The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

 

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy needs a quiet reading space and a lot of time. It is intense, complicated and at times just plain hard to decipher. Bobby Western is a salvage diver although in a previous life he raced cars in Europe. Bobby and his friend, Oiler, are sent down to survey a sunken passenger plane but both decide they have no desire to be part of its retrieval. Back on land Bobby questions what he has seen and this, he presumes, is why he begins to be hounded by a pair of shadowy men, after which he is on the run and hiding from them all through the story.

It is also the story of Bobby’s sister, Alicia, and it is no spoiler to say that at the beginning of the book Alicia is found to have hanged herself. Alicia is a schizophrenic mathematical genius and she and Bobby share a deep although unconsummated (I think) love for each other. Alicia’s schizophrenic visions take up a large part of the story but I found them very entertaining; however, the pages on complicated mathematical questions and things like string theory were too obscure for my non-mathematical brain and as far as I could see I didn’t miss any of the story by skimming over and then finally skipping them.

Bobby and his friends and their conversations vaguely brought to mind some of my all-time literary favourites, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row characters. Strangely, Cormac McCarthy keeps structuring his paragraphs into long sentences strung together with the conjunction ‘and’ over and over. I guess his stature as a Great American Writer gives him licence to play around with grammar any way he likes but it takes a bit of getting used to. I had to resort to Google many times for the meanings of some strange words: a piece of driftwood is shaped like a ‘homunculus’ which is an image of a small human being made of clay, or the map of the brain; ‘adamantine’ in relation to a snake means aggressive. There are lots of others and if you’ve got a dictionary handy it can be quite fun to look them up as they appear.

I would sum this book up as: 1. masterly prose;  2. extremely unusual.

I am undaunted (bloody but unbowed?) by my interpretation above and am looking forward to reading Alicia’s story, Stella Maris, which is, I believe, in the form of question and answer sessions with her psychiatrist.

Published by  Picador

Pan Macmillan

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter

 

Karin Slaughter’s use of dialogue makes the relationships between her characters compulsive reading. In The Silent Wife, Will and Faith’s investigation into a spate of murders leads them to re-open one of Jeffrey Tolliver’s cases from eight years ago. Every alternate chapter goes back to that time as Jeffrey hunted down the perpetrator of some similar murders. The ever fascinating story of Sarah and Will becomes complicated by Sarah’s inevitable memories of her love for Jeffrey.

I read Karin Slaughter’s books when and where I find them; for instance, this one was from the Parkes Regional online library, and the previous one I bought from a supermarket in Hazy View, South Africa. This means I have a higgledy piggledy way of following the story of Sarah and Will but it is always wildly interesting and super enjoyable because of Karin Slaughter’s brilliant storytelling.

 Karin Slaughter is a simply fabulous crime writer!

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

 

I have been a huge fan of Kate Atkinson since reading Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995 and I have consumed everything she has written since. Her latest, Shrines of Gaiety is, as I had expected, another literary masterpiece!

London in 1926 is is teeming with survivors of the Great War. Its many nightclubs cater to the almost frantic search for gaiety and good times while the cold light of day reveals poverty, hunger and vulnerability, girls hoping to become stars of the stage and screen, criminals and corrupt policemen.

Kate Atkinson’s technique of revealing the outcome of an event and then going back to what happened and how it happened always works, as it does in this book. She presents all of her characters objectively while at the same time getting to the essence of each one. They are always honest at least with themselves, no matter how they present to the world outside. This is Kate Atkinson’s trademark approach which makes her novels so identifiable as hers alone.

The shadow of World War I and its ghastly outcome of  the depletion of the young male population as well as the post traumatic effects on survivors hovers over the story,  but for all the harm some are willing to inflict to try and make it to the top of what is left there is kindness and compassion shown by others, hopefully evening up the score somewhat in an effort to get the world back on kilter (before it will all come crashing down again, of course).

Nelly Coker with her nightclubs and her family; Gwendolyn who has come to London looking for two lost girls; Frobisher the good policeman and Maddox the bad policeman; the Bright Young Things and many other characters make this one of Kate Atkinson’s best novels, and that is saying something!

Published by Penguin Random House UK.

Rising Dust by Fleur McDonald

 

Rising Dust by Fleur McDonald is an exciting, dramatic crime novel set on a large sheep station which is bordered on one side by thirty kilometres of the Western Australian coastline. The scenery is spectacular from acres of dry, dusty land carpeted with white, yellow and pink wildflowers, the earth turning to red after a massive, dry-breaking storm, to the white sands and turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.

Detectives Dave Burrows and Bob Holden are investigating alleged stock theft when they uncover evidence of something much more sinister. Although this book is part of a series and there are references to previous happenings, the new story is complete in itself and makes for absolutely compulsive reading.

Glimpses into Dave’s personal life add to the interest and enjoyment of the story and there is lots of outback action with Dave participating in mustering sheep, looking for discrepancies in the size of the flock, as well as coming up against criminal activity back at the Station. 

Fleur McDonald is brilliant at putting together an imaginative, well balanced, timely story. There are so many good writers in Australia today and Fleur McDonald is up there with the best of them!

Published by Allen & Unwin