Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

A woman hitchhikes solo through New Zealand in Catherine Lacey's compelling novel Nobody Is Ever Missing. 

Elyria is missing. She left her husband and her job as a daytime television scriptwriter in New York without saying anything about her plans to anyone. In fact, she had little in the way of plans when she landed in New Zealand. She just needed to get away. Finding out why kept me turning pages, and so did Elyria's busy internal voice.

"He turned the music up, lit another cigarette, and opened a beer as we drove up a mountain, making hairpin turns at unadvisable speeds. My organs let me know how much they disapproved of where I was sitting--I couldn't remember why I had ever wanted to go anywhere at all."

Elyria saw many odd things on her road trip in New Zealand. I did too.

Many of the people who give Elyria a ride warn her about the dangers of hitchhiking. She, however, has more lofty things on her shattered mind.

"Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone."

New Zealand road ornament.

The world through Elyria's filter is mesmerizing and often surreal. I appreciated the grounding I felt during her moments of clarity.

"I walked into the library and the library smelled like every library I'd ever been in and Dewey decimals were on all the spines, same tiny font, tiny numbers, and I thought, for a moment, that there actually were things you could count on in this world until I realized that the most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems."

There isn't a resolution for Elyria in the end--her problems are substantial--and yet I had seen enough shreds of resourcefulness to have hope for her. Nobody Is Ever Missing is a thought-provoking novel written in a fresh, wry style.

Readalikes with similar humour and themes: The Dept. of Speculation (Jenny Offill) for its exploration of marriage; The First Bad Man (Miranda July) for the mentally troubled main character; and Save Your Own (Elizabeth Brink) for a woman floundering to make sense of her life.

Euphoria by Lily King

Three young anthropologists are studying tribes in 1930s New Guinea in Euphoria, a brilliant novel inspired by the life of Margaret Mead.

Nell and Fen have been incompatibly married for two years, working together in the field but with radically different approaches. Fen's jealousy over Nell's literary success and her ongoing correspondence with her female ex, Helen, simmers beneath the surface of their relationship.

Bankson, meanwhile, battles despair after a lonely period amidst the Kiona people.

   "Three days earlier, I'd gone to the river to drown myself.
    [...]

That beautiful image on the cover of
Euphoria is the bark of a
Eucalyptus deglupta. Photo above taken
at Wahiawa Botanic Garden in Oahu.

    They dragged me to shore, flipped me over, pounded me like a sago pancake, and pulled me back up to standing, all the while lecturing me in their language. They found the stones in my pocket. They grabbed them, the two men, their bodies nearly dry already for they wore nothing but rope around their waists while I sagged with the weight of all my clothes. They made a pile of the stones from my pockets on the beach and shifted language to a Kiona worse than mine, explaining that they knew I was Teket's man from Nengai. The stones are beautiful, they said, but dangerous. You can collect them, but leave them on land before you swim. And do not swim in clothes. This is also dangerous. And do not swim alone. Being alone you will only come to harm. They asked me if I knew the way back. They were stern and curt. Grown-ups who didn't have patience for an oversized child."

A few days after this incident, Nell, Fen and Bankson meet at a colonial government Christmas party. A spark is kindled between Nell and Bankson. Would it have been better if Bankson had remained alone?

A quote from Mead is used as an epigraph: "Quarrels over women are the keynote of the New Guinea primitive world."

I felt like I was right in the middle of it all, with the bugs in the tropical heat, mesmerized by the drama unfolding like a train wreck. Short chapters in three shifting perspectives create an engaging sense of discovery. Euphoria is heartbreaking and surprising in equal measure. I loved it.

Eyrie by Tim Winton

Set in the Western Australia port city of Fremantle, Tim Winton's Eyrie is a gritty and tender novel about betrayal's toll on an idealist's spirit. I was hooked from the start by the distinctive internal voice of Tom Keely, a former environmental spokesperson wrecking himself with booze and prescription drugs.

"Well, the upside was he hadn't died in the night. He was free and unencumbered. Which is to say alone and unemployed. And he was in urgent need of a healing breakfast. Soon as all his bits booted up. Just give it a mo."
[...]
"The lift was mercifully empty. He travelled unseen and uninterrupted to the ground floor. Let the lobby doors roll back. Took it full in the face. All that hideous light. Walked out like a halfwit into a bushfire. It was hot enough to kill an asbestos sparrow."

Tom has been holed up for a year in a dive-y tenth floor apartment. His self-centered anguish finally shifts when he meets two of his neighbours who live on the same floor. Tom knew Gemma when they were both kids living on the same block. She and her sister used to take refuge at Tom's house when their father got violent. Now, Gemma has a daughter in prison and she is caring for her 6-year-old grandson, Kai.

