I haven’t fared well with crime fiction in the past, despite being easily sucked in to crime television and true crime spectacles, so I approached Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me with some degree of apprehension. Maybe not expecting much from the book made the reaction I had all the more powerful, but I am rendered slightly speechless by Thompson’s unsparing approach to his knowingly psychopathic criminal narrator.

A deputy sheriff in a small county in Texas, Lou Ford, spends his days patrolling the town with a friendly, approachable manner, spouting cliché, idioms and platitudes as advice to his colleagues. Yet behind his provincial facade, Lou is suffering what he terms “the sickness”, an uncontrollable and insatiable anger and urge to lash out violently, usually against women. When he is involved in a blackmail plot between the son of the man who possibly killed his adopted brother and a prostitute, Lou’s sickness bubbles over into reality and a chain of vicious beatings, ruthless murders and self-assured plotting follow. The less said about the actual narrative, the better – it’s a story best enjoyed through Ford’s eyes rather than mine.

I’ve loafed around the streets sometimes, leaned against a store front with my hat pushed back and one boot hooked back around the other – hell, you’ve probably seen me if you’ve ever been out this way – I’ve stood like that, looking nice and friendly and stupid, like I wouldn’t piss if my pants were on fire. And all the time I’m just laughing myself sick inside. Just watching the people.

Told in the first person, Thompson involves us from the beginning with Lou, though he is a classic unreliable narrator. We’re completely aware that he may not be always telling the truth, that his justification for murder is warped, that things are not going to work out the way he wants them to – and yet, somehow, for most of The Killer Inside Me, I wanted Lou to get away with his sickening crimes. To somehow fool everyone, to slip between the cracks of justice. The reader is never made implicit in Lou’s crimes – they’re described in so little detail that the crimes themselves are never the point of interest. Rather Lou’s acknowledgement of his image of a bumpkin sherriff as an act to cover the murderous intent and his insistence that people believe his act despite all the evidence to the contrary is compelling. Any trace of paranoia is easily dissolved by his illogical reasoning and his staunchly held belief that he is smarter than the cops trying to track down the culprit. Ford drags us, in spite of any moral objections we may hold,  into his obviously deranged way of thinking.

The Killer Inside Me felt more like a curt slap in the face than a reading experience. It left me with the same sense of defiant shock, a speechless disbelief of what has happened. Ford is a character not easily forgotten, and Thompson’s narrative style is understated, yet effectively terrifying.

I know. You’re suffering from Man Booker longlist fatigue too. However, I give you my word that this and Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky are the only titles on the longlist that I have any interest in reading. For a while it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas‘ The Slap was the novel that everyone in Australia was reading, discussing and arguing over. It’s a little pleasing to know that the novel is having the same divisive effect overseas. Nonetheless, The Slap feels inherently Australian, so intimately linked with our issues as a nation and as a culture that I have to wonder if it has the same potency outside of our shores.

The Slap is also one of those books where you feel like a broken record in repeating the plot, so intrinsic is it to the title and the hype surrounding the book. At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne, fittingly with multicultural backgrounds and a variety of age groups present, a man slaps a misbehaving young boy who is not his own. The Slap follows the consequences and reverberations in the lives of those who witnessed the slap that afternoon. Intriguingly, all of the stories, despite the multicultural, gender and generational differences, are all told in the same the same third person voice.

I expected class to play a big role in The Slap, and was surprised to find it difficult to recognize any class aspects coming in to play. The Slap opens with the perspective of Hector, a man who is hosting the barbeque, and is feeling not so much trapped, but definitely unappreciative of the benefits of his middle class male existence. The parents of the slapped boy parrot politically correct dogma, echoing sentiment they believe they should have – and are noticably poorer than the rest of the characters. Sure, the characters throw around “middle-class” as an insult, but for the most part it seems that class has become such an intangible issue, secondary to cultural, gender and generational differences. Tsiolkas is forcing us to look at the negative aspects of all of these characters regardless of their financial position, we’re invited to explore their faults. The characters are hugely unlikeable, except for the two younger characters.

Anouk, a childless by choice writer on a television soap, should have by all rights appeal to my liberal sensibilities. She too has made the unpopular decision to not bear children – most of the female characters in The Slap are burdened by their choice to have children, motherhood defines them. She is a confounding character, it is difficult to understand how someone so supposedly intelligent can have such simplistic views about class and her friendship with Rosie. Why does someone who fiercely holds to her decisions in all other aspects of life so quickly back down for someone she doesn’t even like any more? It’s a question that is raised repeatedly through The Slap, and the answer seems to be compromise. It’s not a romanticized compromise, it’s a compromise always marked by bitterness and resentment.

