Lili St Crow - Strange Angels

I've just posted a new review on my other blog, Other worlds, where the emphasis is on fantasy stories.

It's about Lili St Crow's Strange Angels urban fantasy series, and you can check it out here if you're interested.

Tackling Israeli-Palestinian issues through fiction

One of the hardest things to do in fiction is tackle a complex issue and still deliver an engaging story.

Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Muslim of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage who grew up in Melbourne, has a strong literary track record of tackling the challenging topic of being a teenage girl of Middle Eastern descent in urban Australia.

Her breakthrough first novel, Does my head look big in this?, was a witty and enjoyable story about an Australian-Palestinian Muslim who decides to wear the hijab, and the courage it takes to display her faith.

Her follow up, Ten things I hate about me, was more about cultural identity (rather than religious), in which a Lebanese teenager in Sydney goes to great lengths to hide her ethnicity from her friends.

Now, Abdel-Fattah has gone a step further, using her gifts as a storyteller to present a Palestinian perspective on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Where the streets had a name features the likable narrative voice of Hayaat, a teenage girl whose face is scarred from an event we don’t fully understand until almost the end of the novel.

Hayaat is like most teenagers. She wants to be loved and accepted. She wants her family to be safe. She’s learned to live with the restrictions and curfews of the occupation and the bitterness of those around her who have lost homes and land to the Israelis.

Hayaat has no desire to cause trouble, but when her beloved grandmother, Sitti Zeynab, falls ill, Hayaat is convinced the only thing to lift her spirits will be to touch the soil of her village again. So she and her best friend Samy decide to go themselves, to bring back a jar of the precious dirt.

The trouble is, Sitti Zeynab’s village is on the other side of the giant concrete wall built by the Israelis to keep them separate from the West Bank Palestinians. What should only be a trip of a few miles will take Hayaat and Sami a full day, as they negotiate check points, roadblocks, unreliable public transport and Israeli soldiers.

Given the polemic nature of the Israeli-Palestinian situation itself, it’s a near impossible task to write a story about it with polarising people. But while the Abdel-Fattah’s sympathies lie with the non-violent men, women and children suffering under the occupation, she avoids the trap of painting a simple picture of villains and heroes.

This is a human story. It’s an attempt to show the human face of the occupation – on both sides of the wall. Both sides fear and mistrust the other, but – as this novel quietly suggests – there is hope on both sides too.

Hayaat is a Muslim, yet her best friend Samy is Christian and the difference in their faith appears to have very little significance to them or their community: they are all Palestinian and all living under occupation. And, interestingly, the men and women who help Hayaat and Samy the most during their journey (probably because they have the freedom to so) are Israelis, who – openly or otherwise – oppose the occupation.

Abdel-Fattah’s connection to the people and the place in this story allows her to capture the humour, spirit and humanity of a people whose plight is frequently over-shadowed by the violence perpetrated by a few, but ascribed to all.

Sitti, who has suffered the most in Hayaat’s family, also has the greatest capacity to laugh at the situation of her people.

To Hayaat’s sister, who is dieting in the lead-up to her wedding: “A little meat on a woman is nice. Do you want people to look at your on your wedding day and think you had a holiday in Gaza?”

But Sitti also carries the grief of a nation without a status. To the Israeli family who claimed her home as her own: “I’m sorry for what happened to your family and your people, but why must we be punished?”

And finally, it is Sitti who offers her granddaughter a glimmer of hope that one day the Israelis and Palestinians may find a way to live together: “Justice will come when those who hope outweigh those who despair. Hope is a force that cannot be reckoned with, ya Hayaat.”

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The idea is promising: weave a zombie plot through a Jane Austen classic.

In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith inserts zombie references and action throughout one of the most loved and recognisable stories in the English language.

The altered classic opening line certainly captures the mash-up idea: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains”.

In Grahame-Smith’s version, Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters are renowned Shaolin-trained warriors, roaming the countryside to cut down zombies – much to the disdain of higher bred women such as Mr Bingley’s sisters. Mr Darcy is also a zombie slayer of great repute and his clashes with Elizabeth are no longer just verbal…

The set up for the zombie plot is actually all there in the original: the constant presence of militia, the threat of disease and the horror associated with breaches of social etiquette.

I laughed out loud the first time I heard about this book (and then again when I found it shelved in the classics section at my local book shop).

It promises to put familiar characters in unfamiliar territory (fighting the trashiest of all pop culture supernatural baddies), and comes complete with a tongue-in-cheek study guide at the end. It should be clever. It should be fun.

And it is, for about 50 pages. Then the zombie references and B-grade-worthy fight scenes become a distraction from the real story: the tension between Elizabeth and Darcy.

Around 80 per cent of the original text remains intact, and that’s the problem. Austen’s writing and original plot are so strong, it makes the new scenes completely superfluous. It would have worked so much better if Grahame-Smith had actually re-imagined the story, rather than just inserting a few lines here and there in the original text.

Actually, the best bits for me are the sketches scattered through the pages, perhaps a sign the mash-up idea would have worked better as graphic novel.

The book’s success (which has led to other hybrids, including Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters) proves there are enough people with eclectic reading tastes to create a market for this type of literary bastardisation.

And I have no issue with the concept, I just wish this one had offered something more because, by the end, I just wished I’d read the original.

(According to Wikipedia, due to the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Grahame-Smith has been contracted to write two follow-up books, one of which is reported to be titled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.)

Coming of age with Jasper Jones

Anyone who thinks “coming of age” stories are just for the young adult market should take a read of Craig Silvey’s excellent Jasper Jones.

It’s a gripping, well-written story about small-mindedness in a country town, that’s at turns sad, disturbing, funny and inspiring.

Set in Western Australia in 1965, it’s told through the eyes of teenager Charlie Bucktin. One stifling summer night, the town outcast – Jasper Jones – comes to his window and asks for his help. Charlie follows him into the bush, and what he sees there changes him – and ultimately the town – irrevocably.

In that one night – and then the days that follow – Charlie is forced to step away from childhood innocence and see the world around him for what it is.

Charlie struggles with the burden of what he has seen, and his uncertainty is further compounded by how quickly the town becomes mired in suspicion and hatred.

My good friend Place (a regular poster on this blog) and I heard Craig Silvey speak on the theme of “coming of age” at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September. He defined coming of age as being more than just a loss of innocence, that moment when the bubble bursts.

“It’s gaining and adult point of view of self assurance. It’s when you start to look beyond yourself and learn tenets of empathy. You appreciate another perspective and arrive at some sort of objective truth. It’s all about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

Silvey says it takes courage to challenge myths and traditions, which is what Charlie does when he realises the world is no longer the simple place he once thought it was. And he can’t “unknow” that truth.

Over the space of a fortnight, Charlie sees and hears horrible things. He sees the world for what it is. He responds by trying to understand the nature of cruelty, and how people can go about their lives as if evil doesn’t exist (this theme was also tackled in Sang Pak’s American gothic novel Wait Until Twilight, reviewed here).

In contrast to this soul searching is the comfortable familiarity of Charlie’s friendship with his cricket-obsessed best mate Jeffrey. Their adolescent banter provides welcome relief, as well as some of the most entertaining dialogue I’ve read in a while. (According to the Silvey, Charlie and Jeffrey’s conversations on puerile topics not dissimilar to the debates he has with his mates today. “It was a little too easy to write that dialogue.”)

For the creator of Jasper Jones, the idea of coming of age is not limited to youth: “We all become adults, but not all of us come of age.” And its this understanding that makes this novel such a riveting and enjoyable read.

Hearing the likable Silvey discuss Jasper Jones was one of the highlights of this year's Brisbane Writer's Festival Place and I. He was intelligent, articulate and self-effacing … and yes, we came away with a little bit of a literary crush…

Final verdict (for now) on parallel importation of books

The final verdict is in: the copyright restrictions on parallel importation of books into Australia are staying (which is good news for Australian writers).

Kate Eltham from the Queensland Writers' Centre sums up the outcome (and links to more information) here.

For background on the issue, you can check out my post on the subject back in July.

(And yes, I will write about an actual book again very soon! - Nearly caught up on everything again...)

The household guide to dying

I’m back from my big adventure and a tad behind on a large number of projects. So … I thought I’d post a review I wrote for a competition recently (which did not bear fruit), until I can offer up posts on my holiday reading material.

Dying is an ambitious topic to tackle in fiction. While death is used as a plot device or metaphor in countless novels, it’s not usually the driving force of the narrative.

Debra Adelaide makes death and dying the central theme in her 2008 novel The Household Guide to Dying. But while the impending demise of the narrative character propels the story, it’s also a mechanism for a broader story arc that prevents the novel from being a one-trick pony.

The novel revolves around Delia, a “domestic advice” columnist, whose often acerbic advice masks a woman whose life has not always been as well ordered as her pantry. Exhausted and ravaged from chemotherapy, Delia is preparing herself for the natural conclusion to a long battle against breast cancer.

In between making plans for her young daughters’ future weddings, and stocking the fridge with frozen home-cooked meals, she decides her final book of household advice should be about dying – a subject she’s now qualified to write about with absolute authority.

Delia’s impending death – which she faces with an often jarring sense of practicality –provides the motivation to not only prepare her family for a future without her, but to also finally tend to old wounds inflicted in a small country town many years earlier.

The Household Guide to Dying at first feels like another of those stories intent on celebrating the simple pleasures in life, usually best perceived in moments of human frailty. Certainly Adelaide has a wonderful eye for detail and an evocative turn of phrase, but she’s also intent on telling a story. So, as Delia starts to unpick the seams that have held her life together, it’s apparent there’s much more to this fastidious woman than immaculately laundered clothing and perfect cups of tea. Adelaide paints her stroke by stroke and, ironically, the closer she comes to death, the more human she becomes on the page.

The household, and the role of a woman in it, is a powerful motif throughout the story. So much so, the novel could easily be mistaken as a treatise on the pre-feminist importance of women in society. But a closer examination suggests Delia’s commitment to a perfectly ordered household is a response to the unpredictability of life in the world outside – a world that has left her with deep, well hidden, scars.

Over the years, she’s taken control of her household with almost militant precision, and she approaches death in much the same fashion. Almost every decision she makes is about controlling as much as she can in the lives of those she loves from beyond the grave.

The Household Guide to Dying is meticulously constructed, with the mood continually shifting from humorous to macabre, witty to poignant. Delia’s catalogue of household knowledge and responses to hapless advice seekers are woven between accounts of her final days, and flashbacks to the moments that have shaped her life. Events are told outside of chronological order, ensuring the gentle pace of the story never stalls and saving it from being too flippant, morbid or melodramatic.

There can be no accusations of sentimentality here. Delia doesn’t pass through the seven stages of grief – at least not on the page – and perhaps the story would have been even richer if she had. But what grief she doesn’t express for herself, she does for the past, and when her moment of redemption finally comes, it’s surprisingly effective.

Threaded through all of this is Delia’s research into her own “household guide to dying” – learning about caskets, funeral services and autopsies. The latter is meant to emphasise the banality of death in the face of unbearable grief, but – aside from feeding morbid curiosity – is distracting by its detail.

Helen Garner also tackled the subject of dying in 2008, with her much lauded novel The Spare Room. It’s told from the perspective of a woman forced to watch a dying friend struggle against the inevitable. Narrator Helen agrees to support a friend battling the final stages of a terminal cancer while she undergoes bizarre experimental treatment. Over the course of three emotionally-charged weeks, Helen becomes nurse, guardian angel and unflinching judge of the choices made by her dying friend.

Ironically, Delia is more emotionally muted in her response to death than Garner’s Helen, but then Delia’s story is influenced by a different tension. In The Household Guide to Dying, the tension is not just about Delia facing her own mortality; it’s about what she needs to do before she can face it with a sense of completeness. To her, the task is everything.

Although The Household Guide to Dying is not focused solely on Delia’s inexorable steps towards death, it still manages to be confronting, simply because it deals with issues of mortality and how that theme translates off the page.

A brief break in transmission

Hello ... just a quick post to say I'm eating and drinking my way across Italy at the moment, so the next post is still a few weeks' away.

(I've just finished reading Craig Silvey's excellent Jasper Jones, so that's next on the list...)