Two things drew me to Rose Tremain’s latest novel, “Trespass.” One was the fact that it was set in the Cévennes mountains of the Central Massif (south central France, a region I know well), and the second is that it was described as being “very dark.” I love France and have spent many happy years there, and I love well-written “dark” books.

“Trespass” revolves around five middle aged characters: two French siblings, Audrun and Aramon, who share a secret past; an English garden designer and writer, Veronica, and her lover, a mediocre watercolorist, Kitty; and Veronica’s brother, Anthony Verey, a London antiques dealer in his middle sixties, who has come to France to try to salvage what’s left of his life. While Audrun and Aramon are more or less estranged, Veronica and Anthony have remained very close.

Aramon Lunel is an alcoholic (he has an over-fondness for pastis, “the” drink of the South of France), who is in poor health. His deceased father, Serge, left him a wonderful stone mas, the Mas Lunel, which Aramon hopes to sell to Anthony for 475,000 euros. The only problem is the fact that Audrun, who was left the surrounding woodland, has built a squalid modern bungalow on the boundary that separates her land from Aramon’s, thus destroying the otherwise perfect view and destroying one of Anthony’s requirements for any property he might buy – aesthetic beauty (solitude is the other requirement). Audrun, who steadfastly refuses to rebuild deeper in the forest, out of sight of the Mas Lunel, alienates Anthony, Aramon, and all the local estate agents, who feel they cannot sell the Mas Lunel until the dispute between brother and sister is settled. In the meantime, Anthony’s continued presence in Veronica’s and Kitty’s home is driving a wedge between the two women as Veronica chooses, with increasing frequency, to take Anthony’s side over Kitty’s in any dispute.

Although the Mas Lunel can definitely be restored to its former idyllic beauty, Aramon has not kept it up. Tremain writes, "...thousands of Cévenol people had seemed to forget their role as caretakers of the land. Diseases came to the trees. The vine terraces crumbled. The rivers silted up. And nobody seemed to notice or care." No, Aramon doesn’t care. He only cares about getting out. He has no love for the Mas Lunel or the land around it.

Audrun, however, living in her shabby bungalow, can’t bear to leave the land she loves despite the fact that the Mas Lunel holds many bitter memories for her. In fact, possessing the mas is the one thing that keeps Audrun going from day-to-day.

As would be expected, all of the main characters in “Trespass” have either trespassed on the rights of others or are planning to do so. Kitty, who realizes that the deep bond between Anthony and Veronica was formed long before she and Veronica even met struggles with the once carefree relationship she and her lover shared, a relationship that is now facing destruction from outside forces. "Doesn’t every love need to create for itself its own protected space? And if so, why don’t lovers understand better the damage trespass can do?"

Unlike Anthony and Veronica, Audrun and Aramon do not have the same kind of close bond. Though they both adored their mother, Bernadette, their father was abusive, and he encouraged Aramon to follow his example. Both brother and sister struggle to come to terms with their poisoned past, though they struggle in different ways.

Tremain does a good job of conjuring up the menace that lingers in the Cévenol no matter how bright the sun or how warm the temperature. I can’t really say I felt like I was in those forbidding and dangerous hills, but maybe that’s "just me." I can say that from the very first page, which couldn’t fail to pull any reader in, I knew that these characters were heading toward something terrible, though I wasn’t sure what. Tremain, thankfully, manages to sustain the suspense until the very last page, and even after we find out who the "bad guy" is and what he or she’s done, we don’t know if he or she will get away with it. The book reminded me a little of the works of Thomas Hardy – characters at the mercy of fate, people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and strangely, “Trespass,” which was longlisted for 2010’s Man Booker Prize, reminds me a little of an earlier Man Booker winner, John Banville’s “The Sea,” though the setting and subject matter are entirely different.

Along the way, Tremain gives us a history lesson of the Cévennes. She tells us about the decline of the once thriving silk industry, the poor working conditions Audrun once endured in the underwear factory in Ruasse, the way the Cévenol people never hoped for more than what they already had. But it’s the sense of isolation, of ever-present menace that really captures the spirit of the area and adds to the darkness of this book. The woods of holm oak and beech and chestnut and pine are lovely, but Tremain never lets us forget that its loveliness is fraught with danger.

While I could feel sympathy for some of the characters in “Trespass,” I really didn’t like any of them, other than Mélodie, a little girl we meet in the first chapter and then don’t see again for about two hundred pages or so. I’m not surprised. They aren’t, by any means, likable people. They seem either blind to their faults or dismissive of them. But they did seem real. They were one hundred percent believable and so is their story.

The only quibble I have with this book is a maddening habit of Tremain’s to write "and now he, Anthony" or "now that she, Kitty...." when we know who’s being written about. The reference is distracting. Even though grammatically correct, this habit really got on my nerves and it reminded me of something a lesser writer would do, not someone of Tremain’s status.

“Trespass” isn’t my favorite Rose Tremain book, by any stretch. I don’t think it can hold a candle to the magnificent “Music and Silence,” which I read years ago and still think about often, but other than the above grammatical quibble, I really can’t point to any particular fault, though something holds it back from greatness.

In the end, “Trespass” is an engrossing and unsettling story, and by Tremain’s standards, it’s a dark one. Her characters are in search of redemption from their trespasses, and some of them are more active about pursuing that redemption than others. Is it worth it? Well, Tremain wisely leaves that for her readers to decide.

4.5/5

I bought Diane Setterfield’s bestseller, “The Thirteenth Tale” on impulse, when I saw it lying on a bargain table in the grocery store. I usually avoid bestsellers. Hype steers me away from books more often that it steers me towards them, and I just didn’t think the writing would be the kind of writing I’d like. However, the promise of a “Gothic” tale was encouraging, and I did love the cover art.

In “The Thirteenth Tale,” author Vida Winter has a story to tell, and she chooses the very unlikely person of Margaret Lea to tell it to.

Margaret is a young woman who seems to have no life outside of her room, the six hours she devotes to reading each night, and her work in her father’s antiquarian bookstore. She does write an occasional short biography, but she’s no Kitty Kelly. Margaret’s interest “has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans; people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their deaths, have sunk into profound obscurity.”

Raised primarily by her book loving father rather than by her mother, Margaret, herself becomes so involved in books, letters, diaries, etc. that she won’t read unless she’s sitting down. When she was seven, she tells us she sat on a high wall to read “The Water Babies,” and “was so seduced by the descriptions of the underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles…plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. Reading can be dangerous.”

When Margaret receives a letter out of the blue from the reclusive bestselling author, Vida Winter (“fifty-six books in fifty-six years”) asking Margaret to write Vida’s life story, a story she has told to no one, Margaret is beyond surprised. Besides the fact that Margaret lacks the necessary qualifications to write Vida Winter’s life story, Margaret, herself, has never even read one of Vida Winter’s books. (Margaret’s much more attuned to 19th century literature, instead, and especially “Jane Eyre.”) She does remember having once seen a poster of Vida Winter, and Margaret remembers the “extravagant beauty…the eyes…an inhuman green, the green of glass in a church window, or of emeralds or of boiled sweets.” She remembers thinking: this woman “does not have a soul.” (Though Setterfield never gives us even an inkling of why Margaret would feel that way.)

At first, Margaret is determined to refuse the offer to be Vida Winter’s biographer. Vida Winter is simply too famous. After all, twenty-two people more qualified than Margaret have already tried to write Vida Winter’s story and all twenty-two failed, but one night, curious and unable to sleep, she gets up to make a pot of tea, creeps down to her father’s shop and removes his copy of Vida’s debut novel, “Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation,” a rewriting of beloved children’s fairy tales. She reads voraciously, with gloves on, so the oil from her skin does not tarnish the cover of the book. The thirteenth tale, however, is missing, and as Margaret’s father explains to her the next day, his copy is a rare one, a first edition, published before it was discovered that the capricious Vida had left the closing tale out of the book. Subsequent copies of the book were simply called “Tales of Change and Desperation,” but Vida’s fans have long wondered what the elusive thirteenth tale revolved around.

Now intrigued herself, Margaret makes the trip to Vida’s Yorkshire home. She finds the famous Vida Winter ill and weakening, but ready to tell Margaret the truth after having spun so many fanciful tales to every reporter and biographer who had the courage to set foot on her doorstep, for Vida Winter, you see, found the tales she spun more interesting than the truth.

Now, however, it’s become vitally important to Vida to tell her story – her real story – to someone. For reasons that will remain unclear until near the book’s end, Vida has chosen Margaret for a very special reason.

Vida’s story takes Margaret – and the reader – back to Angelfield. “Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself.” We don’t get to know much about the village, but the house is a decrepit Yorkshire manor house, and the family, while possessing money and property, has no aristocratic titles. And for those of you looking for strange and dysfunctional families, look no further. The Angelfields have it all – adultery, incest, inbreeding, abandoned babies, out-of-wedlock births, dark, tortured secrets, mental and physical illness, violence, outright madness, and maybe even a ghost. The only people who live at Angelfield, other than the family are the elderly housekeeper, known as “the Missus” and the level-headed John Digence, better known as “John-the-dig,” the gardener, who comes from a family whose members have tended the Angelfield topiary garden for generations.

Although this is Margaret Lea’s story, Vida Winter comes to dominate the book. It’s obvious that Setterfield wanted to pay homage to the Charlotte Brontë novel, “Jane Eyre,” which plays a large part in “The Thirteenth Tale,” however, paying homage to that novel required Setterfield to concentrate on strong female characters. The men in the story are either mad or, like John-the-dig, relegated to a minor role, and even the females aren’t quite well developed enough. We very rarely get their inner thoughts. Setterfield keeps us at arm’s length, never really letting us get to know them.

Though the elements of “The Thirteenth Tale” recall the best of the classics, and though Setterfield’s a good storyteller, she’s no Brontë, not yet anyway. While she does a good job of dropping clues to the resolution of her story here and there, the plot, once we reach the end, is still filled with several gaping holes. (I don’t mean unanswered questions or things left unresolved; I mean plot holes.) And while there’s nothing really wrong with Setterfield’s prose, it’s often vague and lacks descriptive qualities that would have brought her story to life.

The switches in person from “we” to “I” are handled well, but they’re a plot device that’s very transparent, even to Margaret. The whole thing was technically "okay," but it gave the tale a false quality that it really never overcame. When we finally reach the end, we find part of the story has been built on deception. Some readers are going to love this, while others are going to shake their heads in dismay. It’s impossible to predict how any particular reader will feel.

”The Thirteenth Tale” is definitely a plot driven novel, and I don’t regret the two days I spent reading it. It was comfy, interesting, but in the end, it wasn’t at all memorable. Though Setterfield, as already mentioned, is a good storyteller, her tale felt like so many tales that have been told before, and sadly, told far better. There was no originality, no adventure, no sense of coming upon something new.

I also thought Setterfield tried too hard to give us a happy ending. In fact, she gave us three or four endings, some happy and some not. She obviously didn’t take the good advice of her writing mentors when they said “when you come to the end, stop.” Instead of stopping, Setterfield carried on. And on. And on. And after the denouement, there’s an Epilogue. More story tacked on. I think the book could have been greatly improved if Setterfield had left a little more for her readers to ponder.

In the end, “The Thirteenth Tale” is better than most debut novels, though it’s certainly not anything stellar. It’s a great book to take on a long train ride, a car ride (if you’re a passenger), a long plane trip, or just to whittle away several hours on a cold winter’s day. Though the ending can be guessed, it can’t be guessed early enough to spoil the read. And Setterfield gives us a little bonus in the character of a charming giant with the improbable name of Aurelius.

When you’re struggling for something to read that doesn’t require you to think too much, when you just want a good story that harkens back to the classics, “The Thirteenth Tale” might fill the bill quite nicely.

3/5

It’s hard for me to say whether Kiran Desai’s second novel, the 2006 Man Booker winner, "The Inheritance of Loss," is panoramic or intimate. On one hand, it stretches from northern India to New York City to England, yet on the other, it focuses so closely on the lives of its primary characters that it can sometimes seem almost claustrophobic. Focusing on the very poor and the middle class, this beautifully written and haunting novel lets its readers know how, even in the midst of change, there are people who long for the “old ways,” who desire not change, but stability and security. People who want to wake up in the morning and know that things are still the same.

Most of "The Inheritance of Loss" takes place in 1986 and is set in the northeastern Himalayas, “where India blurred into Bhutan and Sikkim,” where “it had always been a messy map.” The book focuses, in part, on Sai, a seventeen-year-old orphan, who now lives with her grandfather, a retired judge, a “leftover” of the Indian Civil Service, in a damp and crumbling house called Cho Oyu in the village of Kalimpong at the foot of the snowy massif of Mount Kangchenjunga. Sai is cared for by her grandfather’s talkative and (sometimes) optimistic cook, a man who focuses all his hopes and dreams on his own son, Biju, who he calls “the luckiest boy in the world” after he’s granted a US visa and goes to New York.

Conflict in this novel begins when Sai’s Nepali math tutor, Gyan, and the man with whom Sai has fallen in love, joins a Nepalese insurgent movement. In fact, the book opens with some of these insurgents breaking into Sai’s grandfather’s house to steal whatever they find useful, in this case, food, cold cream, Grand Marnier, and Sai’s grandfather’s old rifles. Although this is a painful inciting incident in an overall melancholy book, Desai does add a bit of humor to the escapade of the robbery in the form of the judge’s dog’s reaction:

“Mutt began to do what she always did when she met strangers: she turned a furiously wagging bottom to the intruders and looked around from behind, smiling, conveying both shyness and hope.”

The judge, however, is deeply humiliated and even has to serve tea to the intruders who stole his possessions. Both Sai and the cook are so embarrassed and afraid for him that they avert their gazes.

This humor in the midst of melancholy, found throughout, elevates this book beyond a merely “good” book to one that’s truly “great” as do many other elements, however, it’s melancholy that drives this book’s narrative, it’s melancholy that forms its soul, and it’s melancholy that readers will remember. Even the secondary characters, such as Sai’s neighbors, Swiss Father Booty and his alcoholic friend, Uncle Potty are melancholic, victims, of a sort, trapped in a world that no longer exists.

After setting up her story, Desai then drops back to quieter moments and shows us how the lives of Gyan and Sai and her grandfather, along with the cook and his son, Biju intertwine. The book roams from Kalimpong to New York City to England in the 1940s, where the judge’s experience of studying at Cambridge mirrors Biju’s experience in New York in that both approach their situations filled with idealism, and both are ground down by the experience of having to live life in a culture that perceives them – wrongly, of course – as only second class citizens.

Though many see the theme of "The Inheritance of Loss" as exile and displacement, I saw it as exile and displacement through the inability to communicate. After all, some of the characters that never leave Kalimpong end up alone and adrift. As this book shows clearly, one need not leave one’s home or place of birth in order to be exiled. The Inheritance of Loss is filled with failings, from the failing of a marriage to the failing of a “new life,” to the failing of a phone call.

I know people who felt this book contained too many story threads. I think it all depends on personal preference. Some people prefer to follow only one character through an entire book, no matter how long, while others prefer books that are more panoramic in scope. Desai does give us much backstory and many flashbacks. The structure of the novel is sophisticated; there are even flashbacks within flashbacks. Some readers will enjoy this, while others will find themselves impatient to get back to the story of Sai and Gyan and to the story of Biju. And it is true that Desai takes her time in letting her story unfold. For example, we learn about Gyan in Chapter One, but it’s twelve more chapters before Gyan actually enters the book. Eventually, though, Desai ties everything together and she does a wonderful job doing so.

One of the things I loved most about this book was the assured, confident, and beautiful writing. Desai is a keen observer of life and all its details, and she expresses her observations beautifully. This is but one example: “The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju's ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else.” And this: “The flame cast a mosaic of shiny orange across the cook's face, and his top half grew hot, but a mean gust tortured his arthritic knees.”

I’ve never lived in a small village in northern India, but I certainly felt like I had after reading this beautiful book. I thought Desai no doubt captured the time period perfectly. Some of the characters – like Father Booty and Uncle Potty – seemed to want to live in a colonial time warp, where nothing changes, while others, such as Gyan, were dreaming of the changes a political upheaval could bring. All in all, I thought the characters, both those who resisted change and those who were fighting for it, were brilliantly realized.

Desai’s first novel, "Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard" was endorsed by Salman Rushdie and her writing, at the time, was compared to his. In truth, that book, which centers around a misfit named Sampath Chawla, who crawls up into the branches of a guava tree and won’t come down and in doing so achieves celebrity as a hermit, does contain many “Rushdie like” influences, though the writing is no where near as “furious” as Rushdie’s tends to be. "The Inheritance of Loss" is a totally different book altogether. Personally, I didn’t see a lot of “Rushdie like” influences in this second novel, which, in my opinion, is far superior to Desai’s first, though there are a few – strings of adjectives with no commas to separate them, occasional playfulness, and great energy – being the most prominent. "The Inheritance of Loss" is a quieter and more melancholy book that Rushdie usually writes ("The Moor’s Last Sigh" might be the exception), and the prose, while still gorgeous, is more spare than Rushdie’s. In this book, I think Desai shares more with V.S. Naipaul than she does with Rushdie, though most of the time, I try to avoid comparisons as they always seems unfair. Though writers sometimes do resemble other writers, each writer is unique.

You may not love "The Inheritance of Loss" due to its excessive melancholy (this is definitely not a “feel good” book), but, even though some may not like the story or agree with it, I don’t think any serious reader is going to deny the book is wonderfully written. In the end, "The Inheritance of Loss" is a luminous book, and, while not, perhaps, heartwarming, it is profoundly human in its promise and in its generosity.

