Monthly Archives: January 2010

Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire

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A thought-provoking and searing first novel. -The Age

Sarah Clark is a smart kid. That’s what we’re told, anyway. By the time she turns fourteen she’s read every one of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, and then the works of Donne, Marlowe, Pope and Marvell. At fourteen she meets the English teacher, Daniel Carr, who will change her life.

“For the entire forty minutes of his first class he spoke about why Yeats was relevant to Australian teenagers in the year 1995. In the second class, Sarah put up her hand to make a comment on something he said about ‘Hamlet’. When he called on her to speak, she started and could not stop. She stayed in the classroom all through lunch, and when she re-emerged into the sunlight and the condescending stares of the schoolyard cliques, she was utterly changed.”

It’s not a huge leap to believe that a meeting of the minds turns to a meeting of the flesh. But their sexual affair is not quite the same as the poetry they’ve discussed– it’s raw, aggressive often brutal. The obvious questions to ask would be: is this abuse? (Clearly he’s breaking the law based on his position and the difference in their ages.) But Sarah has a penchant for this sort of sex, it seems.

And when Carr is forced to choose between Sarah and his wife and children, he chooses the latter– leaving Sarah to drift through the next eight years of her life in a haze of alcohol, drugs, and sex with hundreds of men.

Until Carr re-enters her life.

This is not a love story. Watching Sarah move through her days (and nights) is like peering through the windows of a car wreck. The characters are almost despicable– and so as I was reading, even when things were particularly horrible, I kept thinking –you know what, you guys deserve each other.

Saturday by Ian McEwan

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I am not a McEwan newbie. Saturday is the 4th of his books I have read and, thus far, my least favourite. But even though I didn’t love this book, I would still have to praise McEwan’s ability to write. If I have a criticism of Saturday it’s that it’s over-written. That may be the fault of McEwan’s decision to set the novel in one day in the life of neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne.

Saturday is Henry’s favourite day. He plays squash, does some shopping and on this particular Saturday– anticipates the homecoming of his daughter, Daisy. But, of course, this Saturday isn’t going to be like all the others. He awakens in the middle of the night and watches from his bedroom window as a plane– streaming fire, cuts across the sky to (crash, he assumes) land at Heathrow.

This event wouldn’t be the cause of so much concern if this story wasn’t set post 9/11 and on the very day when hundreds of thousands on people are set to march in London’s streets to protest the war against Iraq.

As Henry sets out to accomplish his long list of things to do before his daughter arrives he gets into a minor fender bender that will propel (although not quickly) the book towards its denouement. Whether or not you find the ending, or the book for that matter, satisfying, will depend on how much you care for Henry and the minutia of his Saturday.

Carrie’s Story by Molly Weatherfield

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Man, it’s hard to find good porn. And I was hopeful about this book, I truly was. Apparently I have been spoiled by the Internet, though. Or perhaps I am just more perverse than I thought I was. Perhaps, five years ago this book would have shocked me…or made me hot. But…now?

Carrie’s Story is exactly what the title says it is: Carrie’s account of being a sexual slave to Jonathan, a rich, good-looking guy with a penchant for having his shoes licked and beating Carrie’s perfect ass.

Carrie’s a smart cookie. She analyzes every little thing that happens to her and makes no apology for the fact that s/m turns her on. And, to her credit, Weatherfield doesn’t make any apology for it either. She acknowledges that whatever floats the boat between consenting adults– even if that means acting like a pony– is fine by her. And she writes about it intelligently.

But for me it was just so-so in the erotic department. I guess I just like my porn to be, well, pornier.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

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British born, Canadian-raised writer Camilla Gibb’s stunning new novel Sweetness in the Belly divided my book club. I was among those who loved it. The book tells the story of Lilly, born to hippie parents and brought up as a Muslim, after their death, in the city of Harar. Her story is told by layering her young years in a politically charged Ethiopia with her life as a nurse in London. It’s a fascinating picture of a world torn apart by poverty and prejudice and by Lilly’s own beliefs. It is also a love story as we wait with Lilly to learn the fate of her lover, Aziz.

I know nothing of the politics of Ethiopia under Emperor Haile Selassie. I know very little about the Muslim religion, but Gibb’s beautiful prose and attention to detail (she conducted fieldwork in Ethiopia for her PhD in social anthropology) makes this book a page-turner. The characters are complex and interesting and the day-to-day struggles of the women, in particular, are riveting. I was both gutted and elated by book’s end.

The Ruins by Scott Smith

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Smith’s book has been on my to-read list for a while. I have had a life-long love affair with horror novels…both the truly creepy (Peter Straub’s Ghost Story springs to mind) and the truly schlocky (just about anything by John Farris) but I don’t read them too much anymore. Still, The Ruins came with quite a pedigree. Smith wrote A Simple Plan a kick-ass book about how the discovery of a crashed plane and millions of dollars irrevocably changes the lives of three average guys. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it.

The Ruins follows the fortunes of four friends on vacation in Mexico. They go to the site of Mayan ruins with Mathias and Pablo to search for Mathias’s missing brother. What follows is an entertaining enough story of pure fantasy- meaning that the horror they encounter isn’t the worst thing to happen to them. (And it’s not all that believable, even for a horror fan.) Smith’s true talent is in scraping at the dark things people do to each other and themselves when they find themselves in a bad place.- For my money though, A Simple Plan does a much better job of making us both wince and shudder.

Stephen King called The Ruins “the best horror novel of the new century.” I’m a King fan, but I’m going to have to disagree. If you want to go to the dark place, read A Simple Plan or better still, read King’s classic, It.

