Category Archives: books

Book review: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

10 Tuesday Jul 2007

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Spoiler alert.

So much poorer than the film. Jimmy, Sean and Dave are playing in their street when Dave is abducted. He escapes four days later. Fast forward twenty-four years later, and Jimmy’s daughter is murdered. Sean is investigating the case; Dave becomes a prime suspect because he came home bloodied that night. Just before the end we realise that co-incidentally, he murdered a paedophile that night outside the same bar Jimmy’s daughter was last seen. Dave won’t tell his wife the truth; she is Jimmy’s wife’s cousin and she tells Jimmy she suspects Dave did it. Jimmy kills Dave then finds out from Sean the real killer was Katie’s boyfriend’s mute brother and his friend, jealous of the attention she got.The plot is good; it’s the uneven execution I don’t like. It starts out with an eerie, melancholic air. But then it degenerates into a type of writing that feels like a poor Hollywood script – cliches, and lines planted in people’s heads that only belong in bad movies. (See my previous post.)

Liking Tim Winton

06 Friday Jul 2007

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It’s so cliched to like Tim Winton. He’s the only Australian novelist most people have heard of. As soon as I tell people I’m a novelist, they ask if I’m going to be the next Tim Winton. I’m never sure quite how to answer that.

Well, I used to answer it by being anti-trendy – disliking Tim Winton’s work and anything else that was trendy, anything that was read comfortably in suburban bookclubs, anything that the general population liked. I enjoyed being the only person in the world who didn’t like Tim Winton’s work.

But this was based on reading The Riders when I was fourteen and Lockie Leonard when I was eighteen.

Then in 2002 I begrudgingly read Cloudstreet, and had to admit it was excellent. (I read it again two years later.) I then went on and read Dirt Music and The Turning. When I read the Turning, I had to repent completely and admit to admiring Winton immensely. It is a brilliant book, with a clean lyricism that his other work doesn’t have. (The thing I like least about Winton is what most people like most – the vernacular, slangy writing.)

I also had to change my mind a lot when I discovered that he was deeply influenced by my favourite theologian – John Howard Yoder, the Anabaptist. I’ve written two simplified versions of Yoder’s work and was amazed that another Western Australian writer admired him.

So, I’d actually really like to have a conversation with Tim. And my opportunity came when a couple swapped tickets with Nicole and I at the Australian String Quartet because the wife had a cough and wanted to be at the back. I was promoted to the second row. A couple came in just before it started and were confused by the numbering. I said to the man, ‘You’ve got the right seat.’ He said, ‘Thanks, mate.’

And then I realised it was Tim Winton.

I spent the performance rehearsing what to say to him. I didn’t want to sound like one more wanna be writer who wants to talk to Tim Winton (ie “I’m a writer too”). But neither did I want to sound conceited (ie “I’m a prize winning novelist too – not the Booker, mind.”). And I didn’t want to talk to him because he was famous – I wanted to talk to him because he was interested in Yoder and wrote good books.

I thought of how he was such a private person and seemed to hate all the publicity. I thought of all the idiots that try to introduce themselves to him. And with my heart thumping away at the end of the performance, I kept silent and watched him walk away.

Review of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe

06 Friday Jul 2007

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This is a strange book and helps me understand why earlier in his career Coetzee was compared to Kafka. 

The novel is, in one sense, a rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was itself based loosely on the story of the real life Alexander Selkirk. Susan Barton is marooned on an island where she meets a white man named Cruso and a black man named Friday who has had his tongue cut out. When she is rescued, she lives in England with Friday trying to survive and have her story written by Daniel Foe.

To read it simply as a rewriting is not enough, though. In another way, it feels like a parable about race relations and gender relations constructed around the myth of the desert island castaway.

The first part is told by Susan as her version of events. She is addressing Foe and all of it is set in speech marks, like Conrad’s Lord Jim. In the second part Susan writes letters to Foe – letters which are never read or received, adding a sense of futility. The third part is a more conventional first person narration.

A strange book; I don’t know what to make of it yet.

I will be adding quotes from the book here:

http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/coetzee-jm/ 

Carson McCullers – Clock without hands

03 Tuesday Jul 2007

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Published in 1961, this is McCullers’ final novel. She died aged 50 in 1967, leaving an unfinished autobiography.

 Clock without hands is a novel about death. It starts with Malone the chemist being told he is dying. Malone goes to visit his friend the Judge, a comic, corpulent Republican former senator in his eighties who drinks and pontificates on his own greatness, while fearing death and mourning his son, dead of suicide in his twenties. Most of the novel is concerned with the Judge, his grandson Jester and his amanuensis, Sherman the African-American with blue eyes.

 This quote sums up the Judge and McCuller’s humour:

When the odour in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his faeces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him. So he sat there, relaxed and meditative, pleased with himself. (81)

McCullers is brilliant in being both humorous and profound. The Judge is a glorious character, so hilarious in his arrogance, in his grand scheme to revalidate Confederate currency (he has millions stored in the attic).

For more quotes, visit my quotes blog – http://othervoices.wordpress.com/tag/mccullers-carson/ 

The problem of Kafka

21 Thursday Jun 2007

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Why do I bother with Kafka?

I’m struggling my way through the Castle for the second time (the last time being eight years ago). I can’t put my finger on what draws me to him. I don’t usually enjoy him while I read him. But his writing stays with me, a haunting presence that I never shake off.

John Fowles wrote something similar in an essay in Wormholes – about how he can’t remember the plot or details of Kafka, only this sense that Kafka’s work gave him.

His work resists any easy interpretation. When I was sixteen and first tried reading him, I thought it was a parable that simply needed me to find what each element represented. I tried to read into my hazy knowledge of inter-war European political situation. A waste of time; wrong track. They’re not allegorical, or parabolical in that kind of sense.