Bernice Rubens - The Elected Member

Well, folks, this one has everything you could ever want out of a Booker winner: dysfunctional families, cultural identity (Jewish), drug addiction, hints of both brother-sister incest and homosexuality, and death. That's damn impressive. And it was only the second book to win the prize -- clearly it Set The Tone for the decades to come.

(Disclosure time: so much time has passed since I created this blog post and wrote the above paragraph that my opinions & memories of this book, never too strong in the first place, have dwindled away somewhat.)

The Elected Member is about Norman Zweck, his sister Bella, and his father Rabbi Zweck. Nominally the narration is Norman's, centering on his drug addiction and the psychotic delusions resulting from his withdrawal, but it gradually expands to envelop the entire family and their own histories, secret struggles, and resentments. It's not a fun book at all, but it's very well done.

Given my own interests and background, what I found the most impressive was the way Rubens portrayed mental illness from the inside out, showing the dreadful, chilling pathos of delusion: the way irrational beliefs can be held by otherwise intelligent people, the ways in which they cling unshakably to the results of their own brain chemistry, they ways in which they rationalise and rebuild reality so that it fits in with what they know to be irrevocably true. She shows the inevitable anger that develops against anyone trying to deny that reality, and the helplessness of anyone on the outside, seeing the psychosis for what it is but unable to break through. This portrait of drug addiction and delusion alone makes the book worth reading.

The title of the book relates to the family context of this individual tragedy; the metaphor is that Norman's condition makes him the single member of the family who has been 'elected' to be both scapegoat and victim as a result of the family's collective history, the events that led to Rabbi Zweck's unhappiness and Bella's bitter loneliness and their estrangement from Norman's eldest sister. Their guilt dictates how they react to Norman's condition and use it to streamline and reflect their own suffering:

They could not bear to make him miserable, though if she were honest, it was her own pain and her father's that was unsupportable. And so they had both entered Norman's derangement, making it workable, tidying it even, making it all 'nice'. They were both equally guilty. She knew in her heart, it was better for strangers to look after him. Her answer over the years to Norman's sickness had been that he was doing it on purpose to drive them all crazy. She had to be angry with him. It was the surest hold on her own sanity. If a mind wavered, it was best to keep the kin at bay.

As often happens with these depressing, clever, well-crafted books that end up on the Booker list, I was slow to get into it, engrossed while reading it, thoughtful for a day afterwards, and then more or less shook off my memory of the emotions it inspired within me. I can't say I loved it, I can't say I'd press it into the hands of anyone looking for recommendations, but I'm glad it was on my list.

Sebastian Faulks - A Week in December

This book was everywhere in the London shops when I was there in January of this year. I suspect the publishers cannily released it in the lead-up to Christmas; understandable, since it is set in London during that particular part of the year. I was drawn to it at the time because of the cover design (I am easy as hell for explicitly London-y fiction) but I was too busy devouring Faulks's earlier novel Birdsong to actually bother with buying it.

A Week in December uses the simple conceit of following a group of varied people with loosely interconnected lives, switching rapidly between them and showing us what their preoccupations and distractions are in this single week. It's simple, yes, but Faulks pulls it off very well by not over-stuffing the novel with people (although the cast is large, it's never hard to keep track of people once you're a few chapters in) and by also introducing a few key events that are scheduled for the end of the week, thereby creating both a structure and an impetus for the story, without which it would likely have been entertaining but lacking in a sense of solid narrative.

By and large the variety of characters is satisfying; although it's not at all a cross-section of class (the predominance of very rich people is at least lampshaded) there's a huge mixture of personalities and likeabilities and opinions. As a result, the book leaps around somewhat in tone. It runs all the way down the spectrum from direct satire of popular culture reminiscent of Ben Elton's sharp black humour (covering reality TV, online second lives, and modern art), via the near-caricature of RT, the failed novelist and spiteful book reviewer, all the way to the measured portrayal of Islamic fundamentalism. I'm not sure where the plotline of John Veals the hedge fund manager and his deal of a lifetime belongs on this spectrum, because I don't know enough about the area to understand the twists and layers of what happens beyond the pointed commentary about who ends up bearing the cost of fiscal irresponsibility in banks. However, I have a strong suspicion that this failure to distinguish between serious depiction and absurdism is exactly the point that Faulks is trying to make about the world of finance.

Like so many of the things I love, it's also a book about books! Most explicitly there's RT, who has seemingly lost the inability to find anything worthwhile in literature, so focused is he on exposing the failings of the authors behind the words; indeed, the act of me writing a review of A Week in December feels almost like a meta endeavour. There's also the OBE recipient nervously learning and reciting potted criticism of books in case the Queen wants to discuss them with him; and finally there are the ways in which books enrich the lives of people who otherwise don't feel that they have much in the way of colour or happiness:

'People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.'

Indeed. And books like this are why I tend to leap at things that fall under the banner of Literary Fiction even though that genre (if indeed it can be called one) includes authors like Banville and McEwan whose books I find tiresome. This one is about families, and religion, and mental health, and relationships, and city life -- all those good things that never get stale as long as the characters themselves are fresh -- delivered in a prose that feels effortless and incisive without ever tipping into purpleism or choppiness. It's probably not for everyone, but I loved it.

Jean Plaidy - Daughter of Satan

This book was loaned to me by one of my best friends as good trashy historical fun, which is not exactly my genre, but I will read basically anything if it is gifted or lent to me.

(I thought this cover was trashy enough, what with it depicting the protagonist's sexual assualt, but when Googling to find a picture of it I discovered this cover of an alternate edition and now I see that no, it could have been MUCH TRASHIER and ten times more hilarious.)

Daughter of Satan is about Tamar, a proud young woman who grows up in seventeenth-century England believing that she is the result of a union between her mother and the devil. She is accused of witchcraft, is Torn Between Two Men (of course) and eventually lands herself in the New World in search of a better life.

I --

I'm sorry, Tink, darling.

I hated this book.

To be fair, I didn't hate it for the first third or so. I enjoyed the prose. I was intrigued by Tamar the child, growing up conscious of the ways in which people fear her, deluding herself into pride and power. I liked the expert depiction of the ways in which the society's tensions and preoccupations on the personal level descended directly from the prevailing political climate and the supremacy of religion as a point of disagreement and a means through which to wield power. As a well-written, well-researched portrait of a historical period through the eyes of its inhabitants, this book succeeds.

As a story, as a story about characters, it doesn't. At least, certainly not for me.

From her promising beginning, Tamar degenerates into inconsistency. Sure, people are allowed to be more than one thing, and to change, but I never felt that her character cohered into anything for long enough that I could gain a basic understanding of what made her tick beyond her vanity and her stubborn need to cling to the sense of Darkness and Specialness that made her a hellish but entertaining child. When these are the only things presented to you as the protagonist's consistent motivating factors, it's hard to connect with her, or even care much about what happens to her.

But the real problem with this book is that it is trying to be a historical romance, and I detested both of the love interests with a fiery, fiery passion. I think the fact that Tamar's life in the latter two thirds of the book is primarily about her mixed feelings regarding the two men -- Bartle Cavill the bullying asshole pirate slash country squire, and Humilty Brown the staunchly idealistic Puritan minister -- is what prevents Tamar herself from remaining the kind of protagonist I like. She wavers. She obssesses. She contradicts herself. She self-sabotages. She's religious. She's not religious. She's petty and fearful and cruel. I want to punch her repeatedly in the face.

Humility is well-realised as a character, and a good vehicle for exploring what it meant to be a Puritan in England at such a time, but he's a hypocrite and a whiner and seriously lacks the depth that one finds in, say, Jane Eyre's St John Rivers (a very comparable character); plus, he's just plain irritating. Bartle is worse, though: he's vicious and he's abusive. He sexually assaults Tamar when she's fourteen, and when she's older he blackmails her into sleeping with him twice. She rebuffs him over and over and over again. He smirks. He claims that she was asking for it. She says that she would rather be tortured and hanged as a witch than sleep with him. He claims that she wanted to sleep with him all along and really she was happy that he came up with an excuse like his horrible blackmailing trickery. This, this ghasty rapist and rape-apologist, is his whole character. Even later in the book when Tamar no longer hates him outright he continues to threaten her, manipulate events in order to be close to her, mistreat her, and warn her that he will take what he wants if she doesn't give it up willingly.

Which would be all right, I suppose -- albeit painful to read -- if it were making a point about misogynist bastards and the prevailing culture of the time and how much it really, seriously sucked to be a woman. But no. The thing is: Tamar buys into it. She comes to realise that yes! She secretly did want him to sexually assault her! She misses him horribly when he is not there! Maybe she does love him!

This was the point at which I had to actively refrain from throwing the book to the floor.

To make this stupidity even worse, there is no believable reason given for Tamar's feelings, ever. The sex scenes are never shown and barely even referred to; it's hard to believe that Tamar enjoyed it, even unwillingly, when all we get are her thoughts about how ashamed she is and how much she hates Bartle -- and then, later, when it's narratively convenient, this about-face. It's trying to be the age-old and dubious story of hatred and conflict being a stand-in for excitement and compatability, and it just doesn't work.

The choice Tamar is given is not the choice between two men that she is genuinely attracted to for very different reasons. The choice is between being wanted solely for her spiritedness and her attractiveness as a sexual object, and being wanted because she apparently needs someone to keep an eye on her wicked soul and also she could produce some much-needed Puritan babies.

So. I can't in good conscience recommend this book unless you are looking to incite some fine, healthy feminist fury in yourself, while incidentally reading the bare skeleton of a rather good historical novel that is struggling to exist behind all the shitty 'romance'.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust

There will be a sudden proliferation of reviews of Booker Prize winners on this blog, because I don't have many weeks left in my current town and I'm trying to get through all of those on my list that I know the local library has.

I'm fairly sure there's a whole subgenre of books that follow two narratives: one of them set in the past, and recorded in someone's diaries or letters, and one of them set in the present and featuring someone reading this record and also having parallel experiences in their own life. A.S. Byatt's Possession, another Booker Prize winner, is a book of that sort. Heat and Dust follows Olivia, the wife of an English civil servant in 1920s India, and her great-niece, who is inspired by the scandalous story of Olivia's life to visit India herself in the 1970s.

Nothing about the overall structure of the book was particularly compelling for me; everything was fairly predictable, the pacing was fine, and it was a good (short) length. I didn't love it, in short. But I'm interested in the British Raj period, and especially the tail-end of colonialism in the twentieth century, and I think as a frank portrait of India through the eyes of an European person, in both that time period and the more modern one, the book definitely succeeded and held my interest. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala is a German-born English writer who -- like both of her protagonists -- fell in love with an Indian man and lived there for a while, and the book doesn't read like it's trying to show India as it is to Indian people, but instead sticks with the more authentic (although hardly original) portrait of an outsider's personal reaction to the country.

It probably says a lot that as I write this, only a week and spare change after reading the book, I'm struggling to think of specific details to put forth as examples. I didn't care overmuch for any of the characters, and there wasn't quite enough emotional engagement with either of the protagonists for me to connect with them. But I do know that the book contained a lot of little things that I enjoyed, little observations of inner life, little scenes that were described vividly, little incidences and incidental characters that made me smile.

Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils

Kingsley Amis is one of those authors whose names I'm aware of, but about whose books I know nothing at all. Plus I have a tendency to mix him up with his son Martin, who falls into the same category. My preconceptions here were minimal.

Well, that's not entirely true. Having read the dust jacket blurb, I was fairly sure that The Old Devils would fall into what I think of -- rather depressingly -- as the Booker Prize Pattern: middle aged white people contemplate their mortality. (The secondary Pattern: coming-of-age in a poor country.) And to a large extent it does. The book follows a group of elderly friends from a Welsh town, and how their relationships and everyday routines are changed when two of them move back to the town after living in England. It doesn't sound like my sort of book, and I did initially find it very difficult to get into, but once I'd been introduced to all the characters and become accustomed to the style of story-telling, I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.

In large part this was because of how carefully and unflinchingly each person was written -- each one the sum of their flaws, and the more painful parts of their history. I didn't like most of them much, and often that spoils a book for me, but here it just filled me with admiration at the understanding of human nature and the well-tuned ear for prose that created these characters. The self-important, self-deprecating, utterly self-centred poet Alan was particularly delightful to read about, because Amis's structuring of the book to switch between everyone's points of view allowed you to see him as others did, and so to laugh at him when he was being most unlikable in his own voice. I always admire it when writers can use multiple-character perspectives to provide this kind of depth of character portrayal, and Amis does it very well.

The most interesting aspect of reading the book, for me, was not a property of the book itself, but rather a fact arising from the particular context of me reading it. The characters are older than the protagonists of most books I read, and convincingly old, and it's incredible how alien I found their fixations and internal narratives, from the perspective of my own 24 years. Before starting the book I'd found a mention of it in a sort of enjoyable lazy non-fiction memoir-of-a-life-in-books by Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing. Hill said of The Old Devils that it was a way for Amis to talk about and confront his greatest fears, and holding that idea in my mind was a way in which I got more out of the book than I otherwise would have. Because, let's face it, I don't have it in me to viscerally recognise the fears of advancing age; the doublethink required to fixate on and repress frightening bodily symptoms; the greyness of perusing history and knowing it to be too late to change anything important; the mess and pointlessness of a routine entrenched in bitterness, or alcoholism, or resignation. I can read them and let them create a picture -- a good one -- in my mind. I can feel the fear, a tinge of it, on the pages. But it's not my fear and so it's not my story.

The book also has a lot to say about Wales and Welshness, and I was left again with the impression that for a lot of people the book would have sparked smiles at injokes, and feelings of recognition. As an outsider I wasn't left with a particular sense of what makes Welsh people Welsh (except for, it seems, truly epic amounts of alcohol consumption); if that was something Amis was trying to accomplish, then it failed for me, but I didn't get the impression that he was trying. I just don't think this book was written, at all, for people like me. Reading it was like reading a work in another language when one has a very serviceable grasp of the grammar and the vocabulary, but lacks the deep understanding of syntax and idiom and context that a native speaker might possess. Maybe I wouldn't need to be Welsh for this book to speak to me on more than a rational level. Maybe I'd just need to be closer to the fear.

Ray Bradbury - The October Country

My newfound love for Bradbury close at hand, I skimmed the library shelf and decided on this collection of short stories, largely because, well, it was a small paperback. (I have no car, and it's a twenty minute walk to and from the library; my book choices are highly influenced by my ability to lug them back home again.) I'd also heard that out of all the mediums in which he's written, Bradbury is best at the short story.

I've read some of Bradbury's essays and musings on his own writing history and writing methods, so I know that he had a habit of making lists of words that sounded good, sounded like they could have stories in them, and then plucking one out and working at it until he'd found the story. The list of titles in this collection reflect that: 'The Crowd', 'The Scythe', 'The Lake', 'The Jar', and so on.

Horror isn't a genre that I've read much of at all, and I'm not sure to what extent Bradbury's stories count as horror; I read somewhere that one can lump him in with Stephen King in a genre of 'American weird', which I think is a pretty apt description. Not all of the stories are frightening, or more than mildly horrific. But they're definitely unsettling; definitely weird.

He does seem fond of the age-old device of one person being convinced of the danger inherent in a seemingly innocuous thing, and the disaster that results when nobody around them will take their conviction seriously. It's a trope that can be tiresome when handled badly, but I was impressed with how effectively Bradbury recycled it in new, creepy, engaging ways. The trope is most blatant in what I think are two of the most seriously disturbing stories in the collection, 'The Small Assassin' (which could almost be read as an allegory for postnatal depression) and 'The Wind', a really quite beautiful story with a creative concept at the heart of it, making it enjoyable and gripping even though it develops in a very predictable manner.

As well as the outright weirdness, the collection also contains some stories with an almost whimsical feel to them (Jack-in-the-Box, Uncle Einar) and those that are quite specifically about familiar emotion translated into a fantastical setting; the quiet despair of the protagonist in 'Homecoming', being surrounded by his supernatural family and hating his normality and inbility to be what is expected of him, shows that Bradbury's creativity is not limited to the simple act of dark invention.

