Newly appointed Aboriginal Community Police Officer Emily Tempest has returned to her roots in Bluebush – in the Northern Territories of Australia – after more than ten years spent traveling the world. The daughter of Motor Jack, a white geologist/gold prospector and an aborigine mother, she grew up in her mother’s culture until she was a teenager and has always felt more comfortable there, despite the educational programs and travels which later took her all over the world. Having returned to live with “her” people when she is in her twenties, she continues to resent the intrusions of the “civilized” white world and the damage it has caused to the natural world venerated by the aborigines. Filled with atmosphere, local color, and nonstop action, the novel opens with a gruesome attack at Green Swamp Well, in which a drunk, elderly prospector is found with his hammer embedded in his throat. Another prospector, also drunk, found asleep near the body, is arrested. Hyland does not sugar-coat any aspect of life in the outback. His characters are coarse, and the action and language are sometimes even coarser. Shootings, explosions, rock falls, attempted murders, a brutal rape, and chase scenes take place even as the author is raising questions about conservation, environmental threats, and the serious problems facing indigenous communities.
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Setting her novel at the end of the twentieth century, Penelope Lively begins Spiderweb (1998) by presenting a sociological picture of the west of England and the once-remote counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, which are now attracting new residents from “outside.” A letter from Richard Faraday to Stella Brentwood regarding a property in Kingston Florey in Somerset, inserted in the midst of this picture, describes a cottage for sale and its pluses and minuses, and indicates that he has been helping her find such a property to purchase. Gradually, the reader learns more about Stella, a sixty-five-year-old, newly retired social anthropologist and teacher, who filters all the impressions one gains about the village and its people through her own eyes. When she buys this cottage, she approaches her new village not as a new member of the community, but as an academic and specialist in social structures. Stella has never married, not because she did not have opportunities but because she has been completely driven by her interests in other cultures and her desire to stay on the move, professionally. Stella has squandered her chance to experience a full life, at least by the standards of most of the rest of the world, and whether she is or can be truly happy and adjust to this small town is the big question.
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Told by Marianna, a young woman who has lost all sense of “home” as a result of the more than ten years of warfare she lived through in her homeland of Lebanon, this impressionistic psychological novel begins with her dreams of “before the war was real.” Romantic images of her mother “wander[ing] outside, smelling the ghostly jasmine in the dark, and Daddy open[ing] another old book under a lamp” overlap with images of her grandparents lighting the candles on a Christmas tree while sweet wine boils on the stove. Now the war is “real,” however. Years have passed, and the old reality she yearns for remains only in her dreams. Marianna, now eighteen, is in another place, America, her father’s birthplace, where, she believes, “nothing can be beautiful” and where she looks “inward to the night, to my dream self who had promised that this time I really had gone back home to my true life.” The warfare she experienced in Lebanon, which began in 1975-76, when she was seven, is now thousands of miles away, but she has been unable to cope with a new life in the US. Focusing almost exclusively on the four people in this family, on their friends, on those who died in the war (between 1975 and 1990), and on Lebanon itself, author Patricia Sarrafian Ward recreates the psychological damage of war.
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William Kennedy’s latest novel in the Albany Cycle, his eighth, continues the story of several repeating families from Albany, New York, during the heyday of its infamous, politically corrupt “machine.” Focusing on Daniel Quinn, a newspaper reporter who is the grandson of the Daniel Quinn (who reported on the Civil War in Quinn’s Book), this novel begins in August, 1936, when Daniel is a child, watching as his father brings a piano (origins unknown) into the Mayor’s house. Cody Mason, a pianist specializing in Harlem “stride,” is about to put on a private show with the young Bing Crosby. Only six pages (and twenty-one years) later, Quinn, an experienced reporter, is in Havana in March, 1957, hanging out at the El Floridita bar and hoping that Ernest Hemingway, will show up. He also hopes to interview Fidel Castro. These two opening scenes, the arrival of Hemingway and his boorish attack on a tourist, and Quinn’s trip to Oriente province, establish the narrative tone and atmosphere for this novel which focuses on two revolutions, the Castro-led revolution in Cuba and the slightly later revolution in the US in the 1960s regarding civil rights. Humor and irony add considerable charm to the novel, and for many readers will more than outweigh the sometimes wooden characters and wandering narrative.
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Hannah Gonen, a young woman living in Jerusalem in the late 1950s, has been married for ten years to a man she pursued and married when she was in her first year at the university and he was a graduate student. Michael, who describes himself to Hannah as “good…a bit lethargic, but hard-working, responsible, clean, and very honest,” eventually earns his PhD. degree in geology and begins work at the university, but Hannah, who has given up her literature studies upon her marriage, soon finds married life – and Michael himself – to be tedious. Her only child resembles Michael in personality, a child rooted in reality, who “finds objects much more interesting than people or words.” Writing in short, factual sentences, which come alive through his choice of details, author Amos Oz, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, recreates Hannah’s story of her marriage, a marriage which may or may not survive.
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