Note: The first novel in this series, called Moonlight Downs in the US and Diamond Dove in the UK was WINNER of Australia’s Ned Kelly Award in 2007.
“You can’t see the change in something if you don’t know what it looked like in the first place, but if you stay out here long enough, you’ll understand. I’m only a beginner myself, but I’ve been round long enough to know that things interconnect—deaths and dreams, watercourses, tracks and plants. Everything.”—Emily Tempest to Police Superintendent.
Newly appointed Aboriginal Community Police Officer Emily Tempest has returned to her roots in Bluebush – in the Northern Territories of Australia – after more than ten years spent traveling the world. The daughter of Motor Jack, a white geologist/gold prospector and an aborigine mother, she grew up in her mother’s culture until she was a teenager and has always felt more comfortable there, despite the educational programs and travels which later took her all over the world. Having returned to live with “her” people when she is in her twenties, she continues to resent the intrusions of the “civilized” white world and the damage it has caused to the natural world venerated by the aborigines. Having won their claim to their ancestral lands (in author Adrian Hyland’s previous novel, Moonlight Downs), the community, Emily notes, has “taken the first tentative steps to independence: built a few rough houses put in a water supply, planted an orchard…and started a cattle project, [and] there was talk of a school, a store, a clinic.” Life seems to have improved somewhat from the previous novel, at least as far as physical comforts are concerned.
Hyland himself spent many years living and working with the indigenous people in the Northern Territories, and he vividly recreates aborigine family life, which is still nomadic and hand-to-mouth in many communities. The young people are easily attracted to alcohol and drugs, readily available in towns, more than they are to schools and to the traditional values of their elders, and the unemployment rate is stratospheric. In this second novel in the Emily Tempest series, little seems to have changed in the racial attitudes of the “whitefellers” toward the aborigines, with many police investigations, as Emily quickly sees, guided more by what investigators still expect than by what any evidence actually shows. A smart woman, as hard as the local rocks and geological strata that have attracted opportunistic miners from all over the world, Emily can also be as quixotic and mysterious as the spirits which she and her people believe move in and out of their lives, keeping the forces of nature in balance. “Say what you like about me and my mob,” she announces, “there’s one thing you can’t deny: we’re survivors. You can kick us and kill us and drown us in bible and booze, but you better get used to us because we’re not going away.”
Filled with atmosphere, local color, and nonstop action, the novel opens with a gruesome attack at Green Swamp Well, in which a drunk, elderly prospector is found with his hammer embedded in his throat. Another prospector, also drunk, found asleep near the body, is arrested. When Emily discovers that the dead man is Doc, an old friend of her father whom she has known since childhood, and that the supposed killer is Wireless, another old friend, she is determined to help. Doc believed that Martians, devils, the CIA, and missionaries were all out to get him, b
ut he was an educated former employee of the Geological Survey, and his shack is filled with books, files, and hand-drawn maps. He had been recreating mysterious geological formations in his backyard, and he and Wireless had been arguing about Zeno’s Paradox. Both have lived by their own rules, and Emily believes that Wireless, who remembers nothing about the killing, will die if he is shut up in prison.
As the mystery of who killed Doc, and why, develops, the author introduces characters from the past, and a variety of new characters who appear and reappear throughout, each trailing his/her own story behind. Danny Brambles, a fifteen-year-old aborigine, has problems with alcohol and drugs, and he cannot seem to stay out of trouble, but Emily believes that if he rejoins his 
family in the bush that he will develop the inner resources he needs to stay clean and become productive. Doc’s brother, Wishy Ozolins, his wife, and their three well-individualized daughters play a role and show their family dynamics, and when Wishy claims Doc’s files, he is perturbed that a major file on the Snowball Earth Theory is missing. Emily’s lover, Jojo, who has been doing research on the endangered bilby in the outback, reappears periodically, always offering support without infringing on Emily’s need for independence. Sgt. Bruce Cockburn, Emily’s boss, shows his ignorance of other cultures, expressing his feelings of superiority as he directs investigations or fails to investigate the important issues when Emily feels that “Something’s out of place. Something’s wrong.” His family, too, plays a role in the action. An assortment of other characters, many of them working on mines, expands the focus on the geology of the area and the conflicts between t
he educated and uneducated, the whites and the blacks, and the men and the women. As morally bankrupt entrepreneurs gravitate to the gold and mineral wealth of the area with their strike-it-rich schemes, it is those with strong ties to family and culture, it seems, who are most likely to survive.
