The Hired Man, by Aminatta Forna

Purchased from the Book Depository

Fiction set in the Balkans has a special attraction for me. The region is where West meets East — that certainly carries cultural interest but all too often during the last 1,000 years it has also meant devastating conflict, even genocide. Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, published in 1945 and the reason he won the Nobel Prize in 1961, remains one of the most impressive novels that I have ever read (sorry, pre-blog so no review here). The bridge itself is the book’s central character; as control of it moves from East to West, or vice versa, life changes dramatically. For those who live there each change means the wait for the next political reversal has already begun.

And while I have never been to the area, I’ll confess to some personal ties. Sarajevo was host to the 1984 Winter Olympic Games — since my hometown of Calgary was hosting the 1988 version, we paid even more attention than usual. That meant it was even more heart-breaking to witness the pointless and ruthless destruction of Sarajevo in the latest Balkan conflict only a few years later. On the upbeat side, Mrs. KfC is a rambler and some years after peace returned she and her friends went trekking in Croatia in 2008 — she found it incredibly beautiful and would return in a heartbeat.

All of which left me looking forward to Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man with much interest. The present time of the novel is 2007, virtually the same as Mrs. KfC’s visit, and a period of “peace” in the troubled area. It is set in the town of Gost (fictional, as far as I can tell), some miles inland from the sea, but a crossroads for both north-south and east-west routes, so a conflict site when the inevitable troubles do flare up. Forna foreshadows all of that in her opening paragraphs:

At the time of writing I am forty-six years old. My name is Duro Kolak.

Laura came to Gost in the last week of July. I was the first to see her the morning she drove into town. From the hillside you have a view of the road, one of the three that lead into town: the first comes direct from the north, the second and third from the south-east and the south-west respectively. The car was on the road that comes from the south-west, from the coast. An early sun had burned off most of the mist and on a day like this the deer might be encouraged to leave the woods and come down the hill, so I’d turned back to fetch my rifle even though it was not the season to hunt.

Duro has called Gost home for all of his life — even when he was living on the coast, it was still “home”. Later on in the narrative, he will tell Laura that the meaning of “gost” lies somewhere between “visitor” and “guest”. Laura is English and this is her first visit to the “blue” house, next door to Duro’s. Her husband has bought the place which she has never seen as a summer retreat for the family (property on the coast has already soared in value now that peace is here but inland places are a bargain) and she has arrived with her teenage son and daughter to begin the process of bringing it back up to snuff. In the Balkans, not all “occupations” start with the military.

Having observed the arrival of newcomers, Duro immediately heads into town for a coffee at the Zodijak, the bar that is the social media center of Gost, to discover what is up. If Laura and children represent the beginning of the external plot of The Hired Man, the introduction to the Zodijak supplies us with the internal one:

Outside the Zodijak the chairs and tables were already out. I nodded at a couple of the guys — one of them worked in the garage next door. Fabjan had hired a new girl for the summer, who smiled at all the customers, which here is as disconcerting as if she walked through the streets singing. She told me Fabjan was on his way in. I ordered a coffee. Someone else called for a Karlovačko. We sat in silence and watched people passing in the street.

It was close to nine by the time Fabjan showed up. Fabjan drives a custom-sprayed BMW, meaning nobody else has one in the same colour and so he doesn’t need to bother to lock it. He was wearing a new suede jacket, something like the colour of butter, and freshly laundered jeans, faded and tight around the balls. Fabjan’s put on a few kilos over the years and the waistband of his jeans cut into his gut. He wore a year-round tan and the beginning of jowls.

The crossroads of conflict, like Gost, always have their exploitative survivors who somehow figure out who is currently on top and, in the short term, profitably align themselves with them. That’s Fabjan — whatever group might be currently pulling the strings in Gost, they are drinking at the Zodijak and Fabjan is quick to serve (and equally quick to switch sides when the inevitable tides turn).

Duro soon introduces himself to his neighbor and equally quickly becomes “the hired man” of the title — he is a freelance builder, but he also has known the blue house all his life. When Laura’s 15-year-daughter Grace discovers a mosaic hidden beneath the exterior stucco of the house and an even more interesting one in a filled-in pool in the yard, Duro knows just where to go to locate the missing tiles for the restoration project that she undertakes.

Inevitably, he becomes attracted to Laura, but, to Forna’s credit, not in the way that you might think. It may have been thirty years ago, but Duro’s first love, Anka, lived in the blue house. It was that love that introduced him to the harsh world of Croatian politics and he has paid for it ever since. Just as those ruling the Balkans regularly change, the residents of the blue house also change — but that does not mean that the house does not carry the history of its previous occupants with it. And the arrival of an attractive new owner awakens Duro’s memories; the wounds incurred then have left scars that fester continuously in the present.

Forna chooses to tell her story in the form of Duro’s diary, begun the day Laura and children arrived. While that device stretches reality, it is a handy one because it allows the novel to judiciously mix the present with the past. It gives nothing away to say that the past becomes ever more prominent as the book progresses. The occupiers of towns like Gost may change, but people like Duro, Fabjan and others stay — and the conflicts that are set up with the allegiances they choose under occupation remain long after the occupiers have left.

I’ll admit that a concern that I had when I started The Hired Man was the prospect of “appropriation of Balkan voice” or something like that. Aminatta Forna was born in Glasgow, raised in Sierra Leone and Britain and spent periods of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. That certainly establishes personal experience in living in areas characterized by conflict, but raises the question of whether Croatia might be a site of convenience more than anything else.

That concern was soon dispelled — Forna’s interest is not in choosing a side (or sides) or even an insider’s look at Croatia’s violent history, but rather portraying what happens to the people who live inside that kind of volatile political world. Her last novel, The Memory of Love explored some similar themes, but it was set in Sierra Leone, much more familiar turf for the author and that showed to both advantage and disadvantage.

From this reader’s perspective, locating this latest novel in an area that she had to “learn” rather than relying on personal past experience enabled the writer to concentrate even more on how these kinds of devastating conflict affect those who are ordinary residents. Yes, she does the Balkans well — even more impressive is the way that she explores the dimensions and impacts of violent, irrational conflict on the people who have to live through it and still live with the consequences afterwards. I liked The Memory of Love a lot, but this novel soars to a much higher level — Duro, Laura and many of the other characters come to life in a way that few authors manage to achieve. It is as good a “human” novel set in the Balkan area of conflict as The Bridge on the Drina is an “historical” one.

KfC’s 2013 Project: Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood

Personal first edition

Margaret Atwood is undoubtedly one of Canada’s best known and most prolific authors. The third volume in her Oryx and Crake trilogy, Maddaddam, is due for publication later this year — it will be novel number fourteen on her resume, published forty-four years after The Edible Woman marked her introduction as a novelist in 1969. At that time, she was already a well-regarded poet — she has continued to publish poetry, children’s books, commentary and criticism throughout her career.

As one who has read her first 10 novels (she and I parted ways with Oryx and Crake), I would argue that there are three quite distinct groupings of Atwood novels:

The early “feminist” books, starting with The Edible Woman up to Bodily Harm (1981), including Surfacing, her second novel, published in 1972. “Feminist” is perhaps too lazy a label — the books do feature troubled, youngish female characters who are facing some difficult choices, not all of their own making. The male characters in the books are definitely part of the problem, not the solution, and society in general seems stacked against the heroines.

The “historical” novels, starting with Cat’s Eye (1988) and extending through to The Blind Assassin (2000). These four (The Robber Bride and Alias Grace are the other two) are probably her best known and most critically recognized — they all featured on Booker, Orange, Governor-General’s and Giller Prize short lists. While feminism is still present, they have much broader plots and Atwood doesn’t hesitate to introduce her political leanings (she has been an outspoken activist throughout her career) into her fiction.

