Review Post 30 - Around the World

A quick trip around the world today:  from England to Australia, India and the Middle East (via Germany).  Please have your passport handy...

*****

I read my first Peter Carey book, His Illegal Self, earlier this year, and frankly speaking, I wasn't overly impressed, despite some interesting characterisation,  However, I thought it was only fair to give him another go, and I picked up a copy of Oscar and Lucinda on a recent library trip (my elder daughter, Emily, was distracted by something shiny for long enough to allow me a quick look around A-D).  The verdict?  Well worth a read.

The story follows two lonely souls, English priest Oscar Hopkins and rich Australian orphan Lucinda Leplastrier, as they float along their early lives only to have them intersect and entwine under unusual circumstances.  Both find themselves separated from their own kind by taste and circumstances, but it is a shared passion which brings them together: a love of gambling.

When the beautiful and headstrong Lucinda reveals her secret to her new clerical acquaintance, she expects the usual disapproving response, especially from a man of the cloth.  Instead, Oscar's face lights up and he describes her vice in an entirely new light.

'Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. ...we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise.' (p336, 2005, Vintage Books)

As the unlikely couple cross paths repeatedly and eventually come closer, the obsessive and the compulsive gambler stake their futures on the outcome of a larger wager, the bet which will shape their futures.  Alas, we know from the start, in the form of a series of teasing interjections from our narrator, Oscar's great-grandson, that this is one gamble which is not going to come off.

Oscar and Lucinda starts rather slowly, and the first couple of hundred pages didn't really grab me.  However, as the narrative gently ebbed forward, I became more and more involved with the odd couple and their intriguing story; by the end of the book, I was desperate to find out what had happened and how the beginning and end of the story came together.

One of Carey's strength is the descriptiveness of his writing.  He lingers over scenes, painting vivid pictures of firesides, threadbare furniture and knotted floorboards, dust floating in the sunlight coursing through lead-framed window panes.  Along with the way his characters are seen through many eyes, their own, their close friends and, occasionally those of minor characters, this attention to detail builds images in the reader's mind until you can almost see Lucinda suppressing her rage when patronised by her workers at the glass factory or Oscar battling manfully on the high seas against his overwhelming phobia. 

In the end, the story is all about taking chances, betting your last shirt in the hope of attaining your dreams.  Strange?  Unseemly?  Perhaps.  I'll let Oscar have the last word...

'I cannot see', he said, 'that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence...It is true!  We must gamble every instant of our allotted span.  We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence.' (p.337)

*****

A few weeks ago, I posted on the first few stories from my Thomas Mann collection (although most people would probably not have realised that from the actual post itself), having taken a break half-way through from the unrelenting mental struggle of grappling with Mann's language and concepts.  Imagine then my delight when, on returning for the return bout, I found that the remaining two stories were whimsical, humorous retellings of ancient Eastern tales (obviously, Mann mellowed a little with age).

The first, Die vertauschten Köpfe (The Transposed Heads), is set in India and tells the tale of two lifelong friends, Schridaman (an intelligent trader) and Nanda (a robust farmer and blacksmith).  After the two friends secretly observe the beautiful Sita bathing in a river, Nanda helps to arrange a marriage for the lovelorn Schridaman with the object of his affection.  Later, on a trip the three of them make to visit Sita's parents, events conspire to make the two men lose their heads - literally.  Despite the intervention of a benign deity, who promises to help the two young men come back to life, this is the real start of the story.  You see, in her confusion, the lovely Sita didn't really check whose head belonged to whose body...

What follows is a story inviting us to reflect on what makes us, well, us.  As Sita struggles to decide who is her husband, Schridaman's clever head or his slightly flabby body, we get to make up our mind about whether it is our animal impulses or higher instincts which control our decisions.  Don't worry, it's not as high-flown as it sounds; in fact, at times, it is slightly farcical and extremely amusing - a far cry from the painstakingly excruciating agonies felt by Von Ascherbach in Der Tod in Venedig.

The second story, Das Gesetz (The Law), is a retelling of part of the biblical story of Moses.  While the gist of the story is fairly faithful, there are some variations from the original.  One example is the portrayal of Moses as the son of an illegitimate tryst between an Egyptian princess and a Jewish waterbearer, with the baby being brought up by the father's family, and not the royal household.  Rather than being the stern, superhuman Charlton-Heston-like depiction of the saviour of the Jews, Moses is shown as a rough, tongue-tied holy man, who relies on the practical nous of a few choice followers to convert God's will into achievable ideas.  Joshua, a warlike lieutenant (who, it is suggested, was actually responsible for the tenth plague of Egypt), makes maps of the route to the Holy Land and considers deeply matters such as requisition of resources and the demographic growth required to usurp possible other claimants to Jewish settlements.
  
Anyone who takes the Bible literally will probably find little to enjoy in Mann's rather loose interpretation of Moses' travels, but for the rest of us, this new slant on an old story is a fascinating tale.  The Jews swing between praising Moses to the skies for leading them from slavery and complaining darkly behind his back for having dragged them across the desert from their comfortable, safe Egyptian bondage.  Even when he is in their good book, Moses can't catch a break as it is him his people start idolising - and not God...

In a week when the Australian Prime Minister finally became the victim of constant backbiting (and, admittedly, a bit of a messiah complex), the morals of Das Gesetz appear more relevant than ever.  Whether you're leading the chosen ones across the Sinai Desert or attempting to stare down the mining industry over possible tax reforms, one thing is certain: it's very, very lonely at the top...

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.