I was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn

Amelia Earhart is arguably one of the best known aviatrix of the twentieth century. Earhart set many records most notable being the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. Her death has fuelled as many conspiracy theories as those that surround 9/11.

On June 1937, during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, lost radio contact, ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Jane Mendelsohn’s novel is a fictionalised account of what happened to Amelia Earhart after she lost contact with Howland Island, her destination, and the navy.

Mendelsohn’s novel is at once a story of a driven, unhappy possibly reckless woman who does not feel alive unless she is flying. The author weaves fact and fiction, the present and the past using first and third person narrative. First person narrative is used as Earhart’s own personal point of view while third person narrative is utilised to portray Earhart’s life. This moving to and fro, in and out of time and space allows the author to blend, like some exotic biographer’s cocktail, layer upon layer of fact and fiction, present and the past, real or imagined until the reader feels drunk from bibliophilic  pleasure.

But there is no hangover or altitude sickness as a consequence of imbibing this particular cocktail. Instead one feels the need to continue drinking the book without stopping for breath or coffee.

The novel is written in the style of a diary with short, usually one paragraph long, entries.

“Back then, a plane was called a ship. There were still cabins and a sense of voyaging. There was a reverence for flight because it was so dangerous. People lost themselves. There was no safety.”

This diary style way of writing gives the novel a sense of urgency. One feels that Amelia Earhart is writing down her thoughts before either she dies, possibly by her own hand, or before she forgets. In the author’s hands Amelia has something of a death wish. The aviatrix is trying to make sense of the world she lives in and the decisions she made. She enjoys the celebrity that has come with her exploits but feels guilty at doing so. She regrets her marriage to the publisher George Putnam but understands that were it not for him she would not have had the success she achieved.

“He’s the husband who made her famous, who devoted himself to her, even when she hated him, even when he hated her back. She needs him so that she can fly, so that she can escape from him, so that she can escape from the very people who worship her.”

At only 146 pages in length the book is short but very sweet. Jane Mendelsohn has taken the ‘goddess of flight’, as she was described by the press, and brought her down to earth by encasing her feet in clay. But, though the author has endowed Amelia Earhart with flaws, insecurities and an occasional hint of self loathing, Amelia Earhart still remains a heroine.

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

The Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

Cordelia Grinstead is a wife and mother to three children. Her husband Sam, a doctor, recently suffered a heart attack, (though Delia, as she is commonly known, refers to it as chest pains). At or about the same time her father died after Delia had cared for him for some time in her own home.

Her children are all teenagers and have become more independent and less reliant on their mother. Delia’s husband has become distant and less attentive. Delia has becoming unsure of her role as a mother, a wife and in the world in general.

While on the annual family holiday with her family and her sisters, Eliza and Linda and the latter’s children, Delia asks a young man who was working on the holiday home to drive her to a place she knows nothing of. She asks the young man to stop at a small town and there she begins a new life with only the possessions she is wearing and what is within her tote bag.

On the surface, The Ladder of Years appears to be a run of the mill novel about a middle aged woman going through the proverbial mid-life crisis. This appearance seems justified when you throw stroppy, mumbling, uncommunicative teenagers and an inattentive older husband in to the mix.

However, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Anne Tyler has written a novel that defies cliché, stereotype and one’s preconceived ideas of what a woman’s mid-life crisis looks like. A clever choice on Anne Tyler’s part was to write the book in the third person. It would have been easier to have written the novel in the first person and allow us the reader to get a better and easier understanding of Delia’s motives and thoughts on her behaviour. But writing the novel in the third person puts the reader at a slight distance from Delia so making it harder to empathize or sympathize with her. It makes the reader have to work that bit harder in getting to understand Delia and her reasoning and in this process makes the reading of the novel that much more satisfying.

I also believe that writing in the third person allows many male readers to follow Delia’s character without feelings of being uncomfortable in their male skin than had the novel been written in the first person. It is possible that many male readers would have found it uncomfortable or off putting to follow the character had they had access to her inner thoughts and feelings. By writing in the third person male readers are allowed to keep their distance and not made to feel that they inhabit a female persona.

