Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus

From the back of the book-

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Reves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire.

Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the reveurs-the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter's daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer's apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love...

This historical fantasy presents an unusual love story. For the bulk of the novel the protagonists are unaware of each others identity, knowing only that they are in competition with each other to prove their superiority. Their main means of communication is through challenging each other to greater and greater feats of magic within the arena of the circus.

The idea of practitioners of different disciplines within the same field challenging each other for superiority isn't new. Neither is the enemies to friends to lovers concept. This book stands out because both of these aspects have been done so well. The characters are all larger than life but somehow fit easily in the story. Secondary characters are as well developed as primary ones. The plot manages to unfold gently without losing pace.

There is an unmistakable literary inclination here with layers of meaning and subtlties to be seen if the reader is so inclined (the symbolism of a black and white world being the most obvious) but the story can be enjoyed without contemplating those deeper levels.

Quite unlike anything I've read in a long while. Delightful-Lynn

Carol Goodman: The Drowning Tree

From the back of the book-
Juno McKay intended to avoid her fifteenth-year college reunion, but she can't resist the chance to see her longime friend Christine Webb. Though Juno cringes at the inevitable talk of her troubled personal life-and the husband who ended up in a mental hopsital only two years after their wedding-she endures the gossip for her friend's sake.
While lecturing at the Penrose College library, Christine shocks the rapt crowd by reavling little-known details about the lives of two sisters-memebers of the influential family whose name the college bears. Christine's revelations throw shadows of betrayal, lust, and insanity over the family's distinguished facade.
After her speech, Christine seems distant, uneasy, and sad. The next day, she disappears. Juno is alarmed and begins to peel away the layer of secrets and madness that surround the Penrose dynasty. She fears that Christine discovered somethig damning about them, perhaps even something worth killing for. And Juno is derermined to find it-for her friend and for herself.
This tangled combination of historical and modern mystery tales has a strong literary flavour. The pace is slow, the characters complex and the story deceptively straight forward.
My last foray into this author's work didn't leave me partiuclarly impressed but I'm pleased to say this effort was much more enjoyable. There were enough red herrings thrown in to cloud the antagonist's identity without it coming as a complete surprise at the end of the story or worse, being telegraphed loudly throughout the book. A complicated romantic subplot fits in well.
I would class this as a mild modern gothic worth a look for those with an interest in the genre and comfortable with a less sensational approach.-Lynn

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender

In the week of her ninth birthday Rose Edlestein’s restive, restless mother bakes a cake. She’s made them before, and the ingredients are the same, but the usually distinctive flavours of chocolate and lemon are drowned out by absence, hunger, emptiness.
It’s not just her mother’s food – Rose can now taste the emotions of everyone who cooks her food or contributes to the ingredients – the nastiness of the farmer who grew that parsley, the cows whose milk is in this cheddar, the wholly factory-processed chocolate chips. In a world where despair, sadness, anger and desperation are rife, it is the latter that literally saves Rose’s life in adolescence, when the comforting nothingness of foods untouched by human hand offer her the only respite from an onslaught of gustatory emotion. And in the process Rose becomes familiar with the unique qualities of every large scale farm and processing plant in the US, as well as many around the world.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a unique novel that looks like another story of family dysfunction - loving but distant father, needy and unchallenged mother, brilliant but strange and removed older brother, introspective and responsible narrator. The theme of children compromising themselves for their parents is not new, but it is very well handled here, and the first person voice neatly walks the line between girl and retrospective woman. The familial functional dysfunction aspect is well done, and the use of tasting emotion through food is really interesting route, that not only allows Rose to discover and describe the emotions of those around her but also explore the nature of isolation. I was for some reason strongly reminded of the very different Perfume, which I was sure I reviewed but can't find anywhere. I'm not sure why the evocation was so strong - perhaps because of the detailed and nuanced descriptions illuminating aspects of a sense to which most of us are comparatively oblivious.
What is very different about The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, though, is the surprising SF element that appears midway through an otherwise more literary narrative. Always somewhat different, Joe seems to vanish without notice – at first for short periods and then for progressively longer periods of time, never talking about what he did or where he went, and looking less well on each return. At first this seems like relatively unremarkable adolescent behaviour, but quite late in the book we discover a clearly paranormal occurrence (not at all in the sense of magic or vampires-and-werewolves, more like Gould’s Jumper). The concept is woven into elements already present in the text, particularly right near the end, but I didn’t find this added illumination so much as surprise, for up until that point I’d thought I was reading something at the more literary end of book group fodder. Rose’s ability is certainly fantastical, but did not break my willing suspension of disbelief. This talent (or, possibly, propensity) of Joe’s. However, is most definitely fantasy/science fiction territory, and I’m not sure the genre mix is entirely comfortable.
This is not in any way to suggest that SF is inherently unliterary, nor that I’m opposed to crossing genres. Some of the best writing I enjoy falls firmly into the former category (this includes the redoubtable Sawyer and the magnificent Bujold among others), and some lauded literary writers have created what are unquestionably works of FSF (from Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale to 1984, Brave New World and Farenheit 451). While I can think of none off the top of my head, I know I’ve enjoyed unusual genre combinations in the past. I’ve given this no little thought and am quite frustrated that I can't think of any, so suggestions are expressly invited!

I did get a strong Book Group feel from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake; I was not wholly involved with it but curious to see how it (and Rose) would unfold. I’m not sorry I read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which I picked up as a 3-for-2 offer recently, but had no strong desire to read more of Bender’s work. Writing this review, though, has unexpectedly piqued my curiosity though, so watch this space. – Alex

