SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

“The crime at the House of Swaps was by no means the only one of its kind.  Since this book’s thesis – that the history of a city is the history of its crimes – cannot be proven merely by presenting one case study, I have decided to mix into the larger narrative certain reports of crimes that, in a sense, foreshadow it.”–the Author.

The metafictional author of this statement has been a member of the “Unesco Standing Committee on The Theory and Art of the Police Novel, headquartered in London and financed by Scotland Yard.”  As a member of the Fourth Panel, his task has been to study real-life “perfect crimes” from the great world capitals and to compare their true nature to their literary counterparts.  While studying the crimes of Rio de Janeiro, he notes that one “perfect crime” stands out from the rest, not because of the difficulty in uncovering evidence but because of the “logical impossibility of accepting the solution.”  His work with the Committee runs into difficulties, however.  A spontaneously emotional person, he finds that his British counterparts on the Committee are “incapable of grasping notions of chance or disorder; they were ponderous, restrained, punctual.”   When he loses his job, he decides to keep his files, which he uses to write this novel.  Although his story can be read as a detective novel, “it can also be read as an adventure story, a ‘treasure hunt’ of sorts, filled with duels, ambition, and revenge.  It is thus closer to Dumas than to Melville or Conrad.”

The novel’s “perfect crime” takes place on June 13, 1913, a Friday, at the House of Swaps, once the estate of the Marquise of Santos but currently owned by Polish Doctor Miroslav Zmuda, who uses it as a gynecological medical clinic during the day.  At night, however, it becomes the city’s most exceptional brothel, a place where men rent the services of prostitutes dressed as nurses and where women, too, may rent the services of men.  In fact, it is also open to couples who can meet there secretly without their spouses knowing about their liaisons, thanks to the back door and a rumored secret tunnel from the premises to the palace which belonged to Emperor Pedro I in the early nineteenth century.  On June 13, however, a murder takes place at the brothel.  The personal Secretary to the President has been a client of Fortunata, but she leaves shortly afterward, and a couple of hours pass before the House realizes that the Secretary’s nap has lasted longer than normal.

Back entrance to the former home of Marquise of Santos, depicted as a clinic and brothel in this novel, now the Museum of the First Empire. Photo by RNLatvian

When they open the door, they discover the Secretary gagged, with his wrists and ankles tied to the bedposts, whip lashes on his body, and his neck bearing the marks of deep thumb prints.  Nothing has been stolen from him.  Forensics specialist Sebastiao Baeta is chosen to investigate.  Baeta, as a client of the House and as the person in charge of the new Civil Police Museum, already knows all the people he needs to contact and understands the need for discretion in his investigations.  He soon discovers Fortunata’s gold earrings in the hands of an old man named Rufino, reputed to be a sorcerer, who claims they were payment to him by Aniceto Conceicao, the twin brother of Fortunata.

The Empire-style Police Station, opened during the time of this novel, now the Civil Police Museum

Almost immediately after these introductory scenes, the author begins his promised digressions into the city’s past history, which he presents out of chronological order, with stories ranging from the sixteenth century to the present and all eras in between – “the concept of city is independent of the concept of time.”  In due course, he discusses the secret tunnels beneath two of the oldest religious orders in Rio, the Benedictines and the Jesuits, who are thought to have used them to transport fabulous treasure to the Calabouco River and then to the Atlantic before these priests were expelled from the city.  That then brings up the subject of treasure, which leads to additional stories of pirates, which leads to stories of witches, and then to grave-robbing, as Beata learns that a mass grave in the English Cemetery has been vandalized and bodies dug up.

Author Lima Barreto, an occultist who wrote short stories based on cases he had studied, and a source of information for this novel.

The desecration of the cemetery stimulates a discussion of the Tupi in the sixteenth century and of cannibal spirits.  Rio itself, the author tells us, “arose from a desecrated cemetery,” and the trading in corpses for medical research continued for more than a century, during which “casumbis” (zombies) were resurrected to become their creators’ slaves.  And that brings up the subject of slavery and the arrival of an Ashanti prince from the Ivory Coast who wanted to expand the slave trade and who brought great treasure with him to ensure this.