Gemma and Kai are facing deep trouble from some scary folk. The question is whether Tom can help himself, never mind anyone else.

It was smart of me to buy a gift copy of Eyrie for my friend Kathy, because this is a great book for discussion. Winton's storycrafting is impeccable and the ending is left open. There are all kinds of important issues like social justice, natural resources extraction, and class privilege. Kathy and I spent an hour on the phone talking about Eyrie last night. Winton will be at the Vancouver Writers Fest in October and we both look forward to hearing him there.

Readalikes: The Antagonist (Lynn Coady); The Painter (Peter Heller); and Carpentaria (Alexis Wright).

Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox

Elizabeth Knox's Mortal Fire is a stand-alone historical fantasy set in Southland, the same alternate-New Zealand as Dreamhunter and Dreamquake. The Dreamhunter Duet totally blew me away, so I was thrilled to read another book set in the same world. I was not disappointed. In fact, I ignored the other four books I had on the go while I was immersed in Mortal Fire.

When I was finished, I felt bereft. Have you seen the Epic Reads video about book hangovers? It was kind of like that. It took a few days before I was able to comfortably settle into a different book.* I only wanted more more more Southland, with its dreamy magic.

Mortal Fire opens in alternate 1959. Canny/Akenesi/Agnes is 16, one of the few brown-skinned students at her school, and the star of the math team. She has an uncanny ability that she can't explain to others, a way of feeling the cracks between things, seeing the patterns that make the world.

Canny's mother Sisema is an indigenous Ma'eu from the Shackle Islands near Southland. When her parents travel to her mother's home island so that Sisema can receive an award of honour, Canny is left in the care of her older stepbrother, Sholto, and his girlfriend. The three of them spend the school holidays in a place unlike anything Canny has previously experienced. Bring on the earth magic!

Believable characters, an atmospheric setting, gorgeous language and an absorbing plot.
I loved this book. Absolutely adored it.

*Tim Winton's dark and stunning Eyrie, set in contemporary western Australia.

The ACB with Honora Lee by Kate De Goldi

Kate De Goldi, New Zealand author of The 10 PM Question has a delightful new chapter book for readers of all ages. The ACB with Honora Lee is about the power of intergenerational relationships. Perry is an irrepressible girl with distracted parents. When Perry's grandmother, who has dementia, is moved to a facility within walking distance, Perry begins regular visits.

If Perry's father left the room Gran asked Perry questions instead.
'Who is that man?' said Gran.
'He's my dad,' said Perry. 'His name is Jonathan Sunley. He's your son.'
He's your Sunley, thought Perry, smiling, but she didn't say that to Gran in case it was confusing.
'Are you Imogen?' said Gran.
'No,' said Perry. 'I'm Perry.'
'That's a boy's name.' Gran squinted at Perry. 'Are you a boy? Where is Imogen?'
'I don't know. And, I'm a girl.'
'Your hair's short.'
'So is yours.' This wasn't rude because it was true. Gran's hair was short and thin and close to her head, like a swimming cap.
'She's probably late,' said Gran. 'She'll be late for her own funeral.'
'Probably,' said Perry. She couldn't think what else to say.
'I spy with my little eye,' said Gran.
'Goody,' said Perry. She liked I Spy.
'Something beginning with spectacles,' said Gran. She pointed her bent finger at Perry's spectacles, which were hard to miss.
'You're supposed to say a letter,' said Perry. You should say, "I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S."'
'Well, best be going,' said Gran. 'No rest for the wicked.'
And she stood up and walked away, which was usually how a visit to Gran ended.

Perry is a wonderful character. Every time she sees her grandmother, she reminds her that she is her granddaughter. Perry is bright and full of questions, good at solving problems, and loves to play with language.

'Maybe bumblebees are just getting stupider,' said Perry. She was thinking of becoming a zoologist when she grew up.
'There's no such word as stupider,' said both her parents together.
Perry looked up from the picture she was drawing. (It was a spider making a web.)
'There is now,' she said.

The primary audience for this warm, witty and wise story is between Grade 3 and 7.

The book itself is beautifully packaged, with coloured drawings by Gregory O'Brien, including the bumblebee pattern on the cloth cover and the whimsical alphabet endpapers. Even the squarish size is just right -- like a gift ready to be presented. Treat a young person... or yourself.

Readalikes: Counting by 7s (Holly Goldberg Sloan); The Higher Power of Lucky (Susan Patron).