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin

Former football star Silas “32” Jones was once the closest thing to a friend that Larry Ott had. They could not have been more different, in terms of race, poise, financial security, parental support or popularity, but they connected. For a time. After Cindy, everything changed.
The disappearance of popular Cindy Rutherford shook the small Mississippi town of Chabot – though she was never found, and there was no evidence, it was obvious that she was killed by her classmate – slightly strange and socially awkward, Larry’s story of dropping her off at her request is patently ridiculous.
Twenty years later the mystery continues to reverberate in Chabot, for nobody more than Larry Ott. His inherited automotive repair business used only by strangers passing through, Larry is more socially isolated than ever. The town has never forgotten; eight days after college girl Tina Rutherford was reported missing, Larry is shot in his home and left for dead.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is an arresting portrait of contrast and intersection – white and black, poor and rich, innocence and guilt, trust and betrayal, courage and cowardice, action and inaction all overlap and intersect. The text steps effortlessly between the past and the unfolding present, slowly revealing secrets and answers, while prompting psychological questions.
This is, quite clearly, literature despite the mystery at Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter’s core – though the disappearances, decades apart, of two white girls in their late teens act as an initial impetus for the narrative, they are a pretext for the exploration of deeper, less obvious mysteries. These include questions about the central characters of ‘Scary Larry’ and 32, but also about the meanings of friendship, connection, moral bravery, subtle peer pressure, fear, love and the meaning of truth. I realise that this description gives away almost nothing of the plot, but it's so closely interwoven that anything more specific would ruin it.
There are a number of laudatory reviews at the front of my paperback copy, with comparisons to other Southern literary works (To Kill a Mockingbird and Faulkner’s Sanctuary) – though I enjoyed the reading experience, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter didn’t quite have that level of emotional impact for me. The most pivotal revelations, which come late in the text, were gentle undulations in a text I found interesting and engaging but pastoral rather than vivid, no doubt in part because I'd guessed quite early on that Larry and 32 were brothers.
I felt that the book could stand on its own but, no doubt in response to public demand, there is an additional section at the end about the author, his back ground and the novel’s development, the process of turning autobiography in to fiction, and a readers’ group guide. I found this last particularly irritating, but this has more to do with me than the book itself.
I’m glad I read Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a 2010 release I bought in Sydney this June (instead of reading books from my back log), read on my way to Hong Kong, and am reviewing on a train from Nijmegen to Schiphol. I shall leave it here, hoping it finds a receptive readership; I think once is sufficient for me. – Alex

Think of a Number - John Verdon

Dave Gurney was best known for his capture of some of the East Coast's most infamous serial killers; in his retirement a chance art class, taken at the behest of his wife Madeleine, is allowing his an outlet related to but not directly connected with his police work. He's quite content to work, pixel by pixel, on digital images of his successes, to the disappointment of Madeleine, who had hoped for a murder-free life. Gurney's content, that is, until a former classmate contacts him.
Gurney was never friends with Mark Mellery, much as the latter's letter tries to imply the contrary. What is clear, though it is thinly masked, is that the other man is frightened. An alcoholic to the point that he blacked out while his wife drowned only feet away, Mellery has turned his life around to become a guru of personal transformation. Everything was fine - new career, wonderful house, acclaim, a loving wife - until the first letter.
Penned in red ink, the cryptic note alludes to a connection with the past and is written by a former, unnamed confidant so close to Mellery that he is able to predict what number Mellery would chose when asked to pick one between one and a hundred. The number (658) has no significance for Mellery, and the idea that this number (sealed inside an included envelope) could be known by another person totally disturbs him. It's the next stage, however, that causes him to contact Guerney - to find out who knows him so well, the second note says, Mellery must send cash or a cheque to a PO Box in the name of X. Arybdis ("not always my name"). Mellery sends the cheque, which is returned as unknown by the PO Box holder. The returned cheque is soon followed by two eight-line poems, also in red ink, that hint at past misdeeds and an impending threat.
I was attracted to Think of a Number (the first in what will clearly be a series) by the premise of a stranger being able to guess what random number another person would pick. I began reading it soon after, only to put it down after a couple of pages because I found the writing style irritating. I have, however, entirely too many unread books and so I took the opportunity of a long-haul flight to make inroads on some of the backlog. I'm glad I did - the mystery is interesting and unique, the character of Guerney interesting and flawed (I do believe that's mandatory in contemporary novels of the genre), and I really liked the way Madeleine's quite different perspective illuminates aspects of the case.
However, there were several times where I got ahead of Guerney, often by several chapters - these included how the killer guessed another number (ridiculously obvious answer that occurred to me immediately but not to Guerney until 240 pages later), the meaning of his pseudonym (X. Arybdis), and the identity of the killer a couple of chapters ahead of out hero. Fortunately, posing over the book for this review I now have an answer to something I had been thinking of as an unanswered loose end: a fish ("Was it a flounder?" Madeleine asked) was left at one scene to link it to another murder.
My biggest issue with Think of a Number (Numb3r in some editions), though, is the tone. The writing has a literary quality at odds with the genre - sentences are not only over-long but unnecessarily descriptive, and Guerney is introspective and self-reflective to a ridiculous extent. Opening the book at random I found:

He closed his eyes, hoping the goodness of the moment would counteract those mental energies that were always propelling him into puzzle solving. For Guerney, achieving even a little contentment was, ironically, a struggle. He envied Madeleine's keen attachment to the fleeing instant and the pleasure she found in it. For him living in the moment was always a swim upstream, his analytical mind naturally preferring the realms of probability, possibility. He wondered if it was a genetic or learned form of escape. Probably both, mutually reinforcing....
Jesus!
He caught himself in the absurd act of analyzing his propensity for analysis. He ruefully tried again to be present in the room.

Gurney notes, assesses and weighs every characters' every aspect, and Verdon faithfully records it all. In case tone, word choice and description are inadequate, utterances are also qualified - glints in eyes shout, lips are pursed "by way of complaint"
There's also something of a laziness of description despite this gratuitous detail - a pathologist strongly resembles Sigourney Weaver (occasionally adopting a Mr Rogers-like tone, which no doubt has more resonance for American readers than I), two functionaries are reminiscent of Tom Cruise, and Guerney himself "looked like Robert Redford in All the President's Men" at college and "Still do - haven't changed a bit!".
I could also have done with more shades of grey - the supporting cast, primarily senior law enforcement, lawyers and politicians, are almost without exception relentlessly blustery, vainglorious and incompetent.
Despite this I finished Think of a Number, primarily because the mysteries (how did the footprints in the snow abruptly end? And most pivotal, how was the number 658 guessed?). I was also pleased that one thing I predicted (Madeleine leaving) didn't occur, though there's at least one sequel to come. I don't think I like Guerney much - his family come a distant second to work, despite the tragic death of his young son (in no small part due to Guerney's distraction about a case) - even when he doesn't have the potential death of future victims as an excuse he still fails to pay attention to his wife, or to do things that he knows would please her, in a passive-aggressive way I found markedly off-putting.
I did enjoy Think of a Number more than I suspect this review indicates. If you're interested in a mystery that combines an unusually literary feel with violent murder and a few good tricks you could do worse than pick this up. I suspect that, should I return to Verdon's work, which may well mellow with experience, it will via the library - I see that the sequel, Close Your Eyes Tight is available for loan. - Alex

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam

From the cover:

Dr. Vincent Lam's literary debut delivers an unflinching portrait of his profession, following a group of four ambitious young doctors as they move from the pressures of medical school into the intense world of emergency medicine, evacuation missions, and terrifying new viruses.
Through the eyes of Fitz, Ming, Chen, and Sri, Lam finds conflict - and humanity - in the most surprising moments. Together these doctors test the bounds of intimacy as they cope with exam pressure, weigh moral dilemmas as they dissect cadavers, confront police who assault their patients, and treat schizophrenics with pathologies similar to their own.

