Juggling by Barbara Trapido
The chaos of the second-hand book stall is a wonderful place to discover authors new to you. Unrestricted by alphabetical, subject or intellectual classification, Chekov and Dostoevsky rub spines with Shakespeare, King, Keyes and Dahl. My bookshelf is full of serendipitous stumblings across new-to-me authors, one of which, recently, was Barbara Trapido.
In Juggling Barbara Trapido keeps childhood, faith, academia and sexual identity flying through the air with an ease that belies the complexity of the lives she interweaves.
In a plot that requires the reader to suspend disbelief time and again, Trapido throws into the mix coincidence and timely entrance of conscious and deliberately Shakespearean proportion. The story follows the Comedies and Tragedies of Christina and her adopted sister Pam and the people around them who complicate their lives. The Tragedies are handled with merciful sensitivity while the charm of the Comedies springs from their simple ordinariness. Trapido wields her pen lightly but with precision: stolen babies, lost twins, rape, mistaken identity, a levitating boy - all conspire to keep the pages turning rapidly.
Christina herself defines Comedies as "a better sort of tragedy because they make us laugh and because the characters stay alive... Comedies send us home feeling happy, because we believe we have witnessed happy endings. What we have really witnessed are sexy endings; visionary endings; endings frozen in a moment of precarious, brilliant symmetry, like a rain of fireworks in a prison yard... if Shakespeare had given us the sequels, we would see at once that all those brilliant bantering Beatrices, having become the wives to all those brilliant, bantering Benedicks, will be whining in back bedrooms that they are neglected, while their husbands chase the maids."
This is reflected in the plot and the reader can close the book at the end of the final chapter Orphans, Jugglers and Tall Hats or continue with the short epilogue which gives us a glimpse up the back stairs while neatly resolving the whatever-became-of...'s.
© Hester Casey, January 2005 back to top
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is unusual - a detective story with no blood, guts or gore. Instead we are told a gentle meandering tale about Precious Ramotswe and her adventures as Botswana's first lady detective, dealing with missing and errant husbands, fraudulent insurance claims, missing children.
The detective agency in Gabarone is at the foot of Kgale Hill and its assets are 'a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter'. There is also a teapot in which the 'only lady detective in Botswana' brews redbush tea. Great quantities of redbush tea get brewed as problems are mulled over and eventually solved, sometimes under the acacia tree outside.
Having briefly introduced us to Precious, we are taken into the past and told the story of her childhood, her closeness to her father, her disastrous marriage at eighteen to a trumpet player. Her father, having worked for fifteen years in the mines of South Africa, has bought cattle and built up a herd so that he leaves her one hundred and eighty cattle including white Brahmin bulls which she sells to set up her agency. Cattle are revered and they feature frequently in this book ('without your cattle you were naked') as do other creatures: crocodiles, lions, cobras, dogs, scorpions, chickens, Go-Away Birds.
The narrative moves slowly and is deeply rooted in a sense of place and community. We are always aware of the physical landscape in which Precious moves: olive grey acacia trees, dusty roads, the endless Kalahari Desert, 'wide grasslands that broke and broke your heart'. And we are always aware of the deep bonds between people, especially family, in this sparsely populated country.
An understated humour is evident throughout, (for example in Happy Bapetsi's uncertainty about whether her newly-arrived lazy lodger is really her father and in Mr Patel's ostentatious vulgarity), but particularly in the laconic dialogue, as in Mma Maletsi's calm assertion that it is better that her husband is with God (albeit via the stomach of a crocodile) than in the arms of another woman. You must be very sorry, Mma Ramotswe says to her. A bit, she replies, but I have lots to do.
Our heroine is a large lady, being an unapologetic size 22, who regards the skinny women on magazine covers as an aberration of natural form. Her large good-humoured frame seems to be part of her irresistible appeal for men: she has many admirers, one of whom is her neighbour, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni who owns Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and a muted romantic subplot ripples through the book.
