Last Summer by Kylie Ladd

A novel about the aftermath of a sudden death shouldn’t be warm and uplifting, but Australian neuropsychologist-turned-novelist Kylie Ladd’s Last Summer is above all a tale of lightness. It’s also absorbing, and harmonious in spite of the many schisms it describes.

The death is that of Rory, a 39-year-old family man who collapses from an aortic aneurysm at a practice for his social cricket team. Rory was beloved by his circle of close friends: his sister Kelly and her husband Joe, James and the aloof Anita, Nick and Laine, and Pete and Trinity. There are small children, jobs and businesses, unvoiced resentments and unfinished or yet-to-begin romantic business. The loss of Rory, whose mischievous, rebellious persona was the group’s fulcrum, creates an immediate and predictable fragmentation.

Ladd opts for probably the best, and certainly the most straightforward, way to tell such a character-driven story – she gives several characters two or three chapters each. It reads as a series, over the ensuing year, of chronological vignettes offering glimpses into lives unified by shared history.

The death occurs in the first chapter and is seen from the viewpoint of Nick, Rory’s oldest and closest friend. In his absorption, Nick fails to notice Laine’s subsequent reconnection with a past love, a subplot which exemplifies Ladd’s close-reading of the effects of grief. She doesn’t care to show us the wailing and gnashing, but rather the real ramifications of loss experienced by those too young to be especially accustomed to it. As one character turns away from their own spouse, they might turn towards another’s – everyone seeking comfort, but causing greater ruptures.

The novel is unmistakably Australian, with every page seeming sun-drenched, from the barbecues to the after-work cricket practices and the Antipodean lingo – one character’s incipient football career ended when he “did his ankle”, while an irate Joe accuses his distracted teammates of playing like a “pack of [expletive] sheilas!”

And in its study of the male-female dynamic – much of the action seems driven by grief-heightened hormones – Last Summer is, unexpectedly, a novel about gender politics. The women are headstrong and self-possessed, at least in domains familiar to them. Laine is an accomplished architect, Trinity a social worker, Kelly a business owner, and Colleen, Rory’s widow, a former head nurse in an A&E department.

Anita, a stay-at-home mother, feels young, inadequate and alien by comparison, but it is she who acts most assertively in relation to her marriage, and Laine who turns out to have the weakest hold on her sense of self.

Women control Last Summer’s middle-class suburbia, if not the world, and whether these marriages fracture or endure will depend on the choices made solely by the wives. Joe is portrayed as lost and yearning, for his wife, whose unusually close relationship with her brother only intensifies with his death. Another husband is spurned altogether.

Ladd’s characters are not especially introspective, and their responses to the tragedy are entirely consistent with the personalities she gives them. The story of grief and its corollaries is one that will never grow tired, and Ladd’s version, vivid and unsentimental, is oddly heartening, and well worth reading for it.

3 / 5 stars: Australian suburbanites get sad, go a little mad.

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A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

At last, comedienne nonpareil (as her Oscar Battle might say) Dawn French has turned her prodigious talents towards fiction. Her first book, her 2008 memoir Dear Fatty, met with rapturous applause and triggered, French says in the authorial Q&A that ends her first novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous, a love of writing solo that took her by surprise, and a new desire to write fiction. And the prolific output for which she is known is no less evident in this new medium – even as this delightful family comedy hits shop shelves, she is at work on her sophomore novel, with a fresh set of characters.

A Tiny Bit Marvellous – a Frenchian title if ever there was one – is the story of the Battle family, specifically psychologist mum Mo, stroppy 17-year-old Dora, and her younger brother Peter, who wishes to be known as Oscar in a nod to his hero Oscar Wilde and who may be the most unabashedly, colourfully camp teen character ever committed to the pages of a comic novel.

Mo has hit the wall of middle age, feeling, as her sagacious mother Pamela points out, that she is no longer admired. Walking down the street one day, she catches sight of a nondescript woman in a drab grey coat in the reflection of a shop window. The shock of this vision of herself, combined with a 20-year-old, pleasant but unexciting marriage and life with teenagers, sends Mo spinning in the direction of a tryst with a new colleague, Noel, whose New Zealandness, she amusingly observes, adds to his “exoticism.”

