Never Thought I'd End Up Here

Last year I read Ann Liang's I Hope This Doesn't Find You and was bemused by its transcontinental ambiguity. Never Thought I'd End Up Here is more firmly rooted in an American background, but its characters are swiftly translocated to a two week student trip to China, where the young protagonists can explore their heritage and family language.

Narrator Leah is battling not just her judgmental extended family, but a complicated personal history which encompasses changing schools under suspicion of attacking and injuring a fellow student, being overlooked as plain and dull, and then giving herself an extreme makeover which resulted in a modelling career -- which she has just quit, leaving her directionless. No wonder she's confused! And when the China trip reunites her with her nemesis, Cyrus, the one who accused her of hurting him, Leah is torn between a plan for revenge and ... starting to like him?

I'm sure you can guess how the story unfolds (I definitely did think we'd end up here), but Liang pushes all the right buttons for an audience eager for young adult romance. My school librarian friend assures me that her books fly off the shelves, and she is a New York Times bestselling author, so she's certainly found a winning formula. Never Thought I'd End Up Here is not quite my cup of tea, but an entertaining and polished ride.

The Good Country

When I was working on Crow Country, fifteen years ago, I found it quite difficult to discover exactly what had occurred between the First Nations inhabitants and white settlers on Djadja Wurrung country, though I could assume that dispossession was swift and violent. It turns out that the true history was a little more nuanced than that.

I was alerted to the existence of Bain Attwood's The Good Country by my book group friend Cathy, who is moving to Djadja Wurrung country, and I was interested to see that it was reworked and republished at the urging of Djadja Wurrung elder Gary Murray, who was generous enough to read the manuscript of Crow Country and even wrote a foreword. The Good Country is a short book, but packed with research, and tells a story that was no doubt replicated in different areas of Victoria during the first hectic, brutal years of active colonisation. Some settlers were ruthless and cruel; others were compassionate, and understood that Aboriginal people were losing their access to food sources (one wonders why this wasn't obvious to government authorities), and that their 'theft' of food and stock was largely motivated of hunger and desperation. I was shocked to learn that one of the main causes of death among First Nations clans was due to syphilis (guess how that was spread).

I wasn't aware that one of the first experiments with 'protected' areas for First Nations people was set up in Djadja Wurrung country, primarily as a refuge from the activities of violent settlers; however, when official support dropped away, most of the remaining inhabitants were resettled at Coranderrrk, where they had ties of marriage and kin. However, some Djadja Wurrung chose to remain on Country, and some gained employment on pastoral stations or even took part in the gold rush.

The Good Country filled in a large gap in my knowledge, not just of Djadja Wurrung history, but the history of Victoria and Australia, and I'm grateful to both Bain Attwood and Cathy for it. 

China Court

I think China Court is the last of Rumer Godden's major works that I still had left unread, and I've been hoarding a copy for about three years until I finally crumbled (what if I went under a bus and I still hadn't got around to reading it?)

There is so much to love about this 1960 novel. It further expands and develops on her earlier book, A Fugue in Time, which also examined the history of a house and its family through several generations simultaneously, but China Court is a country house and the prosperous Quin family balances a precarious position between classes. The stories of a handful of outstanding characters and marriages are stranded together in Godden's infinitely skilful way (though the family tree at the front of the book is very helpful). The present day narrative centres on young Tracy, who has returned to the family home just too late for the death of her beloved grandmother, who holds much of the novel together both as the matriarch Mrs Quin, and the village orphan and interloper Ripsie.

The love triangle between bastard orphan Ripsie and the two Quin brothers is devastating; the history of thwarted spinster Eliza in the previous generation is tragic. And I thought I was going to love the present-day fairy tale pairing between Tracy and Mrs Quin's protege, Peter (running the farm but nobly born, natch), until the last few pages, when Peter hits Tracy -- okay, he 'slaps' her and he warns her first, so arguably, she 'provokes' him, but this sudden assertion of old-fashioned masculine domination left a sour taste in my mouth. It's such a shame, because China Court is a really magical Godden novel in so many ways, if not for this shocking ending I think it would have become almost my favourite of her novels (though nothing will ever beat This House of Brede for me).
 

Archer's Goon

It's shallow of me, but I have to confess that the reason I've never picked up Archer's Goon, Diana Wynne Jones' 1984 novel, is because I didn't like the cover. the combination of the lime-green background, the leather-clad thug and the cartoonish children with their gormless mouths open, all convinced me that I wasn't going to enjoy the story inside.

Well, how wrong I was. Archer's Goon (I don't love the title either, to be perfectly honest) displays Diana Wynne Jones at the very peak of her powers. A story seemingly rooted in the everyday quickly takes a twist, veers off in a magical direction and rapidly roars into full-blown but deceptively well-controlled chaos, with one almighty whiplash twist saved up for the very end. 

A book featuring a family of five (counting Fifi, the student lodger) as well as a group of seven warring siblings with superpowers, and other sundry characters, could easily become confusing, but everyone is crisply delineated, funny and vivid. There's plenty of action and confusion to keep the plot racing, and needless to say, Archer's Goon is meticulously structured and pulls itself together at the end with such panache that the reader can only gasp. I'm sure I once read somewhere that Diana Wynne Jones didn't work out her plots in advance, but just started writing and worked it out as she went along, but frankly, I find that very hard to believe.

It's a delight to add another treasure to my Diana Wynne Jones bookshelf, unappealing cover and all. 

A Murder Is Going Down

I read and thoroughly enjoyed Kate Emery's CBCA Notable from last year, My Family and Other Suspects, and I'm delighted to report that A Murder Is Going Down is more in the same vein. It's not a sequel, but an entirely new story, which opens with our narrator, Heidi, and an older woman called Marianne, stuck in a lift together; Heidi begins to tell Marianne the story of a murder that was committed when her sister-in-law was also stuck in a lift -- the murder of Heidi's older brother Felix. 

From here, the story cuts between the pair in the lift, and the story that Heidi's telling. It sounds grim but fortunately Felix was a very unpleasant person, violent, manipulative and cruel, so we can regard his death with a degree of relief and concentrate on solving the mystery (which matters because if Felix killed himself, as the police might conclude, his lovely wife Elena loses out on the insurance payout). Heidi joins forces with Elena's younger brother, the annoying but charming Patrick, to unravel the clues.

A Murder is Going Down is heaps of fun. Heidi's narration and banter zing, the characters are appealing and well drawn, and the mystery (and the mystery within the mystery!) unfolds in a satisfyingly twisty fashion. The copy I borrowed from the library had already obviously been well read, unlike some of the notables I pluck from the shelves, sad to say, and it's refreshing to read a story set in Perth. I am already a big fan of Kate Emery and I hope she keeps producing these enormously entertaining novels.
 

Capture

I've felt a special connection to Amanda Lohrey ever since I entered an HQ magazine short story competition in 1995. I didn't win, but I was awarded a special second prize of $1000, which was a lot of money for me back then, and I've always had a sneaking suspicion that Amanda Lohrey, who was one of the judges, had gone into bat for my story (it was called 'The Fat Doubloons of Love').

Anyway, I do like Amanda Lohrey's writing, too, quite apart from feeling grateful for that financial boost, and I was especially intrigued by the description of Capture. Jim Mather is a sixty-something academic psychiatrist who is persuaded to make a study of people who believe they have experienced alien abduction. With the help of his assistant, Lucy, he interviews many 'experiencers,' hoping to find common ground between them, but each brings their own meaning to what has happened to them (or what they believed has happened), and Mather grows increasingly restless and irritated by his inability to impose coherence on the group. Meanwhile he has philosophical discussions with Lucy, catches up with an old lover, and has a shiatsu treatment.

This is a short novel, and it's reflective and meditative rather than action-packed (like most of Lohrey's work), but it's packed with thoughtful and provocative moments. What do we believe, and what do we believe in, and why? Do we live in the shadow of death, or bask in the joy of life? One of my friends described Capture as 'weird' but noted that it has stayed with her. I have a feeling it's going to stay with me, too.

Hitchhiker

  

I was a bit taken aback when I read the foreword to M.J. Simpson's biography of Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker. The foreword was written by John Lloyd, now best known as the creator of QI, but at one time Adams' closest friend, and he describes Hitchhiker as 'painstakingly researched and ineffably sad,' and describes Simpson as 'an honest man who has done his level best to present a balanced picture of what can hardly be described as a balanced life,' which at first seemed mystifyingly like damning with faint praise.

