This is my review of Brazil Red by Jean-Christophe Rufin.

When Just and his younger sister Colombe are left by their soldier father in the care of an unscrupulous relative, she seizes the chance to send them off on an expedition to found a new French colony in Brazil, children being in demand as future interpreters because of their ability to pick languages up quickly. It is the mid-1500s, and France is keen to curtail Portuguese imperial ambitions in the New World, to gain access to resources, such as the red dye obtainable from Brazilian trees (hence the title) and to convert the savage Indians to Christianity. However, with the Reformation in full spate, what are they to be taught: the old Catholic faith, or which version of Protestantism including the extreme, apparently abstruse, doctrine of Calvin?

The crew on board ship are a motley bunch, including criminals and Protestants escaping persecution, including a crazed band of Anabaptists, so Colombe’s disguise as a boy probably provides much-needed protection. Once the pair’s aristocratic connections become known, they are taken under the wing of the charismatic but unstable commander Villegagnon, based on a real-life character. Having reached their destination in Guanabara Bay, the site of the present-day Rio de Janeiro, Just readily accepts the life of constructing a fortress and learning how to defend it against future attacks. More reflective, Colombe who has been sent to learn the local Tupi language, identifies strongly with the Indians, living in harmony with nature and free from sterile wrangling over Christian rituals and doctrine.

With his experience as a diplomat and human rights’ worker, including a decade spent living in Rio de Janeiro, Rufin has researched the historical period in depth. This novel is a variation on a theme which absorbs him: the dramatic effects of the meeting between very different cultures, and the sense which many of those involved feel of being in a state of limbo, not clearly belonging to either.

Although Rufin creates a convincing impression of life on board ship, I found the first half of this book intolerably tedious. He no doubt intentionally adopts the formal, literary style of a nineteenth century classical novel, peppered with the authentic terms for items of clothing or parts of a ship, culled from histories of the sixteenth century. However, there are too many over-detailed or unnecessary scenes which could have been pruned down or omitted altogether. Colombe is idealised, and seems too mature and articulate for her age. Most of the other characters are caricatures, dialogues wooden and often the action does not seem far removed from a “Boys’ Own” yarn.

However, when the Calvinists whom Villegagnon has requested to assist him prove to be religious bigots, while Colombe’s experience of life with the Indians highlights the hollowness of so-called European “civilisation”, I began to find my interest engaged. It is as if, having waded through to the point where he wants to be, analysing cultural relations, Rufin comes into his own and his writing takes off, presenting points of view from all angles, with the irony becoming sharper. Yet he can never quite avoid straying into the corny or sentimental at the expense of his serious intent.

The descriptions of the landscape, the great bay with the distinctive sugarloaf mountain and forest teeming with unfamiliar vegetation and wildlife are very vivid. There is some thought-provoking philosophy, as when Pay-Lo, the wise old European conveniently gone native, enabling him to explain Indian thought to Colombe, justifies cannibalism. He likens it to the European habit of killing one’s enemies: to eat one’s enemy is merely a logical part of a life lived close to nature in which everything is recycled and returned to the earth to regrow. Rufin has sanitised and glamorised the lives of the Indians somewhat, but they are clearly underestimated by the Huguenots who decide that trying to convert them is as futile as the attempt to bring an antelope to the knowledge of Christ.

Despite the unusual and potentially interesting subject-matter, the novel is too long and laboured. I would have preferred a well-written history of the period.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Cousins by Salley Vickers.

After the accident which befalls brilliant but troubled, aptly-named Will, his sister Hetta is driven to delve for the chain of events which may have led to it, and to understand its serious repercussions for some family members. The accident is remarkably similar to that suffered years earlier by his Uncle Nat.

Sally Vickers’ approach is ambitious – instead of providing a family saga over three generations or more, she inverts the process by switching between the viewpoints of three women who recall their memories, with distinct personalities and “voices”: Hetta, her aunt Bell, and grandmother Betsy. On reflection, it requires great skill to sustain this approach, gradually revealing facts as in a detective mystery, with the added interest of describing the same situation or character from different viewpoints, some clearly mistaken, or in possession of fewer "facts" than the reader.

The author admits to “plundering and imbibing” experiences from her parents who were lifelong communists, like Betsy’s husband Fred who casually put his political beliefs before the needs of his wife and children, but Sally Vickers’ insight as a psychiatric social worker and psychoanalyst are really what give this novel its “edge”.