Subtitled Stories, this is a collection of interconnected short stories that combine to create a complex narrative whole greater than the sum of its parts. And the parts all sound completely up my alley - health care, the evolution of practitioners, exciting scenarios realistically portrayed, ethico-moral decision making, and even interaction with the dead (my current research focus).
Sadly, I was unable to enjoy the panoply of the whole, because I found the trek into Lam's literary debut entirely too arduous a journey to complete, stopping at page 69, roughly half way through the third story. I therefore can't render a review of the whole, but will quite happily discuss the parts I managed:
The first story, "How to Get into Medical School, part 1" is about Ming and Fitz. He's American, she's the daughter of Chinese migrants who have very traditional beliefs which don't include their daughter either distracting herself from her pre-med studies or her dating a white boy. Though Ming pretends to herself that she's only spending time with Fitz to improve her study, she's really attracted to him, and knows he is to her. what Fitz doesn't know - what nobody knows - is that Ming is dirty, and her academic success rides on the back of sexual abuse.
"Take All of Murphy" picks up when Ming, Chen and Sri are partnered together in the cadaver lab. They're cautioned to treat their cadaver, who they name Murphy, with respect; they're also expected to dissect him with care and according to the text book. But the text book doesn't include an ornate and clearly symbolically important tattoo right over an intended dissection site. The students have to decide whether respect for Murphy trumps their academic requirements.
"How to Get into Medical School, part 2" picks up Fitz's narrative - he didn't get into medical school with Ming, and since she started they barely speak. He feels as driven by his need to see her as by his desire to study medicine/be a doctor, until a chance accident gives him the first peace he's known in months. I have no idea how that ends or him, though, as I put Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures down at that point and just couldn't bring myself to pick it back up.
This was for two reasons. The first is that I didn't connect with any of the characters, and so I just didn't care at all what happened to them. I found Lam's creations self-oriented, relatively two-dimensional, with tragic histories included not as extra depth but in lieu of character development (Ming's aforementioned abuse, Fitz's motherlessness). This might have been alright if there was an emphasis on plot, but Bloodletting is Literature, so (at least in the part I read) plot isn't a huge narrative driver.
The second issue is that I was frequently snapped out of the book by the writing. Fitz in particular is overly analytical, self-conscious and introspective, his every move accompanied by an exploration of its deeper meaning and possible interpretations:

Fitz picked up a shrimp chip by its edge, dipped it in the peanut sauce with red pepper flakes, and crunched. His face became sweaty and bloomed red as he chewed, the n coughed. He grasped the water glass and took a quick gulp...
He coughed to his right side, and had difficulty stopping. He reminded himself to sit up straight while coughing, realized he wasn't covering his mouth, was embarrassed that his fair skin burned hot and red, wondered in a panicky blur if this redness would be seen to portray most keenly his injured emotional state, his physical vulnerability in choking, his Anglocentric intolerance to chili, his embarrassment at not initially covering his mouth, his obvious infatuation with Ming, or - worst of all - could be interpreted as a feeble attempt to mask or distract from his discomfort at her pre-emptive romantic rejection.

A couple of page later, after Ming has gone and Fitz begins to drown his sorrows,

The pain of rejection was a significant shade different from the longing of desire, he noted, though drawn from the same palette. This somber phase could generally be gotten through withal few more, and therefore justified the third drink. A washroom break. With the third pint came the brink between anger and the careless release that could sometimes be attained and was the goal of the drinking. Fitz tired to will himself into this easy release, to tip over the meniscus of anger that grew like water perched higher than the rim of a glass, but it didn't work today.

Really, a 'meniscus of anger'? I found the writing style pretentious, the characters flat, and felt that insufficient use was made out of potentially strong scenarios. Of course, this is a literary work, and these elements aren't exactly out of place in this genre.
It probably didn't help that my expectations going in were more in line with a House of God type work, perhaps without the awful first chapter of that classic work, and I anticipated the lucid writing of some of my favourite medical authors (like Gawande, Groopman or, if we're going for the purely literary fiction, Klass). This is my own fault, and not that of the author, for whom my expectations were raised by the reviews favourable and plentiful.
And I'm clearly in the minority - Bloodletting has not only been compared with medical television dramas like ER, Grey's Anatomy and House, it's been optioned as a similar series itself. With, I can only assume, significant changes. - Alex

Jane Rule: Against the Season

The death of an elderly woman sends quiet ripples throughout her tiny community. Her sister copes with her loss by reading her sibling's diaries. Her shy grandnephew, sent to assist his surviving great aunt, learns courage from their pregnant and unwed housekeeper. A couple of lonely middle-aged friends turn to each other for comfort and are finally able to admit to wanting something more. An elderly couple throw caution and public opinion to the winds in order to be together. And the reclusive town butch is courted publicly by a very determined social worker.
It has been months since I read this and my memories of it are warm, almost affectionate.
As is the nature of Literature very little actually happens within the pages of this book but it is so deftly written that I barely noticed.
This is really a character study examining how people of various ages, experiences and inclinations react to love in all its forms. The characters slowly and gently unfold to the reader, beautiful in their complete ordinariness.
Well worth the effort if you're in the mood for mellow.-Lynn

Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You - Peter Cameron

In the summer between graduating from high school and starting college, eighteen-year-old James Sveck decides he doesn't need to continue his education, and would rather move to an isolated farmhouse somewhere - maybe Kansas. His mother, an art gallery owner recently returned from an aborted honeymoon with her third, soon-to-be-ex-husband, and his working-class-made-good lawyer father are not pleased, and send him to a therapist. During his sessions with Dr. Adler James talks about his life, particularly the incident that happened while he was in Washington, DC, attending the American Classroom program.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is literature - James is filled with angst, more sensitive that the common folk around him, and appears devoid of the need for human connection. He has no real friends, is close only to his grandmother, and manages to drive away the nearest person he has to a proto-friend, because he's unable to understand societal norms. Had these personality traits been related to an autism-spectrum disorder they may have made his narrative more interesting - though difficult, I can think of at least two novels (Moon's The Speed of Dark, and the more well-known Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Haddon) that have carried it off well.
James, however, is not in any way disabled, except by his crippling sensitivity. Like the vast majority of adolescents I, too, was Too Sensitive To Live - every moment was filled with high drama, visible only to me (and, if hey weren't involved in it, my friends). I sporadically kept diaries at the time - like Someday This Pain... they don't make for interesting reading as an adult.
This isn't to say that I found the novel barren of interest - I finished it, and from time to time came across a line that resonated, like this one:

“My mother was right, but that didn’t change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they’re right, you’ll change your mind.”

