In this fascinating and beautifully developed novel, Victor Maskell takes us step by (often debauched) step through what passes for his life. He is seventy-two and has just been unmasked as a spy. “Public disgrace is a strange thing,” he muses as he begins a journal. Maskell, a thinly disguised substitute for Anthony Blunt, is one of several by now well-known young British intellectuals who became spies for the Soviet Union during the thirties and forties, providing them with secret information during World War II and into the 1950s. Booker Prize-winning author John Banville vividly recreates not only the political and social turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s but also the intellectual experimentation and the search for values spawned by these turbulent times. Banville sweeps away the fustiness of previous journalistic accounts of the Cambridge spies and creates flawed, breathing humans in a vibrantly decadent atmosphere.
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If ever there were someone who had a right to be angry and bitter about the fate of Iraq and its intellectuals, Mahmoud Saeed has that right. Arrested and jailed for a year and a day in 1963, when he was twenty-four, and again five more times after that, through 1980, he was never again to see any of his books published in Iraq, and two of his manuscripts were burned by authorities. Yet even Saddam City (released in the US in 2006), about a similar young man unjustly imprisoned and tortured, is a novel filled with humanity and hope, despite the author’s own traumas. Even stronger feelings are evoked in this novel. Obviously autobiographical, at least in part, Saeed examines the various kinds of love which a young boy from Mosul discovers as a youth, sweeping the reader along on a tide of empathy and making him/her feel at one with the main character. Providing wonderful insights into the lives and cultures of the main characters – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish – many of whom are friends of the young boy and his family, The World Through the Eyes of Angels is aimed directly at the heart without a shred of easy sentimentality.
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Mixing the supernatural with dramatic and horrifying realism, this generational novel contains all the ingredients necessary to become a huge popular success. Spanning the years between the 1920s and the present, author Bernice L. McFadden focuses on three generations of the Hilson family as they interact with each other, with others in their segregated neighborhood, and with the white world beyond. Using the town of Money, Mississippi, itself as the “narrator,” the author creates lively scenes involving Reverend August Hilson, new pastor of the only black church, and his family, who have escaped the violence of Tulsa to settle in this small town near Greenwood, Mississippi, along the Tallahatchee River. Moving from the 1920s to the present, with considerable time spent on the torture-murder of Emmett Till in 1955, Bernice McFadden focuses on the everyday lives of all her characters, both black and white, as they navigate the thorny paths of racial prejudice within a small community.
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In lush and often lyrical language, author Gail Jones creates a consummately literary novel which takes place on Circular Quay, surrounding the Opera House, during one hot summer day in Sydney. Four major characters are dealing with personal losses and memories of the past which make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to participate fully in the present. Deaths haunt them all, and as they gravitate individually towards the Opera House, they relive events from their lives. Time is relative as the novel moves forward and then swirls backward during each character’s reminiscences. Only Ellie and James know each other. The other characters lead independent lives, and any connection among them will be just a glancing blow, a random event – one of the minor acts of fate. A mysterious fifth character, who materializes without warning in the conclusion, serves as a catalyst to bring the novel to its thematic conclusion. Literary and artistic references pepper the narrative, adding depth to the themes of love, loss, and death. Sometimes the prose is weighed down by the elaborate imagery, but the novel still offers much of interest to those who enjoy highly literary novels, and the thematic focus and the setting are unusual and intriguing.
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Posted in 9-2012 Reviews, Australia, Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, Historical, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Social and Political Issues on Feb 26th, 2012
If there is such a genre as “Australian Gothic,” this novel would be one of its best-written examples. The sights, sounds, and smells of the bush, filled with storms, heat, dust, and exotic birds and animals, vibrate with life—and death—both physical and spiritual. Set in remote and sparsely populated Western Australia in the early 1940s, this 2008 novel recreates the life of Perdita Keene, a ten-year-old child not wanted by her British expatriate parents, who had hoped she would die at birth. Perdita, whose childhood is formed by the aborigine women who nursed her in infancy, develops a strong friendship with Mary, an aborigine girl five years older, and Billy, the deaf-mute son of the Trevors, white people who run a local cattle station. All three children are outcasts for various reasons, and their bonds with each other are total and life-affirming. The murder of Perdita’s father, described in the opening pages, is at the core of the novel, and the circumstances surrounding the case are not clear. All three children witness the crime, but Perdita, the narrator for most of the novel, is so traumatized that she cannot remember details. Lyrical, sensual, and full of passion, Sorry is a novel that is dramatically intense, full of emotion.
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