Explorers of the New Century begins with a race between Captain Johns, a British explorer, and Tostig, a Scandinavian, as each tries to become the first man to reach the AFP, or Agreed Furthest Point. Mills creates obvious parallels between this race and the 1911 race for the South Pole between Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who became the first to reach the Pole, and the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who, with his crew, died in the attempt to return to his base. From the outset, the novel is full of anticipation and excitement, as the rival crews, who have never met each other, prepare to head south with their mule caravans hauling their supplies and equipment. Johns, his ten-man crew, and twenty-three mules blaze a trail across the scree; Tostig with four men and ten mules, follows a dry river bed, a more difficult trail. By involving the reader in the initial adventure, Mills sets him up so that when the dramatic revelation is made of what is motivating the trip south, the impact is doubly strong.
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Mma Precious Ramotswe, warm-hearted proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Gaborone, Botswana, is drinking tea at an outdoor café when she witnesses the theft of a bracelet. In her haste to apprehend the female thief and return the bracelet to the poor vendor, she leaves her table without paying her bill. The waitress hurries after her, accuses her of intentionally neglecting her bill, and then offers to “forget” about it if she pays her an extortionate fee. Mortified, Mma Ramotswe hopes that no one else has seen the waitress berating her. When the woman at the next table, accompanied by her two children, smiles at her, Mma Ramotswe is relieved that she has not seen the incident. Then the woman comments, “Bad luck, Mma…They are too quick in this place. It is easier to run away at the hotels.”
Distressed by what she sees as the significant loss of some of Botswana’s traditional values, Mma, a “traditionally built” woman, believes ever more fervently in setting a good example and upholding these values in her own life. . Mma Ramotswe is revealed to have a very deep secret, something she has not shared even with Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni.
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Setting this monumental family saga in Gaomi, in northeast China, where he grew up, Mo Yan, a member of the People’s Liberation Army who studied writing at their art academy, presents a realistic, rather than glorified, picture of life in China. Vividly portraying political and historical events—most of them bloody—over the course of the twentieth century, he portrays family life in rural China from the Boxer Rebellion to the Communist Revolution, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao. Shangguan Lu’s early marriage and domestic life unfolds through flashbacks. Through the developing stories of the eight daughters, their marriages, and their careers, the history of China from 1939 to the 1990s unfolds. Mo Yan’s novel is big, and it is important, the first really thorough portrait of rural life in China during the major historical movements of the twentieth century. His style, while often exciting is also brutally realistic and graphic in its violence. Though the author includes legends and cultural traditions as part of his picture of family life, the Shangguan family comes alive primarily through minute details.
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Nazneen, a young bride married at sixteen to a 40-year-old man, is wrenched from the only life she has ever known in the countryside of Bangladesh and conveyed to England, where her new husband, Chanu, has a job. Taught from the day of her birth that “fighting against one’s Fate can weaken the blood,” or even be fatal, she accepts the miserably lonely existence fate has bestowed on her in a London council flat. Though there are others from Bangladesh living there, Chanu believes the other immigrants to be uneducated, illiterate, and uncultured, and he discourages any reaching out Nazneen might do to these people who are “below” them. Author Ali shows Nazneen’s world in all its earthy details. Ali’s depiction of a woman’s coming of age through the process of acculturation is striking in its level of detail. Decisions which many of us take for granted assume new meanings when they are made by Nazneen.
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Writing one of the must unusual and imaginative books I’ve read in a long time, Tasmania native Richard Flanagan presents a multi-leveled novel which is full of wry, sometimes hilarious, observations about people and history. At the same time, it is a scathing indictment of colonialism’s cruelties and its prison system, in particular. Almost schizophrenic in its approach, the novel jerks the reader back and forth from delighted amusement to horrified revulsion in a series of episodes that clearly parallel the unstable inner life of main character William Buelow Gould, who lives in “a world that demanded reality imitate fiction.” Sentenced to life imprisonment on an island off the coast of Tasmania, Gould cleverly plays the survival game, ingratiating himself with the authorities through his willingness to paint whatever they want–species of fish for the surgeon, fake Constable landscapes for the turnkey Pobjoy, murals for the Commandant’s great Mah-jong Hall, and backdrops for his railroad to nowhere.
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