will go to to get his story. And it would seem that the "morally indefensible" act to which she refers in her opening sentence is not about journalism per se but to McGinness's betrayal of his source: pretending that he believed MacDonald was innocent long after he became convinced of his guilt.

'The Wilderness' by Samantha Harvey

Fiction - paperback; Jonathan Cape; 336 pages; 2009.

Samantha Harvey is an exquisite writer and a skilled novelist. The Wilderness is so accomplished on so many different levels -- stylistically, creatively, intellectually -- that it seems astonishing that this is her first novel. What is not astonishing is that it has been shortlisted for this year's Orange Prize for Fiction. And if I might be so bold as to make an outlandish claim based on nothing more than instinct, I rather suspect it might win. Or at least I hope it does.

While not much seems to happen in the book, it is an utterly engrossing story, one that is shocking and melancholic and life-affirming by turn. It has the atmosphere of a spellbinding family drama, with chinks of humour shining through, that someone like Anne Tyler might write. Indeed, it feels like an American book to me, rather than one set in England, although it features some wonderful references to London and the desolate moors of Lincolnshire.

I found it so affecting that I have spent the best part of four days wrestling with this review, and I don't think I will come anywhere close to explaining what it is about this novel that is so brilliant. Bearing that in mind, let me tell you a little of its content.

The third-person narrative focuses on Jake, a 60-something widower, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. We learn that his wife, Helen, 10 years his junior, died from a stroke at the age of 53 and that he is now living with another woman, Eleanor, who is taking care of him. (He occasionally refers to her as "that other woman" because he forgets her name; indeed he often forgets that Helen is dead.) But we never fully learn how that arrangement fell into place, only that the two have known each other for a very long time, have a shared history and that Eleanor waited 30 years to be with him.

Jake has an adult son, Henry, who is in prison, and a daughter, Alice, although it's never quite clear as to whether she is still alive or died as a youngster.

In fact, this inability for the reader to really know the truth is one of the most interesting aspects of Harvey's novel. Through a clever repetition of motifs -- a yellow dress, a cherry tree, the sound of gun shots, mint juleps, love letters, monkeys, the scars on his grandfather's face and a bible bound in human skin -- and family tales -- the story of a missing "e", which parts of a Battenberg cake you should eat first, a 24-hour dalliance with a young woman, an inheritance that goes missing -- the reader begins to see how Jake's memories are slowly deteriorating as his disease takes hold. Stories shift and change and turn into something else, blurring the line between what is real and what is not.

Suddenly nothing he says or does can be trusted, as if it used to be quite an informal kind of illness and now it becomes official. The timeline is a mass of crossings out and corrections. He feels to be the supremely unconfident author of his own life. Question marks appear against words, then he deletes the question marks, thinking that if he doesn't question the truth there is no question about it. It is only him, as the woman says, only him who is confusing things.

But this book is as much about architecture as it is about Alzheimer's. Indeed, Jake, a former architect, refers to the amnesia of his profession on several occasions, and it soon becomes clear that very few of his buildings have been memorable. Ironically, his crowning achievement is a prison extension -- a utilitarian monstrosity that caused a public outcry -- that now houses his wayward son.

And there's a bit of politics thrown in for good measure in the form of the Six-Day War of 1967 between Israel and the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, one of the crystallising moment's in Jake's life. He is so affected by the conflict he sets up a pro-Israel lobby group, because as an architect, he has had his own fights over land. But his mother, Sara, an Austrian Jew, does not approve. "You have foolish ideas," she tells him, before later adding: "These groups, what good are they? You must leave it alone and save the energy for your family."

And it is family -- Helen, Henry, Alice -- which forms the epicentre of his life, and as the memories of them slowly fade and become lost in a fug of confusion the life-affirming nature of this book really hits home: without our memories we have no history, no sense of self, nothing, in fact, to hold onto or to make sense of the world around us.

