fiction – Page 43

Something Happened in Korea

July 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Emily Braunstein Brookes

The Below Country, by Nicholas Edlin (Penguin, 2011) 275 pp. $30.

‘You’ll never see the real thing,’ an American civil student mired in 1980s South Korea tells the narrator of The Below Country late in Nicholas Edlin’s second novel. ‘You think you know a thing, then the bastards move the frame. I’ve spent ten years of my goddamn life here and I don’t know a thing. I don’t know nothing but shadows and fucking silhouettes.’

This arresting scene comes thick in the third section of The Below Country, and it is when the book is at its best. Here Edlin writes his theme into the mouth of a character, and The Below Country feels for the first time like the novel it has always wanted to be: a mystery set in world where nothing is quite what it seems and our narrator isn’t sure she can trust her own mind. It is a disorienting sequence of misdirections that evoke Dennis Lehane or Richard Condon, with characters sinister in their graciousness, and lashings of magical realism. If the whole novel were like this, and if Edlin were able to play the mystery through to a shocking reveal, The Below Country would be a real treat of a psychological thriller. But Edlin, a deft writer of thoughtful, refined prose, seems never to have settled on precisely what kind of book he is writing, making for a novel of uneven tone and frustratingly lacklustre intrigue.

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Friends on Facebook

July 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Tim Jones

Hilary and David, by Laura Solomon (Proverse Hong Kong, 2011), 162 pp., $24.00.

Hilary and David is a novel told in the form of an exchange of letters — though actually, to be fair, since this a 2011 novel it’s told in the form of an exchange of Facebook messages; but they read more like letters, or at least emails, than the fragmentary conversations I tend to have with Facebook friends.

The messages are between Hilary, a young New Zealand woman struggling to raise two children on her own, and David, an English author in his eighties, stubbornly producing books that sell just enough to get his next book published and no more. Hilary’s life is made much more difficult by the fact that her son Wyatt has ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), while Harry has Down syndrome.

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Techno-obsessive

June 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Thomas Gough

In the Absence of Heroes, by Anthony McCarten, (Vintage, 2012), 389 pp., $28.99.

A sequel to Death of a Superhero, Anthony McCarten’s new novel In the Absence of Heroes relocates the Delpes from New Zealand to Watford, North London to tell the story of a family playing out their grief in a techno-saturated reality. The novel begins with a list of statistics about contemporary internet usage which, depending on your own online savvy, will strike you as either alarming or taken-for-granted: 50% of the people online lie about their age, weight, job, marital status and gender; 20% of the people going online will experience negative impacts on their life; use of the internet is a contributing factor in nearly 50% of all relationships and family problems; 11% of people going online are becoming compulsive or addicted; women are now online more than men.

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Everthing Merged and Became Whole

May 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Elizabeth Smither

The Kindness of Your Nature, by Linda Olsson (Penguin, 2011), 216 pp., $40

‘If we could see ourselves from above,’ thinks Marion Flint, the narrator of Linda Olsson’s third novel, The Kindness of Your Nature, ‘we would observe an intricate pattern emerging: a chain of minute incidents and developments, seemingly random, but all part of a coherent process with an ultimate goal’. This reflectiveness might exclude a lot of lives: children, for instance, though the seeing-from-above might begin in childhood, or those whose lives are abbreviated by illness or violence before there is time or leisure to reflect. Just recently I was discussing with a friend the idea of ‘the examined life’ which is supposed to be the only kind worth having. I wondered if there was something indulgent or luxurious about it, with its implications of introversion or narcissism. And yet this desire for coherence and comprehension is very strong, whether in seeking out friends from the past or revisiting significant landscapes.

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Land Bought in the Colonies, Sight Unseen

April 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Jenny Powell

La Rochelle’s Road, by Tanya Moir (Random House, Auckland, 2011), 272 pp., $39.99.

As the end of La Rochelle’s Road began to near for me, a collision of worlds ensured that this would be a novel I would remember for the most earthbound of reasons. Largely set in Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula during the 1860’s, La Rochelle’s Road lures the Peterson family from London, with the prospect of rolling fields and the charm of a furnished cottage. Upon arrival they confront a wilderness of scrub and a cottage full of filth and vermin.

While parents Daniel and Letitia begin the long and drawn-out taming of their property, 15-year-old son Robbie is forced to abandon further schooling to work with his father. With no revenue from their land the two men decide to join a gang of scrub cutters. In the exchanges between the workers, and in their enduring routines, Moir constructs a raft of cultural differences between the Petersons (and no doubt many other settlers), and the more established residents around them. Daniel’s workmates view those with an education as stirrers, who think the world owes them a living. In a telling statement they clarify their desire for egalitarianism in their new home; ‘We don’t want them and their funny ideas here – that’s what we bloody left for.’

Survival for the Petersons becomes a matter of resilience and adaptation. It is also a matter of relinquishing dreams and desires. Each Peterson responds in a vastly different manner. Moir’s success in displaying the impact of even the smallest of events elicits our frustrations and sympathies.

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