Festivalling...

I have been festivalling, drinking up the observations of writers at The Melbourne Writers Festival. I have been to a young adult day and a few more adult things. I came away with some great suggestions for books to read... and I have read a few of them!

I read a series by a YA writer Justine Labastier, the Magic or Madness trilogy. These books seemed aimed at the tweenie end of the YA market and are based on the idea that using magic comes at a cost. Justine's biography is inspiring - she decided to be a novellist and got a contract based on her idea! Magic in these becomes becomes a metaphor for temptation and causes a conflict or two within Sarafina's magic family. The settings are the best things about these books. Courtesty of magical portal Newtown, New York and the outback are bought to life rather vividly. I also read the first of the Midnighters series by Scott Westerfield. I liked the authentic sense of teenage life he created.

I also discovered Lisa Unger an American crime writer. I read her novel Sliver of Truth and was rather swept away by it. I love the world she created and that characters were never as they seemed.

I also went to a great session on writing the Holocaust. I went for work, really, because I'll be teaching a book Once by Morris Gleitzman. But one other the other panellists, Thomas Buergenthal spoke about his life and his memoir A Lucky Child. I came home and read this book in one sitting. I was struck by the understatement of his story, when so many Holocaust narrative highlight the drama.

Being Charlotte B

Charlotte's Bronte's books were formative ones for me as a reader. I remember reading Jane Eyre and Villette as an 18 year old ( a bookish provincial one no less), about to leave my country town for university. I think what touched me about these books was the transformative power of the writer's life so I was interesting to read Jude Morgan's book about Charlotte and her family. It was an odd experience reading the book, seeing Charlotte, Emily and Anne suffering the vagaries of earning a living and intensely felt crushes , to know the plot and wait for it to reveal itself. When are the going to write the books? This question kept me reading. Its a very modern book. Although Charlotte emerges as the novel's main character - simply by longevity, her siblings fall one-by-one to consumption - the novel is very equally weighted; Jude Morgan moves easily between the characters and their consciousness. the novel ends with Charlotte's voyage to the sea "the real sea The Atlantic" and some comfort in her marriage.

The Romance of Birds

This elegant book has renewed my faith in reading after a string of so-so reads. I think it's a big question - how to write about love without making it the same old story - and it seems the secret is to write about the whole story, first love to death. Towards the end of the novel Tom (the leading man) says "you know, the only times we aren't mysterious to one another are probably when we're first falling in love and when one of us is dying. New love blinds us for a while to all the things we don't know".Tom and Addie fall in love around a common obsession with birds, Addie as a painter and Tom as a scientist. Through their lives as Addie develops a intense ecological awareness, this shifts and she almost becomes angry at the simple beauty of birds as involved as she is in various activist struggles. Artistically this is expressed through assembages of taxidermied birds, arranged to comment on environmental issues. These dark expressions of her rage find a popular audience. Through all this the bond with Tom morphs and shifts, as does her relationship with her daughter Scarlett. The writing is lovely and the novel, structured around Addie's first notebook with flashbacks and flashforwards, has a unity that is just so.

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...