“A getaway needn’t be speedy if it’s accurate and efficient.” Wyatt said. “Vanishing, that’s the thing, and that means anticipation.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 16, 2011)

Australian author Garry Disher has a solid reputation for his Inspector Challis police procedurals, but on Disher’s other creative side of the law, there’s also the Wyatt series. Wyatt, a methodical, cool and collected anti-hero is a Melbourne crook, and Disher’s Wyatt series is frequently considered by crime aficionados as an Aussie counterpart to Robert Parker’s Stark series. Wyatt, a heist novel, is the seventh book in the series and it appears after a 13-year-break.

Melbourne has long been known as a hot bed of police corruption, and the city was also home to the notorious Pettingill crime family. Wyatt, however, is a crook who prefers to hunt alone–except for the occasional tip, and in this novel, it’s the tip that leads to trouble.

Wyatt receives inside information from a “fixer, an agent, a middle-man” named Eddie–a man who “could sit on a half-formed plan for years until the right circumstances come along.” Eddie usually provides information, and then sits out on the crime while getting a percentage of the cut. This time Eddie wants a role in the heist, and the job comes courtesy of inside information from Eddie’s sexy ex-wife, Lydia. Lydia used to work for a jeweler who did business with the Furneaux brothers, Henri and Joe. Lydia’s a bright woman who was groped once too often by the brothers, and now she has some valuable information regarding the under-the-table deals conducted by the Furneaux brothers. Seems they own a large Melbourne jewelry store and make deliveries of valuable items all over Southern New South Wales. The beauty of the plan is that the Furneaux brothers fence stolen jewelry brought in from various points all over the world by their cousin, Alain Le Page. As Eddie says: “That’s the beauty of it—we rob a robber.”

Right at the planning stage of the heist, Wyatt has a feeling that there’s something not quite right. For a start, Eddie wants to be involved, and then he’s bringing in his ex-wife Lydia as a crew member. Involving an ex- goes against the grain for Wyatt–after all, there’s a lot of dirty unfinished business between ex-spouses. Who’s to know whether or not one has an axe to grind against the other? In this case, Wyatt’s known Eddie for a long time, but he’s not sure exactly what Lydia’s game is. However, Wyatt finds himself “recognizing something of himself in Eddie’s ex-wife. She was naturally wary and assessing, and silence was probably her natural state.” But beyond feeling a grudging respect for Lydia’s intelligence, Wyatt also feels a reluctant attraction.

In spite of the fact that Wyatt intuitively senses that there’s something wrong with the heist set-up, he decides to go ahead–after all, he’s down on his luck and needs to make a score.

Wyatt should have listened to his sixth sense…..

The novel makes the point that Wyatt is in many ways becoming an anachronism. He’s strictly a low-tech thief and he’s finding fewer situations that accommodate his talents:

“Where could a man like Wyatt lift cash these days? Money was moved around electronically. If cash was used, it was stored and protected by the kinds of high-tech security that he couldn’t hope to crack or bypass, not without the help of experts and costly equipment. That left paintings and jewelry, which were also highly protected and could only be shifted by a fence who’d give you a few dollars and then sell you out.”

If things don’t look up for Wyatt soon, he may be left with purse-snatching as his only option.

Wyatt is a definite read for fans of heist novels. While Soho Crime publishes Disher’s Inspector Challis novels, the earlier novels in the Wyatt series are out-of-print, and so Wyatt may be the first novel readers catch in the series. Much is made of the “legend” of Wyatt in the plot, and that’s hard to relate to if, like me, you haven’t heard of this character before. But nonetheless, this is a well-conducted heist novel complete with corrupt coppers, a psychotic hit man, and a deranged stripper who’s parted ways with her pole.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soho Crime (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Garry Disher
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Dirty Money by Richard Stark Criminal Karma by Steven M. Thomas

Partial Bibliography:

• Approaches: Stories (1981)
• Steal Away (1987)
• The Difference to Me: Stories (1988)
• The Stencil Man (1988)
• Flamingo Gate (1991)
• The Sunken Road (1996)
• Straight, Bent and Barbara Vine: Crime Stories (1997)
• Past the Headlands (2001)
• Play Abandoned (2011)

The Challis and Destry Novels

• The Dragon Man (1999)
• Kittyhawk Down (2003)
• Snapshot (2005)
• Chain of Evidence (2007)
• Blood Moon (2009)
• Whispering Death (2011)

Wyatt Series:

• Kickback (1991)
• Paydirt (1992)
• Deathdeal (1993)
• Crosskill (1994)
• Port Vila Blues (1995)
• The Fallout (1997)
• Wyatt (2010; September 2011 in US)