The Wilderness is an outstanding novel on so many different levels everything I read in its aftermath will seem pithy by comparison. I don't often re-read books, but I have a feeling that this one may just become an old friend. Indeed it invites a second and third reading to really come to grips with the detail of everything within.

'A Woman of My Age' by Nina Bawden

Fiction – paperback; Virago Modern Classics; 160 pages; 1992.

Until very recently I had Nina Bawden pegged as a children's author. Then, while browsing BookMooch a week or so ago, I accidentally discovered she had a rather extensive back catalogue of adult fiction that I simply did not know about. I promptly acquired a rather battered copy of A Woman of My Age (Virago Modern Classic Number 366) and set about reading it.

First published in 1967, this short novel reminded me very much of Doris Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark  in that it tells the story of one woman's emotional journey -- figuratively and physically -- as she struggles to come to terms with growing older and finding her rightful place in the world.

From the outset it is clear that our narrator is not content:

I find this so difficult. When I look in the mirror -- not to see if the grey roots are beginning to show before the next tinting, but in the same way I used to look at myself when I was seventeen, at what, whom and why -- I remain, as I did then, cloudy, fading, sadly out of focus. I do not know myself, only my situation: I am Elizabeth Jourdelay, married to Richard, the mother of his two sons. I am, I am middle-aged. This is an embarrassment that has come upon me suddenly, taking me by surprise so that I don't really believe it. Looking in the mirror I see the wrinkles, but perhaps tomorrow they will be gone and my skin will be smooth again. Though wrinkles are not important. The important thing is that I am in the middle of my life and I feel as I did when I was adolescent, that I do not know where to go from here.

Now, on holiday in Morocco with Richard, Elizabeth longs for the desert because her life was "crowded, cluttered up". But the journey is far from the calm, peaceful one for which she longs. Alongside the heat, there are other English travellers with whom she must contend: the delightfully eccentric and elderly Mr and Mrs Hobbs, and the slightly vain, thrice-married Flora and her much younger lover, Adam.

While Elizabeth enjoys the Hobbs' company, because they remind her of the parents she never had, she finds Flora irritating. Indeed, Flora had gone to Oxford with Richard, and there are suggestions that they pair may have been lovers in the distant past and that their accidental meeting in Fez may have been pre-arranged. These niggling suspicions eat away at Elizabeth, who finds herself analysing her own marriage with a man she barely knew when she married him, aged 20, some 18 years ago.

Her somewhat melancholy recollections of their life together are seamlessly interspersed with what is happening in the present time, as the couple travel from Fez to the barren uplands beyond the Atlas mountains. The reader soon begins to realise that Elizabeth has made far too many compromises in order that the marriage can work, and now, in a foreign country, the cracks in their relationship can no longer be smoothed over. The tension, some of it tragi-comical, builds and builds until it comes to a devastating head...

A Woman of My Age is definitely a product of its times, when women married young and were expected to stay at home and raise a family. But in Elizabeth Jourdelay, Bawden has created a headstrong and independent character who rails against society's "rules" and constraints. Raised by two spinster aunts, one of whom brought her up "to give too much importance to careers and causes and things of the mind", Elizabeth finds marriage and motherhood constricting.

A highly political creature -- "I was very unsure of myself except in matters of political opinion" -- she longs to become a local councillor but Richard thought it a "dirty game and he could not understand how I could endure it" .

Later, when she raises the subject of getting a job, the response from her mother-in-law is crushing:

She said, first, 'Do you really want one, dear? Richard and I thought you had settled so nicely' -- as if I was some sort of jelly -- and then, 'Well, if you really want to, I suppose it would be nice for you to earn some pin money.'

Unfortunately, it does not pan out as planned.

Perhaps it was stupid of me, but I had expected so much, if in a rather a vague way, that the reality was a bitter shock: I was unqualified, I had no degree, I wasn't even trained as a secretary. It soon became clear that nothing which came up to my expectations was open to me. When I realised this, the walls seemed to close in. I became a gloomily devoted mother.