But my common complaint when it comes to Literature, holds true here - nothing happens, nobody changes, and I didn't enjoy the reading process. Someday This Pain Will be Useful to You has been favourably and frequently compared to Catcher in the Rye. Another gap in my literary background, I'm ill-equipped to judge. Knowing the way analysing novels for English Literature generally reduced rather than increased my pleasure of the work, I am heartily glad I'll never have to study the themes, metaphors and sub-texts of this book. - Alex

Change of Heart – Jodie Picoult

When her husband died in a car crash, June thought she’d never be happy again, let alone find love. But the policeman who rescued her from the wreck and accompanied her to the hospital kept checking up on her and her infant daughter Elizabeth, and one morning June woke up to find her life had restarted – though Kurt accepted she would never love him like she loved her first husband, June also discovered that she could love as deeply and as truly once again, and Elizabeth adored the only father she’d ever known. Expecting another child, June’s life was perfect, until the day she opened the door to a young, odd man requesting work; though June was hesitant, he connected immediately with Elizabeth, and June took him on.
It was a decision that would tear apart her life once more, for Shay Bourne slaughtered Kurt and Elizabeth and, for the first time in over half a century, a New Hampshire prosecutor sought the death penalty.
Michael was conflicted about sentencing a man his own age to death – though unconvinced, the other members of the jury persuaded him, and became the twelfth juror to vote in favour of lethal injection. Twelve years later this decision has reshaped his life – burdened by guilt and plagued by anxiety attacks, he’s become a priest and found a kind of peace. That is until he’s assigned to be Shay’s spiritual adviser.
Maggie is a lawyer for the ACLU – her professional life is smooth and accomplished, but her personal life is narrow, peopled only by her rabbi father, hyper-critical mother, and Oliver, her pet rabbit. Restricted by her size, her self-doubt and her constant struggle against her mother's disapproval, Maggie is resigned to happiness only in regards to her career. Assigned to Shay’s case, she creates legal precedent when, learning that Shay wants to donate his organs after death, she fights not against the death penalty but against the method of lethal injection.
Lucius is an HIV-positive lifer, sentenced after he discovered his lover in the arms of another man and killed them both. An artist who uses whatever he can scavenge – from the candy shells of M&M’s to soot – to recreate portraits of the man he still loves, he occupies the cell next to Shay and narrates details of his last months, and the seemingly miraculous deeds wrought by Shay.
I’ve begun to find Picoult’s novels formulaic since reading My Sister’s Keeper, when she first used the technique of alternating between several differing first-person viewpoints in a linear narrative that builds toward a controversial event - a court case determining how much autonomy a minor has, in that case, or the campaign for a death row inmate to donate his heart after death, in this.
Entwined around the primary narrative is an ethically charged or controversial issue, the various perspectives of which are humanised and conveyed by the narrative voices. The opposing elements are generally intelligently articulated, and though emotion is present and influences perspectives, the characters usually retain their equilibrium and rationality. The final chapter is from a pivotal but previously unheard character, with a left-handed twist that jerks the narrative on to a different, often anticlimactic, track.
Familiarity with this technique meant that I spent much of the reading of Change of Heart making predictions about the plot, particularly plot twists, and about narrator and content of the final chapter. And I was right on all counts (spoiler alert): I knew from the moment I learned June was pregnant that the baby would be somehow unwell, and that her voice would conclude the novel. I suspected Shay found Kurt abusing his stepdaughter; once his sister, Grace Bourne, was introduced I suspected this mirrored abuse she sustained at the hands of her foster father. It was certainly clear as soon as Michael saw her burns that she set the fire that killed him, and that Shay took the blame to protect her, probably because he felt guilty about not being able to protect her from her abuser. Though I did not foresee the final, somewhat paranormal element of the novel’s final sentence, but by that time I was a little over the miraculous aspect of the novel.
I was also unimpressed by the method Maggie used to seek a medical opinion of alternative methods of execution that would be compatible with organ donation – because “it could take a busy doctor a week to call me back,” and rather than do any independent research, or call an organ transplantation coordinator, she pops into the local emergency department and fakes appendicitis so she can see a doctor. Not a cardiologist or cardiothoracic surgeon, not an immunologist, but whichever random resident assigned to assess her. I know ED physicians and ED nurses, and I can’t see the consultation she had with (the very gorgeous) Dr Gallagher happening. But things are different in novel-land, and he not only helps her but becomes invested in the case and the campaign.
All this could be interpreted as a dislike of the novel, and that would be an unfair impression. Picoult certainly manages to incorporate not only multiple viewpoints but also multiple, interrelated elements, many of which I was intellectually interested in.
They include: children with chronic illness; the fierce, protective love of parenthood; the natures of expiation, faith, mercy and truth; the willful blindness of those who do not want to see truths; the way experiences are shaped by perspective; the heavy, cloak-like bleakness of grief; the desire for vengeance; the theory of muscle memory, where organ recipients – particularly of hearts – take of characteristics of the deceased donor; the barbarity and irrationality of the US adherence to the death penalty; the inflexibility and biases of the prison system, including an assumption that all inmates are literate and speak (read and write) English; similarities and differences between religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity; the nature of divinity; the working of miracles, and perhaps the undoing of them; the shaping of Christianity, and alternative messages, including the Gnostic texts; the nature of heresy, and the history of the Catholic church; and the distortion of religion.
I was also moved on several occasion, particularly during June's recollection of Kurt's funeral:

Through the radios of the other policemen came the voice of the dispatcher: All units stand by for a broadcast.
Final call for Officer Kurt Nealon, number 144.
144, report to 360 West Main for one last assignment.
It was the address of the cemetery.
You will be in the best of hands. You will be deeply missed.
144, 10-7. The radio code for end of shift.