Hyland does not sugar-coat any aspect of life in the outback. His characters are coarse, and the action and language are sometimes even coarser. Shootings, explosions, rock falls, attempted murders, a brutal rape, and chase scenes take place even as the author is raising questions about conservation, environmental threats, and the serious problems facing indigenous communities. Aspects of the supernatural, and characters’ occasional dream sequences, exist side-by-side with earthy scenes of brutality and ignorance. The novel wanders freely, introducing such a variety of different charac
ters, their interactions, and subplots that it is sometimes difficult to identify the main themes and main plot line. Even Emily herself is sometimes so unpredictable in her behavior that she is difficult to figure. Still, for those interested in this fascinating setting and its close-up on those aborigines who must exist in close proximity to a completely alien world and way of life, it offers new insights and understandings and does so with enthusiasm and respect.
ALSO by Hyland: MOONLIGHT DOWNS (known in the UK as DIAMOND DOVE).
Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.perthnow.com.au
Rock formations like these were studied by Doc. http://goaustralia.about.com
Doc gave Emily a fossilized trilobyte, which she eventually gave to Tiger Lily, his niece. http://www.etsy.com
Dingo Springs is the site of some of the action in the novel. http://www.pedal4prostate.com
The photo of aboriginal children by John Donegan accompanies a story about them here: http://www.theage.com.au
The endangered bilby, a rodent studied by Jojo, may be seen here: http://www.squidoo.com
Setting her novel at the end of the twentieth century, Penelope Lively begins Spiderweb (1998) by presenting a sociological picture of the west of England and the once-remote counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, which are now attracting new residents from “outside.” A letter from Richard Faraday to Stella Brentwood regarding a property in Kingston Florey in Somerset, inserted in the midst of this picture, describes a cottage for sale and its pluses and minuses, and indicates that Richard has been helping Stella find such a property to purchase. We know nothing about either of them except that Stella was best friend of Richard Faraday’s wife Nadine from their college days. Gradually, the reader learns more about Stella, a sixty-five-year-old, newly retired social anthropologist and teacher, who filters all the impressions one gains about the village and its people through her own experience. When she buys this cottage, she approaches her new village not as a new member of the community, but as an academic and specialist in social structures.
professionally. Excerpts from her diaries, including one from her stay in small village in Egypt in 1964, suggest her approach: “My many expensive years of education have left me quite unequipped for life in this mud village with two transistor radios, one moped, one petrol-driven engine and two hundred people, many of whom cannot write their names. What it has given me is the urge and the ability to cast a cold eye upon them and their way of life. Do I find this uncomfortable? Of course.” The parallels to the life about to unfold for her in Kingston Florey are obvious.
st Somerset would cheerfully bare its soul to her…She had only to get talking at a bus stop or supermarket check-out, share a table in a pub, stop to chat at a filling station. Her credentials were instantly apparent: agreeably spoken, no spring chicken, origins uncertain, but that’s what you expect these days.”
new of him in the past, even judging the elegant restaurant to which he takes her: “Food is more than meets the eye…it usually has ritual significance…[it says] the resources of civilization are available [here]. Mud and muck there may be, but immunity is available for those with discrimination.” She compares this man to the love of her life, a journalist she met in Malta many years ago, and the man in the Orkney Islands who begged her to marry him. Ultimately, she realizes that her life, like “this place” is a “web,”and its connections may also bind and destroy.
The author, in creating a gossipy and initially cheerful commentary on village life, makes us empathize with Stella, even as we are ready to throttle her, sympathize even as we recognize she is perhaps hopelessly obtuse. We see her actions with a kind of dark humor, even as we may feel guilty for feeling judgmental about her. The reader recognizes elements of foreshadowing given by the author and understands many of the social issues which underlie the behavior of the local people around her, but Stella, the anthropologist, is not privy to this information and has no way of ever learning it. Ironies, such as these, give the story a kind of resonance and universality which broaden the scope far beyond the limitations of Kingston Florey and offer commentary on what it takes to be a “successful” person. Stella, at sixty-five, has squandered her chance to experience a full life, at least by the standards of most of the rest of the world, and whether she is or can be truly happy is not clear. Whether or not she really cares is an even bigger question.
Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of “home” as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she lived through in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of “before the war was real.” Romantic images of her mother “wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp” overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Marianna herself often picked thyme with a young friend, visited ancient sites with her family, walked along the seashore in Beirut, and shopped in the souks. Summers were special, as the family vacationed in the countryside, where they harvested lavender, picked figs, and enjoyed the terraces that ran through fields filled with poppies, daisies, and heather.
Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (between 1975 and 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage which the war in Lebanon has created for this family. Herself an exile who arrived in the US from Lebanon at the age of eighteen, the author provides vivid images of Marianna, the speaker, trying to cope, first, with her older sister Alaine’s dramatic and emotional escapes from the war and then with her own traumas as both Alaine and Marianna lose their way psychologically, the very underpinnings of their lives destroyed. Neither parent seems to know what to do with their troubled daughters, hoping, apparently, that time and family love will effect cures. Their father, an American academic, is somewhat distant, and their ineffective though loving mother, part Armenian (her family having escaped the genocide in their own homeland) has always felt a bit different.
Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on 
William Kennedy’s latest novel in the Albany Cycle, his eighth, continues the story of several families from Albany, New York, during the heyday of its infamous, politically corrupt “machine.” Focusing on Daniel Quinn, a newspaper reporter who is the grandson of the Daniel Quinn who reported on the Civil War in Quinn’s Book, and son of the now-senile George, a “hail-fellow-well-met” charmer with connections to seemingly everyone in Albany, this novel begins in August, 1936, when Daniel is a child. Peering over the banister of the front staircase in Mayor Alex Fitzgibbon’s house, Daniel sits quietly watching as his father brings a piano (origins unknown) into the Mayor’s house. Cody Mason, a pianist specializing in Harlem “stride,” is about to put on a private show with the young Bing Crosby. Daniel Quinn is overcome by the passion of this music.
te. He is warned about the dangers to himself because of his associations with Renata, and he accepts the red and white “Chango beads” given to him by Narciso, an aged Santeria priest. He travels to Santiago and into the Cuban Sierra, and he observes the atrocities committed by Batista’s army. Throughout, Quinn believes himself to be following in the footsteps of his grandfather, also named Daniel, who was fascinated by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a Cuban planter who freed his slaves in 1868 and fought a ten year war against the Spanish in Cuba. He imagines himself writing a future novel about Castro, similar to the book which his grandfather wrote about Cespedes and the Mambi.
an old neighborhood, now completely changed, and tries to relive his memories; Tremont Van Ort, an alcoholic who finds himself sought by a Black Power activist, who wants him to kill the Mayor; and an assortment of prostitutes, drug bosses, and musicians. In this section, like the Cuba section, Quinn also sees himself writing a novel - this one about the race riots, and especially about Tremont. The final seventy-five pages unite the two sections and explain some of the long-lived questions about everything that happened in Cuba when Quinn visited in 1957.
Hannah Gonen is only thirty when she makes this observation about her husband Michael. A young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, she has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student. Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life—and Michael himself—to be tedious. Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.”
to defend itself and protect its integrity. As their family backgrounds unfold, the personalities of Hannah and Michael and their behavior within the marriage are seen in a wider context. Hannah, who yearns for excitement, draws on her rich store of childhood memories and often escapes into a dream world. Michael, hard-working and pragmatic, remains a geologist, firmly connected to the earth.
As the marriage and Hannah’s sanity appear to deteriorate, the author’s use of symbols gives depth and universality to the story. Hannah often imagines a glass dome over herself and her family, and wishes only that it remain transparent, not cloudy. She remembers the childhood games she played with Arab twins in her neighborhood, bossing them around, and she now fears they will wreak their vengeance on her. She imagines warships and a search for Moby Dick on the Nautilus. Even the changing seasons parallel Hannah’s state of mind, with much of her story taking place in the autumn.
nation. Beautifully realized, My Michael, which shows Hannah’s possessiveness and need for control even in the title, depicts an immature woman who does not know who she herself is when she joins her life to that of someone else. Whether she and Michael learn to move beyond themselves is for the reader to decide.