Something that struck me in particular, reading as I did all nineteen stories in a fairly short space of time, is Bradbury's focus on the horror of the body. This is most obvious in 'The Next in Line', what I thought was the standout story in terms of how utterly creeped out it made me feel; after a woman pays a reluctant tourist visit to some mummies arranged in a catacomb in Mexico, she is overwhelmed with fear that she will die and join them. The careful, meticulous, horrible descriptions of the way she deteriorates -- almost entirely done in terms of bodily sensation and paranoid thought rather than emotion -- is masterful, and very upsetting. 'Skeleton', 'The Man Upstairs' and 'The Dwarf' are also body stories, in which one's own body can be traitor or alien or hated. It's a visceral and ancient kind of horror. It works.

'There Was An Old Woman' is another body-focused one, but instead of the body being the primary source trouble, it's something to be treasured and clung to. I loved this tale of a cranky old woman whose stubbornness in the face of death is both hilarious and, in an odd way, inspiring; it was a wonderful little celebration of humanity's ability to rage, rage against the dying of the light -- and a breath of fresh air in such a dark collection.

I think I need a break before my next Bradbury book; much as I enjoy his writing style and his imagination, the occasional brief and delicious immersion is enough.

Karen Healey - Guardian of the Dead

This is only the second book I've read dealing with the mythology of New Zealand, the first being Keri Hulme's The Bone People, a Booker-Prize-winning fucking marvel of a novel that's somewhat like being kicked slowly in the chest. Guardian of the Dead is much more of an outright dark-fantasy novel, and the mythology -- and the idea of mythology -- plays a much larger part in the story.

(Tangentally, I'll say right off the bat that this is one of my favourite book covers ever. You don't realise how clever it is until you've actually read the book, but even at first glance it's gorgeous and creepy and sucks you in.)

Guardian of the Dead follows Ellie, who like most protagonists of urban fantasy is coping reasonably well with her life (at her boarding school on New Zealand's south island) until, well, weird shit starts happening. The story deals with magical beings, magical powers, and -- of course -- a quest to save the world, or at least a particular corner of it. Not knowing much at all about Maori mythology I can't say how much licence has been taken, but it comes across as self-contained and fascinating and has certainly made me curious to learn more. I was surprised and impressed at how far into horror the imagery strayed, too, wrapping the reader up in creepiness until you don't feel at all safe, and that makes the story itself more unpredictable, because hell, anything could happen now. This is contributed to by the fact that it has exactly the right tone to it, the feel of myth, where every action holds meaning and things like sacrifice and lies and family and courage become all-important.

The characters are sketched well, though I must admit that the love interest held no particular appeal for me. I was completely sold on the fact that Ellie liked him, and that he liked her, no problems there, but something in his personality was too flat for me to get on board entirely with his presence in the story. But I loved most of the very teenaged teenagers and the way they interacted, and the various magic-makers and figures of power, and how Healey shows that even when strange new fantastical things are happening, the motivations and niggling details of everyday life are still worth thinking about.

This book is a prime example of what I think of as the Social Justice YA Movement: it spins a great tale with a likable protagonist, but it also addresses asexuality, fatphobia, sexism and rape culture. Which is fantastic! The more books that show fat girls kicking ass, and asexual boys refusing to compromise their identity, and people judging and making mistakes and rethinking -- the better. Ellie's self-consciousness and automatic comparison of herself to others is almost painfully recognisable, and I think it would be so for anyone who's ever been a teenager. I like that everyone has secrets, and nobody's perfect, and people cross the boundaries between good-guy and bad-guy with perfect aplomb; a healthy dose of moral ambiguity is always welcome, especially in myth.

Also there is Shakespeare in it. Did I mention? SHAKESPEARE. Ding ding ding, automatic bonus points.

I'm going to push this on my sister as soon as I can, and I'd recommend it if you're at all into dark urban fantasy; and I'm now sitting around impatiently waiting for Healey's next book to fall into my hands, because I love the way she tells a story.

Ray Bradbury - The Halloween Tree

Alas! I am now 99% sure I will never have access to a time travel machine, because if I ever do, I fully intend to scoop up a large handful of Ray Bradbury's books and drop them in the path of my ten-year-old self with a note attached: READ THESE. And as my first encounter with Bradbury took place less than six month ago, at the ripe old age of 24, I can only assume that no such time-traveling opportunity will be presented to me in the future.

This didn't look like much when I pulled it off the library shelf (which I did largely because it looked short) -- a novel about a group of boys in a small American town on Halloween. Being Australian, the whole idea of Halloween has mainly entered my consciousness via the consumption of American media. A couple of optimistic kids might show up at the door every year, and we will have to cast around perplexedly for something to give them. During high school it was a good excuse for costume parties.

The first thing that struck me is that these are very boyish kinds of boys, so distinct that I think I could probably pick a Bradbury child from, for example, a Wynne Jones child, should they ever appear in the same story. The way the story is told, hyperbolistic and rapid and rough and overwhelmingly wondrous, is the perfect style for a children's story that refuses to talk down to you.

Over the course of Halloween Night, the group of boys is swept through the midnight histories of the human race: the realities and the myths behind each of their costumes -- skeleton and witch and caveman and mummy, all those classical figures that run through Bradbury's works -- and through it all they are chasing the missing member of their band, who appears to need saving from some unknown fate. It's just enough of a driving plot on which to hang ragged handfuls of fantasy and mythology and horror, and it works. Each of the scenes is evocative, and scary, and manages to sneakily educate you as well. Plus, it's overwhelmingly about how people conceptualise and cope with death, which is right up my alley.

My absolute favourite aspect of it, though, is the sound of the words. I was only a few pages in when I started doing something with this book that I've never done with any other: I read most of it aloud, or at least imagined myself speaking each word inside my head. I couldn't help it. I want to read it to children, with pauses in the spooky bits, and proper sound effects. I want to show them how words can roll together and echo, how rhythm sings when it's done right.

Here's a bit that's death-mythos and language all at once:

"...When you and your friends die every day, there's no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last -"

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

"- now you have time to think of where you came from, where you're going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beast-man, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?"

I'm on to a book of Bradbury's short stories, now, but I haven't yet met anything that impressed me as much as this small book.

Mary Renault - The Friendly Young Ladies

For a long time I thought Mary Renault only wrote historical epics about Alexander the Great and the like, but last year I read her book The Charioteer which is set during WWII (I don't think my obsession with war literature has had a chance to air itself on this blog yet, has it?), and it was a pleasant surprise. When looking up her other more modern works, I was struck immediately by the catalogue tags assigned to this one on the local libary system: Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Bohemianism, Young women, Physicians, Houseboats, Lesbians, Sisters, Bloomsbury (London, England), Psychological fiction, Love stories.

How was I supposed to pass that up? I would have read it on the basis of any one of those, let alone the stunning mishmash of appealing images conjured up by the full list.

The book begins by following Elsie, a sheltered eighteen-year-old whose mind is the product of too many of the wrong sorts of books, and who runs away from her emotionally unbearable home situation in search of her older sister, Leo, who ran away in a similar fashion many years earlier.

Although the story purports to set Elsie up as the protagonist, at first, one of the best things about it is that in face Renault is telling the story of five people: Elsie, Leo, Leo's lover Helen, thier neighbour Joe, and Peter, the young doctor who becomes fascinated by all three women. She jumps around between their points of view to reveal the differences between people as they see themselves and as they are seen by others. When thinking about the relationships and the narration and how they interact, I couldn't go past the concept of the Johari window; if you've never heard of it and can't be arsed with Wikipedia, it's sort of a division of an individual's personality traits into those recognised in themselves and those recognised by others. Renault has a deft way of combining close third person and a more impersonal narrative voice to highlight human nature. One of my favourite quotes concerns the misunderstandings that underpin all human interaction by necessity, because we are not telepaths:

Thought's secrecy must be one of the most wonderful of the works of God. Everything else is explorable, or violable, or reacts to chemistry, or can be laid open with a knife. But thought can only be given. That's the ultimate dignity of man.

(I have perhaps been thinking too much about X-Men and Charles Xavier lately; any kind of commentary about the privacy of thought grabs me.)