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (with a tangent on star ratings)

The last entry that I'll share from my 2004 travel/reading journal is about the book I liked best from that period: Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. I added a star to the entry, which was my code for "outstanding." That was before I kept a Shelfari account and got into the habit of using a 5-star rating system. In case you were wondering, I don't use stars on this blog because I find them too crude for evaluating creative work. Star ratings can be used to gage popularity and polarity, so I think they have their place in conversations about books and reading. My goal is to share more specific information about books, so I avoid the shorthand of star ratings.

Anyway, these are the patchy notes I recorded in May 2004:

Look up Rilke - Third Sonnet to Orpheus. [I don't remember if I did this then, but I did just now: it's online here.]

Pascal - gave opinion that all of our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room. One reason he found for the restlessness of human nature is the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal conditions: so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us. The one thing that could alleviate our despair was distraction, yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin.

Chatwin wonders if our need for distraction, our mania for the new, is an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn.

"All the great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a 'wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world' - the words are those of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor - and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachments and take to the road."

- sedentary peoples more aggressive than migratory ones
____________________________________________

My notes leave out the framework of The Songlines. I remember it being mostly a travelogue of the Australian outback and the musings of a British author about Aboriginal culture. It gave me things to think about and I love books that do that. While I worked on my wwoof hosts' farm, I pondered what I had read. Nowadays, I wear headphones and listen to audiobooks while I garden. The drawback to this is that I'm missing out on thinking/daydreaming time. Is my craving for stories simply a need for distraction? Will my epitaph be "Ruined by Books"?

The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey

Still looking back on books that I read 10 years ago. These are my notes from July 2004 about The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith.

A most unusual and inventive narrative. I was reminded of Ella Minnow Pea (the fabricated country, the footnotes) and of A Prayer for Owen Meany (the freakish protagonist and the bizarre humour). The tiny country of Efica had a relationship to Voorstand that reminded me of the relationship between Canada and the U.S.A. Loved it. Great ending!

It was my first introduction to the multitalented Peter Carey and I've since enjoyed several more of this Australian author's works. The only one that I've previously reviewed on my blog, however, is Parrot and Olivier in America. 

The Silver Button by Bob Graham

The start of a new year is a great time to step back and take a longer look at things, so I've chosen to begin 2014 with a post about a picture book that does exactly that.

The entire drama in The Silver Button by Bob Graham (How to Heal a Broken Wing) takes place over the course of one single minute. While a baby takes his first step, Graham offers glimpses of simultaneous moments happening in a widening circle that begins in the child's house and gradually expands to include an aerial view of the entire city in which he lives. It's a beautiful exercise in gaining perspective and placing ourselves in the context of our larger world.

All ages, from babies to adults.

More picture books that shift the focal point to longer and wider views can be found on my Zoom Out list here.

The 10 PM Question by Kate De Goldi

Bolinda audio edition 2009 with
illustration by Sarah Maxey

The 10 PM Question by New Zealand author Kate De Goldi is one of my all-time favourite books. It's wise and funny and heartbreaking. I've read it twice so far, plus listened to the audiobook narrated by Stig Wemyss [Bolinda: 8 hr 27 min].

12-year-old Frankie Parsons worries obsessively. Earthquakes, dead batteries in the smoke detector, flu epidemics, intestinal parasites in the cat, hepatitis, a hole in his heart, food poisoning... everything. 

Candlewick
U.S. pbk edition 2012

On a hot day, Frankie's friend Gigs suggests that they cool off at the swimming pool. "But [the pool] would be unbearably crowded today, Frankie thought. And last Saturday when they'd been there, he'd had his annual unsavory collision with a Band-Aid. There was nothing more revolting in Frankie's view than freestyling your way, innocent and blissful, into the path of a used Band-Aid. In Frankie's private hierarchy of squeamish experiences, the casual caress of a stained Band-Aid was right up there with accidentally catching sight of writhing maggots in a forgotten rubbish bag. He'd had to get out of the pool immediately last Saturday and lie on his towel in the sun to recover."

Frankie also shoulders the burden of keeping his dysfunctional family's household running smoothly. The family cat, the Fat Controller, is as intractable as the rest.

"The day began in the worst possible way. Twice. First, it began at 3:49 a.m. when the Fat Controller jumped through Frankie's bedroom window with a rat and proceeded to do a presentation juggle on the floor in front of his bed. [...] But removing the Fat Controller wasn't easy, since she became ferocious and most uncooperative if her hunting celebrations were interrupted. Since Frankie couldn't bring himself to pick up the rat (in case it was still alive) and since the Fat Controller couldn't be persuaded to leave the rat, he had to pick up the Fat Controller -- no mean feat, considering her body mass -- with the rat in her mouth, and cart them both down the hall, out through the kitchen, and into the backyard, all as quietly as possible and holding the growling cat at rigid arms' length in case any part of the rat brushed his skin and he somehow contracted bubonic plague."