Back and forth the narrative rambles, adding small bits to the story of the murder and much more information about the history of the city.  Eventually, the author begins tackling sociological issues, discussing adultery as a cultural characteristic, and bringing up the subject of the “capoeiras,” practitioners of martial arts brought to the city by African slaves and Creoles, who believed that no woman could be guilty of adultery, that the fault was all with the men.  And this reminds the author of duels between men for the favor of females.  Eventually, Aniceto, Fortunata’s brother, brazenly challenges Baeta, the policeman, to vie for the hand of one of the women he “owns,” giving him five years to succeed.  And that turns the subject to sexuality and its practices, what works and what does not.

The Imperial Palace, which supposedly had a tunnel connecting it with Zmuda's clinic and brothel

The novel has won several prizes in the author’s native Brazil, and part of the book’s popularity there undoubtedly relates to the fact that natives of Rio would be familiar with many, if not most, of the names, places, and cultural entities being described during all the historical diversions.  For those of us who are not, however, the interruptions in the main story become frustrating, especially since the historical information, all new, is given in random chronological order, “independent of the concept of time.”  The thin characters show little empathy with each other, showing instead feelings of anger, jealousy, and fear of humiliation, and the book appears to have been written for a super-macho male audience.  There are few female characters, and those who do appear are prostitutes and married women looking for pleasure, there being little distinction between them – all are treated as objects.  Although the setting is a hundred years ago, when women were much less liberated than they are now, the book is written in the present and presumably hopes to appeal to a female audience, too.  That may be a hard sell here.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from  http://wp.clicrbs.com.br

The photo of the back entrance to the former home of the Marquise of Santos, which appears here as Dr. Zmuda’s clinic and brothel, is by RNLatvian on http://www.panoramio.com/ The book contains a floor plan of the building, and the curved, oval room shown here is clearly visible in the floor plan.

The Police Headquarters and Civil Museum, new during the time of this novel, may be found here:
http://www.americapictures.net/

A Nova California by Lima Barreto, a collection of short observations and stories by an occultist from Rio, serves as a resource for this novel and is from http://www.goodreads.com/

The Imperial Palace, now a museum, appears on http://gobrazil.about.com/ Pedro I took his oath of office on the front balcony, a picture that is recorded here: http://en.wikipedia.org/

ARC: Europa

“All the children of young Argentines in the 1970s were going to have to solve our parents’ pasts, like detectives, and what we would find out was going to seem like a mystery novel we wished we’d never bought.  But I also realized…that [if I told] my father’s story as a mystery…[it] would betray his intentions and his struggles…[and] merely confirm the existence of a genre…All of his efforts [had challenged] those very social conventions and their pale reflection in literature.”

In this affecting and unusual metafictional novel, Patricio Pron describes his sudden return from Germany to Argentina in 2008 for the first time in eight years.  Pron had left his home in El Trebol, about two hundred miles northwest of Buenos Aires, while still in his twenties, to pursue a literary career.  He had not believed that a writer from a poor country and a poor neighborhood could become part of the imaginary republic of letters to which he aspired unless he moved to New York, London, or Berlin.  Now his father is ill, and though the family has not been close, he immediately decides to return home.  What follows is a dramatic tale of fathers and sons, an examination of time and memory, a study of people who believe that a life without principles is not worth living, and a memory of good people who have been so traumatized by events from another time that they have little common ground for communication with other generations.

The speaker himself grew up during the 1970s, during which the military overthrew Juan Peron and installed a military dictatorship, but as a child, he was naïve to the horrors of their rule as they “cleansed” the country of all democratic and socialist elements.  His parents, however, were both journalists and members of a Peronist group opposed to the military, and in their efforts to protect their children, they existed on a different plane, unable to communicate fully with the children for fear of endangering them, while, at the same time, watching as some of their friends were “disappeared” or killed.  The speaker has always blamed the family’s lack of communication, in part, on his father’s atrocious memory, which he regarded as a “trick my father had come up with, his way of avoiding things that for some reason were too much for him, among which were me and my brother and sister.”  Now he also blames his father’s political past “that I thought I knew nothing about and that maybe I didn’t want to know about.”  In one poignant scene, the speaker remembers a photograph of his father and himself in the mountains, and “I am looking at him, and in my gaze there is a very specific plea: that he notice me…because I’m just a boy, about to collapse at any moment…My father doesn’t look at me.”

Click on map to enlarge.