But the foreseeability of many of the elements gave Change of Heart too great a degree of predictability to me, and I felt as though she was just plugging different elements into their various, preassigned slots.
The Messianic aspect felt uneven, superficial, implausible and incongruent with the rest of the book.
Perhaps my reaction is in part because I only relatively recently read Handle with Care and so the parallels were more blinding than they would have been with more time. But I also found the characterisation, particularly of the women, somewhat uni-dimensional and weak - Maggie's obsession with her weight and resulting unattractiveness was irritating, and though in her thirties she read as mired in her teens; June was driven only by her enduring grief and her abiding maternal love, with no other personality traits portrayed - and that was disappointing.
Picoult's most recent book, House Rules, deals with an eighteen-year-old with Asperger's who's fascinated by forensics, and charged with murder. Lynn and I have decided that 2011 will be the Year of the Backlog, with no library books (apart from a few, predetermined exceptions); perhaps a twelve month break will give me enough space from Picoult's technique to enjoy it. - Alex

Tobsha Learner: Soul

When a geneticist researching a possible genetic basis for violence kills a man in self defence without compunction she begins to believe that not only a tendency to violence, but also to remorselessness, may be hereditary and that she has inherited those traits from her great grandmother, a woman who was accused of murdering her husband.
In the wake of her action her life starts to spiral out of control. Her husband runs off with her best friend. She suffers from a traumatic miscarriage resulting in infertility. Her colleagues are not supportive of the military funding her research, a subject about which she is severely conflicted, particularly when she discovers the army is keeping information from her. She then discovers that her husband’s lover is pregnant. At each point violence becomes a more and more attractive option until she finds herself planning her ex-husband’s murder.
Interlaced throughout this story is the tale of her great grandmother’s life, from her engagement through to her trial for her husband’s murder.
The book culminates in a revelation about the importance of nurture’s impact on nature. And as vague as this summary is, I can’t really go into any more detail without giving too much away.
I was initially attracted to this story because of the main character’s ethical dilemma about the potential uses of her research and while this is an integral part of her character it isn’t the focus of the entire story and the book is none the worse for that.
This author is known for her erotica collections and there was a touch of erotica in this book but it is a distinctly minor element, thank goodness because her erotic writing style doesn’t appeal to me and is the reason I put off reading this for as long as I have.
I needn’t have worried. I really enjoyed watching the two interwoven stories unfold. The actions of each woman seemed not only completely believable but entirely reasonable from their point of view. Identifying with them as heroines makes the reader think about their own potential for violence in similar circumstances-where exactly would you draw the line.
The plot skips along at times and while that thinness is filled out by great characterization it is a fault that prevents this story from taking the step from very good to great.
It leans heavily towards the literary end of the scale but is highly enjoyable and I will be seeking out more of Ms Learner’s work.-Lynn

Tony & Susan – Austin Wright

When Susan Morrow receives a manuscript in the mail from her ex-husband Edward, it’s like hearing from a dimly remembered land. His writing was one of the, many in retrospect, reasons their marriage didn’t last – he took it very seriously, she viewed it as an indulgent hobby. And she’s afraid to read Nocturnal Animals, in case it’s terrible. So she puts the manuscript aside, remembering it only at inconvenient moments when it’s not to hand. Until Christmas, when the card from Edward’s current wife includes a note from Edward – he’ll be in Chicago for one night, providing an impetus and time frame for her reading. Her husband Arnold is going away the day after Christmas, so Susan has three days from then.

Tony Hastings is a mathematics professor. When his daughter, Helen, suggests he continue driving through the night toward their summer house in Maine he agrees, and so does Laura, his wife. But things quickly take a turn for the worse when, on a desolate stretch of Pennsylvanian highway, an altercation with strangers in a couple of cars quickly gets out of hand. Before Tony knows it, he and his family are in danger.

Tony & Susan alternates between Susan’s responses to her ex-husband’s first novel and the novel itself. As Tony struggles in an environment very different from the rarefied, civilised academic world he’s accustomed to, Susan recalls the beginnings of her relationship with Edward as a teen, through to the ending of their marriage. She analyses the novel for hints of the Edward she no longer knows, clues to the man he once was, and for an idea of how he sees her.

I picked Tony & Susan up at Heathrow and was caught by both the premise and the first chapter of Nocturnal Creatures, which conveys an amazing sense of suspense, danger and foreshadowing. I decided against buying the trade sized recent release, and was delighted to find, on returning to Melbourne, that my fabulous local library had it.

It is therefore doubly disappointing that I so disliked the novel as it progressed. I had issues with both halves of the novel, too. So I found the chapters of Nocturnal Animals, initially so engaging, increasingly frustrating – Tony is constrained from acting by his class and values, and the aftermath of the abduction just didn’t resonate at all for me. And good god, the focus on his identity:

He catalogued the idiocies of punks and hoods... who would play chicken with real cars on a highway and kidnap a college professor and dump him in the woods...

Tony Hastings was insulted but refused to be humiliated. My name is Tony Hastings, he said. I teach mathematics at the university. Last week I gave three students Fs for the course. I gave great pleasure to fifteen others with the grade of A.I have a Ph.D.

I get that holding on to his identity is a key component in his character, but enough already – those two extracts are from contiguous paragraphs, but the theme is hammered over and over throughout the novel. I wanted to kidnap him and leave him in the woods.

And there’s a lot of that full name business – he’s almost always Tony Hastings, and she’s almost always Susan Morrow, as though the reader might forget who the protagonists are. Not only is this the case when they’re being referred to in the third person, but they themselves frequently think about, address and are addressed by others in first and last name, so that Tony’s flirtation with a student is never with Louise but always with Louise Germane.

For the Susan sections my ire was directed more to the Literary writing style than the characterisation:

Electricity, like Selena at the picnic, Selena with the purring cat’s voice, whose matter seemed fully convertible to energy in the Einsteinian sense: e=mc2. Selena the electric, altered into Susan the electric, as if Arnold were a transformer, thinking how easy to be free, what delicious things could be done in Edward’s absence if you were the kind of person who did such things. Susan was not that kind. Susan was Susan, from Edgar Lane, teacher of Freshman English, well organized, coherent, grammatical, unified, with margins on all sides, always ready to revise and improve herself. This Susan had delicious wild thoughts full of mountains and forests and floating streams, with fish on the wing and birds at sea, thoughts concentric and phallic, with penis hunting in the mists and cave exploration in the hermaphroditic clouds, but they were only thoughts, unacted, unuttered, the absent underside of Susan the Good.

And then there’s the self-aggrandising sections, where Susan (Wright’s character) is marvelling at the brilliance of Edward’s writing (by Austin), and reflecting on the experience of reading his work.

Susan Morrow thumbs ahead, trying not to see the words, finds PART TWO not far ahead. How sad it is, she thinks. Sadness in the news to come, which nobody mentions but all expect. She gropes for the loophole Edward might have allowed, but finds none. Meanwhile, despite the sadness, she feels this energy and does not know if it’s her own chemistry or the book, Edward in a state of excitement, enjoying his work? She likes to see Edward enjoying his work, it sparks her up. She awaits the horrible discovery her soul deplores, she awaits it avidly.

Maybe I’m just not a very conscious reader, but I don’t think anything like that while I’m waiting to return to a book I’m excited about. Plus I found it a little self-serving, given that the work Susan is responding to, as described by Wright, is the book written by Wright (in the person of Edward). It all felt a little ego-driven, in a way I found grating but may have accepted if I liked either of the characters or felt compelled by the plot.

