Lifestyles of the Fairly Rich and not Awfully Famous

This year, just as in 2010, I decided to take up the Aussie Author Challenge, run by Jo of Booklover Book Reviews, and I'm extremely happy with the results.  In 2011, I've managed to read a staggering twenty books by Australian writers, easily my best-ever total, and I'll be back to do it all again next year!  So, to finish off the challenge, here are reviews of two more books: one which I didn't get around to reviewing at the time of reading (the only one of my Aussie reads this year without a review...), and one more entertaining novel to finish off the year in style :)

*****

Indelible Ink is a book I heard about in an interview with Christos Tsiolkas, and which I reserved at the library while under the influence of a few glasses of Shiraz one Saturday night.  A couple of days later, I read Bree's post on the book and began to have second thoughts about the whole affair (the hangover probably didn't help either).  Luckily though, I gave it a go and was pleasantly surprised; it's a book which is well worth the effort.

Indelible Ink is set in the Sydney of a few years back and is centred on Marie, a well-off, middle-aged divorcée.  Despite a generous settlement, her lack of a head for numbers means that she has begun to slide into debt, and the only way out is to sell the family home - a multi-million dollar mansion with harbour views.  Unable to make up her mind to cast her old life away, she one day decides to get a tattoo - and this is the catalyst for a radical change of lifestyle...

You wouldn't be alone in thinking that Marie doesn't sound all that sympathetic a character (it is difficult to feel sorry for someone who is sitting on - or in - a few million dollars), but luckily that's not the intent.  Marie is well aware that the sale is the result of her own shortcomings, and it is her decision to throw caution to the wind (in this case, the lovely breeze coming off the harbour) that wins the reader over.  Besides, if you think Marie sounds a little vapid and shallow, just wait until you meet her family and friends.

This review would be a lot longer if I hadn't read the book about six months ago, but you don't really need to know much more about it than the fact that I liked it and would thoroughly recommend it.  It's an interesting insight into how the other half lives, and a peep behind the iron curtain the rich keep to cover their private lives, showing the dysfunctionality that lies behind.  And we all love a little voyeurism now and then...

*****

The reader is also given a small glimpse of the high life in Nick Earls' latest novel, The Fix.  Set, as usual, up in sunny Brisbane, The Fix is a story of a story, and how things are never quite what they seem.  Josh has just come back to Australia after a few years working as a spin doctor in London, and while he is waiting to get back into his first love of journalism (and writing a newspaper blog to earn a few bucks in the meantime!), he is approached to carry out a PR campaign for a lawyer receiving a medal for bravery.

For someone used to saving the backsides of big, nasty corporations, it sounds like an easy gig.  One problem though is that the lawyer is Josh's old friend Ben, who we suspect may have hurt Josh in the past.  As the novel progresses, it's also clear that Ben's reluctance to talk about what happened in the 'siege' has less to do with his feelings towards Josh, and more to do with the truth of the whole affair...

I was a little hesitant on starting this book because Earls is a writer who started off writing lad-lit in the vein of Nick Hornby and Mike Gayle, and I wasn't sure if an older, more literary me would still enjoy his work (Gayle is one whose books I now avoid...).  An hour later, and a hundred pages down, I was safely able to take those fears and dump them in the Brisbane river; The Fix is a riveting read.

There were a few uncomfortable moments (I'm not sure a scene with a Korean businessman was strictly necessary, or appropriate), but what I like about Earls is that he has kept his earlier eye for the humorous side of life and combined it with a more developed sense of the darkness that lies beneath it.  The longer the book goes on, the more uneasy Ben becomes - and the more obsessed the reader becomes with uncovering the truth.  But what is 'truth', and is it ever possible to get to the bottom of anything, particularly someone's character?

On starting this post, I was thinking of writing something about how Earls has moved on from lad-lit and is working towards writing more complex and literary novels, thinking that this one would be another step in the same direction.  After finishing the book, I would have to say that I've changed my mind - this is the book that marks him as more than a humorous chronicler of the lives of thirty-something Brisbanites.  The descriptive writing may not be as elegant as I might want it to be, but The Fix is a fabulous, multi-layered work which will, I'm sure, stand up to rereading.

And that makes me very happy :)

Review Post 12a - Australians All, So Please Rejoice

With my new regime of posting this year (weekly posts on multiple books, enforced mainly by other commitments and a dodgy back which doesn't like sitting at the computer all day and all night), my little compositions appear to have become more theme-based of late - as seen in my previous effort. Even so, I've outdone myself with today's offering: not only were all three books borrowed from the lovely people at Narre Warren library, they're all by Australian writers. Beauty. Pull up a lamington, and let's get stuck into a belated Australia Day literary bonanza!

*****

We head first to Brisbane, the capital city of the northern state of Queensland, to enjoy a book by Nick Earls. I've read a fair few of his early books which could be categorised as lad-lit, albeit of a high calibre (more Nick Hornby than Mike Gayle), and usually contained a fair amount of slapstick moments (a date, a need to urinate, an unalert cat - let's just leave it at that). However, his previous novel, The Thompson Gunner, marked a move away from his usual style into a more adult, dare I say literary, genre, and his latest book, The True Story of Butterfish, continues that trend.

Curtis Holland, a member of the incredibly successful (and now imploded) group Butterfish, has come home to Brisbane to get away from it all and get on with a second career as a small-time producer. He buys a house next door to the Winter family: single mum Kate, Lolita-esque sixteen-year-old Anneliese and grungy teenager Mark. Throw in his (gay) brother Patrick and a surprise visit from Derek, the off-the-rails lead singer of his band, and you have the mixture of characters around whom Curtis' new life will form.

However, it's a bit more subtle than that, and the story is just as much about people who are no longer around as it is about those who are. All of the characters are making new starts, attempting to move on after losing, or being rejected by, someone special in their life. Patrick has accepted the end of his long-term relationship, and the Winter children attempt to balance their new life with occasional visits to their father. And Curtis? Well, he has more than his fair share of ghosts to deal with on his return Down Under.

It's a bittersweet story, and Earls handles it skilfully, avoiding the slapstick and forced happy endings of his early work in favour of a snapshot of a life most ordinary (if you ignore the fact that Butterfish sold twenty million records in the US). Does Curtis manage to create an ordinary life in the Brisbane suburbs, or does he, like many an Earls protagonist, manage to mess things up in a spectacular way? It's worth finding out...

*****

Our next book also takes us off to sunny Queensland (after a short detour via North America). Australian superstar writer Peter Carey's His Illegal Self is centred around Che, a young boy from a rich American family. One minute he is off to see his long-absent mother, the next he is hitchhiking along unpaved roads in the Sunshine Coast hinterland in Australia. As you can imagine, this causes poor Che (and the reader) a fair amount of confusion.

Set in the early 1970s, a time when the Vietnam war was raging and young men from both the States and Australia were being sent off to the slaughter, His Illegal Self touches on the political counter culture of the time and brings Che (or Jay, as his East Coast grandmother prefers to call him) into contact with a group of society drop-outs in the Queensland bush, on the run just as much from the brutal police state of Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as from the threat of the draft.

The book's blurb concentrates on Carey's depiction of the innocent child, stolen from his home environment and forced to make sense of the exotic, alien Queensland landscape, but I didn't think that Che actually stood out much. For me, the character of Dial, the academic with the hidden past, was much more interesting. Once this highly educated working-class girl found herself in the jungle setting, her carefully-constructed persona (an image built to distance herself from her humble beginnings) slowly starts to crumble. The contrast with the enigmatic hippie Trevor, illiterate but street smart (or should that be bush savvy?!) is fascinating: Dial finds herself manipulated by the community she has landed in and is frustrated at her inability to outwit a bunch of stinking drop-outs.

I found it hard to get into this book; the first few chapters were good, but then it slowed down with a burst of flashbacks and multiple perspectives. It wasn't until Dial and Che were established in their new (temporary) home that the novel came to life again and Carey was able to show us the effect of a change of environment on our hapless American protagonists. In a book that ponders the meaning of family and strangers (and where we're not always on the side of the family) and takes the main characters half way across the world, Dial (which, of course, is a nickname) is very aptly named: Anna Xenos - in Greek, the stranger or foreigner...

*****

Our third slice of Australiana comes courtesy of Greek Melbourne writer Christos Tsiolkas, and I have a warning for the delicately formed among you: if you are offended by homosexuality, sleeping around, drug use, bodily fluids and functions, blasphemy and anti-Semitism, it's time to go and do something else - your time here today is done. If however, you are still curious, let's continue, and I'll do my best to make sense of Tsiolkas' novel Dead Europe. No promises, though.

The writer divides his story into two strands: one follows young Greek-Australian Isaac on a trip around Europe, starting in Athens and moving on to Venice, Prague, Berlin, Paris and London; the second starts in Greece in the 1930s and is part folklore, part horror story. The reader suspects that the two parts will intersect, but the way they eventually do is as fascinating as it is horrific. Tsiolkas combines casual sex, fantasy, horror, violence and racial tension in a novel which starts slowly and gently increases the pressure until something has to explode. And does.

The genesis of the story is when a Greek couple agree to hide the son of a Jew from the invading German forces in return for a box full of jewels; however, the wife (after certain illicit nocturnal activities) persuades the husband to kill the man in order to avoid the risk of retaliation from the Germans. This act of brutality and betrayal has far-reaching consequences - both in time and space. As Isaac goes about his merry way on the old continent, he begins to experience strange sensations, feeling out of sorts, physically and mentally. And then he starts to get strange cravings...

To be honest, I struggled, initially, to identify with Isaac. Not particularly because he is gay, more because of the way he seemed to be screwing and snorting his way across Europe. We are expected to believe that he loves his partner, Colin, who is the breadwinner of the pair and stuck in Melbourne, while Isaac behaves like a gap-year student on a twisted Kontiki tour. Later, it becomes clear that this behaviour is actually suggestive of events which will happen towards the end of the book; Isaac is, almost from the start, unable to control his desires, be they for sex, drugs, alcohol or blood.