“There are things that I learned to do after coming to Wyalkatchem… how to hang a blanket in the boughs of a gum tree and rock a baby to sleep, how to sit quietly at night with a child in my lap, how to feel for a fever, how to boil willow for its cooling sap, how to paint a throat with gentian violet and listen for the smallest breath, how to make a coffin, how to line it with pieces of cotton, how to dress a dead child, how to lower a coffin into the ground, how to put one foot in front of the other and keep on doing it every day.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (APR 22, 2011)

It’s a tough world that’s inhabited by Gin Boyle Toad – an albino, a classical pianist, an unloved woman whose life has been reduced to freak show status with the indelicate stares, the gossip, the pointing. Although she was raised in Perth’s wealthy environs and showed early and sustained musical talent, she is abused and ultimately institutionalized by her cruel and loathsome stepfather.

Her unlikely rescuer is Agrippas Toad, a dwarfish and crudely mannered farmer who happens to hear her play piano and immediately marries her. By doing so, he attempts to stave off the rumors about behavior that is deemed aberrant in his small-minded farm community. It is the “strangeness” of these two that binds them together. Gin Boyle reflects, “It wasn’t happiness. It wasn’t love. But it had been tolerable, so long as there was nothing else.”

Into these unfulfilled lives come two Italian prisoners of war – Antonio and John – part of a wave of 18,000 Italian prisoners of war who were sent to work on isolated Australian farms between 1941 and 1947. The very pregnant and unloved Gin forms a dangerous affinity for Antonio, a shoemaker by trade, who gives her the attention and compassion that is missing from her marriage. In the meantime, Toad is more intrigued by John, for reasons that eventually become evident.

Gin Boyle – aching from the death of her oldest daughter, Joan, also an albino…scarred from years of feeling like a freak…embarrassed that her life has become circumvented in an ugly small town with a small husband who has an obsession with lady’s corsets…feels the stirring of love under Antonio’s appreciative gazes and through his words. But is it real and can it last?

There are some very real strengths in Goldie Goldbloom’s debut book. The prose often soars to lyricism and the description of the landscape is positively breathtaking. In fact, the harsh and unforgiving Australian outback becomes a character in its own right, and the occasional foray of violence – the hunting of the rabbits, the capricious weather, the lopping off of sheep’s tails – is a fine metaphor for the wartime world. In addition, the book presents some meaningful and compelling themes: what “home” really means, the subtle violence of displacement, and how so many of us are prisoners, either literally or metaphorically, either behind bars or within our own skin.

Is it a perfect book? Well, no. Goldie Goldbloom sometimes doesn’t trust her reader quite enough and drums home certain messages: “You are a stone fortress, not a person. When you opened your gates, it was not to surrender to me, but to capture me.” Or, in response to why Gin didn’t lock up her Italian captives, “They’re men. Not animals.” The build-up relating to Joan ends up being undeveloped and here and there, there’s some melodrama.

But even with those fault lines, this is still an imaginative and stunningly original debut, with characters that will remain seared into your memory. Her mesmerizing tale demands to be read and to be appreciated. The book was originally called “Toad’s Museum of Freaks and Wonders” and has been retitled for its U.S. publication.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 30 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; First Edition edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Goldie Goldbloom
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	After the Fire, A Still Small Voice by Evie Wyld

Bibliography:

• The Paperbark Shoe (2010; March 2011)

“The combination of having too much to drink and a genuine lack of desire towards an unchosen partner were the ingredients for a certain kind of unhappiness.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (DEC 27, 2010)

In Sugar Mother, middle-aged Australian OB/GYN Cecilia Page leaves for a year-long fellowship abroad. Her husband, English professor Edwin decides not to accompany her in spite of the fact that she “asked repeatedly” that he join her. This is not the first occasion of separation; Cecilia enjoys travel and hotel rooms, but Edwin does not. He prefers his “pleasantly shabby” home, along with his routine and no expectation of surprises.

While Edwin and Cecilia, a childless couple, appear to be the epitome of conservatism, even they have their mad moments. Their “flings” however are confined to monthly wife-swapping parties composed of a handful of couples their own age and income status. It’s through this bizarre monthly ritual, organized by Cecelia to continue in her absence, that Jolley’s wicked sense of humour spears the naughty, extra-marital play in suburbia. In Edwin’s circle of friends, even wife-swapping is staged, boring, obligatory, predictable, and above all safe.

