Setting his latest novel on the Oronsay, a passenger ship going between Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and London in 1954, Michael Ondaatje writes his most accessible, and, in many ways, most enjoyable novel ever. Having grown up in Ceylon, from which he himself was sent to England to be educated as a boy, the author certainly understands what it feels like to be a child on a ship for three weeks, like his main character here, but author Ondaatje says that all the characters in the book are fictional, including the main character. The novel has such a ring of truth and Ondaatje’s depiction of the characters is so true to the perceptions of an eleven-year-old traveling on his own, however, that it is difficult to remember that the boy in the book is imagined and not real. Since the boy grows up and becomes an author like Ondaatje, his adult conclusions as he looks back on the importance of these events and what they have meant in the grand scheme of his life become even more vivid.
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In one of the most exciting and intellectually stimulating novels of the year, author Julian Barnes tells a two-part story that reconstructs the lives of four young British secondary school students in the 1960s as they study literature and history and argue about philosophy in an effort to solve the riddles of their universe. Through narrator Tony Webster, one of these boys, the author describes their lives up to their early twenties, then leaves them to their fates until Part II begins, forty years later. Webster, now in his sixties, twice divorced and retired, suddenly receives a bequest which suggests hitherto unsuspected revelations about one of his school friends who died young. For forty years, his memories of these school friends and the experiences they shared have informed and affected his life and his philosophy, but now he discovers that the memories may all have been constructed on lies based on incomplete information. Ultimately, the novel resolves all the complex mysteries of the plot in unexpected ways, and the author’s philosophical musings on life, sex (eros), death (thanatos), and time, their ineradicable connections to our lives, and their more transient connections to our memories are given full play as Barnes also introduces questions of individual responsibility and one’s personal history. A brilliant, challenging, and ultimately important novel of time, order, and chaos and how we survive.
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Gerard Woodward has been one of England’s most iconoclastic literary authors, rejecting all the polite expectations of writing and society by creating novels that seem, on the surface, to be about real families experiencing real life but having a darker agenda. A poet with a fine eye, ear, and sense of pacing, Woodward uses these talents in unique ways to create dozens of scenes which surprise and shock and even repulse, all the while causing the reader to laugh uproariously, not from shock or embarrassment but from surprise and delight in his daring. The opening pages of this novel, which are alternately wickedly funny and darkly ironic, graphically illustrate these points. Mrs. Head, a proper London widow is preparing dinner for her daughter Tory who is living with her and working for the war effort in a gelatine factory. When a German bomb hits the butcher shop nearby, Mrs. Head explores. As she looks over the wreckage, she finds an absolutely perfect leg of pork. Quietly picking it up and wrapping it, for fear that someone will think she is looting the wreckage, she brings it home and roasts it for their first real dinner in ages, admiring the cracklings and the scent as it roasts. It is not until Tory returns home from work and asks, “Where’s Mr. Dando?” that the horror of what they are eating hits home.
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Winner of an extraordinary number of literary prizes in Tasmania, Australia, and England, including the London Observer’s Book of the Year Award, WANTING by Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan emphasizes, by its ambiguous title, two of the most contradictory characteristics of Queen Victoria’s reign—the “wanting,” or desire, to conquer other lands and bring “civilization” to them, and the “want,” or lack, of empathy and respect for the people and cultures which they deliberately destroy in the process. The same contradictory characteristics are also reflected in the personal relationships of the socially prominent men and women of the era, some of whom we meet here. As the action moves back and forth between Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania) and London and from 1839 through the 1840s and 1850s, Flanagan gives depth to the bleak picture of colonial life, creating an emotionally wrenching portrait of Mathinna, orphaned child of aborigine King Romeo, as she is wrested from her countrymen, exiled on Flinders Island, and brought into the home of the ambitious Lady Jane Franklin. Determined to prove that this savage can be civilized, Lady Jane forces the child to imitate a proper British young lady in her education, dress, and demeanor, allowing her no connections to her past but providing nothing of value in its place. Outstanding and memorable novel.
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Author Philip Hensher is nothing if not controversial, and a quick look at the ratings for his novels on Amazon in the UK will show the typical love-him-or-hate-him distribution of star ratings for his books. Though Hensher was named in 2003 as one of Granta’s Twenty Best British Novelists, and his previous novel, The Northern Clemency (2008) was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, many readers have never forgiven him for what may be one of the most infamously nasty book reviews ever written. Having never read a Hensher novel before, and having heard little about him, living as I do “across the pond,” I approached this novel with some sense of uncertainty, hoping that the brilliance of the author’s own work would nullify the opprobrium directed toward him by his resentful critics. I need not have worried. This book, though not without its excesses, is a significant and utterly compelling work of social criticism, a classic example of the best of the best of social satire. The disappearance of a young child on an errand shocks the community of Hanmouth, where the “elite” have never before had to deal with the expansion of the town limits to include people not “their kind,” with their unexpected problems like this one, and many resent the time and effort the town has expended to find China, a “council child.” Great dialogue, vivid description, well developed characterizations, and brilliant satire.
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