A Boy and his Maps

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is physically a beautiful book. Wide silky pages are home to a central narrative, drawings, maps and sub narratives. T.S of the title is a twelve year old boy genius who loves maps. He maps concepts - such as the construction of longing by McDonald's- as well as his physical surroundings. He lives on a ranch in Montana with his scientist mother Dr Clair and his archetypal rancher father and is dealing with the grief of the loss of his younger brother.

The book has a number of literary touchstones. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime comes to mind as well as the boy wizard who shall remain unnamed! Reif Larsen plays with these connections cleverly, yet his protagonist is still a compelling fully realised character. I loved this book. It swept me along!

Once Again, Families

I have been chipping away at this book Things I've Been Silent About by Azar Nafisi - I think I've been reading it for two months! It's a memoir charting her relationships with her mother and father and as much as I was drawn in by its subject - Dad's death last year has left me thinking about parents in our lives - the baldness of it's revelation has left me feeling a little uncomfortable. I'm not sure about the ethics of it all, the laying bare of families for the world! I think this is the place of fiction. We can use our emotion truth with a different cast of characters.

There is no denying Azar has lived through interesting times. Her father was Mayor of Tehran in the Shah's time and there's lots of black and white photos of him in nightclubs pre-Cultural revolution with elegantly coiffed women. From these worldly groovy times, Azar lives through the rise of fundamentalism and the stripping of women's rights. Like many of her class she studies overseas, in her case England and America and eventually leaves Iran.

It's a beautifully written book and the stories contained within it are compelling.

The Red and the Black

No not Stendahl, but two other red and black books - one about spies and one about vampires! I have been craving an old style thriller, so it was great to stumble across Red to Black by Alex Dryden. I grew up reading John Le Carre's Cold War thrillers, so it was a little nostalgic, but of course the political landcape has changed. Putin is in charge now and the Communist "red" is being replaced by the capitalist "black". Finn is a British spy and Anna is a KGB Colonel. Anna lures Finn in a "honey trap" but the relationship actually works for them despite the complications of their lives. Finn uncovers a corrupt banking arms money scam that he tries to foil but of course it's in everyone's interests that he doesn't. The layers off corruption and the irrelevance of the truth are pure spy thriller stuff. Alex Dryden really takes you into the settings both in terms of the espionage world and the European backdrop.

Vampire Academy is first in a series by Richelle Mead. In this world there are two types of vampires - Moroi, living vampires, and Stigoi ,the undead type we are more familiar with. There are also Dhampirs, guardians to the Moroi. The main character of this book is Rose, the "shadow-kissed" guardian of Lissa, a Moroi princess. The high school politics are catty and there are a lot of young women being mean to each other about their sexuality, which I didn't like! But there's a noble hunk and the supernatural side of things is creative and involving.

Love and Bicycles

“They don’t make love affairs like yours any more, Dad”

“Oh no, that’s an interesting observation. Why not?”

“Most women of my generation would have left you years ago.”

At the centre of The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey are a glamour couple, Sabine and George Harwood. They are a cocktails-on-the-terrace type and have been married fifty years. The novel examines the glue that holds such a couple together, depite infidelity and expreme differences in world view.

"Your mother filled up the frame. I couldn't see anyone else but her, no one around or past her."

"Did that ever wear off?"

"No it got worse"

"How?"

"Well then love comes. You fancy lots of other people. But the heart is small and fussy: it knows exactly who it wants."

Sabine and George are expats living a comfortable life in Trinidad before during and after Independence. Sabine is painfully aware that this comfort has been bought through the injustice of a racially segregated society, whereas George is infatuated with both the exoticism of his tropical life and the privileges it bestows upon him. The background is fascinating and the reader feels this pull between tropical exoticism and justice in reading the novel.

The structure of the novel is interesting. The first half of the novel is written in the third person. Sabine and George are elderly and a little cranky with each other. George finds a bundle of letters that Sabine has written to Eric Williams, a former Prime Minister. These letters remind George of their past together and he tries to take up the cause of Talbot, as a form of atonement to the island and to Sabine. It ends sadly.

The second half of the novel is written in the first person from Sabine's point of view, beginning with their arrival as a besotted young couple in 1956. Sabine discovers the country on her green Raleigh bicycle, becoming a figure of fun because it is ludicrous in this society that a privileged white woman should ride a bicycle.

"I tell dem i go fine a job with the white lady on de green bicycle...You is famus, Miss."

The bicycle becomes an emblem of Sabine's youth, independence and naivete and eventually, of course, she stops riding it. Thus the bicycle is imbued with a sense of loss. As an old man, George renovates the bicycle for Sabine, but perhaps this is too late...

To Brooklyn, Carlton and Beyond

Eilis travels from Ennisworthy to Brooklyn; Esma from Footscray to Carlton. For both young women these journeys are signficant in terms of the lives they will lead and the people they will become. It is such an interesting time of one's life, when one is so unformed and decisions can have such an impact.