In many ways, Edwin is disconnected to his home and to his life. Cecilia is the great organizer, and she finds it easy to make friends. While Edwin is proud of Cecilia, there’s also the sense that their shared life is predominantly her creation. Edwin is too colourless and mild to create his own or to take a stand against Cecilia’s forceful character. But there’s one thing in which Edwin is the master, and that’s in his hypochondria:

“Edwin had three books of the body in which he kept notes. The books were the external, the internal and the intangible. The book of the skin (the external) had separate pages for different places on the body. He planned at some stage to have a series of maps like ordnance survey maps (in sections) of the human body, his body, with special methods of marking wrinkles, hair, moles, bruises, pimples, dry patches and the rather more unusual blemishes. Every page had its own legend and scale and he hoped, ultimately, to make an accurate index. All three books had stiff covers and blank pages fro drawings and diagrams alternating the lined pages for the written comments. Faithfully he kept the records, three valuable collections of human data. There were no limits to the notes he was able to make. He often imagined Cecilia’s pleasure at receiving the copies, handsomely bound, at some time in the future, after he was dead.”

Obviously Edwin has too much time on his hands. Little does this fussy, aging man suspect that his ordered life is about to become very complicated.

As soon as Cecilia leaves, the peculiar neighbours next door, Mrs. Botts and her lumpish daughter Leila suffer a series of catastrophes. First they are locked out of their home (a house in which it’s guaranteed they won’t be raped). Then the house is overrun with rats and must be fumigated. These disasters send the conniving Mrs. Botts and Leila to the Pages’ home, and with Cecilia absent, they basically move in and stay….

Sugar Mother is a darkly humorous tale that centres on Edwin’s dilemma. How can he get rid of guests who continuously create new excuses to stay? At first Edwin is willing to go to any lengths to get rid of them, but then soon he finds himself enjoying Mrs. Botts’s cooking and Leila’s company. He has a year to sort the problem before his wife returns home, but a lot can happen in a year.

Bizarre behaviour clashes then blends with the appearance of normalcy in Jolley’s understated and witty comedy of manners. As with Foxybaby, Sugar Mother also presents a world laced with lunacy and eccentricity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Persea; Reprint edition (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS:	Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foxybaby The Vera Wright Trilogy

Bibliography:

• Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976)
• Palomino (1980)
• The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1983)
• Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983)
• Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
• Milk and Honey (1984)
• Foxbaby (1985; November 2010)
• The Well (1986)
• The Sugar Mother (1988; November 2010)
• My Father’s Moon (1989) *
• Cabin Fever (1990) *
• The Georges’ Wife (1993) *
• The Orchard Thieves (1995)
• Lovesong (1997)
• Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories (1997)
• An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
• An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
• The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife (April 2010) *

Non-fiction:

• Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
• Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
• Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)

“If I hear you say once more that the women’s prison is too small and that more women, especially the middle-aged and the elderly should be locked up—I’ll—never mind what I’ll do.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (DEC 5, 2010)

Nothing prepared me for Elizabeth Jolley’s novel Foxybaby. What was I expecting? Well a gentle novel, a comedy of manners, perhaps? Instead Foxybaby is packed with quirky characters whose attendance at a private summer course unleashes a range of odd behaviours.

The novel begins with an exchange of letters between novelist, Alma Porch and Josephine Peycroft, the principal of Trinity College. Alma, who’s also a teacher at a girls’ school agrees to teach a drama course at Trinity College’s summer programme for overweight adults: “Better Body Through the Arts.” The opening exchange of letters sets the stage for the novel’s tone as Alma and Miss Peycroft attempt to work out their artistic differences.

The increasingly testy tone of the letters should set off alarm bells for Alma (they did for this reader), but perhaps Alma’s enthusiasm blinds her to the knowledge that all is not well at Trinity College. She sails off into the Australian outback in her “battered Volkswagen” with her head packed full of ideas for her drama course:

“Enjoying the delightful feeling of escape she sang tunelessly, something operatic, and nodded her head in time to her own aria. She was on her way to Cheathem East. Occasionally she stopped singing to listen, from habit, with some anxiety to the rattle of her engine. This noise being sustained as usual she let her mind race ahead. She hoped Trinity College would live up to her expectations. She thought about sunflowers. Sunflowers with heads as big as dinner plates, golden sunflowers in the corners of old buildings and by crumbling walls. She hoped they would be growing in Cheatham East.”

Alma’s rosy illusions about Trinity College are about to be shattered. The first warning of what’s in store occurs when she ploughs her Volkswagen into the back of a bus parked in the middle of a curved road. While this at first appears to be an accident, this is just one of many scams perpetrated by the lecherous Miles, whose nebulous position at the school is strangely tolerated by Miss Peycroft. When Miles isn’t ripping off the students and teachers with his various schemes, he hangs out in a room in which “everything [that was] there seemed to be for sale.” In the creation of Miss Peycroft and Miles, there are shades of Miss Fritton and Flash Harry from the marvellous British St Trinian’s films.