De Goldi has packed this novel with wonderful characters who live on past the pages. The 10 PM Question is one of those rare gems with strong cross-generational appeal. At the Edmonton Public Library, it's shelved in the children's department, but it could just as comfortably sit in the teen section or with the adult fiction. Grade 6 - adult.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

There's a lid for every pot, as one of my friends used to say. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion follows an Australian scientist's efforts to find a wife using logical methods. Don Tillman is a geneticist who probably falls somewhere on the autism spectrum. People find his blunt honesty bewildering and sometimes hurtful, but Don is just as confused by everyone else's irrational behaviour. I was immediately beguiled by Don's first-person voice.

When Don cycles to a fancy dinner reservation on a rainy night, he is stopped at the entrance.

"You need to wear a jacket." 

"I'm wearing a jacket." 

"I'm afraid we require something a little more formal, sir." 

The hotel employee indicated his own jacket as an example. In defence of what followed, I submit the Oxford English Dictionary (Compact, 2nd Edition) definition of 'jacket': 1 (a) An outer garment for the upper part of the body. 

I also note that the word 'jacket' appears on the care instructions for my relatively new and perfectly clean Gore-Tex jacket. But it seemed his definition of jacket was limited to 'conventional suit jacket'. 

"We would be happy to lend you one, sir. In this style." 

"You have a supply of jackets? In every possible size?" 

I did not add that the need to maintain such an inventory was surely evidence of their failure to communicate the rule clearly, and that it would be more efficient to improve their wording or abandon the rule altogether. Nor did I mention that the cost of jacket purchase and cleaning must add to the price of their meals. Did their customers know that they were subsidising a jacket warehouse? 

"I wouldn't know about that, sir," he said. "Let me organise a jacket." 

Needless to say I was uncomfortable at the idea of being re-dressed in an item of public clothing of dubious cleanliness. For a few moments, I was overwhelmed by the sheer unreasonableness of the situation. I was already under stress, preparing for the second encounter with a woman who might become my life partner. And now the institution that I was paying to supply us with a meal -- the service provider who should surely be doing everything possible to make me comfortable -- was putting arbitrary obstacles in my way. 

My Gore-Tex jacket, the high-technology garment that had protected me in rain and snowstorms, was being irrationally, unfairly and obstructively contrasted with the official's essentially decorative woollen equivalent. I had paid $1015 for it, including $120 extra for the customised reflective yellow. I outlined my argument. 

"My jacket is superior to yours by all reasonable criteria: impermeability to water, visibility in low light, storage capacity." I unzipped the jacket to display the internal pockets and continued, "Speed of drying, resistance to food stains, hood..." 

The official was still showing no interpretable reaction, although I had almost certainly raised my voice. 

"Vastly superior tensile strength..." 

To illustrate this last point, I took the lapel of the employee's jacket in my hands. I obviously had no intention of tearing it but I was suddenly grabbed from behind by an unknown person who attempted to throw me to the ground. I automatically responded with a safe, low-impact throw to disable him without dislodging my glasses. The term 'low impact' applies to a martial arts practitioner who knows how to fall. This person did not, and landed heavily. 

I turned to see him -- he was large and angry. In order to prevent further violence, I was forced to sit on him. 

"Get the fuck off me. I'll fucking kill you," he said. 

On that basis, it seemed illogical to grant his request.

I was routing for Don every farcical step of the way. At its core, this story is about an important issue: everyone needs human love and companionship. Funny, touching and sweet. Highly recommended.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Me, in a pub in Greymouth,
133 years later and just a
little north of Hokitika, the
setting of The Luminaries.

I most certainly agree with the judges of the Man Booker and the Canadian Governor General awards: Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is a winner. Because of its size, I kept it at work and read it during my lunch and coffee breaks. It's taken nearly three weeks to get through it, but I looked forward to every moment spent within the world of the goldrush on New Zealand's South Island. It is a delightfully rewarding book.

The Luminaries is big in every way, not just in its 832 page count. There's a large cast of memorable characters, a devilishly complex plot, a great amount of dialogue (that charmed me with period language such as lucifers [early matches], spills [twists of paper for lighting fires], whatnots [small tables], and clews [metal loops]), and a setting made vivid with details.