The “dystopian” novels, presaged with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and fully developed in the Oryx and Crake trilogy beginning in 2003. My distaste for dystopian fiction is profound — I read, but did not much like, The Handmaid’s Tale, and have not even sampled the two most recent works.

So before even looking at Surfacing, I should note that this is an Atwood work that may not be familiar — or even representative — to some of her most avid fans. It may well be the least read of her 14 novels (although it is still in print) and at first glance seems an unlikely choice for KfC’s 2013 project of rereading a dozen Canadian authors who influenced me. I’ll extend this introduction further by saying that it does have particular personal significance for me. Atwood also published a critical work in 1972, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, arguing in that volume that most Canadian novels published to that date were brutal stories of how individuals coped with a hostile natural environment. I had some experience with early Canadian fiction at that time and was doing some book reviewing for the Calgary Herald — I remember to this day how a scheduled 45-minute interview with Atwood turned into a two-and-a-half hour conversation. While I have never been a fan of her public persona, I can assure you that face-to-face she was a fascinating, warm, informative subject — a positive assessment that may well have influenced my first response to this novel.

Indeed, Surfacing itself is as good an example as one can find of the transition from the fiction that Atwood described in Survival to the kind of work that has proved more representative of Canadian writing since the 1970s. To be sure, every publishing season still features some “frontier” works and the challenges that hostile natural elements present, but that has becomes just one of the streams, not the all-pervasive, central one.

Surfacing definitely has an element of “nature-coping” to it. The first-person narrator is an illustrator who lives in urban Canada (Toronto is suggested, but not named) and who is returning to an island in the rocky Canadian Shield country of Quebec where she was raised, accompanied by her boyfriend Joe and a couple of married friends, David and Anna. She has received word from old friends of her parents that her elderly father (who has retreated, hermit-like, to the rugged island cabin in his retirement) has gone missing — she has persuaded Joe, David and Anna to come along on a two-day trip to see what might have happened.

Atwood wastes no time in letting the reader know that the conflict between frontier and urban environments will be a feature of the book. It opens:

I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hire. But this is still near the city limits; we didn’t go through, it’s swelled enough to have a bypass, that’s success.

I never thought of it as a city but as the last or first outpost depending on which way we were going, an accumulation of sheds and boxes and one main street with a movie theatre, the itz, the oyal, red R burnt out, and two restaurants which served identical grey hamburger steaks plastered with mud gravy and canned peas, watery and pallid as fisheyes, and French fries bleary with lard. Order a poached egg, my mother said, you can tell if it’s fresh by the edges.

That “survival” conflict will never disappear from the novel — the narrator’s three fellow travelers are all urban people, neophytes in the remote environment who can’t even paddle a canoe, so she is their guide into this remote world. Without giving too much away, as the narrator discovers more about herself the theme becomes even more pervasive and dominates the closing chapters of the book.

Along the way, however, we get some of Atwood’s more contemporary observations. She’s never been known as a great supporter of America and that thread also gets introduced in the opening chapter:

Now we’re passing the turnoff to the pit the Americans hollowed out. From here it looks like an innocent hill, spruce-covered, but the thick power lines running into the forest give it away. I heard they’d left, maybe that was a ruse, they could easily still be living in there, the generals in concrete bunkers and the ordinary soldiers in underground apartment buildings where the lights burn all the time. There’s no way of checking because we aren’t allowed in. The city invited them to stay, they were good for business, they drank a lot.

“That’s where the rockets are,” I say. Were. I don’t correct it.

David says “Bloody fascist pig Yanks,” as though he’s commenting on the weather.

And finally, there is the gender tension. Readily-available birth control may have introduced a version of sexual freedom in the 1960s but, in many ways (particularly among pseudo-lefties like these four), it has only increased the dominance of men over women. The narrator and Joe may live and sleep together back in the city, but they are anything but a happy couple. David and Anna may be married, but in no way does that result in Anna being David’s equal. And “sexual freedom” and the remote location supply the excuse for some four-way, male-dominated “play”.

Of the four novels that I have re-read so far in this project, I would have to say that Surfacing has aged least well. Part of that is certainly my own aging: the tension/abuse between the female and male characters had a present-day reality to it when I first read this novel which simply is only a distant memory now. The anti-American story line seems embarrassingly naïve and simplistic, given current reality. The conflict with a hostile environment (and Atwood does get into some natural spirituality in that thread) is the strongest element but even that did not lead to new insights for me on this read.

Having said all that, I would say that readers who respond enthusiastically to Atwood’s dystopian works (and there certainly are many of them) might well want to pick up Surfacing for some early indications of where she will be heading in her later writing career. The latter part of the book may have landed flat with me — I suspect there is much more there for readers who find the “naturalism” of Oryx and Crake rewarding.

As for KfC’s 2013 project, it will be taking a minor detour in the next two months. The first four books have featured well-known Canadian novelists (Robertson Davies, Carol Shields and Mordecai Richler in addition to Atwood) and the last six, while perhaps not so well known to contemporary readers, do have international reputations. My May read is Hugh Hood’s White Figure, White Ground — Hood was my favorite novelist in the 1970s and I would rate him as one of Canada’s most unjustly overlooked authors. And June features Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man, a Prairie novel that I suspect few visitors here have even heard of. If you have found the first four authors of any interest at all, stay tuned — Hood and Kroetsch may not be as well known, but they are well worth reading.

Life after Life, by Kate Atkinson

‘Time isn’t circular,’ she said to Dr Kellet. ‘It’s like a … palimpsest.’

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘That sounds vexing.’

‘And memories are sometimes in the future.’

Review copy courtesy Doubleday Canada

While that quote comes from late in the novel, it is a concise summary of the approach to time that is the most distinctive feature of author Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life. She occasionally shortens it to deja vu or even references reincarnation but the notion of a palimpsest offering a number of overlaid potential images — of past, present and future — is the most useful, particularly since as the book proceeds (in normal chronology, it must be said) the author stops at each stage to peel back the palimpsest and offer a version of each alternative.

To that idea of time, I’d additionally offer a KfC-adjusted platitude by way of summarizing how the narrative is developed: Two steps forward (ending in death). One step back. Restart with three steps forward (death averted).

Let’s illustrate that with the three versions of the birth of Ursula Todd, the character who lives “life after life” in the novel.

An icy rush of air, a freezing slipstream on the newly exposed skin. She is, with no warning, outside the inside and the familiar wet, tropical world has suddenly evaporated. Exposed to the elements. A prawn peeled, a nut shelled.

No breath. All the world come down to this. One breath.

Little lungs, like dragonfly wings failing to inflate in the foreign atmosphere. No wind in the strangled pipe. The buzzing of a thousand bees in the tiny curled pearl of an ear.

Panic. The drowning girl, the falling bird.

That’s version one. The author takes a step back and moves on with version two. Sylvie Todd is giving birth, assisted only by Bridget, the 14-year-old scullery maid, since a winter snow storm has prevented Dr. Fellowes from reaching Fox Corner, the Todd’s country house.

‘Oh, ma’am,’ Bridget cried suddenly, ‘she’s all blue, so she is.’

‘A girl?’

‘The cord’s wrapped around her neck. Oh, Mary, Mother of God. She’s been strangled, the poor wee thing.’

And, finally, version three — Dr Fellowes has successfully fought his way through the storm:

‘She would have died from the cord around her neck. I arrived at Fox Corner in the nick of time. Literally.’ Dr Fellowes held up his surgical scissors for Sylvie’s admiration. They were small and neat and their sharp points curved upwards at the end. ‘Snip, snip,’ he said. Sylvie made a mental note, a small, vague one, given her exhaustion and the circumstances of it, to buy just such a pair of scissors, in case of similar emergency. (Unlikely it was true.) Or a knife, a good sharp knife to be carried on one’s person at all times, like the robber-girl in The Snow Queen.

Only a few pages into the novel and already the heroine has died twice — give Atkinson full marks for audacity, if nothing else, and move on with version three as the new starting point. Ursula makes it to her fifth summer “without further mishap” and the Todd family is on holiday in Cornwall. She and her sister Pamela play at jumping the waves, until a huge wave crests over them and they get caught in the undertow. Ursula feels herself “being pulled under, deeper and deeper”, unable to touch bottom, thrashing around waiting for someone to come.

No one came. And there was only water. Water and more water. Her helpless little heart was beating wildly, a bird trapped in her chest. A thousand bees buzzed in the curled pearl of her ear. No breath. A drowning child, a bird dropped from the sky.

Darkness fell.

Take a step back and start again. The two go wave-jumping and get caught in the undertow, observed by a painter who is including them in the water colour landscape he is working on.

Sylvie was startled to look up from her book and see a man, a stranger, walking towards her along the sand with one of her girls tucked under each arm, as if he was carrying geese or chickens. The girls were sopping wet and tearful. ‘Went out a bit too far,’ the man said. ‘But they’ll be fine.’

They treated their rescuer, a Mr Winton, a clerk (‘senior’) to tea and cakes in a hotel that overlooked the sea. ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Sylvie said. ‘You have ruined your boots.’

‘It was nothing,’ Mr Winton said modestly.

‘Oh, no, it was most definitely something‘, Sylvie said.

I’ve included a lot of quotes to illustrate that point about the palimpsest-like nature of time — and the re-starting of the narrative thread — because author Atkinson never abandons the device in the novel (indeed, the title itself is the most concise summary possible of the pervading theme of the volume). From the advance publicity and early reviews, I was certainly aware of it before I started the book and will admit that it raised a significant level of trepidation — all too often that is the kind of gimmick to which I don’t respond well at all.

And, indeed, in the first section of the book my unease did not disappear. Slowly but surely, however, I came to the realization that it was no gimmick — while it may have seemed repetitive in those early incidents (note the way the author repeats phrases), Atkinson needs to get her reader accustomed to that warped notion of time and action before she starts showing just how powerful a force it can be when she gets to the serious story threads (perhaps “options” is a better term) of her novel.

Ursula’s birth occurs in 1910 and the timeline for the novel extends into the 1960s which means it includes both the Great War and World War II. Her first exposure to the looming WWII comes during her “grand” tour of Europe as a young adult in the mid-1930s (not so “grand” — she spends time as a language tutor in Munich, Bologna and Nancy rather than Berlin, Florence and Paris) and experiences the rise of Nazism. She will spend the war years in London working for the War Office and serving as a warden during the Blitz — for Atkinson to adequately portray the “options” for Ursula’s life (or deaths) in those years, she needs a reader who is familiar with her device of the potential end of her character, the step back and the resumption of a story line in which she survives.

(I am giving those latter sections somewhat short shrift by emphasizing the war experience. By that time, the book has a completely developed cast of characters (not the least of which is Ursula’s family, a dashing aunt, close women friends, an assortment of lovers, fellow sufferers of the Blitz, Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler — yes, those last two do feature in Ursula’s story), all of whom also experience these alternative versions of what happens. Ursula’s favorite dessert during her German experiences is Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte and it is an apt culinary metaphor for the many distinct literary flavors that the author delivers to the reader.)

I am comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty in novels — actually, I love it — and once I became attuned to the rhthym of Atkinson’s device Life after Life was a genuine treat. Each stage explores a number of options about “what might have been”; while the author needs to choose one for her story to continue, that doesn’t mean that the reader doesn’t pause to consider what it might mean if one of the alternatives was, in fact, the end.

I can predict comfortably that Life after Life will be a book club favorite since those ambiguities are the kind of things beloved of in book club discussions (my Canadian review copy has a Chatelaine Book Club sticker attached). It is early in the prize season but the novel already is starting to receive attention from more “literary” sources — this week it made the short list for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly Orange Prize) and Booker watchers are touting it as a possible longlist contender.

However it fares on those two fronts, I’d just say it is a damn fine read.

The Hungry Ghosts, by Shyam Selvadurai

Review copy courtesy Doubleday Canada

The “hungry ghost” that supplies the title for Shyam Selvadurai’s new novel is the peréthaya, a creature that appears in a number of Buddhist and Sri Lankan myths. Its presence is over-arching in the novel with versions affecting all three generations represented in the story so it is worth quoting the author’s introduction, as drawn from the memory of Shivan Rassiah, the narrator and central character of the book:

My mother recently told me that she still dreams of her husband, the same dream she has had since his death. In it, she encounters him at my grandmother’s gate or standing by a pillar on the verandah or sometimes outside the market. He is reborn as a peréthaya, a hungry ghost, with stork-like limbs and an enormous belly that he must prop up with his hands. The yellowed flesh of his face is seared to his skull, his mouth no larger than the eye of a needle, so he can never satisfy his hunger. He just stands, staring at her, caught between worlds. For years, the anguish of that dream would continue into her day, because my mother believed she had caused his death by her anger and there was no way to beg his forgiveness, or at least reach some companionable peace with him.

In Sri Lankan myth, a person is reborn a peréthaya because, during his human life, he desired too much — hence the large stomach that can never be filled through the tiny mouth. The peréthayas that appear to us are always our ancestors, and it is our duty to free them from their sufferings by feeding Buddhist monks and transferring the merit of that deed to our dead relatives.

In their own way, the three generations represented in the novel all “desire too much” and each time they reach out to satisfy that desire (or hope) they only achieve more frustration and agony, adding a personal requirement for atonement to those of their ancestors which already are part of their burden. While the novel ranges over decades of time, The Hungry Ghost portrays a series of attempts by people trying to make things better (the hungry ghost’s desire to eat) and only making things worse with each effort.

Shivan’s grandmother’s issues come with her material success. Daya owns a substantial portfolio of rental properties in Colombo ranging from mansions rented to American diplomats (who pay the rent in dollars deposited to her already substantial offshore account in London) to slum dwelllings which she “polices” with the help of a hired goon, since legally evicting tenants who are behind in the rent is not an option in Sri Lanka. The enterprise is successful enough that she lives in a substantial villa herself — and she has a Bentley, with driver, on hand when it comes time to tour the properties.

The novel opens with Shivan’s memory of his thirteenth birthday when his grandmother takes him out in the Bentley — he hopes they are headed to a shop to buy the bicycle he desires but it turns out to be a tour of the properties. Amassing and maintaining the empire has involved a number of dodgy acts for Daya, with the resulting guilt, and her first step in atonement is to promise that she will hand it all on to her grandson. That is not enough, of course, and as the novel moves on more and more of her time will be devoted to spending her time and assets on building shrines at the temple she attends.

The asset bequest is skipping a generation because another of Daya’s failings is that she has rejected her daughter Hema, Shivan’s mother. As a teenager, Hema seemed destined for success, ranking first in the Senior School Certificate results. That produced a brief harmony with her mother who decided Hema should head to medical school after her Higher School Certificate exams. The reconciliation began to fall apart when Hema panicked and failed those exams. It broke down completely when her response was to take up with and marry a Tamil — since the family is Sinhalese, that effectively put the couple at the centre of the very violent sectarian disputes that plagued Sri Lanka for the latter half of the twentieth century.

Daya’s response was to cut the couple off completely. When Hema’s husband dies suddenly she is forced to ask Daya for help — her mother responds by supplying a residence but nothing more. Nothing more, that is, until Shivan’s thirteenth birthday when she unveils her plan to leave him her estate. She still will have nothing to do with her daughter, but begins to take over her grandson’s life — his willing acceptance is the price that is exacted to continue support for his mother and sister.

Shivan is uncomfortable with this from the start and a few years later, aware that Canada has loosened the rules and is accepting refugees because of Sri Lanka’s troubles, he gets the appropriate documents. Despite Hema’s love of her job with a local newspaper, she agrees that escaping her mother needs to be a priority and the three head off to set up a new life in Toronto.

Shivan’s looming peréthayas now include both his grandmother and mother — the self-discovery that he is gay adds a personal set of challenges, ones that his grandmother in particular makes worse. Life in Toronto proves to be a predictable problem for the three and, despite Shivan’s and his sister Renu’s apparent success at adapting, a part of all of them remains back in Sri Lanka.

All these memories and back stories are provoked by the impending trip of Hema and Shivan to Sri Lanka to fetch Daya (who has suffered a series of damaging strokes) and bring her to Toronto for her final years. Each chapter of the novel opens with Shivan getting ready for the trip — and getting distracted by the memories that it raises, each one of which seems to have resulted in more, not less, anguish.

The Hungry Ghosts is Selvadurai’s (long-awaited) third adult novel, following on the very well-received Funny Boy (short-listed for the inaugural Giller Prize in 1994) and Cinnamon Gardens (1998). I liked both of those books, so can be safely slotted in the “long-awaiting” category when it comes to this one.

Alas, despite the fifteen year wait, I felt like I had read this book before — twice, actually, since both Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens have many of the same themes as this novel. In all three, the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict, and its atrocities, are ever present — understandable, since Selvadurai has a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father and alternates his time between Canada and Sri Lanka, so that conflict cannot be overlooked. All three are equally concerned with generational and class conflict. And both this novel and Funny Boy add the element of a central character who has to fit the discovery of his gay sexual identity into the over-riding conflicts around him.

What The Hungry Ghosts has that neither of the other two do is the story line of Sri Lankan immigrants living in Toronto and how those coming of age in this new country cope with that new challenge (both Shivan and Renu in this book, since they respond very differently). For this reader, it was the best part of The Hungry Ghosts and I would have welcomed even more. For those who have not read Selvadurai, however, it might be wiser to hunt up a copy of Funny Boy — memory says that the author developed his other over-lapping themes better in that debut novel.

I’ll Go To Bed At Noon, by Gerard Woodward

Purchased at Indigo.ca

I’ll Go To Bed At Noon is volume two of Gerard Woodward’s trilogy chronicling the life of the Jones family. It is very much a continuation of the first volume, August, so a brief reminder of my thoughts about that novel seems in order.

For the most part, Aldous and Colette Jones (and their children) are the definition of ordinary — he is a North London school teacher, she a stay-at-home wife. They have two children when August opens; two more arrive during the 15-year span of that novel. Author Woodward’s speciality, however, is to occasionally add very distinct elements of the absurd to the story to give it both spice and depth. For example, the first novel opens with Aldous at the end of a four-day bicycle trip from London to Wales: he is scouting for a location for the family’s summer holiday and much of the “action” of the novel will take place at the farm in Llanygwynfa that he discovers to which the family will return each summer. That trip of discovery is by no means the only strange departure from the ordinary in the Jones’ family life, but it serves as a handy warning of a device the author will employ as the book progresses.

Another important example of Woodward’s device is the glue-sniffing addiction that Colette develops one summer while on holiday: attracted by the smell of the glue from a bicycle tyre repair kit, she samples it and soon develops a full-scale habit that influences much of what occurs in the latter half of the novel.

I’ll Go To Bed At Noon opens some years after the first novel ended, but some things have not changed. Indeed, self-medication/substance abuse is a trait that will effect not only most of the Joneses as the novel progresses, it is a character flaw shared by many members of their extended family as well, a near universal response to the boredom of commonness or the stresses of even minor disruptions to the established routine. The normal Jones’ approach to a crisis is to see if it can be drunk away.

Colette and Aldous are preparing to attend the funeral of her sister-in-law as this novel begins, but Woodward wastes no time in introducing that element. Colette has abandoned her glue-sniffing habit, but replaced it with an equally strong addiction to Gold Label Barley Wine (for North American readers, “barley wine” is the English equivalent of malt liquor, a high alcohol beer):

Colette poured the Gold Label into a glass, where it fizzed half-heartedly, her second of the day. Colette had taken to this tipple recently, initially as a sedative, to reinforce the ever-weakening effect of her sleeping pills. She would drink two or three glasses in the evening, then take four or five Nembutals (the recommended dose was two), which would despatch her to a deep, dreamless sleep for eight hours. The problem was that awakening was a long, slow, painful struggle. She woke as if from a pit of glue, always with a pounding headache, the only cure for which, she soon found, was a morning glass of barley wine. One of those and she was near instantly awake and fresh. A sedative in the evening, a pick-me-up in the morning. Barley wine was her wonder-drink.

The substance may have changed, but Colette is as much an abuser as ever. And the Jones’ eldest son, Janus, is an apple that has fallen not far from the family tree. His parents are not sure if he will turn up for the impending funeral (probably not) but they are certainly hoping not. Both recall his drunken performance a few years earlier at a cousin’s wedding: “…the trampled-on wedding cake, the shattered bouquets, the drenched, sobbing bridesmaids.”

Janus’ on-going problems will feature prominently in the novel, as will those of the husband of the woman who is being buried, Colette’s brother Janus Brian (the namesake for her son — the Joneses retroactively added his middle name to distinguish the two). While the death of his wife will send Janus Brian into his own alcoholism, he had his own distinctive trait even earlier: despite living only a mile away, the only time he ever visited Colette was to announce the imminence of his own death:

It had happened several times, usually as a result of reading some health article or other, that Janus Brian would discover symptoms in himself of a fatal disease. Now she couldn’t even remember what it had been. An innocent pimple, wart, or pedunculated polyp. A benign confusion of cells. A temporary thinning of the blood. As with most hypochondriacs, however, Janus Brian remained annoyingly free of real illness.

That excerpt comes from our introduction to Janus Brian — like his namesake, his story will also be explored in detail. Indeed, it offers an example of why I find Woodward a difficult author to review: while there is continuing story line in the three novels of his that I have read (Nourishment, a non-Jones novel, is the other), the author develops them by extensively exploring sub-plots, using these almost like building blocks to construct the complete work.

Janus and Janus Brian’s lives are only a couple of those Woodward uses here: readers also will experience the woes of another of Colette’s brothers (who, no surprise, also turns into an alcoholic), not to mention the stories of her three other children.

I thoroughly enjoyed both August and Nourishment — as well as this novel — but that endorsement comes with a caveat. To appreciate Woodward, the reader must be willing to go with his flow. For me, all of the Joneses (both nuclear and extended family) became characters of interest and, despite their refuge in substance abuse, some empathy. I can understand, however, why some would find them grating — and if they grate as individuals, some of the author’s unlikely plot twists could become downright annoying. Woodward is definitely not for everyone, but he hits the right chords with me.

I’d still say, however, that you need to read August before taking on I’ll Go To Bed At Noon. It is a much less intense book so developing an affinity for the characters is a much easier process — there are times in this novel, when that reservoir of affinity is a prerequisite to appreciating what is happening here. If you didn’t like August, or even had a “meh” response to it, I’d give this book a miss. On the other hand, if you came from that novel with at least some empathy for the Joneses (especially Colette), Woodward continues to build on it here. The details that I have cited make it seem more depressing than it is — Woodward has a lot of humor to him, but it isn’t the kind that can easily be captured in a review.

As a fan, I’ll certainly be reading volume three of the trilogy (A Curious Earth) but I suspect it will likely be some months before I feel up to the challenge — like Gold Label Barley Wine, my experience says Woodward is best experienced with a disciplined approach to consumption.

Mount Pleasant, by Don Gillmor

Review copy courtesy Random House Canada

Here are just a few of the reasons why I approached Mount Pleasant with some anticipation:

– I have an acknowledged affinity for “city” novels, fiction set in neighborhoods of the world’s memorable cities where the urban environment is every bit as important to the book as its characters or plot. Teju Cole’s Open City with its student-level view of contemporary Manhattan would be one example recently reviewed here; Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility is an earlier era, upper-class version of the same city. Novels about London over the centuries would fill a good-sized library and new volumes appear every year — John Lanchester’s Capital and Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo are upscale and downmarket sketches of that metropolis published in 2012. (Note: All four of those reviews appeared here in the last 13 months. Perhaps I should amend “acknowledged affinity” to “near obsession”?)

Toronto may not rank with New York and London on the world scale, but as a Canadian it has always held the same attraction as a setting for fiction. Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (sorry — last read by KfC pre-blog, so no review here) and Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown (review coming later this year) are Canadian classics set in historical working-class Toronto neighborhoods. Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Ghosted offers a compelling portrait of the city’s contemporary underbelly; Michael Helm’s Cities of Refuge explores some of the darker aspects of Toronto’s reputation as a welcoming destination for immigrants and refugees.

I was born and raised in Kitchener, just an hour down the road from Toronto, and have been visiting the city throughout my life. Mrs. KfC and I lived there for a couple of years (2003-2005) on Ardwold Gate in tony Forest Hill. Until a Depression era fire destroyed it, Ardwold was the estate of the Eaton family (scions of Canada’s now-shuttered department store empire).

The Eaton family crypt

There is an arc of upper-class neighborhoods that stretches across the “top” of downtown Toronto, with Rosedale and Moore Park on its east, Forest Hill on the west. Mount Pleasant Cemetery sits like a keystone in that arc — the 200 acres set aside in 1876 are now the final resting place of more than 170,000 ranging from Prime Ministers (William Lyon Mackenzie King) to pianists (Glenn Gould) to plutocrats and philanthropists (that same Eaton family, the Masseys and the Westons all have crypts there). The cemetery is well-known to anyone in Toronto since a major north-south thoroughfare of the same name passes through it.

The cemetery supplies the title for this novel and Don Gillmor has the credentials to suggest he is an apt person to be giving it a role in fiction. Mount Pleasant is only his second work of fiction but he is well-known for his non-fiction writing, particularly the award-winning, two-volume Canada: A People’s History

Mount Pleasant Cemetery serves the same function as keystone in this novel that it physically does in that upper-class arc that stretches across Toronto. Harry Salter was born and raised in Rosedale — his elderly mother still lives in the mansion where he spent his childhood. Harry and his wife live just south of the arc in one of the working class neighborhoods featured in Ondaatje and Garner’s novels — neighborhoods that have now become gentrified, so they paid more than $500,000 for the fixer-upper they call home.

And Harry’s father, Dale, who made his fortune as a Bay Street investment advisor, will die of cancer early on in the novel and be buried in Mount Pleasant, cementing that keystone in the story of Harry’s life.

As the novel opens, Harry is facing that inevitable death, but it at least has an upside: Harry has been spending well beyond his means and risks having to depart the upper-class privileged neighborhoods where he has spent his life. The $1 million he expects to get from the estate should cover his debts — but it becomes a case of hopes raised, hopes dashed.

Contrary to the popular dictum, Harry’s father had taken his money with him. It was, at any rate, gone. The reading of the will had the giddy outrage of a practical joke. The executor, a terse stranger from one of the large, threatening law firms, revealed Dale to be essentially broke, a shock to both Harry and his sister, and a much bigger shock to Dixie [his divorced father's final lady friend who was expecting even more than $1 million].

The three of them sat in the lawyer’s office as he intoned the will’s clauses with appropriate solemnity, accompanied by a paper version handed out with numbers and percentages highlighted. More than half the estate went to Dixie, a fact that was quickly mitigated by the alarmingly small sums involved. Dixie received $7,200. Harry was second, with $4,200. Erin, an enraged and distant third, received $1,100.

Harry and his wife are already in marital crisis — not just from their shaky economic status, but also facing the difficulties of estrangement from their university student son. So Harry, who spent most of his career as a broadcast journalist before ageism punted him into academia, decides to apply his investigative talents and figure out just where his father’s money went. He has the monetarily-jilted Dixie as a semi-partner in this quest, since she too is convinced something must be amiss.

So there you have an outline of setting, characters and plot. How well does author Gillmor deliver?

On the setting front, he does just fine — but I have to admit that judgment may mainly be a reflection of the anticipation that I took into the book. The way that he describes Rosedale and Harry’s mother’s mansion, his troubled gentrified existence and the keystone aspect of the cemetery were for this reader by far the strongest aspect of the book. Then again, I know the area reasonably well and cannot say how much of a role my own experiences played in my appreciation of his portrayal — there were a lot of very “friendly” reminders that brought back personal memories (if you know Toronto at all, the Five Thieves show up tangentially in the opening paragraph of the book — Harry pays $82 for “organic” lamb).

The novel starts to slip when it comes to character. Harry is adequately developed (particularly when he is spending money he doesn’t have on luxuries, like organic lamb not to mention wine, he thinks he can’t do without), but not much more — alas, the rest of the cast tend to be one-dimensional at best.

And the plot (the search for the “missing” millions) just doesn’t work at all. I can understand why Gillmor needed one (we can’t have a novel based just on setting and lifestyle) but the weakness of that aspect of the book becomes a significant anchor to the whole enterprise as it tries to move on.

I wasn’t disappointed with Mount Pleasant, but I’d have a tough time recommending it — unless you share my going-in bias for a novel that is located in an area of Toronto that I feel I know quite well and was eager to experience in prose. All in all, a promising premise that simply wasn’t successfully realized.

Satantango, by László Krasznahorkai

Purchased at Indigo.ca

Translated by George Szirtes

Satantango is a novel of 274 pages, told in 12 chapters, a total of 12 paragraphs, each featuring a number of narrators. The experience of reading it is as much one of engaging in the author’s approach to structure and voice as it is experiencing the “story”. So let’s open with an example of that from the opening chapter (or paragraph) which extends for 20 pages. It is October, “not long before the first drops of the melancholy long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil”. Futaki wakes to hear bells:

The closest possible source was a lonely chapel about four kilometers southwest on the old Hochmeiss estate but not only did that not have no bell but the tower had collapsed during the war and at that distance it was too far to hear anything. And in any case they did not sound distant to him, these ringing-booming bells; their triumphal clangor was swept along by the wind and seemed to come from somewhere close by (“It’s as if they were coming from the mill…”). He propped himself on his elbows on the pillow so as to look out of the mousehole-sized kitchen window that was partly misted up, and directed his gaze to the faint blue dawn sky but the field was still and silent, bathed only in the now ever fainter bell sound, and the only light to be seen was the one glimmering in the doctor’s window whose house was set well apart from the others on the far side, and that was only because its occupant had for years been unable to sleep in the dark.

That opening excerpt introduces a number of elements to which the author will return as the novel progresses:

The “estate” on which this takes place once had an economy — it no longer has one. Everyone who is still there longs to be somewhere else, with some chance of recovery.

Sounds, like the bells, will often be an important factor but, again like the bells, their source will be more one of question than answer. They represent a summons or warning, but to what no-one really knows — more than anything else they represent an absence of the known.

The story will unfold through the distorted eyes of individual characters as viewed from their confined circumstances, both physical and mental. No one in this book knows more than a small part of the story; all are searching for more.

While the present is definitely not right and the future is oppressively ominous, there is always an equally powerful wish that elements that are not understood (where are the bell sounds coming from?) represent a reason for hope, not despair.

While Krasznahorkai may decline the use of paragraphs, he does not hesitate to frequently shift points of view — for this reader, the sudden changes in focus were one of the book’s greatest strengths. In that opening chapter, Futaki heads off to the Schmidts to collect his share of some money from a transaction we are given to understand has shady elements. Mrs. Schmidt (her claim to fame is inspiring, and often indulging in, the lust of most of the men of the estate) greets him with a story about a horrible dream where she saw a threatening presence peeking through the curtains at her window.

“We’re a fine pair,” Futaki shook his head. “I woke — to what do you think? — to someone ringing bells…” “What!” the woman stared at him in astonishment: “Someone was ringing bells? Where?” “I don’t understand it either. In fact not once but twice, one after the other…” It was Mrs. Schmidt’s turn to shake her head. “You — you’ll go crazy.” “Or I might have dreamed it all,” grumbled Futaki nervously: “Mark my words, something is going to happen today.” The woman turned to him angrily. “You’re always saying that, just shut up, can’t you?”

In fact, Futaki is right. Something is going to happen today: it is announced by Mrs. Kráner not long after in an excited arrival at the Schmidts’ door:

“They’re here! Have you heard?” Futaki stood and nodded and put his hat on. Schmidt had collapsed at the table. “My husband,” Mrs. Kráner gabbled, “he’s already started and just sent me across to tell you, if you didn’t know already though I’m sure you know, we could see through our window that Mrs. Halics had dropped by, but I’ve got to go, I don’t want to bother you, and as for the money, my husband said, forget it, it’s not for the likes of us, he said and…he’s right because why hide and run, with never a moment of peace, who wants that, and Irimiás, well you’ll see, and Petrina, I knew that it couldn’t be true, any of it, so help me, I never trusted that sneaky Horgos kid, you can tell from his eyes, you can see for yourselves how he made it all up and kept it up till we believed him, I tell you, I knew from the start…”

Irimiás and Petrinas, gone for a couple of years and allegedly dead, are indeed on their way back. They may be harbingers of hope — then again they may represent the forces that will lead the entire small community into even greater despair.

I mentioned earlier that structure is a never absent element of Satantango. The first six chapters count from I to VI and are filled with the foreboding arrival of the pair (not to mention the squalor of the present on the decrepit “estate”). They conclude with a multi-page dance sequence (the “satantango” of the title, I presume) involving virtually all the characters in the bar and the arrival of Irimiás and Petrina.

“The Second Part” (that’s the translator’s device) opens with a speech from Irimiás about what the future holds — the chapters here count down from VI to I. The members of the community bet their future on the vision that he offers — you’ll have to read the novel to see whether or not that is well placed.

There is no doubt that Satantango has its fans. It first come to my attention with an enthusiastic review from Max at Pechorin’s Journal — he went on to name it his best novel of 2012 and his review provides a much more detailed analysis than I have offered here. And Satantango is a fixture on the various translated book prize longlists that are currently in play.

As much as I respect that, I have to say it was not a novel for me. I was never tempted to put it aside but the entire reading process was a frustrating struggle — I could appreciate the elements of technique that were on display but found little underneath that to reward the effort of paying attention. I don’t think that I am completely averse to either modernist or existential fiction, but Satantango never succeeded in engaging me in the author’s journey.

KfC’s 2013 Project: Solomon Gursky Was Here, by Mordecai Richler

Personal first edition

Including Mordecai Richler in KfC’s 2013 project of re-reading Canadian authors who influenced me was a no-brainer decision from the start. Like any Canadian reader of my era, I have known his fiction well for decades (and interviewed the man himself more than once). It was equally impossible to not be aware of his controversial political reputation — Quebec sovereignists have a one-man category of detest reserved for him. And there is no doubt that he is a special “friend” of the blog: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is easily the most popular archived post here and Barney’s Version holds down sixth spot.

Having already reviewed those two popular choices did mean that deciding which Richler novel to include provided some challenge. In the final analysis, it came down to St. Urbain’s Horseman or Solomon Gursky Was Here — the first of those two is probably both better known and more typical of his work, the latter is perhaps his most unconventional adult novel. It has been some time since I last read Gursky and memory said that it had been a bit of a challenge — that was spark enough to convince me it was time for a revisit.

There are a number of traits that are present in all of Richler’s fiction. Growing up Jewish in Montreal is one, for starters. The plot line is always a rich stream, with the author usually enjoying pushing the envelope towards the bizarre. And in every book he uses those two over-arching themes as fertile ground in which to seed acerbic satire and grumpy, but often hilarious, observations on aspects of the current state of play.

All those threads are present in Solomon Gursky Was Here, but they come in different proportions than in his more popular works. The Gurskys are certainly Jews now living in Montreal, but that element doesn’t come with the usual familiarity of Richler’s St. Urbain Street — in this novel, they have roots elsewhere and have graduated to prominent global capitalism in the present. What is most distinctive in this novel, however, is that Richler pushes his many plots even further into the absurd than he usually does — and that does produce some challenge for the reader.

The unfamiliar ground is introduced right from the start. The opening takes place “during the record cold spell of 1851″ in Magog, Quebec, 75 miles east of Richler’s usual urban Montreal turf. The patrons at Wm. Crosby’s lakeside hotel (“Refreshments served at any hour of day or night”) observe a sled pulled by twelve yapping dogs emerge from the swirling snow:

The dogs were pulling a long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip. Ephraim pulled close to the shore and began to trudge up and down, searching the skies, an inhuman call, some sort of sad clacking noise, at once abandoned yet charged with hope, coming from the back of his throat.

In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind.

Ephraim unloads his sled and begins to set up camp — including building an igloo. Just before disappearing into the igloo, he bangs a wooden sign into the snow in front of it: CHURCH OF THE MILLENARIANS, Founder, Brother Ephraim. The scene is stranger by the next morning: three more igloos have appeared and a community of “little dark men” and their families have settled in. For the watchful Crosby Hotel bar crowd, it gets even more confusing:

When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim’s igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Whatever them Millenarians is it’s sure as shit a lot more fun than what we got.”

Finally Ephraim pointed at one, nodded at another, and they quickly scrambled into his igloo. The men, beating on their drums, led the remaining women back to their igloos, punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim’s igloo.

Okay, some back story is required here. The conceit is that Ephraim Gursky was a member of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 expedition to the Canadian Arctic — while conventional wisdom says no one survived, Richler fiction says not only that Ephraim did but he has moved back and forth between the Arctic and southern Canada ever since. And is the ancestral father of the Gursky empire, a family-run business which is now a major player in the global liquor trade.

That empire was created by Ephraim’s grandsons, Bernard, Morrie and Solomon, during the Prohibition era. Building off a stake Solomon won by stealing and risking the family “fortune” (meagre savings from his father’s rural Saskatchewan hardware business) in a Prairie poker game (one of his prizes was the deed to the local hotel), they eventually got into the liquor-running business in Western Canada, moved east to the more lucrative Windsor/Detroit run and when Prohibition ended were well-positioned in Montreal to move into the “legitimate” liquor business where they have done exceedingly well ever since.

(Aside: Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Canadian history of the era will immediately make the connection with the Bronfmans, the family behind the Seagram liquor empire, who started out as rum-runners and went on to become one of the country’s leading philanthropic families. And while Richler wrote Solomon Gursky in 1989, elements of the story that I am characterizing as “absurd” live on in the present day. Canadian Club, the rye whisky brought back to prominence as Dan Draper’s drink of choice on Mad Men, was distilled in Windsor and smuggled into Detroit, on its way to Capone’s Chicago. And one of the current Bronfman heirs is in the news as I write this with a bizarre child custody dispute involving the rapper, M.I.A. Some things really don’t change.)

