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Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

halfyellowsunHalf of a Yellow Sun has been on my TBR list for quite some time and seeing the shorts for the new film prompted me to pick it up, and I wish I’d done so sooner. It’s a true page-turning saga, taking in the broad sweep of Nigerian politics in the ‘60s through the lives of a handful of central characters. It reminded me of how little literature is readily known from Africa outside of South African writers like Nadine Gordimer, Doris Lessing and J M Coetzee.

If ‘politics’ makes this book seem dry, it is anything but. It cleverly and brilliantly draws you into the story through the characters. The first of these we meet is Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old village boy who becomes the houseboy for a black African academic, Odenigbo, at a regional university. This introduces Ugwu to the wider world, as he serves drinks to the professor and his friends discussing the political situation and shouting about their socialist and separatist views into the balmy night – Lagos seems a very long way away.

We then see the story through the eyes of Olanna, the daughter of a wealthy middle-class Nigerian family (they are Igbo – a Christian tribe who later suffer massacres at the hands of the Muslim Hausas). Olanna has a tough, hard-headed twin sister, Kainene, who stays behind in Lagos helping out with their father’s business interests while Olanna takes up a junior teaching role in the university where Odenigbo works. She and Odenigbo soon become lovers and Olanna moves in with him – Ugwu, who is devoted to his ‘master’, can see that Olanna shares his feelings, and he accepts her as part of the household, which soon also includes an adopted baby daughter.

The third character whose point of view we share is Richard, an Anglo Brit who’s in Nigeria researching a book. Richard represents the sympathetic white man – he is interested in Igbo culture, and this interest makes him suspect in the eyes of expats and Nigerians alike. Richard gets involved with Kainene, and the dynamics of the novel are set up.

What happens then is a wonderfully effective, and affecting, portrayal of how the unthinkable impacts on the characters’ lives. The politics happen offstage and the characters carry on their lives not sure what will happen next, all cacooned, to some extent, in their relatively comfortable lives. Like all of us they don’t really believe the horror stories they hear until Olanna, on a visit home to Lagos, and hearing there is trouble, goes to check on her poorer relatives and sees the results of a massacre.

As the situation worsens, the south-east declares independence, and the state of Biafra is formed. This is what Odenigbo and his friends always wanted, and they are in high spirits, getting jobs in the new administration. However, things don’t go well, and these middle-class people have to give up their houses and retreat from the advancing Nigerian government forces – with each move they become more and more impecunious. Olanna and Ugwu try to retain a sense of normalcy, but even they are almost starving, although every now and then Olanna’s contacts means she gets some life-saving provisions (her wealthy parents spend the war sheltering in London).

Even Kainene, whose toughness and pragmatism should have protected her, finds she’s squeezed into a corner of Biafra that is holding out, and she ends up running a refugee camp. Of course, it is the poor village people who are the worst affected, making up the majority of tragic death toll from the Biafran famine.

This is such a wonderfully immersive drama – the characters, especially Ugwu, are beautifully drawn. The reader really does feel they are going on this journey with them, in all its sights, sounds and tastes. There are elements of horror but, essentially, the novel shows how tragedy creeps up as we are just trying to live our lives as best we can.

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The Long & the Short – Peaches by Dylan Thomas

A series analysing short stories

young-dogThis story comes from the autobiographical collection Portrait of an Artist as a Young Dog first published in 1940.

The story starts with the young narrator sitting on a cart in a laneway while Uncle Jim goes into a pub leaving the boy alone in the growing dark. As the lane gets darker, the men he has seen through the lighted window playing cards turn into grotesques:

… the swarthy man appeared as a giant in a cage surrounded by clouds, and the bald old man withered into a blank stump with a white face.

We have also seen a glimpse of ‘a pink tail curling out’ of a basket the boy’s uncle takes into the pub.

There are further scary intimations on the slow ride home, with Uncle Jim stopping outside a house and telling the young Dylan that ‘a hang man lived there’.

The only comforting things are Dylan’s own imaginings—‘A story I made up in the warm, safe island of my bed’, the steady clop of the mare drawing the wagon on: ‘the old broad patient nameless mare’, and running into his Aunt Annie’s arms when he arrives clutching his ‘grammar school cap’. This latter gives the clue that he is visiting the farm for holidays.