Alma’s accident–her strange introduction to the school–is but a hint of what’s in store. Two of the teachers don’t speak English, and Trinity College is a dump. The students are there ostensibly to loose weight, so the food is meager (if it appears at all). Alma’s room is soon invaded by Mrs. Castle, a student who can’t stop hammering on about her grandchildren and Siamese cats. But there are stranger things afoot; orgies and assignations are commonplace, and Miss Peycroft, “reputed to be a one time prioress, till she jumped off a wall,” may be the inamorata of another female teacher. Any normal person would run from Trinity College and its collection of nuts. Alma, however is determined to put on her play, She’s so wrapped up with its creation that she chooses to ignore a great deal, and when her mind does absorb the strangeness surrounding her, she simply becomes sleepy.

Foxybaby is primarily a humorous novel of eccentricity with its characters moving from their own bizarre lives and social relationships into the dreadful play, Foxybaby. The novel is reminiscent of a Shirley Jackson tale in which a normal person strays into some horrific environment and is trapped. Foxybaby isn’t horrific, however, although incidents that in other circumstances would be horrific take place (the staged car accident, for example). There’s no threat of danger–except to one’s sanity–in Jolley’s novel. Here’s Miss Peycroft discussing a course called Basic Self Expression:

“That’s Mrs. Viggars,” Miss Peycroft said, “the one sitting in the cardboard-box, rather a squeeze but she managed it ultimately. Luckily Miles found something big enough, a console television carton or was it a double-door refrigerator…”

“Whatever is that on her head?” Miss Porch in her curiosity, forgot good manners and interrupted Miss Peycroft, who did not seem to mind.

“Oh that. That’s a cushion,” she said. “It was hilarious. They all wore cushions on their heads and rocked across the courtyard in the boxes. Great fun!”

Just think of a scenario in which the patients take over the asylum. Make that asylum Trinity College and you get the picture. What’s so curious here is that Alma doesn’t seem to even notice the nuttiness that surrounds her. She’s dotty and giddy, and when she’s exposed to some really awful behaviour, her reactions to the Trinity College crowd create an even stranger situation. This darkly comic tale will appeal to those who love novels of eccentricity and the many foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Persea (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS:	Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vera Wright Trilogy Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

• Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976)
• Palomino (1980)
• The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1983)
• Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983)
• Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
• Milk and Honey (1984)
• Foxbaby (1985; November 2010)
• The Well (1986)
• The Sugar Mother (1988; November 2010)
• My Father’s Moon (1989) *
• Cabin Fever (1990) *
• The Georges’ Wife (1993) *
• The Orchard Thieves (1995)
• Lovesong (1997)
• Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories (1997)
• An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
• An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
• The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife (April 2010) *

Non-fiction:

• Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
• Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
• Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)

“Even as I said it I knew that the invitation was not like water to a thirsty soul, the way it felt, but more like a slug of whiskey to a recovering alcholic.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (OCT 29, 2010)

Every now and then, a novel comes along that is addicting. Nothing else gets done. Dinner gets burned, if it is even made, phones aren’t answered, and appointments are canceled. This is one of those novels. It is seductive, darkly sexual, haunting, and even frightening. You start waiting for the penny to drop, as the pages keep turning and the clues keep mounting. This is one very hypnotic novel.

After an enigmatic prologue, the book opens in Sydney, Australia. The narrator, Julia Alpers, is a law student not committed to her studies at this time. We are brought up to speed with her current dilemma: whether to go to New York on her old friend Ralph’s dime to investigate the last day’s of Ingrid, who disappeared on 9/11 (a year ago), or to tear up the ticket and ignore Ralph altogether. A murky undercurrent presides as pieces of their relationship unfold gradually.

At a leisurely but still tight pace, we learn the background and history of the friendship between Ralph, Julia, and Ingrid. Ingrid was almost an anachronism, a Grace Kelly type with a combination of innocence and power. Ralph had that androgynous and sometimes diffident charm. The triangulation of their relationship was complex, and I liked that it was uncommon, even within a certain familiarity.

This is a story that turns like a screw, gets more and more tense, as well as cross-stitched and dusky. It is finely artistic, with enough literary and art allusions to give you goose bumps. As the editorial description states, there is an analogy to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady but it also imbibes other references. It has the appeal of a nineteenth-century portraiture with a twenty-first century excitement.

This is not a “post 9/11” novel. The events of that day, i.e., the tragedy of the dead and missing, were procured for the purposes of a personal tragedy. There are some unique references to the hole at Ground Zero, but this is not an exploitation novel of that day, or of the inherent politics surrounding that time.