There's something very sad about Elizabeth reconciling her expectations with keeping her family happy, because it's clear that her husband has not had to do the same thing. Of course, we only hear Elizabeth's side of the story, but as the narrative progresses you begin to understand that Richard is not the saintly school teacher husband he purports to be.

And while Bawden deftly captures all the tensions and betrayals and compromises that married people make, she also does a nice line in setting the mood. Her descriptions of Morocco are particularly vivid.

The terrace of the casbah fell away down the hill, dovetailed into one another like the streets and courts of a medieval city, all enclosed in a wall of the same red earth. At one end there was a little tower where cranes were nesting. Beyond the wall was the palm-grove, a chess-board of different coloured grasses, and beyond the oasis, the flat, ochre colour of the desert. The air quivered, not just far in a heat haze, but close by me on the parapet, in a kind of vibrating brightness that hurt my eyes. 

In fact, setting the book in Morocco is a clever touch, because it allows Elizabeth to compare the subjugation of women in North African societies with her own situation. Indeed, when Flora points out that "their men shut them up at home; even if you visit the house, the women don't appear socially. Just to serve the food" the point seemingly goes over Elizabeth's head, but it did not go over mine.

Having read my first Nina Bawden adult novel I'm keen to read the others -- there's certainly plenty to keep me occupied as you can see by this and this. Next on the rank is The Birds in the Trees or maybe I will try Afternoon of a Good Women, two books I mooched even before I'd come to the end of this one. If they are half as good as A Woman of My Age I am sure to be in for a treat.

'The Christmas Tree' by Jennifer Johnston

  Fiction - paperback; Fontana; 168 pages; 1982.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'The Ginger Man' by J.P. Donleavy

  Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 346 pages; 1997.

For someone who has an incurable penchant for Irish fiction, I can't believe I let J.P. Donleavy slip me by for so long. But until very recently he was completely unknown to me. So when my Other Half went on a solo run to Dublin recently and bought me The Ginger Man as a gift I wasn't sure what to expect.

Funnily enough, I recognised the cover of the book, but I'm not sure why. I don't think I have ever picked it up in a book shop. But that's by the by.

The blurb on my edition waxes rather lyrical, calling it a "masterpiece" and "a triumph", but I think that's not credit enough. The Ginger Man is a thoroughly wonderful, riotously funny, head-shakingly brilliant read. I loved it from the very first line to the last.

First published in Paris in 1955, the book was banned in Ireland -- where it is set -- and the USA for obscenity. More than 50 years on, the story is still crude and ribald but certainly not as offensive as it must have seemed in more temperate times in places verging on puritan.

The story follows the adventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, an American Protestant of Irish descent, who is studying law at Trinity College just after the Second World War. Married to an English woman and with an infant daughter, Dangerfield is a chancer who shies away from any form of responsibility, preferring to hang out with his friend, fellow student Kenneth O'Keefe, rather than do any proactive study.

Obsessed with booze and women, he does everything a married man should not do: spends the couple's rent money on alcohol, staggers home drunk and acts violently towards his wife. He also has numerous adulterous affairs in which he treats the women abominably. He is, in short, a thoroughly unlikable and selfish cad. And yet, in Donleavy's hands, Dangerfield is a character you love to hate. I spent most of the time thinking this can't be true, he can't get away with this, surely the man has a conscience? And kept turning the pages, hoping to discover that the man would mend his wicked ways if only he realised his behaviour was so outrageously appalling.

The book is written in a weird mish-mash of viewpoints, effortlessly switching between first person and third person, typical of the following paragraph:

'Come here and sit beside me while I open this bottle.'
She came and sat on the mattress beside him, leaning against the wall, watching him with a flourish of wrist, pop the cork. We lay in the remnants of coal. And a pile of turf. I happen to know that dogs and cats prefer coal and turf. And I don't relish finding myself sitting in it.