Solomon actually disappears from the novel shortly after that poker game — a sled (apparently driven by Ephraim) arrives and takes him north towards the Arctic. A central uncertainty of the plot is whether or not he is still alive and just what influence he has on its various elements.

That uncertainty provides yet another story line in the novel. Moses Berger is the son of the failed Montreal literary poet, L.B. Berger. As a child, Moses lived down the Mount Royal slopes from the Gursky family multi-mansion estate and becomes obsessed with Solomon’s story from the first time he hears of him. Moses’ lifelong pursuit of that story introduces a whole new set of oddball characters with whom Richler can play.

All of that is a very rudimentary sketch of the various story lines in Solomon Gursky Was Here. Each features a pretty much independent set of characters (although there is some overlap), each has its own intricate plot developments and each provides the author a platform for digressions into cryptic observation or bitter satire. Richler loves complexity and detail and you can rest assured that he spares none of it in any of the story threads.

The problem that I had the first time I read this novel was that there is so much going on (and so many people doing it) that I had a lot of trouble keeping it all straight. Richler shifts focus frequently and without warning — particularly in the first half of the book, when he is establishing these widely varied stories, I felt buried in a wealth of detail and characters whom I only vaguely remembered. The parts were certainly interesting and entertaining, but I wasn’t getting much of a sense of the whole.

That frustration did settle down midway through the book (although, given that it is 557 pages, that involved a considerable investment of time) and I found the latter half much more engaging. I must say I did have a similar experience this time through (my third, perhaps fourth, read of the novel) but had the comfort of knowing that it all does eventually come together.

The jacket promo of my first edition of Solomon Gursky Was Here refers to it as Richler’s “most ambitious and mysterious novel”. I would certainly quibble with “most ambitious” (Duddy and Barney both have an admirable depth to them) — “mysterious” is fair if you accept that it has both negative and positive possibilities. Richler is generally a very accessible author but that is not always the case with this one. His canvas for this one is truly large — while all the parts show his considerable ability, for this reader the bigger picture does not come together quite as readily as it does in his more popular novels.

(In April, KfC’s 2013 Project again heads into “different” territory. The author, Margaret Atwood, is certainly familiar. But the novel, her second, Surfacing, tends to be overlooked in current day attention. I remember well reading it when the author was only coming to prominence — I am interested to see how it has weathered the decades since.)

The Dinner, by Herman Koch

Review copy courtesy Random House Canada

Translated by Sam Garrett

The Dinner is the first of Herman Koch’s seven novels that I have read (actually, as far as I can tell it is the only one that has been translated into English) but the Dutch author has already claimed a spot in a sparsely-populated room in KfC’s gallery of reading.

I have an abiding affection for books that successfully establish an engaging “realistic” story and then, dramatically or with careful deliberation, successfully change course and head somewhere far darker. Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels are a perfect example — although, after you have read the first one, you know a bizarre twist is inevitable in the others. Gerard Woodward’s Nourishment is one that features a number of sudden left-turns in plot, all accomplished without losing momentum. And while I haven’t read Gillian Flynn’s best-selling Gone Girl I gather it hinges on a plot disruption so important that every review I have read goes out of its way to avoid a reveal — so it is fitting that Flynn blurbs The Dinner on my copy.

As the title promises, Koch’s book is about a “dinner” and the volume is structured with labelled courses, opening with Apertif and concluding with Digestif, and like any multi-course dinner the interesting tastes of the first few courses acquire increasing boldness and complexity as the experience proceeds.

The Apertif course of the book opens with the first-person narrator, Paul Lohman, and his wife, Claire, heading out for dinner with his brother Serge and his wife, Babette. We know from the start that Paul wants no part of this dinner; Koch builds sympathy for him because this is one of those fancy restaurants where reservations need to be made three months in advance:

A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called “top” restaurants. That information is kept on file — I happen to know that. If Mr. L was prepared to wait three months for a window seat last time, then this time he’ll wait for five months for a table beside the men’s room — that’s what restaurants call “customer relations management”.

Serge never reserves a table three months in advance. Serge makes the reservation on the day itself — he says he thinks of it as a sport. You have restaurants that reserve a table for people like Serge Lohman, and this restaurant happens to be one of them. One of many I should say. It makes you wonder whether there isn’t one restaurant in the whole country where they don’t go faint right away when they hear the name Serge Lohman on the phone. He doesn’t make the call himself, of course; he lets his secretary or one of his assistants do that. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me when I talked to him a few days ago. “They know me there; I can get us a table.”

Except for one important detail, that pretty much sets up the first few “courses” in the book. Paul’s brother is one of those pretentiously successful people who love to exercise their influence — and there are restaurants that are every bit as pretentious that cater to them. Serge had wanted to show his “people” side by meeting Paul and Claire for a drink at a nearby, very unpretentious, cafe where they are regulars before the meal. Paul rejected the invitation because the cafe is Paul and Claire’s kind of place and they don’t want to introduce his phoniness to it: that “important detail” yet to be revealed is that Serge is the leader of the Opposition party in Holland and is expected to be the country’s next Prime Minister. Visiting the populist cafe would merely be an exercise in vote-building imagery for him.

Koch has more great fun with the restaurant, which deserves attention. Paul and Claire accept the offer of “the apertif of the house…pink champagne” served with “Greek olives from the Peloponnese, lightly doused in first-pressing, extra-virgin olive oil from Sardinia, and polished off with rosemary from…” — only later realizing that the house apertif comes at ten euros a glass. By way of contrast, the cafe serves a full meal of spareribs and fries for 11.50 euros.

All of this makes Paul aggressively uncomfortable — he is making no friend of the maitre d’ with his responses — and Serge and Babette haven’t even arrived yet. The greeting they get on entry provides an indication of the dynamic that will drive the novel’s first few chapters: Serge’s incredible arrogance, management and staff’s fawning response and Paul’s growing anger:

Yes, it had to be the owner, for now he stepped forward to extend a personal welcome to Serge and Babette. “They know me there,” Serge had told me a few days ago. He knew the man in the white turtleneck, a man who didn’t emerge from the open kitchen to shake hands with just anyone.

The guests, however, pretended not to notice; in a restaurant where you had to pay ten euros for the apertif of the house, the rules of etiquette probably didn’t allow for an open display of recognition. They all seemed to lean a few fractions of an inch closer to their plates, all apparently doing their best at the same time to forge ahead with their conversations, to avoid falling silent, because the volume of the general hubbub increased audibly as well.

And while the manager (the white turtleneck had disappeared back into the kitchen) was escorting Serge and Babette past the tables, no more than a barely perceptable ripple ran across the restaurant: a breeze falling across the still-smooth surface of a pond, a breath of wind through a field of grain, no more than that.

Koch is not one of those authors who opts for a sudden turn in his plot — rather he carefully spreads out the seeding of the elements of change as the “normal” one progresses. For example, before leaving home Paul contemplated checking out what was on his 15-year-old son’s cellphone. And we already have a sense that Paul’s distaste for Serge will blossom into something more disturbing, but another element is added when he notices Babette’s eyes, unusually hidden behind tinted glasses:

They were red around the edges, and bigger than normal: unmistakable signs of a recent crying jag. Not a crying jag that had happened a few hours ago — no, crying that had happened just now, in the car, on the way to the restaurant.

The author takes all those no further at this stage — indeed, it will be a number of chapters before we discover what produced them. We also learn that this dinner is not just a social occasion but has an agenda: there is something the two couples “need” to discuss. And that both couples have teenage sons, Michel and Rick. Serge and Babette actually have two: Beau is from Burkina Faso and was supported financially by them there, but is now staying with them in Holland on what Paul calls a “rent-to-own” basis (he may or may not be staying on — the “adoption’ was a gesture from Serge to show his liberality).

All of this is revealed almost in asides to the amusing phoney restaurant action (“The lamb’s-neck sweetbread has been marinated in Sardinian olive oil and is served with arugula,” said the manager…pointing with his pinky at two minuscule pieces of meat. “The sun-dried tomatoes come from Bulgaria.”), accompanied by Paul’s hilarious ongoing commentary on how awful all this is — his prominent brother included.

Slowly but very, very surely, the disturbing plot elements move the restaurant phoniness to the side and introduce a harsh, disturbing reality to the dinner. The sons (Michel and Rick for sure, maybe Beau as well) have done something terrible, perhaps even criminal; it has been captured on a smartphone camera and is now on the internet, with promises of even more to come.

Both sets of parents are aware of part (but not all) of what is behind this — both are also aware that it might also simply slip away out of sight if nothing is done. Once Koch gets all this established (say two-thirds of the way through the novel), we have a four-way dynamic between the parents and a three-way one between the teenagers on just what might or might not be done. Suffice to say, the decent, honorable, option is only one of the many that are available.

It is important to note that Koch does not desert the restaurant story line — he piles these other ones on top of it (not unlike those fancy restaurant entrees that arrive in a carefully-stacked pile of five different “things”, with the hardest to cut on top, if I might be permitted a whining foodie metaphor). The humor of the phoney dining experience is now contrasted directly with the sordidness of what the adults seem willing to do.

The result for this reader was a very well-balanced read, that touched a number of different taste buds. Released only recently in North America (to much media attention), it has now been published in 25 countries — one of those rare best-sellers that strikes my fancy. I’ve been waiting for the Canadian release following two enthusiastic reviews last year from bloggers whom I respect — Tom Cunliffe at A Common Reader and Guy Savage at His Futile Preoccupations — and it was worth the wait. I’ll even be happy to be assigned a table by the men’s room when Koch’s next English translation appears.

A Family Daughter, by Maile Meloy

Purchased at Indigo.ca

For this reader, A Family Daughter is an unsual book, in an unusual way: my reaction to it is almost completely neutral. There are certainly books that enthuse me — Meloy’s own story collecton Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It is a good example. An even greater number rank somewhere on the positive side of neutral or slip into the realm of disappointing. And then there are a few (fortunately, just a few) that I find just plain bad. This novel, most unusually, lands squarely in the middle.

On the positive side, A Family Daughter was an engaging, two-session read. Novels that disappoint me tend to bring out my time-wasting “avoidance” behavior: rather than picking them up, I find reasons to scan websites or email instead of reading. This one certainly did not do that.

But the further into it I got, the farther I seemed to move from the book. Characters and plot were okay (and definitely not annoying, as is sometime the case) but never much more. And as I approached the end, I found myself mainly thinking about which book I would read next, never the sign of a postive response to a book.

A Family Daughter, published in 2006, revisits both characters and story that Meloy previously explored in her first novel, Liars and Saints, three years earlier. That book told the story of the Santerre family in post-War (both WWII and Korea) California — Teddy Santerre was a fighter pilot in both wars; his Canadian born and raised wife, Yvette, served as the central character in the story. They had three children: the eldest daughter, Margot, was even more Catholic than her mother, the middle child, Clarissa, was a rules-breaking rebel almost from day one and the only son, Jamie, was a late, unplanned arrival who mainly seemed to upset the comfortable equilibrium that the Santerres had established before his birth.

That novel succeeded on a number of fronts (aspects of the sense of emptiness that followed the two wars, personal religious conflict, among others) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I was quite prepared to see why Meloy felt the Santerres were worth revisiting.

A Family Daughter is told mainly from the perspective of Clarissa’s daughter, Abby, and opens with some promise that the strengths of Liars and Saints will be renewed:

In the summer of 1979, just when Yvette Santerre thought her children were all safely launched and out of the house, her granddaughter came to stay in Hermosa Beach and came down with a fever, and then a rash. Yvette thought it might be stress: Abby was seven, and her parents were considering divorce, and she must have sensed trouble. At bedtime she cried from homesickness, and Yvette asked if she wanted to go home. Abby said, “I want to go home, and I want to stay here.”

The stress only gets worse when Abby’s malaise is diagnosed as chicken pox and she is confined to grandmotherly barracks, as it were. Yvette is out of practice with mothering and becomes increasingly frustrated, but things get better when Jamie, now a young adult, arrives to visit his “favorite niece” (“I’m your only niece” is Abby’s immediate response). A trip to the beach with Jamie quickly sets Abby back on course:

Two hours later they came back, Abby sandy from the beach, with a tub of Dairy Queen ice cream and some Dilly bars that they rushed to the freezer. Abby chatted happily all through dinner, and it seemed to Yvette as if her cheerfulness were a wheel that Jamie had got spinning. Now he just needed to give it a push every so often, to keep it going.

“Thank you, Jamie,” Yvette said, when she got her son alone. She couldn’t remember when she had last thanked him for anything but Christmas presents, and now she couldn’t stop.

Meloy spends only 20 pages effectively re-introducing the Santerre family (and reminding us of some of their internal conflicts) and Abby is soon a freshman at the University of California, San Diego, the school where her mother and now-estranged father, Henry, met in the registration line. Meloy has a dark side and it moves to the fore in Abby’s junior year: Henry asks her to come along on a ski trip, but she declines — on his way through the Donner Pass, he hits a patch of black ice and plunges to his death.

Abby descends into depression and, several months later, Clarissa asks Jamie (unemployed and unoccupied, but still Abby’s favorite uncle, albeit the only one) to visit San Diego and cheer her up. He stays in her apartment and the depression starts to lift, until one night Abby kisses him “not on the temple, but on the mouth”:

He was going to say they shouldn’t do anything more, but she waited like he said, watching him. He picked her up in the towel, with an arm under her knees and one under her back. He groaned a little, which made her laugh. Then he carried her out of the hallway into the bedroom and laid her down on the sublet bed, no excuses about how she had led him into it. He untucked the end of the towel and pulled it aside, and there was half of her, the soft breast, the smooth hip. It was right there in the Bible, as literature or not. Do not uncover the nakedness of your sister’s daughter, for she is your niece. It is a depravity. He pushed the other side of the towel away.

“Oh, Abby,” he said.

There is enough hidden under the surface normality of the Santerre family that that wasn’t really a complete stunner, but I’ll admit that is where my “dis-engagement” with both family and novel began. Unfortunately, it continued to grow apace. The author develops story lines not just around Abby and Jamie, but Clarissa, Margot and Yvette as well — and for this reader they increasingly stretched credibility to the point that they seemed more designed for author convenience than reader enlightenment.

I said in my review of Liars and Saints that I felt Meloy was a better short story writer than novelist, as much as I liked that volume (her limited catalogue now includes two novels, two story collections and one youth book) and I think my response to A Family Daughter reflects that even more. The various incidents that come into play are all developed individually well enough — they just never came together to produce a cohesive book.

As I said at the start, Meloy is a strong enough writer that the novel was not a disappointment — an incomplete collection of well-observed incidents would perhaps be the best description. She certainly deserves to be read (and I look forward to her next adult book) but for those who don’t know her work, I would point to any of her other three volumes (all reviewed on this site) as a better place to start. A Family Daughter is most suitable for completists like KfC — and even I have to admit that the best of authors don’t hit it out of the park every time.