Anouk’s liberal attitude only gets her so far though, and in particular it made me extremely frustrated that she is so ignorant about the culture that lies “out there”, beyond her inner city comfort zone. Her presumption that her usual treatment of immigrant men – a Muslim taxi driver in the given example – is above the “immense sea of indifferently racist Australians out there, a world that existed – as far as she could tell because she’d never visited ‘out there’ – somewhere beyond the yellow lines that marked the inner-city zone-one train and tram tracks on the Melbourne transport maps.” This hit hard, as I live in the forbidden blue zone two and I resented Anouk’s inner-city presumptions because it felt like they were, implicitly, a reflection on me. However, while doing some research on my electorate for the recent election, I discovered some interesting facts that reaffirmed my position. My electorate has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in Victoria, the third highest in Australia. For Anouk, Muslims represent her taxi drivers, “out here”, they are our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues. Yes, racism exists in the outer suburbs, but it is not any worse, or any better, than inner-city exclusive racism.

The shallowness of Anouk’s nameless apology for her rudeness to her taxi driver is later strengthened by Manolis’ later comments about the ease with which Australians say sorry. Forgiveness is a large part of the Slap, characters seek it, characters forgive for the wrong and right reasons, yet the hollowness of these apologies was always read through the lens of Manolis view, and reflected on the greater problems related to our own national and cultural apologies.

The words dropped easily from her lips but they meant nothing. Australians used the word like a chant. Sorry sorry sorry. She was not sorry. He thought she loved him, respected him. He’d nursed this hope for years. He wanted to strike himself for his vanity and foolishness. He had never asked anything of her before and she must know that he would never ask a thing of her again. Sorry. He spat out the word as if it were poison.

Anouk is not the only frustrating character in The Slap, the other adult characters are completely unlikeable: emotionally unavailable, potentially violent and dangerous, dangerously irresponsible, constantly lying to each other and themselves. However, The Slap is thematically very rich, covering so many aspects of contemporary Australian life that it would be impossible to cover them all in one review. One other thing that had strong resonance with me was the nature of compromise. This could be because I am much too self-involved to truly understand the complexity of compromise involved in marriage, relationships and motherhood, but The Slap repeats that compromise made under the guises of these important roles are often made to someone characters are not even sure they like, let alone love. There is a deep-seated resentment behind these decisions which is not healthy. The Slap asks the question of where do our loyalties lie? With family? With friends? With strangers? With ourselves? The answer is never clear, and identity is so built upon traditional roles that, by their very nature, force us to define ourselves in relation to another.

Again she experiences a wave of weariness, a numbing heaviness to her neck and shoulders, to her very bones. This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unattainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired.

And then, there is Connie and Richie. One of the things I loved about Tsiolkas’ debut novel Loaded (incidentally, does anyone else think that the Ari at the barbeque who gave Hector speed could possibly be Ari from Loaded? Just coincidence, or a wink to knowing readers?) was the exploration of a multitude of complex issues and themes related to growing up in Australia through the energy and exuberance of youth. Tsiolkas knows how to write about adolescence in a way that, compared to the hateful and bitter adults, gives hope: I almost wonder why he is content writing about middle-class, middle-aged bores when the real passion and excitement comes through his sensitive treatment of his younger characters. Connie and Richie are marked by a fear and anticipation of the future, but in their confrontation with their future, they change in a way that the adult characters can not. Previously held prejudices disintegrate as they learn, adapt and evolve. They are the only ones truly willing to forgive their friends and family of minor and major transgressions, and thus the real hope of The Slap lies with them.

In summary, I can’t honestly say that I liked The Slap. It didn’t leave me giddy with pleasure, but it did force me to think about issues about identity and compromise, and for that I am appreciative. It begins to approach the problems and concerns confronting contemporary Australian society in a way that is easy to relate to, yet avoids taking an overly moral tone. It is a completely frustrating novel for so many reasons, but absolutely a worthwhile read.

After weeks of reading Dennis Cooper, Joan Didion, introductory philosophy texts, I needed something to lighten the mood. I hadn’t heard a thing about Paul Magrs’ Exchange and only picked it up because of an intriguing cover, a collection of colourful letters smashing up against each other. Discovering that an exchange bookstore was a main feature of the novel was more than enough to entice me. However, for all the appropriately bibliophilic tendencies Exchange evokes, the main story is something of a disappointment, almost undoing all the joy to be found in the young character’s love of books.