I could imagine what it would be like in the gaolor's house:

"the gaoler ushered everyone from the room and pulled the door closed, causing the hallway to shiver. The interior walls of the gaoler's house were made of patterned calico that had been stretched tight and tacked to the building's frame, and when the timber creaked in the wind, or was disturbed by a heavy footfall or the sudden slam of a door, the walls all quivered and rippled, like the surface of a pool --"

A young man, when asked how he likes Hokitika, responds:

"I like it very well indeed. It's a perfect hive of contradictions! There is a newspaper, and no coffee house in which to read it; there is a druggist for prescriptions, but one can never find a doctor, and the hospital barely deserves its name. The store is always running out of either boots or socks, but never both at once, and all the hotels along Revell-street only serve breakfast, though they do so at all hours of the day!"

The entire narrative neatly balances opposites, creating a harmonious whole. I like it very well indeed.

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

A remote island in Micronesia in the 1950s. A "lost tribe" who apparently lived for centuries. A doctor who won a Nobel prize in 1974 for his discovery of a syndrome of delayed aging that was related to eating a rare turtle. The same, never-married doctor, convicted of pedastry in 1997, after charges are brought against him by one of his own 43 (!) adopted children.

What a plot! Hanya Yanagihara has loosely based The People in the Trees on the real life drama surrounding Nobel prizewinner Dr. Gajdusek. Like other recent novels inspired by sensational news stories -- You Are One of Them (Elliott Holt) and Cartwheel (Jennifer duBois) -- it is very well executed.

The People in the Trees is framed as a memoir written by the imprisoned doctor Norton Perina, edited and with footnotes added by his one staunch supporter, Dr. Ronald Kubodera. NYTimes reviewer Carmela Ciuraru aptly compared them to a couple of characters from The Simpsons: [Kubodera] "serves as Smithers to Perina's Mr. Burns." (Except this book is not in any way a comedy.) In the audiobook [Dreamscape: 16.5 hr], the two men are narrated by Arthur Morey and William Roberts.

Perina is a fascinating character, a closeted gay man who seems nearly incapable of experiencing emotion. He writes of a time when he was a young man, travelling with his brother Owen (who is also gay):

"I can still recall, with a sort of odd, unpleasant clarity, that unfamiliar and inarticulable sensation I began experiencing, about halfway through the journey, whenever I gazed at Owen. I remember feeling something pressing against my chest at those times, substantial and insistent and yet not uncomfortable, not painful. After a few episodes, I deduced it was, for lack of a better word, love."

Later, Perina's distaste for women is a stumbling block when he considers that he might enjoy having children around.

"A wife! What would I discuss with her? I imagined days sitting around a plain white table and sawing away at a piece of meat burned crisp as toast, hearing the clop of her shoes as she walked across a shining linoleum floor, her hectoring conversations about money or the children or my job; I saw myself silent, listening to her drone on about her day and the laundry and whom she had seen at the store and what they had said." 

Perina's attitude towards children:

 "I have never found it difficult, as some do, to speak to children. All one has to do is pretend that they're some kind of intelligent farm animal: a pig, perhaps, or a horse. In fact, one should be much more intimidated by the prospect of speaking to a horse, since they can often be quite quick-witted and possessed of a great disdain for those they feel are not worthy of their attention."

If you only enjoy reading about characters that you like, you will want to stay away from The People in the Trees. It was weird that I found myself with concurrent books starring misogynists in the South Pacific. (See Worst. Person. Ever.) To have them both reference the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) was also a surprise. On top of that, the Tuskegee syphilis study is mentioned in The People in the Trees as well as in another book I've got on the go, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Another odd coincidence. Anyway, The People in the Trees audiobook held me spellbound.

Readalikes: State of Wonder (Ann Patchett); I was also reminded of the creepy yet erudite narrative voice in By Blood (Ellen Ullman); and the anthropological field study that makes up a large part of The People in the Trees has echoes of Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead).

Worst. Person. Ever. by Douglas Coupland

Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's demented and satirical new novel. The man of the title is Raymond Gunt, a British cameraman hired to film an American Survivor-style reality TV show in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. He's a boorish horndog adept at offending and alienating everyone around him. Worst. Person. Ever. is as outrageous as it is hilarious.

Imagine every obnoxious person you've ever met, all rolled into one, and you've got the greatest anti-hero ever. I even found myself agreeing with Raymond sometimes, like when he describes processed foods as "overpackaged chemical goatfuckings manufactured in the same factories that make dildos and pesticides." (Not the particular phrasing I would have chosen, but I'm sympathetic to the sentiment.)

The novel rockets along from one misadventure to another. It's entirely in dialogue, counting Raymond's first-person narration.

"I like to think of myself as a giving, caring person who really does think about the modern world -- someone who tries to improve the planet, even though it seems pretty much doomed. As a consequence, maybe I'm not fully qualified to pass judgment on the diet of most Americans. But as I stood there staring at the shit-coated guano logs and repulsive cans of room-temperature weasel piss in the airport vending machines, I was appalled. 'Come on, America, you're living creatures, not science experiments.'
[...]
'Ray, I don't think there's anything in there we could actually put in our bodies.'
Still we scanned the grids of toxins wrapped in bright paper and the cans of sugary blight.
'Look!' Neal was pointing, with a heartbreaking note of hope in his voice. 'Look at that bar there -- it's got peanuts in it. That's food.'
'Probably tastes like a pocket calculator garnished with dried herpes juice flakes.'"

I don't think other readers will have wishy-washy reactions -- you'll either love it or hate it. I loved it.

Sporks and knoons are among the newfangled
cutlery featured in Worst. Person. Ever.
(Image from the flyleaf,
Random House Canada edition.)

Readalike (minus the profanity): Beauty Queens (Libba Bray).

See also other books by Coupland that I've reviewed: Generation A; Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People; and Eleanor Rigby.

The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty

This audiobook cover image in
Hoopla looks too saccharine for me.

I was quite taken aback by the cover image of the e-audiobook The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty in the Hoopla database [Dreamscape: 13 h 46 m] at the library. If I hadn't already been convinced to read it based on a review, I would have dismissed it as not to my taste, strictly based on the cover art. Despite appearances, it is not a frothy romance. Australian actor and voice artist Caroline Lee performs the story with lively wit and warmth.

This audiobook edition is
a little more appealing, with the
 shattering flower, but still not
something I'd pick up cold.

In Kirkus Reviews, Liane Moriarty is described as an "edgier, more provocative and bolder successor to Maeve Binchy." I agree. The Husband's Secret is perfect for readers who enjoy contemporary stories about interesting women. It opens with Pandora's version of events regarding a jar that was not to be opened, and then follows the interconnected lives of three women in Sydney, Australia.

Cecilia, mother of three, has found a letter addressed to her from her husband John-Paul, with instructions not to open it until after his death. He is still alive, but he acts so out of character when he learns that she has found the envelope that Cecilia eventually breaks her promise not to read it. Secrets from the past have far-reaching effects.

 The thought-provoking moral issues in this novel make it perfect for book group discussion. I wasn't crazy about the tidy way things get wrapped up at the end, but I still liked it very much.

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

When I'm not sure what book to read next, I'll go through my TBR pile, reading the first page of each until I know I've got the right one. Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel begins with a chapter titled 'Laura, 1960s.'

"When Laura was two, the twins decided to kill her.
They were eight when she was born. Twenty-three months later, their mother died. Their father's aunt Hester, spry and recently back in Sydney after half a lifetime in London, came to look after the children until a suitable arrangement could be made. She stayed until Laura left school."

I couldn't resist that opening and soon decided this is De Kretser's finest book yet. (See also my reviews of her earlier novels, The Hamilton Case and The Rose Grower.) Obviously I'm not the only one who likes Questions of Travel because it's been sweeping the medals in Australia this year -- the Miles Franklin, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the Prime Minister's Literary Award.

Interleaved narratives follow two people of the same age through their entire lives. Laura Fraser leaves university to travel the world before eventually returning to Australia to work for a travel guide publisher. Ravi Mendis grows up in Sri Lanka, where devastating events force him to seek asylum in Australia.

As in the Zimbabwe setting of NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names, children's games in Sri Lanka mimic the violence in their immediate world:

"Ravi lit a cigarette and remained at his post. A different game started up below. The children ran around until one shouted, 'Bomb!' At once, the others threw themselves to the ground, where they lay spread-eagled and very still. After a little while, they got up and ran around again. Ravi couldn't see the point of this game. But there were days when the children played it nonstop."

Universal truths about our connections to geography and to other people are revealed through finely-drawn individual characters. Foreign places are variously experienced by tourists, immigrants, and refugees. Questions of Travel spans the globe and incorporates world events of the past 50 years. Instead of trying to choose from among the many eloquent passages flagged while reading, I'll just say that I highly recommend it.

(Those of you who love excerpts, please stay with me, right to the bottom. I can't return this book to the library without saving some of this great stuff.)

Readalikes: A Disobedient Girl (Ru Freeman) and Five Bells (Gail Jones).

1980s
"Laura thought, Perhaps suffering isn't a sign that God is absent or indifferent or cruel. Perhaps all the horrible things happen because he just gets distracted. She was sixteen, a metaphysical age. The Absentminded Almighty: having created him in her image, she felt quite protective of him and worshipped him tenderly until the phase passed."

