Andre Brink, The Ambassador
This is a solemn, tortuous, predictable tale about the infatuation of the South African ambassador to France for Nicolette, a flirtatious night-club dancer with religious proclivities. It is told first from the point of view of Third Secretary Stephen Keyter, then from the ambassador’s and finally from that of the woman herself, none of whom are able to make the reader care much about the ambassador’s predicament. However hedonistic she appears, Nicolette’s effect is grave: Stephen, in love with her, informs on the ambassador and eventually kills himself; the ambassador is forced to leave his post; his wife, Erika, a lonely drinker, returns alone to South Africa; their daughter Annette repudiates not only her parents but young men eager to protect her. And Nicolette, the tragic cause of so many shattered lives, confesses her now aborted love for Stephen, who had thought her indifferent to him. On the whole, the pompous banality of the writing, pretentious pseudo-philosophy, stick figures and silly dialogue overwhelm faint stirrings of perception and honest feeling.
( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, 328 pages )
Alice Hoffman, The Third Angel
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line Of Beauty
Ann Packer, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier
How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer’s intimate and emotionally thrilling new novel, which has won its author comparisons with Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller.
At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart. Now to her dismay she has begun to find this life suffocating and is considering leaving it–and Mike–behind. But when Mike is paralyzed in a diving accident, leaving seems unforgivable and yet more necessary than ever. The Dive from Clausen’s Pier animates this dilemma–and Carrie’s startling response to it–with the narrative assurance, exacting realism, and moral complexity we expect from the very best fiction.
( Courtesy of Penguin Random House, hardcover 370 pages )
Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon
A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden
he 1950’s feel as if they happened about 300 years ago, quainter and further off than the 40’s, 30’s or 20’s; and to English readers (Americans may scarcely even have registered it), the most poignantly distant moment of the decade was the Coronation of Elizabeth II — Richard Dimbleby intoning over the BBC, English hearts still simple enough to be touched by the ancient ceremonial.
A. S. Byatt has set her novel in Coronation year and, at the same time, it really does reach back 300 years. Loaded, often overloaded, with literary and mythological symbols of the Virgin Queen, the story centers on the performance of a play about the first Elizabeth.
Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble, is less well known than Drabble because she publishes seldom; this is only her third novel. It is as grave, solid, ample as a Yorkshire tea, with deliberate hints of the Northern tradition of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte, even down to having a curate for one of its main characters. While Coronation year and the play are enacted, we watch crucial changes in a family cowed by the self-righteous tantrums of the father: one daughter escapes into marriage; another, the virgin of the title, learns how to have a hard heart; and the schoolboy son goes mad.
Byatt’s portrait of this hypersensitive, schizoid boy, his senses invaded by terrors and visions, holding annihilation at bay by repeating mathematical formulae, is beautifully empathetic. Self-defense through the intellect is practiced by other of her characters, and something of the sort bedevils the author’s own style. She is at her best in bringing her characters alive, and they live on in the mind. But the book is overdecorated with tags and references from Elizabethan literature that smell of the lecture room; her characters quote lines of verse at one another in a way that I thought went out with Dorothy L. Sayers.
But Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and very traditional storyteller. I wish she would write more often.
( Courtesy Of Rosemary Dinnage to The (London) Times Literary Supplement, 428 pages )
A.S. Byatt, Angels & Insects
Revisiting the Victorian ambience of Possession , Byatt treats her large audience to more extraordinary literary gamesmanship with two intricate novellas. In “Morpho Eugenia” penniless young entomologist William Adamson has just returned from a 10-year expedition in the Amazon. William is taken in by a titled clergyman with scientific pretensions, and soon marries his benefactor’s beautiful daughter. Unable to undertake another Amazon adventure, he studies domestic ant colonies and discovers indecent parallels between the insects and his new family. “The Conjugial Angel” involves a circle of spiritualists, chief among them Alfred Tennyson’s sister Emily, in her youth engaged to Arthur Hallam, the man immortalized in Tennyson’s In Memorium . Emily has been branded faithless for having married years after Hallam’s death (Elizabeth Barrett called her a “disgrace to womanhood”), but she is uncompromising in her pursuit of Hallam’s ghost. As fans will anticipate, Byatt effortlessly exploits the opportunities for pastiche, belletristic flourish and critical commentary. If her symbolism is as excessively upholstered and overdetermined as the narratives of her Victorian models, beneath the padding she sets out a delicate chain of thematic concerns–19th-century tensions between science and faith, erotic currents within families, the nature of marital happiness–and heightens them by juxtaposing the two novellas here. Her easy ventriloquism mocks Victorian excesses even as she uses these same elements to inveigle her readers. Complex and captivating, this fluid volume recasts itself on every page.
( Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, 290 pages )
Trezza Azzopardi, Remember Me
Winnie would say she’s no trouble. She’s content to let the days go by, minding her own business, bothering no-one. She’d rather not recall the past and, at 72, doesn’t see much point in thinking about the future. But when her closed existence is shattered by a random act of violence, Winnie is catapulted out of her exile. Robbed of everything she owns, she embarks on a journey to track down the thief – but she soon finds that what began as a search for stolen belongings has become the rediscovery of a stolen life.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 262 pages )
M.G. Vassanji, When She Was Queen
“My father lost my mother one evening in a final round of gambling at the poker table,” writes the narrator of “When She Was Queen,” the title story of a new collection by bestselling novelist and two-time winner of the Giller Prize, M.G. Vassanji. That fateful evening in Kenya becomes “the obsessive and dark centre” of the young man’s existence and leads him, years later in Toronto, to unearth an even darker family secret.
In “The Girl With The Bicycle,” a man witnesses a woman from his hometown of Dar es Salaam spit at a corpse as it lies in state at a Toronto mosque. As he struggles to fathom her strange behaviour, he finds himself prey to memories and images from the past–and to perilous yearnings that could jeopardize his comfortable, middle-aged life.
Still reeling from the impact of his wife’s betrayal, a man decides to stop in on an old college friend in “Elvis, Raja.” But he soon realizes that it’s not always wise to visit the past as he finds himself trapped in a most curious household, where Elvis Presley has replaced the traditional Hindu gods.
The other stories in the collection also feature exceptional lives transplanted. A young man returns to his roots in India, hoping to find his uncle and, perhaps, a bride. Instead, he becomes a reluctant guru to the residents of his ancestral village. A mukhi must choose between granting the final sacrilegious wish of a dying man and abiding by religious custom in a community that considers him a representative of God. A woman is torn between the voice of her dead husband–a cold and grim-natured atheist–and her new, kind and loving husband whose faith nevertheless places constraints on her as a woman. On Halloween night, a scientist lays bare his horrifying plan to seek vengeance on the man who thwarted his career.
Set variously in Kenya, Canada, India, Pakistan, and the American Midwest, these poignant and evocative stories portray migrants negotiating the in-between worlds of east and west, past and present, secular and religious. Richly detailed and full of vivid characters, the stories are worlds unto themselves, just as a dusty African street full of bustling shops is a world, and so is the small matrix of lives enclosed by an intimate Toronto neighbourhood. It is the smells and sentiments and small gestures that constitute life, and of these Vassanji is a master.
Vassanji’s seventh book and his second collection of short stories, When She Was Queen was shortlisted for the 2006 Toronto Book Award. The jury said: “Vassanji’s Naipaulian language is like a sharp short knife that cuts through the superficial and gets to the heart and soul of the narrative.”
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 254 pages )