There are some scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny; others so shockingly brutal you're not sure you want to read on. I found myself not knowing whether I should be grimacing or chortling throughout. But it's this very fine line between comedy and tragedy that makes The Ginger Man work -- on so many different levels. The beauty of this rather marvellous novel is that it paints a very human portrait of a man so desperately troubled -- financially, emotionally, mentally -- that it's hard not to empathise with him just a little.

For those that want to know more about J.P. Donleavy, there's a wonderful profile of him on the Guardian website. He sounds like a truly fascinating character with whom I must acquaint myself more fully!

'The Crimson Petal and the White' by Michel Faber

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 833 pages; 2003.

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is, quite simply, an astounding literary accomplishment. Within its 800-plus pages unfolds a story that draws the reader into another time and place so expertly that you feel as if you, too, are treading the streets of Victorian-era London.

Critics have quite rightly compared Faber's epic novel with that other great Victorian writer Charles Dickens, but as Kathryn Hughes pointed out in the Guardian this one is not tempered by the social mores that prevented Dickens from writing freely. Faber's book, a 21st century novel set in the 19th century, is lewd and bawdy, gritty and real, and there's no pretense at keeping things in check lest he offend a delicate reader.

Indeed, one could argue that delicate readers should probably steer clear of this epic tale about a prostitute's rise and fall in Victorian England. His central character, 19-year-old Sugar, is infamous for turning the kinds of tricks other whores refuse to do. And while Faber may not go into great detail regarding those tricks, he certainly does not shy away from letting us into the sordid, carnal world of an 1870s streetwalker. The language can, at times, be very crude -- and if you are offended by the "C-word" you'd be wise to stay away.

But despite the constant debauchery (for want of a better word) that fills the pages, The Crimson Petal and the White never feels pornographic, nor sensationalist. Instead, because Faber has such an eye for detail and is a stickler for historical accuracy, the novel feels like an intoxicating trip into a world that few of us could ever hope -- or want -- to visit.

The London he describes is rich and vivid, peppered with beggars and street urchins, while the constant stench of human waste and horse dung fills the air.

Cabs are trotting backwards and forwards, thickly bearded gentlemen in dark clothing dash across their path, sandwich-board men patrol the gutters and, over there, a trio of street-sweepers are standing over a drain, cramming the accumulated porridge of snow-slush, dirt and horse-dung down through the grille with jabs of their brooms. Even as they toil, an equipage bristling with provincial businessmen jingles by, leaving a steamy festoon of turd in its wake.

The story is set over the course of 1875. It begins with William Rackham, the reluctant heir to a perfumery business, hunting out the services of a notorious whore whose name he discovered in an annual brothel directory. When he eventually meets the alluring Sugar, he finds himself as equally attracted to her brain as to her body.

Sugar, as it turns out, is more than the sum of her parts. She's a would-be writer working on a novel about a woman who carries out the most gruesome acts of revenge on the men who have paid to sleep with her. Sugar is also highly intelligent but has simply never been given the opportunity to rise above the mire to which she's become accustomed.

Over the course of many rendezvous, Sugar and William establish an easy rapport, both in the bed and out of it, and before long William finds that the relationship has given him the impetus he needs to take control of the perfumery business he had so long despised. When he begins making his fortune, he "buys" Sugar and installs her in a secret pad, supplying her with a weekly wage and all the material possessions she could ever hope for.

But all is not well at home. His wife is going mad and his young daughter's governess is planning on leaving the household. Likewise, Sugar is desperately lonely and begins to wonder if her sexual powers over William are beginning to wane...

She's tired of waiting for William. Days go by without a visit; then, when he does call on her, he has a mind full of concerns from his secret life -- secret from her, that is. All his friends and family know him better than she, and they haven't any use for the knowledge; it's so unfair!

To say much more would mean revealing crucial plot spoilers, which I am loathe to do, but essentially both characters hatch plots -- with drastic and unpredictable consequences -- to ensure that they can continue to stay together as a kind of surreptitious "husband and wife".

Intertwined with this major narrative thread is a series of other minor storylines involving secondary characters which serve to make the book an especially rich, multi-layered read.