"Hefty eucalypts filled tiny yards: broccoli jammed into bud vases. The trees must have been planted in the optimistic sixties, when minds expanded and it had seemed that everything else must follow."

"Across the world, the world-weary were waiting. Time after time, Laura would learn that she had missed the moment; to be a tourist was always to arrive too late. Paradise was lost: prosperity had intervened, or politics. The earthquake had finished off Naples. Giuliani had wrecked New York. Immigrants ruined wherever they squatted. France -- well, Fance had always been blighted by the necessary evil of the French. But if only Laura had seen Bangkok before the smog/Hong Kong before the Chinese/Switzerland before the Alps/the planet before the Flood."

2001
"Nimal, too, kept in touch. He no longer worked for RealLanka; the company had folded. Hugely successful at first, it had fallen to a creeping malaise. Clients began to complain that the experiences for which they had paid handsomely and in hard currency lacked authenticity. Those who chose to stay with urban families were affronted when their hosts addressed them in English or invited them to watch reruns of American soaps. A Norwegian wrote that the household into which he had been thrust was grossly materialistic. He had been assured that these people were Buddhists, yet five curries had waited on the table, including beef. A new Zealander demanded a refund: her hosts' eleven-year-old daughter had confided that when she grew up she wanted to be just like Britney Spears."

2002
"Tracy moistened her lips with peppermint tea and explained to Laura that she was part time at the gallery. Because Destiny was only three, although you'd never know it, everyone from the swimming coach to the piano teacher said she was so advanced for her age. That was when Tracy had known she'd made the right decision about her future, meeting Stew the very same week she moved back to Sydney. you had to believe in karma, n'est-ce pas, darl? Had she mentioned that Stew was a Buddhist? But not in that fundamentalist vegetarian way."

2004
"The true [travel] guidebook would advise: 'Pay attention, be kind, think twice, shut up.'"

Albert of Adelaide by Howard Anderson

Howard Anderson's Albert of Adelaide is a charming, oddball tale about a platypus who escaped from a zoo with a quest to find somewhere that he could feel at peace. In the remote desert of northeastern Australia, the first animal that Albert the Platypus encounters is a wombat arsonist and con artist named Jack.

"Jack paused to pour more tea into his cup. 'I don't know how much you know about wombats, Albert, but we're a boring lot, let me tell you.'
'I've seen one or two from a distance, but you're the first one I've ever talked to,' Albert replied.
'We live in deep holes, come out in the early morning or late in the evening, eat some leaves, and then call it a day. What kind of life is that?' [...]
Except for all those leaves, the life didn't sound too bad to Albert. 'Quiet.'
'Damn right it's quiet. It was too damn quiet for me.' Jack spit a tea leaf into the fire."

Some of the characters that Albert meets are not so friendly as Jack. In a bar at Ponsby Station, he encounters outright prejudice: "WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE WHO ISN'T A MARSUPIAL. The Management." Misadventure ensues.

It is rare to find an allegory written with such a light touch as Albert of Adelaide. Animal fantasy is also an unusual subgenre for an adult audience. Actually, this book would be fine for readers as young as 9 or 10. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the film Rango.

Readalikes: The Sisters Brothers (Patrick DeWitt); Mr and Mrs Bunny--Detectives Extraordinaire! (Polly Horvath); and The Rabbits (John Marsden and Shaun Tan).

Five Bells by Gail Jones

Five lives loosely intersect over the course of a single day at Circular Quay in Sydney in Five Bells by Australian author Gail Jones. Memories rise gently to the surface as the narrative switches between the different protagonists. Jones has an introspective style that I found piercingly beautiful:

"It was a quiet, folded moment, entirely her own."

"Images lined up for her memory, for the future, for wild or idle surmise, this little collection that made up the blunder of the moment, and of James's pure fear, and of her own shameless sense of triumph."

Whether this previous line brings John Keats, Dorothy Porter or some other poet to mind, it's an example of the nuances that Jones adds through literary references. There are also many references to art.

(On Aboriginal art in a museum): "Pattern was thought, and spirit, and land, and time. Here were no portraits or conventional depictions of objects, but something aquiver, energetic, like human activity seen from the sky."

(On Rene Magritte, witnessing his mother's body after she had drowned, and how small details might be the salvation from ideas that are too large): "The space a drowning might make, the milky-green water closing over a face, was a tremendous, vile and unassimilable thing."