There are also endless little recaps by Susan as she picks the manuscript back up, which I found annoying – I remembered what had happened on the previous page, having an attention span occasionally longer than that of a parakeet.

I did finish Tony & Susan, though less out of any interest than a combination of mild curiosity, resolution, and discomfort about my recent run of unfinished reads. I did find the penultimate line amusing, albeit not (I suspect) in the way Austin intended:

She wanted to punish Arnold too, but the only thing she could think of was to make him read the book.

- Alex

The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell

The third installment in the Dance to the Music of Time sequence brings narrator Nicholas Jenkins to the 1930's. He has his fortune read by Mrs Erdleigh, a very certain woman introduced to him by his Uncle Giles; she declares that he will see her again in a year, and find love in the meantime, much to his scepticism. And indeed, after many an unhappy sojourn into affairs of the heart, Jenkins is reunited with school friend Templer's younger sister, Jean, separated from her husband, who after a time returns his affections.
Politics are more prominent in The Acceptance World, as Marxism enters the vocabulary of England's upper middle classes - a move seen most prominently in the conversion of out moded author St. John Clarke to the cause. The paranormal element first rising in Mrs Erdleigh recurs later when a Planchette board (which sounds something like a ouija board) is brought out, which occasion is also the first appearance of changing politics of the era.
While Widmerpoole appears only briefly, the change in him is significant. Once somewhat pallid and ineffectual, he now seems more certain and almost powerful, though no less pompous - it's when, during a school reunion dinner, he begins pontificating at length that old school master La Bas sustains a severe stroke. Widmerpoole is also the source of the title - he works for the Acceptance World, a company that accepts the debt of others, for a sum. Readers more astute than I have noted that it refers also to the characters of the novel accepting the disappointment of their lives as lived rather than their imagined future lives, idealised in youth.
Unimpressed with A Question of Upbringing, but more appreciative of A Buyer's Market, I am right back where I started. The Acceptance World left me cold and, with the sole exception of Widmerpool, disinterested in the fate of any of the characters. I can see the literary skill of Powell, but this is a purely intellectual appreciation. At no point did I feel gripped by the plot, captured by the characters, or invested in the outcome.
And yet I cannot help feeling as though the fault lies with me - that if only I were more literary, intelligent, or aware of nuance then I too would see this series as a masterpiece, and also be able to find the humour in what many have called "perhaps the finest long [20th century] comic novel that England has produced" (that specific quote, from Anthony Burgess, is on the dust jacket).
Perhaps the problem is that, though I lived there for some of my formative years, I'm not English, not upper class or even particularly class conscious, and have no knowledge of the real people or situations on which the series is based.
My mother says that repeat reading significantly increases one's enjoyment of the series. Frankly, just making it through all twelve once will be something of an achievement, but who knows - perhaps this time in December I'll be raving about the magnificence of A Dance to the Music of Time and eager to start at the beginning again. - Alex

A Buyer's Market - Anthony Powell

In the second chapter of A Dance to the Music of Time we pick up with narrator Nick Jenkins, who has finished his education and is now a member of adult society. In addition to the reappearance of familiar characters like Templer, Stringham and the ubiquitous (and no more likable) Windmerpool, we meet a new cast. The first of these, introduced in the first sentence, is unsuccessful artist and old family acquaintance Mr E. Bosworth Deacon, brought to mind many years later by Jenkins' seeing his work at an auction.
In the style of the series, Jenkins then reflects on his interactions with Deacon, from a chance meeting in Paris as an adolescent, to seeing his work half-hidden at the home of Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, cousin of Jenkin's school friend Peter Goring. And this takes us through a series of debutante balls and a dance with an assortment of characters, threaded through with Deacon and his rather disreputable lady friend Gypsy Jones (who dallies with both Windmerpool and Jenkins, though at different times).
Perhaps because I had a better idea of what to expect, I found I quite enjoyed A Buyer's Market, certainly more than A Question of Upbringing - the key is not to expect a traditional narrative with a plot, or the introduction and explanation of characters. The narrative style is instead more like a stream of consciousness, where one thing reminds our guide of another. Like the title suggests, the reader is danced in a complicated by seemingly random (though planned) pattern, interacting with and parting from various people new and familiar.
It's quite difficult to extract a part from the whole to give a flavour of the writing, as it's all so intricately intertwined. I doubt I'll be able to keep track of the vast cast, particularly as on a first reading there's no way to tell who will recur or be important and who is there as an extra. I now understand why repeated readings would increase the enjoyment of the series, as there are certainly things already that I'd pick up differently from both the first books on a second encounter.
I had a better sense of the comedy threaded through the writing this time, as well as the nuances in the writing, and Widmerpool's heavy presence more strongly indicated his importance in the overall narrative. We also learn a little more about Jenkins, those these glimpses are usually incidental and used to illustrate the character of others - for example, Jenkins gives Widmerpool his work address (not in the City), certain he'll never call by, to which Widmerpool

made some formal enquiries about the firm, and seemed rather disapproving of the nature of the business.
'Who exactly buys "art books"?'

We are, however, left with very clear impressions of how Jenkins sees those around him, particularly potential rivals for the women he (so far quite ineptly) fancies.
There's no question of the writing being a product of both its class and time (both when the novels are set - A Buyer's Market apparently takes place in 1928/29 - and when they were written - copyrighted 1952), as the terms "Jewess" and "negro" and the line "a plump man with a hooked nose and black curly hair, perhaps an Oriental" make clear, quite apart from the minimal role of women. The easy, familiar references to classical art and literature reminded me of Stephen Fry's similar sensibility, and the contrast between this and contemporary novels set in the past was interesting.
I think I'll enjoy my self-imposed task of finishing the series over the year more than I expected, but I doubt I'll preempt a month and read the next installment sooner than planned. - Alex

David Blair (ed): Gothic Short Stories

This is a collection of 20 Gothic stories covering the spectrum from the supernatural through insanity to just plain violent horror. It includes both works by famous authors (Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne) and gems from lesser known writers. It is well annotated with explanations of references unfamiliar to a modern reader and a short biography of each author’s writing life.
These Gothic tales are classics. They illustrate the development of the genre from the eighteenth through to the early twentieth century. Like any anthology there were some stories that appealed to me more than others but I believe each earned its place in this collection.
I enjoyed the stories not only for their own sake but also recognising them as the basis of many modern stories enabled me to see how individual tales could be adopted and grown.
A well selected and presented collection I would recommend to those with an interest in Gothic Literature.-Lynn