There's William's brother, Henry, a pious would-be preacher and his will-they-or-won't-they friendship with an older woman, Emmaline Fox. Mrs Fox, a widow, works for the Rescue Society, an organisation that helps give former prostitutes proper jobs, and thereby knows Sugar and the circles she once operated in.

Mrs Fox's father is also a minor character. He's an arrogant and somewhat creepy doctor who tends to William's wife and pushes for her to be taken into a sanatorium, because how else do you treat a woman who is clearly suffering from a yet-to-be-diagnosed case of post-natal depression? 

William's two bachelor friends, Bodley and Ashwell (or Bashley and Oddwell, as William is want to call them in moments of extreme drunkenness), serve as foils to his conscience, often encouraging him to do outrageous things, and together they add a dollop of devilish humour to the story.

But despite the completely absorbing tale that I found The Crimson Petal and the White to be, it's not without its (tiny) faults. There's a rather annoying omnipresent narrator who can sometimes grate, although the following sentence did make me laugh out loud:

So there you have it: the thoughts (somewhat pruned of repetition) of William Rackham as he sits on his bench in St James's Park. If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.

The good thing is that this narrator does ease himself out of the story quite early on, and only makes his appearance known again at the very end, so it's tolerable if you don't really like that sort of thing. In any case, you shouldn't let it put you off reading this wonderful, boisterous and hugely entertaining novel. It sounds ludicrous to say it, but at 833 pages it almost seemed too short and the near-perfect ending came almost too soon for my liking.

'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.

'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit' by Sloan Wilson

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Modern Classics; 288 pages; 2005.

Sloan Wilson, who died in 2003 aged 83, wrote 15 novels, but his most famous was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, first published in 1955.

I picked this book up several years ago, attracted more by the black and white photograph of Gregory Peck on the cover and the lovely silver spine that is the trademark of a Penguin Modern Classic than the name of the author. Indeed, I had never heard of Sloan Wilson, whom, it seems, had become one of those neglected writers recently championed by the modern literary elite -- in this case, Jonathan Franzen, who writes a brief but very good introduction to this edition. (Franzen did something similar for Paula Fox's Desperate Characters a few years back, which makes me wonder whether that might explain his lack of recent fiction: he's too busy writing introductions for long-forgotten authors than concentrating on his own literary career.)

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is described as the quintessential 1950s novel, mainly because that's the era in which it is set and written, but putting aside the sexism and the "traditional" family life -- man goes to work, woman stays at home and looks after the children -- depicted within its pages, it is still highly relevant and tackles themes and issues that are pertinent today.  For instance, at what point does one acknowledge that it is more important to enjoy one's work than it is to make as much money as possible from something you detest? When do you stop worrying about the future and start enjoying the present? Should you tell people the truth or tell them what they want to hear? Is rampant consumerism the path to happiness?

The book follows Tom Rath, a veteran of the Second World War, who is married to Betsy. They have three young children and live in suburban Connecticut, but are desperate to move up in the world, to "afford a bigger house and a better brand of gin".

When Tom leaves his dull but secure Manhattan job and applies for something slightly different -- a PR man for the United Broadcasting Company (UBC) -- Betsy is surprised. "I've never thought of you as a public-relations man," she says to him. "Would you like it?" "I'd like the money," is his reply.

By a large stroke of luck, Tom walks into a challenging but cushy job as the right-hand man of Mr Hopkins, the president of UBC, who plans to form a national committee on mental health. It's not a particularly well paid job, but the opportunities for promotion are immense.

Still, despite the promise of a bright future, Tom is plagued by doubts -- he simply does not think he is good enough for the job and he struggles to work out where he fits in.

His life is further complicated by the death of his elderly grandmother. She leaves him a large, crumbling estate, which could potentially be the answer to all his financial woes, but her hired help creates turmoil by contesting the will. And then there's problems with the local community which could scupper his plans to subdivide the land for extra profit.

All these complications lead Tom -- and Betsy too -- into a kind of stressed existence, where all they do is work and worry, following a set routine that leaves neither of them content. "There's something that seems to be hanging over us," Betsy says one morning. "Something that makes it hard to be happy."

That cloud hanging over them is Tom's inability to talk about his war experience, not because he is troubled by the people he killed, but because he had an affair with an Italian women with whom he suspects he has fathered a child. This scene, as Tom and Betsy lie in bed one night, is as good as any at conveying the strain within their marriage:

'Did you ever kill anyone?
'Of course.'
'I mean, did you personally ever kill anyone? You've never talked to me about it.'
'Right now I'm too tired. I want to go to sleep.'
He stirred restlessly and shut his eyes. In the dim light from the window Betsy lay looking at his big hands lying quietly folded on top of the covers. 'I cannot imagine you killing anyone,' she said.
There was no answer. Betsy lay looking at him for several minutes before trying to go to sleep. How strange, she thought, to know so little about one's husband.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a wonderful story about juggling the work / life balance while still being able to provide for your family. The blurb of this particular edition calls it "a testament to the enduring power of family love" but I'd argue it's more about being true to yourself, about being courageous and living the life you want to lead, not the life you are expected to lead.

But what I liked about it most, aside from the very human tale told within its pages, is the lightness of touch Wilson brings to the narrative. There's a cast of well-rounded, occasionally comical characters, with walk-on roles that bring a smile to the face. And he's very adept at making conversations sound ludicrous but totally believable by turns.

The strength of the narrative also lies in its many threads. While Tom is the main protagonist, we also get to experience other view points -- namely Mr Hopkins and the probate judge considering the disputed will. And Tom's back story, that as a paratrooper in the war, is nicely fleshed out using a series of regular flashbacks woven seamlessly into the main storyline.

I found little, if anything, to fault in this highly entertaining novel. The author has been criticised for the sappy ending, but personally I didn't mind it, and I'm now keen to seek out the 1956 film version of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit starring Gregory Peck. And I'll probably go hunt out his other novels, which all seem to be out of print; if they are as good as this one it will be worth the effort.

'The Spare Room' by Helen Garner

Fiction - hardcover; Canongate; 180 pages; 2008.

Even before I started reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room I knew I was going to like it. It was the design of the book that convinced me, because surely a publisher wouldn't go to all this trouble to make it look so beautiful if the content was rubbish? The cover image grabbed me initially when I ordered it online, but once I had it in my possession I loved the whole package: the gorgeous cover image (tulips are my favourite flowers); the dust jacket with its luxurious matt sheen; the pretty endpapers (tulip petals interspersed with green leaves); and a green bound bookmark.

But putting the sheer physical beauty of the book aside, The Spare Room is also rather special because it is Garner's first novel in 16 years. Her last novel, Cosmo Comolino, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1992, but she then took a different writing path, concentrating on short stories and journalism. The first (and only) Garner I have read was The First Stone, a non-fiction account of a sexual harassment scandal at a residential college at the University of Melbourne, which caused much controversy upon publication in 1995. I ate that book up in the course of a day and closed the last page feeling dazed, slightly dirty and not quite sure whether the author was a genius or a traitor. Having now read The Spare Room my opinion lies toward the former rather than the latter.

That other great Australian author Peter Carey endorses Garner's talent by describing her new book as a "perfect novel".  Of course this is an oft overused trite phrase but, in this specific case, it's a wholly appropriate one. In fact, I'd go so far as to describe it as a sublime novel, and one that works its way into your subconscious so that you find yourself thinking about it when you are doing other things.

Reviewing the book is difficult though, because the synopsis sounds terribly dull and depressing. A 60-something woman offers her spare room to a cancer-stricken friend of the same age and then finds their relationship tested to the core, doesn't really grab you by the throat, does it? And yet, in Garner's careful hands this story becomes a thoroughly engrossing one. The carefully measured prose, stripped of unnecessary clutter, serves to remove the claustrophobia of such a dark storyline, imbuing it with a light-hearted touch. Indeed, there were many times when I laughed out loud, not the least of when Nicola, the cancer sufferer, asks Helen, the friend caring for her, to buy some organic coffee for an enema.