Dividing the novel into four parts, the author describes his childhood memories in Part I (at least those that he remembers after eight years of heavy drug use in Europe); the disappearance and murder, just two months before his arrival, of a man who worked at a local club and knew his father, in Part II; his decision to examine his father’s personal files and to follow up on his father’s investigation into this man’s death and the long history which preceded it, in Part III; and, finally, his discovery of who his father really is and how he is representative of other fathers whose actions and spirit should not be forgotten:  “Their ghost – not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself – was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm,” and he intends to be the one who records it for posterity.

El Trebol, where the Pron family lives, 200 miles from Buenos Aires. Photo by Defensores.

The novel which results from all the searches and discoveries by the speaker is moving and even tender.  Pron’s honesty about his own history and his own problems suggests that despite a childhood spent without the loving guidance of the father he yearned for that he would ultimately make his own courageous choices and would connect with his family in new ways.  Combining his relentless honesty with images which convey feelings in addition to pictures, he draws in the reader on several levels at once:  In the hospital “My father was lying beneath a tangle of cords like a fly in a spiderweb.  His hand was cold and my face was hot, but I noticed that only when I brought my hand to my face to wipe it.”  He makes the reader see the little town of El Trebol, between Rosario (referred to here as “*osario”) and Cordoba, and feel the friendships which are possible between people like his parents and their comrades in their Peronist resistance group.  His efforts to understand his father through the files he finds in his father’s study allow him to share his father’s thinking directly, even as his father blames himself for the loss of some of his comrades as they consistently challenged the military.

Though the novel takes place during a period of horrific abuses by a powerful and aggressive military, Pron’s setting in El Trebol, where the streets “were like the streets in the small American Midwestern towns from the 1950s movies” makes the setting feel familiar and the abuses more horrific because of that.  His father’s careful research into the fate of Alicia Burdisso in the 1970s and the discovery that she is the sister of the murder victim from 2008 allow the speaker to connect the present with his father’s past in new ways.  His father, a journalist, always intended to write a book, just as the speaker is doing throughout this record of his return home, and as he works his way through his father’s files, he wonders if his father,  is deliberately using his files to create “yet another puzzle in which the pieces were movable and had to be assembled on a larger tabletop that was memory and in fact the world.”

Peronist Youth demonstrating in the 1970s.

Always aware that telling the story of his father’s past risks confusing his father’s individual experience with the collective past of the Resistance organization to which he belonged, the author carefully shows the turmoil which occurs after the death of Peron.  His parents’ organization, unlike most of the other Resistance groups, disbanded, instead of combining with some of the many other groups with different goals that continued to exist, and it is this which may have allowed the members, like his father, to fade into the community without being pursued further.  Pron recognizes, however, that “Something had happened to my parents and to me and to my siblings that prevented me from ever knowing what a home was or even what a family was, though everything seemed to indicate I had both.”  And he recognizes, too, that his father “would have liked not to be one of the few who survived [the military purges], because a survivor is the loneliest person in the world.”

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from  http://blog.eternacadencia.com.ar

The map of Argentina is found on http://www.planetware.com Click on the map to enlarge it.

El Trebol, about 200 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, is home to the Pron family, located between Rosario and Cordoba.  This photo appears on http://www.panoramio.com/ and was taken by Defensores.

A poster of the Disappeared is from http://www.episcopalcafe.com/

A Peronist group demonstrates in the 1970s.  This group is similar to the one to which the Pron parents belonged, though the Prons’ group disbanded after the death of Peron. http://www.taringa.net/

Note: This novel was WINNER of Australia’s most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin Award for 2005;  WINNER of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific;  and WINNER of the Courier Mail Book of the Year for 2005.

“This [land] is alive in its own right.  It’s growing and changing all the time.  It breathes…It even talks, to the right person.  The truth is, land has to belong to someone to really come alive.  It needs a human being to hear it and see it and to understand everything about it—where it came from, where it’s going.”

Set on the plains of Queensland, Australia, this award-winning novel defies genre.  On one level it tells of the long, epic struggle of white farmers to tame a land which has a life of its own—and which sometimes costs farmers their own lives.  On another, it is an historical record of the genocide of the native aborigine population by colonizers who do not recognize or care about the aborigines’ centuries-long relationship with the land or any claims they might have to it.  On still other levels, it is a mystery story, full of murder and deceit, and a Gothic study of a man who lets his obsession with a particular piece of land and a particular, now-decaying mansion control every aspect of his life.  And it is also the coming-of-age story of a young boy who may one day represent a fresh, new spirit—one of respect for the earth, its history, and all the people who have walked it.