Most likely to appeal to readers with an interest in psychological drama in which thought-provoking comments are more important than the plot, however superficially gripping, it is probably necessary to read this a second time to absorb and reflect on all the author’s observations and how they might apply to oneself. It is hard to do this on the first reading partly because intense concentration is needed to grasp all the details, never being quite sure which are important to remember, plus this is a page-turner as regards finding out how it will end, although at times the bleak intensity of it forced me to take a break. The conclusion proves quite philosophically up-beat, perhaps an appropriate reflection of how in reality one moves from anger and denial to positive acceptance.

I agree with readers who feel there are too many characters, some of whom could have been omitted, although others on the periphery who are given such a brief mention as to be forgotten turn out to be important, which suggests they should have been developed in more depth. There often seems to be too much “telling” of details from the past, which could make the reader glaze over mentally, but for the acute perceptions and flashes of wry humour which leap off the page without warning. Although there is less of the strong sense of place to be found in some of her previous novels, the Northumberland coast and Holy Island of St. Cuthbert fame form a recurring background.

The plot is well-structured, starting with the “hook” of Hetta’s conviction that Will is going to die, but we don’t yet know why, and gathering pace to a plausible but not too predictable or neat conclusion. Since the author is clearly so interested in how family members relate to each other, I am unsure to what extent she intends us to feel that their guilt is an unnecessary burden, responsibility for Will’s accident seeming to lie mainly with “outsiders”. I was disappointed that these are portrayed as two-dimensional, almost “pantomime” villains.

Occasionally, the novel strikes too sentimental a note for my liking as when Betsy suggests that the loss of his twin sister at birth meant that “life was never quite right” for Will because of the burden of being a survivor – evident from his newborn “strangely unchildlike”, “relentless frantic wail”.

Recommended overall, including as a book group choice to provoke discussion.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Violins of Saint-Jacques: A Tale of the Antilles by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

In this short novel, written in a continuous chapter-free flow, an elderly artist name Berthe recounts to the narrator the dramatic climax of her time spent fifty years previously on the Caribbean island of Saint-Jacques, ruled as a benevolent dictatorship by the aristocratic expatriate French Count, by whom she was employed as a governess but came to enjoy the status of a respected virtual member of the family, his “confidant and counsellor”. It took me a while to grasp that the island is outlined so sketchily on the map provided, because it is imaginary. This enabled me to overlook some of the worrying geographical inconsistencies (for a travel writer) of having lush forest grow so close to the active volcano forming the core of the island.

Although many devotees of the travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor may be delighted by the only novel he ever produced in a prolific writing career, I abandoned it mid-way and had to force myself to finish it. I concede that the second half is better, since it contains more dramatic action, when all the “hazards and sorrows ahead ” begin to crack the surface of the idyllic bubble of exotic privilege which the author has inflated with his literary flourishes at full spate in the first half, largely devoted to the preparations and conduct of a grand Shrove Tuesday ball, no expenses spared.

I understand why some readers revel in Leigh-Fermor’s Rococo prose, which I admit once aroused my curiosity to visit what proved to be the remarkable Austrian monastery of Melk. However, in this context, the verbosity is just too much to take. In the course of a lengthy description of the Count’s background, Leigh-Fermor turns to the memorial slabs of his dead ancestors, the Serindans: “The orgulous record of their gestures…..their impavid patience in adversity…..the splendour of their munificence and their pious ends was incised with a swirling seventeenth-century duplication of long S’s and a cumulative nexus of dog-Latin superlatives which hissed from the shattered slabs like a basketful of snakes”. The “Serindan cognizance” crops up again: “ a shield bearing three greyhounds passant on a bend on a field of cross-crosslets within a tressure flory-counter-flory”. I found myself irritated by the author’s continual flaunting of his erudition and addiction to flamboyant verbal excess, rather than sincerely seeking to create three-dimensional complex characters for whom one might feel real empathy.