To Dylan’s over active imagination the farmyard in the dark is nightmarish:

The cobbles rang, and the black empty stables took up the ringing and hollowed it so that we drew up in a hollow circle of darkness and the mare was a hollow animal and nothing lived in the hollow house at the end of the yard but two sticks with faces scooped out of turnips.

The next day everything seems more normal, although it is apparent the farm is terribly rundown and life there threadbare, until we meet the unsettling cousin Gwilym. Gwilym is a young man studying for the church with a disquieting propensity to mix up sex and religion.

Dylan gets on reasonably well with Gwilym although his description of him suggests a critical distance: ‘a thin stick of a body and a spade-shaped face’, but when Gwilym uses an unused barn as a chapel and a cart as a pulpit, and preaches to Dylan, the boy goes along with it, letting his imagination run as it always does.

Thomas (the writer) has now set up the story. All is not well in the trope of child goes to farm for holiday. Uncle Jim, we suspect is a drunk (Dylan finds out from Gwilym that he is surreptitiously selling piglets for drink) and Thomas uses the wonderful predatory imagery of a fox to describe him: ‘Uncle Jim came in like the devil with a red face and a wet nose and trembling hairy hands’. Gwylim’s preoccupations are worrying, and, although Aunt Annie is well-meaning, she is downtrodden. Despite all this, Dylan is not threatened in reality—they are his relatives and he is accepted there—he is only threatened imaginatively, through his night fears and his overactive imagination.

At this point in the narrative Thomas introduces a new element. Into the world of Gorsehill Farm comes Dylan’s best friend from school, Jack Williams, dropped off by his wealthy mother to spend the holidays with Dylan, and here we also encounter the peaches of the title.

The peaches are in a can left over from Christmas and kept for a special occasion by Aunt Annie. Mrs Williams, of course, can’t wait to get away from the ‘good room’ with its dust and bedraggled stuffed fox and refuses the offer of the peaches. When she bends down to kiss her son goodbye he tells her she’s wearing perfume, a clue to why she’s dumping Jack at the farm for two weeks.

The boys start off in high spirits playing games and running around but when Dylan initiates Jack into the mock chapel in the barn things go awry. Gwylim tries to get the boys to confess their sins, and Dylan goes through a litany of them in his head from stealing from his mother to beating a dog to make him roll over but, when pressed, can’t admit them:

‘Go on, confess’

‘I won’t! I won’t’

Jack began to cry. ‘I want to go home,’ he said.

Dylan has suffered a lack of imagination in being able to make up a sin and caused Jack to want to go home. Back in bed that night, however, the boys do confess to each other and then Dylan goes on to says he’s killed a man—his imagination running free again symbolised by the sound of a stream he thinks he can hear running next to the house.

But just as Jack’s fears are assuaged, Uncle Jim comes home drunk and there is a row downstairs. When Jim hears about the peaches he lets fly:

‘I’ll give her peaches! Peaches, peaches! Who does she think she is? Aren’t peaches good enough for her? To hell with her bloody motorcar and her son! Making us small.’

The next day Dylan tries to play with Jack but Jack won’t talk to him:

Below me Jack was playing Indians all alone … I called to him once but he pretended not to hear. He played alone, silently and savagely.

Jack calls his mother from the post office and she comes to pick him up. Dylan waves his handkerchief as they drive off but Jack ‘sat stiff and still by his mother’s side’.

Dylan’s way of dealing with the threat of the adult world around him is to see it through the filter of his imagination which can be both threatening and amusing. The reader can see how parlous the situation at the farm is, but Dylan is matter of fact about it—everything can be made different and interesting by seeing faces like spades and his uncle as a fox eating piglets and chickens. We feel sad when Jack won’t go along with it. When Jack sees the threat from Uncle Jim, he leaves, breaking the compact with Dylan. Both boys have to deal with their own situations as best they can, and Dylan’s fantasy world can only ever be particular to him.

© 2014 Helen Richardson

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The Great Unknown – review

The Great Unknown_edited by Angela Meyer

The problem with a lot of literary anthologies is that they are very diverse. This showcases a range of writing but most readers will only find a few stories in the collection that speak to them. Angela Meyer’s anthology of ghost/speculative/strange/uncanny stories circumvents this. If that’s the kind of writing you like, you can read The Great Unknown from cover to cover.

The writers in this collection were asked to take as a starting point the sort of eerie, otherworldly feel that the TV series ‘The Twilight Zone’ produced. As such, you know that these stories are not going to follow conventional trajectories.

Kathy Charles’ story Baby’s First Words starts off with an everyday situation. A dad is picking up his young child for an access visit. From the beginning Charles’ deftly builds up the tension between the mother and the father. The wife needs the husband to look after the daughter but she tries to keep him talking at the front door unsure about him. He gives one-word answers but the reader has access to his thoughts and he’s ranting and bitter. As he drives away with his daughter he fumes about how his wife thinks the child has learning difficulties because she can’t talk. The reader is fearful for the child but is it the child we should be worried about? I loved this story.

Krissy Kneen’s ‘The Sleepwalker’ deals with an annoying but benign problem—Emily and Brendan are grappling with Emily’s habit if sleepwalking. The easy, mundane relationship of the couple is counterpointed to the growing strangeness of Emily’s behaviour. She starts to take photographs when sleepwalking but Brendan laughs it off—the photos are mostly blank. Then Emily develops some more and they see something in them. From there the story only gets creepier.

Damon Young’s ‘Art’ is clever and scary but not in the way the reader initially believes. It blurs the line between the erotic in art and the response in the viewer. Ben’s excitement at the artworks he sees at an exhibition spills over to what he feels towards a girl he’s just met outside the gallery. As in Baby’s First Words, the reader is led to be so afraid for a particular character that we don’t see the blow when it comes.

Ryan O’Neill’s ‘Sticks and Stones’ starts with the wonderful trope of so many horror stories—finding an unusual book in a second-hand bookstore. Blackwood, a philology professor, takes home Ten Terrifying Tales but finds what’s written in the margins more interesting than the stories themselves. The ‘anonymous critic’ purports to know enough about black masses to suggest the description in the book is inaccurate. Blackwood is amused by this, until he turns around and sees a row of letters written across the blank wall behind him. After that the words come after him. This is a clever and satisfying mirror within mirror story.

P. M. Newton’s story ‘The Local’ also uses a horror/mystery staple—small (almost empty) pub in the country, the out-of-towners who come in for a drink, the strange stories, a mysterious figure who seems to know more than he should about bizarre weather phenomena, the people who don’t listen to the warnings. Newton builds a hot, fetid atmosphere effectively.

One of my favourites in the book is the beautiful story by Marion Halligan ‘Her Dress was a Pale Glimmer’. The setting for the story is a simple one—dinner in the garden of a restaurant with a father and his two grown-up daughters—but the description of the girls’ dresses, the beauty of the evening as they begin their meal, and the lusciousness of the food imbues the scene with a fairytale feel.

The sun was low in the sky, nearly setting, shining under the branches into [my father’s] eyes but he said it didn’t matter, it would be gone in a minute. It took longer than that but finally it went down behind the mountain with very little colour, the light became pearly grey and the candles winked in their little glasses.

The beauty is muted because they are sad. The mother has disappeared some time ago and they don’t know whether she is alive or dead. Then one daughter gets a cryptic, yet lovely, message on her phone and all eyes are on the empty chair at their table.

The achievement, and the satisfaction, of these stories is that they take the everyday, the quotidian, and slowly and relentlessly turn it into anything but.

www.goodreads.com/review/list/16022645-helen-bookwoods

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Win a copy of The Great Unknown

Good Reading Magazine is running a competition to win one of 10 copies of The Great Unknown. Click here to go to the website. The Great Unknown_edited by Angela Meyer

This collection of strange and spooky stories was perfect reading for the lazy week between Christmas and New Year, providing a dark antidote to the forced cheeriness of the season … Contributors to the anthology were invited to write about the fantastical, uncanny, absurd, or, as editor Angela Meyer  notes, ‘even just the slightly off’ … While the nineteen stories are diverse in style and content, this shared focus on the strange gives the anthology a pleasing coherence that many collections of short fiction lack … The combined effect of the pieces … reminded me of the pleasures of those puzzling and troubling moments in life, and in fiction, when logic is defied and image and association are required instead.

