Earth Abides - George R Stewart

Why I had not heard of this author prior to reading this novel amazes me.  When I googled it and checked out the forums it seems a lot of people did it at school in their English Literature Classes.  Why could I have not gone to one of those schools!  I had to do Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare!!

The godfather of the modern disaster movie, George R Stewart is famous for his novels such as Fire and Flood where the disaster is the central character.  However with Earth Abides, written in 1949, he has written an enduring post apocolyptic tale of survival and hope for mankind.

The inspiration for Stephen King’s The Stand I could see many parallels but rather than a supernatural tale what we have here is a matter of fact chronicle of what will happen when man loses his footprint on the Earth. The central character Isherwood Williams is a post graduate Geography student, recovering from a snake bite he obtained whilst taking a break in the mountains, when a plague decimates most of the world’s population. 

The novel spans through Ish’s lifetime as he comes to terms with the loss of his family, civilization and learning.  As nature recovers from Man’s dominance, those that are left find that rather than trying to reclaim civilization they slip back to a simple laid back existence, scavenging from the supermarkets and clothes stores. Relationships are formed and children are born and Ish becomes more of a tribal leader, much revered due to his learning but also a figure of awe who is rarely seen without the hammer that he had found in the mountains (and which becomes a symbol of superstition for the younger members of the tribe).

The University Library is taboo, and Ish’s last link to his life as a student, but as he grows older he realises that studious learning is no longer important. Practical knowledge of  how to hunt without bullets and how to make fire without matches are the only way to survival as the last links of civilization rust away or are burned to the ground.  Ish was lucky in a way that he still had his books, as you have to wonder with the advent of electronic resources and with book stores now closing their doors what would there be left if such a plague took place is our distant future?

Jake: Thank you so much for recommending this novel to me, I enjoyed every word.

Frantic ~ Katherine Howell

Are there things worse than death?  Well Katherine Howell has shown us that perhaps there are.  The plot is a fast paced race against time to find the kidnapped son of a paramedic.  

Having been called out to a birth that went horribly wrong, she believes that the patients husband has taken her son in retribution.  But, there are more elements to this story which Sophie will learn to her peril, and which keeps the reader guessing until the end.

The writing style is simple, with no wasted words or waffle.  The settings and characters are realistic, but I did think that Howell was merciless towards one character and although Sophie's extreme actions show just how far a mother will go to protect her child let's hope in the real world someone with Sophie's training would not really take matters into their own hands in opposition to the police investigation. 

This is a quick read, but if you enjoy the medical-crime genre you will be impressed with this debut novel from a home grown author.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ~ Haruki Murakami

How do I begin to review a novel that is as bizarre as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle?  Whatever I say won’t really do it justice; it truly is a strange collection of stories in the form of a novel.

The premise itself is simple, Toru Okada’s cat has gone missing and then his wife Komiko leaves him under mysterious circumstances.  In the search for his cat he meets the weirdly wonderful fifteen year old May Kasahara and the psychic sisters Malta and Creta Kano.  In the search for his wife he meets the equally strange Nutmeg Akasaka and her mute son Cinnamon.  All but May are using pseudonyms.

Toru also becomes acquainted with an old soldier called Lieutenant Mamiya, who tells him war stories from World War II.  These stories are very disturbing, and one of his experiences inspires Toru to utilise a dry well in the garden of an abandoned house to search for Komiko in an alternative reality.

It is the individual stories that each character has to tell that are so amazing in this novel.  Lieutenant Mamiya’s description of watching a man being skinned alive would work well as a stand alone piece in any unsettling fiction anthology, it truly gave me goose bumps.  Nutmeg has war stories to tell too, based on her father’s own war experiences and they link back to Lieutenant Mamiya’s.  She tells two stories of a massacre at a zoo – one involving the animals, and the other involving a group of Chinese men dressed in baseball outfits.

There are several connecting themes throughout Toru’s reality, his alternate reality and the various ‘short’ stories, and they are the dry well, a baseball bat and a blue/black mark that Toru finds on his face after spending a night in the well.  Each story has a dreamlike quality to it, they are strange, some are rambling but ultimately they are hypnotic, taking you away so that you feel you are there. Some stories are told to Toru by a character, whilst others are in letter form.

There is a kind of linear sequence to meeting each character but May Kasahara features throughout the novel.  She will rank as one of my all time favourite literary characters.  I would love to know who Murakami based her on, because she just had me laughing out loud.  She’s so dark, obsessed with death and suicide, but at the same time she is outrageously funny.  I did this novel as an audio book, and I think the narrator captured her brilliantly.  She is such a contrast to the boring Toru and when we came to each one of May’s scenes, I’d turn up the volume and just revelled in her eccentricities! 

If you enjoy the author Franz Kafka, or appreciate the work of David Lynch then you would really enjoy this.  If you like your novels to make sense then forget it!  You have to completely suspend your disbelief and just immerse yourself in the bizarre break from a mundane life that Toru experiences.  I for one cannot wait to read more of this fabulous author’s work.

So, with all this said and done you’ll probably want to know did the cat come back?  Well…….. you’ll have to read it and find out J

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Labels: 1001, Modern Lit

Middlemarch ~ George Eliot

Cover Illustration shows the
birthplace of George Eliot

It’s rare to read a novel where the characters are so richly imagined, and the progression in their lives so well documented.  Even the minor characters are fully embodied.

Set during a period of three years and ending just prior to the first reform Bill in 1832 we meet and grow to love the inhabitants of Middlemarch.  From the well to do Brookes' and the manufacturing Vincy’s to the working class Garth's.

This provincial town isn’t without its gossip, scandals and dogmatic principals and moving forward with the times can be a little difficult as the new age Dr Lydegate finds out to his peril when he moves to Middlemarch in 1829 (the year the novel opens).

The story is told mainly through the lives of Dorothea Brookes and Tertius Lydegate, and they both have a common story in that both have marriages that do not fulfil the ideal and both want to do so much more than they are able to.

This novel is also a political statement of the times, and it would be recommended to research a little on the political environment leading up to the Reform Bill.  However, I found the biggest message in Middlemarch was how important it is for someone to have something to do and a goal to reach for especially when it relates to the betterment of people other than yourself; I don’t think that Eliot would have had much respect for the idle rich. 

Don’t pick up this book if you are after a light read, but if you enjoy immersing yourself into a novel and enjoy full characterisations that grow and develop as one does in real life then I can fully recommend Middlemarch.

Violent Exposure ~ Katherine Howell

What starts out as an apparent domestic abuse case turns into something much much more.

Howell has crafted a pretty good mystery revolving around the paramedics who attend the initial domestic abuse case to the detectives who attend the subsequent murder.  The prime suspect, the victim’s husband, is not who he seems to be and the detectives find the leads take some unexpected turns.

I liked the snappy dialogue, and the banter between the work colleagues  The paramedic scenes were very realistic and obviously drawn from experience, but the story involving the suspect I found a little hard to believe. 

Having been bogged down with some heavy Classics lately, I found this was a quick enjoyable read.

This novel is Howell’s fourth and although it is good as a stand alone read, you would benefit from reading Frantic first.

The Celtic Dagger ~ Jill Paterson

An eminent University Professor is murdered with an antique Celtic Dagger and with the Professor’s brother James Wearing being prime suspect, the race is on to clear his name. The premise is intriguing but Jill Paterson has presented us with a murder mystery which unfortunately does not deliver. 

The plot itself is workable, but each plot pointer is only briefly touched upon, leaving the reader with no sense of anticipation or drama. The third person narrator is used like a bad director and even worse ‘he’ tells the story and ‘his’ delivery would make Ed Wood proud. Any story is better told via character dialogue, which in turn develops the character; you then get into the characters head and you begin to care about them. The narrator should just gently steer you into each scene. The characters in The Celtic Dagger are one dimensional, and I also had trouble with their names which caused me to recap several times to confirm who I was reading about. 

The narration and dialogue is very stilted and I have now developed an aversion to the phrase “At that moment” along with its variation “At that same moment”. I was starting to shriek every time it was used, which was just about every other page.

There were two scenes that could have contained heightened drama: The Cliff Scene and The Stairwell Scene. But, again they are brushed over with a few lines and then the narrator switches us over to a new scene. I have read short stories that have got my heart pounding and Jill Paterson could have done so much more here to create some excitement level; the lack of it really affected my reading experience.

The love interest concerning the Inspector could have been expounded towards the end, I thought it was a nice touch, although Wearing’s imminent romance was a little corny (but I’m not much of a romantic) and as the novel is set in Australia I would have liked to have had more back story to the locations involved. The characters travel around a bit and if you are not familiar with the area it is very hard to visualise.

In summary, the ideas are there, but the author’s writing skills definitely need some work.

The Idiot ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot is a Prince Myshkin who suffers from epilepsy where he has had it treated in Switzerland.  Returning to St. Petersburg he contacts a distant relative of his - a Princess Myshkin – she was my favourite character, she's very eccentric and has some of the best lines in the novel.

The princess has three daughters the youngest of whom falls in love with Myshkin, but she treats him quite strangley – leaving his feelings dangling much of the time.  Myshkin on the other hand, does love Aglaya but he wants to save Nastassya (a fallen women) and marry her instead to do her a kindness by bringing her to respectability.  But, Nastassya feels that she doesn't deserve his kindness, and wants to be with the dark and moody Rogozhin who truly loves her.  Rogozhin and Myshkin had first met on the train going to St. Petersberg at the beginning of the novel and they commence a dangerous and jealous friendship, with Nastassya being between the two of them.  No-one will win.

The theme is mainly light and dark (Myshkin and Rogozhin) – Christ & the Devil.  Myshkin is benevolent, makes friends easily and takes everything in his stride, but Rogozhin is jealous and will resort to murder. 

There are some very profound moments in the narrative.  One being the description of a man’s feelings whilst waiting to be executed – these are clearly autobiographical and chilling.  The other was a suicide note written by the consumptive Hyppolite and read by Myshkin. 

The tale was unusual, the characters strange, but you are drawn into their world by Doestoevsky’s brilliant writing.  I re-read the last few chapters several times as I did not want to say goodbye to them.