Phillip Marlowe hits Yarraville and Blue, Blue Love

Nick Gadd's Ghostlines is a classic kind of detective novel. His detective Phillip Trudeau is a jaded, scarred by the world type with a drinking problem, a little Rebus, a little Humprey Bogart as Marlowe. The writing, fittingly, is very clean and manly. Straight up as it were...

While the plot with it's underdog exposing the unethical rich narrative is appealing, what is extraordinary about this novel is its wonderful evocation of Melbourne. It begins with a kid on a bike being hit by a train and continues from this point to an old man's cluttered house in Williamstown to the sushi bar infected cbd. I loved a sub plot about the Maribyrnong group and and artist named Valerie. He managed to weave in much that was really Melbourne.

I have also been dipping into collection of stories about lovers' quarrels called Let's Call the Whole Thing Off. I loved the artfulness of the writing. Its "ready for my close-up" stuff; no word is really wasted. Dorothy Parker opens the anthology with painfully observed post wedding conversation between a bride and groom about a tiara. The wife picks, the husband deflects then overacts, the wife retreats, the husband makes amends. Darkly comic or depressing depending on one's own state of mind. Jhumpa Lahiri also had a newlywed story that travelled this fine line between love and resentment. The stories are diverse, crossing cultures and sexualities. My favourite was a story about bedrooms and the differing decorating styles of men and women. It was witty and whimsical. Pink has her heart brolen by Blue but eventually finds love again with Green! Gotta watch out for those Blues....

Earlier in the month I read Fred Vargas The Three Evangelists - good quirky french detective fun - and Robin Bowles' The Case of the Missing Masterpiece - more local, slightly less fun.

Music and car crashes

There is much to love about good young adult fiction - the possibility is there for character and story and also a form of untrendy mimesis that can be so refreshing. It is lovely to see your world reflected back to you and to enter the head of a character you like to share a little of their life with them. This was very much the case with me and the book "If I Stay" by Gayle Forman; the narrator Mia had a nice take on the world. She's also in a coma after a car crash and in a Lovely Bones sort of way is commenting on her ailing body as it hangs on to life in the ICU. So the novel moves from this to her memories, happy memories of her family, her friend Kim and her boyfriend Adam. The parents are great characters the mum is a rock chick and the dad a reformed punk English teacher. Their life is very ordinary - chats about life while doing the dishes, school and circle of friends and family. The big idea - how do you get over losses that seem insurmountably cruel? - is always interesting, and this book explores it in a gentle compelling way. Almost everyone in the story has a relationship to music, and choosing your music - be it The Ramones or Yo Yo Ma - works as a metaphor for choosing your way. Its a weepy! ... but the sadness feels very honest, and the books explorations of life, love and memory ring true. The writing is lovely - it seems effortless but is understated and artful.

Families and readers

I have been reading The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif, a lovely saga of a thing, perfect for wintry nights because its set somewhere warm (Egypt) and has at its heart a reader prone to worrying with whom I instantly identified. This is the beginning of the book. "Amal reads deep into the night. She reads and lets Anna's words flow into her, probing gently at dreams and hope and sorrows she had sorted out, labelled and put away". I loved Amal as a character. She has so much integrity, but because the world is so imperfect this leads to a passivity and inertia because it is so difficult to act with integrity when all of one's choices seemed not quite right. Amal absorbs herself in the documents of Anna Winterbourne and her grandmother Layla, documents in English, French and a "neat Arabic raq'a script". I loved this too - the intersections of culture as manifest in language.

It's so clever because at the same time as it is an exotic love story between Anna and Sharif and then Isabel and Omar, it also problematises this notion of exoticism (and really of love). There's a moment in the novel where Amal discovers an article by Sharif about the appeal of the East which he sees as a economic solution to the West's problems and also the Orient, a wonderful otherwordly place full of exoticism. Amal jokes that they could republish it now. I found myself wanting to read about this book (discovering this very glamourous photograph of Ahdaf giving a speech) and some people found the romance too much and others found it a wonderful post-colonialistic launching pad for pontificating! (Actually this article was very interesting about the letters of women travellers as a subversive discourse).

The structure was great - I liked the layers, the disparities between the past and present, the gaps in knowledge between the generations. I found myself fascinated by the missing generation, the adult Nur (Anna's daughter and Isabella's grandmother) and Ahmad (Layla's son and Amal's grandfather), their life stories hinted at in just a few sentences.

Tangles of a Story

Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero was a small gift of a thing. Its subject - the fragility of families - is mirrored in the fragile narrative that spreads like a cobweb with tenuous and haphazard links between the characters. I keep finding stories of fathers in my reading travels and this was an interesting one - a silent, dutiful father with moments of explosive temper. A particular moment of temper - violent and truly awful - propels Anna, Claire and Coop into different worlds. Anna, whose identity is riven by this act of violence becomes an academic, being particularly drawn to the story of a writer called Lucien Segura - whose family is as fragmented as her own. Claire becomes a paralegal, making a career out of building a false intimacy with strangers and Coop a high stakes gambler also an artifice of sorts.