When I saw her brewing the organic coffee in the kitchen after dinner, I said tentatively, 'Do you need a hand to set it up? I can...
She shook her head, too busy to listen.
'I wonder, though,' I said, as she forged off to the bathroom with the equipment. 'Is it a good idea to have a coffee enema at bedtime? You don't think the caffeine might keep you awake?'
'Why on earth would it do that, darling?' she said breezily. 'I won't be drinking it -- I'll only be putting it up my bum.'

Supposedly based on Garner's own experience of caring for a dying friend, The Spare Room has a genuine ring of authenticity about it. You can understand Helen's anger, her fear, her inability to look after her dying friend, even if it is for just three weeks, because you know to be in a similar situation you'd probably feel the same way. Why should a friend do what a family member should be doing? And what happens if this friend dies in your spare room?

This is a novel about death and friendship, about drawing lines and crossing them, about facing up to hard truths and shying away from things we'd rather not confront. But it also embraces other uncomfortable issues, including whether it is permissible to believe in alternative therapies if Western medicine does not have a solution, but all the while it never preaches, never comes across as heavy or patronising.

The Spare Room is one of those books that throws you in at the deep end and, to completely mix my metaphors, you either run with it or you don't. I'm pleased to say I ran with it... and only wished it was longer than its brief 180 pages.

'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' by Richard Flanagan

Fiction - paperback; Grove Press; 425 pages; 1997.

I seem to be on a roll with Australian books. This one, my third in a matter of weeks, is by Richard Flanagan, who first came to international prominence with Gould's Book of Fish, which I read several years ago and loved very much. The book went on to win the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002.

Prior to this Flanagan had written two other novels: Death of a River Guide, in 1994,  and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in 1997. Like Gould's Book of Fish, both are set in Tasmania, an island state of Australia, where the author resides.

At its most basic level The Sound of One Hand Clapping is about the strained relationship between a father and daughter, but it is far more complicated than that, touching on a wide range of issues including poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and wartime atrocities, all set within the social and historical context of Australia's immigrant past.

This is a book that possesses a strangely heady mix of bleakness and despair, tempered by moments of clarity and joy. Initially I wrestled with the writing style, because Flanagan is prone to overly-long sentences that sometimes so twist and bend out of shape you feel like you're riding a rollercoaster:

In that long Autumn of 1959, when elsewhere the world was sensing change so big and hard in its coming that it was like the trembling of the earth announcing the arrival of a yet to be seen locomotive, in that month of April in the city of Hobart, nothing much looked like it could ever change around a town that had grown used to never being anything but the arse end of everything: mean, hard and dirty, where civic ambition meant buying up old colonial buildings and bulldozing them quick and covering the dust promptly with asphalt for cars most people were yet to own, where town pride meant tossing any unlucky derro found lying in the park into the can, and where a sense of community equated with calling anybody with skin darker than fair a boong bastard unless he worse snappy clothes in which case he was a filthy wog bastard -- in that month of April when the cold slowly began its winter's journey, spreading its way down over weeks from the mountain's steel-blue flanks, on an early Saturday morning, an FJ was wending its way through the scummy back streets of north Hobart to the home of Umberto Picotti.

And it can be hard to get a foothold on the essence of the story when the narrative is non-linear, shunting backwards and forwards in time, and told from two different perspectives.

But in many ways this is what makes The Sound of One Hand Clapping such a wonderfully rich and beguiling read. Hypnotic and unbearably sad in places, it's a very human tale about two people locked together by a shared past who struggle to rise above the pain of their circumstances.

The story begins in 1954 when Slovenian couple Bojan and Maria Buloh, both scarred by the horrors of the Second World War, immigrate to Australia. Bojan, along with hundreds of other European immigrants, finds work as a labourer on a construction project to build a massive hydroelectric dam in the rugged Tasmanian highlands. Here the weather is harsh and living conditions primitive. One stormy evening Maria packs her bags and leaves her husband and three-year-old daughter Sonja behind. She is never seen alive again.

