Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Few matters of great political or cultural import have escaped the lacerating gaze of journalist, columnist and author Christopher Hitchens over the past four decades. British-born and Oxford-educated, and now a United States citizen, Hitchens has worked as a foreign correspondent and contributor to publications including The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair and Slate, in between producing 11 books (on Thomas Jefferson, Mother Teresa and atheism, among other topics).

His turn of phrase is rightly legendary. He once described Mother Teresa as a “thieving tyrannical Albanian dwarf”, and he is no kinder to the objects of his contempt and dislike in his memoir. His account of a meeting with Argentina’s murderous General Videla is one of Hitch-22’s finest passages: “I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer . . . Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.”

Hitch, as he is called by those who know him, writes lovingly, almost romantically, of his dear friends the writers Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Peter Fenton – whole chapters are titled ‘Martin’, ‘Salman’, ‘The Fenton Factor’, and the book is dedicated to Fenton.

Though there is no suggestion that any of the friendships have been more than platonic, Hitchens is frank about the commonplace nature of homosexual encounters in British boarding schools, and his own participation in such adventures, having been dispatched to prep school at the age of eight: “The three great subjects of Beating, Bullying and Buggery are familiar enough to me in their way . . . “, and of the latter, “[t]he unstated excuse was that this was what one did until the so-far unattainable girls became available.” In the end, though, Hitchens concludes that the entire schooling experience was emancipatory, and in fact, the whole book, with one notable exception, is suffused with a sense of his appreciation of life.

Parts of the book are somewhat sluggish – I could have done without quite such an exhaustive recollection of his worthy experiences as a young political activist in Europe and Cuba – and the level of detail in relation to his public life, and his friendships, serves to highlight what is starkly absent from Hitch-22: any account of his relationships with his first wife or his current wife, the writer Carol Blue, or with his three children from the marriages. He explains this away, rather weakly, in a preface, where he notes that he can claim copyright only in himself, so as to imply that he lacks the right to share his family’s stories. But then, he calls it a memoir rather than an autobiography, so fair play.

(In a cogent review in the Guardian, Blake Morrison points out that Hitchens’ objective is intellectual historiography rather than emotional catharsis, which I think is on the money. He has never been one to talk about feelings.)

One aspect of his private life from which he doesn’t flinch is the suicide of his mother, Yvonne, when he was 24 (the aforementioned exception). It occurred as the result of a pact with her lover, with whom she had fled to Greece after the breakdown of her marriage to Hitchens senior, a Royal Navy man referred to by his son as The Commander. In the opening chapter, which bears her name, he movingly describes his last conversation with her and his journey to Athens to deal with the aftermath of her death. Characteristically, this is followed by an intellectual examination: ‘A Coda on Self-Slaughter.’

All beloved Hitchens topics are canvassed – atheism, God, Islam, his conversion from Trotskyism to conservatism, his support for the Iraq War, the Jewish Question – in service of a text that, depending on the depth of your existing knowledge of Hitchens may not greatly enlighten you as to the man, but will certainly leave you more informed than you found it.

4.5 / 5 stars: A rich romp through the mind and memories of one of the intellectual heavyweights of our time.

Note:

There is a sad addendum to the publication of Hitch-22: while on tour in the United States in June to promote the book, Hitchens fell seriously ill and was shortly after diagnosed with oesophageal cancer – the same disease that claimed his father’s life. In subsequent interviews, and in this extraordinary piece on vf.com, Hitchens has indicated his condition is terminal, though he may have up to five years to live. There is no sign that he feels sorry for himself, though; he said in an August interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that his long-time heavy smoking and drinking – the cover of my copy of Hitch-22 features a close-up photo of the author mid-cigarette – made him a “candidate”. On a lighter note, he instructed Cooper to disbelieve any rumours he might hear of deathbed conversions.

The Search by Nora Roberts

The Search is the latest output of a woman at the height of her considerable powers, the greatest of which must be her ability to just write. By the criteria of commercial success (400 million books in print) and sheer productivity (The Search is one of six books she will publish this year, in addition to the 165-plus she has written since 1979), Nora Roberts is practically matchless. What’s more, while the likes of hyper-prolific James Patterson are abetted by factories of minions, Roberts appears to do it all by herself.