Divisadero blends the poetic and the narrative. Ondaatje's sentences are effortlessly beautiful. Like this one from Anna's point of view: "I am a person who discovers archival subtexts in history and art where the spiralling among a handful of strangers tangles into a story." Ondaatje's doesn't over explain his poetry or force closure on his narrative - this spiralling is exactly his method here. It's finding moments of truth, epiphany and hope in the randomness of life.

Forgetting our thirties...

This book dug under my ribs. I'd put an exclamation mark here - except I'm not sure it was a pleasant feeling! (There! That thought can have one!) Alice has had a head injury and wakes up thinking she is girlishly 29, happily married and expecting her first baby. In reality she is 39, getting divorced, has three children and has turned into a Stepford wife. Its territory I have been travelling in my minds murk. How does one keep one's girlishness alive against the demands of life? I guess at twenty nine Pascale was a baby and Kris and I were newly married. Thirty-nine was that challenging year after the broken engagement. Maybe this why this book has left me a little melancholy. Still I think some people do get nicer as they (we?) get older. The odd disappointment or two makes us more compassionate, having children more generous.

I loved Liane Moriarity's The Last Anniversary. It was so whimsical and quirky (but honest enough not to be completely fluffy) and I was hoping for more of the same with this one. But although it had some quirk (I loved the blogging granny broadcasting the family secrets online and that when Alice loses her memory she starts raiding her daughter's dress up box),the ending was a little fluffy and unbelievable. Of course, perhaps that is the point. Although I think no-one has their happy endings all at the same time, its a squiggly graph like the ABC logo and even feel good books feel better when they are true to this, other wise it feels like a lie and makes you feel worse!

Angels and Daughters

I followed my daughter through the labyrinth of these lovely books - City of Bones, City of Ashes and City of Glass - snuggled up on the couch reading different installments. It's perfect fare for us as there’s a mother and daughter – Jocelyn and Clary - at the centre of this story. I remember when my daughter was about four starting to read Ursula Le Guin’s The Tombs of Atuan to her and it was terrifying because the mother dies so early in the narrative and the little girl is so completely and utterly alone. Before she could speak she was also riveted by Are You My Mother, the story of the little bird who has fallen out of his nest and needs to find his mother. So it’s an elemental part of a story being separated from a mother and the anxiety this causes, especially in fantasy stories. Fantasy stories do this so well. In this trilogy The Mortal Instruments, Clary must save her mother, who is kidnapped by a Ravener demon and bewitched. It is the adololescent shift in this relationship, where the little girl must rescue her mother. My daughter was very sage about it all, refusing to give away the plot details I was desperate for, thus rescuing me from my own self-destructive thwarting of my plot satisfaction.

Reading these books was so utterly pleasurable. The narrative seemed to combine every fairy tale motif imaginable with out being too much: angels, enchanted swords, magical runes, vampires, lost evil Frankenstein-like fathers, separated siblings, impossible love. I imagine this must have been what reading Harry Potter must have been like for the people who could get over the clunky sentences. It reminded me a little of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – without the cheesiness - and of Phillip Pulmann’s His Dark Materials without the ponderous qualities. When Cassandra Clare was borrowing plots – such as from Star Wars and Paradise Lost she referenced it in a worldly postmodern way. At our place we are both desperate for her new book!

Teenager Discovers Kissing – Stop Press!

As the saying goes, teenagers cannot see beyond the end of their noses and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging by Louise Rennison adds to the body of evidence – narrator Georgia Nicholson is a very self-absorbed girl. Unless of course beyond the end of one’s nose are a pair of boyish lips on which to experiment. Georgia approaches kissing like netball training, at one stage going to a boy Peter’s house who teaches kissing skills to girls “but doesn’t take any money or anything” and she discovers that kissing is best when you fancy the kissee, in fact you go “jelloid”. Georgia’s poor mother with a not-quite toilet trained three year old, self-absorbed Georgia and a hairy husband in New Zealand could probably have told her that, but the older characters the parents and teachers are figures of fun in this book.

The novel is for the funny girls. It shows its readers you can be funny and desirable (even dressed up as an olive). Georgia is often a funny narrator. “His Mick Jagger impression did not stop at the lips. He was a lunatic on the dance floor, strutting around with his hands on his hips. I nearly died. Then Sven joined in, dragging Rosie with him. His style of dancing was more Cossack, a lot of going down into a squat position and kicking his legs out”. And of course kissing is lovely; it’s lovely to discover its loveliness and lovely to be reminded of its loveliness. Here is how it went for Georgia: “I went completely jelloid – it was like being part girl, part jellyfish. It was mega brilliant. Twenty out of ten type kissing. I got all the stuff you’re supposed to have fireworks whooshing in your head, bands playing, sea crashing in and out”. Maybe I’ve been a little hard on Georgia… but she’s is unrelenting on parents and teachers!