Two of the characters are writers; different types of writers, working on different types of books, which means there's a lot of scope for insight (and snark) about the writing process, and creativity, and the publishing industry. Those were some of my favourite parts; I also (predictably) loved the parts set in 1930s London, especially a London seen through sets of eyes that are by turns entranced and bored and interested.

If you're looking for plot, well -- there's really not much of a plot at all beyond the progression and deterioration of interpersonal relationships, and a few progressions of individual character, but I can't say I cared while reading it. It's one of the most character-driven things I've ever read, and isn't pretending to be anything else, and the way it sketches and analyses character makes it all-in-all very enjoyable.

Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him
- Leonard Cohen

I'm going to do something irritating and review the second book in a trilogy without having reviewed the first, but don't worry: I'm not going to talk too much about the plot. What I'm going to do instead is tell you why you should be reading Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trilogy (despite the uberdramatic name) even if long fantasy trilogies aren't really your thing. My sister made me read this one; our relationship has progressed to the point where I am no longer the sole bestower of wisdom and Good Reads advice, which is sort of depressing but also means I read things I otherwise might pass over. I read myself to death on high fantasy in high school and have left the genre largely alone ever since.

I was therefore pleased to discover that this is not your everyday derivative dragons-and-swords high fantasy, even though it features both dragons and swords. This is a (young) man narrating his memoirs, over the course of three nights, to a scribe. The protagonist, Kvothe, does dance perilously close to the realms of Perfect Awesomesauce Fantasy Hero, but is saved from it because his narrative voice is so very human: he's funny, dry, emotional, perceptive and angry by turns, and although the trilogy is indeed all about this one person, it's tribute to Rothfuss's powers of invention and lively writing that you never get sick of Kvothe's company. And the retrospective narrative technique means that there's an inbuilt curiosity about trajectory that keeps the pages turning: how did he get from there to here? We want to know. We really want to know. We wish the book would stop it with the enticing fucking hints. (Not really.)

Although this isn't an ensemble piece by any means, there's a large cast of characters that dance in and out of the story, and I think they might be my favourite thing about the entire trilogy, because they have lives. They're all recognisably complicated people who sometimes interact with Kvothe and sometimes are off doing their own thing. Even if they serve a very particular purpose for Kvothe and for the plot, the reader never feels like they're looking at some stock characters who have been dragged onstage in order to serve this sole purpose. I am particularly fond of the way Rothfuss portrays women (he's a blatantly feminist writer in a way that comes across on occasion as a mite too self-aware, but is still vastly better than the alternative, and very refreshing to see in the genre of male-authored fantasy fiction), and also Kvothe's university friends and their quirks and relationships.

In fact, the majority of the first two books revolve around Kvothe's life at the University, with the result that it kind of feels like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin fell into the hands of Raymond E. Feist and was subjected to a makeover: sure, there's adventure and myth and magic, but there are also long swathes of delightful academic time wherein people study for exams and geek out over weird subjects and get annoyed with their teachers and then go and get drunk. I love it. The greatest and best worldbuilding that Rothfuss has done is in this academic arena: all of the areas of study have been thought out and described beautifully, and their applications are fascinating, and they never come across as easy. Sometimes you have to study until your head aches. Sometimes things come easily, but sometimes you just don't have the knack for it.

The Wise Man's Fear also sees Kvothe leave the University on a sort of enforced gap year, during which this Penny Arcade comic happens (see also: the quote at the top of this review). Oh, and he also learns some crazy ninja skills and comes a bit closer to solving the mystery of his parents' death, which is related to a lot of dark mythology and a possible secret society (there's that plot I wasn't going to tell you about). Another very intense piece of worldbuilding is done here, and that's the people of the Adem, who communicate emotion and nuance via their hands rather than their faces, and have a warrior code and a matriarchal society structure that are impeccably thought out and effectively delivered. I could have read about that society forever; there's so much imagination put into their crreation that you can almost feel it coming off on your fingers as you turn the pages.

There's one more thing that I was so, so impressed to see in these books, and that's the treatment of money. There are a lot of stories where people rise from poor beginnings, and a lot of stories where it's just assumed or handwaved that the characters have enough money to live and to go and do whatever the plot needs them to do. What Rothfuss illustrates wonderfully is just how fucking difficult it is for poor students living hand-to-mouth. Kvothe never has enough money; not through fault (usually), but because he has neither family nor savings, and his tuition is expensive, and it's hard to hold down decently paid work and study like a maniac at the same time. It's a story that rings true with me and I think would with a lot of people -- not wanting to insult friends by not going out with them, but wondering how the hell you can get away with not buying a meal. Praying that no sudden misfortunate requiring money to fix it will come along, because you have no safety net. Borrowing. Pawning. Making compromises. Making do. For all that Kvothe is a talented, brilliant person, he has to work bloody hard just to stay afloat in his own life, and I always appreciate it when an author is brave enough to do that to their darlings.

This wasn't so much a review as a very long recommendation, but there it is: read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, and then prepare to sit around waiting for the third book along with the rest of us.

Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451

Kingsley Amis called Farenheit 451 'the most skillfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells', and having read it hot on the heels of Brave New World (which I couldn't find enough coherence about to properly review, at the time), I was doing a lot of comparisons in my head while I read it. So there'll probably be some comparisons in this review, as well, and I can pretend that this discharges my obligation to say things about Huxley's work.

But starting with this one. I have had a niggling desire to read this book since the age of twelve, when my Tournament of Minds team -- I think this is an Australian thing -- had to write a skit based on its idea of secret oral tradition, of families passing down the classics through the generations to preserve them even though books were banned.

(The skit had to show how two classics had accidentally become merged into a single story along the way: we picked Macbeth and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lady Macbeth and the White Witch were SISTERS and there was RAPPING, and I played a version of Lucy who had a tea fixation. It was epic. We were the state champions.)

Farenheit 451 gives us a world where books are forbidden; burned, along with the houses in which they're found, by the Firemen. The justification is that they lead to confusion of ideas: that truth cannot be known (and neither, of course, can it be controlled) in the cacophony of words and opinions that exist in books. The protagonist is Guy Montag, a Fireman, who begins -- of course -- to question the beliefs that his job is based on, and finds himself destroying his life in an effort to seek out greater meaning.

First and foremost, I am head-over-heels in love with Bradbury's ability to manipulate language, to tell a good story and to deliver it wrapped in sharp, fresh imagery. Particularly striking is the extremely creepy invention and description of the Mechanical Hound, and also a scene where Montag is frantically trying to remember a quote from the Bible while advertising blasts through the train in which he's riding. And this quote, which I read five times in a row, marvelling at how effective the rhythm is:

We are bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colours.

The vividness and the gorgeous urgency of Bradbury's prose creates that skillful drawing that Amis picked up on, and along with it comes a sense of humanity that is striking when you consider some of the other moral fables of science fiction. Putting it next to Brave New World, as I said: while both of them are books about particular ideas, particular ways in which society might become restricted in the name of increasing its members' happiness, I think Farenheit 451 successfully manages to be, over and above this, a book about people. Or at least a person. Montag's inner life is what drives the book, what's lingered on, and what delivers the message. It means that the narrative is smaller, tighter, than the explicit and wide-ranging world-building delivered in Brave New World (which has its own charms, albeit more intellectual ones).

As with a lot of older sci fi (yes, Brave New World had this problem too) there are some serious issues related to the portrayal of women. Montag's wife Mildred isn't quite one-dimensional, but she's never sympathetic; just shrill, pathetic and pitiable. And as the catalyst for Montag's changing views on his occupation, the character of Clarisse just might be the prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl: she turns up out of the blue and talks about whimsical things! She tries to get him to expand his horizons and enjoy life! And, tellingly:

...Clarisse's favourite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me.

Ah, the dream of repressed and empty-souled men everywhere: a pretty young thing whose existence is all about you.

Anyway.

I have to love this novel, because at heart it's about the words with which we choose to fill our lives. Bradbury is telling us his opinion of the importance of books.

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out int he long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirros for the next year and take a long look in them.

The importance, then, seems to be a direct echo of Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's an adventure story that's telling us to honour our stories, because they're how we learn about where we've been, and what we look like now, and where we might be heading.

Take a long look in them.

Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

I don't know much about Michael Cunningham beyond the fact that The Hours was one of my favourite books last year; I was impressed that he'd elevated Virginia Woolf fanfiction into a publishable art, and thoroughly enjoyed the book. Specimen Days is quite similar to The Hours in some ways: it's about three people with intertwined fates, it tells three stories set in three different time periods, and it's tightly woven around an existing text. In this case, however, it's not Mrs Dalloway that forms the thematic heart of the story: it's Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

The three stories that make up this book are not told side-by-side, but in succession: first the one set in the nineteenth century, then the one set in the present, and then the one set in the future. All three use New York as their setting in a way that turns the city into the fourth protagonist (the fifth one, of course, being Whitman's poetry); I've seen this done successfully for London -- China Meiville does it all the time -- but never for an American city, except in the realms of television. (It could be that I just don't read a lot of American literature.)

The three protagonists -- Luke, Catherine and Simon -- do not appear in one narrative each; all of them show up, in different bodies and situations, in all three stories, although they take it in turns to be the central character. Luke's story is that of a boy who becomes convinced that his dead brother is speaking to the world through machines. Catherine's is of a forensic psychologist trying to prevent the actions of a child suicide bomber. And Simon's -- my personal favourite -- is of a man who's not quite human, on the run with a woman who's definitely an alien, in search of answers and a future. The three characters are always linked together by some form of love or other, and the poetry is always there, always spoken, always vitally important. Each of the book's sections could stand alone as a story, but it's only when they're lined up and you can see the people and objects and motifs that connect them that this becomes a novel rather than a collection.

As you might expect from the use of Whitman, this is by and large a book about poetry, and about the idea of America. It's about the isolation of individual lives, and about the interconnectedness of the world. I love the way Cunningham writes; his prose is beautiful without ever feeling heavy or overdone, his worldbuilding is wonderful to experience and his characters are complex and engaging. I wouldn't call it a page-turner and I certainly wouldn't call it uplifting, but it's a good book for reading slowly and just letting the ideas at the heart of it spill over you.

Diana Wynne Jones - Eight Days of Luke

SCHOOL FETES ARE THE BEST PLACE TO GET BOOKS. Some poor deluded person will always have donated something that you deeply desire, and you will pick it up for the ludicrous price of $1! It feels almost illegal, like at any point, as you are hugging your bag of books to your chest and scurrying past the milkshake stall, you will be stopped by large men in security uniforms.

"Sorry," they'll say. "There's been some mistake here. The universe doesn't believe you should be acquiring so much literary enjoyment for so cheap a price. Hand over the books."

Uh, this has never happened to me. Obviously. But I can never shake the feeling that it might.

The excellent thing about these particular editions of Diana Wynne Jones's books (stay with me, this is relevant) is that their garish spines stand out beautifully in the Children's Books section, even though Children's Books are pretty damn colourful as a rule. When I saw this one, I leapt in, realised that it was one I hadn't read yet, and made a loud noise of gleeful acquisition, startling everyone else in the vicinity. Most of whom were...children. Funnily enough.

Eight Days of Luke is a very short book, so I expect my review will be short also. In fact I'm pretty sure the above blathering about fetes will comprise the majority of it.

Basic plot summary: David enjoys spending the holidays with his family about as much as Harry Potter does, so when a mysterious boy called Luke shows up out of the blue, claiming that David has released him from some kind of imprisonment, he's pretty pleased to have some company. Until some strange people start showing up and threatening him. (And even then, he's mostly pleased that his holidays are looking a lot more interesting.)

If you're at all familiar with Norse mythology -- which I am in a vague sense only; I had to look up a few things to fit the pieces together -- then you'll love this one to pieces. The mystery is satisfying, the plot bounds along at a satisfying rate, David is a very teenage teenage boy, and DWJ pulls off one of her best family portraits in showing us both the grubby psychology of his relatives and the ways in which David observes and thinks about their games and behaviours.

It's quintessentially Wynne Jonesian, which means it reads kind of like an Enid Blyton book and American Gods got drunk at a party and reproduced. (Neil Gaiman has gone on record re: how much he was and wasn't influenced by this book, which came out long before American Gods was written.) Plus there's a lot of talk about cricket, which I always like to see in my British fantasy.

And that's about it! Short & sweet.

Margo Lanagan - Black Juice

After reading Tender Morsels, I was determined to hunt down more of Margo Lanagan's work, and the library was good enough to supply me with some of her short story collections. I picked up this one first for the simple reason that it had a medal on the cover (2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards), thus proving that I am easily swayed by awards and other cheap tricks.

'Singing My Sister Down' has become quite well known; it's a quiet, ruthless story that has real overtones of horror for me. A young boy and his family head to the tar pits for a ceremonial picnic and singing session during the hours of his older sister's ceremonial execution. Lanagan's skill in building up a society that has alien customs but familiar interpersonal dynamics is displayed beautifully here, as the family's bickering and love and shared grief are played out against the strange, slow, slow ritual of death.

I found 'My Lord's Man' to be the weakest story of the bunch, not because it isn't well written but because it doesn't have as much of a narrative as the others. It paints a clear picture of three people and the complicated ways in which they relate to one another, judge one another, and forgive one another. But it feels -- not quite incomplete, but lost. As though it needs to be part of a larger whole.

'Red Nose Day', on the other hand, was my favourite. The story of a pair of assassins that slowly expands and expands into something weirder and deeper, it's got the perfect balance of tension and instant strong characterisation. It's a truly bizarre, chillingly imagined tale that reads like Terry Pratchett by way of Stephen King; you're not sure if it's a joke, but you certainly don't feel like laughing. In fact, you feel like backing away gently and hoping it doesn't notice.

When I was quite young my grandfather, who's spent a lot of his life in places like Sri Lanka and India and Bangladesh, wrote and illustrated a wonderful book for me, from the point of view of a labour elephant who had a lot of strange adventures with his handler. It was the first thing I thought of when reading 'Sweet Pippit', which tells the story of a group of elephants in search of their favourite human, who has been arrested and taken away from them. Once again Lanagan mixes recognisable human culture with the fantastical creation that is the elephants' customs, personalities, and powers. And I think that if elephants had names for themselves, they would absolutely be things like Booroondoonhooroboom.

I'm still not sure what to think of 'House of the Many'. Without a doubt it's incredibly well put together, once again abandoning normal fantasy tropes for the scarier and closer-to-home details of a cultish group of people controlled by a single man, seen through the eyes of a small boy. (Margo Lanagan, like Diana Wynne Jones, seems to have a fondness for child narrators.) But I think I was hoping it would lead up to something bigger.

I really liked 'Wooden Bride' but again felt that it could be more effective if it was part of something longer. Maybe because the idea of it -- 'bridehood' as an event that has nothing to do with men and everything to do with girls coming into their own, all the trappings of a wedding blurred into myth and meaningless ritual -- was something that made me yearn to see a wider context, instead of a short vignette that gives the bare bones of the concept and not much more.

'Earthly Uses' is a really fucking creepy story about a boy who lives with his abusive grandfather, and is sent to fetch an angel to heal his dying grandmother. Except 'angels', in this story, are definitely not the shining intermediaries we associate with the word. Gah. I still get shivers thinking about this one, which I suppose means it's a very effective piece of storytelling.

I let out a cheer when I worked out that 'Perpetual Light' was recognisably set in Australia; most of Lanagan's stories are set in unnamed and/or unrecognisable cultures, and there's a sad dearth of Australian urban fantasy or sci-fi in general. To be honest I'm still not entirely sure what parts of it are about -- I'd need to reread it, I think -- but there are definite themes of environmentalism and family, a much more science fiction feel than any of the other stories in the collection, and a kind of mild, dusty dystopia that I loved because it was based firmly in the NSW bush. I also thought the narrator, Daphne, was a great character. I would happily read novels worth of this particular world.

'Yowlinin' was another favourite of mine, largely for the narrator -- a half-wild girl abandoned by her village because her parents were killed, a girl fiercely proud of her independence and scornful of everyone else, but also with a bit of a crush on one of the village boys -- and partly because I think it had the most effective pacing and plot. Like 'Earthly Uses', it features the kind of magical creatures that you're likely to have nightmares about.

