Nice cover, shame about the insides

I've been reading a lot lately in bursts of 20 minutes or so between doing baby stuff. Annoyingly, I haven't found any of these books THAT good and while I'd rather not bag novels people have put a lot of effort into unnecessarily, I can't keep quiet about Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt. It COULD have been really good but it just struck me as lazy and derivative.

Plotwise it echoed His Dark Materials by Philip Pullmanand China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and it borrowed a lot of pseudo-Victorian technologies from The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. More obscurely I thought the overly long climactic battle owed a lot to the ending of the Japanese horror movie Tetsuo II The Body Hammer.

It's even marketed as being similar to His Dark Materials. (The blurb also refer to Sussannah Clarke but any comparison is just silly.)

The man is clearly an SF fan - apparently he set up one of the first SF websites in 1994. But this book read like a pastiche of the best bits of recent successful fantasy novels: enagaging young heroine, check, interesting technology check, airships check, different species of people including some with exoskeletons check, artificial intelligence check and MAGIC check.

There's also a laziness of adopting details from the real world that bothers me a lot. For no apparent reason people who live in mountains have prayer flags and meditate just like Tibetans. Folk froim the "Uplands" speak brogue and play things like bagpipes. Heart-eating dark gods have names ending in "tl" just in like pre-columbian central America.

And I know I was tired but the last hundred or so pages really dragged for me.

None of this would be so bad of course if I hadn't paid full price for this book.

Mother's little helper

It's probably fair to say that before Winnie came along I was ridicuolously paranoid about the prospect of going a bit post-natal. I've been working full time for 13 years and I'm used to talking to adult people all day. I wasn't sure I'd cope with months and months of relentless nappy-changing and baby-feeding.

A few weeks ago we were watching The Collectors and this woman had sent in her collection of blue plastic objects she'd found in the street while pushing her son's pram around. While these things were quite a lovely blue colour (she couldn't bring herself to keep anything red or green even though she picked them up occasionally) no amount of calling it the art of the "found object" could disguise the fact that she was picking up crap from the street like a bag lady.* I looked at my Beloved and asked him to shoot me if I started doing stuff like that.

So far, I haven't time to feel sorry for myself even if there was anything to feel sorry about. Friends, family and community support people are ringing me every day to ask me how I am. This is lovely and heartwarming* and quite a bit different to my poor old mum's day when she was stuck in the burbs without a car and people apparently scowled when you tried to take prams on public transport.

But I thought I might have been crossing a line yesterday morning when I wheeled the pram into the bottle shop at 10:30. I was there to buy wine to go with the dinner I was going to cook and I had two enormous shopping bags full of food as supporting evidence... but so worried was I that the man behind the counter might think I was about to go home and drown my baby blues that I bought UNREFRIGERATED white wine.

* I have tried to call crap art myself. When I was 17 I went through a phase of picking up black shoes I found in the street. I thought it could be a sculpture project for school art but after I had a dozen or so shoes I realised I couldn't stand the smell of other people's foot odour anymore and threw them out.

**except when they ring when I'm trying to sleep (which is at least once a day.)

Positively Loopy

I shouldn't really complain too mcuh about not liking The Loop by Koji Suzuki because I bought it for its pretty psychedelic cover.

It's meant to a be sequel to the two Ring books which were made into movies both here and in Japan. For those who missed them, these eminently credible horror movies involved a curse transmitted by watching a videotape imprinted by the mindpower of a troubled young woman who may have been dead at least some of the time. Perfectly normal and believable.

The sequel however just pushed the boundaries of believability a a bit too far - even for me reading this in the middle of the night while trying to feed a tiny baby.

I've never really "got" Japanese fiction. Not that I've read much besides Mishima and something by Haruki Murakami that may of may not have been Sputnik Sweetheart*. I don't know how much is cultural differences or bad translations.

SPOILER But putting all that aside, this book was seriously odd. It argued that the first two books had occurred within a computer simulation of the world that had started with just machine code for the physical world and evolution had happened in exactly the same way as in the "real" world down to people being exactly the same. And the curse of the Ring jumped from the computer simulation to the corporeal world. Spooky! END SPOILER

Yeah so um, not one to read in a hurry.

*There was lots of stuff about the Russian dog Laika orbiting the world but the only bit I really remember because it was so dumb was a two page explanation by this character of why she hadn't dyed her hair to meet someone for the first time who would have been expecting her to have black hair and now it was grey which depended on dye lasting about two days. Odd.

Another bad book for an anxious new parent

The night before I went into hospital, I started reading The Slapping Man by Andrew Lindsay.

I didn't get far that night. On page one a woman gives birth to a child with a monstrously deformed jaw. On page 2 she's worried he'll bite her boob off while breastfeeding.

Luckily that turned out all right in the end. The baby grew up up to be Ernie, a man with a powerful jaw that could withstand any amount of violence.

This book took me two weeks to read because I kept losing my place.* But this is exactly the sort of self-consciously odd book I find a bit irritating at the best of times. It's set in an isolated coastal community of indeterminate siuze full of "quirky characters". There's Ernie who makes his money from being slapped and his quirky parents and the quirky town butcher who wants to slaughter every different animal and the town publican who's scared of his brother the butcher and quirky Jean who sleeps with everyone but hasn't kissed anyone since her first boyfriend died and finally there's Vronsky the fake town shrink, the quirkiest of them all because he hears all the town's secrets.

