Category: Reviews

This quite long novel set in India in the 1970s is an odd mixture of boarding school story, murder mystery and coming of age story of young, inexperienced teacher Charu but it doesn’t really follow the tropes of any of these genres.

Twenty something Charu who was born with a disfiguring birthmark on her face she calls a ‘blot’ takes a job teaching at a girls’ boarding school in Panchgani, a high scenic area a few hours out of Bombay. She is inexperienced but wins over some of the girls with her teaching of Macbeth, but soon she comes under the sway of a white teacher, Moira Prince, known to the girls as ‘the Prince’ or to Charu as Pin. Pin is wild and the girls steer clear of her but her freedom from convention is attractive to Charu, and she becomes involved with Pin and her friend Merch, a poetry reading, drug-taking man who lives an idle life above a dispensary in town, occasionally teaching at the school.

But no sooner do we get to know Pin, and she has started an affair with Charu, than the Prince is dead, seemingly murdered and thrown off a cliff. The rest of the novel is involved with solving this murder, in one way or another, but quite tangentially.

The middle section switches to the point of view of three of the school girls who were in the vicinity of the tragedy on that wet and windy monsoon night when it occurred. They saw something (including Charu running down from the spot) but are not sure what it all means. They begin investigating, and the main girl, Nandita, who has always liked Charu, is given a dangerous piece of evidence that will point the guilt in a particular direction.

In the last third of the novel we return to Charu’s point of view, the attempted suicide of her mother, and an old humiliation of her father that has diminished the family is revisited. We get to see Charu’s extended family, their meddling and their support, and the pressure put on women to conform. Meanwhile Charu returns to Panchgani and there are arrests and threatened violence, and nothing about the Prince’s death is as simple as it seemed.

All this makes it sound like it is a plot-driven novel but it’s not really. It’s really, I think, the author’s recollections of her own time at a girl’s boarding school and her exploration of how a person who doesn’t fit in, navigates her way around her family and society. What is wonderful about it, for a non-Indian, is a lovely insight into Indian culture that is a far cry from the stereotyped Raj or the gritty urban take on poverty and corruption. I loved the detail of the school still, in the 70s, run on British lines and the unspoken but evident divide between white and brown, the feel of the monsoon and the landscape, and the descriptions of food and family life. It’s a baggy, voluminous tale but the experience of another world is very enjoyable.

This is a clever, low-key speculative fiction novel where, when the disasters come (climate change, plague), they are normalised into the lives of the characters. If you’ve lived long enough like me, you’ve seen this happen yourself. When I was a child it was inconceivable that animals like tigers or koalas might become endangered, inconceivable that every square inch of the world might be touched by humans – yet here we are.

Clade starts at about our own time with a young scientist, Adam, in Antarctica observing the vanishing sea ice. Adam’s partner, Ellie, is back in Sydney waiting to hear if her IVF treatment has been successful. This family, in a way, is the genetic code running through the book, the stories like the moments of mutation that shift along biology. Bradley doesn’t give us a comfortable narrative arc, but rather a series of linked stories exploring aspects of our possible future that concentrate on human relations – husband and wife, father and daughter, grandfather and grandson, against a backdrop of floods, plague, migration upheavals, repression, all seen through reality as well as the plethora of ‘screens’ and ‘overlays’ pumping out ‘feeds’. Clade, in its structure, reminded me of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in the power and emotional depth that can be achieved by building up something through concentrating on a particular aspect and character, and then just letting a certain resonance happen between the different stories. I’m not quite sure how this works and, in a way, it shouldn’t – it should seem disjointed but it’s not.

Climate change, as our esteemed ex-prime minister said, is the greatest moral challenge of our time. There are many dystopian novels around now, and I’m sure there will be more. Bradley’s is a refreshing take on this, rooted in the everyday at a human level, yet at times quite wildly speculative, full of interesting takes on things, on the dark thoughts about the future most of us must have.

Dr Jennifer White suffers from Alzheimer’s and she is the narrator of this murder mystery (where she is implicated as the murderer). How is this possibly going to work as a narrative? LaPlante cleverly works out a way to give us an intriguing, tense, absorbing novel. Because of her condition, Jennifer is almost always in the present (although she does, at times, fleetingly remember the past) – but her ‘presentness’ is necessarily only contained in brief passages of clarity. Luckily Jennifer is an orthopaedic surgeon, a well-off upper class resident of Chicago so she is erudite and sardonic.

While it is Jennifer who narrates the story, LaPlante uses the device of a journal that is filled in by Jennifer’s carer, Magdalena and her (Jennifer’s) daughter, Fiona, so that Jennifer can read what was said and done the previous day (for example, when she denies something has happened, Magdalena can point to the section of the journal as proof). There are also some letters and photos that have been pasted in that Magdalena or Fiona feel might help Jennifer to remain tethered to her past life.

It’s a bit of a trick, but probably a necessary one, that laPlante includes the dialogue that Jennifer hears but, obviously, doesn’t ‘narrate’ to us as such.

In this way, aspects of the past are slowly pieced together – what Jennifer’s relationship was with her friend Amanda (who has been found murdered with four fingers on her hand amputated), her husband James, and her children Fiona and Mark. A thread of tension runs through when an inquisitive detective takes an ongoing interest in Jennifer.

Running counter to a resolution of the mystery is the deterioration in Jennifer’s condition. Despite her snippiness, the reader can’t help hoping against hope that Jennifer retains her independence, her lucidity. LaPlante beautifully captures the richness of Jennifer’s remembrances and observations, as well as the black humour of the mind getting things askew.

This aspect of the novel is satisfying in itself, even without the murder device. I guess pitching a novel about Alzheimer’s isn’t as attractive as an Alzheimer’s mystery thriller. I felt the final revelation in this strand was weak but this doesn’t detract from the strength of the novel as a whole. There are a lot of these narrow, limited-focus novels on the market lately – S J Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. They are a one-trick pony but very compelling for all that.

I was put on to this novel through a historical fiction site where there were a lot of favourable reviews for it. I can see why, because it is quite entertaining in a Dan Brownesque way.

Joanna Stafford is a novice in Dartford Priory. She hails from an aristocratic family that has fallen foul of Henry VIII’s pogrom against the ‘old faith’. Joanna, as a modern heroine in a medieval frock, is soon out of the priory and involving herself in court and political matters. She goes to see her cousin Margaret burnt at the stake for treason and is captured as a collaborator by the authorities and ends up in the Tower.

To save her father, she is coerced into helping Bishop Gardiner (who is ostensibly working for the king) find a mysterious artifact, the Athelstan Crown, that is supposedly hidden somewhere in Dartford Priory.

Accompanied by two Dominican brothers (again whose allegiance is questionable) she settles back into Dartford, and her quest.

Bilyeau’s research on priory life is thoroughly done but her modernisms in language grate (Joanna is forever saying ‘everything is fine’). I like that Bilyeau has chosen a novice nun as her heroine (an a Catholic one at that – we are all sick of the over-exposure of the Tudors) and she does give Joanna a sense of faith and loyalty to her calling, even if she is the most disobedient novice imaginable (the deadly sins of anger and pride also get a workout).

The story is full of hidden tunnels, scraps of information in library books, clues woven into tapestries, murder by reliquary, secret messages, treachery etc. I won’t spoil the ending but it was a bit of a damp squib after the build up – possibly because there is a sequel The Chalice.

It is all a bit silly but the setting is nicely done, the characters are engaging, and the pacing and tension achieves the objective – a page-turning entertainment.

This novel by Emily St John Mandel, set in Canada, veers between the time before a pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population, to a time after. In the time before we get to know Arthur Leander, a celebrity actor and Miranda, his first wife. We also follow another young man whose emergency ward doctor friend tips him off that the flu epidemic is the big one, so he stocks up and holds out with his brother in a high rise flat, before he, like most of the other survivors, hits the road to find other people and a new way of life.

Meanwhile, in the post pandemic world we follow the experiences of Kirsten, a twenty something woman, who has joined a travelling symphony and acting troupe that journey around the small settlements that have set up around a lake, and perform Shakespeare and give the odd classical music concert. I like the idea that St John Mandel evokes of the world reverting to something like it must have been in medieval times in small settlements – staying put, hardly knowing what lies beyond walking distance.

The Station Eleven of the title is not, as one might expect, the name of one of these settlements – but it’s the name of a fictional space station veering out of control in space. The character, Miranda, is drawing this graphic novel as a way of coping with her life, and one way or another, too complicated to outline here, this book influences and links some of the disparate characters in the post-pandemic plotline.

The main tension driver in this stream of the novel is the figure of ‘The Prophet’ – who, of course, tells his followers they were saved for a reason, that they are part of the light (sound familiar?) but like many of the cult leaders we now about, his power goes to his head and he uses vicious means to keep his followers (and child brides) under his control. The Prophet is after the travelling symphony for inadvertently harbouring one of these girls who has stowed away in their wagon.

I was so disappointed in this book. It had so much potential but it is a mishmash and totally confused in what it is attempting to say. Why, oh, why is about a third of the book given over to the rise of Arthur Leander as a celebrity actor? Yes, he starts out as nice young man trying to find his way who stumbles on fame, and, yes, we’re happy when he finds Miranda and they fall in love. Miranda, to me, is one of the most interesting characters, especially as the imaginer of the Station Eleven world, yet she is given short shrift. Arthur pretty quickly has an affair with another woman and divorces Miranda. We don’t find out much of her post-Arthur life. Is St John Mantel trying to say something about the idiocy of celebrity culture? But, if so, what? The main thing about Arthur is that all the characters that sit around a dinner party table one night are linked in some (very tenuous) way in the story, but I can’t see that this really mattered, or has any particular meaning beyond providing some glue for the novel.

In parts, this novel is great – I loved the travelling symphony idea with their credo ‘survival is not sufficient’, I liked the description of the post-pandemic world, and thought the portrayal of the pandemic was effective and affecting. I so hoped that Miranda with her artist’s eye would become our heroine, but she doesn’t. As for Arthur Leander, I couldn’t care less about him and have no idea why he was the main character. It’s all very confusing but there’s enough in there to make an absorbing read, if you quickly flick over the Arthur bits.