This is my review of Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.

At first, this seemed wooden and dated, a pale imitation of Trollope or Eliot, who had been writing in a similar vein two generations earlier. Initially, I found the main source of interest in the detailed descriptions of the industrial landscape of "The Five Towns", a kind of verbal Lowry, if the latter had painted the Potteries rather than Manchester.

Then, I became hooked by Bennett's portrayal of the main characters, which in time seemed to me more realistic and telling than his more celebrated Victorian forerunners. We know that Anna's relationship with the suave and capable Mynors will not follow a simple and happy path, since the author begins to hint at future tragedy, but will this be dramatic or subtly understated?

Competent, self-contained but inexperienced, Anna has been understandably dominated by her miserly tyrant of a father who has been punctilious in growing the fortune left her by her deceased mother, but cannot bring himself to give her free access to the money, only arbitrary duties such as his brutal insistence that she pursues rent arrears on one of her properties. Denied a normal, loving upbringing, it is hardly surprising that Anna find it difficult to establish a spontaneous romantic relationship with Mynors. She admires him, even imagines him in her bed, but it is only a matter of time before she comprehends that life with him means exchanging one tyrant for another, admittedly more benevolent than her father. It is easier for her to extend the maternal love she feels for her young sister to a weak, inept man who needs her support.

Bennett also proves clear-eyed over the materialism and hyprocrisy of some of the pillars of the local Methodist community, which exerts as great a domination on poor Anna as does her father. He describes with wry insight how the community deals with the suicide of a leading church member , "an abject yet heroic surrender of all those pretences by which society contrives to tolerate itself. Here was a man whom no one respected, but everyone pretended to respect – who knew he was respected by none, but pretended that he was respected by all….. If any man could have been trusted to continue the decent sham to the end and so preserve the general self-esteem, surely it was this man. But no! Suddenly abandoning all imposture, he transgresses openly….snatching a piece of hemp cries, `Behold me; this is real human nature. This is the truth; the rest was lies. I lied;you lied. I confess it, and you shall confess it.'"

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.

At first, this seemed wooden and dated, a pale imitation of Trollope or Eliot, who had been writing in a similar vein two generations earlier. Initially, I found the main source of interest in the detailed descriptions of the industrial landscape of "The Five Towns", a kind of verbal Lowry, if the latter had painted the Potteries rather than Manchester.

Then, I became hooked by Bennett's portrayal of the main characters, which in time seemed to me more realistic and telling than his more celebrated Victorian forerunners. We know that Anna's relationship with the suave and capable Mynors will not follow a simple and happy path, since the author begins to hint at future tragedy, but will this be dramatic or subtly understated?

Competent, self-contained but inexperienced, Anna has been understandably dominated by her miserly tyrant of a father who has been punctilious in growing the fortune left her by her deceased mother, but cannot bring himself to give her free access to the money, only arbitrary duties such as his brutal insistence that she pursues rent arrears on one of her properties. Denied a normal, loving upbringing, it is hardly surprising that Anna find it difficult to establish a spontaneous romantic relationship with Mynors. She admires him, even imagines him in her bed, but it is only a matter of time before she comprehends that life with him means exchanging one tyrant for another, admittedly more benevolent than her father. It is easier for her to extend the maternal love she feels for her young sister to a weak, inept man who needs her support.

Bennett also proves clear-eyed over the materialism and hyprocrisy of some of the pillars of the local Methodist community, which exerts as great a domination on poor Anna as does her father. He describes with wry insight how the community deals with the suicide of a leading church member , "an abject yet heroic surrender of all those pretences by which society contrives to tolerate itself. Here was a man whom no one respected, but everyone pretended to respect – who knew he was respected by none, but pretended that he was respected by all….. If any man could have been trusted to continue the decent sham to the end and so preserve the general self-esteem, surely it was this man. But no! Suddenly abandoning all imposture, he transgresses openly….snatching a piece of hemp cries, `Behold me; this is real human nature. This is the truth; the rest was lies. I lied;you lied. I confess it, and you shall confess it.'"

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of A Song from Dead Lips: Breen & Tozer 1 (Breen and Tozer) by William Shaw.

