Only picky because I care

I finished The Laments by George Hagen yesterday. I'd rescued it from a discount bin in a notoriously mercenary book chain because I loved the cover. And it is both very pretty and an extremely accurate reflection of the book's insides. (Good work, book designers!)

Curiously, even though I'd read the blurb, the title subconsciously reminded me of The Commitments and I half expected it to be about a Celtic musical group rather than a family with Lament as a surname.

According to Howard Lament, Laments have always travelled. That's his reasoning for uprooting the family at the first sign of problems where they're living at various times in South Africa, Rhodesia, Bahrain, England and the US. And they do have problems: from baby swapping and family tragedies to unpleasant neighbours and disappearing bosses.

But, despite their misfortunes, there's a lot of joy in the Laments' lives and Hagen has a charmingly light touch that never strays into mawkishness. I was very teary at the ending but glad at the same time. I also reaaly loved the way Hagen described the ups and downs of a marriage over a couple of decades as the partners grew and changed.

I did have two quibbles: a newborn is described as smiling delightedly at people which is high;y unlikely if not impossible (Winnie didn't do this for four weeks) and a boat is found abandoned "in the Coral Sea twentyt miles east of Brisbane" which I think would probably be a bayside subrban backyard. But these are tiny things realy.

The other day, before reading the Laments, I almost bought Hagen's next book Tom Bedlam which is all about long lost sublings and trying to create a family in the nineteenth and early twentieth century England and South Africa but I wasn't sure how the touchy-feely stuff would be overwhelmed by the grand historical themes. Now I think it'll be great.

IM IN UR CRIB WATCHING UR BABY

Be good if I could get a camera in my hand when my Geriatric and Fat Indoor Cat (GAFIC) jumps into the storage basket under Winnie's crib. So cute! So kittenish! Such an attention-seeking beast now there's a new member of the family who has all this STUFF in spaces where he used to laze about. Poor cat.

Over the past few days, in between laughing at GAFIC and feeding, cleaning and playing with the baby, I read In the Woods by Tana French. I bought it because I loved the cover and the way the edges of the pages are black. The photo doesn't show this or the lovely dual textures of the cover. It looks so SPOOKY and interesting that I didn't even mind paying full price (or not much anyway). It's a beautifully designed book.

For once, the inside didn't disappoint. This is really well executed police procedural set in contemporary Dublin. The thirty-something Detective Ryan is investigating the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the same suburban remnant wood where two of his friends disappeared at the same age more than two decades earlier. He was with them but was left behind for some reason and he has no memory of what happened. He's convinced the crimes are connected and turns his world upside down trying to recover his memory and prove this.

What makes this book so good is the way French evokes the thoughtless animal joy of childhood and the atmosphere of suburban Dublin. The contemporary scenes are scattered with enough pop cultural references (Scissor Sisters, South Park etc) to make it seem part of the real world too - unlike many in this genre. I can only assume the stuff about how the police operate is true too. Ryan's central relationship is with his partner and this is really beautifully realised as the emotional and professional core of his life.

This is the sort of book where I have to put it down and do something else to avoid rushing through to the end pell mell and I was sad to reach the last page.

Hello and Good-bye

I woke up to the news that Elizabeth Jolley had died and, because the radio was on Triple J, I wondered for half a second if there was another Elizabeth Jolley who was 25 and sang alt-country with Ryan Adams and I hadn't heard of her because I'm so out of the loop. Then they said "writer" and "age of 83" and I realised the radio and I were thinking about the same person.

Well that's quite sad. I liked her books even though they made me feel extremely uncomfortable in a squidgy "oh my God I can't beleive you're allowed to DO that" way. I haven't read any of them for years. The Sugar Mother was particularly, um, awkward-making.

In other news, I read Julia Darling's delightfully mad Crocodile Soup last week. She's a poet and a a playwright and this was her first novel written in the late 1990s. You can't read this story literally (a bit like Elizabeth Jolley really) because the plot's overblown and you're never entirely sure what's happening and what's imagined but it's quite delightful. She enters the mind of a little girl incredibly well - like Donna Tartt did in The Little Friend. But that juvenile sense of unreality continues when the main character grows up (physically at least) and doesn't really cope with the world.

Someone told me she'd written other books but when I went looking I found out there was only one other one because she died in 2005. The other book is about a woman dealing with cancer.

This is like Bruce Chatwin all over again! I mean, in the sense that I find a modern writer I like but they're not going to keep writing for another 20 years like I want them to.

This picture shows the cover of the edition I read. Other editions have a boring picture of a cherubic little girl but this is far better. EVERYTHING that's pictured is relevant to the book, from the red shoes to the Society for Cutting Up Men badge. Looking at it after turning the last page was truly delightful! Good work, publishers, even if it is a bit literal.

Last of the Christmas books

I really don't understand publishers sometimes. Why would you give a book the cover in picture one (an Old Masters painting of a voluptuous seminaked woman) when you could have the much more dynamic exciting, accurate, attractive and relevant cover in picture 2?

Cover one is the UK edition of The Ruby in her Navel by Barry Unsworth.I was given the Australian paperback with cover two for Christmas. Because it looked so pretty, I've been saving it up to read for five weeks. I don't think I would have looked forward to reading it if it had been in cover one. I might even have wrapped it in brown paper before taking it on the train.

The book is set in twelfth century Sicily shortly after the second Crusade where the Christians apparently did quite badly and looked like they were going to lose hold of the kingdoms established in the first Crusade. Many of them went to lick their wounds in Sicily where a Frankish king had been ruling over a racially mixed society for decades, carefully balancing the skills and interests of the Saracen (Arabic Moslem), Byzantine Greek, Italian, French and German populations. The book is about palace conspiracies to reduce the power and influence of the Saracens.

The main character is a fairly naive young Frank who wants to be a knight but works within a Saracen-dominated administrative office. People keep EXPLAINING the political situation to him in a way that's a bit didactic and is probably my major problem with the book. This is an amazingly alien world that does need some explaining (and Unsworth does a fabulous job of describing the physical environment), but the approach is heavy-handed at times.

There's also an extremely exotic Turkish dancer who introduces what sounds like bellydancing to the western world. Phwoar!!!

Cover 2 shows the elements of the plot with its pictures of a jousting knight and a dancing girl (with a tiny red dot in her navel. You probably can’t see that). It also looks like it’s designed to imitate a manuscript that might have been illuminated by someone living in a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic place like Sicily. Maybe it’s meant to be by a monk who grew up looking at Frankish knights but also understanding Arabic decoration. This just makes far far more sense as a cover than a pretty oil painting of a passive naked lady.

And at least cover 2 gives the woman a face.