Fiction | start narrative here

Eleanor Brown’s The Weird Sisters is a gentle novel about three very different sisters returning to their childhood home to care for their ailing mother. The offspring of an eccentric Shakespeare professor father and named after characters from the Bard’s plays, each sister bears the unique burden of their Shakespearean namesake. Through the difficulties and love of their family, they find their way, and, cue heartwarming cliché, each other.

Rose has stayed in the area, a successful mathematics professor with an attentive fiancee, and resents her sisters flight from the town. Bean has returned from her high cost lifestyle in New York after being unceremoniously fired from her job and Cordelia may have found a reason to finally give up her gypsy lifestyle and settle for good. Frustratingly, each sister is determined to face their past and secrets alone, ignorant of the similarities she shares with her sisters. Readers will find a lot to love, and relate to, with the family’s bookishness – the books left open around the house, the retreat into the written word when reality seems too much.

She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. “A few hundred,” she said.
“How do you have the time?” he asked, gobsmacked.
She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of her. Because I don’t spend hours flipping through cable complaining there’s nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces? I am reading.

This is not a hugely taxing novel. Brown’s style is light and enjoyable, well-versed in the particulars of lovingly antagonistic relationships between sisters. A curious use of the collective narrative voice (“we”) is effective, only sometimes jarring, and allows for us to see how the sisters view each other as a whole. As one of three weird sisters myself, I really liked seeing how the three interacted together, with their parents and as individuals and the frustrations inherent in each of those relationships.

And though I am not usually one for sentimentality or sappy narrative arcs based on the power of forgiveness and love, Bean’s story of repentance and self-forgiveness, even when couched in the alien (to me) language of religion and religious redemption, reduced me to tears. Everything I write seems to be so damned apologetic for being affected by a story on a basic empathetic level. Eleanor Brown makes it easy to relate to these women and their stories, even when they are at their worst. Moments of predictability don’t diminish the strength of Brown’s writing and though it is quite different from what I usually enjoy, The Weird Sisters is a satisfying read.

Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (1944)

March 24, 2011 Book Reviews

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Some authors strike fear into the hearts of wary readers. Faulkner. Joyce. You know the usual suspects. For me it is the White American Male literary triumvirate of the mid 20th century – Roth, Updike, Bellow – celebrated, praised, awarded and much adored, and because of this, damn intimidating. I suppose it stems from a fear of “just not getting it” and having any literary appreciation credentials stripped away and shunned from the readerly world forever. Stupid, I know. So it was with a considerable amount of trepidation that I approached Saul Bellow’s debut novel Dangling Man.

Written in a diary format, Dangling Man is the story of a moderately intelligent young man, Joseph, who has enlisted in the army but is stuck in some sort of bureaucratic purgatory while the authorities figure out what to do with him. While his colleagues go off to battle, or are stationed around the country, Joseph spends his days in a shoddy boarding house, walking around Chicago, avoiding questions about his current position, having meaningful conversations with himself, looking back over his past, and generally being a layabout little shit.

Joseph considers himself as something of an intellectual, a scholar who had previously found success in rote employment. Joseph’s self-assuredness and confrontational methods of dealing with the world and others brings Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to mind. More appropriate a comparison would be with Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road, who also believes that his self proclaimed intellectual ways put him above the less educated. (Although I’m thinking that, as with Caulfield, reading this book at a certain age makes one more likely to relate to Joseph’s outlook.)

As he is in most things, Joseph is conscious of a motive in his choice of clothes. It is his answer to those whose defiant principle it is to dress badly, to whom a crumpled suit is a badge of freedom. He wants to avoid the small conflicts of nonconformity so that he can give all his attention to defending his inner differences, the ones that really matter. Furthermore, he takes a sad or negative satisfaction in wearing what he calls “the uniform of the times.” In short, the less noteworthy the better, for his purposes. All the same, he manages to stand out.

For someone who declares himself intelligent beyond compare, Joseph is not only lacking an element of self-awareness that would make him more tolerable, but unforgivably misogynistic. He is unable to accept his wife Iva’s agency, constantly belittling her with his moods, unable to influence her and shape her into the well-read intellectual he wants her to be. He is given to sudden outbursts of anger and, in one scenario, a strange scene of faux-parental discipline, which are not given the same amount of consideration as the minute actions of others. His diatribes about how the world and his friends, colleagues, family are all deemed lacking and his uniqueness are tiresome and become very tedious to read. When he simply recounts his days or his past, the prose flows better, but for the most part it is difficult to empathize with Joseph and his precarious predicament. Maybe if he didn’t resort to massive generalizations about mankind (while excluding himself from those crude beasts) and unfair criticisms.

Sometimes he manages to appreciate simple serene scenes from his domestic life – such as napping with his wife after eating strawberries rolled in powdered sugar – yet, even this becomes another opportunity for a long pronouncement about … whatever, who cares by this stage. His arrogance and verbosity quickly becomes boring. And yet, though Joseph is an arrogant asshole, and irrationally horrible to those around him, it’s impossible not to feel just a small amount of sympathy with him when he gives up his dangling days and demands to be called up for duty. One is left wondering whether the discipline of army life will be beneficial to him.

So, as it turns out, my trepidations was largely unfounded. Though this is Bellow’s first novel so perhaps his later works will, whenever I get around to reading them, be somewhat more challenging. Dangling Man, while having some moments of insight, didn’t make much of an impression.

Sick Notes by Gwendoline Riley (2004)

March 15, 2011 Book Reviews

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Meh.

The above would have been my review of Gwendoline Riley’s Sick Notes had I reviewed it immediately after reading. However, the more time I have to think over the book, the more unforgiving I become with the cobweb thin excuses for characters, plot, motivation. Once upon a time I probably would have loved this novel, would have become intoxicated with the rhythms of Riley’s language, with the lifestyle of drifting between bars and parks and dusty bedrooms and bars, with her heady take on the thrill and awe of intensely felt attraction.

Esther has returned home to Manchester to live with her friend, Donna. She spends her days drinking a lot and wandering the streets, writing, watching and thinking until she meets and spends a few days with an American musician, Newton. There are hints Esther left in the first place to “sort herself out” though her current behaviour dismisses any recuperation ever having taken place. Her behaviour is abrupt, her conversations stunted – though this seems to be a stylistic choice on Riley’s part, the characters communicate almost entirely in non sequiturs. Esther is prone to vicious outbursts of irrational behaviour that do not seem to be prompted psychologically or emotionally, and without any self-awareness on her part. She is infantilized in speech, thought and behaviour.

Donna has a crush on the boy at the biography desk so we have to go upstairs and walk past him a couple of times.
‘Don’t look,’ she says. ‘We’ll stand by that display table and I’ll just ache in his direction.’

As Newton begins to dissect their dalliance and talking about his other lovers, Esther switches off, unable to look at him or be present in the situation or the conversation, she is unable, or unwilling, to verbalize to him how she feels – and yet she finds herself feeling so strongly attached, even as she recognizes what he is trying to communicate. And, so, after he leaves, she mopes and yearns and drinks a lot and I think it is supposed to come across as all being so terribly romantic and melancholic but … it’s just annoying. Are we supposed to empathize with or pity her?

Esther seems hopelessly desperate, and surrounded by friendly idiots who only encourage her unhealthy actions, rather than giving her a firm slap in the face and telling her that her one night stand was probably not the beginning of a great healing romance. Her problems are never fully realized, it is uncertain whether she has really come back from New York or is covering up something else – this is not used as a narrative technique, it’s just presented as halfway interesting background for the real story of Esther and Newton’s whirlwind romance and the disastrous aftermath.

The most painful aspect of Sick Notes is that Riley seems content to glorify Esther’s alcoholism, while never naming it as such. It is, albeit, a seedy glamour, but the high gloss of Riley’s prose lends a particular grace to Esther’s problem. Riley’s prose is synaesthetic; you can feel the cold, dreary rain and long for a cup of the ever present tea to warm your fingers, you can smell the dust and the mould of the house, the stench of gin emanating from Esther’s room. Riley’s style is, in places, undeniably lovely and is only saved from becoming irritatingly twee by a few moments of raw honesty.

Though the dialogue feels staged and unnatural, the characters annoying portraits of studied eccentricities, there are some graceful moments in Sick Notes, but as a result of Riley’s writing style rather than content. It appears that a lot of other people really enjoy it, so perhaps I am the lone voice of dissent on this one. Meh.

Under the Skin by Michel Faber (2000)

March 6, 2011 Book Reviews

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From the cover and blurb of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin I was expecting some sort of psychosexual thriller about a murderous woman on the prowl for male suitors. This is not my usual tastes, but what the hell. At first, Under the Skin does appear to follow this formulaic path but quickly turns in to something much more complicated, much more compelling and deeply disturbing.

Isserley is a slightly odd woman who drives along highways in Scotland looking for physically fit male hitchhikers. Through what appear to be casual conversations she determines their drifter status and further assesses their physical suitability, and those that are found satisfactory she takes back to a secluded farm. And that, unfortunately, is as much as I am willing to reveal in this review and I apologize for the vagueness that is to follow. Under the Skin is a novel where the less you know about its premise, the greater the impact on the reader. I was, as mentioned, rather clueless and as a result was very much bewildered, frightened and intrigued by this story, carrying it with me beyond the pages.

Isserley switches the television off. More awake now, she’d remembered something she should have known from the beginning, which was that there was no point trying to orient yourself to reality with television. It only made things worse.

Isserley herself is compellingly strange, marked by an inability to understand simple concepts, unexplained debilitating aches and pains, odd turns of phrase and unfamiliar words, and a ambiguous moral attitude toward picking up the drifters that she begins to question and explore as the novel progresses. Her use of unfamiliar slang (that wordnerds may attempt to look up in a dictionary and become frustrated that it doesn’t appear there) purposely alienates the reader from immediately determining Isserley’s role. At the same time, the peculiarity of the words and images invokes the desire to uncover the truth.

Yet, as you think you’re beginning to understand something, however briefly, Faber turns those assumptions to dust. My original expectations of this book as “psychosexual thriller” in part shaped my reaction to it – everything that happened was much stranger and more disturbing than I could have anticipated. Under the Skin is an artful experience of suspense, as Faber provides just enough without seeming unclear or without direction.

That’s what lying had done to the world. All the lying that people had been doing since the dawn of time, all the lying they were doing still. The price everyone paid for it was the death of trust. It meant that no two humans, however innocent they might be, could ever approach one another like two animals. Civilization!

As well as exploring Isserley’s growing contempt for her employer and her own existence, Faber reveals Isserley’s drifters through brief glimpses of their interior monologues, and by contrasting the cruelty, callousness and sometimes kindness of these drifters with the grisly severity of their fate Faber points us towards our own humanity. The story itself suggests a larger moral implication which is readily applied to our own everyday choices without seeming didactic. However, it would be too simplistic to read Under the Skin as straight allegory, as it manages to be much more complicated than a simple folk tale.

Like a half-remembered nightmare, Under the Skin lingers long after it has ended, the gaps leaving open any number of horrific possibilities. Words like chilling, horrifying or harrowing, and vague reviews like this one, do not do this book justice.

The Best Australian Stories 2010 edited by Cate Kennedy (2010)

November 23, 2010 Book Reviews

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Short stories, for me, are a way of easing myself back into reading following a severe reading rut. They serve as a reminder of what fiction can do, even in small doses, how words can shape images, emotions, thoughts. I took The Best Australian Stories 2010, edited by Cate Kennedy, with me on my recent trip and though at first only dipping in and out of the selection, by the end I threw moderation aside and was happily gorging myself on story after story. Of course, with an anthology like this it can be difficult to organize your thoughts coherently: do I look at it as a whole? Do I select one or two stories that I enjoyed and focus on them?

There are names both familiar and previously unheard of in this collection, unpublished stories are placed equally among those that have been retrieved from hallowed literary journals. These stories cover a wide range of emotional territory and styles, from the funny, the breathless, the painfully sad, the joyous moments, and the horrific. Given the restraints of the short story form however, these explorations of emotions never feel too exhausting or depleting.

Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee’s temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleep-bleared funk that’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself with new morning.
- from “The Yarra” by Nam Le

My personal highlights, in bullet point form:

Paddy O’Reilly’s “The Salesman” which, though working on accepted stereotypes of working class suburbanites as brute, racist and insensitive, plays with these expectations as much as it reinforces them.
Karen Hitchcock’s “Little White Slip”, a nicely unromanticized look at motherhood and the expectations it places upon a woman’s identity, this story ruthlessly cuts through to the pain, the bodily changes, the heightened and sometimes irrational emotional battles and the hormonal impulses without the need to glorify the role of motherhood. Although I enjoyed it, the ending did feel a bit too “and they lived happily ever after”, which detracted somewhat from the powerful depiction.
Nam Le’s “The Yarra”, probably the longest story in the anthology, is an involved tale about the experience of second-generation Vietnamese men involved in brutal acts of violence along Melbourne’s river. Le wonderfully captures the relentless heat of Melbourne summers which works towards heightening the internal struggle of the protagonist, Lan, whose brother has just returned home after a long jail stint. Both of them are forced to confront their violent past, its consequences and the strength and contradictions of their filial bond.
Chris Womersley’s “The Age of Terror” is quietly horrifying. What at first seems to be a meditation on aging turns into something else entirely, and it wasn’t until after I finished reading this story that I began to put the pieces together, to see the comparison being made and realize how truly terrifying it is. A difficult, multivalent story that lingers for hours, days after reading.
John Kinsella’s “Bats” is a lovely and strange story of vanity, youth and attraction. A girl and a boy watch a purple sunset over a mountain and he educates her on the fauna of the inland, culminating in a bat getting caught in her long blonde hair. This may be my favourite story of the collection, simple but rich.
Antonia Baldo’s “Get Well Soon” is another strong contender for the favourite story though, a beautiful story on living with a family member suffering with depression, how it effects the entire family and exploring the limits of responsibility and the tenacity of faith.

Rebecca’s disappointed that I don’t live for these moments of rapture anymore. It’s true. I’m ordinary. I’ve accepted the inadequacies of living. But I can’t sit beside her forever and whisper that discovering the world is a matter of choice. I can’t remind her of the smile on her face when she wore that strapless sea-green dress to her formal. I can’t tell her she’s so alive she just might have to die while I, half-dead, can afford to go on living. And so I leave her, a white frame twisted on a bed, those sharp-angled thoughts cutting into her brain.
- from “Get Well Soon” by Antonia Baldo

It becomes increasingly obvious that guilt features heavily in this selection: the guilt over past mistakes, past sins, guilt over irreversible accidents and damage, guilt over failed relationships, guilt of not living up to social expectations. Is this guilt something that is deeply embedded in the national literary consciousness – from the vicious blights on our national history, to our past as a colony of convicts, a quick overview reveals much to feel guilt over- or is it merely a quirk of editorial selection? Whatever the cause, toward the end of the anthology this recurring theme does begin to feel needlessly repetitious. The guilt is felt, but rarely are actions taken to appease this guilt, these stories prefer to wallow in the personal regrets, as though acknowledging it is repentance enough.

My knowledge of the Australian literary scene is not sufficient enough to comment on any glaring omissions, but The Best Australian Stories 2010 is overall a strong collection, showcasing a wide variety of contemporary Australian storytelling talent, offering readers a number of names to look forward to reading more from in the future.

Praise by Andrew McGahan (1992)

November 10, 2010 Book Reviews

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Andrew McGahan’s Praise is a novel about being young, unemployed and poor in early 90s Brisbane, when copious amounts of drugs, alcohol and sex are the only things that can stave off boredom. After quitting his job, sometime poet and asthmatic chain-smoker Gordon spends most of his time negotiating with social services for unemployment benefits, drinking booze, taking drugs, and becomes involved in an intense sexual relationship with the insatiable Cynthia, ex-heroin addict and chronic eczema sufferer.

At first Gordon and Cynthia’s relationship is almost tender, and McGahan nicely expresses the awkwardness and awe of discovering another’s body and how it works with yours, especially with the added interest of disease and skin irritations on display in Praise. But Cynthia’s relentless passion for Gordon’s sex is exhausting, and through constant depictions of their sex life – and there seems to be little else to their relationship, bar heading toward the bottle shop or dealer to stock up on supplies – this quickly becomes boring. As characters, Gordon is too passive and Cynthia too excessive, for them to really work together.

I felt as much love for Cynthia in that moment as I ever had, even in the good times. It was strange and confusing. But when a woman loved you enough to want you to die, it was hard not to love her back.

Like Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, the main characters are, despite their faults, constantly drawn to each other, their bad habits and behaviour disguised as love, their dangerous or destructive tendencies as alluring, as though theirs is an impossible attraction that cannot be thwarted by logic and will-power alone. I just don’t buy into this idea of l’amour fou any more, the anhiliation of self is too complete.

Toward the end of the novel, as Gordon and Cynthia are separated, Gordon becomes involved with a girl who he has spent ten years nursing an unrequited love for. Yet, when it comes to consummating this love, he just can’t move beyond the idol worship, unable to see her as an independent being. This relationship is much more complex, more cerebral than Gordon and Cynthia. Perhaps that is the point, Gordon’s attraction to Rachel is purely based on fantasy, so much so that years of imagined intimacy discounts the possibility of it happening; Cynthia, on the other hand, is a woman that demands the physical from Gordon, yet there isn’t a connection based on emotion or understanding. It’s an updated version of the Madonna/whore complex, only this time through a distinctly Australian grunge aesthetic.

I said, ‘Speech is such a definite thing.’
‘So?’
I thought for a long time, staring at my drink.
I started again. ‘Maybe it’s a matter of sincerity. I’m never that certain of anything I feel about a person, and talking about it simplifies it all so brutally. It’s easier to keep quiet. To act what you feel. Actions are softer. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, and emotions should be interpreted in lots of different ways.’
‘But people are never going to understand you.’
‘People are never going to understand you if you tell them things, either. It’d be even worse.’

I suppose others have used words like “raw” and “gritty” to describe McGahan’s Praise. The style is simple, dialogue coupled with internal monologues, but a high sex-drugs-booze content alone doesn’t make a piece of writing gritty and raw. Gordon’s conflicts and struggles with love and sex conform to expected standards, and there is no enlightenment or possibility of change. Stagnant characters and relationships make Praise a frustrating novel.

How It Feels by Brendan Cowell (2010)

October 29, 2010 Book Reviews

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Accomplished Australian television and film actor, screenwriter, playwright, and director Brendan Cowell has turned his creative hand to fiction, with his debut novel, How It Feels. How It Feels examines the sadder aspects involved in growing up and coming to terms with the choices and consequences of one’s actions and the gradual acceptance of adulthood and responsibility, told with a gritty been-there-done-that narrative style.

On the night of receiving their final school results, Neil Cronk and his friends indulge in drugs, booze, violence and, almost but not quite, sex. This is not the final adolescent party before emerging into calm, well-behaved adulthood; this is an evening that has irreperable repurcussions for all involved. This section is told with the vital energy of youth, that feeling of invincibility and that actions have no consequences. Thought much of the focus is on Neil’s sexual failure with his girlfriend, Courtney, the real highlight is Cowell’s sensitive, though uncompromisingly honest, take on male friendship. The friendships between Neil, Gordon and Stuart are refreshingly free of pretension, Cowell transfers the middle-class, outer suburban male voice and attitude seamlessly onto the page. Though the events of their wayward adventures aren’t of the magnitude of those that will follow, significant changes are already taking place within the characters.

The evening deepened and dipped as everyone packed off into cliques and corners, merging with those they had formed an alliance with over the past one to thirteen years. If adolescence was a war zone then fashion and music were both protection and artillery: they kept us safe and offered us a position to fire ourselves from.

As Neil breaks from his planned life of university and city living and instead studies drama in Bathurst, Cowell brings in some of that pretension that comes with university, and in particular, the Arts. Neil turns from the slightly weedy cohort of his friends to a unrelentingly egotistic and self-involved prick, yet it’s an evolution that makes sense considering the difference between his university crowd and those he left behind. Back home, major changes are taking place, but Neil is too absorbed with the rituals and institutionalized weirdness of his life – seeing it almost as more enlightened than, for example, Gordon going into business. Again, on the eve of graduation and his final performance piece, Neil is shattered by the news of a friend’s death.

As an adult in London with a moderate degree of theatrical success, Neil still maintains a strong connection to those he left behind. This adult section is told in a sometimes disconcertingly fractured way, as the narrative moves between the past in London, the past before the wedding, and the present, it is easy to lose track of where exactly Neil is. Nonetheless, the dramatic events of this section – death, break ups, watching a friend marry your ex-girlfriend, drug use, abuse and recovery – carry great emotional weight.

Told over these three major transitional stages in Neil’s life, How It Feels is a brutal look at masculinity in contemporary Australia. Though there is much to cover in terms of youth, love, loss, heartbreak, success, failure – the running theme throughout is the male experience of contemporary life. Cowell’s narrative voice is strong, at times raw and confrontingly masculine. Issues such as home and the past are deftly dealt with, but what resonates is the connection we have to the place we grew up, despite how far we run from it or how much we try to deny it, and how this place and its people define us. To say this is a strong debut is understating the point, How It Feels is ruthless, wrenchingly felt and truthful, yet not without the necessary light to guide us through.

They gave me another chance, and I am eternally grateful. It is easy to jump out of the village, move to the cities, and spend your time poking fun at the little places we hail from and their routine ways, but deep down inside you know that’s where the real people are, the truly decent souls, and you fight and fight to deny it, until you need them so bad it hurts.

[Disclosure: publisher supplied proof copy from work. How It Feels is released by Picador Australia through Pan Macmillan Australia in November 2010, ISBN: 9781405039291. View the How It Feels book trailer on youtube.]

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers (2009)

October 27, 2010 Book Reviews

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It’s quite an interesting situation to be in, to have your childhood nostalgia repackaged and remarketed to you as a twenty-something reader. It’s not even an authentic nostalgia, as a kid I wasn’t really much of a fan of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I liked it, sure, but I wasn’t obsessed. (Tintin, Commander Keen, medical dictionaries, Corey Feldman – now those were my obsessions.) I know that Sendak’s iconic picture book holds a unique status among my generation but I’m not sure how much of that stems from reading it as a kid or rediscovering it as a slightly older than the targeted age group. With the release of the film version last year, Dave Eggers, who also collaborated on the screenplay, wrote a novelization, The Wild Things, of his film script based on Sendak’s picture book.

When considering the figures involved in the film and associated products, this book included, it’s not hard to see who was the real market: film directed by Spike Jonze, known for his cult films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and music videos, co-written by Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius fame and soundtracked by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Is it as simple as pulling together a few generational icons to repackage a cultural artefact to an older market?

One might think that a boy who was out in the snow for so long would get cold, but Max was not. He was warm, partly because he had on many layers, and partly because boys who are one part wolf and part wind do not get cold.

The Wild Things introduces us, once again, to Max, a product of divorce and television, trying to adapt to his mother’s new boyfriend and his older sister’s change in attitude. This first section of the novel returns us to the boredom of childhood, of being slightly outside understanding and being of the adult world. Max doesn’t fully comprehend the world outside of what it means for him, considering things only so far as according to how they effect him. In a plain, yet engaging, style, Eggers captures the focus and energy of beiing a kid, the moments of great certainty, as well as frightening uncertainty.

Max misbehaves. He floods his sister’s bedroom as revenge for ruining his igloo. He bites his mother for trying to control him. And then he runs away, and after many days and many nights of sailing, finds himself in a land among the wild things. I do like that Eggers doesn’t give us any explanation, that we’re left to our own devices to draw our own conclusions, if we even want to. As he claims his royal right over the group of wild things, he learns about responsibility for others, the repercussions of personal failure. It is an updated, modern fable, but – and maybe this is a sign of losing touch with my own “wild thing” – ultimately I preferred the real world aspects of the novel, the acknowledgement and exploration of the subtle trauma of being young and negotiating the world.

So he had a choice. Would he stay behind the curtain and think about things, marinate in his own confusion, or would he put on his white fur suit and howl and scratch and make it known who was boss of this house and all of the world known and unknown.

Despite Eggers’ admirably sincere writing style and his ability to capture the nuances of childhood boredom, The Wild Things reads too much like the film – both visually and the characters themselves. It is easy to be cynical about the circumstances of the novel’s production, but The Wild Things, as a novel, does seem extraneous.

The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight (2005)

September 22, 2010 Book Reviews

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Earlier this year at the Melbourne International Film Festival, my favourite film was a documentary, Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (Omar Majeed, 2009), that explored the combination of the Muslim faith and punk music. I was struck by the passion and energy that reignited the classic punk sound, it was a music that felt had some deeper necessity than the usual haircut and tattoo brigade. Though the film did sometimes digress from the cross-country journey of Muslim punk bands on tour, the power of the music stuck with me. And, lest anyone try to tell you that fiction has no cultural power anymore, the entire scene was inspired, or at least given a name, by a self-published – originally distributed as photocopied versions given out at mosques – novel that gave the alienated and confused the possibility of reassessing their religion through punk music, Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores.

Yusef is a straight-laced Muslim who moves into a sharehouse in Buffalo, New York with other Muslims, pleasing his parents in the process. However, the house is populated by a variety of punks who question their religion while remaining devoted to it. They search for a new meaning for their faith in a contemporary America. Jehangir is Yusef’s guide through the unknown world of punk subcultures and this form of Islam so different from his parents. Jehangir is the mohawked West Coast punk traveller, having seen it all and heard it all and desperate to bring it to the East. He brings the idea of taqwacore, Muslim infused punk, to his housemates with tales of band shenanigans and powerful ideas. Also in the house is the stoner Fasiq Abasa, militant straight-edge Umar, tattooed Amazing Ayyub and burqa wearing riot grrl Rabeya.

Through the use of familiar punk stereotypes, Knight is able to bring their wildly different perspectives to their religion, filtering the religion through these recognizable cultural stereotypes. This allows the characters to argue and fight over issues such as pre-marital sex, drug use, alcohol, tattoos, female sexuality and the Quran. They may not be as devout as some, but they take their religion seriously while breaking all the rules. Yusef is largely an observer in this world, mostly conservative with no subcultural capital to speak of, but it is precisely this blankness that lets him be influenced by both sides of the cultures – he is transformed by the powerful ideas he finds in Islam, and questioning of authority he sees in the music and subculture of punk. The Taqwacores examination of issues in contemporary Islam at times reads like a manifesto, but never an indoctrinate one. Its characters are too diverse, their need to question authority too deeply instilled to allow that:

I stopped trying to define punk around the same time I stopped trying to define Islam. They aren’t so far removed as you’d think. Both began in tremendous bursts of truth and vitality but seem to have lost something along the way – the energy, perhaps, that comes with knowing the world has never seen such positive force and fury and never would again. Both have suffered from sell-outs and hypocrites, but also from true believers whose devotion had crippled their creative drives. Both are viewed by outsiders as unified, cohesive communities when nothing could be further from the truth.
I could go on but the most important similarity is that like punk, as mentioned above, Islam is itself a flag, an open symbol representing not things, but ideas. You cannot hold punk or Islam in your hands. So what could they mean besides what you want them to?

For the uninitiated like myself there is also a lot to learn from The Taqwacores about Islam culture. A glossary at the back provides translation of many of the culturally specific Arabic terms used, though strangely not all of them. The rituals and routines of Muslim life is lovingly described, even as the characters intend on breaking these rules. The story itself covers all sorts of narrative ground: road trips, coming of age, “let’s put on a show” to the journey of the doomed rebel hero. This mish-mash of fiction genres does become something of a problem as at times it seems like that while our characters are evolving, the story itself does not. However, like the best punk music, what The Taqwacores lacks in structure and traditional form it more than makes up for with an urgent energy and vital passion that demands attention.

The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner (2010)

September 20, 2010 Book Reviews

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When I read Alan Warner‘s The Sopranos back in June, I was very much taken with his group of rebellious schoolgirls and their misadventures in the city, and in particular, Warner’s ability to show a great amount of compassion and understanding for his less than perfect characters. The recent sequel, The Stars in the Bright Sky, brings the girls together again, this time in their early twenties and preparing to jet off on an international holiday together. A series of mishaps see Manda, Finn, Kay, Chell, Kylah and newcomer Ava stuck in Gatwick airport, spending their nights in swanky hotels and guzzling more than a few drinks.

As with The Sopranos, The Stars in the Bright Sky is a character driven novel. These are the same girls from the port, their behaviour sometimes ludicrous, their attitudes brash and their emotional outbursts frequent. For all their negative characteristics, it is difficult not to warm to them, as they struggle along the paths their lives have taken them. Whether they are still stuck in the port, like Kylah and Chell, or with a young child to an absent father, like Manda, or escaped to university like Finn and Kay, they’re all trying to assert their identity. And it is within a group such as their own that the positives and negatives of their personalities are most evident.

Though Manda was a key figure in The Sopranos, her small-mindedness and domineering personality bringing tension to the group, here her personality is the primary element of emotional clashes. Manda is loud, she is brash, she is excessive, almost to grotesque proportions. There are a number of incidents where her actions seem ignorant of the rules of hygiene and personal safety. She talks, endlessly, about herself and her opinions. She is the character that hasn’t, and probably never will, leave the confines of the port town for good. In a way, she reminded me of a less vindictive version of Rhiannon from Rachel Trezise’s Sixteen Shades of Crazy. However, for all her thoughtless actions and spiteful words, Manda’s brand of viciousness seems considerably less threatening than it did as a schoolgirl. Her lack of intelligence and worldliness shows, and the other girls are better prepared, mentally and emotionally, to deal with her ignorance. Some of her actions would push the closest of friends to breaking point, but these girls are loyal to her despite her faults. She frustrates the reader as she dominates conversations and ruins the serene mood of the holidayers, but that’s also what makes her such an enjoyable character to read.

Chell’s smaller voice said, ‘But girls. The stars is still there even in the daytimes. Just you can’t see them. And it’s the night that shows the stars. Like Kylah. She’s a star now and we all know it, but one day she’ll show up brilliantly. And all of us. I just know it. The stars are still up, shining just for us all girls.’ Chell’s voice had dropped to a whisper.

Particularly interesting is the group dynamic of the girls, however focused on Manda’s ego it can be. The narrative falters when the girls separate – a long sequence of a drug binge lacks the dynamic of the larger group. Unlike in The Sopranos, where the girls personalities seemed to be overshadowed by the group itself, here they seem to each bring something to the group, something unique. I was surprised by the lack of information on Orla’s death between the novels, especially as it seems to be an event that played a large part in Manda becoming who she is. The group dynamic is altered somewhat by the introduction of Finn’s university friend, the glamourous, rich and sophisticated Ava. Her background is so different from what we know of the girls, yet she manages to include herself in their gossip, their discussions and their hedonistic activities. The somewhat late revelation of her drug problem felt a little forced, and signalled the novel’s weakest point.

Although I imagine the slang-ridden, gossip fuelled dialogue of these novels aren’t going to appeal to everyone, it continues to amaze me that Alan Warner so accurately captures the voice, the thoughts and the nuances of being a woman from a lower socioeconomic class. Morvern Callar also displayed his talent in this cross-gender realm, albeit with a much darker story. Cinematic images of mundane beauty are another highlight of The Stars in the Bright Sky, like getting caught in a hedge maze in a thunderstorm, or sitting slumped on suitcases waiting for check-in. Female friendship is something that is mostly plagued by petty bitchiness, or defined around a male character, but here it is warm and empowering without ignoring the problems of jealousy or spite. The nature of international airport culture and larger world affairs are mere backdrop for the minutiae of everyday life for these young women, and it is the genuine warmth of their strong friendships that gives The Stars in the Bright Sky its true heart.

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