– Rachel Roberston Australian Book Review March, 2014.

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Imaginary Friends – Alison Lurie

imaginary_friends_coverThis novel, published in the 1967, has an old-fashioned flat, rather factual style that reminds me of the work of John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids) but the style belies the beautiful control Lurie has over the story—she skewers her characters and themes with acute irony.

The imaginary friends of the title are beings from another planet that have chosen a group of small-town citizens to reveal themselves to. Verena, the otherwise ordinary, although attractive, niece of a couple who are in contact with the beings becomes the conduit of their messages, which are revealed through automatic writing.

On to this scene comes our narrator, Roger Zimmern, a junior academic in sociology, and Tom McMann, his more successful professor. McMann has been looking out for a cult group on which to conduct field experiments into what would happen to such a group if their beliefs are questioned by external events.

While this scenario has the potential for a lot of high drama—individual comes under influence of venal cult leader, kidnapping, de-programing, or an SF take on extra-terrestrials—Lurie’s portrayal is of much more prosaic nature. The people involved in the group are everyday types: a uni student or two, a spinster, middle-aged couples etc. Verena, while ethereal, is pretty much the girl next door. The cult itself, who call themselves the Truth Seekers, emphasises meditation and purity of thought, something any health magazine might recommend today (there is some fun to be had when the beings specify the group should not wear lowly close-to-the-earth fibres and must wear mineral/synthetic clothes instead). And at the end of their meetings, after contacting the beings, there is always a spread of awful American finger food that seems to inevitably involve Jello.

Our narrator Roger, the junior academic new to field work, is asked by McMann to infiltrate the group and this he does very easily merely by knocking on the door of Verena’s aunt’s house and saying he’s interested—it’s like he’s asking to join their bridge evening. A few weeks later McMann also shows up and charms the group. Lurie very amusingly portrays the researchers’ non-directive responses to the Seekers—they’re not supposes to affect the group but just reflect it

… [McMann] was seeking us in his dream life [says Verena], which is now made manifest. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes, That’s so.’ McMann assented to this truth as blandly as to the platitudes he had agreed with before.

‘… I seem to see a shadow over your leg, your left leg. Have you had an injury there?’

‘Yeah. My knee. I hurt it in the war.’

… I had thought McMann too prominent for an observer [Roger thinks], but no longer. Non-directively, following Verena’s line, he had lowered his voice, retired into the background. I knew by the way he watched everything that went on, sometimes with a brief nod or almost imperceptible smile, the he was satisfied with the Seekers—and felt as pleased as if I had invented them for him myself.

All the time of their involvement the two academics are taking notes and making assumptions about how the group will evolve.

It doesn’t take long, however, for the uni student to make a few inquiries at his own university and to find out the identities of our infiltrators (who have posed as businessmen). But, rather than feel betrayed, Serena et al. feel flattered at the attention and see the academic interest as support for their ideas.

In the end the novel is not about sensation but about psychology. The story comes to a head when, Heaven’s Gate-like, the invisible beings say they will become manifest at a certain time and date. The group sit in their usual circle in the lounge room with tinfoil under their feet (to assist contact) but when this doesn’t work have to traipse out into the sub-zero cold of the backyard in minimal synthetic clothes to await the visitation.

The tension of the novel is set up in the first paragraph:

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past months thinking about what happened to Tom McMann and me last winter in Sophis: asking myself exactly what it was the Truth Seekers did to us there, and how. Could any group of rural religious cranks really have driven a well-known sociologist out of his mind, and his assistant almost out of the profession.

It is how this scenario comes about that is the satisfying denouement.

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The Great Unknown

The Great Unknown_edited by Angela MeyerPlease keep a look out for the anthology of ghost, fantasy and horror stories The Great Unknown edited by Angela Meyer and published by Spineless Wonders (and which includes my story ‘Navigating’). These stories were all inspired by the Twilight Zone television series and so are creepy, uncanny and scary. What more do you want for those cicacda-filled nights in the beach house over summer? In bookshops now or from Spineless Wonders. (or click the image below in the sidebar).