What enfolds over the next 35 years is essentially the nub of this compelling novel. Bojan drowns his grief in drink and struggles to make a decent life for his daughter. Sonja, unbearably miserable, eventually flees to the mainland. It is only when she is about to become a mother herself that she decides to re-establish contact, returning to Tasmania to make amends with her now elderly father. Her life's story is then told in a series of flashbacks intercut with chapters from Bojan's point of view.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping is a book about new beginnings that shatters the myth of Australia as the "lucky country". It does not shy away from presenting white Australians as uncouth, uncultured and racist at a period in the country's history at which immigration was running at an all-time high. For that reason alone, it is a refreshing -- and challenging -- read.

This critically acclaimed novel won the 1998 Victorian Premier's Prize for Best Novel, the 1999 ABA Australian Book of the Year Prize and was shortlisted for the 1998 Miles Franklin Award. It was made into a film directed by Richard Flanagan in 1998.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

Fiction - paperback; Penguin Popular Classics; 67 pages; 1994.

In my quest to read more work by Irish literary greats this year, I recently purchased a newly repackaged Penguin Popular Classic version of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest. This edition, with its vibrant green cover and tracing-paper thin paper (all 100 per cent recycled), retails for a meagre £2 -- that's a damn cheap price for a masterpiece, in my opinion.

I don't normally read plays (as the 200-plus reviews on this blog will attest), but I decided to make an exception in this case. (Well, to be honest, I'd already read The Picture of Dorian Gray back in my early 20s and because there's a distinct lack of other novels in Mr Wilde's back catalogue I wasn't left with much choice.)

I had seen a film version of this play a couple of years ago (the 2002 version starring Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Frances O'Connor, Reese Witherspoon and Judi Dench) and I remember laughing out loud at a lot of it. But seeing the words in black-and-white print makes them seem even funnier -- if that is possible.

For those who don't know the storyline, the brief synopsis goes something like this: Country gentleman Jack Worthing invents a younger brother, Ernest, whom he pretends to be when he visits the city. This gives him free reign to pursue the beautiful Gwendolen. Meanwhile his city-based friend, Algernon Moncrieff, invents a poorly relative, Bunbury, whom he pretends to visit in the country in order that he can leave his dull city existence behind for a bit of fun and frivolity. One day Algernon pretends to be Ernest and visits Jack's pretty charge, Cecily, in the country, which leads to all kinds of confusion about identity. Obviously, Jack is not happy, but when his own deceptive behaviour is called into question, the scene is ripe for much farce and hilarity.

In three short acts, this play delivers so many laughs and classic one-liners it's difficult to appreciate the genius of it in just one reading. Fortunately, it's short enough -- just 67 pages in this edition -- to read cover-to-cover twice in a very short amount of time.

How many people haven't heard this line?

(Delivered by Lady Bracknell to Jack): To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune: to lose both looks like carelessness.

Or this one:

(Delivered by Gwendolen to Cecily): I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

But it's not just the lines which are funny, but the setting and the ways in which they are delivered that makes certain scenes especially comedic. This scene, in which Cecily serves tea and cake to her new rival in love, Gwendolen, is a good example of Wilde's ability to capture the little details in people's behaviour that conveys so much about their character and mood.

Cecily [sweetly]: Sugar?

Gwendolen [superciliously]: No thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar in the cup.]

Cecily [severely]: Cake or bread and butter?

Gwendolen [in a bored manner]: Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

Cecily [cuts a very large slice of cake and puts it on the tray]: Hand that to Miss Fairfax.

Without wishing to wax lyrical, this is a sumptuous, dazzling read -- a wonderfully clever farce to brighten up the dullest day. It's tightly written, with not a word wasted, and there's a delightful conclusion in which all the lose ends are brought together and tied up with an unexpected flourish. Masterpiece, indeed.