Author Andrew McGahan, photo by Roger Cummins

The young boy is William, an eight-year-old when the novel opens in 1992.  As he looks out the window of his family’s small farm, he sees what he believes is a nuclear explosion, soon learning that it is an explosion and fire in his family’s wheat field which has killed his father.  He and his mother, with no resources, accept an invitation to move to Kuran Station, a remote area west of Brisbane, where his great-uncle John McIvor owns a huge farm.  William and his mother, upon their arrival, discover that the farm’s once-grand manse is now a decrepit, falling-down ruin.  John McIvor lives alone there with a disagreeable, if not evil, housekeeper.  He has alienated his entire family, and he is now going to set up tests to see if William might be a suitable heir to his property–If William can prove that his love and appreciation for the land are equal to that of John McIvor.

Click on map to enlarge

William’s story alternates with that of John McIvor as a young man in the late 1920s.  John’s father, Daniel, “a hard man,” was manager for many years of the Kuran Station farm, then owned by the White family (whose name is obviously symbolic).  The McIvors’ efforts on behalf of the farm, even including the “resettlement” of the aboriginal population, have led both Daniel and John to feel akin to owners themselves.  When the Depression hits, however, Daniel is fired, and the family is banished from Kuran Station.  John, bereft, regards his banishment as “an amputation,” and he vows that someday he will become the owner of the Kuran Station land.  John McIvor, an old man when William first meets him, has eventually achieved that goal, and he is now determined to leave a legacy.  “You have to leave someone behind who remembers,” he says, and William is the only person who might be suitable.

Aboriginal sunset dance

As the novel develops, it becomes a microcosm of Australia’s history of land ownership.  The national government is proposing a Native Title Act, which would provide access to ancestral lands for the remaining aboriginal population, if they can prove their connections to it.  John McIvor, in turn, forms the conservative Australian Independence League to oppose this act, believing it to be an illegal repossession of land the farmers have made their own.  He arranges for William to remain at home and not go to school, telling him, instead, to explore, get to know the land, feel its spirit, and understand its soul.  In various episodes, William finds sacred places and sees visions—of a man on fire, an axe murder, a long-dead explorer, and the mythical bunyip, and he hears the rustling of aborigines from the past when the wind blows across the plains.

The mythical Bunyip, which young William sees while alone. (Posted in memory of Stephen A. Haines, long-time Amazon reviewer and friend, who was known to all as The Bunyip.)

On every level, the novel is a Gothic page-turner, filled with energy and excitement.  The mysterious uncle living in a decrepit mansion with padlocked rooms, an evil housekeeper, a mysterious doctor, promises of inheritance, and the quest for knowledge all tie this novel to the Gothic tradition of the past.  But the novel is also a bit frustrating.  Several main characters are shown largely in terms of the obsessions which grip them, and this makes them less than sympathetic and often unlikable for the reader.  The extended explanation of Native Title legislation, while fascinating for its attempts to right some of the wrongs done to the aborigines, sometimes bogs down the narrative in legalistic details, and the descriptions of the land, gorgeous at the beginning of the novel, become heavy (and sometimes turn into “purple prose”), especially when William, seriously ill, gets lost on the plains.

Recent ruling on aboriginal land rights, article from June, 2012. Double click to read

Released in the US in January, 2007, this novel attempts to do it all, and it succeeds on many levels.  Those who become involved in the story of William (and I was one) may become so caught up in the excitement of his story that they will hardly care about the areas in which the novel may be less successful.  Quick-paced and filled with new information for non-Australian readers, this novel is readable, entertaining, and informative.

NOTE:  ANOTHER NOVEL which uses the issue of aboriginal land rights as the main conflict of the novel is:  MOONLIGHT DOWNS (entitled DIAMOND DOVE in Australia) by Adrian Hyland, WINNER of the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction in 2007.  Kim Scott’s novel THAT DEADMAN DANCE,  the WINNER of the Miles Franklin Award for 2011, provides a broader, more historical study of how the whites became the dominant culture in Australia, starting in the early 1800s.

Photos, in order: The author’s photo, by Rodger Cummins, appears on http://www.smh.com.au/

The map of Australia is from Http://Www.Freeworldmaps.Net/Australia/ Click on the link (or on the map above) to get an enlargement.