I am a little squeamish at times (definitely not a big fan of slasher films), and there were times, standing and reading on my commute home, where I visibly flinched at some of the events of the later stages (probably making other passengers edge carefully towards the other end of the carriage). It was hard reading; there was some powerful and disturbing stuff to take in. It is, though, precisely this which makes the book a success; its ability to shock the reader and make them consider Isaac's situation and how they would act in that position. Tsiolkas also plays a little with the reader as we are never completely convinced that we understand what is real and what is imagined; as you may have gathered from what I've already said about Isaac, he is far from being a trustworthy narrator by the end of his travels.

What's it all about? The new world (Australia) versus the old; the curse and strength of the Jew; racial and ethnic tension; sexual freedom and exploitation. And blood. The blood of your ancestors running through your veins, and the blood keeping you alive. A thirst for blood.

You'll love this book. You may not enjoy it.

43 - 'Headgames' by Nick Earls

After a week or so in the classical world, it was time to get back to a more contemporary feel this weekend; to be more precise, late twentieth-century Brisbane, a world containing a lot more pubs and not quite so many ritual sacrifices (although it has been a while since my last visit, so don't take my word for it). Nick Earls is an Aussie author of several novels and would easily fit into the much discussed (and often derided) 'lad-lit' genre if he lived about 10,000 miles to the north-west. Having read many of his books about the mishaps of various semi-autobiographical characters, I thought I knew what to expect from this collection of short stories, but on the whole I was (pleasantly) surprised.

There is a wide variety of styles and subjects over the eighteen tales that make up 'Headgames'. The five stories that form the backbone of the collection, following the everyday adventures of Frank and Philby, slightly nerdy (or, as they say down under, daggy) university students looking for love and cheap drinks, are typical of Earls' novels. Philby, tormented by a shyness that is criminally vulgar (couldn't resist it) and a rather embarrassing English mother with a penchant for speaking in foreign accents, meets the hyper-confident Frank in a chemistry class, a meeting which is to drag the shy, unassuming Phil out of his comfort zone (mainly consisting of his bedroom) into a world of creme-de-menthes, sausage sizzles, part-time jobs at the 'Ekka' (the yearly show or fair) and a general lack of sensible study. The last story in the collection has Philby in his thirties, regressing to his shy self at an after party for a film and ending up at dawn doing something incredibly unusual with a Hollywood celebrity. No, I'm not going to tell you what (or who) it is.

Many of the other stories, however, take a very different road than Frank and Philby's light-hearted adventures. As a former doctor, Earls is, understandably, interested in diseases and illnesses (particularly serious ones), and a few of the stories are concerned with this theme. 'All those Ways of Leaving' is seen through the eyes of a young woman who is slowly dying of cancer and shines a light on the way people treat her in the light of her impending death. 'Box shaped Heart', on the other hand, looks at a young student's recovery from a near-fatal heart condition. His determination to get back to full health as soon as possible and continue with his university career is explained not only by a fear of becoming a permanent invalid, but also by the realisation of what could happen if his friends move on without him.

In 'There must be Lions' though, the focus (I think...) is more on mental illness than a physical ailment. A woman in a hospital or clinic believes that lions enter the building every night and devour the patients' limbs (which somehow grow back again before the morning comes); despite her best efforts to capture one, they always seem to subliminally persuade her to release them from the nets she has caught them in. Her painstaking efforts to prove to the world that the lions are real, including her hundreds of letters to experts in the field of lions (and the Lone Pine Koala sanctuary, just in case), are a scary indication of just how deluded people suffering from a mental illness can become.

This slightly off-beat story actually turned out to be a fair representation of the style of the rest of the tales in this book. From a young woman's never-ending trip to a gigantic, ever-expanding shopping centre, and a sadistic P.E. teacher's sad demise while only able to bark out instructions with his last breaths for his students to keep running, to a grumpy unicorn, angry because his female housemate continues to use the toilet (when everyone knows that it's a reading room and that the garden is the appropriate place to do your business), and a lab assistant who ends up more lab than assistant (woof), Earls displays a deft surreal touch that keeps the human emotions close at hand despite the detour to Planet Bizarre. Incredibly, I found myself reminded of a certain famous author who has written some, shall we say, slightly unusual short stories: the Australian Haruki Murakami?

It's a bit of a stretch, and Earls has yet to produce any lengthy works which compare to Murakami's more famous novels, but the comparison is apt at times on the short-story front. If Murakami had been brought up in Brisbane by embarrassing English parents, studied medicine at university, got into indie and alternative music rather than jazz, developed a liking for sickly green liqueurs over Cutty Sark whisky and favoured shy, clumsy central characters over cool, anonymous protagonists, he may have turned out a bit like Nick Earls.

Whether that would be a good thing or not is for you to decide, dear reader; if you can get your hands on one of Earls' books in your part of the world, I would urge you to give him a go (if only to expand your world view to include a nice city on the other side of the world where footwear in supermarkets can be optional). Who knows, you may even decide to visit Brisbane after reading about it in his stories. Just a word of advice in case you do though: watch out for the unicorns. I hear they can be very temperamental at this time of year.