A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell

Opening at an unnamed British public school in 1921 and closing during his first year at university, A Question of Upbringing begins the story our narrator, Nicholas Jenkins. We learn little of his own life and family, as Jenkins strings together reminiscences of his school days with the romantic Charles Stringham, daring Peter Templar (who is sent down after a string of practical jokes), and the plodding and clueless Windmerpool, branded an outsider his first day, when he wore "the wrong kind of overcoat." Through the course of the novel Jenkins' path randomly crosses his old school friends and Widmerpool, along with those of other characters, most notably during Jenkins' stay at La Grenadière in France to hone his French.
Starting the year off the way I intend to continue, I have not only started with a non-library book but the first in the acclaimed twelve-part series A Dance to the Music of Time, with the intention of reading one each month. God help me. Because I just didn't get the attraction. A Question of Upbringing is certainly not a strongly narrative or plot-driven novel, and nothing much seemed to happen. Neither is it character-driven, for I learned little about Jenkins and only glimpses about the other characters he encounters. There is certainly a strong sense of time, place and above all class, but that doesn't so much grab me.
I've been told that the books become more interesting and intricate with each installment, and that analysing each novel separately robs the narrative as a whole of its complexity, subtle nuance and character development. We shall see. - Alex

The Messenger – Markus Zusak

Ed Kennedy spends his life alternating between working as a cabbie and playing cards with his three mates, Marv, who’s blindly loyal to his dilapidated light blue Falcon, Ritchie, who still lives at home with his parents, and the lovely Audrey, who dates losers and is unaware that Ed’s in love with her. When the four friends are caught up in a bank robbery, featuring possibly the world’s most inept criminal, it’s the closest thing to excitement that Ed’s known for a while. The would-be robber’s quickly caught, and Ed testifies against him, despite vows that he’s a dead man for doing so.
From this unpromising beginning arises a mission, one that Ed is conscripted into and afraid not to pursue. Following directions on a series of playing cards, Ed begins to observe a group of strangers, interfering with their lives for the general good. His interference comes at a cost – Ed is threatened, beaten up and terrified, by he feels a sense of purpose long missing from his life. And behind it all is the question – who is orchestrating it all?I really enjoyed the premise, the writing style, the character and voice of Ed, and the comedy laced through The Messenger. As Ed becomes involved in the lives of strangers he becomes more conscious of his own life, and is forced to confront truths about himself, his family and his friends that would otherwise stayed hidden.
However, I was hugely disappointed with the identity of the mastermind behind the whole thing. As a reader I was more interested in the journey than the impetus, and would probably have been relatively uncritical of a plausible, even if far-fetched, answer. Instead Zusak combines fourth-wall breaking, Literary style and a dollop of deus ex machine to create the written equivalent of Dallas's season eight it-was-all-a-dream ending – Ed is a character, the tasks were created by the author, and in the final words of the novel, “I’m not the messenger at all. I’m the message.”
Ick, yuck, moving on. – Alex

Sarah Water: The Little Stranger

When a doctor is called to attend one of the servants at the local manor house he is surprised to find not the glamorous Georgian mansion of his childhood memories but a dilapidated post war residence inhabited by a family not quite coping with changing society.
As his acquaintance with the family grows he becomes privy to their dark secrets. The war-wounded son, reluctant lord of the manor, claims to be plagued by a ‘presence’ in the night. The elderly mother is tormented, mentally and physically, by the memory of her first-born’s tragic childhood death. The servants complain about ghostly goings on. Even the solid and dependable daughter thinks there might be more to the house than meets the eye.
But the doctor is a man of science and logic. He simply can’t believe all that the family are telling him. And yet, he can’t completely dismiss it either.
And here I can not be more explicit without spoilers.
Set in early post world war II Britain, on the surface this is a story of a once proud and powerful family now in decline. The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, almost a little too slowly at times. The individual ‘spooky’ elements are not particularly scary but cumulatively they give a not-quite-right feeling that is far more effective in creating creepiness in this context than more overt horror would have been. I would have liked to see more made of this aspect of the story. In many ways the decision not to expand upon the haunting elements was an opportunity missed.
The characters felt true to the time. So much so that I found myself actively disliking them on some occasions, while pitying them on others but I never really connected to any of them. I think the back story of the main characters would have added an interesting dimension to the book and made it easier to identify with them.
The twist ending was at once both disappointing and intriguing.
This book has the feel of a traditional Victorian gothic while maintaining a distinct literary flavour. While it is far from the best I have read, it is the first book in many years that has me thinking about the central themes and wanting to dissect the story in order to find out what really went on. Speculation abounds-Lynn

The Girl in a Swing - Richard Adams

Alan Desland, a dealer and lover of porcelain figurines, is middle aged and resigned to bachelorhood. Somewhat reclusive, his self-image is highly coloured by having overheard at a young age that he was unattractive. On a routine trip to Copenhagen Alan meets Karin, a beautiful young secretary/clerical worker and is instantly smitten by every aspect of her. Filled with trepidation and precipitated by fear of not seeing her again, Alan delays his return to England and asks Karin out.
He is delighted to find her receptive and after a whirlwind romance proposes. Karin accepts, on the proviso that they marry in England, and agrees to move there with him. After a discussion with his minister, however, Alan thinks the three week wait will be too long and thanks to one of Alan's American clients the loving couple fly to Florida to wed instead. they have a joyous honeymoon in Gainesville, initially marred by Alan's inability to perform but finally consummated.
Though the wedding occurred before anyone had met Karin, she soon charms his friends and family. She is, however, reticent to discuss her own history and makes no effort to contact her own friends or family.
Though he relates Karin's intermittent crying and nervousness, Alan does not seem to see the import of these and other behaviours. He has some hinted at psychic abilities as a child, and though he manages to ignore the many signs Karin displays, Alan acknowledges, or at least senses, a spectre of darkness hanging over them, though. His concerns tragically come to fruition- an event unsurprising to the reader, for we know from the outset of Alan's narration that Karin dies. Throughout the novel we see Alan's idealisation of Karin, a vision he grimly clings to despite mounting conflicting evidence that Karin is not the alabaster figure he envisions.
A marked change from Adams's earlier, and more well known work (Watership Down and the more adult, darker themed The Plague Dogs), The Girl in a Swing is unquestionably a literary novel, with Gothic overtones. Alan is trilingual and possessed of a classical education - he and Karin quote philosophers, poets and writers in a variety of languages, which tended to break my connection with the narrative, being monolingual and clearly not the productive of an English prep school education.
The Girl in the Swing is in many ways a product of its time - the terrible price Karin paid for their love would almost certainly not be necessary now. On a related but less controversial note, I've often thought, though I think not written here, about the move from to-day/to-morrow to the conjoined form we use, and if there was debate about the transition the way there is about linguistic shifts. Anyway, Adams is of the first camp, at least in the edition I had, which was given to me when I was ten or eleven. I can only imagine that the parent of the child who gave it to me was going on the reputation from Watership because it's very much not a children's book. The darker themes, the impotent angst and the sex scenes (which are far more literary than erotic) aside, the writing is aimed at an adult, literary audience.
There's an interesting insight into impotence from a male perspective, wherein Alan compares "that great field of life dominated by Aphrodite - the area of sexual passion

to those of a miner descending the shaft or a soldier approaching the front: "the frightening realisation that here all life-long assumptions - the safety and predictability one had always taken for granted and come to rely upon - did not apply. Continuous danger and uncertainty affect the very eyes through which one saw the world and affected everything I thought and did."

