Lily Narcissus by Jonathan Lerner

 

Sid and Lily Norell together with their children, Lauren and Jody, leave America in 1957 for Taiwan where Sid is to take up a diplomatic post with the American Embassy in Taipei. Their story is told in a first person account by Lauren, interspersed with Lily’s letters back home to her friends, Rose and Esther, which Esther has kept and gives to Lauren after Lily’s death, many years later.

This enchanting, engrossing novel follows Lily’s progression from the comforts of Bethesda and her many friends there to life as an expat in ‘the Orient’, as she would always refer to Asia. Although initially counting the months until they could return home, Lily gradually came to realise that Sid’s intention was to become a career diplomat and she began to find herself suited to her new role. 

Lauren’s recollections on reading the letters, while appreciating Lily’s good works and socialising skills, are judgmental from the point of view of a child who was never able to hold her mother’s attention for long. It was tremendously interesting to read of the impact of expat life on the parents and, separately, on the children.

This book is filled with so much: transplanting a family from one life to a completely different other; hints of the CIA’s involvement in Asian affairs; the Vietnam war, refugees, aid workers and soldiers suffering from the previously unnamed post traumatic stress disorder.

Lily’s letters and Lauren’s narration reveal as much about themselves and their world as could be told in a third person account. This is, simply, a brilliant book!

Published by Unsolicited Press

Where the River Runs by Fleur McDonald

 

This is a beautifully constructed book about righting wrongs, re-establishing relationships and solving a century-old mystery.

Chelsea has returned with her small daughter, Aria, to her home town where her father, Tom, is living alone, continuing to run his sheep station with the aid of one full-time employee named Cal. Chelsea has a battle ahead of her to win back the love of her father and the respect of the friends she left behind,

Dave, the local policeman, is called out to the discovery of what appears to be a grave on Tom’s property and he and his assisting constable, Jack, are tasked with investigating the find. Fleur McDonald cleverly brings a new dimension to the story by rounding out Dave’s character to include his marriage to Kim and his own relationships with his mother and his brothers.

 All the supporting characters are clearly defined and my interest didn’t waver for a second as I tried to pace myself to prolong the enjoyment but failed and read long into the night, as I usually do when I’m reading an engrossing book. The scenery is described with as much scrupulous attention as the people of the town of Barker and the book hums with the promise of love and redemption.

Australia has produced many brilliant writers and Fleur McDonald shines with the best of them! 5 out of 5 absolutely!

Published by Allen & Unwin

Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor

 

Iris is a novel of the dark side of Depression-era Sydney. Many of the characters in the story, including Iris herself, Kate Leigh, Tilly Devine and policewoman Lillian Armfield, were real people living in Sydney in the 1930s but this is a fictional account based on fact. There was an episode of the television series, Underbelly, a while back which featured some of these legendary figures and I found it helpful to picture them as they had been shown in that episode.

Fiona Kelly McGregor has written in the vernacular of the time and for an old reviewer like me this was fun and easily interpreted, although there were a few expressions I hadn’t heard before. The men, pretty much without exception, are brutal and the women don’t expect them to be any different. The women who work as prostitutes see this as a sure way to make the cash they need to exist. Iris and her pals look at thieving (tea leafing) in the same way as they plan and strategise their expeditions into the department stores in their area.  For most of them their living conditions are deplorable but in the times in which they lived their needs were condensed to enough food to stave off hunger, a drink or two to relieve the harshness of their lives and a warm bed.

Iris is intelligent and musically gifted; she plays the piano and the accordion and she sings. She learned to shoot rabbits in Glen Innes where she grew up and, in a culture where even the stupidest and meanest of men are considered superior to all women, it is her readiness to defend herself which has landed her in the trouble she is in as the book starts.

Iris is a long book with a lot of characters and it requires the reader’s full concentration. The language is very Australian but scenes from the underbelly of 1930s Sydney were not, I am sure, exclusive to our country.

This is an excellent story, and that is ridgy didge.

Published in Picador by Pan Macmillan 

Lessons by Ian McEwan

 

I consumed this book! Or it consumed me, or something. This is a novel telling the life story, or at least from 7 years old to mid his mid-seventies, of one Roland Baines.  Roland shares aspects of Ian McEwan’s own life story, such as his relationships with his siblings and his parents, and this added to my fascination with and enjoyment of this quite brilliant book. 

Roland, being the child of a soldier, has spent part of his childhood in Libya; at the age of 11 he is sent to a Council-run boarding school where he is happier than he expected to be in the company of other boys. At the age of 14, while worrying that he might not have much longer to live depending on the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, he finds himself immersed in a life-altering situation with a piano teacher but I will not spoil anyone’s enjoyment of this fabulous book by explaining any further; it was such a joyful experience for me to follow Roland’s life through the years as it will be for all who read it, I am sure.

The book begins with Roland as a 38-year old single parent of a 4 months old baby and continues back and forth over his lifetime, his experiences and interactions shaping him into the person he is to become. There are a lot of clearly-drawn, marvellous characters and plot lines and I was horribly inconvenienced by having to eat, sleep and tidy the house occasionally before I could get back to my reading.

I have been a huge Ian McEwan fan since reading Atonement, but if Lessons had been my introduction to his books I would have gone back and started collecting them as I have done! How wonderful that after writing so well for so long he has come up with another masterpiece. 

Published by Vintage.