The aboriginal dance photo may be found on http://travel.nationalgeographic.com

William sees the mythical Bunyip while alone on the plains.  The Australian stamp appears on http://mywetdesert.blogspot.com It is posted here in memory of Stephen A. Haines, an Amazon reviewer for many years and long-time friend, who was known to all as The Bunyip.

The recent ruling regarding aboriginal land rights is discussed here: http://rightnow.org.au/

A Reading Group Guide is available here:  http://www.allenandunwin.com/_

“The Internet’s a godsend to you…it’s where you feel most comfortable. There, you’re able to convince yourself you’re connected to the world, when in fact you’re protected from it, isolated, alone and safe.”–A friend, speaking to Jenny Rowan, on the job.

James Sallis is a never-ending source of surprise as a novelist. Though his minimalist prose style does not change – concise, compressed, and incisive – and his subject matter always focuses on the darkest aspects of life, his approach to his subjects varies widely. His early novels, like the John Turner trilogy, which have been combined under the single title of What You Have Left, verge on Southern Gothic. Set in Tennessee, the novels are filled with local color, but those colors are very dark, as life deals unexpected horrors indiscriminately to Turner, a damaged policeman, over the course of several years. Drive, which became a successful film, and Driven, its sequel, move the setting to Phoenix for two novels so darkly violent that they terrify with their bloody intensity.   The Killer is Dying, my favorite of Sallis’s novels, also set in Phoenix, is different from the others in that all three of Sallis’s main characters, while living difficult lives at the mercy of grim outside forces, also show a resilience of spirit and the ability to deal with their situations.  Sallis makes us care about them because of that, and even a hired killer inspires a little sympathy.  “Strength was not about overcoming things. Strength was about accepting them,” Sallis says in that novel,  a dark commentary on human nature which nevertheless allows for some hope.

In this new novella, Others of My Kind, Sallis shows a broader development of this theme, and more hope. Strength is important, and accepting what comes is necessary, but it is also essential to recognize “the importance of letting people get on with their lives…It’s only when others turn up hell-bent on change – family, peers, people with religious, social, or political agendas – that it all goes to shit. We’re adaptable creatures. We make do. We wear the shirts we have.” It is that broader consideration of society as a whole, our roles in it, and our recognition that even the most damaged people have the power not only to accept their pasts but to move beyond them – and even, perhaps, to make lives easier for other people who have suffered – that makes this novella different from Sallis’s previous work. Life for survivors of horrors, like Jenny Rowan and Cheryl here, may never be warm and cozy in Sallis’s world, but, he observes, it is possible for them eventually to come to terms with the past, to grow beyond the effects of the horrors which have dominated their inner lives, to think about a future, and maybe, with luck, begin to see signs of hope, if not happiness.

While Jenny is held prisoner in the box, her captor gives her the classic 8-Ball toy. This one says “Outlook Not So Good.”

Using the point of view of a female victim for the first time, and setting the story in a chaotic near future, Sallis introduces Jenny Rowan’s back story (all of which happened before the novel opens).  Jenny now uses an assumed name, chosen after she was held prisoner from the age of seven to the age of nine, confined to a wooden box under the bed of her kidnapper, who viciously assaulted her sexually for two years. When she eventually managed to escape, she hid in the Westwood Mall for two years, scrounging for food and discarded clothing, until she was discovered by social services and assigned to a juvenile facility until her sixteenth birthday. Aid from an elderly woman after she was released led to a job, and she also went on to school and received a degree. Throughout, she recognizes the help she has received from good people who allow her to make her own decisions, and eventually she finds the perfect job, working for a TV station where she spends all day alone in a dark office finding snippets of stories on the internet and then combining them into features for the evening news. It is in this job that Jenny is working when the novella opens, and she quickly becomes real for the reader, who begins to care deeply about her future.

Jenny found plenty of places to hide and find food during her two years living in a mall.  Photo by Peter Kaminski

Sallis seizes life here and twists it way beyond all norms, establishing easily identifiable themes about a victim’s emotional survival and strength, her tenuous steps into society, her need to progress at her own pace, and eventually her ability to reach out and help “others of [her] kind.” The focus is metaphorical, even allegorical, and the book is less realistic, more symbolic, than we are accustomed to with Sallis: After two years of captivity, begun when she was seven, for example, Jenny has somehow forgotten her name, address, the names of her parents, where she went to school, and everything else from her early childhood, the reasons for which are never explained, though her torture took place long after those formative, usually permanent, memories. She succeeds in keeping herself hidden for two years while living in the Westwood Mall without ever being caught by security or reaching out. She catches up on her schooling in the juvenile facility so successfully that she earns an Associate’s Degree while working full-time over the next few years. When the novella’s real action starts, Jenny begins slowly to connect with other people, one of whom is a major political figure during a time of social turmoil, that friendship further emphasizing the symbolism as it relates to well-meaning people who work for change through political, social, and religious agendas.

