Living in an ethnically and religiously mixed neighborhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Nihil Herath is one of about a dozen children – Tamil, Sinhalese, Burgher, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and Catholic – who take their cultural differences for granted. Nihil’s Sinhalese family is new to the neighborhood, but they fit in immediately with their neighbors, and under the leadership of Nihil’s mother, Savi Herath, they soon become the backbone of their little community. Using the Heraths and their four children – Suren (age 12), Rashmi (age 10), Nihil (age 9), and the energetic and irrepressible Devi (age 7) – as the linchpins of this saga of Sri Lanka, author Ru Freeman creates a lively neighborhood which represents virtually all the forces contesting for influence from 1979 – 1983, as the revolutionary Tamil Tigers decide to forego the legislative process and try to take over the country by force. Keeping the focus firmly on the children, who see and hear rumors of war, and the children’s fearful reactions to the increasingly dire news, Freeman creates a microcosm of the larger world and the devastation that is promised. Her characters, both the children and the adults who influence them, are lively and realistic, especially in their focus on the small, the personal, and the minutiae of everyday life as it begins to change.
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Helen, a young croupier on the night shift at a London casino, is traveling home during the wee hours in a taxi shared with two co-workers. When they stop at a traffic light, two men, obviously homeless and perhaps drunk, arrogantly step out from the curb just as the the light is about to change and walk slowly, at their own pace, across the street, seeming to dare the stopped cars to move when the light turns green. Wild-looking, scraggy, and rather frightening, one man makes Helen pay attention, though she hunches down in the back of the taxi to avoid being seen. “Brian, it was Brian,” she thinks in astonishment, “her brother Brian,” whom she has not seen for twelve years. Stunned, she silently begins to make excuses for “Brian’s” behavior at the street crossing, applying her memories of Brian’s mild personality to the behavior of the younger of the two strange men on the street. Establishing some of the novel’s main themes in this opening scene, which is more dramatic because of the violence which does not take place, author James Kelman follows Helen from that moment with “Brian” to her arrival at the home she shares with her six-year-old daughter and Mo, a South Asian man who represents “normality” to her. For the next twenty-four hours, Kelman keeps the reader inside Helen’s head as she tries to sort out her life and figure where she may be going.
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If a reader were to base his/her whole opinion of this latest book on the “bliss” Paul Theroux experiences when he sees the Ku/’hoansi bush people, one might conclude that this book is a genuflection to simpler cultures living the hunter-gatherer lives of their forbears, a rare reaction by Theroux who is notoriously hard to please. That felicitous conclusion would be completely wrong, however, even in relation to his experience among the lovely Ju/’hoansi bush people who so impress him in Namibia. When he makes this statement, Theroux has already traveled through South Africa, spending significant time in Capetown and discovering that while the special townships created for the poor have improved in the last ten years, that new, even more desperate, poor are arriving from rural areas and making new, and even more primitive settlements in slums on the outskirts. His travel plans up the west coast, from Capetown to Timbuktu in Mali, along the south and west coasts of Africa, allow him to seize opportunities as he travels, make notes as he goes, and post his observations in ways similar to his observations of the Horn of Africa and the East Coast ten years ago. His visit with the Ju/’hoansi on Namibia has been the first sign of hope that he has had in his trip. Angola, his next stop, proves to be the turning point. One of the richest countries in the world in terms of its oil production and revenues, all of which end up in the pockets of politicians and businessmen, Angola becomes the centerpiece of the book in terms of the corruption at the heart of African life. Ultimately, Theroux must decide whether it makes sense to continue into increasingly devastated West African cities.
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Israeli author A. B. Yehoshua creates a surprising novel of ideas which ranges widely, as it examines such issues as reality vs. the recreation of reality through art and film and myth; life, as opposed to the afterlife, and whether the afterlife is real or an imagined fantasy; the actualities of the past vs. memories of the past; the concept of guilt and whether one can atone; and the many aspects of love – love and death, love and hatred, love and jealousy – as it controls our actions (and even our politics). The story line itself is not complicated. Famous Israeli director Yair Moses has received an unexpected invitation to attend a retrospective of his films to be held in Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. He arrives with Ruth, an aging actress whom he regards more as a character in his films than as a real person. The films to be shown are all his earliest films, each made with the help of a brilliant screenwriter, Shaul Trigano, one of his students. The novel is rich in detail, ideas, and symbolism, and the author’s narrative is both energizing to the reader and exciting in its possibilities. Like so many other novels of ideas, however, it subordinates characters and their lives to the overall structure in order to clarify and illustrate philosophical and thematic ideas. As a result, the characters become vehicles, rather than living, breathing “humans” as they move in and out of their films and their “reality,” which is, of course, reality as depicted in an imaginative and unusual piece of fiction.
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For more than ten years, Harry Turtledove’s Ruled Britannia has been my personal Gold Standard for novels of alternative history. Having just read (and about to review) a new alternative history, I went back to this one to see how it stood the test of time. I liked it even better. Starting with the premise that England did NOT defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, during the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, author Harry Turtledove puts Elizabeth in the Tower of London and makes King Philip II the official ruler of Britain, with his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia representing him on the formerly-British throne. All the leading writers, philosophers, and artists so famous to students of Elizabethan England, when it WAS Elizabethan, are still hard at work in London, but now, their patron is Spanish, not British. Writing in the language and style of the period, author Harry Turtledove casually (and very skillfully) incorporates innumerable Shakespearean quotations into his text, often with humorous intent, and Shakespeare lovers will be kept busy playing the obvious game of identifying the plays in which these quotations appear. Puns, the off-color wordplay which so often provides comic relief in Shakespeare’s plays, dialogue in which characters talk at cross-purposes, and a character who constantly misuses “big words,” are a delight for language-lovers.
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