One of the latest in the seemingly inexhaustible series of dysfunctional detectives, Breen has more reason to be so than most – he is recovering from the recent death of his father for whom he has cared during a long decline. Is this sufficient excuse for running from the scene of a robbery on seeing his work colleague Prosser held at knife-point? Breen understandably has to face a good deal of flack from the rest of the team for this, but perhaps less convincingly no formal disciplining. Yet we can see he is an above-average officer from the painstaking attempt to interpret evidence on the murder case of a young woman and his tolerant attitude towards Tozer, the often out-of-line female officer foisted on him in an otherwise solidly male team.

Set in 1968 around Abbey Road at the time of Beatlemania, this story will strike several chords with those who can remember the period. Others may find it hard to credit the sexism, casual racism, ubiquitous chain-smoking, unchallenged bullying at work – in short, general political incorrectness, and it is unsettling to realise how unthinkingly one accepted it at the time.

Beneath a fairly conventional police detective drama there lie some serious issues such as police corruption in the 1960s and the cynical British reaction to the Biafran war, of which I was to my present shame then completely unaware. There is also some quite strong character development behind the stereotyped attitudes of the police officers, and the crude workplace humour and rivalries. After building up to a dramatic climax, the author clearly leaves the ending open for a sequel or two. Apart from a feeling that the subplot relating to Prosser is handled in a rather rushed way, and the quality of the writing, generally good, occasionally slips, I recommend this novel and intend to read the sequel, "A House of Knives".

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux.

Dutiful younger son Randolph Aldridge agrees to work as manager as Nimbus, the mismanaged but potentially profitable sawmill his wealthy father has just purchased in the remoteness of the Louisiana swamps. His perhaps unlikely motivation is to bring back to the fold his elder son Byron who has been located working as a "lawman", or security guard, at the site. He has returned from the First World War in a shell-shocked state that leaves him by turns aggressive and depressed, certain only that he no longer wishes to take over his father's business. Byron's resolve to restrict the opening hours of the local casino-bar embroils him in a bitter feud with the Sicilian mafia boss Buzetti who runs the gambling, and Randolph also becomes involved in the conflict.

After a slow start, the plot gathers pace, veering between violent barroom brawls and minute descriptions of river steamboats, trains and various aspects of sawmill production, all of which Gautreaux must have researched in great deal and seems to find fascinating, although I often felt frustrated by the lack of a diagram to explain his descriptions. The book has something of a Wild West quality, except that the landscape is of course bayou and swamp in periods of muggy heat and rain, rather than arid desert, and intense manual labour replaces rounding up cattle on the plains.

My admiration for Gautreaux's "The Missing", with its often original poetic language and vivid sense of place, led me to seek out this book, which has the same qualities. Beneath the at times wearisome swashbuckling, there is a thought-provoking portrayal of how "a whole forest" of cypress trees is turned into "window frames and water tanks". When Randolph seek out a livery stable to ride twenty miles to his new job, he is advised with brusque humour, "you better get a fat horse that'll float. if you don't break off his legs, you'll have to row him through some low spots". Whereas Randolph comes out of it all with a fat bank account and prosperous life-style, he is honest enough to realise that the mill workers end up with "only the same belongings they'd owned when they signed on". On night-shifts, some men carry pistols and scan "the borders of light for the luminescent eyeballs of alligators" and water moccasins lurk in puddles to bite the unwary by day. When it floods, Randolph can hear "the backs of turtles bumping against the floorboards". Yet, the menace of the natural world is as nothing compared to the threat from the determined criminals who seem immune from justice, since the Sheriff cannot be persuaded to take action against them: "I can't hardly enjoy being famous if I'm worried about some honky-tonk dago burning my house down".

As is often the case, the story carries an essential flaw, since Buzetti could easily have contrived the murder of Byron and Randolph in the first few chapters. Byron often seems too "together" in moments of stress to be truly shell-shocked. His wife Ella is a little too much of a cipher. In fact, in this male-dominated world, the men's characters are developed in much more depth than the women's.

Although I had reservations at first, and found the reading of this quite heavy-going at times, with a distinct need for editing out of some wordy detail, the enclosed world of "the clearing" was certainly well-embedded in my mind, I felt concern for the fate of the main characters, and by the end it seemed worth the effort. I can also imagine it as a film.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates.