'Rite of Spring', about a boy who participates unwillingly in a harsh and dangerous ritual that is needed to bring about the start of spring, is another one that has a strong sense of myth to it, with the struggle of human beings against the grudging elements, and the idea that our rituals and beliefs have real consequences.

All in all, this collection left me with both a wild jealousy for Lanagan's powers of imagination and language, and a desire to snap up all her other books as soon as possible.

Diana Wynne Jones - Unexpected Magic

You know how it is. You're in Galaxy Bookshop (or any other fantasy-sci-fi treasurebox of your choice) and you can maybe, possibly, probably stretch your budget to one book. One book. Suddenly everything looks desirable, but nothing looks quite desirable enough to be The One. You slouch impecuniously towards the Diana Wynne Jones shelf in the YA section, knowing that her books are at least the kind that you will consistently reread and are thus usually worth purchasing.

Lo! And behold! Sitting neatly next to a handful of Chrestomanci books is something you've never come across before (excellent) and that you know your local library doesn't have (even better!): a book of short stories. Nice and thick, too. Decision made.

I read this collection slowly, especially because I was only a fraction of the way into the book when Diana Wynne Jones's death was announced. I felt as though every word of hers that I hadn't yet read had just become infinitely more precious.

If you've read any DWJ at all you probably have a fair idea of the kind of stories that are in this collection: fifteen shorts and one novella, all stuffed full of children and cats and families and England and annoyances and, as the title suggests, one sort of unexpected magic or another.

I enjoyed the novella, 'Everard's Ride', the most, because I think DWJ's characters are best when you have a bit of time to get to know them. It's a fairly standard normal-kids-get-mixed-up-in-affairs-of-magical-kingdom story, but with a frightening bite to the politics of it all, wonderfully drawn dynamics between siblings, friends, and acquaintances, and a hefty dose of class awkwardness thrown in.

There's probably not much point in faithfully listing every single story in the book, but I'll mention some favourites. 'Auntie Bea's Day Out' is another classic DWJonesian story of a family of a children under the eye of an unpleasant relative, and the strange things that start happening to them on a trip to the seaside. 'The Girl Who Loved The Sun' stands out as being much less deadpan and Kids Own Adventure; it's written as a fairytale, a lyrical myth, and brings some welcome variety of tone to the collection. 'Nad and Dan adn Quaffy' (no, that wasn't a typo) is a tongue-in-cheek, hilarious story about an author whose writing technique is to pretend that her word processor is the controls of a spaceship -- and who is one day surprised to find that the computer is talking back.

There are three stand-out shorts, in my opinion, and I think I liked them the most because they were most successful in conveying a real sense of niggling danger. 'The Master' is the disturbing tale of a newly qualified vet called out to a murder scene and faced with crypticism and wolves. 'Enna Hittims' is about a girl stuck at home with the mumps whose drawings come to life and try to take over her house. And 'Dragon Reserve, Home Eight' is a real masterpiece of worldbuilding, giving a strong sibling relationship and some dragons and a whole lot of fear and moral ambiguity, all in a very short space.

Telling any existing fan of Diana Wynne Jones to read this book would be the most pointless form of preaching to the choir, but if you've never read her, I think it would be an excellent introduction to her distinctive narrative style.

Annette Curtis Klause - Blood and Chocolate

There are many reasons why I follow the blogs of authors, not least of which is the vain hope that they might inspire me to WRITE SOMETHING YOU LAZY FOOL, but one of them is so that I can catch posts like this one from the fabulous Sarah Rees Brennan, in which she throws book recs around the place. Blood and Chocolate is, in her opinion, the best werewolf book ever. As someone whose favourite werewolf books has for years been, by default, Terry Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant (which is maybe not a Werewolf Book per se, but certainly the only book I can remember that contains a significant number of them), this sounded like an excellent genre-exposure opportunity.

Paranormal romance is not something I get excited about as a general rule. I will happily read sporkings of the more dreadfully written and blatantly rape-culture-endorsing examples of the genre, but by and large I will steer clear. (If you haven't read that post of bookshop's before, GO AND DO SO NOW. I'll wait.)

For the first chapter or so I was feeling dubious about Vivian, the protagonist, given that we are quickly treated to a description of her that teeters precariously on Mary Sue Precipice:

She was tall and leggy, like her mother, with full breasts, small waist, and slim hips that curved enough to show she was female. Her skin was gently golden; it was always golden, sun or not, and her tawny hair was thick and long and wild.

But although Vivian is gorgeous and a boy-magnet and speaks French with a perfect accent and has hair that changes colour super strength, there was a lot I ended up liking about her. I liked that she's a teenage girl with teenage girl problems ranging from how to fit in at school to how to cope with her mother's taste in new boyfriends. I liked that she has good self-esteem. She also has a healthy and enthusiastic attitude towards sex that I found really refreshing to read about, as even a lot of books aimed at adults tend to dial down the sexuality of women -- especially young women -- and so Vivian's HURRAH KISSING and GODDAMNIT WHEN WILL I BE ABLE TO SEDUCE THIS DUDE thoughts and feelings came across as part of a balanced portrayal of a teenager, not sexytimes for the sake of sexytimes; especially because romance and sex are definitely not the only thing Vivian thinks about. Not even the main thing she thinks about, I'd say.

The other enormous redeeming factor is that Vivian is not a normal human girl who happens to be the object of a paranormal being's affections. Vivian is a proud werewolf whose pack is having problems: some of their members started killing humans (which is absolutely forbidden) and they had to leave their last town in a hurry, but not before a fire was set on their property in revenge; a fire that killed a lot of them, including Vivian's father. And the pack is now having a lot of trouble settling into their new place, especially because they are lacking a leader, so there's a lot of infighting and bitchiness and power plays going on, which in Vivian's opinion is a whole lot of stress she really doesn't need. Especially now that she's gone and fallen in love with a human boy.

Basically: Vivian is what would happen if Edward Cullen were actually a vain and ballsy teenage girl who just wanted a) her family to stop being so crazy, and b) to have some sex already.

So yes, there were a lot of things to like: I liked Vivian and her pro-active attitude, I liked the werewolf mythology and the werewolf politics, I liked the characterisation of a lot of the supporting characters, I liked the plot. I liked that there was a scene where Vivian bit out another werewolf's eye and then spent a few hours afterwards going ugh, I did what? But...as a whole, the book fell flat for me, and there were too many things that pulled me up short and made me frown.

The lack of positive female characters other than Vivian herself was depressing. Vivian's relationship with her mother is at least complicated, but Esme is presented as being sort of flighty and status-hungry, and not really there as any kind of emotional support. Vivian is also the only female werewolf of her generation in the (admittedly quite small) pack, and it's quite clear that her milkshake brings all the boy-wolves to the yard, not just because she's all sexy but because...well, there's nobody else? All of Vivian's inner struggles and identity issues and boy troubles etc. are dealt with inside her head because she has absolutely zero female friends, or even friendly acquaintances, to confide in.

As for the love story, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop for the first half of the book, but when it did, it just didn't make sense. Suddenly there's another love interest? That guy who sexually harrassed you quite a few times without ever apologising? Remember when you accidentally won some kind of ritual battle and he expected you to be his queen and you were like hell to the no? Can't we stick with that interesting storyline, ie. loyalty to pack law vs. dislike for powerful jerkface?

Spoiler alert: no.

It's not that I was heavily invested in the original love interest, either, it's more that I would have been just as happy -- happier -- for Vivian to end up single and a bit wiser. (Although an unfortunate side effect of the lack-of-female-confidantes problem was that for the ending to be a happy one, Vivian needed to end up with some kind of close relationship. It's just sad that romance was presented as the only option.)

For a story that has at its heart a great portrayal of identity problems, the frustration of two conflicting aspects to one's life, and the determination to follow one's heart even if it leads one outside the norms of one's community, I found the ending disappointing. Inasmuch as it answers the question of 'Can one defy one's appointed role in life and society?' with a resounding APPARENTLY NOT.

Blood and Chocolate is an easy read and a fun inversion of the usual paranormal romace tropes -- I'd certainly hold Vivian up a a role model to any young girl who might be tempted to stray down the Bella Swan path -- but as far as my favourite werewolf book goes, I think The Fifth Elephant is still at the top of the list.

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon

Recently I opened one of my notebooks and was momentarily puzzled by a list of book titles on one page. Then I remembered that some expat friends of mine living in Brussels had taken me out for a night on the town while I was visiting them. By the book-list stage of the evening I was already down a bottle of raspberry beer (ah, Belgium) and two gin-based cocktails, and would be consuming more alcohol before the end of the night, so perhaps it's not surprising that the intense hour-long conversation about books in which I loudly insisted that everyone! at the table! tell me their favourite book! so I could borrow them all from the library! became a memory with a hint of fuzziness to it.

Nevertheless.

Flowers for Algernon. I'd heard the name before, and the title sounded suspiciously like something that might have oozed from the pen of Mitch 'Cloying Sentimentality And Cheap Fucking Pathos' Albom. Then I found out about the Hugo and Nebula awards.

(Booklogging by Faye: fifty years behind the times! Next up: the Iliad.)

For those of you who, like me, didn't study this book at school, the premise is this: an intellectually disabled man called Charlie volunteers to be the first human subject of an experimental procedure which proposes to increase intelligence, and has been shown to do so in a mouse called Algernon. The book is made up of Charlie's progress reports, a diary which shows the gradual improvement of his intellectual power, and the consequences that this has for his life and happiness. As far as literary achievement goes, I think Daniel Keyes did an excellent job with the portrayal of a personality and a mind constantly in flux. One of the most important things it tries to convey is how the people around Charlie think about him, act around him, and relate to him, and how these things change as he does; assuming you-the-reader to be someone of average intelligence, the journey that you go through mirrors that of these people in a way that borders on the uncomfortable at times.

I am nowhere near as conversant in social justice and discrimination theory as it pertains to disability as I should be, I expect, but this book does a very good job of whacking you pointedly around the face with its Major Themes (which is, as with a lot of sci-fi, not necessarily to its detriment). It's even more interesting when reading it now, in the twenty-first century, to think about the particular Slippery Slope Of Humanity that this book is addressing: the drive to fix. The balance between lauding medical advances that can improve someone's quality of life, and adequate acknowledgment that perhaps a person's life is just fine without an external standard of normality being imposed upon it. But then, as someone whose medical school shoves a lot of ethics tutorials in her direction, I was interested by the detail that one of his family members had to sign off on the procedure because Charlie was not considered to have Capacity To Consent, even though Charlie's commentary shows you that he did indeed understand both the benefits and the risks as they were communicated to him.

A clear distinction is drawn between academic intelligence and emotional intelligence which is certainly not neurologically arbitrary, but comes across as...narratively so, I suppose? The fact that smart-Charlie is still devoid of well-developed social skills becomes more and more apparent, and more and more important, as does the fact that his personality becomes a lot less pleasant as a result. I wasn't entirely sure what I was meant to be learning from this -- it's better to be extremely nice than extremely clever? It's impossible to be both? Does extreme intelligence automatically lead to a disdain for the rest of humanity? This was the only point on which I was unwilling to be happily swept along in the story, because I didn't feel that was communicated with the clarity that illuminates the rest of the book.

I don't have much more to say about this one, really. It's clever and thought-provoking and I'm glad I read it. And unlike a high school essay, I can stop this review at any point I please, so let's leave it at that.

Lionel Shriver - So Much For That

Unlike the last book, I can't pretend that I didn't walk into this one with eyes wide open. I've read a couple of Lionel Shriver's books before (her most famous one, We Need To Talk About Kevin, was the best book I read last year) and I have huge amounts of respect for her as an author, but a certain amount of emotional resilience is required to get though her books, and I knew this one would be no exception. Especially because I knew that it is, to a large part, about the American health care & medical insurance system.

Despite watching epic amounts of Scrubs -- for educational purposes, you understand -- over the years, and also hearing about the trials and tribulations of my American friends when it comes to accessing affordable healthcare, I didn't have a lot of nitty-gritty knowledge about how health insurance in the States works. Terrifyingly jargonistic paragraphs like this one worked to shed some light, but it was the kind of light that tells you that you're not alone in the dark creaky house at night, and there's a good chance the bearer of the other light has a knife:

"See," she went on, "this World Wellness Group outfit is the health insurance company from hell. They levy co-pays on everything, including the meds, and we have to fill dozens of prescriptions every month. With their whopping deductible, you're out five grand before you're reimbursed a dime. Their idea of a 'reasonable and customary' fee is that a doctor's visit cost in 1959, and then they stick you with the shortfall. They're way too restrictive about going out of network, and Flicka requies very specialized care. Then there's co-insurance on top of the co-pays: twenty percent of the total bill, and that's in network. And here's the killer: there's no cap on out-of-pocket expenses. Add to that that their lifetime payment cap -- you know, how much they'll fork out in total, ever -- if also pretty low, only two or three million, when someone like Flicka could easily exceed numbers like that before she's twenty... Well, we had to find other coverage."

Living in a country where all hospital care is free and all GP visits and most medications are subsidised heavily by the government (although many people choose to have some form of health insurance on top of this, to get faster access to elective surgeries and more choice of treating doctors, you don't need a cent of insurance or a dollar in your wallet to get care through a public hospital), all this makes me want to claw at my face and scream.

The book centres around two married couples: there's Shep, who saves all his life for early retirement on a tropical island only to find out that his wife Glynis needs him to keep his job -- and dip into his savings -- because she contracts mesothelioma. And there are their friends Carol and Jackson, who live with the fact that their daughter Flicka has familial dysautonomia and will probably die before she gets much older; in the meantime, she's the source of the constant medical and financial strain outlined in the quote above.

I'll tell you straight off, this is not an easy book to read. At times it's excruciating. I had to take frequent breaks from it during which I read less wrenching fare. It also doesn't try to shield you even the slightest amount from the realities of illness and medicine, so if you can't cope with some really blunt descriptions of cancer symptoms and chemo and its side effects, you may not get through it.

But it's worth it not just for those of us who need an education in what a phenomenally unfair health care system looks like, but also because Lionel Shriver has a mastery of human relationships and human behaviour that is unparallelled in my experience. She writes realistic, flawed human beings; she writes them responding to good times and bad; she writes them with a depth of analysis and a keenness of perception that's astonishing; she writes likable people and unlikable ones, and she shows you how easily it is for people to swing between these categories. One of the examples that cut closest to home for me was the use of Glynis to illustrate how perfectionism is the enemy of productivity when it comes to creative pursuits.

It's a book about living within a structured, governed and taxed society, and the ways in which people play by the rules -- or don't -- and what happens when the ground falls out from under you feet and the society you've been supporting isn't there to support you in turn. It's a book about priorities. And although it doesn't say so in so many words it explains, powerfully, why the term 'temporarily able-bodied' has the same usefulness as 'cissexual': pointing out the arrogance of assuming that something is normal.

As a concept, she understood being "well" better than anyone on the planet. For After Glynis had discovered a terrible secret: There is only the body. There never was anything but the body. "Wellness" is the illusion of not having one. Wellness is escape from the body. But there is no escape. So wellness is delay. What had Before Glynis -- Well Glynis, Pre-Inexorably-Going-to-Be-Sick-Any-Minute-Now Glynis, done with her free ride, her gift of the soon-to-be-revoked illusion that she was not, after all, a body -- a body and only a body?

The book asks why we as a society have so little protocol for how to behave in the face of death, when it's the oldest and most inevitable human reality. The biggest question that it asks, though is this: how do you put a price on a human life? And how do you manage when you are forced to do exactly that? In a chillingly effective piece of structure, the start of each chapter gives you the new balance in Shep's bank account. In its way this illustration of the cost of dying, down to the last cent, is just as brutal as the descriptions of rectal bleeding and insomnia.

However, just so you know: the book doesn't leave you broken. It lifts you up. It gives you something back. After Kevin I wasn't expecting even that much from Shriver, so the ending, while it didn't pull too many punches, was certainly a balm for my horrified soul.