Simon has moved to a small country town to live with his grandparents after the tragic death of his parents. Unusually unlike most other protagonists of young adult fiction, the still grieving Simon is quiet, awkward, self-conscious, without whipsmart comebacks to the taunts of the local lads. At first the heavy use of British slang – lots of lads and dafts – grated, but gradually faded in to the background. A fervent reader, Simon and his grandmother, Winnie, bond through a love of charity store book shopping and reading, a passion his surly grandfather doesn’t share.

The saving grace of the drab charity shops would be the inevitable shelves of paperbacks. This was the cheapest way to buy books, and he liked how they were jumbled together: ancient classics cheek by jowl with recent popular blockbusters; westerns and romances; fantasy and stark, searing realism. The erratic order of things exactly reflected his own reading habits and the almost random way he chose what would take up his attention next.

By chance, Simon and Winnie happen upon an exchange bookstore, manned by the artificially limbed (yes, really) Terrence and confident goth girl Kelly. Winnie discovers a book written by an old childhood friend about their lives growing up together and the narrative sometimes diverges into stories about Winnie and Ada’s past, leading up to a feelgood reunion. Simon too strikes up a friendship with Kelly, that borders on the romantic but due to Simon’s awkwardness is never quite able to move beyond friendship. Just as I was warming to the bibliophilia present in Exchange, enjoying long passages of the simple pleasures of reading and drinking tea, I stupidly read the back cover again which referred to “a terrible act of revenge.” Though it wasn’t evident in the style, story or structure itself, this knowledge filled me with a sense of dread. The story was so gentle, so peacefully quiet that I became anxious about what would happen to Simon and/or Winnie.

“Yes. It seems wrong, somehow, to get rid of books. You need them. They’ll remind you of who you are. And where you’ve been. And you’ll need them even more, when everything is changing…”

From there, and not just because of my rather unfounded dread, the story falls apart. Yet, I can’t really pinpoint exactly why. It could be that the story doesn’t particularly go anywhere, and there is no recognizable change or evolution within the characters. There seems to be the faint suggestion that reading is just a way of avoiding confrontation with real, abject feeling – whether grief, unhappiness or jealousy – which I do not agree with it. The final half of Exchange is uninteresting despite the interesting premise, and denies the pleasure that Simon, and surely the reader, takes in books and reading.

Those of sensitive dispositions would do well to avoid Dennis Cooper’s work, and even this review may prove too much for the squeamish. Cooper pushes the boundaries of the accepted expressions of desire into the taboo. It’s when I reread books like Frisk that I realize just how my memory has faltered – the strongest memory was of the intricate detailing of sexual murders, which turned out to be only a chapter in this book, and I wish that I had some record of my thoughts about reading Frisk seven years ago so that I could see the ways my reading changed. Frisk is the second novel in Cooper’s George Miles cycle, a loosely connected series of books exploring the complications of desire through masochism, sex, murder and death.

Frisk makes use of the technique of having a central character with the same name as the author, Dennis Cooper. The ideas expressed here are so far removed from what we are usually willing to accept, that it seems like Cooper is urging his audience to project the depravity on to him, or his fictional persona. In a sense, he’s removing that step where readers guess that the expression of the abnormal must reveal the deepest hidden desires of the author. But, this very projection is also at the heart of all the sadomasochistic violence within the novel, and fictional Dennis Cooper’s fantasies: the worst of it comes from our imaginations, so who is responsible and are we willing to confront our complicity? Cooper’s technique is decidedly self-reflexive:

“I don’t know,” I muttered, shrugged. “Well, that’s not totally true.” My forehead crumpled up. “I sort of know…well, basically because I realized at some point that I couldn’t and wouldn’t kill anyone, no matter how persuasive the fantasy is. And theorizing about it, wondering why, never helped at all. Writing it down was and still is exciting in a pornographic way. But I couldn’t see how it would ever fit with anything as legitimate as a novel or whatever.”

The novel opens with a graphic shot by shot reconstruction of a snuff porn image, presumably, we learn later on, the same pornography that Dennis saw as a young boy. The novel weaves between Dennis’ later sexual experiences with a boyfriend, Julian, and his fascination with a particular type of young man. Through a brief relationship with a man, Henry, who looks exactly like the man in the original still, Dennis realizes that the image may have been faked, that is, not a real image of man being murdered. It got me thinking about how images seen at crucial times of development can become ingrained, informing desire itself, even if the image is violent, demeaning and dangerous; that learning the desirous image is faked doesn’t lessen the desire for it, despite the impossibility (or criminality) of achieving it.

Nonetheless, Dennis explores his fetish for the combination of sex and death, and extreme sadism through his graphically depicted fantasies. He reconstructs the story of an object of his desire, Joe, supposedly a masochist, who was murdered before Dennis could form a relationship with him. The line between fantasy and “truth” is absolutely essential to the theme of Frisk – that so much of our desire is based on a unachievable, unrealistic fantasy with little concern for reality. Dennis moves to Amsterdam and writes letters to his former boyfriend Julian about his murderous exploits, claiming to have killed and dismembered a number of young men. Julian and his brother Kevin visit Dennis, intrigued by the letters, and discover that Dennis’ letters were the creation of his imagination. However, Kevin is determined to recreate the original image for Dennis. The novel ends on another shot by shot reconstruction, this time revealing the imperfections of the image, the ways in which it has obviously been constructed. It’s almost a melancholic ending, as we come to see that unless Dennis can block out his morality, he’ll never achieve what he views as the ultimate sexual release. It’s a ruthless metaphor for how desire is so controlled and obstructed.

I think it is clear that Dennis Cooper’s fiction is not going to appeal to everyone. The sexual violence is told in brutal detail that is difficult to read, it revels in the horror and pleasures of total destruction. That the imagined (again the postmodern roots show, as a fiction novel isn’t it all imagined?) violence was my only memory of Frisk seven years after reading it suggests that maybe I read it on a purely literal level, and I don’t remember it affecting me very much at all. For those willing to brave the darkest corners of the psyche, Cooper raises a lot of relevant questions and does so in an inventive, if visceral, way.

On the surface Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays looks like yet another story of a beautiful, privileged woman suffering a nervous breakdown. Maria Wyeth, an actress, is going through the breakdown of her marriage to director Carter Lang. Yet, Didion’s writing avoids the typical hysteria. Her technique is sparse, the restraint she shows is purposely alienating, intent at keeping the reader at a distance from the true horror of Maria’s suffering. It protects us from the oblivion of nothingness that Maria feels, and forces us to confront it ourselves.

She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.

To recount the plot seems futile, the narrative is built from key events seen through Maria’s eyes. Maria has been committed to some form of institution, and looks back over what happened in the lead up to, during, and after the breakdown of her marriage. There is no clear linear progression, but events, signs, symbols gradually do fall in to place. Maria has an abortion. Maria visits her ex-husband on a movie set in the desert. Maria watches her close friend commit suicide. Something as simple as a stilted telephone conversation, as momentous as an arrest in the desert, or the nightmarish hallucination of the contents of blocked drains are all told in a brutally dispassionate third-person voice.

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on playing.
Why, BZ would say.
Why not, I say.

The structure of the novel is interesting too, opening with single chapters told in the first person from major characters – Maria’s manic, compelling voice, Helene reflecting on her conflicted relationship with Maria, and Carter trying to pinpoint where things started going wrong. From there, most of the novel is told in this distant third-person narration, until the end where Maria’s voice is heard again. This seems to mirror the state of Maria’s internal self, beginning with rampant self-obsession, turning to looking at herself from a disconnected and distant viewpoint and finally, we hope, gaining a stronger sense of her own identity by the end. It’s bleak, but Didion’s writing is so controlled that the emotional effect of these events, and of Maria’s perception of them, doesn’t hit until after. Play It As It Lays is a novel that lingers, becoming all the more powerful as time passes.

Closer is not the Dennis Cooper I remember reading back at university. While the extreme sexual violence is still there, with suggestions of mutilation and masochism,  in Closer it simmers beneath the surface, lurks in the shadows. Instead, Closer is a dark, somehow touching, look at the lives of gay youths and the boy they all physically desire, the troubled George Miles.

Closer takes the form of a series of loosely connected chapters, George Miles being the thread that connects them, each from the perspective of a different young man. There is John, an art student, who draws portraits of beautiful people and desecrates their image until they are ugly; who forms a sexual relationship with George. John remains distant while he re-examines his artistic purpose, and cannot draw George’s face accurately. When he finally does, afterwards George tells him of his own issues, and John breaks it off with him. It’s as though the image is what he desires, and the realization that there is something “real” behind that image is too frightening.

He didn’t have time to draw everyone, but being picky meant choosing an artistic goal. John couldn’t. He didn’t know what he was doing. He wound up selecting the best-looking students because they were fun to deface and pretty easy to bullshit. He’d just sort of casually say that maybe he was portraying how tortured they were behind their looks and they’d gasp at his scribbles like they were seeing God or a UFO.

Other characters have a similar relationship trajectory with George, drawn to his flawless facade (which is not described in great detail, allowing us to project, like the characters, an image of impossible, otherworldly beauty), only to abandon him when they discover that he too has fears, feelings and flaws. That is, that he is a person and not an ideal. The chapters from George’s perspective reveal a sad, emotionally disconnected young man, numbing himself against his pain with sex, drugs and a childlike fascination with Disneyland.

Paul, a pathological liar who believes he is a famous, attractive, talentless popstar, spews stream of consciousness rambles about authenticity, performance and love. For him, George is a way to step out of the (imagined) spotlight and find love, separate from adoration. Other characters are also George’s school friends, only one of which is not in love with George himself, but in love with another who is in love with George. Their lives and stories are intricately connected, yet they seem unable to make a lasting connection beyond the image.

Lies are so hard to keep track of. It’s like your constantly being reborn every time you begin a new sentence.

The ending is unsettling, the violence is only suggested so as with George’s beauty, our warped minds are forced to go to the darkest places to imagine these unspeakable acts. It’s confronting and manipulative. The violence is made all the more vicious by everyone’s extreme apathy toward it, no one is horrified, no one is angry, no one is surprised. In amongst the visceral deaths, abuse, and unsightly injuries there is always a glimmer of hope. Not much, but it is there. The possibility of love, of moving beyond the image of the other no matter how beautiful or scarred it may be.

I really didn’t like James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, so this review is going to be a lot briefer than usual. Frank Chambers is a drifter who one day finds himself on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern, owned by Nick Papadakis, and takes a job. Intense attraction sparks between Frank and Nick’s wife, Cora, and they plot to kill Nick so they can be together, succeeding only on their second attempt. The police suspect them of wrongdoing and reveal that Nick had taken out a hefty life insurance plan after the first attempt on his life, and assume that the payout due was the pair’s motivation. In the clear after some knotty legal finagling, they decide to start their new life together but, c’mon, do you really expect a happy ending here?

“Then he came along. I took him, and so help me, I meant to stick by him. But I can’t stand it any more. God, do I look like a little white bird?”
“To me, you look more like a hell cat.”

The Postman Always Rings Twice is told in a sparse, dialogue driven prose with a quick and sharp rhythm. No time is wasted on motivation or detail, Frank’s desire and reasoning goes largely unexplained. The relationship between Frank and Cora lacks the passion to make their crimes seem convincing. If Cora was too delicate to hurt Nick’s feelings by leaving him, how does that morph into murderous intent? The pedestrian, dispassionate prose makes these characters difficult to comprehend. Where in The Maltese Falcon Hammett’s crime story was written in the stylish prose that defined the hardboiled genre, Cain’s lacks excitement, character or dense plot. Very disappointing.

In J.G. Ballard‘s Concrete Island, architect Robert Maitland crashes his car through a highway barrier, and he expects that he will be easily found and rescued, returned to his safe world of family and extramartial affairs. Only he finds himself injured and unable to escape the abandoned island between motorways – he has great difficulty climbing the embankment, peak hour traffic won’t stop for him and the curve of the highway doesn’t give drivers enough time to register him. Increasingly desperate, he resigns himself to an extended period of isolation on the island.

He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectation he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all.

This is Ballard, and I’m surprised that such a bleak look at the world we’ve built ourselves was able to break my prose fiction reading rut. As always with J.G., the concepts are stronger than the execution, but the ideas are so compellingly prescient. Ballard’s prose style is a pornography of violence, with fetishistic details of Maitland’s seriously injured body and gleeful lingering over the twisted metal carcasses of crashed cars. It’s no surprise that this book was released only a year after Crash. In Crash the car crash was sexual, Concrete Island sees the structures which support transportation as potentially alienating, but again, offering liberation from the constraints of contemporary society.