However, having now read the biography and gone back to re-read the foreword, it seemed less mean-spirited and closer to the simple truth. Douglas Adams was evidently a gifted and difficult man, and the huge success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy delivered him wealth, fame and opportunities, and simultaneously dragged like a millstone round his neck. He was a fountain of ideas, fired up when he was collaborating with other people, a natural extrovert, but loathed the isolation and discipline of sitting at a desk and doing the lonely work of actually writing, hence his notorious inability to meet a deadline. (Perhaps his most famous quote was, 'I love deadlines, I like the whooshing noise they make as they fly past.')

Adams' was widely loved, but he burned many bridges. He brimmed over with ideas but was hardly ever able to see them through to a finished product. At one point his publisher had to lock him up in a hotel room and physically sit glowering at him until he had finished writing the book he was contracted for. He was a master of distraction and procrastination (it's not considered in this book, which was published in 2003, but I wonder if he had ADHD). Adams died far too young, of a heart attack at 49, when his daughter was only seven years old. That's not the only reason why this biography seems so sad, but also the unfulfilled promise of a huge brain and often lonely heart. 

Golden

Golden by Jade Timms has been short-listed for the CBCA Awards, and it's immediately obvious that it's a cut above the average YA title. Eddy (Edwina) is dealing with untreated PTSD after the drowning death of her brother-in-law Jackson three years earlier; in fact, her entire family is still struggling with his loss. Eddy feels haunted, angry, miserable and very much alone. The story of Golden tracks her turning toward recovery.

I really liked the big cast of characters, mostly Eddy's teen cohort from her small coastal town, including her twin brother Pat. (Timms really likes unisex names -- as well as Eddy, we have girls called Stevie, Joss and George.) The cast is nicely diverse, too, and there's a satisfying web of cross-currents that link and divide the friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/ exes/wannabes. The adults are all pretty useless, though Eddy's dad is doing his best. I also enjoyed that Eddy didn't discover a miracle silver bullet to cure her trauma; it's the sum of a whole lot of different things that end up helping her, including messing with art (I feel as if this might have been intended to take up more of the story at one point, it fades away toward the end), running, friendship, finally talking about her experience, cooking, and first love all playing their part.

While it's not action packed, Golden is thoroughly engaging and kept me turning the pages. Eddy is appealing but plausibly flawed, and I kept wanting to make an appointment for her at a therapist (at the end of the novel, she's going to try therapy again); it was hard to believe that no one in her circle had recognised how badly she needs help in three years. But then, maybe I come from a therapy-positive background! I won't be surprised if Golden wins a medal to match its title.

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman

Lucy Worsley is a well known English historian who has presented many television and podcast series and written several books of historical fiction and non-fiction. I must admit that in the media I sometimes find her 'isn't this thrilling' presentation a bit much, but I must also admit that I found her biography of Agatha Christie utterly beguiling and illuminating. Worsley has a knack for intertwining Christie's personal history with social movements of the time which makes for fascinating reading.

Naturally the hinge of the book lies with the mysterious events of 1926, when Christie disappeared for several days, after her husband had told her he was leaving her for another woman. Her car was found abandoned and foul play or suicide was suspected. She was eventually discovered in a Yorkshire hotel, and the official story was that she had lost her memory. The whole episode was a press sensation, and it didn't take long before nasty aspersions were cast: was it a publicity stunt? A hoax to cast suspicions of murder on her husband? Or an elaborate scheme to lure him back? Worsley takes the view, informed by modern psychological knowledge, that Christie was acting in a genuine fugue state, a recognised psychological condition which is not exactly amnesia but certainly involves acute mental distress and delusion. It seems highly unlikely that Agatha Christie, who fiercely guarded her privacy all her life, would have deliberately staged such an attention-seeking stunt.

Worsley points out that the notion of Agatha Christie stories as cosy and nostalgic has largely arisen from the TV and movie adaptations of her work; the actual books were often acutely modern (for their time) as well as technically adventurous. Though she lost her grip as she grew older (Worsley suggests that perhaps dementia was setting in in her later years), at her peak she was a sharp psychological observer as well as a fiendish mystery plotter. I'm quite tempted to go back and revisit her classics -- I acquired loads of Christie collected volumes from various library sales, but I think they are all in storage with my daughter's stuff...
 