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen’s book Black and Blue, was the first novel my book club ever read together- almost eight years ago now. I remember liking it quite a lot, so when her novel Rise and Shine was chosen for last month, I was quite happy.

Until I started reading.

Meghan and Bridget are sisters living in New York City. They couldn’t be more opposite. Meghan is the famous host of a morning TV show, Rise and Shine, and her sister, Bridget, the dowdier and less confident one, is a social worker. You can already see where this is going, can’t you?

Although Meghan seems to have it all- a wonderful husband and a fabulous son, both of whom Bridget adores, there are cracks in her seemingly perfect life and one day she utters something wholly inappropriate on live television and her world comes crumbling down. And the problem with the book is  I could care less.

What follows is 269 pages of Meghan and Bridget trying to sort through their personal baggage and come to terms with each other on a different level. And all of that was okay- not great, but okay…until the last 50 or so pages when Quindlen does what I hate….takes all the lives she’s dangled in front of us and propels them into the future giving us the ‘happily ever after’ she so clearly thinks they deserve.

Ugh.

The Lake Dreams the Sky by Swain Wolfe

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I don’t know how Swain Wolfe’s novel The Lake Dreams the Sky ended up on my bedside table. Somehow I managed to score an advanced reading copy of it and it has been in my ‘to-read’ pile forever. I finally picked it up and couldn’t put it down.

The Lake Dreams the Sky tells the story of Elizabeth, a high-powered something or other who returns to the lake of the title to visit her elderly grandmother and reacquaint herself with the Montana landscape of her youth. What follows is a beautiful love story prompted by Liz’s discovery of a picture she’d admired as a child.

Liz’s story isn’t anywhere near as interesting as the story the picture has to tell. Ruth, a white woman raised by the Red Crow and Cody, a drifter who arrives in town when his truck breaks down, meet and fall in love. They are both good people who got dealt a shitty hand and their relationship fuels the jealousy of the small-minded people who live in the town. Their only allies are the owner of a local business, who is also an outsider of sorts, and Rose’s Red Crow mother.

Theirs is a story of passion and hope and it is beautifully told. If you aren’t rooting for them to make it by the book’s end, you have a hole where your heart should be.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

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The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing has been on my to-read list for quite some time, but I had a difficult time finding it. I finally happened upon it at a second-hand book store. It’s a short book, only 159 pages, but it took forever to read because Lessing writes dense, intense prose. Every single word counts.

About The Fifth Child, Newsday said: “I’d be willing to wager that if she never wrote another word, it would be The Fifth Child– and not, say, her famous The Golden Notebook– that ultimately confirmed Lessing’s stature as a writer.”

Harriet and David meet at a party, fall in love, buy a house that is too big for them and immediately start to fill it up with children. Theirs is a seemingly happy family- extended at holidays with parents and siblings and over the years more children. Each of Harriet’s first four pregnancies are without difficulty. She seems one of those natural mothers, perfectly content to waddle around feeding whoever happens to be sitting around the table, doting and content.

But then she gets pregnant for the fifth time. Understandably, with four small children to cope with, Harriet is upset by this unexpected pregnancy- but it is more than that.

…she could not sleep or rest because of the energy of the foetus, which seemed to be trying to tear its way out of her stomach.

“Just look at that,” she said as her stomach heaved up, convulsed, subsided. “Five months.“

The arrival of the fifth child, Ben, throws the Lovatt family into turmoil. The aftermath of his birth, his otherworldliness and Hariett’s attempts to cope make up the remainder of this book.

I can’t say that I loved The Fifth Child. As a mother, I certainly understood Harriet’s feelings, first of antipathy, later of remorse and finally of acceptance does get under your skin- but Lessing writes from a sort of detatched point of view and I never felt completely settled in Harriet’s world. Or maybe that was the point.

Blood Red by Sharon Page

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Sharon Page’s book Blood Red is basically 347 pages of sex scenes linked together by a plot that is so nonsensical, I stopped paying attention to it.

Althea Yates is a vampire hunter in England circa 1818. For a while now she’s been having these strange and highly erotic dreams and she is shocked when, one night at the inn where she and her father are staying, one of the men in her dreams (there’s two, naturally) shows up.

He’s Yannick. A perfect specimen. But drat, he’s a vampire.

His brother, Sebastien (known as Bastien in the novel) is also a vampire. Together they are known as The Demon Twins. And once Althea and her father release Bastien from his tomb, where he’s been languishing these last ten years, he and Yannick set about introducing virginal (but up for just about anything) Althea to the delights of the flesh.

Yannick and Bastien aren’t like any vampires I’ve ever encountered. Soulless they may be, but they never kill for food, they can shoot bolts of coloured energy from their hands and they have a reflection. Apparently they have a few other vampire tricks up their sleeves, too.

Reading Blood Red was like eating a bowl of chips– absolutely no redeeming nutritional value, but tasty enough.

The End of the Alphabet by CS Richardson

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Richardson’s first novel is a slim 139 page contemplation on how one would spend the remaining days of a relatively uneventful life. Ambrose Zephyr is diagnosed with an unnamed incurable disease on his 50th birthday. After the initial shock wears off he embarks on a whirlwind trip with his wife, Zipper. (Don’t even ask about the ridiculous names.) He decides to visit one place for each letter of the alphabet. A is for Amsterdam and so on.

My book club was divided down the middle on this one. Some of the women really loved it. They thought Richardson’s pared down, choppy prose suited the story- giving it an urgency which was mirrored by Ambrose’s desperate attempt to pack as much into his remaining days as he could. Others, like myself, thought the book failed to connect the reader with Ambrose. How can you care about someone you know so little about?

Before publishig this first novel, Richardson was an award-winning book designer.