On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry

Almost as soon as I put down my completed copy of Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side, my hunch that it would be judged widely pleasing was borne out when it was listed alongside 12 others on the annual Man Booker Prize longlist. It is not the first time Barry has been in the running for the Commonwealth’s most prestigious prize for fiction: he was shortlisted in 2005 for A Long Long Way and again three years later for The Secret Scripture.

The multitalented (plays, novels and poetry) Irishman is due, and On Canaan’s Side would be a worthy laureate not least because it handles the complex subject of grief with rare economy, while showing the seismic power of sudden and premature loss.

The protagonist is the elderly Lilly Bere, a Chicagoan who was forced to flee Dublin with her doomed fiancé at the end of the First World War. On Canaan’s Side opens in the immediate aftermath of the suicide of her 20-something grandson, Bill, and proceeds through her experience of grief until its arresting halt 17 days later.

Which is not to say it is all about Bill – in fact the narrative, stark in content yet laden with Barry’s usual lovely wordcraft, evokes a sombre, reflective mood largely through a series of flashbacks that constitute a biography of Lilly’s 89 years. The loss of Bill – her only surviving relative – is one more in a series, and the story of her endurance of it is powerful in its simplicity. There are few who can craft something so remarkable out of the most ordinary, and Barry lets none of the effort that must have been required be perceived.

Lilly’s life has been no pretty picture. She has lost a homeland, a brother and son to war, and a not-quite-husband to civilian bullets. Her son Ed, though alive, is buried in the post-traumatic stress of Vietnam, and his toddler proves Lilly’s saviour as she devotes her later years to raising him. But Bill’s life unfolds as if in mirthless mimicry of his grandmother’s, and by his early 20s he has emerged from his own divorce and a stint in the second Gulf War. It is as if Lilly’s steeliness loses its potency down the generations, with Ed retaining his life if not his sanity, and Bill proving unable to cling to either.

Throughout, Barry’s prose is jaw-dropping, and the beauty of his writing – “those long-limbed creaturely fogs that walk in against the Hamptons like armies, whether attacking or defeated, whether going out or returning home is hard to say” – will surely contribute to his elevation once more to the Booker shortlist. Indeed, war is a prominent theme, both as a literal reference and perhaps a metaphorical allusion to the daily, subconscious practice of guarding against death.

The ending cannot be objectively defined as either happy or sad, but it is entirely natural. The final lesson of On Canaan’s Side may be that one is never too old or world-weary to elude devastation, and that an aged heart, its defenses weakened by life, is perhaps the kind most afflicted by sorrow.

4 / 5 stars: There might well be a Booker in it.

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The German Boy by Patricia Wastvedt

It is in 1947 London that Patricia Wastvedt opens her latest novel, The German Boy, with Stefan Landau, “this white-skinned, bruise-eyed German”, landing in Dover and journeying to London to be met by his aunt, Elisabeth, the sister of Stefan’s English mother, Karen.

Elisabeth is apprehensive at the arrival of this near-stranger, and for good reason – 16-year-old Stefan, enigmatic, taciturn and only recently freed from the Hitler Youth’s death grip, can barely hide his disdain for his English relatives, the only family he still has. In this, he is very much his father’s son, and the story of what became of his Fuhrer-loving parents in Nazi Germany is just one of the narrative pearls Wastvedt plants for her reader to prise out as they make their way through this rich, absorbing novel.

Stefan remains oblivious to the (perhaps typical) messiness of his family’s evolution since the end of the First World War, but the more fortunate reader has the pleasure of returning, from this opening, to 1927. Here is introduced the novel’s pivotal character, a young artist named Michael Ross, who will become both subject and cause of sisterly obsession and the estrangement of Karen and Elisabeth.

Michael’s family is damaged in a way not unusual for the time: his father Albert was severely disabled in a 1917 mustard attack in France and is cared for by Michael’s mother Vera. Michael’s Jewish ancestry, though it’s of no consequence to the Rosses or their acquaintances, will become a matter of great import later in the story, when Karen (whom, he met, along with Elisabeth, through his sister Rachel in their school years) introduces him to her thoroughly propagandized German husband.

The beastly Artur Landau is a well-drawn, grim echo of the many willing servants of the Third Reich. Karen is in love with him and is thrilled to give birth to their son, but their marriage is one of convenience (not least because, by this reviewer’s reading, Awful Artur doesn’t bat for Karen’s team). As menacing as the Fuhrer himself, Artur’s actions catalyze much of the fast-moving second half of the story, which leaps from the early 1930s and the establishment of Nazi Germany to 1947, following the divergence of Karen and Elisabeth’s familial paths. These passages, crafted with imagination and empathy, make The German Boy an historical novel that is a cut above the rest.

Wastvedt demonstrates a remarkable knack for evoking the many small kindnesses and unexpected fellowships that bolstered the bruised survivors of two unholy wars. One character, striking up a conversation with a night porter at a train station one chilly evening, ends up giving the virtual stranger 20 acres of land he owns in the Romney Marsh.

Years later that kind man becomes Elisabeth’s husband, and we can see that event owes more to her recognition of her need for his goodness than to romantic love. But this is Wastvedt’s point – there is no horror in the mundanity of the everyday, when you have seen the alternatives.

3.5 / 5 stars: A family’s story, told with delicacy and daring.

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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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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Of all the memorable scenes in Ann Patchett’s extraordinary outsiders-in-the-Amazon novel State of Wonder, the passage in which a small boy fights an anaconda might be the most brain-searing. As the protagonist, Dr Marina Singh, struggles to pull the snake from his body as it slowly squeezes away his life, the tail begins “to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her.”

But then, it’s hard to pick just one: it’s a tale in which a Caesarean section is performed on a septuagenarian, and deep in a jungle alive with mosquitoes, a tribe lives free from malaria. That it all makes perfect sense, could be no other way, is testament to Patchett’s inventiveness and dexterity as a storyteller.

The boy in question is Easter, a deaf-mute abandoned by his tribe who has fetched up with the enigmatic, brilliant Dr Annick Swenson, like Marina an employee of pharmaceutical company Vogel. Eight years ago Swenson ventured into the wilds of Brazil to uncover the secrets of a hyper-fertile tribe, and she is yet to present her results. Increasingly impatient, Vogel has dispatched one Dr Anders Eckman to retrieve her, but as the novel opens, Marina receives a letter from Swenson announcing his death from fever.

Stricken both for herself – she and Eckman shared a laboratory for years – and for his wife and sons, and seeking respite from a tentative relationship with another, older colleague, Marina takes over Eckman’s mission to lure Swenson back.

The title may refer to many facets of this treasure-chest of a story: the boundless mysteries of this Amazonian settlement and the fecund Lakashi; the professional obsession that drives Swenson to subject herself to experimentation; the dream-state, a mixture of horror, fear, fascination and joy, that characterizes Marina’s experience in the jungle; and the reader’s absorption in a story of incomparable majesty.

Swenson’s two areas of research are counterpoints: her discoveries about the reasons for the prolonged fertility of Lakashi women (Marina is confronted by the sight of a heavily pregnant 70-something on more than one occasion, and the Lakashi birth rate is five times that of other tribes in the region) will be of enormous value in the West, where infertility is on the rise in some demographics.

Meanwhile, what this research has revealed about the unique local flora leads Swenson to discover an apparent natural inoculation against malaria, still a widely fatal disease in many tropical developing countries.

Patchett’s mastery of a world in which many writers have stumbled is perhaps the most notable aspect of this deeply impressive work. State of Wonder, in theme and nature, is subject to comparison with Joseph Conrad’s seminal Heart of Darkness, but its feminine perspective and distinctly 21^st-century sensibility are among many marked differences between the two.

She creates heart-wrenching scenarios that are neither melodramatic nor unempathetic, merely human. The idiosyncrasies of the Lakashi are presented as no more peculiar than that of Swenson, and watching the latter’s impenetrable cloak fall, her secrets surface, is thrilling. As if infused with the seemingly magic plants she describes in her story, Patchett has put the human condition under a microscope and emerged with a novel of lasting greatness.

4 / 5 stars: A tale of the unexpected, told by a virtuoso.

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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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