I felt this rapt hum as I was reading, like a deep secret or a liquid center. The characters are lucidly drawn and filled with that brio of privilege and youth, an intellectual group of arty students who have a casual, refined, urbane sophistication and ardor that is sensual and ephemeral. Tranter’s sense of place is simply elegant, filled with the light from a window, a shadow across the wall, a tint in the eyes. Her descriptions of Sydney and New York are hypnotizing. And Tranter has a Tolstoyan grasp of psychology blended with physiognomy. Subtle, enigmatic expressions are given intricate meaning. It sometimes cut me to the bone.

The prose is fluid and rich, with a restrained passion and hunger. The story and characters become more complex, more complexioned, musky, ripe. It is moody, elegiac but droll, with what I would call a licorice tone to it. Deep, fertile, rooty. This is a real sleeper of a novel. Make sure your schedule is clear; this is virile and unputdownable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Washington Square Press; Original edition (August 10, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kirsten Trantor
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Not yet reviewed on MostlyFiction… but tone reminds me of: Now You See Him by Eli Gottlieb  (See Guy Savage’s review here.)

Bibliography:

• The Legacy (2010)
• A Common Loss (2012)

“…But what I really mean is Poor us. All three of us have had terrible things happen – murder, cancer, abandonment – and for the first time I’m tempted to tell Robbie about Rachel. It’s not sympathy I want but the credibility that comes with having faced and lived through something tragic. I can say that I understand, and I do, but to Robbie and Alice – who know nothing of my past – my words would sound hollow……I say nothing.”

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill (JUL 30, 2010)

It is important to set the parameters, or the standards, of a Young Adult novel right up front when reviewing one in a public forum. The Young Adult novel is a genre that allows authors to explore edgy content within the typical bathos of teen self-consciousness. If a novel is to be successful in this market, it must ambitiously try to underscore topics such as murder, sickness, abuse, heroin addiction, suicide, sexuality – pretty much any topic with an “edge” – and have a central character that is either surrounded by the subject, or is going to potentially be lost to the subject. Take Romeo & Juliet, minus out the words of William Shakespeare, put it in first person narrative form – let’s let Romeo be the narrator – and you will be soundly situated in a Young Adult novel.

In general, these novels tend to be action-oriented, filled with personal drama, and focused almost exclusively on a difficulty that one character experiences. Because the genre’s goal is to dramatize a topic and render an ultimate (usually, moral) denouement, chapters are generally short and can read like scenes from a television show or play. Good examples of this genre make liberal use of dialogue, realistic setting, and character archetypes (i.e. the mean girl, the bad boy, the messed-up-by-sadness protagonist).

All of this is by way of introducing Beautiful Malice, a YA novel by first-time author Rebecca James. The novel centers around, and is told by, a high school student who has been a witness to, and victim of, her sister’s murder. On the heels of this tragedy, she relocates to another town and takes a new name. There, she keeps to herself and keeps her secrets and self-blame safe. Until she meets the larger-than-life, beautiful, magnetic Alice, who befriends her. Alice makes Katherine, the narrator, her best friend. Although Katherine is striving to just be unnoticed and live a quiet last year of high school, Alice’s friendship spins her into a web of psychological torture as only a teenage girl can experience it.

The topic of this novel is murder; specifically, the repercussions of a terribly normal mistake suddenly crashing into someone else’s malicious intent. Thrown into the mix is promiscuity, teen pregnancy, mistrust of adults, and a world in which teenagers must find their own way. It’s a page turner.

This novel is a successful YA novel for all the reasons mentioned above. For an adult, there are limits to what we will accept as drama. However, for the audience that this novel seeks, it deserves to be noticed and read.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bantam (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca James
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More YA: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales Twilight by Stephanie Meyers Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Bibliography:

• Beautiful Malice (July 2010)

“I have a corner seat in this train by a mistake which is not entirely my fault. The woman, who is in this seat, asks me if I think she has time to fetch herself a cup of tea. I can see that she badly wants to do this and, in order that she does not have to go without the tea, I agree that, though she will be cutting it fine, there is a chance that she will have time. So she goes and I see her just emerging from the refreshment room with a look on her face which shows how she feels. She has her tea clutched in one hand and I have her reserved seat because it is silly, now that the train has started, to stand in the corridor being crushed by army greatcoats and kitbags and boots, simply looking at the emptiness of this comfortable corner.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JUN 13, 2010)

Although she wrote all her life, Jolley didn’t get her first book published until she was 53. Thereafter she published 15 novels, four story collections and four non-fiction books. The daughter of an Austrian mother and English father and a transplant to Australia from England, she became one of Australia’s most celebrated authors and won at least 16 awards. Yet by the time of her death in 2007, her books were out of print. This new edition of her acclaimed autobiographical trilogy brings these three novels — My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife — together in one volume in the U.S. for the first time. The conclusion, The George’s Wife, was never before published here though it won major awards and accolades in Australia.