All the characters within The Ladder of Years are rounded three dimensional people and as a reader I felt that I knew and understood each of the novel’s inhabitants by the end of the book. This knowing and understanding is from the perspective of a friend of the family and not as a family member. By this I mean that as much as I believed I knew the character’s motives and reasons for what they did and how they lived I still couldn’t be sure I was getting the full picture. This I believe was intentional on the author’s part. I believe that Anne Tyler was trying to communicate that we never fully know someone else even when they are family. There are times in our lives when we feel like we are an outsider within our own family group looking in through a window that becomes more opaque as time moves on.

Anne Tyler’s novel is a well crafted moving and at times funny novel that will not disappoint any reader, even the male of the species.

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

Eveless Eden by Marianne Wiggins

This novel is both a thriller and a love story inextricably linked to the major events that took place between 1986 and 1991: the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the downfall of the Ceausescu and the subsequent ending of the Communist regime in Romania. In the novel’s foreground are Noah John and Lilith da Vinci, a journalist and photographer respectively, who embark on a torrid affair that will inevitably, like the times they live in, change their lives forever.

I believe that any novel’s protagonists should have at least one good virtuous characteristic, one redeemable trait that a reader can use to justify following the character’s story through the novel. But in Noah John there is nothing to hang that particular hat on. He is a weak, charmless character who commits an abominable act halfway through the book that is never fully addressed. Though this act is an allusion to what is happening and will happen in Germany it still cannot be forgiven and for me was a emotional distraction as I read the rest of the book.

Lilith da Vinci is a more redeemable character but still not that likeable. She is a strong, brave character, sexual permissive and has a belief in highlighting, through her photographs, the horrors of war and the world we live in.

The backdrop that the novel is set against and the protagonist’s part in these events is what makes the novel interesting and worthwhile reading. The novel’s allegorical structure, set as it is within the historically tumultuous five years that shook the world to its political and social foundations, allows the lover’s affair and characterization to reflect and imbue the time they are living through.

Many of the novel’s minor characters are poorly and lazily drawn. For instance Noah’s Scottish friend is called Mac and is a heavy drinker. The author writes some of Mac’s dialogue in the vernacular but spells the words phonetically.

The novel’s backdrop and how these world events and the reader’s knowledge of how these will affect the 1990s and the 21^st century is what makes this book readable, not the main characters Noah and Lilith who at times appear nothing more than ciphers to decode a world in upheaval. Then again maybe this was the author’s intention.

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan

American Chinese Olivia Laguni finds out she has an older Chinese half sister, Kwan Li, after her father’s death bed confession to her mother.  From initially being excited about the prospect of having a sister the six year olds excitement soon evaporates and turns into embarrassment and resentment of her mangled English speaking sister. This embarrassment is compounded by Kwan’s belief that she can see and talk to dead people in the World of Yin. Interwoven with Olivia’s story of her life in San Francisco are the stories told by Kwan of her former life in China.

The sisters are the narrators, with Olivia being the primary one. The main body of the novel has Olivia relating her life in San Francisco between the 1960s and the 1990s. As Olivia grows up she continues to be embarrassed by her half sister Kwan who is twelve years older than Olivia. Kwan’s broken English and her lack of knowledge of American ways creates a climate of bullying and teasing for Olivia as other children perceive Kwan to be a ‘retard’. This childhood trauma and subsequent dislike and resentment of Kwan bleeds through to Olivia’s adulthood and is exacerbated by Kwan’s interference in Olivia’s relationship with her partner Simon.

Kwan, however, unreservedly loves her little sister even when it transpires that because of Olivia, Kwan is sent to a mental hospital due to her belief that she can see dead people.

During Olivia’s childhood Kwan tells her ‘ghost stories’. Stories of the dead people she sees. These stories continue into adulthood and in addition Kwan recounts stories of her past lives.

Convolutedly, Kwan, Olivia and Simon visit China and in particular where Kwan grew up.

The author of bestseller The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan, has crafted an ornate, chiaroscuro like piece of work with The Hundred Secret Senses. The novel is about America and China, life and death, cultural incongruities and the difficulty of filial devotion to one’s siblings.

However, fundamentally the novel is about relationships; the relationship between married couples, siblings, parents and their children and the most difficult relationship we all face, between the living and the dead. Amy Tan handles all these issues with adroit aplomb.

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

Spinsters by Pagan Kennedy

It is 1968 the day after Martin Luther King Jr is assassinated, Dora and Frannie’s father, passes away after a long illness. Shortly after, the sisters receive an invitation from their Aunt Katherine to live with her.

Living with their Aunt and her black maid Letty proves unfulfilling to the sisters. They decide to visit other relatives and this ultimately results in a road trip through America’s Southern states.

As is evident from my above rating this novella (its word count is only some 63000 words) is not something I could easily recommend.

It is an agreeable and easy read but this only damns the novella with faint praise. I found the book lacking in subtlety and depth. The motifs, allusions and symbols are writ large. The pacifist Martin Luther King Jr is killed while the next day the World War II conscientious objector father of Dora and Frannie dies. America is going through huge changes and turmoil; the Vietnam War, the anti war riots, the race riots, women’s liberation. These changes will irrevocably alter the country, politically, socially and culturally. America’s Baby Boomers were attempting to rip the country from the hands of the pre World War II old guard and pull the country into a modern world. These events are mirrored, in a smaller way of course, in the lives of the sisters. Dora is outgoing, sexually active, gregarious and believes in a brighter future. Frannie on the other hand is old fashioned, strait laced and clings to the past and its apparent certitude.

They drive through Texas but decide not to stop in this particular state due to the oppressive heat. Of course, even five years on the sound of bullets can still be heard reverberating around the Lone Star state.

The conclusions to the all the story threads that weave through the book are foreseeable and rather too neat for a book that uses the America in the 1960s as its backdrop. The Vietnam War raged on for another four years. Nixon became President in 1969 and his Waterloo was still four years away. The times were a changin’ but the old guard still had a grip on the political rudder.

If one was to read The Spinsters as anything other than an allegorical novel then one could find it enjoyable. The author Pagan Kennedy does have an elegant, clear writing style that throws up some wonderful images, a ‘saleslady whose hair was stiff as seven minute icing’.

Dora and Frannie’s feelings of entrapment, loneliness and isolation while caring for their father will resonant with many people in an age where one in four people in the UK care for an elderly parent. The handling of this particular issue is what earned the novella its half a mark.

No’ of pages - 158

Sex scenes – none (there is some mild sexual references)

Profanity – none

Genre - drama

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

This fin de siècle, first person, novel, is at its Austenesque heart a story of decay, hope and incestuous love.

Cathy lives in a large run down country house with her Grandfather, known locally as ‘the man from nowhere’. As Cathy looks back on past events in her life we encounter past inhabitants of the house; her brother Rob, the Irish housekeeper Kate, the mysterious Eileen and numerous servants employed from the local village.

Cathy and Rob’s mother, who was a baby when she arrived with Cathy’s grandfather at the country house, left when Cathy and Rob were very young. Their father has also ‘abandoned’ them due to his mental illness and is being treated at a sanatorium. Their grandfather has retreated into his study from which he very rarely emerges and so Rob and Cathy are largely left to their own devices apart from the able assistance and love of their housekeeper and friend, Kate.  

Secrets and lies are cemented into the very brickwork and foundation of the house and its real and metaphysical decay begins to expose those two fragile elements to householders and visitors alike. These two sides of the same coin seep and bleed through the novel and their exposure is being hurried by the likes of Ms Eunice Gallagher, Cathy and Rob’s former tutor and governess.

This 1996 winner of The Orange Prize for Fiction is like the curate’s egg, excellent in parts. Helen Dunmore’s characters are wonderfully written. As you read through the novel it feels like each line is creating the skin and bone and organs of each character while each chapter is pumping blood through their perfectly, forming bodies. By the end of A Spell of Winter, one feels that one has not only read about the characters but has actually met them.

At times the novel does read like it is part of the Austen oeuvre. Being a lover of all things Austen, this is not a bad thing and may have been the author’s intention. One cannot read of the character Mr George Bullivant without thinking of the first line of Pride and Prejudice: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’. Mr Bullivant reminded me Mr Charles Bingley from the same novel, good natured, well mannered, kind and wealthy. His name is well chosen as it means, the good, faithful man. In fact Mr Bullivant is given one of the best lines of dialogue, ‘Thinking of people when they’re not there, it’s one of life’s great pleasures, isn’t it’.

The first line of the prologue, ‘I saw an arm fall off a man once’, sets out a major theme within the novel, decay. Decay of not only the grandfather’s house but of his mind and that of his sons. Decay in inhibitions and ultimately the morals of the two main characters, Cathy and her brother Rob.

The book’s title, A Spell of Winter, Cathy’s favourite time of the year, implies decay. And it is in that winter that Cathy can hide, physically and mentally, within its long hours of darkness.

There are times when the dialogue does not do justice to the rest of the novel. At times it reads like something from a sub romantic Barbara Cartland novel as this exchange between Mr Bullivant and Cathy attests to;

‘You’re cold,’ he said, noticing my shiver, ‘We’ll go into the house.’

‘No, I’m not cold. I like it here.’

‘You like the snow, don’t you? It suits you.’

‘Yes’

‘I always think of you outside, in the woods or in the garden.’ said Mr Bullivant.

‘Do you?’

‘Yes, why do you sound so surprised?’

The novel’s incestuous story line could be considered a brave and bold move on the author’s part or simply a contrivance to generate publicity through tabloid moral outrage. Personally, I believe the former reason. Rightly or wrongly I wondered if this was the kind of book I should be reading and enjoying but I also had the same thoughts when reading Nabakov’s Lolita. 

Do I recommend this book? Yes I do. Did it deserve to win to win the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction? Too early to say as I have yet to read four of the six books that were nominated. But of the two books that I have read from the shortlist, The Spell of Winter and Julia Blackburn's The Book of Colour, Helen Dunmore's is my favourite.

No’ of pages – 313

Profanity – none

Sex scenes – 1 (there are also some mild sexual references)

Genre – Drama/Romance

Originally posted at http://thevoyageout-bookreviews.blogspot.co.uk/

The Book of Colour by Julia Blackburn

Julia Blackburn has written a biography or a memoir if you will about the paternal side of her family that goes back as far as her great grandfather. But this is not a conventional, genealogically straight-forward biography. The author swoops in and out of her father and grand-father’s lives through dreams and nightmares, mentally visiting rooms within a large ethereal house each connected by long white corridors. In each room she encounters a place in time inhabited by her ancestors. The author becomes a part of her ancestor’s lives as if by some form of bilocation.
While in this fantastical state of bilocation she interacts most often with her grandfather (whose name we are never privy to), the dark-skinned son of a white missionary and his son, Eliel, the author’s father.  On the island of Praslin, one of the smaller islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the white missionary is busy trying to stamp out copulation while simultaneously trying to deny the colour of his own act of copulation. The Missionary’s dark-skinned wife is cursed by a witchdoctor and she and her son flee to the island of Mauritius to try and hide or outrun the witchdoctor’s curse. Julia Blackburn’s father arrives In England aged eighteen having been trained as an Anglican Priest on Mauritius but the curse appears to have followed him over the ocean.

The book is not an easy read. The subject matter is unsettling; racism, self loathing and mental illness, and the writing style has a surreal texture to it. However, if you want an easy read there are plenty of celebrity biographies out there to satiate your appetite.

The book is laid out in a series of short chapters with an average of five pages per chapter. It is said that we have an average of six dreams per night within an eight hour sleep. The short chapters reflect that dream state. They allow the reader to end the dream or nightmare with the close of a chapter. The short chapters allow you reflect and cogitate what you have just read before moving on to the next chapter/dream.

As with any surreal style of art, symbolism features rather heavily. There is a lot of looking out of windows, standing at windows, looking at one’s reflection in windows. There is a barely a chapter that does not mention the act of shaking; the Grandfather shakes, the grandfather’s friend shakes uncontrollably, the author’s father shakes and trembles at various times through the book, Uncle Julius the missionary’s brother shakes Eliel by the shoulders when greeting him and zombies shake themselves free from the ground.

This prevalent image of shaking is not simply a symbol of the fear that the every character in the book feels quite palpably but is symbolic of one of the thematic motifs that run through the book, a curse. The grandfather states that curses are “very hard to shake off”. The curse placed on the author’s grandmother appears to follow the family down through the generations culminating in the Eliel’s mental illness in his fifties.

Here is Ms Blackburn’s strength. Her ability through her rich, layered unpretentious writing has the twenty first century reader believing in witchdoctor curses by the end of the book. Like the curse, racist attitudes rear their ugly head throughout the book. But thankfully the author never lectures or gives an opinion on said racist attitudes. She simply lays out the truth of the matter and allows the reader to find their own feelings regarding this issue. This is rendered in a beautifully, understated passage that has Eliel being handed a book by his new teacher Mr Swann. In the book are the names of local families that are black but like to be thought of as white.

This is the first book review and I have been lucky in finding such a wonderful book to kick off my blog.