And what does she do? In this case, tells an erudite and compelling story that is surprisingly neat; it is unusual to find a drama-thriller of nearly 500 pages that could not have done with a little fat trimmed, but in the case of The Search, any downtime in the plot, such as a mid-point visit to a spa retreat by the heroine and her girlfriends, is used to add emotional heft, and is the one of the reasons the book succeeds.

This heroine is Fiona Bristow, and the descriptor is accurate in more than a literary sense. Eight years before the start of the book, she was the only one of a dozen women to escape from the clutches of a serial killer nicknamed the Red Scarf Killer. The offender, George Perry, was eventually incarcerated, but not before taking his revenge on Fiona by murdering her policeman fiance.

Fiona has since retreated to Orcas Island, a remote area in the US northwest. At 29, she lives a quiet life, running a canine rescue centre that tracks dogs to train missing persons, and teaching classes to domestic dog owners on the side. She has a close-knit group of friends and a great bond with and passion for animals, but a subterranean wound festers in her inner life, and with two events – the emergence of an apparent RSK copycat killer, and the arrival of an enigmatic, eligible furniture-maker – the wound is suddenly exposed.

Fiona first encounters the bachelor craftsman, Simon Doyle, when he brings his puppy for training. The pair’s initial mutual distrust, followed by will-they-won’t-they tension, adds a frisson to the first half of the book and pays dividends in the second, as the suspense, both emotional and criminal, is ratcheted up. (On a side note, Roberts does the notoriously tricky literary sex scene rather well.)

Roberts expends substantial creative energy on luring us into Fiona’s world, and when a writer has the skill to make her readers care about her invented populace as much as she does, she must have a similar facility with plotting, or it’s all for nought.

Happily, Roberts has this in spades. That there will be some kind of showdown involving Fiona, Perry and the mystery killer seems likely, and what does happen is both unexpected and immensely satisfying. The Search, peopled as it is with slightly eccentric figures, is absorbing not only for its storyline but also the relationships that form and deepen.

Roberts reportedly does much of her research via the internet due to a great aversion to flying; that she may never have been to Washington or spent time with K-9 squads is undetectable. The level of detail and deftness of touch are to be savoured. In Fiona and her creator, two masters are at work.

4/5 Stars: A classic page-turner, and one for dog-lovers.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

My Name is Memory by Ann Brashares

The rather lovely notion of enduring passion across many lifetimes is at the centre of My Name is Memory, the seventh novel by Ann Brashares, perhaps best-known as the author of the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series for young adults. 

This new book is her second in the adult fiction genre, after 2007’s The Last Summer (of You and Me), and, clearly emboldened by her earlier successful renderings of the torment and complexity of teenagehood, she introduces her two main characters, Daniel and Lucy, as they experience a profound connection that comes to a climax at a high school ball.

The encounter, as fleeting as it is dramatic, leaves both Lucy and the reader baffled: who is Daniel and where did he come from? Why does he insist on calling Lucy ‘Sophia’? How can she be so drawn to someone she doesn’t even know?

Answers start to emerge in the following chapter, when the action jumps from present-day United States to North Africa in 541, and the tense from the third person to the first, with the narrator musing: “I was first born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch . . . I consider it my first life . . . I guess it’s possible that I’ve lived lives before that.”

This faltering voice belongs to Daniel, who has lived dozens of lives in succession and can remember them all. (The possibility that reincarnation is very common and that only the individual’s awareness of it is unusual is alluded to by Brashares but regrettably not fully explored.)

It is in this first life that he meets Lucy, then a nameless young girl who disappears inside a burning house that Daniel has torched in battle. Tormented, he searches for her down the centuries, finding her, in different women, in 700s Asia Minor and in England in the shadow of World War I. But how to engage Lucy’s memory of Daniel’s role in her previous lives, and what – or who – will intervene to thwart their love?

Aspects of My Name is Memory are reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks’ remarkable 2008 novel People of the Book, which tracked not a love affair but the journey of the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, through centuries of European unrest.

Brashares’ tale, hinging as it does on character rather than setting, is neither as well-researched nor as meticulously detailed as Brooks’, but both writers have a knack for moving swiftly through time and from place to place without discombobulating the reader. Considering Brashares’ action can leap from 2006 Virginia to the coast of Crete in 899 in the course of two chapters, it’s an admirable feat.

That said, if you’ve had any more than a glancing encounter with Audrey Niffenegger’s megaselling The Time Traveller’s Wife, it will occur to you, within a handful of pages, that Brashares is either unabashedly ripping Niffenegger off or out to prove she can do it better.

For this and other reasons – the pure romanticism, the dastardly villain standing in the way of true love – Brashares’ storyline will be familiar in a favourite-blanket sort of way. It’s nothing out of the comfort zone, but good to spend some time with – and proves a surprisingly tender read that is best undertaken in a minimum of sittings. 

3 / 5 stars: The seven ages of man’s yearning.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

After the Party by Lisa Jewell

What a relationship looks like after 11 years and two small children is the subject of British writer Lisa Jewell’s unexpectedly moving new novel, After the Party.

Ralph and Jem meet as flatmates in a romantic London hovel; they fall in love at an art gallery in Ladbroke Grove when Ralph, an artist, unveils an exhibition of which the subject is Jem. As Jewell writes, Jem takes one look at the paintings, another look at Smith, Ralph’s friend and her erstwhile boyfriend (who is at that moment drunkenly proclaiming his love to a different, entirely uninterested woman), and promptly and passionately collapses into Ralph’s arms.

What follows is seven years of unrelenting bliss. They move from the flat to a house, have thriving careers and luxuriate in lie-ins and champagne-fuelled picnics in Battersea Park. Then Jem, approaching 32, decides she wants a baby. She has always desired a family; Ralph doesn’t see the need to add another person to their harmonious existence and proceeds with reluctance. The five childbearing years which ensue strain the relationship, with Jem suffering miscarriages before and between the births of Scarlett and Blake, and Ralph failing to bond with his infant son.

The book is cleverly structured, not following a linear form but opening with a prologue detailing Ralph and Jem’s separation and shared custody of the children – they spend the first half of the week with their mother and the second with their father. When Ralph fails to pick them up for his allotted three days, Jem knows something is wrong, and his vague explanation and subsequent disappearance heightens her concerns.

Part one (of four) begins one year earlier, as the relationship is disintegrating.  Panicked by Jem’s apparent disinterest in him, Ralph decides to go to California for a week to visit Smith. There, he meets a captivating Australian named Rosey, while back in London, Jem finds herself drawn to Joel, the solo dad of Scarlett’s friend. The week apart initially tightens the family unit, but the emotional distance remains, and when a plausibly unexpected and problematic event occurs, the couple’s foundations are shaken perhaps beyond recovery.

Clearly it’s ‘chick-lit’ (an annoyingly reductive categorization), but whether you consider that a selling point or an alarm bell, Jewell’s writing is artful and confident, elevating her story far above the mundane.

The tale’s focus is Ralph and Jem’s relationship, so the character development of the peripheral figures is less than robust; Smith, Rosey, Joel, Jem’s sister Lulu and others are ciphers designed to move the plot at breakneck pace towards a satisfying and thoughtful conclusion. (Though any one of these characters would make an engaging protagonist; Jewell has a knack for exposing the more intriguing elements of the human personality in a few paragraphs.)

After the Party is a sequel to the first of Jewell’s seven novels, Ralph’s Party, which covers the eventful period preceding Ralph and Jem’s coupling. It’s an intimate, cogent depiction of how a stable, loving relationship can start to fragment – and how people might behave in the face of this and amid the vicissitudes of life.

Jewell writes in the preface to After the Party that faithful readers’ excitement at the prospect of a sequel both spurred her on and terrified her, and she hopes she hasn’t let them down. On the contrary: this will win her many new fans.

3 / 5 Stars: The perfect mix of levity and sobriety. Click here to view other Easy Mix book reviews.

Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig

A novel which examines contemporary life in a churning, teeming city with a complete absence of judgement is a rare thing. Even rarer is one which tells us something new about how we live now.

Hearts and Minds is ambitious, not least because Amanda Craig devotes equal space to five main characters in today’s London: Polly, a divorced human-rights lawyer and mother of two; Job, an illegal Zimbabwean immigrant working as a cab driver and car detailer; Anna, a 15-year-old Ukrainian prostitute; Katie, a young American working at a prominent magazine; and Ian, a South African teaching at a dysfunctional inner-city school.

The novel opens with the dumping of the body of an unknown woman in a pond on Hampstead Heath. Who the woman is, how she is connected to the other characters and how the five eventually meet each is the novel’s ostensible plot, and it is sharply rendered.

However, what makes Hearts and Minds one of the most exceptional contemporary novels of the past year is the clear-eyed, quiet pathos with which Craig tells her tale. At moments it feels like five books in one, with each the record of a person being drawn, steadily and almost magnetically, to those who will change their existence.

It is the connections formed between the characters that tells us who each one is. Polly, who has just ridden in Job’s cab, is caught out by the sudden departure of her nanny, Iryna, and needs someone to ferry herself and her young son around. She calls him back and, over hours together in a car, the two forge an unexpected bond.

Katie, bereft after breaking up with her fiance, is afforded by her solitude the chance to become the saviour of another character. Other encounters are fleeting and unrealized: Polly nearly runs down Ian, cycling in Hampstead; Job and Polly never know how closely they are tied to Anna.

Hearts and Minds is the sixth novel by Craig, a long-time reviewer and broadcaster and the children’s book critic for The Times. She says on her website that the seed of the novel was planted in 2001, when she began to notice just how many people in her daily London life were immigrants, from the cab drivers to the local café waitresses and the drycleaner – and started to consider whether they were legal or illegal, happy or unhappy, what had brought them to where they were.

The novel, intended for publication in 2004, was delayed by Craig’s serious health problems, and all the operations she required were performed by first or second generation immigrants, in hospitals in which she was nursed by women from all over the world. For a time after her hospital stay she was cared for by a series of au pairs from eastern Europe.

Craig’s experience is reflected in her work: there are conversations, recollections and musings that are so authentically depicted they could only have come from real life. As she says, the au pairs had fascinating stories to tell of war, ambition, misery and triumph over adversity. Craig has paid close attention to what she has been told, and has rewarded their faith with a novel filled with compassion and devoid of sentimentality.

It is not an easy read: there are scenes, particularly some involving Anna, that will make you wince. But, though the story begins with five people in varying states of fear and misery, it ends rather differently. What is in between is remarkable.

4 / 5 stars: One for the 2010 top 10 list.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Recipe for Life by Nicky Pellegrino

Upon the release of this book a fortnight ago, Nicky Pellegrino, a Briton of Italian descent who lives in New Zealand, gave interviews to a handful of media outlets in which she discussed being raped in her flat by a knife-wielding stranger some years ago.

She told the New Zealand Herald that she had never expected to talk publicly about the experience, until she wrote her new book, Recipe for Life. In the first chapter, the protagonist, Alice, finds herself challenged and changed by the very incident that occurred in Pellegrino’s life. Pellegrino said she was speaking out, and gave this experience to her character, because of all the “silent survivors” who never tell their stories – and also to show that life is made up of many things and is not defined by one bad experience.

With Alice, whose chapters (in the first person) alternate with the omnisciently narrated chapters of Babetta, an elderly Italian woman living next to an abandoned villa in the southern town of Triento (a fictionalized version of Maratea in Basilicata), Pellegrino sets out to demonstrate just that. 

In the wake of her rape, which occurs as Alice’s former boyfriend Charlie sleeps downstairs, Alice finds herself listless and lost. With no culinary skills, she takes a job in a local Italian restaurant in London, working her way up from vegetable prep to the pasta station. The head chef, Tonino, recognizes her talent, but the combination of her lack of formal training and her malaise prompt him, when the opportunity arises, to encourage her to decamp to Italy for the summer, where her friend Leila’s mother has bought an old villa.

Villa Rosa is – you guessed it – the house next door to Babetta’s, and Triento, it so happens, is Tonino’s home town. His parents, Raffaella and Ciro, own a café there, while his brother Lucio, with whom he has a tense, competitive relationship, runs a pizzeria. Alice is given the chance to work in both establishments and learn the mouth-watering ins and outs of Italian cooking, and swiftly develops a firm bond with Rafaella and an enormous crush on Lucio, who, in Pellegrino’s description, possesses a smile like a devastatingly sexy Mediterranean version of the Cheshire Cat.

But, oblivious to her friend’s desires, the gorgeous black-haired Leila swoops in and snaffles the luscious Lucio. It is nothing more than a summer fling for man-eating Leila, however, and the two return to London on amicable terms, but quickly go their separate ways. Alice resumes her on-off relationship with the dependable Charlie.

So far, so well-written but fairly middle-of-the-road. Where the novel picks up steam is with the sharp decision on Pellegrino’s part to jump 10 years ahead. Leila is now a successful novelist and Alice, having made an interesting romantic choice, is living quietly in the English countryside. When Leila’s mother dies, Leila extends an olive branch to Alice, inviting her to spend one last summer at Villa Rosa before it is sold . . .

Recipe for Life is Pellegrino’s fourth novel, arriving on the heels of last year’s successful The Italian Wedding. It would – and this is not faint praise – make a very good film; Pellegrino has struck a rich vein of dramatic potential in her characters and their environment, and her writing is smooth. Europhile readers should be advised that she knows exactly when to pause the action for a lunch of fresh seafood and ciabatta.

She has said that now that she is no longer juggling novel-writing with editing the New Zealand Women’s Weekly, the books are coming much faster. I hope we see a sequel to Recipe for Life in due course; I have a feeling her characters have more to do.

 2.5 / 5 Stars: Like Alice and Charlie, a slow-burner that is worth the investment.  Click here to see other Easy Mix Book Reviews.

I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne

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Depending on your age and demographic, your familiarity with Ozzy Osbourne will stem either from his music career, as frontman of Black Sabbath, or from his later foray into reality TV, as the doddery, drugged-up patriarch in The Osbournes, which he filmed for several years with his wife Sharon and two of their three children, Kelly and Jack. 
 
In I Am Ozzy he recounts all of the above, and while the memoir features sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll from start to nearly finish, and the bones of the story are familiar, it is far from cliché. Born in 1948 to a working-class Birmingham family, young Ozzy (he is known by his given name, John, only to his family and his first wife) did poorly at school and was unable to hold down a job. He was, he says fortunately, dissuaded from a life of petty crime by a short stint in jail. (He notes that his poor literacy and inability to concentrate at school were explained in mid-life, when he was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder.)
 
What Ozzy developed an early talent and affinity for was going down the pub. He says he has an addictive personality; even in the final part of the book, when he describes the past five years of full sobriety, he swaps his copious consumption of alcohol and drugs for tea, drinking eight or 10 enormous mugs a day. In a bid to cut down on smoking he gave up cigarettes for cigars, and was quickly inhaling up to 30 Cohibas each day.

Mr Rosenblum’s List by Natasha Solomons

This quirky, clever debut novel from British writer Natasha Solomons has an unusual premise: her titular protagonist, in a bid to fit into his new home after fleeing Jewish persecution in continental Europe, writes a list of everything he needs to do or acquire to be a proper Englishman. (The full UK title is Mr Rosenblum’s List or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman.)

Jack Rosenblum’s eccentricity, attention to detail and steadfastness gets him a long way. Before we are even through a quarter of the novel, he has bought and made a success of a carpet company, which furnishes him with the means to buy the right British car (a Jaguar XK120, of course) and a splendid suit, as per Rule 107 of the List: An Englishman must have his suits made at Henry Poole and Co., Savile Row.

The stumbling-block comes with the final item on his 150-point list – an Englishman must be a member of a golf course. He makes attempts to enter every club in the vicinity by means both fair and ever so slightly foul – he is driven to the latter only out of desperation; Jack is a person of great goodness – but it is all for nought. To the men to whom he is appealing, his Jewishness is not an encumbrance to be shaken off and replaced with English trappings; it is an unconquerable obstacle.

The latent anti-Semitism of the time is evident in a scene in which Jack and his wife Sadie are invited for drinks at the home of a local aristocrat; the two are unaware that they are being observed as if they were zoo animals by the host and his friends.

Sadie is a woman who could best be described as long-suffering – her husband is in some ways a mystery to her, and she doesn’t share his desire for assimilation. He takes seriously the immigration officer’s edict to speak nothing but English, resorting to German curses only under extreme duress, while Sadie sneaks away to share German conversation and food with a friend. Their differences in personality and temperament are many, and are only emphasized by the discombulating effect of their new, foreign environment. Sadie yearns for her parents and brother, lost in the war. Their daughter Elizabeth, studying at Cambridge, is a distant figure whom Jack fears he shames with his lingering Germanness.

When Jack lights upon the perfect solution to the golf-club snag – why, he will buy a 60-acre property in rural Dorset and build his own – Sadie is baffled. But her husband is “five-foot-three-and-a-half of sheer tenacity” and, when all else fails, he starts to confide his travails in letters to the American golf legend Bobby Jones, which has unforeseeable results.

Solomons deftly balances the novel’s lightheartedness with quiet acknowledgement of what real people like the Rosenblums would have experienced in 1940s England. From the early destruction of Jack’s exhaustively crafted first hole to the blatant bid to drive him from the countryside altogether, the novel contains several affecting examples of bigotry.

It is no less entertaining for that. Solomons is skilled at balancing plot with heart, and she is a highly intelligent writer. As an aside, I love food in novels – what characters eat and how they behave around food can be wonderfully revealing. Some of the loveliest passages involve food – Elizabeth, visiting her parents, scoffs six vanilla crescents as she chats in the kitchen; Sadie bakes her lost mother’s Baumtorte in a fit of melancholy – and I learned from Solomons’ blog that she is a true-cake lover herself.

Solomons’ grandparents were evacuated from Berlin before the war, and her blog features some of her grandmother’s recipes – including the aforementioned crescents. It helps to explain the deliciousness of Mr Rosenblum’s List.

3/5 Stars: A well-told tale of an endearing hero.  Click here to see the Easy Mix Book Reviews.

Inheritance by Jenny Pattrick

Among Jenny Pattrick’s innumerable talents is the ability to fully embed her novels’ characters in place and time: in her debut novel, The Denniston Rose, and its sequel, Heart of Coal, she explored the lives of miners on the West Coast when Denniston, now a ghost town, was a booming coal producer.

Those novels are two of the most successful in New Zealand publishing history, and Pattrick’s status as a bestseller undoubtedly contributed to her selection as the 2009 Katherine Mansfield Fellow.

It was while undertaking the prestigious fellowship in Menton, France, that Pattrick wrote much of Inheritance, which is set in two nations (New Zealand and Samoa) and times (1990 and 1966 respectively). She says that although it might seem strange writing about Samoa while living in the south of France, she found it easy, in a foreign land, to reflect on her own experience of 1960s Samoa, where Pattrick lived for two years as a young mother just after independence.

“The sort of ‘distance nostalgia’ I felt when living in Samoa was not unlike the feeling I had last year . . . in France,” she says. “When I entered that plain concrete box of a [French] villa, I was in Samoa. I could smell the frangipani and hear the surf on the reef. Strange!”

Pattrick’s knack for vividly rendering a specific place in time is on full display in Inheritance, which begins in an art exhibition room in Invercargill in 1990, when a Samoan woman, Elena Levamanaia, recognizes a slight Pakeha woman walking nearby as Jeanie Roper, a dear but long-absent friend she made in Samoa 25 years. But Jeanie doesn’t respond when Elena calls her name, and Elena (a warm, loving and immensely appealing character) quickly makes the link between the exhibiting artist, Francesca Hope, and her old friend. Jeanie is Francesca’s mother, and now goes by the name Ann Hope.

From here, Pattrick artfully chips away at the mystery of what drove Jeanie back to New Zealand with a tiny baby, leaving behind in Samoa her husband Stuart, who was seriously maimed after a brutal encounter with Elena’s brother Teo. What happened between Jeanie and Stuart? Why has Jeanie told her daughter that her father was Italian, when it is plain to Elena that Francesca is half-Samoan and half-palagi? Who is the sinister man now pestering Jeanie as she tries to maintain her quiet life?

These questions are answered in a carefully structured 300 pages that, while telling the ostensible story, also explore the theme of truth. How much do people need to know about their own history and that of those they love? Especially clever is the contrast between what is revealed to the reader and what the characters are told about themselves. It’s a direction that risks ending in the implausible or contrived, but to read a Pattrick story is to be in the hands of a master.

Inheritance is above all a novel of family secrets, but it is also a glorious depiction of island life in a unique point in time and a story told so well that it can only come from experience – no amount of research could equip a writer as well as Pattrick’s knowledge of Samoa does here.

Adding to the scent of authenticity is the reference to actual events that occurred in the time of which she writes, including a devastating hurricane, a filariasis campaign, and the switch to decimal currency. And at the end, there is the pleasant discovery of a glossary of Samoan words. It adds up to a captivating novel that deserves as wide a readership as its predecessors.

4/5 Stars: a fine piece of work from a New Zealand master.  Click here to see the Easy Mix Book Reviews.