News Archive
2010
2009
In short - Fiction
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday October 10, 2009
The RehearsalBy Eleanor CattonGranta Books, 320pp, $29.99This is an intellectually brilliant novel by a very young writer €” Catton is only 24 €” about the nature of performance.A group of high school girls has been scandalised by one of their number's affair with a young male teacher, who has been duly banished from the school.Much of their response to these events is filtered or channelled through the music teacher, whom several of them have in common.Meanwhile, at a nearby drama school, the first-year students are putting on the traditional end-of-year performance and have decided to write and perform a piece about the schoolgirl scandal.As the novel progresses these storylines come closer together until they finally meet up.But Catton writes about life itself as performance and her characters and their dialogue are in no way grounded in realism, speaking in stylised soliloquies that are clearly not meant even to approximate naturalistic dialogue.It's a demanding novel and quite a difficult read but Catton's talent is dazzling.Music from Another CountryBy Jeremy FisherFat Frog Books, 100pp, $23.95This is a story about three generations of Australian men and the different challenges they face.Neil Piggott, now the grandfather of young adults, is a war hero; these days he spends most of his time in the garden, with his Victoria Cross tucked away safely inside the house. His son, Robert, has grown up a little conservative and smug, blaming his father for his mother's death and hostile to his father's second wife but he still feels free to park his sons at their grandfather's house to be looked after while he and his own wife go on holidays.Robert's eldest son, Kieran, makes a bad judgment call when he chooses his mother's birthday party to announce to the family that he's gay and from that moment he is estranged from his parents. It's his grandfather, Neil, to whom Kieran turns and who, when he contracts HIV and then full-blown AIDS, helps him to face his coming death. There's a certain amount of special pleading in this short novel but it's nonetheless a moving story about masculinity, families and courage.The Blue NotebookBy James A. LevineWeidenfeld & Nicolson, 224pp, $29.99Levine is a doctor at the Mayo Clinic who has for some years worked with the UN focusing on the plight of women and children in poverty. This novel is based on an experience on a field visit to Mumbai during which he visited the Street of Cages, where child prostitutes are on display in small gated cages for the perusal of potential customers. In one of these cages he saw a small girl writing in a notebook full of her notes and sketches, which she showed him.In this novel, his first, Levine takes on the narrating voice of this little girl, for whom pens, pencils and paper are all precious while men, sex and her surroundings are discussed through a veil of childish euphemisms designed to keep brutal realities at bay.The book was written "in order to highlight her plight" and Levine does so with great skill. But among its other distressing aspects is the reader's disquiet at the writer's appropriation of this child's voice. In this case, however, it could be argued that the end justifies the means.PICK OF THE WEEKPresent DangerBy Stella RimingtonQuercus, 384pp, $32.95Rimington's first novel, At Risk, was published in 2004. Since then she has been turning out spy thrillers in her Liz Carlyle series at the rate of one a year. At the age of 74, she has obviously not slowed her working pace much since her days in the 1990s as the first female director-general of MI5.Liz Carlyle is a clever and ambitious agent with MI5. As this novel begins, her boss and close friend, Charles Wetherby, the object of an unacknowledged but powerful and long-standing mutual attraction, has only recently been widowed. Unbeknown to Liz, the director-general is aware of her closeness to Charles and on the grounds that "office romances" can't be tolerated, decides that Liz must be sent, at least temporarily, on a mission elsewhere: Belfast, to be precise.This is a very smooth way of intertwining Liz's private life with her professional duties and in this kind of novel it works extremely well. The disconcerting background to her Belfast posting is that although "the troubles" seem on the surface to be well over and a fragile but working peace established in Ireland, there are still many people determined to carry on the sectarian struggle. One in particular is wreaking havoc.What's compelling about Rimington's novels is not so much their quality as thrillers, though she is a supremely competent and convincing writer in the genre; it's more the fact that she knows her subject matter perhaps better than anyone else in the world.We live in an age of extreme anxiety about authenticity and even though Rimington's work is unambiguously fiction, the reader feels reassured that life as an MI5 agent really is like this and Rimington is not just making stuff up. It's the same kind of readerly pleasure you might get out of a good police procedural written by a former senior member of the CIB. It's not that such authenticity is actually required in order to enjoy crime and thrillers but it's this quality that makes Rimington's novels special.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald