Book Review: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

For an orphan girl growing up amid the poverty and criminality of Victorian London’s notorious Lant Street, Susan Trinder has led a remarkably sheltered life, kept safe and protected by her adopted step mother Mrs Sucksby. But when Richard Rivers, or Gentlemen as he is known to them, arrives with a scheme to defraud an heiress of her inheritance, Susan heads out into the world, ready to make her fortune at the expense of the innocent Maud Lilly.

Set in the misty, damp, cold world of mid-nineteenth century England, Fingersmith is a novel that delights in delivering the Victorianna that readers expect. Pickpockets, thieves, great estates that harbour murky secrets, lunatic asylums, all these leitmotifs so familiar from Dickens, Collins, Henry James and the like are delightfully recreated, yet it is to Waters great credit that the classics neither overwhelm nor overshadow Fingersmith. Rather, she uses them as diversions, playing with readers’ expectations, and then subverting them. There are twists here that almost caused my heart to stop. At one point the twist was so unexpectedly decisive that it is impossible to resist the urge to describe the experience as a kind of pleasurable mugging. Sweat beaded on my forehead. It was as though I had downed a few glasses of whiskey, such was the spinning of my head. I had to put down the book and stare at a wall for five minutes, trying to take in the twist.

There are moments in every book that make or break the readers engagement, and there are two here that match or exceed any from the greatest works of literature I have read. The above twist was the first. As a storyteller, there can be few better than Sarah Waters. In the pacing and control of information, she is virtually flawless. Fingersmith manages to be both a page turning romp and a book to enjoy one page at a time. The prose is pleasingly thorough and she inhabits the mind’s of her characters as though they are her own. The characters are horrible at times, and, like the best rogues, that makes them so much more appealing. Indeed, judging from the response of other readers I’ve talked to, Susan must be one of the most popular characters anywhere in literature.

The second moment that made my engagement comes at the end. It is a quiet transformation, not dramatic in a heart-stopping way, but gently seductive. I won’t give away any details of it, other than to say that it provided a pleasingly open ending to what had appeared before then a pretty straight-forward feminist perspective on erotica.

Fingersmith provides a rewarding and utterly compelling reading experience. There is something ceaselessly refreshing and appealing about lesbian romance. I think it is in the general absence of cultural power inequalities that sometimes overwhelm heterosexual romances. This is the first Sarah Waters novel I have read, but it won’t be the last.  She is a superb writer who matches character, form, style, themes and content in one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have had in a long time.


9 out of 10

Fingersmith was first published by Virago in 2002. The edition pictured here is the current Virago paperback, published 2003, ISBN 9781860498831, 548pp.

Book Review: Ellipsis by Nikki Dudley

In the interest of full disclosure I must preface this with the caveat that Nikki Dudley is the partner of my brother. That said, I endeavour to make this as balanced and honest a review as any I write.

Read: May 2010

Ellipsis in one tweet-sized chunk:
Rewarding, psychologically complex, and disconcerting, Nikki Dudley's portrayal of everyday disconnect from life will delight readers looking for something different in the mystery genre.


“Right on time.”

These are the words that Daniel Mansen mouths to Alice as she pushes him to his death in front of a London underground train. She’s been stalking him for weeks: obsessed by the red of his scarf; drawn to him by a force she has followed blindly, without question or thought. But these strange words change everything. Did she know Daniel? Was this murder not an act of free, albeit pathologically imbalanced, will? Confused, Alice begins to investigate and as she does she discovers that there are gaps, not just in what she knows about Daniel, but what she knows about herself.

Across town, Daniel’s cousin Thom discovers a note in Daniel’s empty bedroom with the time and place of his death written on it. Fearing that it confirms that Daniel committed suicide, he too sets off to investigate, hoping that some sort of certainty will help fill the increasing and explained void in his own life.

Each a refugee from their past, Alice and Thom become knotted together in the search for answers. It is only as they unravel the mystery surrounding Daniel’s death that they see how many other ropes still bind them.
Revolving around the ellipses in each of their understanding, in all that has gone unsaid in the footnotes of their past, Ellipsis is a slippery, satisfying and unusual novel that never quite gives the reader what they want – and it’s all the better for it. They are the most unreliable of narrators, and with the reader placed in their shoes and never privilege to information they aren’t, it makes for a compulsive, page-turning read driven forwards by the increasingly blinkered obsession of its protagonists.

In many ways they are mirror-images of each other, with Alice gradually emerging from the wasteland of severe psychological distress while Thom descends rapidly toward it. They each have a separate narrative voice: Alice, lost and alone, commentates on her own adventures in first person, as if in conversation with her absent mum, where as Thom, investigating on behalf of his family, is referred to in the third person. This dichotomy is representative of a wider theme in Ellipsis, the encumbrance of family which can both liberate and constrain, often at the same time.

Ideas such as these are conveyed astutely, without unnecessary embellishment or hyperbole. The same can be said of the London they live in: dampened down, grim and self-contained. It is the cold concrete grey of a London winter without any technological or social distraction to bring it alive. Their London is a city without colour, and the monochrome atmosphere is broken only by the occasional flash of vivid red – Alice’s favourite colour – that provides a visceral injection of life into the proceedings, similar to that presented by the little girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List. Alice has a deep, compulsive attraction to red, yet it is never really explained, just another ellipsis left flapping in the breeze of one of the most open-ended novels I’ve read in a long time.

Dudley is originally a poet and it shows: her descriptions are exact and visually evocative, particularly when it comes to character. At one point an old women is described as having a face like “a fruit gone bad, folding and collapsing into itself.” This is Dudley’s greatest strength, but at times the similes and metaphors are piled too high, with the result that they lose a little of their lustre. In between stunning description there is a tendency for the prose to become a little repetitive, particularly in the third person passages – “Thom walks…”, “Thom kneels…”, “Thom whispers…”. In this sense her style generally calls to mind that of Doris Lessing or Nadine Gordimer; it is prickly and no-nonsense, more concerned with substance than the niceties of smooth flowing prose. A good editor could perhaps have rounded the edges, and cut some of the more flabby passages, but this is largely a matter of personal preference.

What I love about Ellipsis is its opacity. Information is released gradually, and in a way that tends to provoke more questions than answers. For a debut novelist Dudley shows impressive authorial confidence to leave so much open-ended. At times this can be frustrating, particularly in relation to Thom, who remains aloof for much of the first half and doesn’t fully emerge from his shell until the closing pages. He is often used a blank slate against which to compare Alice, who is the real star of the novel. She is a wonderfully flawed hero, easy to identify with, whose development arc is both compelling and cathartic.

Ellipsis is rewarding, psychologically complex, and disconcerting; Dudley has an often startling eye for description, and her portrayal of everyday disconnect will delight readers looking for something slightly different in the mystery-thriller genre.

Sparkling Books, April 2010, 9781907230103, 304pp

7 out of 10

Book Review: Tail of the Blue Bird - Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Read: March 2010
 
“Ei, wonders will never cease. They say nothing is other than what you see, but it is also true that nothing is other than what you don’t see.”
 
Kayo Odamtten is a young forensic pathologist working a dead-end job as a biochemical analyst in Accra. Educated in the UK, and with a few years working with the police in Birmingham under his belt, he is frustrated by the lack of opportunities in the force back home, by what he sees as their backward thinking and back-scratching ways. He has become Anglicised, perhaps without realising it, to such an extent that he still uses the name he adopted in England, Kayo, even now back amidst people who can pronounce his birth name. He is obsessive, convinced that science can solve every mystery, determined that no death will ever go unexplained in Ghana again. He is personally and professionally frustrated, an outsider at home.

When a pile of rotting remains, possibly human, is discovered in a hut in the small village of Sonokrom – population twelve families – deep in the Ghanaian hinterland, Kayo is dragged in to assist the police in their investigations. The ambitious and corrupt Inspector Donkor – whose idea of recruitment involves arresting and imprisoning him on conspiracy charges and persuading his employers to sever all ties – sends him off with the warning, “Don’t return until you have a good scientific theory and report – CSI-style.”

He does his best: taking samples for DNA testing, using blue merge goggles to spot patches of urine on the floor, creating a digital map of the crime scene on his laptop, typing and retyping his report. But there are mysteries here that science cannot explain: strange boys wandering in the forest, a flock of birds from far away, ghostly music in the night, strange curses as old as time itself.

Tail of the Blue Bird presents a familiar clash between the old and the new, between mythology and scientific rationalism, between tradition and the influx of modern ways of life.

Yet the manner of its telling is anything by archetypal.  Nii Ayikwei Parkes has utterly re-aligned the so-called ‘African novel’, discarding the post-colonial in preference of a more Ghana-centric approach. Its questing hero, Kayo, seeks not to explain Ghana to the outsider, but re-discover it for himself. He talks to the villagers, shows respect for their customs and hierarchy, shares palm wine in the local bar.  He may be detached, but is neither insensitive nor derisory, takes time to listen to the locals rather than seeking to impose science on the situation. And these specifics are representative of a wider paradigm shift. Ghanaian-English terms, spelt phonetically, are scattered liberally throughout the prose, without italics to differentiate or glossary to explain them. Indeed, it is English words such as cigarette and photo and Thursday that are italicised, reflecting the inherent focus of the novel.

Tail of the Blue Bird is a whodunit with a difference, focusing more on the ‘what’ than the ‘who’. It is short, perhaps too short, and the resolution is a little crammed into the end. But in Kayo it has an engaging character with a strong moral compass, and his journey towards re-discovering who he is reflective of an entire generation educated abroad who have to adapt to local facilities when they return. It would be easy to say that in doing so, Kayo discovers a higher truth, an appreciation of the world that science cannot understand. But that would be too glib. This isn’t a case of the traditional trumping the modern, or a romanticising of mythology as the embodiment of the Ghanaian people. It is about adaptation and re-appraisal. Each explanation, rather than explaining the other, only sheds more confusion on what may or may not have taken place. The boundaries between fact and fiction blur and in the end, Kayo has to accept that truth isn’t always the most important outcome.

In Tail of the Blue Bird Nii Ayikwei Parkes presents a fresh format for the ‘African’ novel and in doing so demonstrates just how western-centric our reading has become.

Jonathan Cape, 2009, 978-0224085743, 176pp

 7 out of 10

Case Histories - Kate Atkinson

Read: April 2009

Case Histories in one tweet-sized chunk.
Darkly comic and well characterised, Case Histories introduces Jackson Brodie as he seeks to bring order to the world one case at a time.

Jackson Brodie is a private investigator with a conscience. Some even say he's “the last good man left.” Recently divorced, with failing health, he accepts cases without concern for whether he will be paid, and spends long hours visiting with his motley assortment of clients. For him, life is an eternal balancing act between the lost and found, debits and credits in a great accountancy exercise in human suffering. He has morose tastes in music – Emmylou Harris, Trisha Yearwood, Gillian Welch – old singers who “understand pain.” He dreams of emigrating to a new life in France, of keeping his daughter Marlee safe from the horrors of the world. But none of this is going to happen, not while an old colonial relic like Binky Rain is calling him at all hours to help find her cats. And, on top of everything else, it appears that someone is trying to kill him...

Case Histories is a finely characterised detective novel in which three old, unsolved cases are resurrected and gradually come together thanks to Jackson's hard work and empathetic ability. It is an exciting, complex mystery. It is also darkly humorous, set in the completely ridiculous world of Cambridge where characters are overcome with libido on a drive to Diss, Italian teenagers on their bicycles cause traffic hazards, and everyone working in customer service seems to be Australian. Kate Atkinson brings a healthy dose of scepticism to her narrative, filling it with melodrama, absurdity, and a sense that everything is far too normal. Most notable of all, Case Histories is shot through with a kind of simple, human morality not often found in high-posturing literature. Money is worthless, time is irrelevant, all that seems to matter is doing ones duty and trying to help those who need it in any way possible. It is a joy to find a book with so little pretension.

The prose however is a little clunky. It is instructive rather than demonstrative, packed with redundant description. The authorial standpoint is too distant from the characters, standing back from the action and describing everything the character sees, thinks, and does. Many sentences begin “Jackson thought....,” or “Jackson felt...” or “It seemed to Jackson...,” instead of cutting out these redundant openings and getting straight to the point of describing what it is he actually thinks, feels and sees. I wanted to get out a nice thick-nibbed red pen and edit the whole book down into a more stylishly flowing pace.

However, I have talked to others who absolutely loved the prose and cannot understand these criticisms. The structure and pace of the novel is intricate, conversational, and enjoyable so perhaps these stylistic questions don't even matter. I guess it all comes down to a question of taste: I have always been concerned, above all else, with style and narrative flow, often to the detriment of other factors.

More to the point, these problems, if indeed they are problems, are largely overcome by the books many virtues. The characterisation is first rate. Each character is a complex entity, seeing the world through their own eyes and understanding the same events in slightly differing ways. They try to be good and successful, but cannot help but see the worst in themselves. Bravado is delightfully absent. They have that delightful ability not to be able to see the good in themselves. And sometimes their perceptions are flawed.

This all makes Case Histories fantastically ambiguous. There are big gaps in the plot where things happen which the reader is not told about, only left to surmise from what is not said. Case Histories is basically written as a series of snapshots of different conversations and ruminations, which interweave and overlap each other, gradually building a complex double (more like quintuple) helix of different lives lived in the face of extraordinary misfortune.

As Jackson stumbles between cases, seemingly unable to remain detached from the people he is working with, long kept secrets are divulged and characters begin to step out of the shade of history and live their lives completely once more. Perhaps things happen a little too easily, perhaps these long forgotten crimes fall into place a little too neatly, but that is not too much of a negative. The solutions are never as simple or obvious as they promise to be. And the point of Case Histories is that it is about looking at the people behind the crimes; their lives, their hopes and fears. Answers are reached, not by shouting or bullying, not through pressurising or bribing, but by sitting down quietly with those involved and talking to them. It is a thoroughly human book, full of morality and good intentions; of trying to be the best you can be even when that is not the person you ever expected you would become.


7 out of 10

True Murder - Yaba Badoe

True Murder is an enthralling debut which cracks and fizzes with an atmosphere of childhood. It is tense, excitable, fantastical, and all the time given to misconception, exaggeration, and drama. Ajuba is a young Ghanaian girl just starting out at an English boarding school. Her childhood has been fraught with chaos: her father’s promiscuity, the breakdown of her parents marriage, her mothers growing paranoia, escape from Ghana to London, her mother’s drug overdose. And now, having called the ambulance and saved her mother, Ajuba has been whisked away to live at a boarding school. It’s a lot for one child to go through.

Yet boarding school promises to offer her a period of normality. There are other girls her age, and she is a good student. But when Polly Venus, a Generation X preteen, full of attitude and bravado, arrives at the school, things become a whole lot more interesting. Soon Ajuba fallen under Polly’s spell and the two become inseparable. And when Polly invites Ajuba to come home with her for the weekend, Ajuba is delighted to find that the Venus’s are every bit as exuberant and passionate as their daughter. Soon she is spending all her time there, as though they are her surrogate family, so much more fun and loving than her real family.

But when the girls are playing in the attic one day, they find some bones wrapped in an old coat. Thinking they are those of a dead kitten, they call the RSPCA, only to be told that the bones are actually those of a baby. Already obsessed with the detectives of an American magazine serial True Murder, and with their wild imaginations in overdrive, the girls set out to unravel the mystery and solve the crime. But things are not as they seem; there are fault lines appearing in Venus household, Ajuba is troubled by her mothers absence, and the detective games are digging up mysteries that are better left unknown. As the summer draws to a close, all three mysteries come together, with tragic results.

Yaba Baoe is a consummate storyteller: the pace and guile with which she delivers this tragic tale of childhood fantasy gone wrong draws you in and surrounds your every sense. Already a successful filmmaker, Baoe writes with a cinematic eye for tension, and a full pallet of visual imagery. The characters come alive before you; with every turn of the page you anticipate something good, and get something better. And all the while, the tension is growing hotter. Something is about to snap…

True Murder is simply written, plot-based and enticing. It occupies that fine line between exciting and lyrical literary fiction, and mainstream popularity. I am not a big fan of childhood recollection fiction, but this is so well written and characterised that it is a sheer pleasure to read. It may not quite have the astounding gothic background or literary genius of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but there is something similar here. The prose is thick, it enfolds you in the action, you forget where you are and find time has passed without your notice.

Ajuba is a sympathetic, intriguing, and likable narrator and her friendship with double act with Polly completely steals the show. Yet there are another four or five very strong characters in their own rights, who think interesting and diverse thoughts, and who have their own issues and worries which they are trying to work out for themselves. At every point I felt present and a part of the action. In vacillating between a very English setting of the school and Ajuba’s magical, colourful, and exotic Ghanaian background, the reader feels her cross-cultural confusion. This is a novel of cultures colliding inside one girls mind, and the confusion that a young child can make of such big issues.

There are, however, problems with this novel. The strange and confusing tense shifts fail to build the tension as they intend; I am unsure how Polly’s family can afford their magnificent new house; the ending is a little confusing. But overall the plot is engrossing, and Ajuba is such an enthralling narrator that you do not notice anything outside the story taking place before your eyes. There are many layers of mystery, many different plot lines which you feel tugging you onwards toward their dramatic conclusions.

There will be few debut novels published in 2009 more accomplished and enjoyable as True Murder.

6.5 out of 10