Having read My Father’s Moon and Cabin Fever years ago, I can tell you it makes a difference having the final volume, but even more – reading the books in one volume changes the experience. There’s a disjointed quality to Vera’s narration and a rhythm to the prose, which creates a deep intimacy when all three books are read together. The format also satisfies the build-up of suspense and relieves certain frustrations with Vera’s sometimes self-destructive passivity.

As My Father’s Moon opens in post-WWII England, Vera is departing with her illegitimate daughter, Helena, for a teaching position at a progressive boarding school, Fairfields. Her mother is distressed that she is taking the child, but then her mother is distressed at the whole mess Vera has made of her promising life. And thirty pages later, as if to underscore her series of bad choices, Vera is waiting at the end of a train line, having left squalid, abusive Fairfields and thrown herself on the mercy of a nursing colleague she hasn’t communicated with in five years.

Each of the ten sections focuses on an aspect of Vera’s life, which illuminate the story’s center – her wartime nursing (instead of the university her parents had hoped for) and her own naivety, self-absorption and insecurity. From Fairfield her perspective returns to childhood and boarding school, the wartime refugees her mother aided, a lesbian affair, a beloved neighbor whose warnings go unanswered, and pivotal incidents in her war experience. Fractured repetitions offer new depth, details or interpretations of events.

From her poor but bookish home life and the typical child’s impatience with her mother’s foreign accent to the casual cruelty of dormitory girls in a hidebound, lawless environment, which is uneasily echoed in nurses’ housing, Vera is flatly, musingly honest about her own failings and loneliness. At school Vera torments a girl she calls Bulge, for no more reason than physical antipathy. As a new nurse, she’s in thrall to a roommate who she keeps in cigarettes and spending money. Taken up by a doctor and his wife who move in moneyed, bohemian, dissolute circles, she feels herself uplifted, cosseted and loved, only to find herself seduced and abandoned.

As Cabin Fever opens Vera is a doctor in a hotel at a conference. And that’s about all we find out about that. “Memories are not always in sequence, not in chronological sequence.” Structured like My Father’s Moon in interconnected sections, Vera remembers Helena’s birth, her horrible, stultifying experience as a mother’s helper, her removal to the nursing home to have her baby and her extended stay there, all of it intertwined with wartime and childhood memories. Loneliness looms large, but there’s a fair amount of humor too as Vera limits her focus to getting through the day.

In book three, The Georges Wife, Vera makes the same mistakes all over again, longing for love. “I suppose I shall be lonely, Mr. George, I suppose that, one day, I shall have to be alone. I shall be lonely.” Taking a position as a servant to an unmarried brother and sister quite set in their ways, she has a second child. But this time there is no running away and no abandonment though Mr. George (as she still thinks of him) keeps putting off their marriage. She goes to medical school, and takes up with a strange couple not of her class – echoes of her postwar youth. But this time she gets her education and eventually emigrates to Australia with Mr. George.

From her perspective as a psychologist Vera does not spare herself: “I am a shabby person. I understand, if I look back, that I have treated kind people with an unforgivable shabbiness. For my work a ruthless self-examination is needed. Without understanding something of myself, how can I understand anyone else.” Of course, most of us could say the same if we were honest. Jolley says it in a trilogy of beguiling rumination, exploring a half-century of history through one woman’s very personal experience. Though largely tossed about by life, drifting into circumstances and relationships of least resistance, Vera finally gets a grip on herself and her future and perhaps that’s what maturity is all about, even if it’s still a lonely place.

Jolley’s prose is intimate, poetic and unflinching. The disjointed structure builds upon itself with an almost mesmerizing quality. Though less humorous than much of her fiction, the trilogy is a work of emotional depth and beauty, which will be enjoyed by anyone who likes to wrap themselves in compelling, artful fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Persea; 1 edition (April 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS:	Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	See this one, for a contrast: Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann And more by Elizabeth Jolley: Foxbaby Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

• Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976)
• Palomino (1980)
• The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1983)
• Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983)
• Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
• Milk and Honey (1984)
• Foxbaby (1985; November 2010)
• The Well (1986)
• The Sugar Mother (1988; November 2010)
• My Father’s Moon (1989) *
• Cabin Fever (1990) *
• The Georges’ Wife (1993) *
• The Orchard Thieves (1995)
• Lovesong (1997)
• Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories (1997)
• An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
• An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
• The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife (April 2010) *

Non-fiction:

• Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
• Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
• Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)

“Sometimes people aren’t all right and that’s just the way it is.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (NOV 27, 2009)

Set in Australia, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, skillfully tracks two narratives, each struggling to escape fateful trajectories. One, the story of Leon, traces his arrival on the continent, the child of European immigrants in the 1950s. Leon, his mother and father set up a pastry shop in Sydney turning out tarts and cakes. They live well, until, that is, his father volunteers to fight in the Korean War. He returns shattered and broken, and so Leon’s world is ruptured. An irreconcilable course is set and years later Leon is conscripted as a machine gunner in Vietnam. There he realizes a nascent thirst for violence which will shadow him presumably the rest of his days. In Vietnam, and experiencing a firefight, he photographs his first kill, “he found himself wishing he’d got someone to take a picture of him with the dead boy. And then he wondered where that had come from.” A theme of descending forces drives and moves him unwittingly.

In the parallel narrative, we meet Frank, as he returns to a rundown family shack, a previous retreat for both his father and his grandfather, in rural Australia. He is attempting to put his turbulent past behind him, including a relationship to which he contributed little but violence. He plants a garden, trying to eek out an existence. He seeks solitude, but neighbors intrude, and he attempts to force common civility upon himself and bring order to his fractured life.

The novel, in alternating chapters, relates the stories of these two men, until the parallel worlds overlap in a fashion that, though not altogether unanticipated, surprises the reader and brings a semblance of explanation to the narratives. When the stories interweave, the result is significant, if not profound. This is skillful and delicate writing.

In a short YouTube interview Evie Wyld jokingly relates that her book is “a romantic thriller about men not talking.” Indeed, there is romance, though little more than suggestive. And there is a slight inference of the thriller, particularly when a young local girl goes missing. But Wyld is being self-effacing in throwing out the cliche. “Men not talking” is a loaded phrase and suggests deep currents and subtlety, both of which she conjures up and dishes out in full course. There is a scene, for example, where Frank, taking a swim, is pulled unawares to sea. Afraid of what dangers lurk in the deep, panic rises as he struggles to shore when a shark appears, its fin visibly tracking him. “Frank floated on his back…Something bumped his arm. He raised his head and saw that he had drifted clear out of the bay and there was something in the water with him. After swallowing a mouthful, he felt for all his limbs and found them still there. A fin appeared a few feet away, not a huge fin, but still a fin and it didn’t look like a reef shark. It hung in the water, oddly still, waiting for him to make the first move.” The metaphor is successful and deftly delivered without beating the reader over the head with symbolism. There is danger to the murky depths and these men are trying to get out of the current.

It, danger, lurks not only at sea, but in the fields where it watches quietly, or so Frank fears. He frequently stares into the cane field at night, uneasy that something is lying in wait. Like war-torn Leon, Frank is in danger of being eaten alive by the life he has been delivered and struggles to escape its consequences. It is an ancient theme, as the book’s title, drawn from the King James Bible suggests. The biblical verse continues, “O Lord, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.” Can we out-swim that which we’ve inherited? Or is destiny, in this case violence, an indelible seeping stain? Wyld explores this question with stark prose that is, like the landscape described, at once beautiful and bleak. She punctures her writing with grace notes of description which render the characters, so starkly drawn, animated and full. For instance, Leon’s mother in the bakery kitchen: “His mother whisked egg whites so that the muscle on her right arm stood out like a stick of butter.” And, later, in school, Leon “felt his own body, a sluggish weight, pale and thick, a rock with a wooden shell.” Such writing sings and puts into sharp relief the dark nature of the world being described.

These men are haunted. The landscape is haunted. There is much that is bleak and desperate here, but it does not overwhelm the book, such is the skill at which these lives are revealed, the linage of violence and struggle defined. Wyld addressed this quality in a recent interview. “I’m interested in the idea that it’s not the person who is the brute,” she said, “but that the things that happen are brutish.” Even darkness well rendered can be a beautiful thing. I am encouraged of late at the quality of work of the new generation of writers. Evie Wyld is a Grantas New Voices of 2008 author and well deserving of the recognition. I look at her and wonder at how so much wisdom and talent can reside in one so young and fresh.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (August 25, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Evie Wyld
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Granta interview
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books set in Australia: Sorry by Gail Jones The Broken Shore by Peter Temple The Floating Brothel by Sian Rees

Bibliography:

• Sea Stories (2007)
• After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009)
• All the Birds, Singing (April 2014)