This ambitious American novel is more than a crime thriller about a missing girl, gifted but plain, naïve and unstable Cressida, and Brett Kincaid who is suspected of harming her. Once an admired local sporting hero, he has returned, a physical and traumatised wreck from the Iraq war, the pressures of which have just brought to an end his longstanding engagement to Cressida’s beautiful elder sister Juliet. The author is also exploring the impact of the war on a small town community in New York State, and exposing the counterproductive effects of neglectful and cruel US high security penal institutions. On yet another level, this is a kind of modern fable, comparing the US with the declining state of Carthage, re-enacting in C21 terms the classical tale of “false Cressida”, the betrayer and bringer of misfortune to herself and others.

Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific and celebrated writer, with a clear compulsion to tell stories based on complex moral issues. She is often strong on creating diverse, if somewhat stereotyped characters who prove to have complex depths, convincing dialogues, and a vivid sense of place. The continual use of stream of consciousness in this novel carries the reader along, if you can “tune in” to it, and is effective in creating a sense of people’s changing, often fragmented, confused and changing thought processes.

What could have been an outstanding novel gives the impression of having been written in a rush. There is a breathless quality to the great flooded river of prose: the overuse of exclamation marks and brackets often grated on me. There is a good deal of repetition, which has a hypnotic effect but may be the result of a lack of editing. I also had to get used to the frequent “back-to-front” sentence structure which may need to be read twice to grasp the meaning. "Not contempt for the political propaganda fanned on all sides like deliberately set fires but fear – of what the new military invasion would lead to, beyond estimation".

Although the long chapter on a prison tour is a powerful polemic against the brutalising effects of incarceration without rehabilitation and more particularly of capital punishment, I found the delivery quite stagy, and such characters as “the Investigator” and his assistant “the Intern” unconvincing. This may have been a deliberate “unreal” yet hard-hitting interlude in the main story of the Mayfield family, which is gripping and moving, until it reaches an ambiguous ending, open to interpretation as either trite or chilling.

Flawed and irritating, yet full of insights into the human condition and memorable, this story is hard to “rate”.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014 by Karen Joy Fowler.

In this quirky and original tale, the narrator Rosemary Cooke introduces us to her dysfunctional family: father a college psychology professor, “a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, fly-fishing atheist from Indianapolis”, mother regularly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and intriguing elephants in the room: the two older siblings, Lowell and Fern who have left home abruptly and are no longer in contact.

This is the kind of novel that depends on the order in which details are revealed and about thirty per cent of the way in, the author casually drops a bombshell which obliged me to go back and reread from the beginning to check for missed clues. Beneath an entertaining veneer, the story explores the effects of an academic psychologist’s decision to conduct an experiment on his family, and also the reliability of childhood memory.

At first, the wisecracking American style and habit of addressing the reader is by turns amusing and irritating, but not moving:

“My father made a crude joke….If the joke were witty, I’d include it, but it wasn’t. You’d think less of him and thinking less of him is my job, not yours.” Yet gradually, as the implications of a disconcerting, even shocking, situation become clear, the humour – often very funny – helps to make the poignancy and sadness more bearable.

At times, this seems an odd mixture of story, polemic against animal testing and popular psychology textbook, with some of the author’s background research slotted into chapters in a slightly disjointed and didactic fashion. The desire to follow the plot and understand the various theories tend to pull the reader in different directions. It’s easy to miss interesting points on the first reading, like the quotations from Kafka at the beginning of each section, particularly well-judged when you realise why they are there. There’s also food for thought in the idea that Thomas More’s Utopia relied on a warlike tribe to fight its battles, and slaves to kill animals to provide its meat.

I would give five stars for the zany yet telling flights of creative thought, although I found the subplot with Rosemary’s friend Harlow weaker than the main story of the Cooke family, and the narration is often repetitious and perhaps a little trite at the very end.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

 

This is my review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.

Exhausted, sick, and starving Aussie servicemen forced to watch the brutal beating of a colleague in a Japanese wartime prison camp distanced themselves from the horror by focusing on their next inadequate meal, or the feast they might one day enjoy again back home. In the same way, the reader often has to switch off from Flanagan's unrelenting portrayal of the cruelty and squalor of life for those slaving on the Burma railway. Since the author's own father was one of the slave labourers, the book must be based on first person anecdotes, although the violence sometimes seems overdone, as when a man already at death's door is flogged for what seems like hours but somehow survives.