Despite the episodic structure, which some readers may find too disjointed at times, the story is told simply and the language is clear and uncluttered. The novel is not uniformly light-hearted, darker realities are touched on from time to time: the brutality of the South African mines, the ravages of drought and poverty, the gruesome prevalence of witchcraft. But overall the story leaves an impression of serenity and warmth, as if the reader too has spent some hours under that dusty acacia tree watching the distant hills and listening to the sounds of Africa. This reader enjoyed the book and will read the next in the series, Tears of the Giraffe. For those who live for the next Tarantino release, this is probably not for you.
© Imogen Seoige, December 2004 back to top
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
This year's must-read is a mixture of clever research, layered plots, and not-so-clever writing. For members of Eblana Writers, it represents examples of 'how-to-do-it' and 'how-not-to-do-it'!
If you are interested in Da Vinci, in codes, or in Opus Dei and the Catholic Church, you'll find this book intriguing. If you don't know why 1.618 is the most important number in the world of art and nature, then this book will tell you. However, you may find it a little irritating when it starts to explain things to you that you have always taken for granted. For instance, did you know that when you are in the U.S. Embassy in Rome, you are deemed to be on U.S. soil? Of course you did. Well, Dan Brown, the author of the Da Vinci Code, assumes his readership needs to be told that.
Reminiscent of Geoffrey Archer's or Sidney Sheldon's style, Brown's simplistic writing can be understood even by very young readers. Perhaps he feels his young American reader needs to have everything over-explained, but a more mature or sophisticated readership is likely to find it all just a little insulting.
Take chapter 78, for instance. Sophie, one of the main characters, is using a password to open a cylinder, which the reader knows contains a papyrus. If she enters the wrong password, a vial of vinegar will break inside and the important papyrus will be destroyed. To build the tension, the author gets the other character to interrupt with: 'Remember the vinegar!', awkwardly reminding a reader, who didn't need to be reminded. Then Brown decides to explain it all over again, so he writes: 'Sophie knows that if she pulls too hard, a lever inside will apply pressure to the glass vial and shatter it.'
Okay, okay, thinks the reader, just get on with it. I get the picture! But no, the author decides it would be clever to keep the tension going even longer. This, of course, would be fine - if only his methodology were not so childishly obvious. As Sophie starts to pull open the cylinder again, Brown interrupts with another corny line: 'In the excitement of deciphering the code-word, Sophie had almost forgotten what they had expected to find inside' Again the reader is subjected to a lengthy reminder of what is inside the cylinder. Aaargh!
This must be the author's first novel, you think. Most of it is actually quite good. By the time, his next novel is published, surely he will have matured beyond the constant use of these over-obvious tricks of the craft? Yes, you think, a good editor will teach him to strip away all those overwritten passages. Alas no, folks. This is no first novel. This is no novice writer either. A graduate of Amherst College, it turns out that Dan Brown has actually taught creative writing at the Phillips Exeter Academy. Hmmm.
Eblana Writers should read this book. We should do so with a red pen in one hand to cross out the unnecessary clauses. We should highlight the arch writing and the cringingly corny phrases. Then we should pick the worst paragraphs and scenes and re-write them the way we all know they should have been written in the first place.
Next we should take another pen and mark the clever bits, note the well-drawn characters, the plots and the sub-plots, and appreciate the simple, but effective structure of the novel. If we do all this, then our group will get much more out of the Da Vinci Code than the millions of beach-readers worldwide, who have found it to be a stimulating, fascinating and rollicking good read. Which, when all is said and done, amazingly, is exactly what this book is.
© Fiona Price, November 2004 back to top
His Dark Materials a trilogy by Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials trilogy is a remarkable Tour-de-Force. Beginning with Northern Lights, continuing in The Subtle Knife, and ending with The Amber Spyglass, it is
an extraordinary, multi-layed masterpiece that can be read at many levels.
It tells an incredible story of the eternal war between wisdom and ignorance, beauty and ugliness, Good and Evil. It is an exhilarating poetic mixture of adventure, history, philosophy, religion, myth and cosmology set in the many thoroughly realised worlds envisioned by stunning imagination of the author. The characters are wonderful; complete, absorbing, and never less than interesting. Indeed, some of their idiosyncrasies are positively amazing!