It's structured around really short chapters focussed on one character that may not relate to anything else that happens. Some of these are quite poetic but it's impossible to work out how much time passes during the action - it could be weeks or a couple of decades. Yes, I realise this is probably the point.

Anyway I was surprised that even though there was heaps I didn't like, it wasn't that bad. Some of it was even pretty funny. Oh and I liked the cover.

*Admittedly, for most of that time, I WAS heavily medicated, sleep deprived and a bit excited about having a tiny baby of my own to cuddle and wrap up and try to tickle.

Fire and Brimstone and all that

The week before Winnie arrived, I was desperate to finshThe Volcano by Venero Armanno. This was mostly because the book weighed almost two kilos in hardcover and I didn't think I could hold both it and the baby. It wasn't really because of the plot because you knew pretty well what was going to happen from the beginning.

The book tells the story of Emilio Aquila, a Sicilian post-War immigrant to Brisbane who got caught up with a crime lord and with union-busting railway management. Along the way he could never really shake the nickname "Devil of Sicily" he got as a youngster for living as a brigand on Mt Etna and kidnapping a girl who then had to marry him.

This was published about five or six years ago and I used to see a lot of people reading it in public. It has a lovely cover and sounds like a terribly PC postcolonial immigrant tale. But I was put off from reading it then. This was partly because the reviews talked about the use of ancient mythology (Pluto kidnapped Proserpine on the slopes of Mt Etna and took her to the Underwold to be his queen except she wasn't happy which is kinda sorta what happened to the protagonist and his wife) and I'm dubious about modern novels using myths because it's hard to do it well. But in this book, it wasn't that heavy handed and it did work.

And there were a lot of good things going on that I enjoyed a great deal such as descriptions of migrant life in Brisbane in the 1950s where the locals were as casually and unapologetically racist as you'd expect. Life in Sicily during the war sounded very grim too. Where the book did lose me though was in the present where Emilio befriends an annoying young woman who's trying to study creative writing and is depressed after the death of a boyfriend. Some of this - such as her discussions with her incompetent supervisor - is meant to be funny but it doesn't really work for me and I got annoyed that she had not one but two artist boyfriends.

So, a lot of pages, a lot of story, a lot of great background research but ultimately unsatisfying.

Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

A couple of weeks ago I read The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser. Until just now I didn't realise it's technically Australian because the author has lived here since she was 14. This is a reasonably excusable oversight because the novel is set almost completely in Sri Lanka with a couple of excursions to England.

The action takes place from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s amongst the privileged Sinhalese class who were wealthy and socially powerful but never accepted by the Europeans as equals even though they sent their children to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge and bought their suits on Saville Row.

The central figure, Sam, is a very unhappy barrister who spends his whole life being rejected by both his mother and the society which unaccountably defies his expectations, rewarding people he sees as useless and denying him his just desserts. He can't bear Sri Lankan independence: at one point he laments that he has to put up with pineapple jelly when he'd been raised to appreciate marmalade. This unhappiness makes him very cruel.

I thought it was remarkably good. It starts off with Sam's account of his life and the case he thought would make his career. Mercifully, this is quite short because he has an overly fussy, ironical voice. Most of the rest of the book is narratged in the third person, some from other viewpoints so you can qury the reliability of Sam's version of events.

The blurb on the front of the book says that it is reminiscent of Remains of the Day. This is a fair enough comment about Sam's capacity for self-deception but there is a lot more going on in the story. The jungle is described magnificently. One character changes from a hunter to a proto-ecologist over time. There are ghosts of dead children and magical visions. It's a very fine read.

But I really could have done without reading about a stillborn baby when I was eight and a half months pregnant. I poked Winnie until she did somersaults after reading that bit.

The Rich are Different

I also read the May edition of Vanity Fair when I was in hospital.

I admit I only bought it because the cover had two of the cutest things in the world on it: Leo di Caprio and a teensy weensy cuddly fluffy white polar bear cub. What's not to like?

Inside, I learned that Bobby Kennedy Jr - son of Bobby that got shot in 1968 and apparently an environmental lawyer - chose his prep school in upstate New York himself. He was attracted to his choice because it had a zoo.

A zoo.

At my school we thought ourselves lucky to have grass.

How I almost burst my stitches

When I was in hospital with Baby Winnie, I couldn't hold both her and a book. Well I could HOLD a book; I just couldn't keep it open and actually READ.

So I spent a lot of time reading magazines. Very slowly because my concentration was shot.

This profile of of superstar artist Jeff Koons made me giggle far too hard. It alleges that when Jeff was wooing Ciccolina, an Italian parliamentarian and porn star, she didn't speak any English and his Italian extended to ordering dinner.

Instead of LEARNING Italian, he spoke English to her with an Italian accent.

Eventually, when that didn't really work, he got a translator to help but she had to be dismissed when she fell in love with Jeff.

And he reckons he was surprised when the marriage didn't last...

Life without the interwebs

Back again. Strangely enough hospitals frown on new mothers using computers in bed. In fact, some of the midwives were a bit dubious about books too. One went so far as to say I wouldn't have time to finish the trashy novel I was trying to read between feeds until 2010.

My how I scoffed!

But 13 days later when I got to the last page and couldn't remember the beginning, I realised she had a point.

Anyway, the baby is delightful. We think she's the most beautiful thing in the world - far cuter than Princess Mary's newborn for instance. But I know that to the rest of the world she probably looks like Winston Churchill - except with a more boring hat.