Monthly Archives: September 2007

Book review – Rick Moody: The Diviners

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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An ambitious, sprawling novel depicting America in the uncertainty of the disputed election of 2000 through the prism of the flurry around a mini-series project that is picked up and hyped throughout the media industry.

It is the same sort of book as James Joyce’s Ulysses – with constant literary innovation and such a wide range of voices and styles. Of course, it’s not nearly as good; the only passages that approach brilliance are those where Moody returns to his forte – the suburbs and the family.

But even where it isn’t brilliant, it is always good, entertaining, engaging and insightful. It finishes with a futile flourish, as the network CEO is assured by a judge in the disputed returns that the climate is right to crush the mini-series and everything it stands for; the future is reality TV, Republican and patriotic.

Book review – John Fowles : Daniel Martin

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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JF’s alternative title, The Englishman, would have been more appropriate. It is in one way a novel primarily about Englishness through the eyes of a middle aged humanist egotistic screenwriter.

It scares me how deeply flawed it is as a novel. Such an important writer could have such poor judgement? Didn’t anyone warn JF? Couldn’t he seem himself? Its major flaw is its boring wry dialogue between characters who don’t seem to be able to express anything more than a kind of bemused English banter. Hundreds of pages of this!

It gets better at the end in Egypt when Daniel and Jane finally express something deeper. More should have been made of Anthony’s character; the situation is potentially very interesting.

Book review – Ian McEwan: Saturday

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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An excellent novel which manages to show the state of the world through one man’s mind on one day. Perowne is a neurosurgeon; the Saturday in question is the day of the anti-war protests just before the invasion of Iraq. In his relationship to his family, a game of squash and a road-rage incident which turns into a home invasion by a thug, he feels and thinks about the state of the world and the state of his life.

McEwan’s prose has these moments of intense insight that are beautiful to read. He manages to write about what it’s like to listen to a certain piece of music, or the subtle feelings you might have waking in the middle of night and watching your wife sleep.

The final scene lifts the whole novel another notch, an inspired piece of writing with Henry Perowne looking out on the square at the end of the long Saturday and thinking about what will come in the future, the leaving of his children, the death of his mother and father-in-law; the terrorist attack that has to happen. He imagines another doctor standing looking out at the square in 1903, and how this doctor would not believe what was to happen in the next one hundred years.

Book review – Andrew McGahan: Last Drinks

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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Ten years after the Fitzgerald Inquiry, corrupt journalist George is in exile in a small country town; but then his ex-best friend Charlie turns up dead in the town. George goes to Brisbane to cremate Charlie and tries to find out what happened. The story emerges in big chunks of flashback whenever George meets someone from his past. This feels clumsy to me; it’s not integrated, it’s a stop the story and go back to the past. The novel is soaked in alcohol; every character is an alcoholic. George has gone sober for the last ten years, but when he finally uncorks a bottle toward the end, it’s like a sex scene we’ve been working up to all novel.

Book review – Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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The main character is Daisy Goodwill, and it’s not exactly a diary. But Stone refers to the surname given to all the orphans at the orphanage where Daisy’s mother Mercy was brought up and to Daisy’s father’s preoccupation with stone as a quarry worker and then a stone sculptor. Daisy is herself almost an orphan, her mother dying in childbirth; her father not seeing her again until she was eleven.

The novel tells her story from birth to death, 1905 to the 1990s. Its scope is huge; we learn the stories and fates of many of the people whose lives contribute to Daisy’s.

Most interesting to me was the life of her father-in-law, Magnus Flett, who lives to 116, the last fifty years of his life spent unknown and estranged from his family, who all think him long dead. Daisy, visiting Scotland, comes across him.

The novel embraces many genres, a tapestry of biography, monologue, newspaper articles and letters.

Book review – Dara Horn : The world to come

01 Saturday Sep 2007

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Benjamin Ziskind steals a Chagall painting from the NY Jewish Art Gallery because his family used to own it.

The novel has many strands – Benjamin’s grandfather who was given the painting as a boy in a USSR orphanage; Benjamin’s parents – his father a Vietnam veteran and his mother a children’s book illustrator who takes Yiddish stories and folklore and brings them to life again; Benjamin’s twin sister, Sara, who forges a copy of the Chagall; Benjamin’s potential lover, Erica, curator at the gallery, who is trying to find the thief. And then finally, bringing the strands together, Benjamin’s unborn nephew, Daniel, who in the final chapter is shown through the ‘world to come’, the world he is entering, by angels who are his dead ancestors.

The two novels it reminds me of most are The Book Thief and Nicole Krauss’s History of Love. I wonder if Krauss and Horn are friends or rivals, being two Jewish women writers in New York with two years between them and both writing magic realism that concerns family and text