Margo Lanagan - Tender Morsels

I didn't know what I was getting into when I pulled this book off the library shelf. I'd heard the name of it bandied about on other blogs, and I'd heard it recommended by people whose tastes I generally trust, but my knowledge of the book itself was something like: another YA fairytale retelling? Maybe? Kind of...dark?

Hoo boy.

For one thing, I don't know how many teenagers I'd give this one to. For another, it's not trying to retell any one existing fairytale that I'm aware of, though it has elements woven through it that seem very familiar in an old, forest-dark, Brothers Grimm kind of a way. It's set in two worlds: the 'true' world, and an 'ideal' world, or personal heaven, to which a young woman called Liga escapes with her daughters. The book is about the reasons for that escape, and what happens when the barriers between the worlds start to break down. I won't say a lot more about the plot itself because I found that going into it with no expectations was actually a good way to do it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to twig to the fact that this is, starkly and insistently, a book about rape culture. It's about female sexuality. It's about the policing of female sexuality, and the ownership of it, and how difficult it is to understand your own emerging sexuality as a growing girl enmeshed in a society that keeps trying to tell you how and when and to what extent you should be exercising it. (It's also, well, about rape and sexual abuse of children, and while the scenes are never graphically described, I imagine it would be very triggering for some.)

The other main theme is related, but wider in scope. It asks the questions: to what extent can we, and to what extent should we, protect our children? Where do we draw the line between sheltering their innocence and keeping them wilfully ignorant? Given power and choice, should life be enjoyed, or should it be lived? Should it be narrow and comfortable, or painful and rich? Lanagan never flinches from portraying these questions, and the characters caught up in them, as complex and morally conflicted. She doesn't lead us easily towards the answers, and she doesn't pretend that good will always win out, even though the pursuit and possibility of justice is another theme that shines through.

There were a couple of niggling complaints that I had with the book as a whole; most significantly, I found the pacing to fall entirely flat. It wasn't until I was well over halfway through the book that I found myself wanting to keep turning the pages to find out What Would Happen Next; up until that point some things had happened, sure, but I hadn't been given any sense of overarching plot or tension. That said, I was interested enough in the characters and the subtle world-building to keep going, and everything did more or less draw together by the end.

Tender Morsels is a dark fairytale. But the creeping insidious horror of the book isn't any particular monster, or any one evil villain; it's the hovering phantom of male control over female sexuality, the phantom of rape culture. By the end of it I felt bruised and shaken and furious on behalf of the characters, and on behalf of everyone who's ever had to put up with misogynist language and entitlement and sexual harrassment and communities structured in such a way so as to endorse sexual double standards. This book will make you angry. Read it anyway. Read it because.

Peter Carey - True History of the Kelly Gang

This blog was created with the intent of writing about my experiences as a medical student/maybe a junior doctor, but I've come to the realisation that I don't really want to blog about my education and my professional life; if a blog is to have any chance at longevity, it will need to be something I can work on as an escape from the medical world. And the only other thing I do enough of, it seems, is reading books. So let's see how that works out.

The champagne bottle to be smashed against the blog's creaking hull is Peter Carey's novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), chosen for the highly creative reason that it's the first book I've finished since deciding to give this book-blogging thing a go. (No, I tell a lie: the first book I finished was Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, but me trying to review that would be laughable at best and also lend a very misleading tone to the blog as a whole. Besides, I'd been slogging away at that one for months, and anything related to Plato or Socrates or really anything pre-Renaissance is at this point a far-off and distant dream.) I picked up True History because I'm in the middle of a personal project to read every book that's ever won either the Man Booker Prize or the Man Asian Literary Prize. Honest to God, I am least one-third as pretentious as this makes me sound. I merely have a weakness for lists on which items can be crossed off, and a few of my very favourite books of all time have won the Booker, so I thought I'd expand my horizons a little. And cross some things off lists while I was at it.

Like the terrible, terrible Aussie that I am, I had been putting off reading this particular book. Peter Carey is one of only two authors to have won the Booker twice (the other being J.M. Coetzee), and of his other winning book Oscar and Lucinda I can remember very little beyond the fact that there was a church made of glass in it, what more could you possibly want? But I knew that True History was written using vernacular, and I wasn't sure that I would find such unconventional language easy going.

I'm pleased to tell you that I was completely wrong.

The book is a fictional memoir of one of the most recognisable figures in Australian history, the bushranger Ned Kelly. I honestly have no idea if anyone outside of Australia is like to have heard of him (there was a movie? Orlando Bloom and Heath Ledger were in it?) but here down under he's certainly a Thing. One of our better-known artists, Sidney Nolan, did a series of paintings of him, like this:

The letterbox-head is an instantly recognisable motif, drawing on the fact that Kelly and his gang wore plate metal armour in that shape.

However: the book itself. Edward 'Ned' Kelly, farmer turned bushranger, eldest son of a poor Irish family, is writing out his life story for his daughter to read. It's very difficult not to feel for this sober, hard-working, furious boy, to whom family is everything and poverty is truth and justice is nowhere.

As far as the writing style is concerned, Carey's done something that I think is quite spectacular: by roughing up the syntax entirely, removing most punctuation and leaving the grammar to fend for itself, he's managed to write a highly lyrical book that nonetheless manages to convince us that it could have been written by a poorly educated man with a natural gift for metaphor.

When our brave parents was ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history and every dear familiar thing had been abandoned on the docks of Cork or Galway or Dublin then the Banshee come on board the cursed convict ships the ROLLA and the TELICHERRY and the RODNEY and the PHOEBE DUNBAR and there were not an English eye could see her no more than an English eye can picture the fire that will descend upon that race in time to come. The Banshee sat herself at the bow and combed her hair all the way from Cork to Botany Bay she took passage amongst our parents beneath that foreign flag 3 crosses nailed one atop the other.

For all that Ned Kelly's voice sounds Irish, the book feels deeply Australian; the descriptions of the bush ring true, and there's a lot of commentary about Australia itself as a fledgling colonial place starting to find its own identity as a settlement built by, but so remote from, England.

And here is the thing about them men they was Australians they knew full well the terror of the unyielding law the historic memory of UNFAIRNESS were in their blood and a man might be a bank clerk or an overseer he might never have been lagged for nothing but still he knew in his heart what it were to be forced to wear the white hood in prison he knew what it were to be lashed for looking a warder in the eye and even a posh fellow like the Moth had breathed that air so the knowledge of unfairness were deep in his bone and marrow. In the hut at Faithfull's Creek I seen proof that if a man could tell his true history to Australians he might be believed it is the clearest sight I ever seen and soon Joe seen it too.

UNFAIRNESS. It deserves the caps. A major theme of the book is that of injustice, betrayal, how anger can be forged into action, how life takes more from -- and piles more onto the heads of -- those who can least afford it, and how theft and murder and rebellion can become the only paths that seem sensible when the world is slowly destroying you and the ones you love. It's certainly not a cheerful book, and I don't think I could even describe it as 'uplifting', but I didn't come out of it feeling like my soul was crushed beyond repair or anything like that. Mostly I wanted to roll around in the sentences some more.

True History has won prizes out the wazoo, and I think it deserves every one of them. It's beautifully and unconventionally written, the plot is never slow or boring, and it grabs your emotions firmly by the collar and drags you along with them.

Finally, I was delighted to find in the book a quote directly addressing the fact that Australia as a country has a tendency to celebrate things that maybe aren't the most deserving of celebration (eg. ANZAC Day, the great patriotic public holiday on which we celebrate a crushing defeat!). For all his criminality, Ned Kelly holds the same sort of romantic, adventurous, folk-hero appeal as Robin Hood. This novel has also brought home to me the extent to which he, as a poor Irish-Australian criminal, stood at the time for resistance against the English, who were the authorities in the colony of Victoria.

What is it about us Australians eh? he demanded. What is wrong with us? Do we not have a Jefferson? A Disraeli? Might we not find someone better to admire than a horse-thief and a murderer? Must we always make such an embarrassing spectacle of ourselves?

This Australian's opinion is that Peter Carey can go on making spectacles like this one for as long as he wants.