From Angela Meyer’s blog Literary Minded:

‘In Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Reality TV’, a guest is confronted with her husband’s infidelity under bright lights, while Ali Alizadeh’s ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ satirises American talk shows and a cultural obsession with sporting ‘heroes’. Chris Flynn’s ‘Sealer’s Cove’ has a nudist caught in a time slip. Carmel Bird evokes Edgar Allen Poe when oversized hares incite the folk of rural Victoria to commit criminal acts, and in ‘Sticks and Stones’ Ryan O’Neill has an academic attacked by a demonic alphabet.

There are darkly seductive artworks, disappearances and reappearances, altered realities, future visions, second chances, clever animals, knowing children, and strange presences in photographs and abandoned motels, in these stories by established and emerging writers. Contributors include Marion Halligan, Krissy Kneen, AS Patric, Damon Young, Chris Somerville, PM Newton, Deborah Biancotti and Kathy Charles.’

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Lexicon – Max Barry

lexicon2Wil wakes up in a US airport washroom. Two men have assaulted him and pushed a probe into his eye, trying to find out something about him but he doesn’t know what. He has to go with them, they say, or he’ll be killed:

… if you stay here in twenty minutes you’ll be dead. If you go to your girlfriend, who I’m sorry to say you can no longer trust, you’ll also be dead. If you do anything other than come with us now, quickly and cooperatively, I’m afraid, dead.

And so starts a wild road trip with Wil and Eliot trying to shake off the ‘poets’ who are after them (the other man bizarrely kills himself at the command of one of the poets). It is soon apparent that Eliot is also a poet, but a renegade one, and one of his former comrades called Woolf is out to kill him. The poets have the ability to command obedience in others by using a string of nonsensical words targeted to the personality of the victim (unfortunately for the poets they are not immune from other poets using the words on them).

We are then introduced to Emily Ruff, a young confidence trickster making a precarious living through scamming on card games. One day a stranger notices her ability to ‘read’ people, and gets her to answer a questionnaire. The answers are intended to show what sort of person you are, and once that is known, you can be ‘compromised’. The stranger thinks Emily might have what it takes to become a poet, so he recruits her and she joins their swanky school to be trained in psychology, lexicography etc. But Emily is a bit of a rebel and she rubs up against the straight-laced rules. When she has an affair with a fellow student (a total no-no, intimacy is dangerous as it reveals too much, leaving you open to ‘compromise’) she is out on her ear. She gets a reprieve, however, when she’s told to go to Broken Hill, Australia and blend in until she’s called upon to do her duty as a poet.

It’s what happens in Broken Hill that forms the basis of the events in the book—it’s a disaster that the press says is a catastrophic chemical spill, but is it?

Barry has a lot of fun with the idea of the power of words. The poets are all called after famous writers (Eliot, Woolf, get it?), and the media in all its forms is questioned, as is the profiling of people through what they say and write (Twitter, Facebook, anyone). But first and foremost Lexicon is a rollicking, tense, page-turning read. Barry’s clever structure means you are guessing right up to the end, and maybe if it doesn’t all quite make sense, who cares? I couldn’t put it down.

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True North – The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack

True_NorthTrue North by Brenda Niall is a joint biography of the writer Mary Durack (Kings in Grass Castles) and the painter and artist Elizabeth Durack. The north that is referred to in the title is the Kimberley region and the Durack cattle stations at Argyle and Ivanhoe carved out by their grandfather Patsy Durack in the 19th century. By the turn of the 20th century their father MPD Durack was running Argyle Downs and Mary and her older brother Reg spent time there when they were very young. However MPD thought his wife shouldn’t live in such rough conditions and he set her and the children up in a grand house in Perth while he remained for most of the year in the Kimberley.

The north, and the family history in the area, was a potent idea for the children, and they loved it when they could stay with their father on the stations (taking a steamer up from Perth to Wyndham). Two sons, Reg and Kim, fell under the spell so much that they tried, with varying degrees of success to make a go of it in the north. The stations, though, were not as lucrative as they once were and the family (once one of the top pastoralists) suffered straitened circumstances.

Mary and Elizabeth longed for the north and were averse to the Perth socialite scene, so when they left school they went to work on the stations as cooks and general help. It was only for two years, and the conditions were very primitive, but this time impressed itself indelibly on both women.

For Mary it would eventually prompt her to write her family’s history in Kings in Grass Castles and to write her children’s books about Aboriginal themes such as The Way of the Whirlwind. Elizabeth collaborated with Mary doing illustrations and covers and when Elizabeth struck out on her own as an artist the royalties from these joint projects kept her going.

The biography shows Mary to be the more considered and sociable of the two, and a ‘soft touch’. She had six children with an older man who chose to live in Broome for most of their married life while Mary remained in Perth, trying to write and raise the children. Elizabeth, by contrast, was more of a free spirit, acting rashly and repenting at leisure (she fell in love in the outback with an attractive but unstable man who’s wealth basically allowed him to drink himself to death). After the death of her first love she then fell for the bohemian writer Frank Clancy but Elizabeth was too much of a free spirit even for him, and the marriage failed leaving Elizabeth broke with two small children. She slowly built up a career as an artist but she was never really financially secure until much later in life.

By entwining the lives of the sisters, Brenda Niall is able to portray a picture of the whole family, and how the bonds of the sisters enriched their respective creative careers (lucky for Niall the sisters wrote prolific letters to each other). Niall also explores how encountering so potent an idea/experience when young can determine the direction of the rest of one’s life.

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A Book for All and None – Clare Morgan

a book for all and noneWhat do you make of these strands: female academic (40ish) with an interest in Virginia Woolf asks to meet male academic (60ish) with speciality in Nietzsche view to exploring possibility that Woolf was influenced by the work of Nietzsche; in 19th century, Nietzsche develops romantic interest in Lou von Salome, although she is involved with Paul Ree (ménage a trois?); Walter Cronk CEO of CronkAm is involved in shonky deals in post-invasion Iraq, has affair with obliging middle-class Julie, travels to Kuwait and Iraq where he confronts the violence of the region (Oh, and he is the husband of aforementioned female academic); Virginia Woolf goes to stay at remote sea-side cottage; male and female academic develop romance as they follow up their academic hunches …?

I have read reviews that say Morgan‘s novel is ‘neatly plaited together’ and that it ‘unfolds like a paper-sharp origami’ – I’d say Morgan tries to force together disparate threads that were never going to fit; the result is misshapen and terribly dissatisfying. If ever the truism ‘it is not the sum of its parts’ applied, it applies here.

And what a pity because there is some beautifully insightful writing in this novel but Morgan does not do justice to her material. If you tease out the storylines you see that there is more than one novel’s worth of material. The affair between Raymond (the male academic) and Beatrice (the female) is subtle and sad. Raymond has an interesting family background that has left him damaged and reclusive; Beatrice is a reserved woman, elevated by the rise of her husband into a world she is not interested in. However, the development of this relationship is abbreviated so the really quite nauseating relationship of Walter and Julie can be examined, and so that Walter’s pretty unbelievable exploits in Kuwait and Iraq can be played out. What on earth is torture, multi-national shenanigans, Iraqi politics etc. doing in a book about Virginia Woolf and Frederick Neitzsche? If there is a link, Morgan doesn’t make it clear, or I’m being dense.

And that brings me to the next juddering misalignment – of all the interconnections that might have been made, why force a connection of ideas between Nietzsche and Woolf? And the ridiculous thing is, that it isn’t even a literary influence that Morgan finally reveals (I won’t spoil the extremely far-fetched denouement by saying any more).

I can only conclude that these disparate topics are some pet interests that Morgan wanted to explore, so she jammed them all together (the acknowledgements say that Morgan spent a year in a friend’s ‘lovely’ villa in Cyprus to write the book – in her shoes I’d explore my pet interests too).

Quite a lot of the book is spent on portraying Nietzsche’s mental deterioration as he begins his pursuit of Lou, and the consequences of this, and this was all well done. And the relationship of Raymond and Beatrice had potential but there was too much distraction from other parts of the book to make this really work. The parts on Virginia Woolf were less developed, leaving her a wafting, insubstantial character.

Clare Morgan is a creative writing academic at Oxford and this is her first novel. I know a writing teacher who always asks his students to define ‘whose story is it?’ – I wonder if Morgan can answer that question or if she even thinks it matters.

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Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

some-must-watch Arcturus Crime Classics have recently republished (Hinkler Books, Heatherton, Victoria) classic crime novels from the 1930s to 70s of “once famous but now neglected’ writers. I bought 5 for $20 at my local newsagent and what a bargain they have turned out to be.

Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White was published in 1933 and inspired the film Spiral Staircase directed by Richard Siodmark.

On page 1 we are introduced to Helen who is walking back to the lonely country mansion The Summit (where she works as lady’s help) just as dusk draws. The setting includes a “blocked view”, mud, “barren sepia mounds” and a “fine spit of rain”. Helen is introduced as “facing hard economic facts” and “not prone to self-pity”. She also has an optimistic, joyful attitude to life and is small, frail, “pale as a slip of crescent moon”. So far, so good. We have a heroine who is small and frailish but plucky and realistic in a gloomy inhospitable landscape and set out, at least for now, for home. We know it is a crime classic, so it would bode well if she could hold her own. Oh, and just at the bottom of page 1, we are told Helen likes to ask strangers the time of day, as she has a specialised interest in looking at their watches. No doubt this slightly odd interest may help her when the time comes. I realise I was subconsciously thinking that as I look back on the first page after being taken on a whirlwind ride through Helen and the other characters’ (whose very unreliable characteristics emerge and submerge) eventful night while boxed in in a gale-whipped country house set in a black and shifting landscape.

On arrival at The Summit, Helen appreciates the warm well-lit glow and human busyness in the house, barricaded against the storm. In fact the ritual of trying to tie up the shutters and lock the doors (one of her tasks) recurs throughout the book. White’s black, spiny, discomforting imagery is carefully salted throughout, not holding up the pace one whit. I particularly liked the image of the coal scuttle in the old lady’s room where each piece of coal is wrapped in white tissue paper (to minimise upsetting noise). I loved her imagery of trees and the plantation outside the house as alive, with tree trunks splitting into two, one half a hiding man. In fact this imagery reminds me of a Stephen King – I am sure he has studied White on to slowly build terror without the reader even being aware of the slow ratchet of expectation.

The people inhabiting the house are a wonderful set – the housekeeper and her husband, the lady’s nurse, the family and Helen. Their characters are effortlessly developed through action and dialogue, but description, however, cannot be relied upon. The replacement nurse with her masculine appearance and jealousy, the apparently malevolent (is she really so helpless?) old lady, the student’s inexplicable resistance to the sexy daughter-in-law’s advances and the housekeeper’s weakness for brandy (in a teetotal house) all start to breach the walls of the house, as the murderer prowls ever closer.

White-SpiralPBHelen is the third-person narrator and the writing at the end of the book becomes more fractured as Helen’s stout little character becomes less and less reliable, and more self-pitying. But her willingness to compromise as the situation fatefully unravels is probably realistic. One thread of sanity and safety runs through the book – Helen’s romance with the doctor whose comfortable authority and entrance to the barricaded house becomes unreliable. And even then, as we expect the lover to come to the rescue, it is not he who resolves the story, and the breached integrity of the house itself is seen in reverse.

I could not put this story down, even at the end where the story fracturing slightly. Helen’s ‘specialised interest” actually turns out to be curiosity, a craving for novelty that has its place in the fateful unfolding of events. White makes setting up her characters and the threatening nothing-is-as-it-seems world almost seamless from the first page. From the “barren sepia mounds, blurred by a fine spit of rain” and “lumpy” distant thunder, to Helen’s stout character which welcomes each day, ready to “shred its interest from every hour”, we snuggle down, feeling safe, we are in the hands of a competent story teller. I gulped down each carefully placed word, each fateful, destined twist and turn, each misdirection, in huge satisfying drafts. That’s how you take your reader on a whirlwind ride!

Another Arcturus Crime Classics is Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley also known as Francis Iles who wrote After the Fact, filmed by Hitchcock as Suspicion. Trial and Error is the story of Mr Todhunter who finds he has three months to live would like to distinguish himself in an otherwise humdrum life by doing a civic good before he dies, to wit the murder of a thoroughly nasty person!

Tania’s review.