Dora, hopeful, insecure and mercurial, lurches between fad diets and endless Facebook conversations, obsesses over plans for her 18^th birthday party and litters her speech with “like” and “Oh my complete and utter God”, pausing periodically to fire off “I h8 you” texts to a hapless Mo.

Oscar is an utter joy and deserves a novel all of his own. A film too. He is foppish and fearless and exceptionally well-drawn, and his scenes with Pamela, to whose home he decamps for his beloved banoffee pie when the strain of yearning for a proper smoking jacket becomes too much, are as sweet as the pie (for which French includes the recipe).

It is to French’s credit that she finds such depth in what could be dimensionless characters: she plumbs beneath Dora’s monstrous carapace to the vulnerable, appealing girl beneath, contrasting the delicate nature of her ego with Oscar’s unstereotypical sureness of self (I couldn’t watch him shift his affections from Noel to a tragedy-stricken schoolmate without grinning).

It is written in diary form, with brief chapters switching between each of the three primary characters’ perspectives and voices. Mr Battle garners only one chapter of his own, but it’s a doozy, and brings to a climax a storyline that takes a while to gather steam. As French notes in the Q&A, she realized she was “a third of the way through and hadn’t started the main part of the story yet . . . I had to go back and start threading in a bit of tension.”

This does show in the finished product, but no matter – the slow-burn effect adds oomph to the affecting resolution of this story of the Battles. It’s more than a bit marvellous.

3.5 / 5 stars: A great comedienne’s detour into fiction is a treasure for the reader.

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Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

A mother, her two children and a fire at their elite private school. It’s another stomach-churning premise from English writer Rosamund Lupton, following last year’s bestselling missing-person drama Sister.

Afterwards is a curious mélange, part quasi-ghost story, part family drama and part suspense thriller. It works – sort of.

When the fire breaks out, 17-year-old student nurse Jenny is in the highly flammable art classroom at the top of the building. Grace, attending the school sports day in which her son Adam is competing, sees the flames and rushes into the building in search of her daughter. Both are badly injured.

That the fire was caused by arson is established, as is – in Grace’s mind, at least – a short-list of suspects. (Momentarily we will come to how Grace can be acting as private detective when she is comatose in a hospital bed.)

One is Donald White, the husband of Grace’s friend Maisie and father of Jenny’s schoolmate Rowena, who suffered burns to her hands while attempting to rescue Jenny. Another is Annette Jenks, the dippy new secretary who is found to have been careless about her upkeep of the school’s comprehensive security protocols.

Then there is the woman Annette replaced, Elizabeth Fisher, recently forced into retirement. Finally, there is Silas Hyman, a disgruntled ex-staff member whose circumstances scream motive and who Lupton dangles in front of her reader like a carrot for much of the novel’s 470 pages.

Silas was fired from his teaching position over a playground incident in which a child suffered two broken legs. Though we are never encouraged to believe that he was guilty of the negligence of which he was accused (and Lupton comes up with an extraordinary child-sociopath for an alibi), his messy marriage and the suggestion of an entanglement with Jenny consume much of Grace’s attention – even as we know she should be looking elsewhere.

Afterwards is a book in which the darkest things happen. The backstory of Silas Hyman’s sacking is savage, the tale the principal spins to parents to explain the departure of the much-loved secretary is downright cruel, and the climax is designed to leave you feeling a little less safe in the world.

But whether you find Afterwards absorbing or irritating will largely depend on your ability and inclination to suspend disbelief, for the plot trick that allows Lupton’s two principals, Grace and Jenny, to exercise omniscience despite being unconscious and immobile in hospital beds is their evolution into living ghosts. They can roam the halls of the hospital, eavesdrop on conversations and even venture outside in the company of their loved ones, who are unaware of their sub-spectral presence.

They sit in on the interrogations conducted by Grace’s policewoman sister-in-law and spy on those Grace has pinpointed as suspects, meeting periodically to review their findings. It’s not dissimilar in spirit and mission to Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry and will seem preposterous to some, but Lupton’s empathy for her characters and engrossing narration of what becomes a search for justice is admirable.

2.5 / 5 stars: An engrossing mélange.

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The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Yasuko Hanaoka has what many would consider a good life. She lives in a small but comfortable Tokyo apartment, works in a bento shop and has raised her school-age daughter Misato alone since her split from her former husband, Shinji Togashi.

Misato’s paternity is never addressed in Keigo Higashino’s sharp The Devotion of Suspect X, a procedural that hit the bestseller list hit in Japan in 2005 and is newly translated for the English-speaking world, just as a film adaptation is in the works. Togashi was not Misato’s biological parent but her stepfather, and something of a brute – though Yasuko ended the marriage several years before the story begins, he has turned up periodically to demand money and enjoy the distress he still causes Misato.

In the fateful scene that sets up the plot, he visits the Hanaoka apartment, taunting Yasuko and refusing to leave until she gives him 20,000 yen. But it seems not money he’s after but a way back into her life and that of her daughter, and it’s when he turns his attention to the cowering Misato that her mother snaps.

The flash of what was a diabolical family dynamic is revealing: Yasuko is not so much afraid as irritated and weary, but Misato’s evident fear creates an air of menace that dissipates, albeit briefly, when Togashi lies dead, strangled with an electrical cord.

The matter of a dead body is a greater problem than Yasuko can solve, but with her reclusive neighbour Ishigami’s Sherlock Holmes-esque entrance into the story, the corpse quickly vanishes and an alibi is concocted in the event of the body’s discovery and the attention of the police.

With that, a complex web is woven. Ishigami has at once rescued and indebted Yasuko. And as we learn from his old university acquaintance, Manabu Yukawa, who returns to Ishigami’s life in the wake of the murder, the mathematician-turned-high school teacher was known by his fellow students as ‘Ishigami the Buddha’, such was his affinity for the unknown and his unreadable demeanour. It is in this implacability, and the impossibility of gauging the extent of Ishigami’s motivation and what he is capable of doing in service of it, that the intrigue lies.

Yukawa plays a savant-like role in the story, liaising alternately with the lead detective, Kusanagi (another Imperial University alum), and Ishigami as the investigation unfolds. It is he who realizes Ishigami’s feelings for Yasuko are beyond mere neighbourly concern. Towards the end, it becomes clear that Yukawa now understands everything, but he won’t solve Kusanagi’s case for him, preferring to invite the detective to see the crime through a different lens.

If you think of The Devotion of Suspect X as a literary episode Law & Order: Tokyo you won’t be far off – it is a tightly plotted procedural stemming from a single dramatic event that delivers, as the jacket promises, ‘an ending you’ll never guess’. And, surprisingly, it’s a story that could translate easily to any Western city. Higashino has a knack for finding the universal in the criminal and deserves fame beyond Japan.

3.5 / 5 stars: With this highly original thriller, Keigo Higashino’s fame is sure to spread.

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Smokin’ Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Seventeen books in to her bestselling series, Janet Evanovich has her high-voltage, man-juggling bounty hunter Stephanie Plum right where she wants her. With pneumatic partner Lula always close at hand to provide comic relief and practical back-up, Stephanie enters Smokin’ Seventeen with a romantic dilemma and, possibly, under a curse.

As in previous outings, she continues to juggle an open relationship with a local cop, Joe Morelli, with regular trysts with a security expert, Ranger. Indisputably, she neither needs nor is seeking further personal entanglements – but her family puts paid to that by ushering in one Dave Brewer, the son of a family friend who has returned to the Plum stomping ground, blue-collar Trenton, New Jersey, following a messy legal entanglement and subsequent business and marital failures.

Shortly before the predictably awkward set-up, Stephanie is bailed up at a doughnut shop by Morelli’s fearsome grandmother, Bella, who gives her ‘the eye’ and curses her with unspecified maladies.

At the same time, a body is discovered on the property of Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, where Stephanie works for her cousin. In all, five bodies are found, and Trenton authorities are on the trail of a serial killer. It speaks to the rich vein of mirth in Evanovich’s storytelling that the killings and the apparent effects of the curse carry equal portions of the plot.

The curse, it transpires, may relate to Stephanie’s libido, and certainly relates to a memorable scene involving a Porsche 911 and a blind alley in the bad part of town. The serial killer, for his part, will be lucky indeed to elude the snare of Stephanie and luscious Lula, who advocates regular fried-chicken breaks and takes imaginative umbrage at being called ‘fat’ (news of an upcoming Stephanie Plum movie, with Katherine Heigl in the starring role, is heartening chiefly for the prospect of Lula being brought to celluloid life).

It’s fitting that Smokin’ Seventeen reads like a high-camp action movie. When Lula tires of the histrionics exhibited by one of the pair’s ‘FTAs’ (for failure to appear, the people they make a living from tracking down and returning to custody), she merely pulls her stun-gun out of her purse and zaps him. He’s not a threat – he believes himself to be a vampire, and Stephanie and Lula have tracked him down at the local funeral home, where he spends his days in a casket.

Later, Stephanie refutes the unwanted advances of an admirer by belting him in the side of the head with her hairdryer and leaving him outside her apartment to take his leave once he has come to. She also pulls the stun-gun trick on a less-than-kindly stranger who elbows her in a queue. Never are Stephanie and Lula subjected to legal chastisement or read the civil rights riot act. That would just spoil the fun.

It’s light fiction, no question, but Evanovich has a rare talent for comic writing, and readers rightly keep returning to her tightly bordered world in which the usual rules don’t apply. While Sizzling Sixteen seemed to suffer from a lack of inspiration – Stephanie went through her paces, but appeared plagued by a vague malaise – Smokin’ Seventeen has her back on form.

3 / 5 stars: Evanovich doesn’t falter for a moment in Stephanie Plum’s most audaciously camp outing yet.

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Fallen by Karin Slaughter

Karin Slaughter likes a strong woman. Take one of her recurring characters, Special Agent Faith Mitchell, for whom she has created quite a backstory. Pregnant at 14, Faith mustered the fortitude to give birth to her son, complete high school, and later train to serve in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, where she eventually met her professional partner, Will Trent.

Not content with this degree of multitasking, by the time Slaughter opens her new novel, Fallen, she has given Faith a four-month-old daughter, who is cared for by her grandmother, retired Atlanta police chief Evelyn Mitchell, while Faith works.

Slaughter, true to form, makes the opening passages of her nearly 400-page tome count. Arriving home later than expected because of a meeting overrun, Faith exits her car to see a trail of blood leading to the front door, her infant daughter locked in the shed, and her mother’s gun missing from the shed safe. Minutes later, her home is filled with the bodies of local gang members and drug mules.

Evelyn, whose blood is at the scene, is nowhere to be found, and thanks to a curtain-twitching neighbour, questions emerge about what the ex-cop was really up to of a morning. Why was she leaving the house for hours each day with an Hispanic man with gang connections? And does it have anything to do with the corruption scandal that tainted members of her squad and forced her departure?

Fallen is less of a whodunit than a who-are-they. Regular Slaughter cast members Will Trent and Dr Sara Linton enter the fray to conduct the investigation, establish the identities of the dead men and help locate Evelyn, whose whereabouts are hinted at in brief, grisly scenes. Just as importantly for long-time readers, the pair continue their fraught but unconsummated liaison, complicated by Will’s unstable estranged wife and the ghost of Sara’s late husband, who was a prominent presence in earlier novels.

Slaughter has painstakingly developed the personalities of Faith, Sara, Will and others over 10 years’ worth of books, in her series set in the fictional Georgia region of Grant County. In an enlightening postscript to Fallen, she sheds some light on her reasoning for moving her characters to the big smoke of Atlanta: among them, that the rising number of grisly deaths in Grant County would beg the question of why anyone would continue to live there, and that the blank canvas of a large city was too rich for a writer to ignore.

Fallen isn’t her best work – despite her evident care, the plot feels flimsy and the pay-off, though plausible, is almost cynical. She is a writer of substance with a clear, fluid style, and it seems that with this outing, she has chosen to devote more energy to character growth than to the atypically pedestrian storyline. In particular, close calls for both Sara and Will appeared less important for plot purposes than for forcing each to confront their feelings.

Slaughter patently adores her characters, and takes some pride in planning their trajectories several novels ahead, leaving hints for readers as to what may come. The fictive potential of the city of Atlanta will be a test of this writer’s considerable skills.

3 / 5 stars: With character arcs to burn, this is one for the fans.

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The Conductor by Sarah Quigley

The themes of her latest work suggest that New Zealand author Sarah Quigley has been communing with the artistic and historical ghosts of Berlin, her home for the past decade.

The Conductor is extraordinarily ambitious, and for the most part it succeeds. Its conceit is the survival, and importance, of artistic pursuits under extreme duress – how the human urge to make and create can triumph over the dark desire to dominate and destroy.

Quigley has chosen as her setting not the German capital but Leningrad, in the grim months of 1941 and early 1942, as the Third Reich conducted the fateful Operation Barbarossa to conquer Russia.

Her people – who grow smaller both literally and figuratively, as the enemy approaches and the siege of the city and the starvation of its citizens begins – are a small, endearing coterie of artists, some historical figures and some inventions.

She presents the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as a mid-30s workaholic who obsesses over his symphonies at the expense of his young family. At this time, Shostakovich was writing his renowned Seventh Symphony (nicknamed Leningrad), and combining periods of compulsive creativity with rest breaks in which, by Quigley’s description, he would down vodka with his close friend Ivan Sollertinsky, a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory and the competitive, egoistic artistic director of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra.

A more fleeting appearance is made by Yevgeny Mravinsky, who by the time the novel begins has cemented the Philharmonic’s reputation as one of Europe’s greatest. Quigley glosses over the flight from the falling Leningrad of Mravinsky and his principal orchestra, choosing instead to devote much of the narrative to the superhuman efforts of Karl Eliasberg, who was left behind with the ailing members of the reserve orchestra and conducted the premiere of Shostakovich’s symphony.

Another plotline is more personal, following the travails of Eliasberg’s lead violinist, a widower who believes his young daughter, a talented cellist, to have died on her way to a safe haven outside the city.

At times, the intensity with which Quigley evokes her characters’ inner lives is reminiscent of the visceral, portentous prose of Edgar Allan Poe: unable to sleep for fretting over his professional responsibilities and the destabilization of Europe, Shostakovich, “his mind stretched as tightly as rope”, hallucinates the sensation of a rat running across his face – “rasping claws, a dragging leathery slither, a foul breath mixing with his.”

Later, she neither shies away from nor glorifies the horror of the siege, as food supplies run out and survival becomes a matter of cunning and a willingness to consume what others will not. Nikolai’s suspiciously healthy-looking neighbours are revealed to be capturing and cooking rats, while human bodies in the street, once disinterred from the ever-present snow, are found to be missing their fleshiest parts. These have been removed and eaten by others.

While the nature of the completed symphony is not Quigley’s concern – it was celebrated at the time as an impassioned, defiant response to Nazi militarism – her homage to the beauty and power of art, and to the value of courage, is her own, deserved triumph.

3.5 / 5 stars: A New Zealander’s account of European artistry and war.

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Red Wolf by Liza Marklund

Published in Sweden in 2003, Red Wolf is making its debut in English in the same year that her latest novel, The Postcard Killers, written in collaboration with James Patterson, reached the number-one spot on the New York Times’ bestseller list (making Marklund the second Swedish author, after Stieg Larsson, to attain that position).

Like the majority of the writer-journalist’s crime novels, Red Wolf chronicles the adventures of the tabloid journalist Annika Bengtzon, who, after a brief sabbatical from daily reporting, has opted to become an independent investigative reporter for a major Stockholm tabloid, with a focus on terrorism and its history and consequences.

Having made a few routine reports on 9/11, covered the bombing of a shopping centre in Finland, and interviewed survivors of the Bali bombings, Bengtzon wants to sink her teeth into a knottier, less publicized act, and the (fictional) 1969 attack on the F21 military base near the Swedish city of Lulea proves the ideal case.

Though dual investigations of the incident, in which a fighter-plane exploded and caused fatal burns to a young conscript, were conducted at the time by police and security police, every suspected Swedish left-wing group remained untouched, and the attack was blamed on Russian paramilitary forces.

However, the inability of investigators to penetrate Sweden’s activist underground, combined with the unsavoury treatment of the victim’s family, which was placed under a gag order and denied compensation, left a cloud over the incident which an eager Bengtzon finds all too enticing.

Her hunch about a cover-up appears confirmed when she learns that a veteran journalist in Lulea, Benny Eklund, has been killed in a hit-and-run – days after he published an article about F21 and terrorism. She tracks down a young witness to the incident whose evident terror is justified when he is found murdered in his home a short while later. Bengtzon’s dogged digging goes on, and more bodies pile up.

It is no giveaway to say that subtlety is not Marklund’s great talent – though, in fairness, one never knows what has been lost in translation. Her strengths are structural – the pacing of Red Wolf is top-notch – and in the development of dramatic tension, though here it is a pair of familial sub-plots that snatch the reader’s attention, making the resolution of the F21 mystery the less satisfying part of the story.

You see, Bengtzon is a workaholic with two young children and a put-upon husband, Thomas, who is finding the charms of a sympathetic colleague hard to resist. Separately, Bengtzon’s best friend Anne is drowning her grief over her ex-husband’s remarriage and baby-on-the-way in too much wine.

Swedish crime writing has a distinct flavour, set as it often is in the frozen hinterland of the Arctic nation; more than most crime writers, the likes of Henning Mankell, Larsson and Marklund seem to enjoy taking their reader on a tiki-tour of outlying, snow-bound villages in pursuit of their investigators’ prey. While Marklund’s writing might lack some of the depth and resonance of the others’ work, she has in Bengtzon an appealing and versatile protagonist whose tenacity makes Red Wolf a satisfying Scandinavian adventure.

 2.5 / 5 stars: Stimulating Swedish shenanigans.  Click here to view more Easy Mix book reviews.

I Still Dream About You by Fannie Flagg

One of the popular instructions given to young English students is to beware of reading texts through the prism of knowledge of the writer’s biography: don’t seek out oblique references to homosexuality in Henry James’ novels, treat Hemingway’s hard-drinking characters as mere figments of the author’s imagination, and for heaven’s sake, try to find something original to say about The Bell Jar that doesn’t involve the suicide of Sylvia Plath.

With her delectable new novel I Still Dream About You, Fannie Flagg laughs in the face of such edicts; like her earlier books, most notably Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, which sat on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 36 weeks before being adapted into a hit movie, ISDAY is peopled with strong, irrepressible women who are modeled on those in Flagg’s family, and undoubtedly, given the author’s colourful background as an actress, TV writer and comedienne, Flagg herself.

Flagg lures her reader into this novel of deceptive depth by introducing one such woman, Maggie Fortenberry, a 60-year-old real estate agent who has decided, as she describes it, to “leave.”

Quite what she means isn’t immediately clear, but when the omniscient narrator says of Maggie that “doing something like this would never have been her first choice, [but] it had become painfully clear that she had no other option . . . All she could do was get out now while she still had the mental and physical faculties to do it”, it is apparent that Maggie is planning her own suicide – but in such a way that her friends and colleagues will think she has merely disappeared.

You see, Maggie is an accommodating sort, going to much trouble to tie off loose ends. She closes her bank accounts, pays all the bills, cancels the phone service, even empties the fridge to spare her housekeeper the task. But her inability to say no or decline a request for help leads to repeated postponements of her departure and drives the plot, drawing Maggie and her colleague Brenda into a mystery involving an grand mansion, an unidentified skeleton and a diabolical real-estate competitor.

Who the skeleton once was, and how it came to rest in a steamer trunk in a locked attic is revealed by Flagg in chapters interspersed with the present-day action; these serve as a subtle counterpoint to Maggie’s tentative progression toward the world of the willingly living.

The supporting characters are a delight, from the hilariously hedonistic Brenda to the pair’s boss, Hazel Whisenknott, who is no less vivid a figure for having died before the novel begins. And the city of Birmingham, Alabama, where Flagg was born and still lives, becomes much more than a simple setting, as Flagg’s characters directly confront its complicated past; one gazes out a window at the 16^th Street Baptist Church, where four African-American girls were killed in a 1963 bombing, while another reminisces about her sister’s participation in the infamous incident in which fire hoses were turned on civil rights protestors.

Flagg’s delight in infusing her characters with joie de vivre has a contagious effect on her reader; it is as if she preps her heroine like a wind-up doll and sends her into a funhouse where the exit is known, but the journey is in equal parts unpredictable and enchanting.

 3.5 / 5 stars: A Southern story with a heart of gold.  Click here to view more Easy Mix reviews.

Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy

Presenting a collection of disparate, unrelated characters and slowly drawing them together as if by magnetic force – typically through a single tragic or unfortunate event – is a vaunted storytelling technique, as tricky to pull off as it is tempting to an ambitious novelist or screenwriter.

Good cinematic examples of this type are the 1991 Steve Martin / Kevin Kline film Grand Canyon, and the 2004 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Crash. In one of the finer novels of 2009, Hearts and Minds, Amanda Craig linked the lives of five people in contemporary London in a series of absorbing but not implausible events.

Regrettably, the enervated Minding Frankie is not in this league. It’s a rare misstep from a scorchingly successful author; translated into 30 languages, Maeve Binchy’s back catalogue of more than a dozen novels has sold 40 million copies, and the cover of Minding Frankie touts her as the ‘world’s favourite storyteller’ (how this has been determined is not disclosed).

The titular Frankie is a baby, born early in the novel to terminally ill Stella, who dies shortly after her birth, and ne’er-do-well alcoholic Noel, who lives with his parents, works in a dead-end job and is gobsmacked to the point of paralysis by the emergence of a baby from a single, drunken sexual encounter after a night of line-dancing.

As Noel reels, his American cousin Emily arrives for a visit, moving in with Noel and his parents Josie and Charles and swiftly proving to be in possession of a degree of level-headedness against which neither addiction nor an unplanned baby is any match.

In a nearby neighbourhood, Lisa has reached the end of her tether in a loveless family home. Chance encounters – a hallmark of Minding Frankie – see her embark on a one-sided relationship with a self-obsessed restaurant owner, and, more fruitfully, cohabit with Noel and baby Frankie, for whom she becomes a primary caregiver.

To ratchet up the dramatic tension, Binchy introduces Moira, a pinched and emotionally starved social worker determined to save Frankie from this mélange of semi-parents – and newly sober Noel doesn’t help matters by teetering on his wagon when faced with any threat to the stability of family life.

A host of supporting characters rounds out the somewhat colourless picture, and in fact, character is precisely what Minding Frankie is most lacking. The baby herself is a mere cipher – she could just as well be a puppy or a temperamental house-plant for all the emotional engagement Binchy has the adults demonstrate towards her. No character is more than two-dimensional, and several aren’t even that.

Where Binchy does display her trademark warmth and shine is in the slow journey to self-awareness undertaken by each major character and achieved with the help of others. Each is in some way crippled or damaged by their past and an emotional deprivation of sorts, and only by letting others in – with wee Frankie as the conduit – can they become fulfilled human beings.

It is as predictable as it sounds, but the Binchyian flavour helps – though Minding Frankie is far from her best work, and constant readers will expect more. The ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ truism can make for fine fiction. Regrettably, this isn’t it.

1.5 / 5 stars: ‘Tis tepid fare from the Irishwoman.  Click here to view more Easy Mix Book Reviews.