The frequent inclusion of Latin tags, and dialogues in French, often with a Creole patois, plus an imitation of the Count’s weak “r”s which the local people have innocently copied, often seem both pretentious and irritating if one cannot understand them. I may be underestimating his intention to write tongue-in-cheek as in the passage about ancient tree trunks, each “half following the spiral convolutions of the other like dancing partners in a waltzing forest; the rising moon entangled overhead in the silver and lanceolate leaves, had frozen these gyrations into immobility.” – A “highly literary simile" which he attributes to Berthe. Perhaps I should excuse the dated character of a book written more than sixty years ago about a period now more than a century past. Yet, in his creation of a dawn of twentieth century period when privileged people still lived complacently in the conspicuous consumption of untrammelled luxury served with unquestioning loyalty by contented slaves, I have the uneasy impression that Leigh Fermor does not question the morality of all this – it reads like a lost world for which he feels a sentimental nostalgia. An extreme example of this is the jovial acceptance of the Count’s practice of “droit de jambage”, a Leigh-Fermor conceit for “droit de seigneur”.

Perhaps, I am taking it too seriously, and should simply laugh at a guest dressed as a swordfish, and a heroine in flight falling over an armadillo.

⭐⭐⭐ 3 Stars

This is my review of Golden Hill by Francis Spufford.

In the parochial little British colony of mid-eighteenth century New York, no one knows what to make of the handsome young new arrival from London, Mr Richard Smith. Is he a provocative conman, or a well-intentioned blunderer? Should the wily merchant Lovell accept his bill of exchange demanding the vast and ruinous sum of a thousand pounds? When the gossip grapevine spreads the word of Smith’s wealth, everyone wants to curry his favour, but a twist of misfortune can quickly set the whole community against him

Francis Spufford has used his research skills as an established writer of non-fiction to recreate in his first novel the minute and vivid detail of a past age which seems to ring true even if it is fact an artful illusion. This is a modern take on a Henry Fielding, Tom Jones kind of fiction, a succession of quirky events, with a sometimes intrusive narrator, but free from the sententious, long-winded moralising of the classics. The author has even taken the bold risk of adopting an eighteenth century turn of phrase, and appears to carry it off. Although some may find the style somewhat contrived and overblown, I was continually impressed by his skill in moulding words into distinctive, original images and thoughts. Often funny, entertaining yet farcical, the narrative keeps returning to the alternating spark and pathos of Smith’s encounters with the sharp-tongued, unpredictable Tabitha Lovell, the bird in a cage of her own making. He is drawn to her fatefully, despite knowing that “there is something very wrong with her”.

He made me realise how the lack of coins in New York obliged people to trade with a bewildering variety of coins of arbitrary value “ a Morisco piece we can’t read, but it weighs in at fourteen pennyweight, sterling, so we’ll call it two-and-six”. He can write a whole page on the simple act of walking in near darkness through a hall and up a staircase: “picture frames set faint rumours of gold around rectangles of darkness or curious glitters too shadowed to make out, as if Lovell had somehow collected, and drowned, a stairwell’s worth of distant constellations”. And so the narrative rattles on through the twists and turns of pursuits of a thief, sinister bonfire celebrations, melodramatic escapes across roof-tops, imprisonment, amateur dramatics, and duelling in the snow.

Francis Spufford could make paint drying sound interesting, as when Smith describes a boat trip up the Hudson River through a fog which shifts from “coagulated grey curtains…. to mere streamers and tatters….. while little cats’-paws of breeze come wrinkling and dabbing…..scuffing the water… from silver to pewter” or observes the winter ice forming on the East River, “into whose depths you could look and see swirls of grey brine and glassy freshwater fused together as still and rigid as the heart of a child’s marble.

Beneath the flippant, tongue-in-cheek portrayal of a varied cast of well-drawn characters with hints of their failings and secrets, run the darker currents of the serious rivalry between the Governor and smoothly menacing, power-hungry Judge De Launcey, the crude and corrupt system of justice, and the contemptuous exploitation of the slaves on whom the prosperity of the colony is based. There is the lurking knowledge that even a happy ending will be short-lived, since the colony is shortly to be blasted apart by the War of Independence with Great Britain.

On finishing this book I was left with a sense of disappointment, partly because the verbal pyrotechnics of this well-plotted page-turner made other novels seem bland. It was also due to my finding the denouement revealing Smith’s much-hinted at but long-kept secret something of an under-developed anti-climax, and the final unsettling twist too clever by half. Yet I did not mind that the ending is inconclusive. In general, for sheer originality and the quality of the writing, this book would make a deserving winner of the Man Booker Prize.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars