Time's Long Ruin ~ Stephen Orr

I read this book as a selection from the ‘National Year of Reading’ list – maybe you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but I did, the cover picture is super cute.

In any case, I did not regret my choice: this was the South Australian entry, and it is a beauty. Told in retrospect by the main character Henry Page, still living in his childhood home, (where the floorboards ‘creak in exactly the same spot every time I go to make a cup of tea or take a pee’) it is the story of an outer-suburban community in the 1950’s, tragically to be torn apart by the disappearance of the three Riley children who were Henry’s best friends ‘…my only friends, really’.

It is in fact the story of the real-life Beaumont children who disappeared from Glenelg Beach in the 1960’s, a horrible mystery which remains unsolved; the drawn-out agony of that story, along with the kidnap and murder of 9-year-old Graeme Thorn after his parents won the lottery, are two traumatic events that are burned into my childhood memories.

Stephen Orr writes with deceptive simplicity, but within the easy-read style he builds characters of real depth, imperfect but likable, recognisably Australian. I just wanted to keep turning pages to follow the lives of Henry with his socially-limiting club foot, his loving policeman father and bitter, cruel-tongued mother, and those of their quirky neighbours.

By the time of the children’s disappearance, I found myself totally involved in the life of the Croydon community. The children had been allowed to take the tram to the beach without adult supervision, not at all unusual in Australia’s relatively innocent, crime-free 1950’s and early ‘60’s.

The tension of the mother, her anger at their lateness dissolving into disbelief, fear and guilt, made my neck ache.

The fact that the real-life mystery has never been solved does not detract from the overall quality of the story; the use of a fictional environment adds human context to the bare bones of police and coroner’s reports of one of Australia’s saddest crime mysteries.

Helen

Pygmy ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Pygmy is a diminutive 13 year old terrorist from a country/state that is never named, but which is likened to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and China.  This ‘country’ has arranged for several of its young ‘operatives’ to stay with host families in America as a kind of student program.  

The operative’s mission is code-named ‘Havoc’ (surprise surprise for a Chuck Palahniuk novel!!), and it is to take place at the National Science Fair where money tainted with a neurotoxin will be released and it is hoped that the money will be spread around until all the capitalists are killed.

 This story is told via Pygmy’s regular dispatches to his superiors, and is written in a drone-like pigeon English which at first is quite hard to read, but you do get into the rhythm of it.  As well as learning about Pygmy’s time in America you also find out about his formative years and his training leading up to the mission. Pygmy rarely mentions actual names, so his host family, the Cedars, become familiar to us as ‘Pig Dog Brother’, ‘Cat Sister’, ‘Cow Father’ and  ‘Chicken Mother’. Things look dire for America with such indoctrinated and well trained operatives, but things do go a little awry when Pygmy realises that deep down he does feel emotion and that strange feeling is actually fondness for his host ‘cat sister’.

Pygmy is a satire on Western, particularly American, consumerism and greed. It is certainly a very original novel, not just for the plotline but also in the way that it is written.  After reading the first chapter I debated whether to make my life a misery over the next few days or just forget it and move onto something else.  Luckily I decided to persevere and I read a very clever, shocking and funny novel.

I don’t recommend Palahniuk novels to people I know as he’s very confronting and not to everyone’s taste, a lot of readers I know would be offended by his work.  But, for the record, I thought this was a great novel though I think he has limited his readership because of the narrative voice.

Maxine

The Leftovers ~ Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta delivers a troubling story about how ordinary people react to extraordinary and inexplicable events, the power of family to hurt and to heal, and the ease with which faith can slide into fanaticism.

The Garvey family — Kevin, Laurie and their two children, Tom and Jill — are the Mapleton residents at the centre of Perrotta’s novel, which opens three years after a Rapture-like event has whisked millions of people off the face of the earth. Just how many millions Perrotta doesn’t specify, but the phones still work and Starbucks still dispenses coffee by the grande. Nor do all (or even most) of the missing qualify as Camping-style Christians; those raptured away include Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and the odd    alcoholic.

The Sudden Departure, which occurred one October 14, is never made remotely real — we’re told that various children and spouses just abruptly vanished into thin air — and laborious and unconvincing analogies to 9/11 are repeatedly hurled at the reader. We’re told that “the economy had gone into a tailspin after October 14th, with the stock market plunging and consumer spending falling off a cliff” and that makeshift memorials and missing-persons notices sprang up everywhere”.

The rapture’s failure to conform to biblical prophecy has driven some people over the edge. The Rev. Matt Jamison becomes chief among the rapture deniers of the remaining Mapleton population: “He wept frequently and kept up a running monologue about . . . how unfair it was that he’d missed the cut.” The minister’s response to this unfairness is to insist this wasn’t the real rapture, and to prove it with a newsletter full of scurrilous tittle-tattle about the disappeared.