It was Karin's great beauty that so affected him, combined with a sense of disentitlement, that this vision of loveliness could indeed be for him. But her tactful, gentle handling of the situation reassures him. However, the rapid, inexplicable romance and the fact that he knows virtually nothing about Karin causes Alan no alarm, and throughout the novel his beloved remains a cipher.
The title of the novel comes from a porcelain figure of intriguing provenance, which is discussed in the novel and a variation of which can be seen here.
I love the line, as Alan arrives back in London, that could have "gone chasing the hares on the grass between the runways" - it's not only indicative of his buoyant mood but also a far more bucolic image than arrivees to London see now!
Vogue is blurbed on the cover as saying of this little known work that it is "a novel of beauty, calm, sensuality, anticipation, horror and nightmare" - with all of which I concur, but I also found it overly literary, unsatisfying and anticlimactic. - Alex

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt

A Northern writer visits Savannah in the last 1970's and, over a period of months, gets to know some of the more colourful and influential residents of this traditional and unique Southern city. When Danny Handsford, a young hustler, is shot and killed by an influential older man, there's some expectation that it will be swept to one side, which is consistent with related events. Instead antiques dealer Jim Williams is charged and tried. As our narrator covers the subsequent events he finds himself discovering a new side of a town he's come to love.
Based on real events but tweaked, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is written in first person and presented as wholly factual. Far more a character study than murder mystery, Berendt introduces readers to a variety of eccentrics from the lauded Lady Chablis (a lounge singer who sometimes takes a break from the hormones and goes by Frank); disenfranchised Luther Driggers (who's supposed to have a vial of concentrated poison that could wipe out the town through the water supply), and voodoo priestess Minerva (who gives the book its title). The central character, though, is Georgia's Savannah, and Berendt weaves a picture of eccentric independence and the presence of the past into his narrative.
I'm surprised Midnight was such a success but suspect that, like some other surprise best sellers, it tapped into a zeitgeist that passed me by. It's certainly more a literary novel than it is murder mystery - the pace is languid, the pivotal event occurs around half way through, and if you're reading for content rather than ambiance you'll find yourself wondering what the point of much of the atmospheric writing is. Indeed, had the shooting not occured I would have been hard-pressed to find a narrative spine in the book. It didn't read to me as though the death of Handsford was in the front of Berendt's mind when he began writing, and there's nothing that flags the lead up as significant.
Yet, despite this, none of the events seem shocking or even surprising - everything unfolds at a languid, low impact pace that I suspect reflects the society he depicts. Even the unusual people seem drawn in pastel or sepia tones, removing much of the significance of even quite shocking revelations. And while we learn a little about the city of Savannah and her people, I came away from the book with no sense of the author, where he came from, why he spent so much time in Georgia, what drew him to Savannah, or even what he thought about any of it.
Perhaps that's what influenced my feelings of neutrality. Midnight is one of the many books I've had languishing about for years and have brought with me overseas to read before allowing myself to buy anything new. All I knew about it going in was that I'd had it for years, it was set in the South, had some vague connection with voodoo, was well received, and had been made into a film. I come away from it feeling much the same. I certainly didn't hate it, but I didn't love it, I wasn't connected to it, and I don't feel altered by it. I understand that some people love it, and am sure they have their reasons, but for me it will be part of the background wallpaper of my 2009 reading list. - Alex

Breathing in Colour - Clare Jay

Alida Salter's life has been, to a great extent, on hold since the tragic death of her infant daughter Kizzy thirteen years ago. When she receives a call in the middle of the night notifying her that her other daughter, Mia, has not been seen for a week and is feared dead, Alida flies to India to search for her, despite the protests of her ex-husband Ian. As she tries to find the daughter she lost the day Kizzy died, Alida discovers herself.
I was initially tempted to put Breathing in Colour aside - part of Jay's Creative Writing PhD, it was irritatingly overwritten and heavy on the shadowing, with lines like "As usual Alida tried to shift her thoughts away from the event that had destroyed their happy balance"; "the telephone shrilled; a shocking sound in the silence which caused Alida to quickly swivel around in her chair to stare at it"; "her room was steeped in expectant silence"; and "in one smooth motion she gathered her limbs and leapt from the bed." I grant you, none of these in itself is particularly objectionable but, as is obvious from the last few posts, I'm not in a particularly indulgent place right now, and these grated. I also found the notification call, which is all Alida's responses, particularly annoying. However, mindful of the unprecedented number of books I've cast aside within a few pages of late, I decided to give Breathing in Colour more time to prove itself.
I'm so glad I did. Combining Alida's present time journey with chronological snatches of Mia's memories, Breathing in Colour portrays a story of deep betrayal, loss, grief, joy, art, discovery, forgiveness and colour. India is the ideal setting, as that richly tapestried land beautifully complements the explosive assault to the senses Mia intermittently experiences - she has synesthesia, a condition where senses are cross-experienced so that noises have colour, textures are flavoured, and colours are textured.
The new setting allows Alida to reexamine her past and her relationship with Mia. This is aided by the presence of Taos (rhymed with house), an Australian artist who encouraged Mia to express her lucid dreams as collages, which is turn provide Alida with clues about Mia's location. As Alida retraces Mia's footsteps, through a combination of knowing her daughter and these clues from Mia's abandoned room, Alida begins to express her own experiences through writing.
Taos is travelling his own journey of exploration, and together they examine the weight and impact of memory and loss, grief and rebirth, patterns and numbers, the nature of self and the way we choose to view what happens to us. Vital to the narrative is art and self expression, and the role of the artist is explored in a way I both connected with myself (not an artist), and that an artist friend found resonant.
I have long been fascinated by synesthesia, and this fictionalised account of the experience added a dimension to what would otherwise have still been an interesting, albeit less engaging, novel. Maybe I ought to revisit some of those works I recently thrust aside on only preliminary exploration. - Alex