The story revolves around Dorrigo Evans, the only member of his family to win a scholarship and become an eminent if controversial surgeon, most revered for his leadership of men held prisoner by the Japanese. Crises seem to bring out the hero in Dorrigo. Otherwise, beneath his veneer of confidence and charm, he is a shell of a man, promiscuous and nihilistic, haunted by the horrors of the war and the loss of the only woman he believes himself to have loved.

With continual switches back and forth in time and between points of view, the book often seems rambling and disjointed, although this may serve Flanagan's intention to show the nature of memory, and the influence of the past on the future. He moulds words to convey complex thoughts:

"…the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life….. people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space their private world…. And the more that private life becomes a secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt."

Flanagan creates vivid images of "writhing peppermint gums and silver wattle that waved and danced" in the Tasmanian heat, or "monsoonal rain flogging the long A-framed shelter – bamboo and open-walled" in the Burmese jungle. He often focuses on a single incident, leaving major events to the imagination. There are subtly moving scenes as when Dorrigo travels through the snow to a remote farmhouse to comfort the widow of one of his colleagues. Another, is when three camp survivors of the camps embark on a well-intentioned drunken escapade to fulfil the dream of a dead colleague, with an unexpected positive outcome.

The author extends the perhaps overworked theme of the wartime camps by exploring "life afterwards" for both the Australians and the Japanese, although the latter sometimes seem stereotyped and two-dimensional, despite the inclusion of some beautiful if ironic haiku. Scenes of intense brutality are shot through with threads of sentimentality. There are a few too many contrived coincidences towards the end when Flanagan is tying up loose strands in a belated stab at plot. Perhaps he tells us too much what to think of characters like Dorrigo and his love "Amy-ami-amour". These are flaws in the often brilliant flow of an author celebrated in Australia, now gaining recognition in the UK, but it gives plenty of meat for discussion if you have the stomach for it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng.

I have given this ambitious first novel four stars because, although flawed, it is thought-provoking and conveys a vivid impression of the cultural diversity of Malaya during the 1930s-40s, and what the diverse population had to endure.

As the British in Malaya sleepwalk into the outbreak of World War 2, Philip feels somewhat alienated from the Hutton family who have made money in business and trade in the Far East for over a century. He is the youngest son, and the product of a second marriage between his father and a Chinese woman who died when Philip was small. So, he is susceptible to the influence of the charismatic Endo-san, teacher of the martial art of aikido and probable spy, laying plans for the Japanese invasion of Malaya. Although Philip has been brought up as a Christian, he has flashes of awareness of having lived in a past life with Endo-san, and of achieving a state of enlightenment through meditation.

The author's status as a Chinese Malayan and martial arts practitioner give authenticity to a plot with great potential for drama, intrigue and insight into relationships between cultures. I do not mind slow-paced, reflective novels and do not feel the need to like the main character – in this case, Philip comes across as emotionally repressed. So, why did I find Part 1 such hard going? This was partly due to an often stiff and wooden dialogue, although this may have been an attempt to convey the formality of some modes of Far Eastern expression. The plot makes heavy use of reminiscence and a "telling" style, which combine to distance the reader somewhat from events. The confidante Michiko Murakami seems dispensable to me. The book is laden with characters and minor details, and would have been sharper with more ruthless editing.

With the Japanese invasion in Part 2, the novel belatedly takes off, improving in both pace, style and dialogue. We know from the outset that Philip collaborates with the Japanese during the war, and now it becomes clear why and how. Is he naïve in thinking this will save his family? Will he ever be forgiven for his apparent treachery? Is he in fact motivated by a homoerotic relationship with Endo-san? – The author never specifically describes this as such, and the link between the two is caught up what may interest Tan Twan Eng most, namely the fact that the two men may be fated to meet in successive lives until certain matters are resolved.

Although I would say this book is original and well-written in places, it seems overlong and the author seems reluctant to "call it a day" at the end. Fascinating issues at the heart of the book are somehow not explored as clearly as I hoped. I was also repelled in particular by the obsession with daggers and swords, and switches between moments of an almost psychopathic acceptance of ritual killing to enable even guilty men to die honourably and passages of shallow sentimentality. This is, I suppose, my western take on eastern cultures I do not fully understand.

The author's second book, "Garden of the Evening Mists" is similar in having a wealthy half-westernised Malayan fall under the spell of a talented and manipulative Japanese man, in this case a gardener and tattooist. I think the later book shows a development in the author's skill as a writer, although the plot of "The Gift of Rain" is potentially more powerful and moving.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars