After quitting a comfortable government job, Tom Jokinen takes up a position as an apprentice undertaker. Working in a family run funeral home in Canada, Jokinen begins to feel increasingly perturbed with the way much of the Western world treats death, in particular the evolution of the funeral itself. As more people begin to turn to cremation as a viable option for post-mortem disposal, and secular rituals begin to take place of the religious, what becomes of the humble funeral home? Jokinen uses his own on the job experience, some journalistic investigation and a good sense of humour to explore this idea further in his memoir Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training.
People don’t want to know. There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with that arrangement. We in funeral service cover the gap. People pay us to keep to ourselves what goes on there.
The changing socio-cultural value of the funeral is at the heart of what Jokinen is investigating. Through a look at the funeral business itself, and how it has had to adapt to changing attitudes toward the funeral, he reminds the reader that undertaking is, above all, a business. And that in business, and the commercial world, people will seek value for money, even if it is at the expense of respect and dignity for the dead. The growing trend of personalized memorial services is also being capitalized on by the industry, and it’s not hard to see why. As the popularity of cremation grows the funeral industry loses their profit from embalming, caskets, flowers, services, etc, and so they’ve had to adapts their services in an increasingly secular world that ultimately aims to celebrate the individual.
What Jokinen is really mourning is the loss of communal ritual and tradition. He provides indepth descriptions of how people of different faiths ritualize death, and how the tradition of that is waning in the face of growing religious scepticism. Now, he argues, with no religious links or community to guide our actions and reactions to death, we’re gradually becoming a generation that has lost touch with the inevitability of death, we’re insulated from it to the point of ignorance. We’ve replaced faith and the tribe with an overzealous faith in science and medical technology, which, obviously, cannot prevent death and fails to offer a way to deal with it.
Scatter where you want, bury where you wish, but do something with intent, don’t be passive and follow what commissioned pre-need salesmen consider the norm. Use your imagination, balance your spiritual beliefs with guesswork, but do the work: accept we know nothing about death, take a leap of faith, and have the courage to act anyway.
Through his examination of the various rituals we use, Jokinen comes to a conclusion that could work as an effective market for the environmentally and socially aware or perhaps just an ideal vision of how he would like to be seen off. Either way his conclusion and the progression of his thoughts feels natural, he makes everything he argues for seem so logical, almost obvious. He is able to see the humour in what may be an otherwise dire occupation and weaves many hilarious anecdotes into his discussion. Jokinen’s deft touch stops the memoir from getting too bogged down in the seriousness of the issues he explores, and his consideration of the industry and our cultural relationship with death is thought-provoking and insightful.
I first took notice of Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree when I read a write up in the July 2010 issue of Good Reading magazine. Sometimes all it takes to convince me to read something is the mere mention of a decaying mansion being an important part of the plot. Yes, this has something to do with the novel I’ve been carrying around inside me for years now. One day, my friends, one day. But until then, I keep reading other people’s take on the deteriorating house hoping that they haven’t pilfered my idea.
It’s the sweltering summer of 1997, and Karen Clarke, a gifted student of languages is finishing up at university. Unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, she uses her new found freedom as an opportunity to extend herself beyond her comfortable friendship group. A chance meeting with the wildly bohemian Biba Capel sees Karen pulled into the inclusive and mysterious world of Biba and her brother, Rex, and their crumbling childhood home in London. By the end of the summer, as the byline goes, two people will be dead and lives changed irrevocably.
She slung an arm around me so that our cheeks were pressed together and mouthed the words as my pencil formed them. Personal space was clearly an alien concept to her. That, coupled with her eccentric clothes and complete lack of self-consciousness meant that by now I was pretty sure I was dealing with a mad person, fascinating and disarmingly different to everything I was used to.
Told in Karen’s perspective between the past and the present, The Poison Tree spends much of its time vaguely hinting at what is to come, and the secrets that are being kept from the other characters and the reader. This attempted build up just wasn’t effective or suspenseful, there are no real hints at what or how things panned out, just the deliberate ambiguity that something did happen. Why not trust the natural dramatic momentum of a story rather than resorting to the tired flashback technique? I had much of the same issue with Rebecca James’ Beautiful Malice, (which is in many ways very similar to The Poison Tree, the secrets and hidden troubled past of a main character, now with child, looking back) so I wonder how much of my impatience with this technique has to do with the genre itself, or my lack of knowledge and awareness of psychological thrillers.
I’m loathe to reveal too much more of the plot, as the unravelling of the secrets is the main point of enjoyment of such a novel. The early days of Rex, Biba and Karen’s friendship doesn’t quite reach those frenetic, heady heights of new and exciting friendships, as I imagine was intended. The last third is a rush of tying up loose ends and revelations, which makes for moderately thrilling reading but the accelerated pace here jars with the slow beginning. An uneven pace and wildly vacillating characterizations prevent The Poison Tree from being truly gripping, but it somehow manages to be passably entertaining.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied proof copy from work. The Poison Tree was released in Australia by Hachette in June 2010, ISBN: 978-144-470104-3]
The cover to the left of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest Tell-All doesn’t look like it contains a story about the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood, does it? When I first saw it online I thought it looked too blank but when I picked up a copy from the library I was surprised to discover that the cover is actually covered in GLITTER! Far removed from the typical hyper-masculinity we’ve come to expect from Chuck Palahniuk.
Alas, as those much wiser than I have said, all that glitters is not gold.
Hazie Coogan is the live-in maid, confidante and assistant to fading, aging Hollywood actress Katherine Kenton. Despite Hazie’s careful methods of preventing her Miss Kathie’s heart being broken by yet another man, their lives are interrupted by the arrival of Webster Carlton Westward III who quickly wins the heart of the tired and lonely actress. When Hazie and Kathie find a tell all memoir manuscript in Webb’s suitcase foretelling the star’s imminent death, they set out to thwart the attempts on her life that come with each new draft.
Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands or one of those new miracle pills.
As if human beings – men in particular – need yet another way to lie.
Before the narrative starts there are eighty pages of incessant name-dropping of celebrities from the golden years of Hollywood – this in a novel of only 179 pages. Eighty pages of repetitive, shallow hints at the social circles Kathie once moved in, as if to show us the stature that she once held. It repeats that Kathie is desperate for the love of any man, and that Hazie is just as weirdly possessive of Kathie as the suitors she tries to protect her from. The writing follows a stilted style supposed to mimic screenplay directions which comes across as awkward and clumsy. The lack of adequate scene setting or relevance to the story that is to come smacks of disrespect for Palahniuk’s readers – the same readers he trusted would be willing and able to decipher the pidgin language in 2009′s Pygmy.
The repetition doesn’t end with the lacklustre scene setting, as the methods of execution found in Webb’s manuscripts and Kathie’s evasion of these elaborately planned deaths repeat. Over and over again. She overcomes the prediction that she will be mauled by bears only to be faced with potentially falling from a high-rise balcony, and overcoming that too. Is this constant repetition somehow supposed to show us lowly minions the tedium of fame? Endless parties and award ceremonies surely cannot be as boring as the scenario Palahniuk presents us in Tell-All. The Chuck Palahniuk Twist Ending™ is as weak and watered down as the vodka in my parents liquor cabinet when I was 15. Like my parents, I’m not easily fooled by a story that is lacking structure, relevance or humour.
I know it may be difficult to believe, but I write this as a Palahniuk fan. I don’t open his books expecting enlightenment and breathtaking literary writing, but I do expect dissatisfaction with contemporary life to be twisted into darkly funny prose. I resent being treated like a dumb Palahniuk disciple who is willing to lap up any poorly written dross that is dished up to me. No matter how much glitter is thrown on the cover, Tell-All is still a dud.
‘Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.’
Such was my hesitation with reading Matt Haig’s newest novel The Radleys. Vampires, surely their time is almost up? As someone who still believes the pinnacle of vampiric pop culture is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’ve somehow managed to avoid the current publishing trend for lovelorn vampires and nasty bloodsuckers. The Radleys, however, manages to take the almost tired vampire myth as a tasty metaphor for repression and moves it into the suburbs.
The Radleys are a family living in a middle-class suburb in Britain. Peter Radley is the local town doctor, longing for the bloody sexual shenanigans of his past, while his wife Helen Radley secretly longs for the vampire that converted her. Their children, Rowan and Clara, are on the verge of discovering exactly what it is that makes them so different from their peers. Clara has gone vegan in an effort to stop animals from being scared of her, only much to the knowing dismay of her parents, it appears to be doing damage to her health than good. Rowan can’t sleep at night, plagued by rashes and a crippling shyness in the face of his schoolboy tormentors. The scene of suburban disguise, where the threat of being unveiled is always present, and sets the intrigue of things to come with hints and clues to let the reader in on the Radleys secrets.
Rowan nods, knowing he could never tell her he has only heard birdsong online, or that he and Clara once spent a good hour watching video footage of chirping sedge-warblers and chaffinches, nearly in tears.
It is only when a sickly Clara leaves a teenage bonfire party, and is followed by a boy who forces himself onto her and she reacts in an unthinkably violent manner that the teenage Radleys secret is revealed to them by their parents. Peter, much to Helen’s reluctance and protests, calls his brother Will. Will refuses the hidden abstainer vampire life, instead living his life like a rebel rocker vampire. Only Will has his own secrets too, and his vicious attacks are just as much a method of hiding from his desires as Peter and Helen’s façade of suburban normality. There is a definite narrative synchronicity here, people and events are neatly connected. It’s as though Clara’s “coming out”, as it were, is all it takes to settle the tenuous image the Radleys have built for themselves, all the lies told in order to construct a coherent identity unravel so easily.
I really loved all the references to classic literature, such as Lord Byron and Thomas de Quincey as vampires living it up as DJs in Ibiza – Don Juan and DJ Opium! Haig switches the narrative voice between the major and minor characters to give readers a complete and varied perspective on the Radleys predicament. Excerpts from a self-help book Peter gives Rowan called The Abstainer’s Handbook also provide a background for the story, as well as being satire of how to beat addiction guides. The story reads quite smoothly, as everyone and everything seems to be connected in convenient ways, however there are also a few surprise twists. The Radleys is a clever analogy for repressed desires and suburbia, if in the end, a little too easy to swallow.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied proof copy from work. The Radleys is released in Australia by Text Publishing on the 28th June 2010, ISBN: 978-1-921656-41-5]
Rachel Trezise’s Sixteen Shades of Crazy is set in a small Welsh valley village, Aberalaw, where three very different women find themselves attracted to an English drugdealer. The three women, Ellie, Siân and Rhiannon, are the girlfriends of a local punk band, the Boobs and after an eighteen month narcotic drought, Johnny provides not only chemicals for the women but intrigue, mystery and the chance of escape.
Ellie is the most sympathetic of the three, she’s educated, sensitive and has resigned herself to dull factory work after her dream of coasting on the wave of what she thought would be the Boobs inevitable successes seems less and less likely. She’s intelligent, aware of the limitations of her surroundings and her self, and how there is an irreperable difference between those around her and what she desires for herself. Her boyfriend, Andy, is intent on planning their upcoming nuptials according to his family traditions, but Ellie is hesitant, realizing that expressing a reluctance to marry and procreate would be akin to blasphemy in the eyes of her friends and his family. For her Johnny is alluring because he seems to offer a escape from the banal future, he engages with her on issues that she is passionate about. Her sights are set beyond Aberalaw, a fact the others – content with the rituals of their insular village life – appear to resent. It is frustrating, at the beginning, that Ellie seems to think her only escape is through Andy’s band, when clearly he doesn’t want to escape the familial tradition and domestic simplicity. Her relationship with Johnny is based on false hopes based on Johnny’s knowledge built on soundbites – he knows enough to get these women interested enough to sleep with him, but there is no need for him to know anything beyond that because once that’s done, well, he really has no need for them.
She never overlooked an opportunity to remind Ellie where she was, because she knew Ellie wanted to be elsewhere, beneath the skyscrapers of New York. Rhiannon had resigned herself to a monotonous existence inthe Welsh gutter and no one else was allowed to look up at the stars.
Siân, as a main character, is unfairly underused; she comes across as merely a supporting player for the endless conflict between Ellie and Rhiannon but her story is just as heartbreaking as theirs. Siân is the image of familial perfection, she has the happy children and the tidy home, but with a clueless husband and working two jobs, a deeper malaise lies beneath her life. Siân’s inner life isn’t as explored as Ellie or Rhiannon’s, but her attraction to Johnny is mainly for his product. He can provide the pills she desires to blunt the motherly instinct she cannot otherwise escape. Her ending is tragic, set in motion by the cruel trickery of Rhiannon.
Rhiannon, nearing forty, is grotesque in her excess: physically, her large body is made comedic by oversized silicon breasts, her attitude, her blunt, rude and abrasive way of speaking, her unsubtle cruelty to others. Sex is her weapon, as attack and defence. Her contempt for beauty (Siân) or intelligence (Ellie) isn’t so much borne of jealousy, she just can’t see their use when her flesh is all she needs to seduce, to get her own way. Rhiannon is pure viciousness, made more disturbing by outbursts of violence that demand she is the focus of all attention. Her attraction to Johnny is one of conquest, having what the others want, and having it before them. It is Rhiannon that ends up with Johnny post-drug bust, but the others have moved on – Ellie to New York, Siân in death – and I wonder whether her supposed victory is soured by the lack of willing competition. There are some brief comments on Rhiannon’s mixed heritage – her father was black, her mother white – but other than inspiring a number of distasteful remarks from minor characters, this doesn’t seem to really go anywhere, I’m uncertain how her race matters here.
The women in Sixteen Shades of Crazy are all desperate, and only a stranger can offer them the opportunity to evolve. The constant tension of casual violence and endless boredom of the working class village remains somewhat in the background, I would have loved more reflection into how the surroundings and culture worked to trap these three women in the first place. However, Sixteen Shades of Crazy is primarily a character driven novel and Trezise creates a rich interior life for these suffocated women – especially with Ellie and Rhiannon – that makes their plights difficult to ignore.
I’ve been in the news a bit lately. Well, sort of. A young lass with the same name as me has attempted to become the world’s youngest person to sail unassisted around the globe. Imagine if our paths crossed, the socially awkward, bookish J.W. and the seafaring prodigy J.W: hilarity and valuable life lessons, I’m sure, would ensue. Basically, this is the concept behind John Green and David Levithan‘s collaborative novel, Will Grayson, Will Grayson. Two young men, both of them named, you’ll never guess, Will Grayson, are slightly troubled and questioning kids whose lives intersect by chance one evening in Chicago in a porn store called Frenchy’s. Lives are changed, and lessons are learned; and all of it is told in the characteristically hilarious and touching writing of John Green and David Levithan. Together they manage to make teenaged characters into the kind of teenager you wish you had been at that age, smart and funny, yet endearingly clueless about the intricacies of life and love.
Will Grayson 1 lives by a rule which has never failed him yet: don’t care about anything and just shut up. Essentially, this is his way of protecting himself from getting hurt. His best friend, the three hundred pound, musical loving, openly gay Tiny Cooper is the centre of his universe. In Tiny Cooper, Green has written another fantastic best friend character, whining and self-centred as he may be, he’s also laugh out loud hilarious. Enter a burgeoning relationship with possibly gay Jane, a best friend who is writing a musical about his fabulous self, and Will 1 finds his tried and true method of getting by beginning to falter.
“NO. No no no. I don’t want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It’s so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it’s the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they’re not that important. You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!”
Will Grayson 2 is a little harder to love, depressed, angry, cruel – he shuts everyone out in the most abrupt manner. He’s fending off a not-really-friend’s unwanted attention, dealing with his father’s absense, his rampant depression, his sexuality and retreating into the haven of an online relationship with Isaac. This Will is much harder to connect with as his reluctance to reveal himself to his peers and family also extends to the reader. However, as his life begins to change through a chance encounter with Will Grayson 1, he becomes not altogether likable – this could be a case of hitting too close to home though – but we can understand the why he acts the way he does.
she asks me if i took my pills before i ran off this morning and i tell her, yeah, wouldn’t i be drowning myself in the bathtub if i hadn’t? she doesn’t like that, so i’m all like ‘joke, joke’ and i make a mental note that moms aren’t the best audience for medication humor. i decide not to get her that world’s greatest mom of a depressive fuckup sweatshirt for mother’s day like i’d been planning. (okay, there’s not really a sweatshirt like that, but if there was, it would have kittens on it, putting their paws in sockets.)
As the two Will Graysons meet, relationships blossom, lives and attitudes change and an epic musical is written and performed. Adolescent relationships and friendships are dealt with all the emotional seriousness they are felt with at that age, and the wealth of pop-cultural references and sassy dialogue prevent things from ever getting too heavy. Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a fun read from two well established young adult authors, and the quirky hijinks and supporting characters make it a vibrant look at adolescence.
Working in a bookstore it has been difficult to avoid the hype surrounding Rebecca James’ novel Beautiful Malice. First the subject of a furious publisher bidding war, then heralded to booksellers as the next big thing in young adult literature, we’ve been promoting the hell out of this book for months. When the library called me saying a copy was ready to pick up weeks before the release date, I was pleased, I’d be able to read it in plenty of time before it arrived in stores. Here’s the thing about hype: it’s a commercial construct, it’s created for the sole purpose of making us pick up, and hopefully buy, a book that we might not otherwise even look at. If the hype surrounding a cultural product is not created organically, through word of mouth, from the readers, participants, audience, it seems to be without foundation. A few acknowledgements of my own limitations first: I recognize I’m not the target audience for this book, being older and more jaded than the young adult age bracket, and I’m not overly familiar with the psychological thriller genre.
I’ve heard that charming, powerful people have the knack of making you feel as though you’re the only person in the world and now I know exactly what that means. I’m not quite sure what she does, or how she does it – another person would have come across as overly eager, obsequious even – but when Alice gives me her attention like that, I feel golden, warm with the certainty I’m fully understood.
Katherine has moved to Sydney following a terrible family tragedy involving her younger sister Rachel. Quietly studious in her new surroundings, she is befriended by the wild and vivacious Alice and drawn in to her circle of friends while struggling with her guilty conscience over her past. The novel shifts between multiple points in time, Katherine after-Alice and with a young child, younger Katherine with her sister Rachel and the hours leading up to the shocking event and Katherine as she adjusts to her new friendship and coming to terms with the past. To reveal too much is to spoil what pleasure the novel holds, some of the twists are overly foreshadowed, while some, are completely unexpected. Much of the first half of the novel is drawing attention and hinting toward what revelations are to come and the deliberate vagueness becomes tedious after a while. The relationship between Alice, Katherine and Alice’s on/off again lover Robbie is nicely drawn out, as they each confide in each other about the trauma of their pasts. There is the intimation that something is not quite right with Alice, as her moods and attitude rapidly and unpredictably change on her close friends.
I nod agreeably and smile and let Philippa think that she has made me feel better, that she’s said something I haven’t heard before. The trouble with words is that no matter how much sense they make in theory, they can’t change what you feel inside. And what I’m starting to understand is that there is no real end to this, there can be no complete absolution. Rachel’s death and my own part in it is something I’m going to have to live with. The best I can hope for is that I can learn to forgive myself for being a less-than-perfect sister.
Much of the potential power of Beautiful Malice hinges on the tension between the past and the present, and the dark secrets that have lasting consequences for their keepers. Sometimes, particularly when Katherine falls in love – an occurence which isn’t dealt with the same warmth or degree of detail that the friendships are – the tension disappears completely. We’re still vaguely aware of the troubles to come, but the pacing feels a little off here. The tension picks up again as Alice’s levels of crazy skyrocket and her attempts to sabotage Katherine’s life become more extreme, although perhaps the denouement could have felt much more intense if we hadn’t already been warned of the deaths of two major characters.
I’m a bit conflicted about this one. I wanted to like it, and I found it a mildly entertaining novel that lacked a certain intensity that I was, from the publisher created hype, expecting. And that’s the danger with hype, the combination of publicity efforts and reader anticipation can all too often create expectations that are impossible to reach.
The Temple-Goers, journalist Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, is a novel about friendships that cross socio-economic barriers, the distinction between the rich and the poor, ambition and pride, lust, love, religious faith,bitter hatred and the struggle for cohesive national identity in contemporary, postcolonial Delhi. The divide of traditional beliefs and practices collide with the contemporary and modern beliefs and practices brought to India by student émigrés shape the difficulties of developing a cohesive cultural and national identity. In The Temple-Goers, these issues are explored through the relationships of a privileged writer named Aatish Taseer who befriends an ambitious, significantly poorer young man, Aakash. Aakash’s assimilation into Aatish’s world sets in motion a number of irreparable changes in both of their lives.
Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.
After a stint in London, Aatish returns to Delhi to revise his novel, he spends his time with his devoted girlfriend, Sanyogita, and attend numerous parties and events. Recommended a gym by a family friend, he meets the enigmatic trainer Aakash. The two build a friendship which seems to be based on mutual admiration or envy of the other. Aakash, though living in a poor area of Delhi and with no entry into the privileged world that Aatish lives in, manages to integrate with Aatish’s social circle and significantly improve his social standing. Throughout the novel the writing is lushly floral and colourful, as Aatish casts a watchful and aware eye over his surroundings, both those familiar and unknown.
The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.
Using himself, or a fictionalized version of himself, characterized as a writer allows Taseer to subtly provide an interesting form of self-criticism, in a way preempting any criticism from the reader. It’s a clever technique, but not used to excess. Aatish receives the long awaited readers notes from the revised version of his novel; Aatish and Sanyogita discuss the merits of the work of Aatish’s writer friend and mentor; Zafar, Aatish’s Urdu teacher and renowned poet, and the writer friend provide him with writing advice – all of these incidences add a touch of self-awareness to the text. Not enough to distance the reader from the powerful narrative, but enough to give reason and evidence as to why The Temple-Goers is written as it is.
His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ‘something fresh and original.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’
The blurb and prologue of The Temple-Goers hint at a highly televised murder which doesn’t really come to the forefront of the narrative until the last fifty pages. While I did enjoy the rest of the novel, the gradual build up of Aatish and Aakash’s relationship and the gradual decay of Aatish and Sanyogita’s relationship, the vivid imagery of an India still trying to find it’s identity and the profound schism between the country’s rich and poor – the set-up in the promotional material or the introductory chapter of the supposedly crucial murder (and, presumably, who committed the crime, and all the how and why questions that come along with it) creates an expectation which is never quite fulfilled. When the murder and its wide reaching repercussions do reach their climax, it feels all too rushed, given the languid time spent on all the other details of the narrative. This horrific event, the brutal murder of a character we have come to know not intimately, but enough to feel the shock, however predictable it is, and the ways in which the convictions play out are accelerated so much that their effects aren’t as deeply felt as other aspects of the novel. Perhaps this expedited account is to suggest the stark difference between the daily realities of Delhi and how quickly events can change our circumstances, our relationships and our friendships. Regardless, I wish it had been drawn out more, reading another two hundred pages of Taseer’s vibrant writing would have been a pleasure.
A compelling narrative about friendships and rapacious ambition, and a portrait of a modern, changing India, The Temple-Goers really surprised me. From the promotional material and vague recollections of interviews and brief mentions in articles, along with the publicist-ready catchphrase of “the Indian Bret Easton Ellis”, I expected something a lot more dry, amoral and disconnected. Instead, The Temple-Goers offers a rich insight into another culture undergoing an immense shift, while personalizing this through understandably flawed and conflicted characters.
[Disclaimer: publisher supplied advance reading copy. An extract of The Temple-Goers is available online.]
From the suggestive pose of the silhouette on the cover, and a brief flick through in which phrases like “desperate sluts” and “big tits” jumped out at me, I didn’t exactly expect much from Clinton Caward’s debut novel Love Machine. Even the blurb made me think “oh, great, a story about a down and out guy who wants to save a prostitute.” Love Machine‘s book trailer on youtube, gives much more of an accurate representation than the cover or the blurb. And yet, I still picked up the proof from work and promptly settled in with it. The strengths of Love Machine allowed me to see past my first impressions, and to find in Clinton Caward a gritty realist writing style which I look forward to reading more of in the future.
The Kings Cross circus was free and open for business every day of the year. It drew people from everywhere into this tiny postcode, stripped them back to their most basic needs, and played it out on the streets. The sex and the drink and the drugs were there for all to see, but you didn’t have to watch for long until the violence began to show itself too.
In Love Machine, Spencer is an underpaid, somewhat aimless, retail monkey in an underground sex shop in Kings Cross. The cavalcade of clientele and co-workers are colourful with innumerable quirks, kinks and fetishes, all of which Spencer has the means to fulfill. In his time away from work, he is filming a biblical epic with blow-up dolls. A chance meeting with a young prostitute, Livia, sets in motion a series of life changes causing Spencer to start question what he really wants.
Just saying Livia’s name lit something up inside me. I saw her moving under the moon and I wanted to put my arms around her and protect her from all the horrors of life, although she’d seen many more of them than I had. Like characters in a novel, we’d be happy, fixing our problems, moving toward self-revelation, culminating with her straddling me on a beach in a windstorm. But life lacked that kind of structure. It was formless and full of dark emotional things that changed shape like the weather.
While being a mildly amusing piece of ladlit, Love Machine‘s strengths lie in the portrayal of the seedier side of inner-city living; of small-time criminals, of drug dealing, of prostitution and a general unsettling and grimy vibe. It also grasps at the frustration of working a low wage job, and the brief camaraderie that comes with such careers. As Spencer spends time with his brother in the house they grew up in, the banality, dysfunction and casual violence of poorer suburbs is also adequately captured, and lends it a distinct, albeit dirty and often brutal, dignity. I think this sense comes from not trying to romanticize working class suburbia, but rather accepting it fully, faults and all. It is suburbia that offers Livia and Spencer their escape from the constant barrage of sleaze in their lives.
I took the cover from his hand to look at the pictures. I wondered what would happen after all the taboos were broken. What would excite us? Boredom was the real truth about too much pornography. What would happen when we were completely bored with everything that was streamed live through the internet twenty-four hours a day? Once we were desensitised, would the economies of the world, no longer lubricated by sexual advertising, grind to a halt?
Although there were a lot of aspects of this novel that didn’t appeal to me – particularly the idea of Spencer as the male saviour of Livia, saving her from working in the sex trade, drugs and a violent ex-boyfriend; the religious undertones which never fully took shape – but it wasn’t completely without merit. Although I imagined I was not exactly the target demographic of such a novel and a lot of it is rehashing out the same male fantasy, I otherwise thoroughly enjoyed it.