“The mark of wisdom and civilization was the capacity to conquer desire, to deny it and crush it.  Otherwise, one was no better than …the convict, the Esquimau, the savage: all [were] enslaved not by the bone around their brain…but by their passions.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (MAY 05, 2009)

Wanting by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan emphasizes, by its ambiguous title, two of the most contradictory characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign—the “wanting,” or desire, to conquer other lands and bring “civilization” to them, and the “want,” or lack, of empathy and respect for the people and cultures which they deliberately destroy in the process.  The same contradictory characteristics are also reflected in the personal relationships of the socially prominent men and women of the era, some of whom we meet here.  Lust, desire, or  physical “wanting” are feelings  to be overcome because they are “uncivilized,” but men routinely indulge their passions with those far “beneath” them–servants, prostitutes, native women—people considered outside the limits of educated and wise society.

“Wanting” with its two meanings—“desire” and “lack”—forms the thematic underpinning of this novel, with intriguing plot lines and settings which move from the British penal colony of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), with its on-going battles to control, if not eliminate, the aborigines, to London’s highest levels of aristocratic and literary society.  Famed explorer Sir John Franklin and his wife Jane, who represent the Crown in Van Dieman’s Land, share the stage with aborigine King Romeo, his wild and mysterious daughter Mathinna, an assortment of local workers and tradesmen, and eventually, with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and even, on one occasion, the royal families of Europe.

The novel opens in 1839, as the Protector, a preacher, oversees the resettlement of a small group of wretched aborigines from Van Dieman’s Land to remote Flinders Island.  There he is mystified by the incurable illnesses and increasingly “monstrous deaths” of the people under his “protection.”   He fears that somehow he may be responsible, but he does not know how—he has been careful to demand that the aborigines adopt western dress, eat a western diet, follow a western way of life, and learn to pray Christian prayers.  When their leader, King Romeo, dies an agonizing death, the Protector saws off his head for further study by British scientists.

Ten pages (and fifteen years) later, Lady Jane Franklin, wife of Sir John Franklin, the former Governor of Van Dieman’s Land, is in London, trying to raise money for new expeditions to discover the fate of her explorer husband, his ships, and their crews, lost for nine years in the Arctic.  She has displayed the skull of King Romeo to phrenologists, who have concluded that the King was a savage, enslaved by his passions.  Ironies abound.  Lady Franklin is frantic to find an influential ally who can help her quell the rumor that Sir John Franklin and his crew became so desperate during their final days in the Arctic that they engaged in cannibalism and other “savage” behavior.  Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins, the two most popular writers in England during the period, answer Lady Jane’s call.

As the action moves back and forth between Van Dieman’s Land and London and from 1839 through the 1840s and 1850s, Flanagan gives depth to the bleak picture of colonial life, creating an emotionally wrenching portrait of Mathinna, orphaned child of King Romeo, as she is wrested from her countrymen on Flinders Island and brought into the home of the ambitious Lady Jane Franklin.  Determined to prove that this savage can be civilized, Lady Jane forces the child to imitate a proper British young lady in her education, dress, and demeanor, allowing her no connections to her past but providing nothing of value in its place.   Sir John, believing that this experiment is doomed to failure from the start, is more committed to using force than persuasion.

While he is developing the characters of Mathinna, Lady Jane and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan also develops the character of Charles Dickens in parallel scenes.  Frustrated in his relationship with his cold wife and overwhelmed by his responsibilities to her and their ten children, he believes that “we all have appetites and desire,” but that “only the savage agrees to sate them.”  Throwing himself into his work to stay sane, he finds himself, ironically, attracted to one of the actresses in his play, The Frozen Deep.

The constantly changing time periods and revolving settings are sometimes challenging to follow, and the connections among the various plot lines are a bit tenuous (and may be historically inaccurate), but Flanagan creates lively characters who reflect their cultures and their hypocrisies.  Numerous parallels and ironies between the “civilized” British characters and the “savages” show the arrogance of power, while Flanagan’s vivid descriptions of the characters’ surroundings add to the sense of immediacy and bring the often brutal action to life.  Life in Van Dieman’s Land is ugly—pitiless—grinding down the characters (and the reader).  Three years after the departure of the Franklins, life for all the people they have left behind is worse than it was before their arrival.  An unusual novel which shows the damaging effects of empire-building, on both the conquered and on the arrogant “conquerors,” Wanting makes the reader understand why the surviving aborigines ultimately believe “the world was not run by God but by the Devil.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 3 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (May 12, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE:	Wanting
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Flanagan
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Richard Flanagan Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	SORRY by Gail Jones DROOD by Dan Simmons

Bibliography:

• Death of a River Guide (1994)
• The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)
• Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001)
• The Unknown Terrorist (2006)
• Wanting (May 2009)