After a few days spent in total isolation fending for himself – including a fevered psychosis that the the island is a physical manifestation of himself and his past – Robert is taken in by a brain-damaged acrobat and his young female keeper, Proctor and Jane Shepherd. They are curiously unwilling to do anything to help Robert escape the island, but do assist his survival. The return to primal instincts is a key element of the story, as Robert fights for his dominance over the two and their “conspiracy of the grotesque.” His cruelty is perhaps unwarranted – especially toward the sweetly loyal Proctor – but he is able to intellectualize it as necessary for his survival. Robert ultimately decides to remain on the island, intent on finding his own way out.

Concrete Island is full of ambiguity, lacking the closure that Robert’s escape would bring, the uncertainty about Jane and Proctor’s past, or the nature of the island itself. Otherwise innocent embankments now have a sinister implication, that element of the unknown. When so much of the earth’s land has been discovered, perhaps the only real places we can become stranded are those that we ignore daily. Ballard’s is an ugly world, where isolation in the shadow of heavily populated areas is all too possible, and when there is hope, there’s always a stolen sports car in the night, speeding with its headlights off to knock you back to reality.

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]

When I first bought the first volume of William Faulkner’s novels from the Library of America series, I was hesitatant to start reading his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, because of a random review that I read on LibraryThing. I was put off for months, despite having absolutely loved As I Lay Dying. When I found myself suffering a bit of reader burnout I decided to finally get stuck into Faulkner. From this I’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t always trust the reviews of people whose literary taste you’re not familiar with. Soldiers’ Pay may not reach the soaring heights of Faulkner’s later masterpieces, but there is a lot to admire in his debut novel.

Soldiers’ Pay opens with a bunch of drunken soldiers returning home by train after the war. Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe are seated across from the horrifically scarred Donald Mahon and a young woman, Margaret Powers, also finds herself incapable of leaving the injured Mahon to fend for himself. She and Joe prepare to take him home to Georgia, where a flighty and unfaithful fiancée, Cecily Saunders, and worried, oblivious father await him. As they, and other townsfolk, adjust to life touched, broken and irrevocably altered by World War I, Faulkner crafts a commanding meditation on the cycles of sex, death and human relationships.

“It isn’t me that made you lose a night’s sleep. I just happened to be the first woman you ever knew doing something you thought only a man would do. You had nice fixed ideas about women and I upset them. Wasn’t that it?”

The style is undeniably Faulkneresque. The opening chapters have soldier songs interrupted by dreamy descriptions of the landscape, intercut with the drunken dialogue between the characters. It’s an effective technique, intentionally jarring. Characters’ thoughts mix with the words they speak, revealing the contradictions between the two. The style becomes more functional as the story progresses, but does occasionally return to the effectively dramatic style. Admittedly, some passages do read rather awkwardly, perhaps too overwritten and drifting from the focus of the novel. Faulkner convincingly utilizes repetition: the rector father repeating “This was Donald, my son. He is dead.” as he comes to term with the inevitability of his son’s death, and the fixation of certain characters to their memories – Emmy’s recollection of her midnight liaison with Donald, Margaret’s guilt about her dead soldier husband, George’s obsession with Cecily – echoing the inescapable return for these characters to their defining moments. The repetition falters and loses effect as Faulkner chooses to repeat descriptions of landscape, admirable turns of phrase that become tedious with their reiteration.

Like Vardaman in As I Lay Dying, young Robert Saunders’ voice and thoughts express the same youthful inability to comprehend the complexities of the adult world. I am utterly in love with a scene from the novel, relatively inconsequential to the story, of Robert hiding in the bushes listening to Margaret and Joe talk, seeking his revenge for their having spooked him in front of his friends, as he overhears and misinterprets their conversation. Faulkner plays with our awareness of his characters, giving each of them their own unique perspective, slowly revealing their essential core and showing the uselessness of snap judgement. It is quite beautiful. The central relationship between Joe and Margaret is also really tender, very real, complicated by her considered decision to marry Mahon when Cecily cannot go through with marrying the invalid. Their parting scene is, to use a cliched term which doesn’t at all accurately sum up how distraught this scene made me, heart wrenching. Both this and Margaret’s epistolary relationship with Lowe are poignant reflections on the state of flux of human relationships.

In wartime one lives in today. Yesterday is past and tomorrow may never come.

Though showing only hints of Faulkner’s formidable talents, Soldiers’ Pay is a powerful look at the intricacies of human relationships, the breaking of the spirit in the wake of World War I, and the centrality of sex and death to our existence. It manages to be humane, sensitive and with moments of elegantly poetic and perceptive prose. If Soldiers’ Pay is to be considered a minor work in the oeuvre of a master I have a lot to look forward to.