 

Other survivors go over the edge in different ways. The Barefoot People (young Tom Garvey eventually becomes one) believe the proper response to the mass disappearances is to party down pretty much 24/7. There’s a Healing Hug movement, led by a guru named Holy Wayne whom Perrotta memorably characterizes as “that age-old scoundrel, the Horny Man of God.” The Huggers are  waiting for one of Holy Wayne’s teenage “brides” to deliver the “miracle child” who will, presumably, usher in a new age of cosmic grooviness.

Far more sinister is a martyrdom-seeking cult called the Guilty Remnant. Members must take a vow of silence, wear white and brandish lighted cigarettes every time they appear in public. “We Smoke to Proclaim Our Faith,” goes their mantra. The main jobs of Guilty Remnant members are to “watch” non-members — that is, stalk them — and to garner new devotees and wait for the end of the world. Laurie Garvey drifts somewhat aimlessly into this cult and then becomes subsumed by it. As “The Leftovers” winds to its almost foregone conclusion, the dismayed reader learns that smoking is the least ominous    sacrament practiced by her new soul mates.

Yet the novel isn’t completely bleak. In fact, we come to care about the characters deeply. Perrotta cuts quickly and cinematically between these story lines, deftly building tension as he immerses us in the characters’ daily lives and the ways that people deal with what they can’t understand.

Di

Blindness ~ Jose Saramago

I have been intending to write a review on this book for a few weeks now and I keep getting caught up in life and forgetting. Yesterday when I pulled up at the local supermarket I was transported back to Blindness. “The Doctor’s Wife”, the only sighted person in a sea of blind, hunting for food. It is for me the strongest visual from Blindness and such a sign of a great novel.

The first thing I love about Blindness is how much you care about the characters although you do not know a whole lot about them. They are not given names. “The Doctor” “The Girl with the Dark Glasses” etc, are only ever referred to as such.

Sitting at the traffic lights, a man is waiting for the lights to change. He looks up. He sees a bright white light and cries “I am blind”. He is “The First Blind Man” A passer-by on the street offers to take the man’s car and drive him home. He drops off “The First Blind Man” at his house to await the return of his wife. We stay with him, but later we find out the man who dropped him home stole his car… and soon after turned blind himself.

“The Wife of the First Blind Man” takes her husband to “The Doctor” he is perplexed and recommends more tests, before the night is out he has turned blind and so have the patients waiting in the waiting room along with “The First Blind Man”

This epidemic of white blindness spreads and the powers that be decide to put those who are blind along with anyone who has been in contact with them into a closed mental facility to be controlled by a branch of the army. They are separated into The Blind and The Contaminated.

I am fascinated by this post-apocalyptic style of novel. This situation of mass blindness asks a lot of humanity. When the food stops coming regularly and one ward of the facility decide to control the food in return for sex from the females of each ward, I am sickened but not surprised. This return to primal desires is brought up often in post-apocolytic novels. In King’s The Stand, a motorcycle gang block a road and capture those woman who try to cross. A blind man in The Day of the Triffids, captures a sighted woman and uses her as his sighted slave.

Would I, as a woman, be prepared to offer myself to these men in return for food for my husband? Would men who were not felons or mental patients in their normal life, turn into sexual devients because of the leadership of one inherently bad man? If I were blind, with no indication of sight returning would I even have the will to continue to live in conditions such as these? For some reason these questions fascinate me and Jose Saramago does not disappoint. The characters do not have huge amounts of back story, but you are with them every step of the way on their struggle.

Let it be noted that I read this as an audiobook – Wikipedia says “Like most works by Saramago, the novel contains many long, breathless sentences in which commas take the place of periods. The lack of quotation marks around dialogue means that the speakers’ identities (or the fact that dialogue is occurring) may not be immediately apparent to the reader.” The audiobook however was wonderfully narrated by Jonathan Davis and never felt like a translation. This book was originally publishes in Portuguese and there has also been a movie adaptation which, kids permitting, I will sit down and watch tonight and share my thoughts with you later.

If anyone is out there I’d really love some suggestions of similarly themed books to read. Earth Abides, The Stand, Day of the Triffids, The Road, Children of the Dust… I’d also love to know of any outstanding audiobooks. Jonathan Davis narrated The Earth Abides also and I thought that was fantastic. A good narrator really does make all the difference.

Tanya

Postscript: 

Well I did get to watch the movie adaption of Blindness. I watched it in 2 or 3 sittings which is the only way I ever get to watch movies and it wasn’t bad….

I am not usually a fan of Julianne Moore but she was good as the “Doctor’s wife”. As is usual with most movie adaptations there were important segments missed and it was definitely not as good as the book but considering that all but one of the cast have to play a blind person I think it was terrifically well acted and scripted.

Give it a go if you like the novel but don’t watch it instead of reading the novel!

Tanya