Follow Lyra and Will into mortal danger as they make hard won progress on their perilous journey through many worlds. And all in order that they can assume their privileged Fate; which is nothing less than to rewrite history, and allow wisdom and love stand revealed.
Be gripped with tension, and then find wonderful relief, as time and time again they gamble with their lives. Relying only on their ingenuity and integrity and the help of friends in all worlds, they are forced under the most extreme and provocative of circumstances to outsmart the incredible odds stacked up against them.
Meet witches, gypcians, armoured bears, deadly dwarfs, shape-shifting daemons, shaman, scholars, dubious priests, and creatures with seedpod wheels for hoofs upon the way. Marvel as angels appear and tell their story. Learn of the Spirits fate in the land of the dead. Delight in supreme storytelling that never falters as we are led masterfully to the mind-blowing crescendo.
Prepare to board a roller-coster, to worlds each more incredible than the last. Travel in time; be stunned and knocked out of complacency by revealing insights about Life and Death and human nature. Be pierced by the arrow of knowledge; torn apart with concern for young Lyra and Will, and willingly seduced by storytelling designed to activate and engage the all the senses. And not least, prepare too, to be amused and entertained by clever pun and debunking genius, for some moments of genuine hilarity.
Move over Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Make way for His Dark Materials - to my mind one of the most important and complete works ever written.
© Bernie Mc Cormick, October 2004 back to top
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Susie Salmon tell us "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973" in the second, startling sentence of this novel which is set in suburban Pennsylvania, in an era when people believed things like that didn’t happen. She was raped and her body was cut into pieces and dragged away in a sack.
Heaven is everything a 14-year old girl could desire - no teachers at the school, the textbooks are Glamour and Seventeen magazines and there are friendly dogs to play with. But all Susie wants is to be back on earth going through the normal, daily routines of learning and homework, sports and boyfriends, maturing and enjoying life.
The narrative moves smoothly between past and present, so we see what life was like in the Salmon family before and after Susie’s death. Through Susie’s eyes we see the grief and horror of her family and friends and their very differing reactions over a period of ten years. We begin to care for her father Jack, determined to catch his daughter’s killer, mother Abigail who initially retreats into a daydreaming automaton, Lindsey who seems destined to be known as the girl whose sister was murdered, four-year old Buckley and colourful Grandma Lynn, rarely without a cocktail in hand. The observations on their behaviour are perceptive - perhaps too much so for a fourteen year old even as precocious as Susie.
The book is part detective story and part fantasy, because although Susie gives us the grisly details of her death early on, her family are hopeful for a long time that she has only temporarily disappeared. We wince at the bumbling police efforts to identify and capture the murderer and wonder will he be caught before he kills again.
Near the end the tone falters when Susie visits earth briefly and makes love in the body of her friend Ruth. But that’s a mere quibble in the overall quality of Sebold’s sure-footed writing. This is an original and imaginative novel and many of the scenes came back to me weeks after I had finished reading it.
© Sheena Duffy, September 2004 back to top
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Before launching into the review let me strongly urge you to read this book. I say that first lest anything else I mention should dissuade you. It is fictional and written from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old boy with special needs. I don't know whether the author has any knowledge of such people but it has the resounding ring of truth. Truth plays a big part in the life of Christopher. Although the word autism is not mentioned anywhere in the book, I assume that is Christopher's condition. He has a special affinity with science and mathematics in particular. He also has a photographic memory and can 'play back' events. He exercises this ability a number of times to help him deal with difficult situations.
The book begins with Christopher's discovery that the neighbour's dog has been killed. He is upset at the fact that no further enquiries will be made by the police and sets out to solve the crime and write a book about it. This is a huge undertaking for him and he is helped and encouraged by one of his teachers. How can someone who has difficulty communicating with people and lives in a closed world tell a story? Brilliantly, as far as I am concerned.
The story unfolds with unexpected twists and surprises like any great yarn. The author, Mark Haddon received the Whitbread book of the year for this along with the Guardian children's fiction prize. Thoroughly deserved !
© Sean McGaley, August 2004 back to top