Several people who supposedly don’t know Jenny’s past have somehow learned about it but say nothing to her, a device which advances the plot and allows them to help her secretly. Some of these real-life helpers become the equivalent of angels, while those who deliberately hurt her appear as monsters from some cruel netherworld. “At some point,” Jenny observes, “we realize that [change is] not going to ‘just happen,’ that we’re going to have to make the decision to become human and put some effort into it…We work at making a self for most of a lifetime, only to find that the self we’ve created is inseparable from the struggle.” As she lives each day, she continues to struggle, resisting closeness for fear of also losing control.

A baby being nursed by squatters who live beside Jenny resembles a “limp doll baby.”

Eventually, Jenny wants to conclude her story, but she has difficulty doing so. Even she recognizes that her unlikely relationship with a powerful political person is an element about which others might say, “Wow. And hand me a tissue.” But she also observes that “America is as much idea as actuality…the state with its grand ideals must look away from whatever belies those ideals. Henry James claimed that in America each new generation is a new people. Each day here is also a new day, unburdened by history, rife with promise.”   With this unusual novel, which balances subtle themes within a less subtle metaphorical framework, James Sallis goes in some optimistic new directions, with themes which may be further developed in novels to come.

ALSO by James Sallis:  DRIVE,      DRIVE (the film),      DRIVEN (the sequel to DRIVE),      THE KILLER IS DYING,      WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT (John Turner Trilogy),    WILLNOT,    SARAH JANE

Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from a video on http://vimeo.com

The 8-Ball toy, with the “fortune” of “Outlook Not So Good,” appears on http://thetolerantvegan.com Danny, Jenny’s kidnapper, gave this to her as her only toy for the two years she was imprisoned.

The Perimeter Mall may be found on http://commons.wikimedia.org Photo by Peter Kaminski

The  baby of the squatters who live beside Jenny is said to resemble a limp doll. http://grandmastrash.blogspot.com

ARC:  BLOOMSBURY

“There is a degree to which novels will write themselves if you allow them to, but the process of allowing them to do so is tiring, difficult, and registers with the writer as really hard work…It’s like taking a strange dog for a walk on the end of a lead: it either charges ahead in the wrong direction, or has to be tugged behind, or turns and snaps at your ankles, or worse, just sits down on its haunches and stares at you.”—Author Fay Weldon

Metafictional novels, in which the author becomes one of the main characters, are very tricky.  Though they pretend to be spontaneous, with the author commenting on the actions she and her characters are performing on two or more different narrative planes, they are also patently artificial, with the author carefully preparing, editing, and sometimes rewriting these “spontaneous” comments about the nature of her work.  Some authors, in their self-conscious commentary, try too hard to make the reader understand what it takes to be a writer and end up sounding either patronizing or “cute.”  Others forget that most readers are looking for an exciting story with lively and intriguing characters and instead get bogged down in their own stories, instead of the stories of their characters.

Fay Weldon, author of thirty-four novels by 2010, when this book was written, strikes a fine balance as she alternates between narrative, perfect dialogue, and metafictional commentary, most of it very funny, and the reader cannot help but become involved on many levels.  She makes her writing life sound so intriguing that I found myself playing along, imagining myself as the creator of the dysfunctional characters in “this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse.”  Like the dog in the opening quotation, some of these characters do charge ahead in the wrong direction, some do need to be pulled along from behind, a few turn and snap at you, and some do just sit down and stare – at least for short periods of time – and it is this very tension between Weldon and her characters which makes this novel such an unusual treasure.

The Coromandel Peninsula juts from the east coast of the North Island, between Auckland and Tauranga.  Double click to enlarge.