Summerwater

Almost exactly a year ago, I was blown away by Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall (thanks to Penni Russon for the recommendation). I wasn't aware when I borrowed Summerwater that a TV miniseries of it was released last year -- the reviews I've found have been lukewarm at best, but it's a weird coincidence, and if it pops up on my screen I'll probably at least have a look at it. It's an odd choice for an adaptation, because each of the chapters in Summerwater is so internal -- each voiced from the point of view of a different character, and with some overlap of events, but each with a very distinct attitude and each one very self-absorbed. It's not easy to dramatise a narrative which depends so heavily on internal monologues, and it sounds as if the TV writers didn't quite pull it off.

I do love a book written from different perspectives, even one like this which relies on a mounting sense of tension rather than any startling events, until the very end. It traces a single day in a rainy Scottish campground, where half a dozen families and couples are marooned by the weather. It's not a long book, and it would make a good teaching aid for demonstrating what 'voice' is and how it works. My one quibble would be that we don't get to see inside the heads of the 'outsider' family, the Ukrainian mother and her young daughter, in whose cabin noisy parties are held every night to the fury of the other guests. I'm guessing this was a deliberate choice, to keep them firmly in the role of outsiders, but it still makes me slightly uneasy that we don't get the same insight into their lives as we get into everyone else's.

Sarah Moss is a beautiful and skilful writer, but her subject matter is unrelentingly dark. In a way I'm glad that Summerwater and Ghost Wall are no longer than they are.
 

Unhallowed Halls

Lili Wilkinson just gets better and better, she is right at the top of her game (disclaimer: we've been friendly for years, she lives near me and we run into each other sometimes). Over the course of her writing career, she has produced delightful rom-coms, gripping realist novels about cults and apocalypse, and lately she's turned to chunky volumes of fantasy, all of which have been standalone stories with a fresh world and magic each time. Gee, she's good.

Unhallowed Halls has been deservedly shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year, and at this stage (without having read all the shortlisted books), I hope it wins. It's a terrific tale of elemental magic, set in a remote Scottish school for troubled, rich teenagers (surely there is a nod to Hogwarts here). Page has been brought from Florida to Agathion on a scholarship -- but why? Among a host of gifted adolescents, her gift is a particularly dark and mysterious one. For the first time in her life, Page finds herself part of a friendship group, and even falling in love with a boy. But a web of lies and a horrifying history of deception and murder lies beneath Agathion's seductive surface.

There is a lot of body-swapping in this story and Wilkinson does a stellar job of helping the reader keep track of whose soul is inhabiting who, and when. Underlying the plot (and surely this too might be a gesture toward the weird cruel creature that JK Rowling has become) is a concern with minds, souls and bodies -- are they, and can they be, split? What if mind and body don't feel as if they belong together? Is the body a gross flesh machine to be despised and mortified, or a gift to be relished? These deep questions are wrapped in a thoroughly thrilling and often beautiful fantasy tale that weaves together the boarding school, magic, romance and sacrifice in a fresh and gorgeous way.
 

The Correspondent

  

I heard about Virginia Evans' novel, The Correspondent, at the Sorrento Writers' Festival, where it was discussed by a panel of psychiatrists. I was going to reserve it at the local library, but balked when I realised there were 143 people ahead of me in the queue! Eventually I found it on the shelf at my reliable Athenaeum so I was able to gobble it down.

The Correspondent is that delightfully old-fashioned thing, an epistolary novel, something which has become much rarer since texts and email have pretty much replaced the snail mail letter. Most of Sybil's correspondence is via pen and paper, but there are also emails. The short format of most of the letters keeps the pace humming along, and the elliptical references to past events and current relationships let the reader do just enough work to piece the story together -- it's very cleverly done.

Of course a clever structure is wasted if the central narrative isn't also engaging, but Sybil's story has plenty of hooks. She's old, she's isolated, she's stroppy and doesn't mind picking a fight; she's estranged from her daughter and divorced from her husband, who now both live overseas; one of her sons died as a child, and we suspect that Sybil's troubles can be traced to this source. But she also seems to have a sinister stalker, and a couple of suitors, and a teenage boy to mentor, and it's through all these relationships, hostile, friendly and affectionate, that Sybil is gradually drawn back into the world. 

The Correspondent is a satisfying, fun and gently moving read, a perfect marriage of form and substance.

The Worst Perfect Moment

I'm usually pretty positive about the books from the CBCA Notables list, and Shivaun Plozza's The Worst Perfect Moment has an intriguing premise: sixteen year old Tegan is dead, and she's landed in an afterlife that recreates the worst weekend of her life. She needs the help of cute, annoying angel Zelda to figure out just what the Marybelle Motor Lodge has to teach her, or they are both in serious, eternal trouble.