Julia Blackburn’s seemingly effortless style is at times beguiling and thought provoking. In the wrong hands The Book of Colour could have quite easily have became polemical and sentimental. The author has allowed the reader a peek into her ancestor’s lives and I believe it is just that, a peek. One can assume that there is so much more behind Julia Blackburn’s biographical curtains.
My only criticism is that the reader is left wondering what became of some of the people within the book; Eliel’s mother who suffered because of mental illness, Evalina Larose, relative or servant, and most importantly Eliel’s father who stayed behind on the island of Praslin. I have so many questions but so few answers. However, it may well be that the author does not have all the answers. It is a small criticism over-shadowed by my admiration and recommendation.

Opening Line - "It was once thought that when your house had been visited by the plague, then it was a good idea to shut a pig in the infected rooms and leave it there for a day and a night".

Memorable Line - "He looks so small and fragile lying there and as I watch I see him fading before my eyes; his body becomes colourless and transparent, the walls of the house around him are as thin as lace curtains."

No' of pages - 180

Profanity - None

Sex Scenes - None

Genre - Biography/Memoir

The Hundred Secret Senses - Wendy's Review

“… Yin people, after while, just speak heart-talk. Easier, faster that way. No misconfusion like with words.”

“What does heart-talk sound like?”

“I already tell you.”

“You did?”

“Many time. Don’t just use tongue, lip, teeth for speaking. Use hundred secret sense.” - from The Hundred Secret Senses, page 211 -

When she is five years old, Olivia meets a half sister she never knew she had. Kwan is twelve years older and arrives from China to live with Olivia and her family in San Francisco. It is 1962 and Kwan has lived a life light years away from Olivia in terms of culture and language, religion and belief – she is a puzzle to Olivia as she offers up stories of an ancient previous life lived in mid-nineteenth century China. Kwan seems to have the power to communicate with the dead through her “yin eyes,” something that fascinates, frightens and bewilders Olivia.

Narrated mostly from the point of view of Olivia, but interspersed with Kwan’s fantastic stories, The Hundred Secret Senses is a novel about two sisters and their complicated relationship. As Olivia struggles with her failing marriage, Kwan is her constant companion, whether Olivia likes it or not. Olivia is removed from her Chinese heritage and embarrassed by Kwan’s stilted English and superstitious beliefs. But despite her best efforts to dismiss Kwan’s stories, Olivia finds herself drawn into a world where dead people speak, the past becomes entwined with the present, and fate seems unavoidable.

Fate has no logic, you can’t argue with it any more than you can argue with a tornado, an earthquake, a terrorist. Fate is another name for Kwan. – from The Hundred Secret Senses, page 168 -

Amy Tan’s characters jump to life on the page. Original, funny, and deeply complex, the characters drive this story about human connection, love, secrets, and the mystery of life itself. I loved Kwan, a character who is quirky, lovable, and immensely wise.

Kwan, in contrast, is a tiny dynamo, barely five feet tall, a miniature bull in a china shop. Everything about her is loud and clashing. She’ll wear a purple checked jacket over turquoise pants. She whispers loudly in a husky voice, sounding as if she had chronic laryngitis, when in fact she’s never sick. She dispense health warnings, herbal recommendations, and opinions on how to fix just about anything, from broken cups to broken marriages. She bounces from topic to topic, interspersing tips on where to find bargains. Tommy once said that Kwan believes in free speech, free association, free car-wash with fill-’er-up. The only change in Kwan’s English over the last thirty years is in the speed with which she talks. Meanwhile, she thinks her English is great. She often corrects her husband. “Not stealed,” she’ll tell George. “Stolened.” – from The Hundred Secret Senses, page 21 -

Tan takes her readers back to China, into an old world of tiny towns and breathtaking vistas, and immerses us in a world of Chinese ghosts and deeply entrenched superstition. She slowly reveals the relationship between Olivia and Kwan, moving toward a conclusion which is surprising, heartbreaking, and filled with hope.

I loved this book with its mix of humor and sentiment. Tan alternates between reality and spiritual knowledge, turning what we think we know on its head. She reveals a deeper understanding about what it means to be human and connected in a world which seems vast and mysterious. Readers who appreciate lyrical writing and complex characterization will want to add this Tan novel to their must read pile. The Hundred Secret Senses earned Tan a spot on the 1996 short list for The Orange Prize for Fiction.

Highly Recommended.