5/5

Note: I am not East Indian. Perhaps if I were, I would see this book in a different light. As it is, I can only evaluate it from the perspective of a Westerner.

Beginning in the late 1830s, and set over seven seasons, Adam Foulds’ Booker shortlisted novel, “The Quickening Maze” tells the intertwined stories of the “Northamptonshire poet,” John Clare, the son of a farmer; Alfred Tennyson, the man who would go on to become Britain’s Poet Laureate; and the Reverend Matthew Allen, MD, the man who owned High Beach Private Asylum in Essex’s Epping Forest, where both Clare and Tennyson’s brother, Septimus, were patients.

Although Clare’s nature poetry was acclaimed in his young adulthood, as time went on, his literary style fell out of favor, and what money he did make went to feed his alcoholism. When “The Quickening Maze” opens, Tennyson has just arrived at High Beach. High Beach was, in the mid-19th century, quite a progressive and humane institution. When first institutionalized, Clare, now rejected by both his rural friends and London high society, and feeling his psyche fractured by this split, often imagines himself to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron or on his more rambunctious days, Jack Randall the Boxer, and he still retains some clarity of thought as he remembers the days when he and his poetry were more in favor.

Tennyson lived close by High Beach in order to make frequent visits to his brother, who isn’t “mad” like Clare, but suffers from intense melancholia, which today, we would call depression. (In this book, however “melancholia” seems exactly the right word to use.) In fact, Tennyson’s entire family is rather melancholic in nature, and Tennyson, himself is portrayed as rather brooding, underappreciated, and in constant need of money.

The need for money is a subplot that runs through this novel. Dr. Allen, who has a history of incarceration for debt, becomes convinced that the new industrial age will produce a high demand for domestic furniture and church fittings, and he’s devised a steam engine-driven device he calls the Pyroglyph that will mass-produce decorative woodcarvings. He prevails upon Tennyson to invest 8,000 pounds in the device, a vast amount of money in that day and age, especially considering the fact that Tennyson had yet to become popular and was, in fact, at the time worried about the bad reviews his work was receiving. Allen was more of a charismatic optimist, and in 1841 wrote to Tennyson that the orders would soon be flooding in. By early 1843, however, the story was far different.

While Allen wasn’t very good with his moneymaking schemes, he fared better as a humane and genuinely caring doctor. He tried to help, if not cure, his patients by talking to them and by assigning them therapeutic physical tasks. At High Beach, patients were only locked up if absolutely necessary. In fact, the asylum was divided into two sections, one for the dangerous patients who would cause harm to themselves and to others and the other for less severe cases.

Much of the story centers around Allen’s efforts to combine his professional and private life, his efforts to escape his debt-ridden past (through the Pyroglyph), and his difficult relationship with his own brother, Oswald. Much of the tragedy of “The Quickening Maze” lies in Allen’s sheer determination to change his bad luck and his utter failure to do so.

All is not utter misery in this novel, however. A subplot involving Dr. Allen’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Hannah and Tennyson is rather lighthearted and often comedic, though at its core, it, too, is sad. Hannah, dreading “the life with linens, the dreary, comfortable, tepid life,” longs to be noticed in her own right, as any girl her age would. “It can be a little difficult to command attention when surrounded by lunatics,” she says. She dreams of romance and weddings, and sets her sights on the unlikely Tennyson, imagining a life with him to be “books and animals and invented games.” He’s an unlikely would-be suitor for a girl Hannah’s age, though. Unlikely because at the time of his visit to High Beach he’s “sinking into the grief that will make him famous” and also mourning the death of his young friend, Arthur Hallam and his (Tennyson’s) inability to commemorate that death as he wishes to. (He will return home to write “In Memoriam.”) As a result, Tennyson scarcely notices Hannah, who manages to convince herself that she’s desperately in love with the nearsighted, balding, and sometimes-unwashed poet.

Perhaps Hannah’s best friend, Annabella, is part of the reason Hannah is ready to “settle” on Tennyson. Annabella’s beauty eclipsed Hannah’s like the sun eclipses the moon, or at least outshines it. As Hannah says, “It aligned men, stiffened their backs, knocked their hats up from their heads.” Poor Hannah. Foulds really makes us feel for her having to compete with someone as gorgeous as that. And though she might be only a peripheral character, it’s Hannah who embodies this book’s principle theme. When she finally moves on (it’s not a spoiler, we all know Tennyson did not marry a “Hannah Allen”) she thinks “after so much nothing at all, life was finally happening, but not at all as she’d imagined.” It’s just one simple sentence, but in it is embodied the thrust of the entire book – the nature of self, and the fact that life moves on for all of us, but almost never as we expected, and seldom as we’d hoped it would, and that our sanity depends on our acceptance of this fact.

Writing about people who actually lived is one of the most difficult tasks a writer can give himself. “Real” people, people who actually lived, can seem forced and wooden when compared to entirely fictional people the writer can manipulate in any way he chooses. Obviously, the success of “The Quickening Maze” depends on Foulds’ voice, on his success in capturing the historical as well as the invented, and Foulds does a wonderful job in bringing Allen, Clare, and Tennyson to life and in making the reader care. We get the idea that he’s truly captured the essence of each man. He writes lyrically, and he writes meticulously. His writing is precise and dense and never vague, and he has the poet’s keen eye for detail.

Though Foulds does a wonderful job writing about those who really lived and recreating their lives, it’s when writing about the “mad” that Foulds is at his best. Clare, himself is drawn with particular sensitivity, but there’s also Margaret, another inmate at High Beach, an anorexic, who imagines herself to be holy and even has a vision of an angel in the forest:

“The wind separated into thumps, into wing beats. An angel. An angel there in front of her. Tears fell like petals from her face. It stopped in front of her. Settling, its wings made a chittering sound. It reached out with its beautiful hands to steady itself in the mortal world, touching leaves, touching branches, and left stains of brightness where it touched.”

If that isn’t gorgeous writing, nothing is.

“The Quickening Maze” is impressionistic, and so is Foulds’ beautiful prose. He can say in one sentence what it takes other, lesser writers paragraphs to tell us.

We get the best of both worlds with Foulds. “The Quickening Maze” is a shimmering, stylish, poetic book, but it’s not a book that sacrifices plot and substance to style. There’s plenty to anticipate in this novel, and we become totally involved with its characters – real and invented – and we feel what they feel, as much as we are able to do so.

I think this is either going to your “type” of book or isn’t. I don’t think there will be a lot of middle ground. Needless to say, it’s definitely my kind of book. It’s intense, intelligent, sophisticated, and beautifully strange. To Foulds’ enormous credit, he never portrays madness as an exalted state of literary enlightenment, as so many other writers have done. Although this book is lofty and lyrical and poetic, it never backs away from the truth about madness, and it never allows its reader to do so, either.

Near the book’s end, Clare is sitting among the band of Gypsies, with whom he so identifies. Sitting there:

“...he saw a tree lying on its side, barkless, stripped white, ghost-glimmering through the others…He pitied it, felt suddenly that he was it, lying there undefended, its grain tightening in the breeze.”

Though Clare pities the tree, to Foulds’ enormous credit, we don’t pity Clare. Instead, we understand him. We understand how each life is lived at the edge of madness, how one traumatic event could plunge any one of us into never ending darkness.

“The Quickening Maze” is a gorgeous book, a rare gem, polished to perfection. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

5/5

One might think that a book titled “The Gardens of Kyoto” would be set in Japan, but such is not the case with Kate Walbert’s hauntingly beautiful debut novel. Instead, this lovely book wends its way from a brick mansion in Baltimore, Maryland to a hotel on Paris’ Rive Gauche, to a military hospital on Long Island, to a women’s college in suburban Philadelphia. Along the way, it makes stops to reveal “hidden” characters to the reader, fascinating people all, but people whose lives, at least in relation to the book’s narrator’s, are ephemeral, people whose lives blur through grief or tragedy or fantasy, people who may or may not be “real” to anyone but our narrator, people who may not be real even to themselves.

“The Gardens of Kyoto” begins with a deceptively simple sentence: “I had a cousin, Randall, killed on Iwo Jima. Have I told you?” The book, however, is complicated, structurally sophisticated, and ephemeral. The gardens in the title are a reference to Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji Zen gardens, probably constructed in the late 15th century, and consisting of an arrangement of fifteen rocks on raked, white pebbles, situated so that only fourteen are visible at any one time, from any vantage point. (In Buddhism, fifteen designates enlightenment, and presumably, one would have to be enlightened in order to see the fifteenth rock.

Walbert has chosen to tell her story within a frame, which leaves her free to roam the past as she chooses, and create a book in which all is never exactly what it seems. The book’s narrator, Ellen, the youngest of three sisters, is a middle-aged English teacher when she utters that simple opening line, but as a young teenager, she was a shy, sensitive, dreamy girl who lived for her annual Easter visits to her cousin, Randall in Maryland.

Randall is a bookish and intellectually curious young man, a few years older than Ellen, and like Ellen, sensitive and quiet. He lives with his father, an elderly, retired judge, who spends his days closeted in his library, researching a biography of Jonathan Edwards. Randall is obsessed with memories of his deceased mother, and he enjoys showing Ellen secret rooms in his father’s house that were used to smuggle slaves to the North via the Underground Railroad. The young impressionable Ellen becomes totally infatuated with Randall, and according to her, their relationship is cemented by the fact that both of them have bright red hair. Ellen, in fact, becomes so taken with Randall that her brief association with her beloved cousin will color every relationship she has throughout the rest of her life.

We know, of course, that Randall is eventually sent to fight in WWII and that he doesn’t survive the war. (This is not a spoiler; as mentioned above, it’s revealed in the first sentence of the book.) In fact, one of the book’s early set pieces takes place in a diner in which Ellen is waiting with Randall and several other soldiers for a train that will take many of them away from their loved ones forever.

After learning of Randall’s presumed death on Iwo Jima (his body is never found), his father sends Ellen a package of Randall’s “treasures” that contains his (Randall’s) diary as well as his book, “The Gardens of Kyoto.” It is through Randall’s diary and his beloved book about Japan’s famous gardens that Ellen and the reader are able to piece together the history of Randall’s short life, and in so doing, learn about Ellen’s. Slowly, Randall takes on another role, not cousin and not friend, in Ellen’s life.

As Ellen details her relationship with Randall for her own daughter, the narrative is colored with both grief and loss. We know how much Randall meant to Ellen; we’ve already come to like him ourselves; and we know he is one of the soldiers who will not return. Ellen doesn’t deny this fact, even to herself.

As Ellen continues to relate her story, we learn how she and others like her felt about coming of age in the 1950s. Certain things, taken for granted (or not taken for granted, but acknowledged as not to be swept under the figurative rug) today, were simply not tolerated in the era immediately following WWII. One was rebellion, something one of Ellen’s sisters displays during an otherwise “normal” and “loving” Thanksgiving Day dinner. Domestic abuse was another, along with the other things one preferred not to deal with. Unwed pregnancies were taboo, as was suicide and the madness to which some of the soldiers in WWII and Korea were driven. The emotional devastation of war is a constant theme running through “The Gardens of Kyoto,” and it affects Randall’s father, Sterling, Ellen’s sister, Rita and her husband, Roger, Ellen, herself, and Lt. Henry Rock, a handsome young man who falls in love with the already “attached” Daphne, one of Ellen’s friends, and with whom Ellen, herself falls instantly in love.

One might assume that a book detailing so much tragedy and violence would become “weighty” and perhaps even melodramatic. Walberg, however, writes such restrained prose, with such a light touch that for the most part, the book remains delicate and lyrical, and because of its restraint, all the more chilling.

”The Gardens of Kyoto” is a rich, full book, with wonderfully developed, imperfect characters and beautifully developed themes. Is it perfect? No, it’s not. At times, Walbert relies too much on epistolary gimmicks to advance her plot than she does on her own considerable powers as a writer. Besides the diary and book that are given to Ellen by Sterling, Randall’s father, there’s the note from glamorous Aunt Ruby to Randall that reveals a long buried family secret; there’s the letter that Randall steals from a locked box in his father’s desk; there are the invented letters from his sweetheart the lieutenant reads out loud in the evening to try to boost the morale of his men; and then there are the bloodstained letters culled from the corpses in the trenches (only letters free from stains were sent on to the families of deceased soldiers to minimize the families’ pain). And in a book that’s remarkable for its lovely nuanced understatement, Ellen’s deliberate staining of Henry’s letters with her own blood is a bit too much. And given the fact that the title of the book is the name of a Japanese rock garden, it’s a little heavy handed that Henry’s surname just happens to be “Rock.” Fortunately, these minor jarring notes don’t harm the beauty or the power of this book. I’m going to guess that some readers will even like them, and even those who don’t will be willing to forgive.

In setting down her story, Ellen blurs the lines of fantasy and reality. Eventually, the reader has to question which events in the book really happened and which are only products of Ellen’s wishful thinking.

The writing in “The Gardens of Kyoto” is gorgeous. Except for the few instances of the overuse of epistolary devices mentioned above, this is a beautiful and beautifully understated book. The prose is poetic and lyrical; the sentences are, for the most part, long, detailed, and almost as multilayered as the book. It was a joy to read this book for the prose alone. And though the structure and themes are “heavy” and complicated, the book never feels overwrought. Instead, it has an airy, weightless quality that I very much admired.

In the end, “The Gardens of Kyoto,” while taking place primarily in the US and revolving around American characters, expresses a profoundly Japanese view that “truth,” like the gardens of Ryoan-ji, is subjective and depends solely on the viewer’s vantage point.

I thought this was an extraordinary book – extraordinary in its finely drawn characters, in the scope of its plot and theme, and in the understatement and beauty of its poetic prose.

It’s far too little known and read.

4.5/5

Room, by Emma Donoghue is narrated by a young boy, Jack, who has just “celebrated” his fifth birthday. For reasons you learn pretty quickly in the book, Jack has never known a human being other than his mother, who he calls “Ma.”

I have to admit, I’ve never been fond of books narrated by children, but Room, for me, was especially odious. “Ma” has created characters out of all the objects in “Room” and Jack refers to them as though they are real, living, breathing persons. There’s “Wardrobe” and “Rug” and “Plant” and “Meltedy Spoon.” One page of this is bad enough, but an entire book? It took a lot of determination for me to finish the thing. Here is Jack describing a typical day in "Room":

We have thousands of things to do every morning, like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back on her saucer on Dresser.... I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that’s nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus."

Well, a paragraph of that here and there might have worked, but a whole half of a book? Not on your life. And this is a kid who can sing along to Eminem and Woody Guthrie music videos. He knows the latest dances. He listens to people speak on TV. His own mother, the only person with whom he converses, speaks normally. He uses words like “rappelling” and “hippopotami” with ease. Heck, he even knows more about the fall of the Berlin Wall than many Germans. So what’s with the almost unintelligible baby talk? I know he’s only five, but other than his horrendous speech, he seems to be a very precocious five. And please. How many rundowns of “Dora the Explorer” or “Spongebob Squarepants” can one reader take without wanting to throw the book across the room?

The story of Room is split into two parts, the first part occurring in “Room” and the second part occurring “Outside." The transition from "Room" to "Outside" is, to put it mildly, totally ludicrous. For a kid who doesn’t even believe the outside world exists, to do what Jack did is beyond belief.

Once we realize the basic premise of "Room," one would think it would take on a particularly sinister quality. Instead, it’s painfully boring and slow going and almost totally lacking in suspense. Because Donoghue confines her point of view, at least in the first half of the book, to Jack, the insight we get is painfully mundane, and well, boring. The second half feels forced and shallow and contrived.

Some people have made the remark that Donoghue captures perfectly the voice of a young child. I don’t think she does. However, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that Donoghue does capture a five-year-old’s speech pattern perfectly. How many books written by five-year-olds do you find engrossing and enlightening? My bet is none. Five-year-olds can be cute in small doses and of course we love them and want the best for them, but let’s be truthful, they really aren’t very insightful or interesting for long periods of time, and neither is Jack.

I also felt Donoghue glossed over the difficult transition that takes place at the about the book's midpoint. I felt the second half of the book lacked depth just as the first half did, though in a different way. For reasons known only to Donoghue, she chose not to explore the rich store of human emotions she could have mined. There was a curious disconnect between the intense trauma “Ma” and Jack would have had to suffer and the blitheness with which Donoghue relates their story.

And what of the unnatural bond formed between Jack and “Ma” while in “Room?” Yes, I realize that two people in their situation are going to form a deep bond, but once that situation changes, then some separation and setting of boundaries is going to be necessary in order to promote mental and emotional health. But Donoghue never explores this facet of “Ma’s” and Jack’s life, though clearly, she realized it exists. At one point, Jack says of himself, “Maybe I’m a human, but I’m a me-and-Ma as well.” That outlook might have served him well in “Room” but it’s a dangerous one to cultivate in “Outside.”

Donoghue took a real risk with Room and I applaud her for her courage. I think this is going to be a very polarizing book – people will probably either love it or hate it. They will feel it worked wonderfully or they will feel it didn’t work at all. Obviously, for me, it didn’t work at all. I thought the premise was wonderful, but I felt Donoghue failed to deliver. I honestly can’t understand how this book even made the Booker longlist, let alone the shortlist. I expect more depth and insight from a Booker nominated work. Do I think Donoghue was a lazy storyteller with Room? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I do think she capitalized on gimmicks and topicality, and I was very disappointed. In the end, the whole thing felt like a cheap trick to me, and after reading it, I felt like I had to go take a long, hot shower.

1/5