Unfortunately, The Worst Perfect Moment didn't quite work for me. To start with, I think the cover is pretty awful -- that murky green is true to the story, but it's also one reason why the Marybelle is such a horrible place. I know it's important for Australian authors to appeal to an international (ie US) readership, so Tegan is American, her mother is 'Mom,' and the Marybelle is in New Jersey. But I have a visceral aversion to Australian stories pretending to be American. I also felt uneasy about the casual co-option of the architecture of Christian heaven, angels and even God to unpack teenage angst -- I couldn't help feeling that all these supernatural beings must have bigger problems to occupy their time? For me, the whole tone of the novel felt slightly off: in focusing on Tegan's past friendship dramas, I felt as if we were losing sight of the fact that she's just died-- her father and her little sister, who obviously love her to pieces, are going to be absolutely shattered, let alone her mother, who has left the rest of the family and will now no doubt be burdened with a lifetime of irredeemable guilt.

I can understand that it's a tricky mix to pull off a humorous take on the afterlife, existential life questions, queer romance, grief and death in one young adult cocktail, but for me, this time, the recipe didn't quite work. 
 

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

I'm not usually a great reader of celebrity biographies, but when I saw this Rob Lowe autobiography on the sale trolley at the local library, I felt it was worth shelling out the two bucks. I'm a bit of a fan of Rob Lowe; the family are in the middle of a West Wing re-watch, in which he stars as Sam Seaborn, and I'm comfort-watching Parks and Rec, in which he's extremely funny as super-fit and positive Chris Traeger. Also my daughter made me watch Bad Influence, an eighties movie in which he plays a villain who uses a sex tape to bring down his hapless victim, and which unfortunately came out at the same time as Lowe himself was the focus of a sex tape scandal (which almost permanently ruined his career).

It's hard not to feel some sympathy for the young Lowe, who was in his early twenties when the sex tape scandal occurred, and who'd been making movies since he was fifteen, but without anyone to provide him any wisdom or guidance. Young men aren't known for their sage judgement, and Lowe shows compassion for his younger self and his over-indulgence in girls and alcohol. Interestingly, he describes himself as being a giant nerd at school, which is sweet, and he lost his head when he suddenly found himself a member of the coolest gang in town.

What saved him was meeting his grounded and sensible wife, Sheryl, and going to rehab. He's still married and sober till this day, which in itself is pretty impressive. I love the way he turned himself into a comedy star, from being a very pretty heartthrob and a serious dramatic actor. Stories I Only Tell My Friends is predictably packed with celebrity anecdotes: he was high school mates with Emilio and Charlie Sheen, he dated Melissa Gilbert and Princess Stephanie... But Rob Lowe is genuinely fun to hang out with, all by himself.
 

Big Sky: when the emu left the earth

I heard astrophysicist Professor Ray Norris (born in the UK, now living in Australia) and beloved and controversial First Nations elder Bruce Pascoe talking on Radio National about their collaboration, Big Sky: when the emu left the earth, and immediately reserved it from the library. As anyone who's read The January Stars will know, I'm a sucker for astronomy and space (Duane Hamacher, who was the consultant on January Stars, is quoted often in this book).

I was a little disappointed by the astronomy volume of the otherwise excellent First Knowledges series, and Big Sky fills in some of the gaps. It really is remarkable to think that some sky stories, like the Seven Sisters myth, which carries extraordinary similarities all over the globe, may have travelled with the first humans out of Africa. There are other stories from parts of Australia that might recall celestial events like supernovae, comets and meteor strikes, that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. Star maps can act as mnemonics, along with stories, to guide land journeys. The Emu of the title of course refers to the Dark Emu figure visible in the dark patches of the Milky Way.

I was particularly struck by the different explanations of solar and lunar eclipses, often described as Sun-woman and Moon-man having sex, but showing an understanding of who is on top of whom! Some of Norris and Pascoe's examples show that Aboriginal cultures had a more sophisticated understanding of the skies than Renaissance scientists.

I'm not sure that books are the best way to pass on First Nations knowledges; the ideal way is to have an elder explain to you what you're ready to understand. But in the absence of that firsthand experience, books like Big Sky are the next best alternative.