"A woman standing still in a main street on a Saturday afternoon could carry all this: death, time, recollected acts of love-making -- all together, simultaneous, ringing in her head."

"The world did not acknowledge private misfortune." But readers can, and that acknowledgement is a precious thing. Five Bells explores themes of memory, grief and forgiveness within the "breathing of the world."

Readalike: Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf).

The Forrests by Emily Perkins

In 1967, an unusual family moves from New York to Auckland in Emily Perkins' character-based novel, The Forrests. "Reasons to do [...] with lack of success back home, a paucity of funds, an excess of entitlement." Frank Forrest threw himself into directing an amateur dramatics society in his new community and alienated most of the membership. His family lived in poverty and his wife, Lee, was his only cheerleader.

"Dot and Eve agreed that they hated their father."  Three years later, Frank abandoned them all and flew back to New York. Lee packed up her four children -- Michael, Evelyn, Dorothy and Ruth, plus Michael's friend Daniel, who at age 13 had pretty much moved in with the Forrests permanently -- and they moved to a commune on "wimmin's land" outside Auckland.

"Dot lay in the children's cabin on a bunk bed, on top of the thin red sleeping bag, sloughed like a cocoon over the foam mattress, yellow and bitten, that covered the plywood bunk base, and she wept over The Little Mermaid and for all her selfishness. When her father returned she would love him with an open heart."

Dorothy was 7 when the family first moved to New Zealand. The story follows the stages of her life in vivid, sensory snapshots all the way through to old age. From a child reading fairy tales to a senior woman with an eReader:

"Dot scrolled the pages of her book, another book she couldn't read without her glasses and magnifying glass; all very well enlarging the font but not when it ended up three words per line."

Perkins' writing style brings not only people but also individual moments into focus:

"The light was indecisive, shifting between bright and low, and it disoriented her, made her hurry in case of being late, so that when she reached the floral clock, tightly coiled in this early spring but still marking time between the green minutes, the Roman hours, it took Dorothy a moment to be able to read that she was early." (See a heritage photo of the clock online here.)

A beautiful, unsentimental look at the hardships and the rewards that make ordinary lives extraordinary.

Readalike: Carry the One (Carol Anshaw) for the examination of family dynamics over a long period of time.

The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones

I'm back from Belgium with lots of good memories, a head cold that started after I landed in Edmonton and a laptop that refuses to connect to the internet. On a borrowed machine, doped up on medication and probably jetlagged too, here is a review of one of the books I read on the trip.

Author Lloyd Jones is probably best known in North America for his novel Mister Pip. The Book of Fame is also a New Zealand award-winner. It's a fictionalized account of the true story of the original All Black team of young rugby players who travelled to the UK in 1905 where they astounded sports fans with their skill. I know next to nothing about rugby but I was swept up in this amazing tale.

Over the course of a year, the New Zealand team lost only one match out of 35 games. "For the record, we scored 830 points and conceded 39." You don't have to know anything about the scoring system to recognize what a feat this was. Final scores give a good indication of their prowess: Oxford (47-nil); Bedford (41-nil); Munster (33-nil); Yorkshire (40-nil). Their crushing itinerary had them sometimes playing two or more games per week. They suffered broken ribs and collar bones among other injuries and illness and continued to win against the top British teams. The men came from humble backgrounds - farmers, miners, civil servants - and their first impressions of England exemplify this: "There appeared to be little in the way of landscaping left to do."

The choice of first person plural narration is an inspired and perfect choice because the men worked so well as a team they were like one individual with many bodies. The only other time I've read a novel in this viewpoint is in Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters. The format Jones used could be loosely described as verse. Vignettes, fragments of newspaper accounts, personal journal entries and list poems are all part of the mix. There are accounts of game details too, of course, but I never felt overwhelmed by too much sports talk.

When I finished the book, I immediately felt the need to watch an All Blacks haka on YouTube. I could imagine the impression it would make on the opposing team!

I highly recommend The Book of Fame to readers who enjoy travel writing or historical fiction with a focus on people and everyday-life details. It's a must for rugby fans.

Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy

This wonderful collection of short stories from Australia is aptly endorsed in the quotes on the back of the book:

"sly, seductive, and surprising"
"talent for the comic and the chilling"
"clear-eyed, unsentimental empathy"
"a feeling for the precise moment when stars move in the cosmos"
"funny, wise, and achingly sad"
"incredibly spare and gifted writing"

What can I add? The stories differ widely, yet almost all of them deliver a little jolt at the end. I would be seeing a situation one way, and then suddenly have my perspective altered. This could have been unsettling, except the endings were just so fitting, it was more like an a-ha! feeling. A very good reading experience.