Weldon focuses not just on four generations of one family, from seventy-seven-year-old Beverley, three times a widow but not averse to marrying again, to her estranged daughter Alice, her adult grand-daughters Cynara and Scarlett, and her teenage great-granddaughter Lola, along with all their many lovers and husbands.  She also focuses on the invisible spirits which have come with Beverley to England from New Zealand, where she grew up (as did the author).  These kehua are the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, “adrift from their ancestral home,” charged with “herding stray members of the whanau (extended family) back home so the living and dead can be back together in their spiritual habitation.”  They are particularly concerned, in this case, with something that happened to Beverley when she was three years old.  Walter, her father, killed Kitchie, her mother, in New Zealand, leaving Beverley an orphan. Since their bodies never received a proper burial in the “Maori standing place,” and the site of the murder was never exorcised, some of the kehua hid in the hold of the ocean liner taking Beverly out of New Zealand years later.  They intended to ensure that the family did not lose its “spiritual habitation.”

All Saints’ Church by E. W. Pugin, located across the street from Beverley’s house, is a place where Alice has found solace.

Even the author feels the kehuas’ presence as she writes about Beverley and her family from her basement workroom:  “At night there’s a general feeling of busyness around me, a sense of movement, an urgency, a stirring in air that’s never quite still…If I listen hard…[I hear] a sound I can interpret only as an intent breathing too close for comfort, and then a hissing and silence.”  Walk-ins, Northern Kelpies, Livas’s sneaky demons, selkies, and the Welsh Cwn Annwn (the dogs of death) are also mentioned in this novel in which most of the characters (with the exception of Alice) are not Christian and are generally at loose ends spiritually.  A Maori tells the author that “Ghost and spirits in many cultures..are used as metaphors for a hereditary dysfunction:  curses last even unto the seventh generation.”

The action bounces around, and scenes in one part of the book may not be explained until much later in the book, when additional information is provided.  Most readers, however, will be having so much fun with the details and the often hilarious dialogue that they will willingly set aside their questions and just follow Weldon’s lead wherever it takes them –  through wicked stories of love and betrayal; often farcical scenes of sexual exhilaration;  and satirical episodes about the trials of the mostly well-off as they search for meaning and purpose in political causes, jobs, and, in Scarlett’s case, designer clothing and accessories.

House by Wells Coates, modernist architect for the house belonging to Louis and Scarlett

Each character tries to match his/her life to the perfect dwelling, a place which feels like the “home” everyone yearns for, and Weldon uses this a unifying motif throughout the novel.  The author herself lives in Yatt house, an older house in Highcross, once belonging to the Bennett family, which sometimes “reappears,” with their dog.  Beverley lives in Robinsdale, a Victorian Gothic house in the outer fringes of London; Scarlett (Beverley’s granddaughter) and her mate, Louis, live in Nopasaran, a 1930s modernist house designed by Wells Coates, in which the bedrooms are only alcoves, allowing no privacy at all; Cynara (Scarlett’s sister) lives in “a small, mean but practical terraced house” which she keeps because she wants to be “where the ‘real people’ are; and, living in Campion Towers, is Jackson Wright, handsome actor in Upstairs, Downstairs (for which Fay Weldon herself  was honored with a Writers Guild Award for Best British TV Series).  All these people are using their houses as extensions of themselves, perhaps looking for the kind of “belonging” which the kehua believe comes only when one joins with one’s extended family in the sacred and peaceful graveyard.

The buzzing the author hears around her computer turns out to be, not a kehua, but a hummingbird hawk moth.

Despite the novel’s impressionistic structure and lack of predictable chronology, the story moves quickly, at the same time that it also presents a vivid portrait of the author at work.  Filled with ironies and understatements, and often hilarious in its dialogue, this novel has something to say about people and their need for connection to the past, at the same time that it can (and should) be read for the pure fun of its characters and point of view.   A new addition to my Favorites list.  Highly recommended to lovers of literary fiction.

ALSO by Fay Weldon:  CHALCOT CRESCENT,      BEFORE THE WAR

Photos, in order: The author’s photo appears on http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk

The map of New Zealand is from http://www.freeworldmaps.net

The All Saints’ Church, by E. W. Pugin, described as being across the street from Beverley’s house is actually in Urmston. http://en.wikipedia.org Photo by Parrot of Doom/Tom Jeffs.

The Wells Coates house, depicted here, is found on http://benfleethistory.org.uk

The hummingbird hawk moth, which the author thought was a kehua when it buzzed around her computer screen appears on http://www.redbubble.com

ARC: Europa Editions