Using Bobby Mahon as the central character around whom most of the action revolves, Irish debut novelist Donal Ryan writes a dramatic and affecting experimental novel in which the story and its symbols, such as the “spinning heart” on his father’s gate, evolve through the points of view of twenty-one different characters, all of them living in the same town, knowing the same people, and contributing to the network of rumors and innuendos as members of “the Teapot Taliban,” as one character calls them. The father of Pokey Burke describes his two sons – Eamonn, his first son, whom he loves more than his second son, Pokey, whom he has spoiled over the years to make up for his lack of affection for him. Pokey’s father, Joseph, now blames himself, in part, for the economic problems now affecting so many families in the village. The village’s young men, in particular, have especially serious problems during the recession, since they often feel that their efforts have been betrayed and their manhood has been compromised. The breezy, casual, and sometimes highly confidential stories the characters share with the reader range from darkly humorous to frightening, reflecting the uncertainties of life itself and the often dominating role played by the church and by the characters’ unresolved issues regarding sex.
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With a casual and natural curiosity about the mysteries of life, a young Tuvan boy from Mongolia muses about dreams in a quotation from The Blue Sky, clearly illustrating the aspects of this autobiographical novel which make it come alive so vibrantly for those of us who know nothing about his culture and are learning about it for the first time. Set in the 1940s, the novel recreates a time in which the old ways are the only ways for the Tuvan people, an isolated group of nomadic people living in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia on the Russian border. Using the point of view of Dshurukuwaa, the young Tuvan boy, the author tells a coming-of-age story which is clearly his personal story, as he observes the growth of the outside influences which are just beginning to affect his people. The boy is very much a little boy, always acting “in the minute,” reacting to daily events with all the passion of a child, and the author, Galsan Tschinag, is able to communicate the boy’s feelings to a foreign audience in ways which make the Tuvan culture both understandable and unforgettable.
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The most detailed and complex novel that author Abdulrazak Gurnah (from Zanzibar) has written on the subjects of immigration and displacement so far, The Last Gift is a multigenerational novel which opens with Abbas, a sixty-three-year-old man whose origins are, at first, unknown, returning to his residence in England after work. A conscientious, driven man, he is also very private, keeping to himself and not sharing his past even with his family. He becomes ill on the way home one extremely cold day, so ill that this proud man “wishes for someone to pick him up and carry him home.” Collapsing, he is taken to the hospital, where, worried, in pain, and thinking he might die, he realizes “that he had left things for too long, as he had known for so many years. There was so much he should have said, but he had allowed the silence to set until it became immovable.” As Abbas tries to gain the courage to reveal his thirty-year-old secrets to his family, the points of view shift among Abbas, his wife Maryam, his daughter Hanna, and his son Jamal, all of whom are trying to discover who they are in the British culture which they find themselves and into which they do not seem to fit. Gurnah stresses the themes of alienation, displacement, escape, guilt, hope, and eventually resolution among the family.
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Setting her novel in 1939, in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, author Rebecca C. Pawel carefully recreates many of the elements which led to that civil war and which continued in the partisan turmoil that continued long after that. Sometimes described by Republicans as “a war between tyranny and democracy,” and by Nationalists as “a war between Communists, anarchists, and ‘Red Hordes’ against civilization,” the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 1939) attracted extremists on both sides, and those sides were not always clearly delineated. Because the action, the motivations, and the shifting allegiances are complex here, the author wisely keeps her narrative style simple, moving the action along on the strength of her characters, who are memorable despite the fact that they are somewhat superficial examples of the various factions at work in Madrid at the time. Sgt. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon, a mid-level gardia, is widely honored by his fellow officers, having been involved earlier in the Siege of Alcazar in Toledo. Tejada often behaves in ways which will be repugnant to readers, but he is also depicted in the confused context of the period. He is brought to the scene of a murdered guardia who was his best friend – Francisco Lopez Perez, known as Paco, a man with whom he had lost touch during the war and whose body he had to identify on the street. Realistic and filled with the kind of details that only someone who has studied all aspects of this war would know, the novel is both a good mystery and an especially readable depiction of an otherwise confusing time of history.
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The Industry of Souls, written in 1998, opens with a thoughtful and loving tribute to the human spirit: “It is the industry of the soul, to love and to hate; to seek after the beautiful and to recognise the ugly; to honour friends and wreak vengeance upon enemies; yet, above all, it is the work of the soul to prove it can be steadfast in these matters.” Here, and throughout the novel, author Martin Booth focuses on ideas of industry and work, but as he expresses his ideas, he often uses deliberate, poetic parallels to Biblical verses: “[There is] a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace [Ecclesiastes]…” Alexander Bayliss, known as Shurik, is celebrating his eightieth birthday, as the novel opens. Walking around Myshkino, the Russian village where he lives, he visits with residents and recalls his life as a prisoner in the mines of Siberia, contrasting it with his life in Myshkino since then. At eighty, he is a man completely at peace with his world, celebrating the love, endurance, and forgiveness which have made his life not only bearable, but ultimately, full of joy. Through flashbacks and shifting time frames, he shows how he, a British businessman, came to be a prisoner in the Soviet Union, a worker in a Siberian coal mine, and how he coped for twenty years.
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