Eilis is the protagonist of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. At the suggestion of a visiting priest she finds herself leaving Ireland for a new life - job, home and eventually man - in the United States. Toibin captures perfectly this unformed quality. Eilis has the newness of youth; her only baggage a small snub at a dance before she leaves. She is ever so quietly courageous; dealing with new experiences such as seasickness and squabbling rooming-house mates with integrity. Reading this book I found myself thinking of my mother's story. While she didn't travel so far, in her teens she had left her home town for work. These were the times.

This book is an utterly convincing portrayal of Eilis' character and her world. The writing is pared back and lovely. I loved a scene where Eilis goes to confession to tell of her sex with Tony, the priest compassionately offering help "if she is pregnant". It is such an achievement I think that Toibin has taken such a simple story and made it such a beautiful novel.

Eilis has a choice that is a literary choice only. She has married the man she is ambivalent about and is unable to explore the man who might be more suitable, the man of the snub. )This would be her Mr D'arcy ending!) That Eilis loves numbers and her dream is to a bookkeeper must be forgotten as this was not a choice she has in her time. the reader sees these choices but Eilis can and has made only one. The promise and the pleasure of the opening up of new experiences of early adulthood close off as choices are made.

Something in the World Called Love by Sue Saliba explores these questions on more local ground. Esma moves to a share house in Carlton. She is studying poetry and wants to be a writer. She is drawn into a dark intimacy with Kara , a "queen bee" character, a manipulative girl-woman. (They should come with warning stickers, these women). Esma begins to think that there is "something in the world called love" and that is this "love" for Kara. Its an interesting subject the girl crush. Esma is looking for intimacy and a model on which to base her new life. Sue Saliba in trying to capture this unformed nature of Esma's character writes in loose open prose poetry with minimal intrusive punctuation.

The Angel's Game

On Friday the sofa, the heater and The Shadows of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Safon made a compelling combination. David Martin, the hero of this doorstop book, falls into a career as the writer of a series of "penny dreadfuls" called The City of the Damned. I loved the term "penny dreadful". It builds a sense of nostalgia for a time when trashy books were cheaper than their more worthy cousins! And of course, The Shadows of the Wind is in its own way a penny dreadful (but of the $32.95 variety). David is a self -deprecating narrator and he comments early in the novel on his adolescent creation of his dream girl, and Shadows has two of them, the unattainable Christina and the more worthy but overlooked Isabella. Ruiz Safon is borrowing from Dickens here. Great Expectations becomes a touchstone in this book and its plot is plundered repeatedly. The mysterious benefactor is also a device Ruiz Safon borrows Vidal with his guilty secret and the sinister Corelli. Ruiz Safon's literary pantry is also well stocked with Faust and Borges. There's a labyrinth of lost books and a pact with the devil!


The novel opens splendidly - it's evocation of a writer's life and the world of books was highly seductive - but ultimately the layers and layers of pastiche left me with a soulless feeling. It invokes all the elements of the Gothic without really believing in it and the Gothic needs its raw passion. Yet it's not really clever enough to be pure pastiche in the Borges style. Nevertheless it had a page turning quality!

Lives and Choices

I have been reading The Good Parents by Joan London, My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman and Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin. An odd little collection of books reall. Their cocktail of disparate characters from Perth, Lismore and San Francisco have left me thinking about those who chose their lives and those who let their lives choose them.

The Good Parents is a wonderful book – complex and detailed. At its centre are Toni and Jacob, parents of eighteen year old Maya who has disappeared. They are an attractive couple: “The couple didn’t think of themselves as old. They wore jeans and leather jackets and much-polished RM Williams boots, more like aging rockers than hippies…You could say a sort of small town version of Nick Nolte and Anjelica Huston”. They are ostensibly happy together and are "good parents". However the stress of their daughter's disappearance causes flashback reflections on their lives so far and the choices they have not made. Jacob remembers a moment in his youth when studying for his exams he abandons his study to elicitly read War and Peace, achieving a lack lustre grade for his beloved English, and by default falling into a career as an English teacher in a country town. Toni's good looks catch the eye of a gangster at the bus stop and she defaults into marriage. Toni and Jacob connect by accident, run away and have a family.

The minor characters are great. Jacob's sister Kitty, also a teacher, falls into a lifetime of unsatisfying relationships having at one stage "three abortions in a year". Her story - a passionate fling with the possibility of a last chance child - was poignant. Maya, the teenager who is seduced by her truly horrible boss, is also passive, passive character. What was she thinking?

Armistad Maupin's friendly tome was a contrast in confidence! Still living despite his HIV (hence the title), Michael at 55 has found love again with Ben, a lovely man in his thirties. Despite small moments of insecurity, Michael is so confident sexually. In fact all of the characters are. It must be a San Francisco thing! It's interesting despite the big differences in worlds, there are those universal touchstones - Michael's mother is dying and he has to deal with this.

Joanne Horniman's book tells the story of Sophie a single mum in her twenties. Sophie loves reading and her daughter and is inspiringly resilient really, but doesn't dare to dream to want the best for herself. What is up with this? it's everywhere....